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Rob Coyner

@tobuildafire.bsky.social
201 followers 294 following 144 posts

Growing up, I wanted nothing more than to help people. For a brief time at USAID, I was able to do that.

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Reposted by Rob Coyner
Lauren Dobson-Hughes @ldobsonhughes.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
I am loving the chaos of the eastern conference in the first round of the playoffs.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
When I see a New York Times book critic discuss how a poet who hates poetry is attempting to resurrect the novel, i just have to wonder how they each find their own navels so interesting.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
One and likely only time I’ll be excited to see that goon hit one out of the park.
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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver @lastweektonight.com · 09/03/2026
Here’s last night’s story about USAID, why the Trump Administration has gutted it, who is being impacted, and how many nice things John can say about George W. Bush. It’s more than zero! By a very narrow margin, it is more than zero. youtu.be/tU8S13xYJNM
youtu.be
USAID: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
YouTube video by LastWeekTonight
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
I would move to Chicago just to vote for Kat.
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Sean T. Collins @seantcollins.com · 09/02/2026
I'm hardly the first person to note this, but it's enormously instructive that our President and his followers saw the message "THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE" and understood it, correctly, as an attack on them
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 09/02/2026
This is a love letter to Reggaeton featuring some of the biggest songs in the genre, Dale Don Dale by Don Omar and Gasolina by Daddy Yankee. These songs came out 20 years ago and made Reggaeton internationally famous.
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
newyorker.com
What ICE Should Have Learned from the Fugitive Slave Act
Americans took to the streets to defend their neighbors in the nineteenth century, too.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
This has aged well: “There’s no surprises….What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue. We all saw that coming.” Can’t wait to hear this morning’s spin.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
He’s very excited for #caturday
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
“You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” -Ursula K. Le Guin, the Dispossessed
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Tooey @sueric.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Kash Patel today: "You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want." Really?
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Lack of training is not the issue.
youtu.be
How ICE is using far-right subculture to recruit
YouTube video by CBC News: The National
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
“The end of the world isn’t as quick as everyone imagines; there’s time to learn. Yet there are no instructions.” -Victoria Amelina
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 24/01/2026
Screenshot of a post on X (Twitter) in dark mode. The verified Democrats account (@TheDemocrats) posts the text, “You’re a fucking liar with blood on your hands.” The post quotes a tweet from Stephen Miller (@StephenM), also verified, saying: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists,” followed by a truncated link. The post shows a timestamp of 4:31 PM on Jan 24, 2026, and 599.4K views.
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Mark Gongloff @markgongloff.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
We’re supposed to believe this is a domestic terrorist attacking ICE with a gun
A photo of the man murdered by ICE today, just before the shooting. He’s standing and holding a phone in his right hand and holding his empty left hand to the sky and looking behind him at a woman running away while an ICE agent closes in on him from the front. On the ground behind the man is a woman that the victim will soon try to help, leading several ICE agents to attack him and pin him to the ground, before shooting him several times.
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LOWρUFO 🇺🇦🇵🇸🌍 @lowrhoufo.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
“I'll show you light now. It burns bright forever. No more blue tomorrows. You on high now, love.”
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 21/12/2025
Even if they are somewhat repetitive, I have to own up to how I have given myself over to the fully realized world James Cameron has created in Avatar. Would that the architects of AI could learn from him how to use technology to imagine new worlds rather than reduce our own to a set of algorithms.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Is the point of Axios to credulously regurgitate bank and tech executive groupthink without even the most basic level of skeptical analysis? It feels like little more than a PR firm for entrenched interests at this point. Or, worse, a pass through for their quotes and press releases.
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The Doctor (Commissions open) @lucidillusions.in · 22/03/2024
Sounds legit...(ish) 🧪Meme
The image is a meme about Archaeopteryx, a bird-like dinosaur that had three fingers on each wing.

 The text on the image reads: "Archaeopteryx had three fingers on each wing and held its palms facing each other, implying it was capable of air quotes and, therefore, sarcasm."
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Crooked Marquee @crooked-marquee.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
‘Sweet Smell of Success’ is “a bleak and unsparing depiction of obeisance before power in a morally bankrupt culture,” @splicedpersonality.bsky.social writes: crookedmarquee.com/classic-corn...
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
“I don’t think this government will stop…Violating due process this time means they will violate it again and again and again.” youtu.be/e4X0hI40a8A?...
youtu.be
Inside ICE Detention: Stripped, Shackled, Starved
YouTube video by New York Times Opinion
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” Omar El Akkad’s forceful rebuke to those who cynically preach patience and good intentions while doing nothing but look away and make excuses, has deservedly won the Nat’l Book Award. W/o a doubt it is the hard shove I needed in this moment.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Was lucky enough to attend an advance screening of Hamnet and in a year of standout lead actress performances, Jessie Buckley is in a league of her own. She won and broke our hearts with the love, joy, and grief she brought to this film.
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Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
"The international community, in particular the US and other western governments, allowed all of this to happen. This is what genocide looks like in the 21st century: not only in scale or method, but in how it’s normalized. " www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Israel needs to face accountability for our genocide. And so does the US | Yuli Novak
The international community allowed all of this to happen. We must not look away or move on
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Karen Attiah @karenattiah.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
So Harvard is keeping this guy, but Claudine Gay had to step down over ginned up plagiarism accusations and bad-faith accusations of anti-Semitism. Got it.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Each of Lynne Ramsay’s films has been an expressionistic gift, bringing out the best of actors—in this case with Jennifer Lawrence’s shattering performance—to show the inner turmoil of characters that words alone so often fail to convey.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. -Omar El Akkad
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David Simon @audacityofdespair.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
Is Schumer still the minority leader? Is Durbin still the whip? Is Cortes-Masto still a vice chair? Good Democrats -- rank and file, those committed to restoring party --must tell Act Blue and every candidate with hands out for the coming midterms -- that there's no cash coming without new leaders.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
Truly grateful for access to AFI Silver Spring, where they have had several screenings of Seven Samurai this week. While my younger self recognized it as one of the great all-time action epics, the class consciousness of Kurosawa is much more visible to me as I age.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
A significant difference between 2025 and 2017 is that the mask is finally all the way off of those who claimed solidarity for so long. There’s barely even lip service anymore that claims of protecting rights and livelihoods are anything more than broken promises in waiting.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
It’s not accurate to say that Senate Dems got nothing in return for their cowardice. Or, that Democratic voters didn’t get anything either. The politicians got the voter turnout they needed on election day. And in return, they gave us all a knife in the back.
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Atul Gawande @agawande.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Today @TheNewYorker released our short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” online. It traces the ongoing effects of the sudden shutdown of US foreign aid through the story of one mother in Kenya as she seeks to save her daughter from sickness and starvation. 🎥 1/ www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
newyorker.com
The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands
The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.
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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
The factional grifters will hate this, but the Mamdani-Spanberger-Sherrill axis actually suggests the outlines of a broad, emerging Dem coalition organized around both anti-Trump *and* affordability politics, not a party bitterly divided against itself.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
I may not live in LA anymore but I’m so happy the Dodgers got this series to November, that Rojas got them to November 2, and that Yamamoto carried them over the finish line.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
Rojas!
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
BUGONIA FTW
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
I love October baseball. November baseball is better.
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The Last Mile with USAID @thelastmilewithusaid.substack.com · 31/10/2025
How hurricane relief efforts in Jamaica are affected by the end of USAID : Goats and Soda www.npr.org/sections/goa...
npr.org
How will the dismantling of USAID affect U.S. relief efforts in Jamaica?
USAID was the lead American agency in disaster response. Now that it's been dismantled, questions are arising about how effective U.S. relief efforts will be in Jamaica after the hurricane.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
How is it that if I Had Legs I’d Kick You is more unsettling and full of existential dread than any horror film that’s been raved about this year?
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
It may not be the ultimate Frankenstein but it does feel like the ultimate Del Toro. Not necessarily the film he was born to make, but clearly the film he has wanted to make his entire life.
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Rick Steves @ricksteves.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
🧵: Last June, more than 5 million Americans joined #NoKings rallies across the country, protesting President Trump's authoritarianism. And this Saturday, with your help, it's going to be even bigger and better.
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Rick Steves @ricksteves.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Thread: A year ago yesterday was a very happy day for me. I had lost my prostate. It was good riddance, as it was riddled with cancer. I’m now cancer-free — and thankful for the tax-funded technology that saved my life.
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Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
I had a moving, heartbreaking, powerful discussion with 2 Israelis who lost family members to Hamas on Oct. 7th, 2 years ago today, on the power of 'radical forgiveness' & on standing up to the Israeli government that abandoned their family members. Full interview: zeteo.com/p/israel-gaz...
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Rick Steves @ricksteves.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Nearly 8% of the people on our planet are farmers who produce more than a third of the world’s food on small plots of land...just an acre or two each. These farmers want to work, produce, feed their families, sell what’s left, and stay on their farms (cont.)
youtube.com
Farmers Embracing Smart Agriculture
YouTube video by Classroom Europe
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Rick Steves @ricksteves.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
Nearly 10% of humanity (~800M people in 2025) struggles to live on less than $3 a day. It’s important for Americans to appreciate that reality — and the growing gap between the extremely poor & the extremely privileged — because, as USAID demonstrated, our nation has the power to change it. 🧵 1/8
classroom.ricksteves.com
What Extreme Poverty Looks Like
Ten percent of humanity struggles to live on under $2 a day. That, and the gap between the extremely poor and the more privileged, is important to see.
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Rob Coyner @tobuildafire.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
One Battle After Another may have been filmed in 2024 and loosely inspired by a 35-year-old book, but it drives home how much the present moment feels like the bleak absurdity of a Thomas Pynchon novel.
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Chris Taylor 🇨🇦📸♉️🏳️‍🌈🌎 @chwita.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
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