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Timothy Soseki Kudo

@timkudo.com
370 followers 329 following 403 posts

Writes things people sometimes read. Bylines: New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, The Atlantic, et al. Insta: www.instagram.com/theensoproject Web: timkudo.com Signal: @timkudo.01

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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 13/09/2026
Came across this 1943 ad for sugar beet workers offering an escape from the concentration camps. "Some day," he has said, "I'll leave here to return to my former home, or to start over in a new and friendly community. Some day I'll be a part of America again... to produce or fight for it."
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 12/06/2026
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 30/03/2026
Stop scrolling & post two characters who bring you happiness
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 28/03/2026
No Kings NYC
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 03/02/2026
Free link to WaPo story: "Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon" that describes DHS issuing secret, non-judicial warrants to companies to surveil and intimidate Americans for exercising their First Amendment rights. archive.is/5hTis#select...
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 19/12/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 08/12/2025
✊
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 20/10/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 18/10/2025
NYC #nokings was an order of magnitude bigger than previous events. Also, mad respect to the small child handing out these stickers.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 09/10/2025
See also Richard Nixon: From 68% to 24% in one year, six months, and 20 days.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 23/09/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 12/09/2025
For the October issue of the The New Republic, I profiled Army Lt. Nicolas Talbott, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging his own Commander in Chief's ban on transgender people serving in the military.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 15/08/2025
On Saturday August 23, from 10-11:30 AM at the Tule Lake concentration camp site: People and Places Will NOT be Erased! RALLY Defend the historical truth of the WWII Japanese American incarceration. Sign-up: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 02/08/2025
Completely agree. Deference combined with the glacial pace of the American judicial system is already resulting in widespread, devastating, and irreparable harm.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 26/07/2025
When my father was arrested at 9yo and eventually deported, my family was forced to give up their dog Teddy like many others. This caption from @denshoproject.bsky.social I read in January has stuck with me since.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 24/07/2025
My cat has decided her bed is a fainting couch.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 13/07/2025
From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt (P.447)
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 27/06/2025
This is the kind of thing you need to be telling people before they buy their tickets.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 25/06/2025
👑
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 25/06/2025
Early results (~20%) show Zohran Mamdani doing quite well.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 17/06/2025
🤔 www.hcinnovationgroup.com/policy-value...
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 14/06/2025
NYC #nokings
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 11/06/2025
This is excellent news. x.com/sentdefender...
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 08/06/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 08/06/2025
An order by Trump to deploy the military and have it open fire on protesters would be catastrophic in a way few Americans who haven’t served in uniform realize. Unlike the National Guard at Kent State, today’s military is significantly more lethal. In 1970 the Ohio National Guard killed four protesters and wounded nine at Kent State University, firing semiautomatic M1 Garand rifles, which held an eight-round magazine and could fire 40 to 50 rounds a minute.* As one National Guard member there that day recalled: “I distinctly heard one shot fired; then all hell broke loose when 28 men fired a total of 67 shots over a period of 13 seconds.”

A modern military squad operates with roughly nine M16s loaded with 30-round magazines and three squad automatic weapons that each contain 200-round belts of ammunition. If today the same number of soldiers were firing for 13 seconds, as they did at Kent State, they could easily unleash several hundred rounds. Additionally, contemporary crowd-control tactics often result in “kettling,” in which protesters are pushed into densely confined areas, where individual bullets are likely to penetrate multiple people before stopping.

This has nearly happened before. When the Insurrection Act was most recently invoked, it was by President George H.W. Bush, who deployed elements from the 1st Marine Division to Los Angeles in 1992, after the Rodney King verdict. After taking fire while responding to a domestic disturbance with the city’s police department, Marines fired more than 200 rounds into a house with children inside after an officer yelled, “Cover me!” Thankfully, nobody was harmed, but as Major General James Delk, who commanded the joint task force at the time, would write: “The marines responded instantly in the precise way they had been trained, where ‘cover me’ means provide me with cover using firepower.”
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 01/06/2025
This Sat. Jun 7, join me and the Northern California Episcopal Diocese along with @tamikonimura.bsky.social, @dorismatsui.bsky.social, Steve Sasaki, and Raquel Aldana, to discuss the Japanese incarceration during WWII and its parallels today. Sign up here: www.norcalepiscopal.org/tule-lake-wo...
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 14/05/2025
Looking forward to talking on June 7 with the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California about the aftermath of my family's incarceration at Tule Lake during World War II. If interested, sign up here: www.norcalepiscopal.org/tule-lake-wo...
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 02/05/2025
Furious that I'm paying $10 to Jimmy Fallon every year in tax credits. "Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she wants to add $100 million in credits for independent productions that would bring total film subsidies to $800 million a year, almost double the amount from 2022." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/u...
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 29/04/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 23/04/2025
"Warfighting"/"Warfighter" has been common parlance in the Marine Corps for decades and is the name of the Corp's major doctrinal publication.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 07/04/2025
Still reeling from this realization.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 05/04/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 05/04/2025
NYC Hands Off march
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 23/03/2025
MLK:
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 22/03/2025
"That Americans seem to be rediscovering the art, science and potency of noncooperation — combined with a robust protest capacity and legal action — shows that resistance against Trump’s agenda in America is not only alive and well. It is savvy, diversifying and probably just getting started."
Title: Counts of U.S. Protest Events: 2017 vs. 2025. Line graph. X axis: Jan 22-Feb 26. Y axis: Cumulative number of protests 0-1000-2000. Green 2017 line from 0 to just over 1000 protests. Blue 2025 line from 0 to nearly 3000 protests during the same period.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 16/03/2025
On the bright side, my mink mark phalaenopsis is blooming
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 08/03/2025
Isamu Noguchi | 野口 勇
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 01/03/2025
Hegseth told the officials that if Mexico didn’t deal with the collusion between the country’s government and drug cartels, the U.S. military was prepared to take unilateral action, according to people briefed on the Jan. 31 call. Mexico’s top brass who were on that call were shocked and angered, feeling he was suggesting U.S. military action inside Mexico, these people said. The Defense Department declined to comment.
Hegseth’s suggestion of a potential U.S. military action struck a raw nerve for Mexico’s generals, who are brought up on stories of past U.S. armed interventions, including the 1846 Mexican-American war that cost the country half its territory. 
Since the Jan. 31 call, Hegseth has repeated the same message publicly, from the U.S.-Mexico border, which he visited a few days after the call, to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which he visited this week.
“We’re taking nothing off the table. Nothing,” he said when asked if he would rule out military strikes in Mexico.
The once-improbable scenario that the Trump administration could make good on its threats to take military action has reverberated in Washington. 
On Thursday, a group of former U.S. and Mexican military and trade officials, congressional staffers, analysts and drug policy experts gathered around a long table on Capitol Hill for a three-hour exercise to lay out what would actually happen if the U.S. carried out military strikes in Mexico. The exercise mapped out severe economic disruptions between the two countries, border closings, violent flare-ups, and civil unrest on both sides of the border.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 28/02/2025
Secretaries of Defense William Perry, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin call for immediate hearings into Trump's Pentagon purge.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 15/02/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 12/02/2025
That’s why we’re calling on all decent and honorable people, civilian and veteran alike, to join us in opposing this policy. But we’ll give the last word to Army 2nd Lt. Nicolas Talbott, one of the trans service members suing the government, who said it best: “Every individual must meet the same objective and rigorous qualifications in order to serve. It has been my dream and my goal to serve my country for as long as I can remember. My being transgender has no bearing on my dedication to the mission, my commitment to my unit, or my ability to perform my duties in accordance with the high standards expected of me and every service member.”
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 12/02/2025
Instead of judging our military members by the character of their service, Trump’s executive orders would have us judge them by the size of their “reproductive cell.” Like similar segregationist policies of the past, the order would prevent the most qualified from even being given the chance to prove themselves, undermining a military meritocracy that should be singularly focused on winning our nation’s wars. (But perhaps segregation is the point. This week, the Army and other service branches abandoned recruitment efforts at a prestigious annual Black engineering event that, as one Army recruiter told Military.com, was “one of the most talent-dense events that we do.”)

Paradoxically, Trump’s executive order states, “Military excellence cannot be diluted to accommodate political agendas”—and on this point we agree. Because what the president is in fact doing is imposing a radical gender ideology in order to appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service, like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion. It will only decrease military readiness and get soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and National Guard members killed.For a law to equally protect its citizens, it cannot target any particular individual or group. If Trump’s order is allowed to go into effect—at a minimum—common sense dictates that military leaders should implement it in an apolitical way that does not discriminate against particular individuals. But this then raises a number of other questions: If all procedures that affirm gender are prohibited, does the order require similarly cracking down on the use of steroids, human growth hormones, and other masculine-affirming medical procedures? What impact would this order have, as written, on someone severely injured in an explosion who needs reconstructive surgery? Does it require banning circumcisions in on-base hospitals? What about in vitro fertilization treatments or ear piercings?

The myriad contradictions within Trump’s executive order reveal it for what it is—a discriminatory policy, clothed in the language of military readiness, that aims to single out a particular group of Americans for exclusion.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 12/02/2025
If allowed to take effect, a ban on service would resegregate the military based on gender, deny basic health care to trans service members, and bar them from certain unisex areas, such as bathing facilities and berthing. No doubt there are service members who agree with many provisions of Trump’s order, but it doesn’t make logical sense for a military unit.

That’s because a core principle of military readiness is that training should be realistic. This is why we practice with live ammunition fire and maneuver, despite the risks, and at training bases that replicate the Spartan conditions of combat deployment. In fact, Trump’s executive order makes this very point: “The Armed Forces must adhere to high mental and physical health standards to ensure our military can deploy, fight, and win, including in austere conditions and without the benefit of routine medical treatment or special provisions.” But mandating unrealistic living conditions only undermines readiness and puts service members’ lives at risk. If the military is supposed to train like it fights, why should service members face integration and shared living spaces for the first time at war?Between us, we have defecated in cat holes, WAG bags, and oil drums alongside service members of different genders and sexual identities. We’ve shared pineapple pound cake with straight, gay, and trans service members alike on dusty bomb-laden patrols, and we have skimmed rooftops, dodging electrical wires to carry the bodies of fallen comrades home for a proper burial. We ourselves span a range of gender identities and sexual orientations that have been banned in the past, and we have honorable discharges that make us living proof that this new policy is based on a lie.

The reality is that straight and LGBTQ+ people in the military have been serving together since Gen. George Washington crossed the Delaware. As every veteran knows, the military is one of society’s most democratizing institutions. It’s among the few places in America where people from all walks of life come together to accomplish a single mission. While it is often as imperfect as the society that sends their children to serve in it, the stakes of war make the military uniquely meritocratic. This order will only create artificial divisions in the ranks, sow unnecessary conflict, create busywork at the small unit level, and prevent the most qualified from serving.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 12/02/2025
President Donald Trump’s executive order banning trans people from serving openly in the military states: “The United States military has a clear mission: to protect the American people and our homeland as the world’s most lethal and effective fighting force. Success in this existential mission requires a singular focus on developing the requisite warrior ethos, and the pursuit of military excellence cannot be diluted to accommodate political agendas or other ideologies harmful to unit cohesion.”

However, as military veterans, we know that this order will accomplish exactly the opposite. When it’s 5 degrees out and expected to drop, and it’s you and your battle buddy’s turn on night watch to share a sleeping bag in the snow-covered mudhole the two of you have spent the past 12 hours digging, the last thing on anyone’s mind is gender or sex. In those moments, all that matters is a person’s character and the mutual trust that comes from living and training together until you’re certain you have each other’s back. Excluding people who can meet rigorous service standards simply because of who they are is a fundamental attack on this principle, which has formed the bedrock of military service since the inception of the republic.Already, lawsuits have been filed challenging the order on behalf of six trans people currently serving across services and ranks, as well as two recruits seeking to enlist. But we need not wait for a court ruling to tell us what we already know: This policy is immoral, is unconstitutional, and should be immediately rescinded.

We served in the military under President Bill Clinton’s similarly discriminatory policy, known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; it was finally repealed in 2011, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender service members were allowed to serve openly. Then, as now, the policy was harmful and did nothing to achieve the goals its proponents claimed it would. This week, a memo released by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated: “Efforts to split our troops along lines of identity weaken our force and make us vulnerable.” But that’s exactly what this executive order does.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 12/02/2025
I'm dying.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 09/02/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 07/02/2025
Nailed it.
But Paul is a good example of an all-too-serious intellectual movement that has emerged from the wreckage of the Obama years, when “postracial” liberal optimism began to curdle into open contempt for liberatory struggles like Black Lives Matter or the fight for universal health care. I think of it as the far center: a loose coalition of disillusioned Democrats, principled humanists, staid centrists, anti-woke journalists, civil libertarians, wronged entertainers, skeptical academics, and toothless novelists, all brought together by their shared antipathy to what they regard as the illiberal left. The far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions; it is against cancel culture, student protests, and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals — concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the far center is liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but it is also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 05/02/2025
Ro Khanna in three tweets.
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 30/01/2025
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Timothy Soseki Kudo @timkudo.com · 26/01/2025
Always nice to have something you wrote make the New York Times print edition.
Image of newspaper clipping with headline "Let My Family's Story Be a Lesson and a Warning"
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