Eric Downing

[sammy @_itzsammy]

Mad about student loan cancellation because you already paid yours off? Pretend it's a tax cut for the rich. You never got one of those either, and somehow you didn't complain.

[The Green Dragon Tavern @greendragonhq]

Billionaires can’t pay more in taxes but can spend $400,000,000.00 on midterm elections.

[‏ً @justjargons]

i still don’t understand how so many of you were hoodwinked into believing the government should not use the money you pay in taxes to create a social safety net that benefits you, fund public healthcare, lower housing costs, and make daily life more affordable.

[Hero @redvivisection]

can't believe we missed the 10th anniversary of this. must've been busy that day

[Xeloph @Xeloph]

"I don't mind trans people, I just don't want their existence shoved down my throat"

Brother, it's conservatives shoving trans people down your throat. They can't shut the fuck up about them. It's every political podcast, rally, and advertisement. It's all they think about.

[Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran]

...The Vice President of the United States... in 2026...

Trying to insult a Senate candidate...by implying he is gay.

How terribly far we have fallen as a nation.

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

i can't stand the double standard, democrats and generally progressive people are expected to be perfect all the time, meanwhile republicans can say whatever the fuck they want and their cattle fanbase will eat that slop and defend them endlessly

[☭ 🖼️⭐️⭐️🔻 🚩 @mussy03_]

Part of the reason westoids barely riot anymore is cuz they have been brainwashed into thinking that uprisings are for the ‘uncivilized’ not knowing that this is peak civility

[Reed Galen @reedgalen]

This says so much more than he can possibly know.

[ُ sushi ibushi 𖣂 @svhibe]

israel is the greatest global force of evil of our time, and everyday it survives a massive portion of humanity dies.

[Jon Favreau @jonfavs]

AI companies think AI could wipe out humanity, which is why America has to get there first.

We can't let China win the race to wipe out humanity! That's our birthright!

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[jordan @JordanUhl]

Gas is $4 a gallon, salad gives you diarrhea, there’s glass in the bread, the planet is boiling, home prices are higher than ever, we’re up to our ears in credit card debt but my number one issue is where my Representative stands on a Twitch streamer.

[evil nugget ex wife chicken pervert and ᵗʰᵉ ᵏᵒˡᵉ @ttpdfc]

before i work on myself does anyone want me the way i am now

[Zara Quinn @_Zaraquin]

Imagine your country falling apart and your biggest concern is renaming a lake. What a fucking joke.

[Covie @covie_93]

-It is still Lake Ontario
-It is still the Gulf of Mexico
-It is still the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
-He is still a pedophile.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[John Fugelsang @JohnFugelsang]

My dad was a public school teacher; and he always said the toughest parts of the job were:

1. Having to pay for your own classroom chalk, and
2. Performing gender-reassignment surgeries during class hours w/out parents finding out.

[fully fund transit @crosstown_line]

instead of building modern infrastructure or making transportation safer, they’re focusing on making sure we all have to listen to some guy’s incredibly loud tiny weenie compensation machine

[kathleen @kathleencrave]

you’ll already be depressed and then dolly parton dies.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The doctor who delivered Dolly Parton in a one-room Tennessee cabin in 1946 was paid with a sack of cornmeal. Her father farmed other people's land and could not read or write. Eighty years later, the reading program she built in his name has mailed more than 300 million books.

She wrote "I Will Always Love You" on the same afternoon she wrote "Jolene," as a goodbye to Porter Wagoner, and released it in 1974. Elvis wanted it. The night before the session, Colonel Tom Parker called and said Presley would only record it if they got half the publishing, meaning half of everything the song ever earned. She had been in Nashville ten years by then. She said no, and cried all night. Whitney Houston cut her version in 1992, held number one for fourteen weeks, and Forbes later put Parton's royalties from it near $10 million. She put some of that money into an office complex in Nashville and called the place the house that Whitney built.

Dollywood opened in Pigeon Forge in 1986 because she wanted paychecks in the county she came from. Around 4,000 people work there now. Three million visitors come every year. The University of Tennessee put its economic impact at $1.8 billion, and it is the largest employer in Sevier County. Since 2022 the company has paid tuition, fees, and books in full for every worker from their first day, seasonal hires included.

Wildfires tore through those mountains in November 2016, killing fourteen people and destroying more than 2,400 buildings. Her foundation was handing out money within 48 hours. Every family that lost a home got $1,000 a month for six months, regardless of income. The final check was $5,000. Total delivered: $8.9 million.

In April 2020 she sent $1 million to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research. When Moderna's vaccine results ran in the New England Journal of Medicine that November, her fund appeared in the footnotes.

Carl Dean, her husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025. The note she wrote to fans afterward ended with the same five words she wrote for Porter Wagoner back in 1974. She died in Nashville today. Her family asked that instead of flowers, people give to the Imagination Library, which still mails 3.4 million books a month to children who will never get to meet her.