WeUnite

Powerful letter, I really like how he says it's important to speak out!

Imagine this you're talking to friends and you start talking about cars. Naturally you work the following statement into the conversation: "I'm never going to buy a Tesla, they have so many recalls, are unreliable, lie about their range, and have poor build quality". What you just did might matter a lot more than you think because perhaps your friends will repeat what you just said and the message spreads. What you said may also surface when it's time for them to buy a car.

Or you're talking about social media and your friend says he's tired of the content on social media. You could say, yeah I totally agree. I deleted my Twitter/X, Facebook and Instagram account. I now use Lemmy, Bluesky and Mastodon. My mental health has improved a lot after making the switch.

Now imagine this: you're talking to someone who you're very good friends with but you're never talked politics before. This can perhaps be a little risky but what if you bring up something small and innocent that could be used to gauge their views. Or just listen to their thoughts without judgement and see where they stand. Perhaps you'll find that you both agree on things you never knew you did and then you become allies and you work together to make a difference in your community.

Or most importantly if you have friends who share your political views. If you do please ask them these questions: Are you registered to vote? Is your registration up to date, active and current? Do you have a ride to get to the nearest/designated polling place? Do you know all the upcoming election dates and primaries? Sadly we need this question too: Republicans are trying to suppress your vote: do you have up to date identification and paperwork?

There's a concern that Republicans are going to try to pass more voter suppression laws in hopes of shifting the results in their favor. We can fight against this both by doing everything we can to prevent these policies from getting passed in the first place and if sadly they become law let's still win anyway despite the additional challenge. Remember people throughout history fought hard for the right to vote, the best way to preserve your rights is to exercise it. Even if it becomes harder to vote it's still imperative that you do it! Also there's not much harm in having up to date paperwork. In fact it might be beneficial for other reasons in the future.

Here's information about voter ID laws by state: https://www.usa.gov/voter-id

Here's my suggested list of actions. Hopefully you won't need to do all of these to vote but you might still find benefit to doing these things anyway because it could help you later in life.

1. Up to date voter registration. Check to make sure it's active and accurate. How do this will depend on where you live so check locally using official information from your local government for example their official website (which will typically end with .gov or (two letter state initials).gov) or calling them with their current phone number.
2. Ensure your driver's license is valid and up to date if you drive or consider alternative forms of acceptable voter ID if you don't.
3. Get a certified copy of your birth certificate
4. Apply for a passport (may also be helpful if the country were to go really bad and if there's an emergency you never know if you'll need this, also you can travel internationally which is great!)
5. Social security card. You can get a free replacement if you don't have one.

Helping your friends vote can make a big difference because they may feel empowered to help their friends too!

They are convening now: I don't know if there's still an hour or so you can call your Senator and tell them to vote no on Hegseth.

You can watch live here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-senate-convenes-for-expected-hegseth-confirmation-vote

Copy and paste from the Wikipedia article:

Charles and David have run fundraising/seminars on conservative public policy and political strategy twice a year since 2003. Only about 17 people participated in 2003, but that grew to around 500 in early 2016. The seminars grew from raising less than $100 million in 2008, under $300 million in 2014, and somewhere between $700 and $900 million for the 2016 election cycle.[38] The gatherings were characterized by great secrecy (participants were routinely urged to destroy all paperwork of the gatherings), commitment to conservative free market ideology, and the wealth of the participants, known as "investors" (in 2015, for example, 18 billionaires were present at a seminar). An example of a seminar at the network gatherings was one entitled "Understanding and Addressing Threats to American Free Enterprise and Prosperity", at the June 2010 event in Aspen, Colorado. The meeting invitation stated that "[our] prosperity is under attack by the current [i.e. the Obama] Administration and many of our elected officials" and "we cannot rely on politicians to [defend our free society], so it is up to us to combat what is now the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes".[96] The seminar program indicated that past meetings have featured speakers including Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas; Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour; commentators John Stossel, Charles Krauthammer, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh; Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn; and Representatives Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, and Tom Price.[97] Some presentations at the gatherings are restricted. Guests may be required to give up their cell phones, media presence limited to only "a handful" of organizations, and photos and videos "strictly prohibited".[92]

If you encounter a paywall you can try reading it on MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/she-lied-to-us-ex-gabbard-staffers-speak-out-about-insane-meeting-with-syrian-dictator/ar-AA1xB9oa

Also remember to contact your senator and demand that she not be confirmed. If your senator is a Republican remember to remind him/her that she was a lifetime Democrat. No matter the party mention that she's part of a cult and that someone who praises dictators isn't patriotic.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250120031402/https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lg4vvxtcff2e

These words are included in the official CNN transcript too: https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2025-01-19/segment/05

While I think it's better to avoid billionaire controlled social media platforms like Twitter, Threads, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook if for whatever reason you must use an account on those platforms I have some subtle habits you can instill in yourself that will make your life better and make a difference all by doing these simple actions that require very little of your time. Note that trying to get people to leave these billionaire platforms is better than continuing to use them. Also note these instructions work on almost any social media platform even the non-billionaire ones. Bluesky takes reports very seriously, I've seen imposter and scammer accounts get deleted just minutes after reporting them.

Here's how it works. Whenever you see disinformation or any content that violates the rules especially if the content is in particular reprehensible do the following:

1. Take a screenshot of it, for maximum impact if the post got a lot of engagement make sure the numbers were included. Also BrioxorMorbide suggested putting an X over the misinformation kind of like Snopes does because otherwise it can be reinforced in some people's brain.
2. Report the content
3. Wait for the results (you cannot lose no matter if they accept the report or don't)

I hear some of you thinking Facebook or whatever website hardly ever takes down rule breaking content, they always tell me that ${horrible_content} is allowed under the rules. Why bother reporting? The answer is because when they process your report you get an answer back saying they reviewed it and if they removed it or if they allowed it. If they allowed it you now have a powerful screenshot. Take a screenshot showing how your report was rejected. Then share that screenshot on places that you know will be strongly against whatever content was allowed on the social media platform. Someone did that recently and it had a powerful impact. Look at all the people saying they deleted their X accounts. The picture I posted for this post originally came from there but sadly the post was removed. Thankfully I saved a copy before it was deleted.

If they do remove that content that's also a good outcome because you just reduced the spread of hate/disinformation.

One powerful thing people in the EU can do is report posts which violate the DSA. If the large social media website doesn't respond quickly enough they get fined. Moreover your reports could perhaps become part of statistics regarding how much illegal content social media websites host.

Reporting also has the benefit that it will result in data. If people keep reporting a particular type of content it means they are not happy with it.

Here's another thing you can do. When you see right wing content that maybe doesn't directly violate the rules but instead comes close without breaking them like Fox News does click whatever equivalent there is to "I'm not interested in this". The goal here is to make the algorithm be less likely to show you things such as Fox News. The algorithms may be based on what similar people do so you could be reducing the chance Fox News will be shown to other people too. Likely if lots of people click that button the content will be penalized or deranked. Even if you're the only one who's impacted it will still help your mental health not to see that horrible content. That's why earlier I said "make your life better".

Also when you see disinformation or hateful content try to push back on it without wasting your too much of your time. Maybe respond with Snopes says that's not true and provide a fact check link or copy and paste a rebuttal to the post or for discriminatory content say something like we are all human being, let's love instead of hate each other. The goal here is to take into account that silence always benefits the oppressor but without wasting too much of your time which could be better spent doing more impactful forms of resisting like registering people to vote or something like that. Also be careful not to do something which will cause people to become more entrenched in their hateful ways.

Yet another thing you can do and you may already be doing this is post progressive content and try to reach new audiences. For example if you read an interesting article about how a Republican is corrupt (there are tons of these articles) might as well post it on all the social media accounts you have. Research shows that people do things if they think it's popular so you're helping people realize how popular it is to be progressive and spreading it.

Here we go again. From conservative to liberal as soon as it has a personal impact.

If I understand the article correctly it hasn't been through a final vote. Maybe it's still possible to call the following people and urge them to stop the Laken Riley act.

From the article:

The Democratic senators who backed it include Reps. Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), Gary Peters (Mich.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), Jacky Rosen (Nev.), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), Jon Ossoff (Ga.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) and Mark Warner (Va.).

Please call these people and tell them you don't want the Laken Riley act.

I've noticed a lot of linking to articles from Fox News and the New York Post. I'm sure everyone already knows about Fox News but you may not know that the New York Post has essentially the same flaws as Fox News. I believe that these "news" sources should at minimum have restrictions or face an outright ban.

I've previously posted on this topic at length I just thought of trying to extend this to Reddit. Sadly I don't have an usable account because for some weird reason got shadow banned when I tried to create an account so the best I can do is ask that people here with a Reddit account for help.

I'm urging everyone with a Reddit account to send a message to the moderators of r/news and r/politics urging for these two policies:

1. Automoderator message warning that the website is known for low quality reporting and it's owned by Murdoch and therefore may contain conflict of interests.

2. Encourage users to link to reputable news sources and develop media literacy skills to. Posts to low quality news sources should be deleted when similar but higher quality content is available elsewhere. Often times the NY Post and Fox News just summarize from more reputable news sources and add their own bias and opinion to the story.

These policies should also be applied to similar websites that have the same flaws but are not owned by Murdoch. For example websites like The Daily Mail are similar because although they are not owned my Murdoch they have the same flaws in that they are not committed to telling the truth and instead profit by spreading hate, lies and propaganda.

In addition whenever you see someone share a link on a Murdoch rag or similar no matter what social media platform they are on please try to educate people on what website they are using and how it's biased.

Here's an example comment I posted when I saw someone linked to nypost.com on the Technology community.

Just so you all know the New York Post is a Rupert Murdoch (same person who owns Fox News) rag. According to Wikipedia it wasn’t profitable from 1976 to 2022 perhaps even loosing up to $70 million a year. The reason why he ran it at a loss for so long is for influence. Prior to Murdoch’s acquisition the “Post was seen to have liberal tilt, supporting trade unions and social welfare”. Now it’s a conservative trash rag.