The oily nexus between lazy and malicious
While Worcester tries to make Nguyen the villain, Colorio's writing op-eds for Glenn Beck
Hello, everyone. This past week has been annoying. The week to come will surely prove just the same. Today’s post is a synthesis of these annoyances past and annoyances to come. That it’s late is a testament: this shit was a slooooog.
Cambridge ended single-family zoning recently—ahead of a state commission report released on Friday arguing every town in the state should do the same—and we’re stuck thinking that it’s the city council’s job to plow the roads. That is the horizon of our imagination here in Worcester.
Anyone who tries to do a good thing here gets made the villain eventually. Everyone understands this so precious few people try. And when they do they lose support rather quickly. What, you think you’re better than me?
The city would burn down if our council got rid of single-family zoning. It is at the same time a premier example of a city council actually doing something.
Everyone thinks the council should ‘get things done’ but asked to define what that means they say ummmm ahhhhh well... they should show up at the meetings. And what happens at the meetings? Ummm well you know... they uhhhh...
If I were god emperor I’d remove this city’s access to Facebook as a first order of business. It’s a net negative. It makes politics in this city all the more embarrassing to engage with. And it was embarrassing to begin with.
I’m tired and full of simmering resentment. But here I am. The punishment for caring never ceases and like good little masochists we here at Worcester Sucks show up every day for more of it.
The crankification of Hampton-Dance—Allie on Colorio and The Blaze—Bill on The Blaze and the APP—odds and ends
The Crankification of Johanna Hampton-Dance
Like I said at the top, anyone who tries to do a good thing here gets made the villain eventually. Councilor Thu Nguyen this week just hastened that inevitable process. We just can’t help it but to blame the victim here.
On Wednesday, Nguyen announced they’re abstaining from participating in the rest of the council term.
I will not be returning indefinitely to the council floor nor partake in performative politics or a council that refuses to hold themselves accountable to human decency and the unravelling of transphobia, discrimination and the toxic council culture we've all witnessed in the last month.
This is a bold and largely unprecedented decision. So, predictably, a large swath of the politically engaged population around here has met it with open hostility and resentment—and not just the cranks. A good number of “progressives,” happy to stand with Nguyen against the blatant transphobia in city hall up until this point, are taking it as their ticket off the train. And they’re doing so loudly. This is disappointing.
It seems we’ve all forgotten so here’s a reminder: Candy Mero-Carlson was throwing slurs around about Nguyen, and no one—not the mayor, not the city manager, not Mero-Carlson herself—has done a damn thing to condemn or curb that behavior. Seven councilors pointedly voted against doing anything.
Left with the decision on whether to continue to participate in that toxic environment or opt out, Nguyen opted out. That is a reasonable response. We elected Nguyen to lead, and whether you personally like it or not, this is an act of leadership. The condemnations of their behavior read very much as victim-blaming. The talk of “getting back to work” is coming from people who have either hugely inflated or flat out incorrect understandings of what a city councilor does. The six-vote majority that has blocked nearly everything Nguyen has put on the table over the past four years remains intact. Nothing Nguyen wanted to get done was going to get done.
In this newsletter, I’ve often written about the way this city punishes you for caring. You’d be hard pressed to find a better example than the council career of Thu Nguyen. They were chewed up and spat out like many before them. The decision to abstain from the rest of their council term is an effort to go down swinging.
I am very likely in the minority on that opinion, which is fine. But ask yourself: what are you accomplishing by hopping on the ‘fuck Thu’ train besides reaffirming your support for the very roadblocks to progress that brought us to this point? Disagreement with tactics is fine but a whole lot of people have taken this moment to take it a step further than those typical squabbles. Instead, many appear content to loudly and publicly proclaim that Nguyen, actually, is the villain of this story. This has happened overwhelmingly on Facebook.
In the days since, Johanna Hampton Dance, a one-time city council candidate, has put on a master class in such behavior.
She has a petition on the agenda Tuesday and she gave a quote to the Daily Mail, a right-wing British rag that has gleefully descended on the city in the wake of the sanctuary vote.
Yesterday afternoon I called Johanna to ask her about both.
“It's not necessarily, and people, I—and myself included, have had to find myself stating, this is not about the gender politics, this is not about that. This is about the fact that, and it was just proven, we just had the ice storm and the city was not on top of the job.”
I said “Okay...”
I asked what the council’s role is in road clearing and she said “to hold the DPW accountable.” I asked for an example of how they go about that typically and she changed the subject.
I asked about Mero-Carlson’s hurling of the “it” slur, and Hampton-Dance said “where’s the proof.” Then she repeated the rumor swirling around the townie Facebook cesspool that the city employee who came forward was “pressured into it.” Asked for proof of that rumor, Hampton-Dance said that she heard it from Serenity Jones and that “other officials” are also saying it. I need to see the proof that Candy said it but the employee that heard it? Lying. The cognitive dissonance is real.
This, from a person who ran against Candy, a one-time victim of her smears, is disappointing and frankly pretty weird. Like I said, we need to ban Facebook.
Hampton-Dance also said she worked with City Clerk Niko Vangjeli to get her petition on the agenda. She was asking him what she could do, and he was ready with the answer.
“And so I was like, well, there has to be something and there's nothing in place. He's like, there's something in the charter. He was like, you would have to petition city council to petition the state legislators to put it in place in the charter.”
So now, on Tuesday (tomorrow), the council will vote on what was essentially the city clerk’s idea. It reads like this:
Heading into this vote on Vangjeli-via-Hampton-Dance’s petition, it’s worth looking at what the latter told the Daily Mail in a recent bad-faith story about Worcester.
Johanna Hampton-Dance, a local musician who twice ran to serve on the council, says Worcester has become a national joke as its local bureaucracy was spinning 'out of control'.
'Radicals are pushing their agenda for social justice, when the city council should be about clearing the trash and paving our streets,' Hampton-Dance told DailyMail.com.
'For the vast majority, the screaming and shouting is foolish and embarrassing, and these people should pull themselves together and have adult conversations about tough issues.'
The lack of solidarity in this city is insane and it runs deep.
While Hampton-Dance is the most surprising participant in the right wing culture war assault on our queer community, we turn now to one of the worst offenders: Donna Colorio.
In two separate but related pieces, Allie Cislo and I are gunna tackle the whole mess of her writing an op-ed about Worcester for Glenn Beck’s independent far-right publication The Blaze. While Allie’s focuses on local concerns, mine situates it in the longer national trend of the right’s astroturfed trans panic agenda. There’s some overlap but hey that’s fine.
From Hampton-Dance to Colorio, this is the company Worcester is gleefully keeping—in lockstep with Glenn Beck as the whole narrative bends to making a villain of Nguyen for the act of saying something important.
It’s not all bad though. Think about joining Showing Up For Racial Justice at this event ahead of the meeting Tuesday.
The oily nexus between lazy and malicious
By Allie Cislo
Last Monday, six days after the Worcester City Council passed the trans sanctuary city resolution, Donna Colorio published a brief think piece detailing her decision to vote no.
The article appeared in The Blaze, a conservative outlet co-founded by Glenn Beck, which claims to be "unapologetically pro-America and pro-free speech. It is the home of dissent from woke capital, Big Tech, cultural arsonists, and state-sponsored media."
"We are builders," the outlet boasts. Its buzzword salad manifesto does not expand upon what, precisely, its media empire is busy constructing.
On Feb. 4, the day the sanctuary city petition was first heard by the Council, Donna Colorio held it under privilege to request a city report to financially justify her no vote. Colorio was always going to vote no on this petition. At a time when the stakes were lower, she simply exempted herself from voting at all on a 2022 call for the Commonwealth to pass trans sanctuary laws, departing chambers before the vote took place.
She is no firebrand, no public grandstander, but she draws her core constituency from the same chthonic well as Shanel Soucy, the erstwhile School Committee candidate torpedoed in part by her virulent homophobia in 2021 (Donna was photographed alongside fellow ‘no’ voter Moe Bergman glad-handing at one Soucy event during the campaign). But the requested report, rooted in a bad faith query that asked new solicitor Alexandra Kalkounis to produce a statement that walked the line between speculative fiction and augury, represents the kind of administrative clothesline that snaps taut at the ankle every time a pro-social item attempts to pass under Colorio's preternaturally still stare.
In her article, Donna points out with an uncited statistic that approximately one in five Worcester residents lives in poverty. She claims that the resolution posed a threat to these residents, to the federally funded programs that they rely on for health care, housing, and food. The council's job is in the realm of the tangible, she says. Sanctuary, safety, the felt sense that you are free to walk down the street without being attacked, is for trans people in Colorio's world, simply too ineffable.
Had Donna bothered to read the text of the resolution she voted against, she would have encountered a litany of statistics describing how structural and interpersonal discrimination converge to shove LGBTQ people—especially trans people of color—into that one in five Worcester residents living in poverty. Had Donna actually read the petition, she would have encountered data such as:
"WHEREAS, the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law reports that 17% of sexual minority adults have experienced homelessness in their lives, compared to 6% of cisgender straight people, and that 8% of transgender adults have experienced homelessness in the last year alone, while only 3% of cisgender people did; and
WHEREAS, a survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reveals that trans people experience unemployment at twice the rate as the general population, with trans people of color impacted at a scale four times the national rate. Transgender survey respondents further reported that they experienced extensive discrimination as both renters and homeowners, 19% said that they had been denied a home or apartment because of their gender identity, and their homeownership rates were reported at only half the national rate."
The people who benefit from federal funding, be it through social safety net programs or grants, are not a class distinct from the queer and trans community. If we accept at face value the dubious premise that federal funding is seriously threatened by a sanctuary resolution, the stakes for the selfsame people pleading for their lives are not immaterial. You cannot centrifuge the queerness out of the working class, particularly when social discrimination has such clear economic impacts. They will try, though. When fellow ‘no’ voter Moe Bergman opined that he did so on behalf of the other 200,000 residents of Worcester, the good hard-working people who stayed home instead of keeping him late in chambers with their whining, he contributed to this rhetorical project. For Donna and Moe, neither of whom broke 9,000 votes in the last election, the “entire city” that they invoke as their constituency exists as an economic mirage completely divorced from the impacts of structural discrimination.
Perhaps Donna did bother to read the resolution, after all. Perhaps, as Bill has written many times in this newsletter, the cruelty is the point.
But before coming to that conclusion prematurely, I was curious to learn about Donna's stated commitment to eradicating poverty. Surely, if she could not bring herself to make even a symbolic stand—given that the resolution affirms existing state law rather than proposing new policy—she must be doing so from a place of integrity, as a tireless advocate for people living at the margins. If she wants to commit the high school sophomore's logical fallacy that attending to parks and potholes is somehow incompatible with the ability to hold two thoughts in your head simultaneously, I was excited to see how she has worked tirelessly in other contexts to address poverty in Worcester.
The mucus trail Donna Colorio leaves in the archives of City Hall is, with these tender hopes in mind, underwhelming. She is not the originator of thoughtful inquiries about alleviating material privation. In response to the proposed housing project on Lewis Street that has since become A Place to Live, she called in 2020 for public meetings to allow community members to “give input” on the supportive housing facility. These orders were opposed by Sarai Rivera, who represented the district in which the building is located. At first blush, advocacy for transparency and community input seem laudable, until you juxtapose it with orders she has authored over the years requesting hard limits on public comment periods during council meetings and the similar “information gathering” tactics she used in 2024 to delay action on the spate of pedestrian traffic deaths. In this context, Donna’s community meetings are emblematic of rank NIMBYism, designed to foment discontent among the residents of Worcester who would rather sever a limb than concede that they share their humanity with people who are unhoused.
She is a repeated advocate for increasing surveillance around the city, ostensibly for the purposes of reducing illegal dumping and ‘illicit’ activity, though her interest in punitive oversight also extends to publicly funded local colleges and universities who provide facility space to groups engaged in “illegal activities.” At the beginning of the pandemic, she co-authored with—who else?—Moe Bergman, Kate Toomey, and Candy Mero-Carlson an order requesting that there be no increase in beds for homeless non-residents of Worcester until the city had produced “in the interest of transparency and edification for the general public” a report including such humanitarian items as a pro/con list. In January 2024, she authored one of her now-classic “just wondering” orders asking for a report about how the Worcester Public Library accounts for seating and paying for unhoused people who dare to exist in a warm indoor space.
This is by no means an exhaustive list: what it demonstrates, however, is that the most stark nod to impoverishment in Donna Colorio’s public service record is that of her capacity for human empathy.
While combing through the motions and orders of city council past, the phrase "cultural arsonists," a group that contributors to The Blaze purportedly include among their enemies, kept resurfacing in my mind. In a 2022 interview, Pete Havel, author of The Arsonist in the Office: Fireproofing Your Life Against Toxic Coworkers, Bosses, Employees, and Cultures, described cultural arsonists as “people that burn things down. That is motivated by wanting power to use against people, wanting revenge, profit motives — just wanting to see stuff burn.” In his book, he further explains the ramifications of a toxic workplace culture that allows these so-called arsonists to run unchecked: “[it is] created when decision-makers either behave badly themselves or look the other way and do not address bad behavior from others. [...] If they don’t want to address an issue, they ignore it or even normalize it.”
To date, Candy Mero-Carlson has still not categorically denied referring to Thu Nguyen as ‘it.’ The council majority declined to take up a bureaucratically irreproachable request to investigate this incident, and is winding up the local outrage machine to pillory Thu for refusing to accept workplace abuse as a necessary and unavoidable condition of public service. According to Havel, in a toxic workplace culture “ethics are seen as a roadblock to getting things done. Doing things the right way becomes inconvenient.” Donna’s smug invocation of “pragmatic” governance as justification for rejecting the sanctuary resolution is enabled by the unchecked pyromania of her fellow councilors and Joe Petty’s utter dereliction of moral leadership as mayor.
It is a chilling realization to come to again and again, its rancid frisson never lessened for its frequency, that a majority of the people sitting in Worcester's elected offices operate at the oily nexus between lazy and malicious. In Donna, and in the council culture she represents, we see someone willing to burn down the entire house to keep her and the people like her warm.
Allie Cislo (she/they) is an educator, textile artist, and organizer based in Worcester, MA. She is a co-founder of the Worcester Havurah, a diasporist Jewish community, and a member of Queer Worcester Residents & Our Allies.
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Rolling around on the astroturf
Bill again!
Donna Colorio—who averages about 10 words a meeting and who has not written an op-ed since 2015—who is either in Bergman's thrall or the other way around, we're still not sure—wrote a six-paragraph op-ed for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze last Monday headlined “Why I voted ‘no’ on the trans sanctuary city bill.” She writes:
“Worcester has gone crazy!” people say to me as I travel about the city. “When is the city council going to get back to city business?” I was bombarded by tons of responses from constituents this past week because I was one of only two votes against making Worcester a “sanctuary city” for transgender and gender-diverse people. The comments were overwhelmingly supportive, encouraging, and extremely thankful to me for “being the voice of common sense.”
If you’re unsure of what that The Blaze is, consider yourself in good company and also lucky. I didn’t know anything about it until I got the link texted to me last Tuesday. The Blaze was launched by Glenn Beck in 2010, originally as a TV station, and has since gone through several permutations as it adapts to the ever-changing conservative media landscape.
Colorio’s op-ed appears in the ‘opinion’ vertical, in a sea of similarly culture-war styled conservative slop. For instance, the very next opinion piece put up after Colorio’s was “RFK Jr. takes on Big Pharma’s lies — bring on the reckoning!” The day before Colorio’s, there was “Democrats wilt before the power of DOGE” and “Stubbornness, divine providence, and Donald Trump” Just as I’m writing this, on Wednesday, there’s a fresh one up from Glenn Beck himself: “The new golden age: Why the world respects Trump’s America”. It’s paywalled. Oh well!
Like the rest of the conservative media ecosystem, this machine runs on trans panic, making Colorio’s op-ed well placed. A quick search of the site pings countless examples of run-of-the-mill transphobia, as well as some antisemitism and racism thrown in for good measure. Here’s one from last May that hits all three: “From Soros to Beijing: Unveiling the billionaires behind transgenderism” Beck is the author, and in the first sentence, he plugs his TV special The Reckoning, on the supposed evils of gender-affirming care. The second sentence:
You would be shocked and horrified by what is being done to society’s most vulnerable — our children — and those with special needs, all in the name of this corrupt transgender ideology.
This is the vaunted company Colorio joined when her op-ed went up. In doing so, she offered up our city as fodder for the fascists—willingly participating in the same fleeting conservative spectacle that got Jim Polito onto Fox News—and she only might have gotten paid for it. Polito most certainly didn’t. Both of them are monsters. But anyway.
In the piece, Colorio says the city’s trans community are the victims of some sort of Soros-inflected and unstated “them.”
“This decision was not made lightly. I spent hours listening to passionate stories from members of the LGBTQ community. It became clear that while they are indeed victims, they are not victims of policies lacking from our city but rather of an agenda seeking to divide our community and use these residents as pawns.”
An argument that makes sense only if you deny them any individual political agency whatsoever! And, of course, ignore the very real national assault on rights and protections for trans people.
“Residents have expressed to me repeatedly that they want the council to focus on tangible issues like fixing potholes, maintaining parks, enhancing public safety, managing taxes, and improving schools. These are the responsibilities we should be concentrating on to improve everyday life for all in Worcester.”
Colorio’s last original idea, you’ll remember, was “we should kick the homeless out of the library.” The greatest public safety issue the city faced over the past year was the pedestrian deaths crisis. While that was ongoing—the entire bloody summer in which children were killed and put in comas—Colorio held up the 25 MPH proposal in her Traffic & Parking subcommittee. Sigh. Cue Logan Roy: You are not serious people.
Before this, Donna Colorio has written precisely two op-eds: one in 2013 and one in 2015, both railing against “Common Core” education standards—a bugbear of the time for Heritage Foundation types.
So why the decade-long absence from opinion writing? Why pick it back up now, with the new bugbear of the moment? In an outlet that has absolutely nothing at all to do with Worcester?
The easiest answer is she was recruited. With the conservative media swarming around Worcester lately, I’m sure Colorio and Bergman’s inboxes were alight with media requests, same as Thu’s inbox has been a cesspool of the most vile fascist ideations you can imagine. I put in some records requests for an email chain that’ll say one way or the other. But it doesn’t really matter.
In placing this op-ed with The Blaze and not putting it in, say, the Telegram, our traditional forum for op-eds from councilors, Colorio tells on herself in a major way. She very much wants to be a part of the anti-trans panic sweeping the country, and she very much does not consider this a matter of getting back to the basics. No one has ever submitted a story to a website like The Blaze about trans people with the goal of, as Colorio puts it, re-focusing on “tangible issues.” This is the action of someone who sees our trans neighbors as cause for moral panic. She is both that kind of person, and a sitting city councilor in our city. That’s unacceptable.
Behind Candy Mero-Carlson’s “it” comment, Colorio becomes the second councilor to plant their flag on the side of the transphobes. That either of them are in power around here calls to question that the city is all that much of a sanctuary for the gender diverse.
In Colorio’s example though, we really see the ugly trans panic narrative spun by conservative media come home to roost.
It’s worth a brief sketch of “trans” in the imagination of the Republican Party, and, dragged by the nose as they are, an increasing number of Democrats. There’s a great big long history of it up on Ettingermentum’s newsletter. I’ll provide a brief recap.
2015-2016: Gay marriage is settled and very popular and Republicans need a new thing against which to define the real American family. The pioneering attempt is HB2 in North Carolina, the “bathroom bill.” It’s a disaster. So much so it initiated a corporate retreat from the state, costing billions in economic development. Trump himself called the whole thing stupid in a 2016 Town Hall event.
2017: One of Trump’s first and least popular actions: the transgender military ban. Another stunning failure.
2019: The American Principles Project emerges as a leading anti-trans conservative think tank with a bold new idea: What if we refocus on transgender children, as attacks on adults have so far been a failure? The race for Kentucky Governor, with Democrat Andy Beshear challenging Republican incumbent Matt Bevin was used as a testing ground. This, from a 2019 New York Times piece headlined “A Conservative Push to Make Trans Kids and School Sports the Next Battleground in the Culture War.”
If Democrats have their way, soon boys will be able to compete against girls in school sports.
This scenario, presented in a pair of ads that are appearing on computer screens and smartphones across Kentucky, is the work of a little-known group funded by anonymous donors called the American Principles Project, which in recent years has focused on fighting more familiar clashes in the culture wars over same-sex marriage and abortion rights.
The Kentucky race was, for the APP, a stated testing ground for this rhetoric. “What we’re doing is trying to show Republicans how to win on these key issues,” Terry Schilling, the group’s executive director, is quoted saying. It failed, like all past attempts. But the APP kept plucking away at it.
2020: An attack line against Joe Biden hit the scene, foisted by none other than the APP: that the presidential hopeful was endorsing sex changes on 8-year-olds. They flooded swing states with tens of thousands of text messages to the tune. Though it didn’t help Trump much, it set the groundwork for the “anti-woke” rhetoric of today.
2021-2024: Under Biden, anti-woke trans fearmongering became praxis for Republicans. From ettingermentum:
As the Republican Party started to conceptualize its very identity around strident “anti-wokeism”, a massive wave of anti-trans policymaking began to rise, starting in the country’s reddest states. In just the first four months of 2021, over 250 anti-LGBT bills were proposed, and 17 were passed: more than any year since 2015. Following the playbook pioneered by the APP, many of these bills specifically targeted children, with seven states passing sports bans and one, Arkansas, outright banning gender-affirming care for trans kids. Post-HB2 apathy had been replaced almost overnight with a sudden fervor.
That’s the upshot to all this. Transphobes aren’t pushing transphobia because trans people are easy targets for political gain. They do it because it makes them feel better about their own failures, and because they are ideologically obsessed, out-of-touch psychos with apocalyptic delusions.
The anti-trans hysteria was packaged with panic over critical race theory as a way to whip the rubes into a frenzy. Mission accomplished. Terry Schilling back at it again, quoted in the Times:
“This is a political winner,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative American Principles Project, arguing that more voters would have been swayed had many Republicans not “shied away” from the subject.
Bravely, the Times pointed out in the same article: The potential consequences for transgender people, for whom harassment and threats have become common and suicide rates are high, are profound. Thank you, Times.
2025: Anti-trans panic is now one of the dominant trends in mainstream political discourse. Trump took action on it on Day One, of course. Democrats like our own Seth Moulton have completely submitted to its logic. And the APP is still at it, dragging us further and further down the road to fascistic hysteria. Here’s a Fox News story from Feb. 6: “Feds spent millions studying trans menstruation, strengthening gay rights in the Balkans, database reveals” What database, you ask?
The American Principles Project, a conservative nonprofit that bills itself as "America's Top Defender of the Family," published a new database Thursday morning called "Funding Insanity," which details various initiatives — both domestic and abroad — that received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the federal government to promote left-wing gender ideology.
Ahhhh look at that. This whole thing, from the get go, completely cooked by one conservative think tank. In the story, Schilling is yet again quoted. Compare Donna Colorio's op-ed to this rhetoric from Schilling:
"When Americans pay their taxes every year, they expect that money to go towards projects that help them: strengthening our national defense, building and upgrading infrastructure, protecting our natural resources, etc.," American Principles Project President Terry Schilling said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital.
For comparison, here’s Donna:
“Residents have expressed to me repeatedly that they want the council to focus on tangible issues like fixing potholes, maintaining parks, enhancing public safety, managing taxes, and improving schools. These are the responsibilities we should be concentrating on to improve everyday life for all in Worcester.”
Schilling:
"However, in recent years Democrats have been using public funds to instead push their radical gender agenda here at home and around the world...”
Colorio:
“It became clear that while they are indeed victims, they are not victims of policies lacking from our city but rather of an agenda seeking to divide our community and use these residents as pawns.”
Hmmmm who exactly “use these residents as pawns,” again, Donna? Who exactly is “seeking to divide”?
Colorio might not know what she’s doing, but Schilling certainly does. He knows—and we should all know—that the anti-trans panic has never been more than a right-wing bid for political expediency. It is a stain on the city that we have a sitting city councilor willing and eager to play along.
Odds and ends
On a whim Saturday, Katie and I went to the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, which was surprisingly cool as hell. Would recommend. Also Clinton has a real charm to it in general.
Here’s a fun video on how to handle a transphobe in your life.
It’s been months and months and months since the state appointed a special investigator to look into the murder of Worcester state police recruit Enrique Delgado Garcia. In a letter sent several days ago, members of our state delegation are demanding an update. It’s getting ridiculous.
Next Wednesday, March 5, there’s a cool organizing meeting some of you may be interested in attending! I’ll be there most likely. You can register here.
Interesting story in the Worcester Business Journal about NIH cuts and Umass Medical.
St. Vincent has a new CEO after the MNA basically singlehandedly forced out Carolyn Jackson. Let’s do it again!
Progressive candidates would do well to read up on how Zohran Mamdani is going about his race for NYC mayor: housing and transit housing and transit housing and transit housing and transit. Good Q&A in The Nation: “Zohran Mamdani Wants You to Have More Money in Your Pocket”
The West Boylston Police Station Trump flag story is just nutty. It’ll be coming to a close today—likely with the firing of the city manager who took issue with it. Wild.
RIP to B.T.’s short-lived Worcester location. Closing next week I guess. It was just okay if we’re being honest.
Lastly here’s a really cool song I caught the other day on Marty In The Morning, the Irish radio program I now listen to religiously every morning.
Allie’s piece. 👏👏👏👏👏👏 incredible. 5 Stars. No notes. Fire emoji.
"you cannot centrifuge the queerness out of the working class" bars!!