Set a reminder for my upcoming Space! We’re discussing: the Height & Fall of the Aro Confederacy, Invasion of Benin, Ekumeku War, & Royal Niger Company.
https://t.co/sEU4IRJfHF
@frankuche_17@elnathan_john@basilabia@BigChiefDamian@Frankiee44 @Tee_mwrites
Animals should not be used for radical transgender experiments.
This is not science. This is ideological cruelty paid for by the American taxpayers.
Our TRANS MICE Act ends it. No federal funds may be used to conduct, support, or fund research aimed at altering an animal's biological sex.
No hormones. No surgeries. No taxpayer dollars spent mutilating animals in the name of transgender ideology.
This legislation brings accountability, ends taxpayer-funded cruelty, and ensures science serves the public, not ideology.
I cried today. I'm not going to pretend I didn't.
Four presidents shared a stage in Chicago, a thing that used to be ordinary and now feels almost holy, and I felt the tears come before I understood them. At first I thought I knew what they were. I thought they were grief. I thought I was crying for how far we've drifted from that morning in 2008 when so many of us let ourselves believe, all the way down, that America could be better than her history. That we could be better. The distance between that morning and this one felt like the whole sad arc of the story, and for a moment I let myself sit inside the ache of it.
But the longer President Obama spoke, the more I understood I had it backwards.
He told a story I can't stop thinking about. The line we all know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, didn't start with Dr. King. King was borrowing it from a Boston minister named Theodore Parker, who preached it more than 170 years ago. And here is the part that broke me open: Parker preached it at one of the darkest moments this country had ever seen. The Compromise of 1850 had just made it a federal crime to shelter a man fleeing slavery. In Boston, a young fugitive had been seized, tried, and marched to the harbor by hundreds of armed officers, put on a ship, and sent back south into chains. While the whole city watched.
That is when Parker said it. Not in triumph. In the dark.
He admitted he couldn't see how it would end. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” he preached. “The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve... I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”
He couldn't see it. He believed it anyway. And then he kept fighting.
As Obama put it today, Parker's words were “a declaration of faith, a defiant call, not to abandon hope or give way to fear, but to stay true to our better selves, and true to one another, and to keep fighting... even in the face of cruelty and bitter disappointment, even in the face of impossible odds.”
And that's when my tears changed. Right there. They stopped being grief and became something else, something that scared me a little with how much it felt like hope. Because I realized I wasn't witnessing a eulogy for a country we'd lost. I was watching a man reach down and hand us back the very thing we had set down in our exhaustion. The arc doesn't bend on its own. It never did. It bends because people put their hands on it and pull, people who can't see the end and reach for it anyway. People in the dark, refusing to believe the dark gets the last word.
He would not let the day be about him. He said it plainly: America's story “isn't frozen in the past. It has chapters yet to be written, not by one person or a few people, not by Barack and Michelle... but by all of us.” Michelle said the same thing in her own way, that the center was never about them, never for them. Look up at that building and you'll see three words cut into the stone: You are America.Not him. Not them. You. Us. The ordinary, the unfamous, the tired, us.
And then Bruce Springsteen walked out with a guitar and sang “Land of Hope and Dreams.” If you don't know it, it's a song about a train, a train with room for everybody on it. Saints and sinners. The lost. The broken. The ones who've been left standing at every other station their whole lives. This train carries everybody. He sang it soft and aching, like a prayer he wasn't sure would be answered but was going to say anyway, and when the last note left him he turned to the Obamas and said the only thing left to say. “I love you.”
See the way Michelle Obama stood on that podium talking about her husband…. his brilliance, his resilience, his love, his kindness, and what a wonderful husband he is.
You can tell he is proud to have a wife like Michelle Obama.
Some of you men will never experience a moment where your wife publicly says sweet things about you, not even privately, because all you’ve ever done is cause her pain and put her through agony.
Idk but Michelle Obama telling Barack “You told me all those years ago that you couldn't promise me the world, but you could promise me an interesting life. And, of course you outdid yourself and managed to give me both." is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard someone say to another 🥹
If you’re visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you’re here… pls pack it in your CHECKED BAG on the way home.
Thank you.
What an honor to have the solidarity of @FrencHMonTanA! We will never forget your kindness and generosity toward our member Noureddine Bitat.
Thank you to everyone who has donated to Noureddine’s @gofundme and to MDMotivator and to all the amazing folks whose tireless work and solidarity made Noureddine feel like NYC is his family now.
Through solidarity everything is possible. Union power! Driver power!
10 years ago my wife, the mum of our kids & the MP for Batley&Spen was killed by a far right extremist.
At anniversaries I try to be optimistic about the future. But not this time. In the ten years since she was killed we have gone backwards & I fear our democracy is now at risk
It was great joining Njideka Akunyili Crosby — a gifted Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist — to unveil our first portrait together. This piece reflects so many chapters of Michelle and my story, and we’re thrilled that it will be on display in the Hope and Change lobby at the Obama Presidential Center starting this Juneteenth.