Terri Gaal

Serial skeptic, true believer. lover of words, food well tended, ideas closely examined, travel far and wide, laughter at the absurd, my children.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

Dear Joe,
I wish I could sit down with you face to face and explain why so many of us were offended by the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.
For me, it had nothing to do with the UFC or who showed up for the fights. The brand you and Dana have built is a bona fide American success story. More power to you. As for the fighters, in my book, anyone brave enough to put it all on the line in the arena is remarkable to witness. Their dedication and discipline inspire me. I don’t understand anyone who can’t admire that.
And as for the people who attended, I, for one, love Shane Gillis. I think he’s hilarious and brilliant. It was a show. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to witness it firsthand.
My problem is that I believe some of our public spaces are sacred. And unlike many of the great powers that came before us, these American monuments belong to all of us. Not to whoever happens to hold power at the moment.
The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to any President. It belongs to the people. To treat it as Caesar treated the Colosseum is antithetical to everything our founding fathers fought for.
This is not Rome. Presidents are not emperors doling out bread and circuses for the peasants. The White House is the People’s House. This “celebration” could have happened in any stadium within a stone’s throw of the South Lawn. No one would have had an issue with it.
But that was obviously Donald Trump’s whole point. By holding the event on the South Lawn, what he was saying to the rest of us is:
“This is my house. I own it. I will do with it what I please. I’ll build a colosseum and have the gladiators fight under my gaze. I’ll tear down the East Wing. I’ll pave over the Rose Garden. I’ll cover everything in gold and marble. I’ll erase the names of all the men who came before me.”
The fights were an exhibition of imperial domination, not a celebration of our 250th anniversary as a democracy.
The White House is not Buckingham Palace. It is not the Palace of Versailles. It is not the Forbidden City of Beijing. It does not belong to an emperor, or a king, or a commissar.
The White House belongs to us. All of us. The person who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is nothing more than an honored guest. A temporary caretaker.
The President is our servant. Not our Caesar.
Respectfully, Hunter

P.S. Cage match between me and Don Jr.? Your call on the venue. Anywhere but the South Lawn.

[Terri Gaal @TerriGaal]

@JeremyWingert79 The Secret Garden and Heidi

[Terri Gaal @TerriGaal]

@SketchesbyBoze Same and when I was about 18-21 I decided to get that list and watch all of those that I had not yet seen.

[Tim Miller @Timodc]

77,302,579 more tweets like this and i will be able to move forward.

[Tom Santos @tommysantos14]

When Trump leaves office:

The Department of War will go back to being the Defense Department.

The Trump Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center.

The Gulf of America will once again be the Gulf of Mexico.

The unfinished East Wing (it won't be finished by the end of Trump's term) will be rebuilt by the next president, and it will not be a ballroom.

Federal agencies packed with unqualified loyalists will fire those people and rehire the career experts Trump fired.

The Department of Justice will go back to enforcing the law instead of protecting the president.

Scientific agencies like NOAA, the EPA, and the CDC will go back to publishing research without political interference.

The U.S. will re-align with its allies and not with its enemies.

The presidential pardon power will stop being used as a rewards program for loyalists.

Inspectors General will go back to investigating corruption instead of getting fired for it.

The White House press room will go back to having briefings, with real journalists and not podcasters.

U.S. foreign policy will stop revolving around flattering dictators.

And the world will progress as though Donald Trump never existed.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

A year ago we were supposed to be getting $2,000 rebate checks, DOGE was going to find $2 trillion in waste to balance the budget, we were going to pay no income taxes because tariffs would pay for everything, gas & home electric bills would be cut in half, and no new wars.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

We’re facing an ever-worsening literacy crisis. Millions of brains have been scrambled by conspiracy theories & short-form videos. Curiosity is dying. Our collective intelligence is sinking into the gutter. The solution is to read. The solution is to read.

[Tim Alberta @TimAlberta]

Okay so,

1) an American citizen exercises his First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and his Second Amendment right to bear arms, out of apparent concern that a tyrannical federal government is violating basic protections afforded under the Constitution

2) after coming to the aid of an unarmed woman who's been shoved to the ground by a masked federal agent, the citizen -- impaired by pepper spray, holding nothing but a cell phone -- is dragged to the ground by a group of other masked agents

3) during the scuffle, shortly after one masked agent removes the weapon from the restrained citizen's person, several other masked agents open fire, unloading 10 shots from close range and killing the unarmed citizen

4) despite video evidence, a spokesman for the federal government says the citizen approached agents with a gun, provoked a violent confrontation, and planned to "massacre" law enforcement

You really want to defend this? Go ahead. Just know, you look like an absolute fool.

[Mary L Trump @MaryLTrump]

Donald’s DOJ was required by law to release the entirety of the Epstein files to Congress. In the 30 days since then, he:

added his name to the Kennedy Center.
ordered a deadly strike on Nigeria as “a Christmas present.”
sent U.S. troops into Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro, killing almost 100 people in the process.
suspended funding for childcare assistance programs in five blue states.
changed the White House website on January 6 to praise his pardoning of the insurrectionists.
withdrew the U.S. from 66 international organizations.
flipped off an autoworker who called him a “pedophile protector” and said “fuck you” to him—twice.
claimed falsely that Renee Good, who was murdered by an ICE agent, “behaved horribly” and “was very disrespectful.”
threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to unrest his own agencies have incited in Minnesota.
has repeatedly threatened to invade Greenland if it refuses to allow him to buy it.

You know what hasn’t happened? The DOJ hasn’t released over 99% of the Epstein files. Wonder why.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

People say, “I don’t need to read fiction.” You absolutely do. The world is currently being run by rich, antisocial, amoral men who have never opened a book, and you need only look around to see the damage it’s caused. Empathy & curiosity are vanishing because people don’t read.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

“Why are folks getting dumber?” Because they don’t read. “Why aren’t men as romantic & poetic as they used to be?” Because they don’t read. “Why are people so vulnerable to propaganda?” “Why is everyone a conspiracy theorist?” Because they don’t read. Because they don’t read.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

If you want to push back against tech's encroachment into every corner of our lives, you have to read books. They're eager to create a future in which most people are illiterate and hooked on slop, a world without imagination or knowledge. Reading is resistance.

[Terri Gaal @TerriGaal]

@SketchesbyBoze I love classics but currently reading this for the first time at 53. Edmond Dantes! ❤️

[Terri Gaal @TerriGaal]

@defense_civil25 “Gracchus: I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they’ll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it’s the sand of the coliseum.”

[collagen machine broke @chronicallybeee]

it’s just very weird seeing how people have been propagandized to believe the government should exist for any other purpose than to care for the people

[Michael McFaul @McFaul]

Admiration by so many Republicans for Putin--a brutal dictator with no respect for human life, individual liberties, or private property, who hates America -- is one of the most shocking developments of my life. Never saw that coming.

[Mario @PawlowskiMario]

BREAKING 🚨: Zelenskyy: “I will never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine. Never.”

This is it. The moment we’ve been warning about. Trump and Putin are openly discussing Ukraine’s fate without Ukraine. This is the same imperialist, authoritarian bullshit we’ve seen throughout history—strongmen deciding the future of nations like they’re trading poker chips.

We are watching history repeat itself in real time. If Ukraine is abandoned, Eastern Europe is next. NATO is next. Democracy is next.

This isn’t just about Ukraine. This is about the world order shifting under our feet. Pay attention FFS!

[Chrissy Houlahan @RepHoulahan]

I’m struggling for the words to describe my disappointment with Vice President Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. I feel as though all of Europe and half of America deserve an apology.

VP Vance chided and derided Europe for the very things that our great nation is wrestling with. He maligned the continent’s leaders and voters when our own house is not in order.

According to him, Europe is “retreating” away from free speech and is making wrong choices about who should be “part of a free society.” He maligned them for not leading with the right values and for persecuting those who disagree with them. He also spent time scoffing at the idea that Romania’s election was possibly compromised, with not a whiff of a mention of the violence of January 6 or the attempt to annul our own election of 2020. And, not a word about Ukraine or Russia.

The hypocrisy is just more than I can take.

I’m sorry. This does not reflect who we are and how much we value the European Continent.

[Alex Taylor @AlexTaylorNews]

Gobsmacking stuff. Vance has the nerve to lecture us Europeans on democracy (criticizing among others Romania which cancelled its election after obvious Russian interference)

The same Vance whose boss didn't accept the result of a democratic election and incited people to riot

[Terri Gaal @TerriGaal]

@bonhoefferchild I grew up Southern Baptist and I was taught in Sunday School that Bathsheba deliberately went on the roof to bathe to entice David so of course she had a part to play in his sin. Took me years to really deconstruct from that misogynistic claptrap.