Jack Mirkinson
@jackmirkinson.bsky.social
11K followers 1.5K following 2K posts
Senior editor, The Nation (@thenation.com) | Editor/co-owner, Discourse Blog (@discourseblog.com) Get in touch: jmirkinson at thenation dot com / jack at discourseblog dot com
![JM: I don’t want to get into making you account for all of your tweets, but, for instance, your tweet about Kamala Harris—you’ve said that you regret saying the exact words that you said. But you were responding to her now pretty infamous warning to [potential migrants from] Latin America, saying, “Do not come.” Do you regret the sentiment behind the tweet—the objection to the Biden administration’s immigration policies? Or do you still stand by the feelings that you had, even if you don’t stand by the exact words that you used to express them?
AC: The tweet itself was really related to just feeling deeply frustrated and powerless, as someone who had no political power, with establishment politics that has gotten us to the moment that we’re in—where, for some reason, it’s OK for the language that my opponent is using against me to exist. Where he doesn’t have to answer to the policies that funded ICE, that allowed for fascism to rise, that made it so that we spend more of our tax dollars on war than on our own kids
I will apologize for the things that I need to take accountability for as many times as I need to for folks to know how sincere that is. But I have to wonder why it is that someone who had no power when I said those things, no institutional power, is being deeply dehumanized by over $5.5 million of spending against me, while my opponent has yet to answer any question of substance about the things that actually matter to the community here.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:76bed4yvg4fex4cyqb4f7orp/bafkreial3eqlavivh3pddyzjkcsaklp4ihko5ctpy55fk324t7ikjv2sua)
![AC: I knew that they would come after me. I couldn’t know what form it would take. And I also could not have imagined the degree and the scale [of it]. It’s really reflective of the kind of politics that we’ve had for far too long—of divisiveness, of dehumanization, of cruelty in many ways.
I’ve been very intentional this entire campaign about making sure that I was criticizing Adriano on his policies, on his absence, on the impact that his performance as a congressman has had on our community. [I’ve had] no clear answer to any of the questions around his voting record, around the money he takes from special interests. No clear answer as to why he refuses to call it a genocide [in Gaza].
And yet he is engaging in a type of politics that is bringing people to my social media to call me a gorilla, to call me a rat, to call me trash. And they’re calling me Haitian, as though that were a bad thing. They’re questioning my Dominican heritage. He has turned this into a race about Dominican identity versus whatever he thinks I am, which is crazy. My parents are Dominican. My grandparents are Dominican. All eight of my great-grandparents are Dominican.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:76bed4yvg4fex4cyqb4f7orp/bafkreienaam6aki7xrjfdrdnjaspwhcfcllabwelwn4rxmb45gedfceyne)
