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community weblog
Dear America: Your rights are on the line
We are the federal workers who protect America from discrimination. The federal government is dismantling YOUR right to safe housing and essential services—and silencing us to hide it from you. We break that silence and ask you to stand with us, before it's too late. Read the letters.
posted by Winnie the Proust on Apr 17, 2026 at 7:33 AM
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Waiting for the New York Times to thoroughly undercover this and if forced to cover it at all, to normalize it coming and going. No other media outlet will mention it at all.
I'm sure it will get some play on the socials, but it will be highly silo'd so that only dedicated Resist-libs and wine moms (laudatory) see it. Normie/swing voters will be profoundly under-exposed to the story. It will not go viral or be a major concern or even talked about a week from now.
Oh, and Liz Warren, Bernie Sanders and AOC will be the only Dems to make noise about it (maybe Sheldon Whitehouse or Brian Schatz or something; Pressley and some of the other progressive House members will make statements that are completely ignored by the press), and the party leadership will be late to the game if they get in at all.
I would love to be wrong about any of this, and I am sure this is an unhelpful comment. Don't mind me, I'm just processing my trauma.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 8:03 AM
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I am sure this is an unhelpful comment
I was just about to say the same thing. Reduced to posting letters on a website 10% of the population will read. 20 years ago this would have had people rioting in the streets.
The gradual progression of this fatigue is well understood, which is why fascists always look like they are playing a short hard game when in fact they are playing a long gentle game.
posted by CynicalKnight at 8:12 AM
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I understand that very few people will read it and very few news outlets will cover it but it is still good to get it on the record and it still represents a positive action for the people who wrote the letters and built the website.
There are very few ways to resist. People get depressed when they feel like they are not doing anything. People go to No Kings marches because it feels good to do something. This is another one of those somethings.
Eventually all the somethings will reach critical mass and the upward curve of "people taking action" will cross over the downward curve "cognitive state of dear leader" and that is when the impact will be felt.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:28 AM
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well I shared the links on my measly social media presence and hopefully will get reposted so at least some more people might hear about this and read the letters. it's difficult to avoid negativity, or a sense of helplessness, but we keep trying, right?
posted by supermedusa at 8:33 AM
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but we keep trying, right
it's the subdee way
I don't recognize other ways
posted by runsrealgood at 8:44 AM
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This is well put together.
There are actions you can take on their take action page.
It might feel like very little, but it all counts.
Maybe a third of the country is very bigoted, and the GOP has had the advantage in our system of government since they made sure they were the party of the big rural states.
More recently, they've had an even greater advantage since Roberts took over the Supreme Court and played a 20 year game of allowing money in politics and undoing the Voting Rights Act, allowing republican controlled states to routinely run elections where they discard the ballots of millions of minority voters.
Now we've gotten to what will hopefully be the end of the line on that strategy. Not just because people will realize the game is rigged (of course they already know) but because it will become increasingly obvious that the riggers are not on their side.
posted by subdee at 8:49 AM
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it's the subdee way
omg... thank you.
it DOES feel better to do something.
posted by subdee at 8:50 AM
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I don't see that this is "reduced to." When did civil servants ever have a major voice in things?
I also see this more hopefully than some prior commenters. This is another resistance community a-borning. The more of these we have, the more people resist, and the more these can work together in coalition, the more difficult-to-disrupt power people can accumulate.
What is giving me hope at the moment is that I am connected in some way or other to WAY more resistance communities of various kinds in my local area than I could POSSIBLY give significant time to. I think this is a more sustainable set of efforts than Indivisible was -- the attempt to Organize Everybody At Once Into The Same Org, at least in my area, fell victim to infighting and incompatible agendas.
Uh, sorry, 'scuse me, I have a rally to get to that starts in twenty minutes.
posted by humbug at 9:39 AM
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As a child of a civil servant, and somebody who has had career-long contact with civil servants as part of my job (I'm one of those contractors who really ought to be a civil servant) I have to go along with @humbug above. This is a new thing under the sun: civil servants don't speak out of school like this. That this is happening is a necessary step toward broader resistance within the civil service. Which will be slow coming, because at the end of the day the civil service is supposed to implement the policies of the Executive, when the latter are sanely conceived.
As for how people would have been rioting in the streets back in the day... I'm skeptical of that. I think we are lots closer to General Strike-type massive resistance than any time in the last 100 years. The last 75 years, for sure.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:51 AM
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Eventually all the somethings will reach critical mass
You're absolutely right. I apologize for my negativity. I forgot an important lesson. Try.
posted by CynicalKnight at 10:38 AM
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try
posted by j_curiouser at 12:08 PM
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[ One deleted at user request!]
posted by mod_adrienneleigh at 10:01 AM
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