This morning, five people will decide whether Leavenworth becomes a place where people go to die. Not as a metaphor or someday. Quite literally. A 1,000-bed CoreCivic facility, run by the same company this community already called a hell hole, is up for a vote. The commissioners who raise their hands for this deal will carry the names of everyone who suffers inside it.

If the City of Leavenworth decides to reopen a closed private prison, the inhumane detention and treatment that made numerous prisoner deaths possible will become a local problem. These deaths will be here in our backyard. Death in Leavenworth is certain. 

The city is being faced with a choice that will define its future. To understand the stakes, we must look to the past. Kansas and the town of Leavenworth have been here before. 

During the 1850s, the Kansas Territory received the name “Bleeding Kansas” for the ongoing violent confrontations between abolitionist and pro-slavery groups over whether the territory would join the Union as a free or slave state. Leavenworth was the first city to be incorporated in the newly formed Kansas – and was primarily settled by Border Ruffians and Pro-Slavery individuals, eventually becoming the pro-slavery epicenter of Bleeding Kansas. 

On the other hand, Leavenworth was also home to Bethel AME Church, a stop on the Underground Railroad that aided slaves escaping from Missouri. 

We have seen mass raids on restaurants in Lenexa, we have seen ICE agents surveil the Boys & Girls Club in Olathe, and we have seen ICE arrest a protester practicing their First Amendment right to film in Lawrence. There are children in this region who have already started memorizing what to do if their parents don’t come home.

The haunting and once distant stain on the history of Kansas –  Leavenworth’s pro-slavery past – is once again knocking on the door. 

That history is not revived only through language or symbolism, it reappears whenever human beings are reduced to bodies for confinement, profit, and control. That is precisely why the return of CoreCivic to Leavenworth carries such a deep historical weight. 

As The Kansas City Defender has previously reported, CoreCivic itself is synonymous with torture, human rights violations, and safety failures in U.S. detention facilities. Across the country, their prisons and ICE detention centers have been rife with mismanagement, Riker’s Island or Guantanamo Bay-like living conditions, medical negligence, violence, and abuse.

The ACLU of Kansas warned that CoreCivic has never answered for the horrendous conditions and dangerous violence that peaked in 2021 and contributed to the closure of the Leavenworth facility. 

ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons has already made plain how this system views human life. In 2025, he said he wanted deportation operations to function “like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.” In that vision, these detention facilities act as processing hubs of secrecy, violence and removal. If opened, the Leavenworth Facility will become exactly that – a 1,000-bed facility that will see human beings separated from their families and being sent to unknown places, or facing a far worse fate – death.

On Tuesday, March 10, the decision to open a 1,000-bed CoreCivic facility and continue the shackling of free people will rest in the votes of only five city commissioners:

Nancy Diane Bauder. 

Rebecca Hollister.

Hollister “Holly” Pittman. 

Joseph Alfred Wilson, II. 

Samuel Rollie Maxwell, IV. 

Their decision will have ripple effects not only for those in Leavenworth, or even the Free State of Kansas, it will ripple across the entirety of the Midwest Region.

All of this is known to the five Leavenworth Commissioners. They know that this facility will bring more death and violence into Leavenworth. They know that they will be complicit in the ethnic cleansing happening in the United States. More importantly they know from first-hand experience the grief that CoreCivic, a privately run prison company, has already inflicted on their community in the past. 

CoreCivic, while in operation in Leavenworth, was described by a local judge as a “hell hole”, so why would Leavenworth enter a contract with the Devil?

Why assist in mass deportations? 

Why be complacent? 

Are the threads of Leavenworth’s pro-slavery past so engrained in its elected officials that they cannot muster the spine to reject this notion? Or do they carry on the spirit of those who stood against slavery?

The people watching this vote, the families terrified of being separated, the people organizing to to keep our communities safe – we know that if these five Leavenworth City Commissioners  “Vote Yes” on granting a Special Use Permit to CoreCivic, they will be responsible for the kidnapping, deportations and deaths that occur because of this facility. 

These commissioners will vote yes or no, and their names will attach to every person who comes through that facility and does not come out.

To those who feel powerless, to those who are angry for the future we are heading into, to those who know that we deserve better: I urge you all to join a Rapid Response Network in your community. I urge you to organize. I urge you to keep your hope.

Mariame Kaba, the abolitionist organizer and author who has spent decades building the movement to end incarceration, put it plainly: “Hope is a Discipline.”

It is our duty to fight for our freedom

It is our duty to win

We must love and support one another

We have nothing to lose but our chains

– Assata Shakur

The post CoreCivic Kills People. Leavenworth Is Voting on Whether to Let Them Do It Here. appeared first on The Kansas City Defender.

“Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections.” The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics.

Steve Jobs famously said that computers are a bicycle for the mind. What does that make LLMs? An e-bike for the mind? A car for the mind? A jet plane for the mind?

Yes, bikes are political. Since their invention, they have been political. “Bicycle riding came to embody the individuality women were working toward with the suffrage movement. It also gave women a mode of transportation and clothing that allowed for freedom of movement and of travel.” (source) Have you ever thought about the trails you ride? Are they city? Or on state land? Do you know who the original stewards of the land were? What tribes? Remember when our federal lands were at risk last year? They still are, by the way. Do you ever ponder how you’re allowed to ride there? And what happened with the areas you’re not? Well, turns out, the reasons about where and how we ride bikes are because bikes are political.

As tensions arise in Minneapolis and across the United States, Monumental Loop co-founder, Bikepacking Roots board-member, and Outdoor Alliance ally, Matt Mason, has penned a Dust-Up stating the obvious to many, but it clearly needs to be said: “BIKES ARE POLITICAL!”

Editorial note: The communities in Minneapolis are reeling right now and can really use your help. If you can, please consider donating to Support Phillips Families in Urgent Need, Support for Critical Housing Needs, and there is a massive list of grassroot aid organizations on the MPLS Mutual Aid Linktree.

This week, several bike brands spoke out against ICE operations and expressed their support for immigrants. Predictably, and sadly, the comments were filled with “keep politics out of it” or some variation of “I ride to escape politics”. At my most generous, I can refrain from assuming these folks are all bootlickers, but there’s certainly an unhealthy dose of privilege in those statements. Setting aside my own judgments, the idea that bikes aren’t political is simply incorrect. Bikes are political… and we’re doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring that fact.

Frankly, we don’t need to stress ourselves searching for examples of politics shaping where and how we ride. Bike lanes? Political. No bikes in designated wilderness areas? Political. Cattle shitting in the spring that you rode all day to reach? Political… and the ranchers know it! Tariffs increasing bike prices? Political. Every level of government, from town councils to the President of the United States, makes decisions that affect cycling.

Because “keep politics out of bikes” is such an obnoxiously ignorant statement, I won’t spend much time on it. Instead, let’s dive deeper into what is possible when we unify our voices and engage with the political world. Yes, that’s a sneaky Bob Dylan reference.

We live in a political world
Love don’t have any place
We’re living in times
Where men commit crimes
And crime don’t have any face

Over the past decade, I’ve been attempting to secure long-term protection or recognition for the Monumental Loop. Originally, the idea for the route sprang from a meeting with local, state, and federal elected officials, along with community members, in 2009. Political. At the time, there was a push from Senators Udall and Bingaman to designate nearly 500,000 acres of Doña Ana County as wilderness areas.

Ultimately, the ranching community, along with off-roaders, was able to use its political influence to squash the designation. Quick side note: the ranching community/meat industry is so proficient at politics that the government essentially pays them to degrade our public lands. It’s an infuriating example of how an industry can use political power to get what it wants, even when it isn’t supported by the majority of citizens.

By 2012, a coalition of hikers, scientists, and public lands lovers, but oddly not many cyclists, had gathered enough steam to push for a National Monument designation on the same half a million acres. In 2014, President Obama designated Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks a National Monument. Political. Because cyclists, specifically mountain bikers, were absent from the coalition, the language in the monument designation has since been interpreted to disallow any new mountain bike trails in the monument.

That’s a huge missed opportunity with lasting consequences, all because we “stuck to bikes.”

Now twelve years into OM-DP’s existence on the landscape, I (with help from a bunch of folks) have been able to get bikepackers and mountain bikers a seat at the decision-making table here in Las Cruces. Politics, it turns out, is built on relationships. Relationships can be messy and draining, and keeping them healthy requires sustained effort.

Taylor Rogers at Outdoor Alliance says, “Imagine what’s possible when you skip a few rides and instead advocate for the places we ride”.

Unfortunately, I’ve skipped more than a few rides lately and spent far too much time on Zoom! Those missed rides were replaced by meetings with Senators, a role on the Bikepacking Roots Board, a training program with Outdoor Alliance, and a personal commitment to always mention getting livestock off public land at every meeting. Is this a meeting? And what’s come of my visits to D.C, my new bolo tie, and my efforts to build relationships with lawmakers?

Well, not much yet (my midwestern humility and humor showing there), but I’ve put Doña Ana County and the Monumental Loop in position to be among the first batch of routes to receive federal recognition through the B.O.L.T. Act. Political, and a huge win for a place that wasn’t on the map for cyclists until recently.

There are countless more examples of how politics shapes the who, where, and why of cycling. It’s literally an endless list. The one currently in the news is, you can’t ride a bike if ICE kills you. The sooner we recognize how powerful our collective voices can be and put them to work, the sooner we’ll have safe streets, fully funded land management agencies, well-maintained and legally protected trail systems, and a diverse, thriving community of cyclists.

Or we hide our heads in the sand, use bikes as an escape, and watch as we slowly lose everything from our constitutional freedoms to our public lands.

Bikes are political, and you are too.

Editorial note: The communities in Minneapolis are reeling right now and can really use your help. If you can, please consider donating to Support Phillips Families in Urgent Need, Support for Critical Housing Needs, and there is a massive list of grassroot aid organizations on the MPLS Mutual Aid Linktree.

If you’re new to this series, welcome to The Dust-Up. This will be a semi-regular platform for Radavist editors and contributors to make bold, sometimes controversial claims about cycling. A way to challenge long-held assumptions that deserve a second look. Sometimes they will be global issues with important far-reaching consequences; other times, they will shed light on little nerdy corners of our world that don’t get enough attention.

The post The Dust-Up: Bikes are Political appeared first on The Radavist.

Howdy folks,

I have some good news, which is that, after seven months, I’ve finally recovered from Long Covid. This is not something I particularly want to talk about in depth but it was the worst thing that ever happened to me! Anyway, sorry for the long period without posting that much, but I hope this amazing house (both laudatory/derogatory, that’s dialectics, baby) will make up for the three months I went AWOL.

BEHOLD:

Not to be over-exuberant, but I genuinely think this is the best McMansion exterior of all time. That includes all the messed up castles, the Mediterranean-style cult complexes, the Staten Island weirdness. Nothing, to me, epitomizes just how uniquely wacky these houses can be. The oversized broken pediment with the fat fake corinthian columns, the lawyer foyer transom window, the ultra-nub, the 45-degree angle, it is all there and it is all hellish, and none of it will ever happen ever again. Anyway this house is $2.5 million dollars and 10,000 square feet. Someone should buy it and give house tours to young people for whom this way of live will soon be unimaginable.

There is nothing so bold to me as the idea of a canted lawyer foyer flanked by two equally huge windows. The fact that the house is more populated by vases than people…something something a vessel for wealth, ah!

Someone on TikTok is going to find this house and set all the pictures to that terrible vaporwave nostalgia song. “tuscan kitchen [black heart emoji]” (as is their right, just like blogging is my right)

If you were a rich person muralist, please get in touch with me (patreon@mcmansionhell.com) I want to hear YOUR stories!!!!

I mean, if I had a giant mysterious wardrobe I, too, would be fernmaxxing (I am 32 years old and will not be talking like this. I am getting generationmogged and have to draw the line somewhere.)

If someone says to you “we should go to Venice in May” ABORT ABORT ABORT. you WILL pay 15 euros for gin and tonic. you WILL get pickpocketed or puked on by British people. you WILL be eaten by mosquitoes. Go in November when no one’s around and you can have a good cry about how everything dies, sinks into the ocean, one might say, and how futile it is to try keeping it alive on horrible wooden stilts. The gondolier will tell you wistfully about how the dolphins returned to the lagoons during the pandemic lockdown. Then he will look at you because their leaving again is your fault.

I hate putting the word “cuck” in this blog. Ten years ago, that would warrant an angry parent email. Now children say cuck to each other in elementary school because they learned it from a Charlie Kirk assassination fancam.

This is kind of like one of those 19th century galleries but for 400,000aires who mostly think of art as a piece of furniture.

I used to not believe in the mobbed up pizza place (no one likes an ethnic stereotype) but there was one I went to in Coastal New Jersey that was unmistakably mobbed up. Guys coming in and out of the back in suits, cash only, no GrubHub, no delivery. It wasn’t called Vito’s though. That would be stupid of me to disclose.

It’s so funny that for a month we collectively pretended that every man alive cared about the roman empire. Just the kind of cute thing we used to do online before cultural microphenomena became primarily driven by incel forums.

That’s right, folks, McMansion Hell is TEN YEARS OLD this year, and there WILL be a party in Chicago in July. (More details later.) Anyway, heinous back facade. What were they thinking.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am now, like, $3000 in medical debt from having Long Covid, a disease doctors and insurance companies famously believe in and cover. If you are the woman who hacked up a lung next to me on my flight to New Mexico, not even an N95 could beat your germs and I feel entitled to financial compensation.)

Anyway! See you next month!

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

The document shows in stark terms the power, and potential risk, of online advertising data and how it can be leveraged by government agencies for surveillance purposes. The news comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased similar tools that can monitor the movements of phones in entire neighbourhoods. ICE also recently said in public procurement documents it was interested in sourcing more “Ad Tech” data for its investigations. Following 404 Media’s revelation of that ICE purchase, on Tuesday a group of around 70 lawmakers urged the DHS oversight body to conduct a new investigation into ICE’s location data buying.

This sort of information is a “goldmine for tracking where every person is and what they read, watch, and listen to,” Johnny Ryan, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) Enforce, which has closely followed the sale of advertising data, told 404 Media in an email.