November 11th
Dear Friends,
Happy Veterans’ Day to those who served. Ahh, public service. It will be good to have public servants living the White House again.
Of course, the current resident refuses to acknowledge that his lease is almost up. According to Alex Hern of The Guardian, the president is behind a lot of the “false or misleading claims of electoral fraud going viral on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube”:
Major social media platforms are nominally cracking down on misinformation, prominently displaying election results or appending warning labels to posts by Donald Trump that seek to undermine the validity of the vote.
According to social analytics platforms such as NewsWhip and CrowdTangle, however, claims about voting irregularities have become among the most-shared content on Facebook.
The top three posts are all from Donald Trump, according to CrowdTangle: one alleges “Fake Votes” in Nevada, where Trump trails Joe Biden by 36,000 votes; another claims Georgia, where Trump trails by 13,000 votes pending a recount, will be a “big presidential win”; and a third says “a very large number of ballots” will be affected by “threshold identification”, the meaning of which is unclear.
Choose Democracy posted a reassuring message this morning that I encourage you to read, especially if you have been feeling slightly alarmed by the Administration’s actions and the failure of many Republican officials to recognize the election results.
Unfortunately, the president is not the only American facing eviction. Both Federal and NYS protections for folks facing evictions are set to expire at the end of the year. Please write a letter to your state legislators, urging them to pass the Emergency Housing Stability and Displacement Prevention Act, a comprehensive and long lasting eviction moratorium. This is a ready-made action that will take you one minute. Do it now, please!
My public service this week was to write these emails that you can use as-is or adapt to send a message about promoting equity and ending segregation in the city’s specialized high schools. Please take three minutes to send the emails. Then, join New Yorkers for Racially Just Public Schools.
And finally, here’s a treat: tomorrow evening, artist Howardena Pindell, who created Rope/Fire/Water for The Shed, will be talking to curators Adeze Wilford and Ashley James. To attend this free event, register here.
with love,
L