Executive Director @americnhumanist Past: M.Ed @harvard, BA @yale, @PeaceFirstOrg,📱startups Ever: Building a 🌎 where everyone belongs & thrives, 🌊 politics
Annapolis
Joined April 2010
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Compassion won't fight for itself, so we have to.
In the middle of the radical religious right's "war on empathy,"' we're giving away $100,000 in grants for Americans to help their neighbors.
America needs more empathy, not less, and we're standing on it.
This is fantastic: The @americnhumanist is giving away $100,000 in grants to spread compassion.
They’re calling it the “American Empathy Project.”
americanempathyproject.org
Fish Stark retweeted
Not staying quiet about a failed status quo in the name of unity. Not going to betray voters done with the donor class.
Tax the Billionaires
Medicare for All
Free childcare
Free college and trade schools
No Aid to Israel
I am a New Deal Democrat, not a Chuck Schumer Democrat.
Fish Stark retweeted
A study from Brown University found that the Bush administration's wars have killed at least 4.5 million people and displaced 38 million more.
Fish Stark retweeted
Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while *he* was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled.
You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.
Fish Stark retweeted
The funny thing about people saying “Oh, Ro Khanna was hoping armed settlers would detain him for the photo op” is that there are very few places in the world that are funded by US tax dollars where Khanna could stumble into that scenario in just a few hours after arrival.
Like, try a little bit of self reflection. Why was it basically guaranteed that that would happen to him in just a three day trip?
Fish Stark retweeted
Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine.
When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention.
They made a huge mistake.
You will be hearing more soon. nytimes.com/2026/07/11/us/po…
Fish Stark retweeted
You might think to yourself: why would AIPAC waste this money when they know Abdul will win the primary?
Answer: so they can soften him up for the general and beat him with the Republican, but make the attacks look like they’re coming from a fellow Dem.
By not banning AIPAC, a GOP-leaning group, from spending in Dem primaries, Dem leadership paved the way for this.
AIPAC's United Democracy Project drops another $3.4M in ad buys supporting @HaleyforMI and opposing @AbdulElSayed, bringing their total to over $10.7M in the #MISen primary so far.
Fish Stark retweeted
Really hard tone to nail here, and he nails it; an authentic patriotism that grapples with flaws and the founding ideals, but in which the ideals are the most enduring and defining feature.
Mamdani: There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in far away lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here.
And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.
For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.
We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.
The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence-that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all.
It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel— the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too.
Fish Stark retweeted
"How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another."
"Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again-including 250 years ago-those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress."
Mamdani: The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.
How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.
At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again-including 250 years ago-those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.
And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted-but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.
As we mark 250 years, what do we see?
We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world— one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands —those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone —and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.
Fish Stark retweeted
Mamdani: There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in far away lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here.
And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.
For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.
We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.
The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence-that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all.
It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel— the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too.
Fish Stark retweeted
I think the Massachusetts Senate Dem primary (on September 1 🫠) will give us some clarity about what specifically (predominantly white) progressive base voters are most fed up with
Ed Markey is a unique combination of:
— Incumbent
— Old
— Being to the left of his challenger
Fish Stark retweeted
There's a kind of leftist who notices that education is a privilege and thus concludes it's good to be ignorant
Fish Stark retweeted
Since last week’s NY primaries, the professional “opinion-haver” class has been working overtime. As usual, they’re missing the point.
Voters don't care about ideological labels. They care that you're willing to pick – and win! – righteous fights on their behalf. 🧵:
Fish Stark retweeted
Sorry, in Woke 2 we don’t tolerate religious bigotry of any form
No more faux progressive language to defend reactionary behavior, we left this bullshit in 2020
Fish Stark retweeted
I wasn't sold on the Ossoff hype for a long time, but you can mark me sold. He might be the only Dem that all wings of the party like, his charisma is off the charts, he doesn't ever fall into traps and engage wedge issue BS, and he's done an amazing job being my Senator
Fish Stark retweeted
Hi @NYTimesPR, thanks for responding. Appreciate it. I'm a subscriber and I think some of your reporters do some great reporting.
Just to respond to your response to my post:
1) There were no facts "misstated" by me. You cited three examples in response. Only one of them was about specific *named* GOP House members (and it wasn't from "yesterday", it was from a year ago.) So I stand by my post.
2) As others have pointed out already, none of the 3 articles you cited have the names of any GOP individuals in the titles ("Right-Wing Republicans" "a Kansas Republican" "G.O.P. Fingerprints"), in comparison to your original "Who is Darializa" takedown piece. Where is your "Who is Brandon Gill" or "Who is Keith Self" or "Who Is Randy Fine" or "Who Is Mary Miller" critical profile pieces? How about "Who is Tom Emmer," given the GOP House Majority Whip just a few days ago spewed racist crap about Somalis? And where are the Peter Baker tweets summarizing *their* most controversial claims?
3) This isn't a new criticism. Many have made it against your paper for many years; that you go harder on the left than the right, that you even occasionally whitewash the far right. Remember when you had to do a public response in 2017 to a NYT profile that went super soft on a... Nazi? politico.com/story/2017/11/2…. Remember when you guys did a softball piece about a far-right, Islamophobic Trump aide's love for cooking? nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/po….
Oh, and dare I ask: where are the fawning 'Trump voters' in diners' equivalent pieces for DSA members in NYC bodegas? Isn't it time?
4) Finally, that your response to my post was to proudly say you guys at the Times have "been documenting the increasingly extreme viewpoints on both sides of the political spectrum" kinda makes my point for me. One side's extreme wants universal healthcare and an end to genocide. The other side's extreme says Somalis are "garbage" and wants "remigration", mass deportations and white supremacy.
But, hey, "Both sides!"
