Ady Barkan Profile picture
Fighting for social justice. Founder @BeAHeroTeam. Organizer @CPDAction. Chillaxing w/ @rachael_scar, Carl & Willow. Paralyzed by ALS. Author: Eyes to the Wind.
Oct 7, 2018 6 tweets 2 min read
2 years ago today, @rachael_scar and I walked into the neurologist's office. She was carrying 4-month-old Baby Carl on her chest.

We walked out an hour later with my death sentence. ALS would paralyze and then kill me, and there wasn't anything we could to stop it. How would we persevere? What we do with the short time I had left? How could we find hope in the dark?

These were our personal challenges. But they became questions for the nation a month later when Donald Trump was elected president.
Oct 3, 2018 6 tweets 2 min read
Do you want Brett Kavanaugh impacting your life for the next 30 years? If not, you have three days to #CancelKavanaugh.

Here are 5 things you can do. I promise you will be glad you did.

(Please RT to help save our democracy.) 1. Show up at a vigil Wednesday evening.

There are vigils happening all around the country. Find one near you, bring some friends with you, alert your local TV station, and tweet out some photos.

moveon.org/scotus
Apr 7, 2018 5 tweets 2 min read
.@WorkingFamilies comms director @joedinkin has a better answer than these data wonks:

Reject issue by issue silos & instead go for meta themes.

70: Trump is enriching the rich and powerful at the aexpense of ordinary Americas. (Trumpcare, tax scam, gov corruption all fit here) 30: Trump is dividing Americans from eachother & we can't let him do it. (Attacks on immigrants&muslims fit here, so do voting rights, mass incarceration, civil rights, lgbtq, metoo. This is actually all a pretty dopy way of framing things but the polling suggests it works.
Jan 29, 2018 10 tweets 5 min read
Like usual, @realDonaldTrump is attacking smart black people who disagree with him. Today's installment? Saying that Jay Z and @VanJones68 should be grateful to him for low black unemployment rates.

@shawnsebastian has a full rebuttal here. I'll give you the abridged version. First, Donald Trump gets zero credit for the strong economy. Take a look at these 2 charts. The recovery started 8 years ago (under a Black president).

And it was propelled forward until now because Janet Yellen insisted on pursuing true full employment.

Trump fired Yellen.
Jan 13, 2018 16 tweets 9 min read
Wow look! Full employment makes "unemployable" people very employable. And it has tremendous ability to combat racial inequality.

*This* is why we launched Fed Up. Full employment is the most powerful public policy that exists for improving lives.

mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/bus… By empowering workers to quit if they want, full employment:
Raises wages,
reduces inequality,
combats racial discrimination,
promotes gender equity,
reduces sexual assaults/harassment,
stabilizes schedules,
facilities unionization,
reduces depression&suicide
Enhances skills.
Dec 31, 2017 15 tweets 5 min read
Some end-of-year thoughts about this moment, this movement, power, race, money, and what we need to do together over the coming 10 months. Please read it and retweet it if it strikes a chord with you. And, white people, *please* open your wallets before midnight tomorrow. This year has been exhausting. For all of us. The racism & xenophobia has been out of control. To me, as a white person, it has been offensive & shocking. But you know what? Those feelings are negligible compared to what it's felt like to be on the receiving end of the hatred.
Dec 30, 2017 12 tweets 6 min read
Yesterday, I linked to @CharlesPPierce's piece arguing that @realDonaldTrump is exhibiting serious cognitive decline. I said he has dementia. I invited you to share your stories of loved ones with similar problems, & hundreds of you did, movingly. But some of you also pushed back, arguing that it was irresponsible of me to make that armchair diagnosis, because it stigmatizes people with mental illness. It's an important critique, on a crucial question in American politics, so let's talk about it now. #CripTheVote
Dec 16, 2017 12 tweets 5 min read
I have received more messages of love and solidarity this week than any person deserves in a lifetime. For that I am forever grateful. And our struggle against this immoral tax scam will reach its climax next week. On Mon & Tue, we will meet on Capitol Hill in a contest for the soul of this nation. The sides are clear: money vs. people, greed vs. love. Across the US, Americans are raising our voices, rejecting this bill's pessimistic vision: a vision of scarcity, inequality, and misery.
Dec 11, 2017 28 tweets 6 min read
It’s been a long day. 20 hours of poignant conversations with journalists, parents, and activists about the state of our nation and our prospects for stopping this cruel bill. But I want to talk about my wife, @rachael_scar . And about women. In America. In 2017. Her name is Rachael Scarborough King. She is a professor of English Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And she is Carl’s mother.