Read about a congresswoman inventing stripper panics to erase trans kids from classrooms, a Kansas government demanding 1,500 trans people hand over their IDs today, and a Department of Justice that apparently shit-gargled the only Epstein documents that mention the president — sat down at 7am, heart hammering like a fist on concrete, pivoted from the grocery list I was writing, and wrote this instead. Turns out the news doesn't wait for your oatmeal to cool. Fkrs…

Atlanta: 60°, partly sunny — soft light on a city that knows something ugly is being laundered through gentleness.

Detroit: 43°, clear — cold and honest as a union hall on a slow Tuesday; the rust knows what it knows.

Kansas City: 57°, sunny — golden and warm today, but a 70° weekend before the storm drops in Sunday, like hope before the legislation hits.

New York: 35°, sunny — bright and hard-edged as a congressional subpoena that nobody's actually serving.

San Francisco: 57°, cloudy — the bay holds its breath, grey as a DOJ press release that answers nothing.

Miami: 75°, sunny — beautiful and oblivious, the way power always looks on a Friday.

The smell of institutional cowardice is specific — it's bureaucratic ink and the particular silence of files that should be there but aren't.

This morning we've got missing Epstein documents, trans Kansans criminalized for existing, and an Illinois congresswoman inventing school strippers to launder her anti-trans agenda. Welcome to the fucking gathering.

First time here? Pull up a chair — we do this every weekday at thistleandmoss.com.

Editor's note: February ends this weekend and I am not being dramatic when I say it felt like swallowing gravel every morning — so let's hold each other up, yeah?

The weight of paper — 3 million pages released, heavy as stone — and still the most important 53 pages smell like they were burned in a backyard somewhere off Pennsylvania Avenue.

This administration promised transparency and delivered the world's most expensive disappearing act.

What they said: "The Department of Justice continues to change its story. The facts are clear: documents related to a survivor who accused Donald Trump and Jeffery Epstein of abuse when she was a minor are missing from the released files." — Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), House Oversight ranking member.

The DOJ, that shit-gargling cock-roach operation currently running cover for the highest office in the land, released over 3 million Epstein pages on January 30 — then somehow forgot the 53 pages containing three of four FBI interviews with a woman who accused Trump of sexual assault when she was a minor in the 1980s. A CNN review found more than 90 of 325 FBI witness interview records — over a quarter — aren't in the public database. Convenient. The DOJ initially said nothing was missing, then said duplicates, then said ongoing investigation. Each answer was a different flavor of bullshit.

The damage:

Response: Senate Democrats led by Chuck Schumer are vowing to use "every tactic" to force full disclosure; even GOP Sen. John Kennedy said publicly, "Release the documents." The DOJ said Wednesday it would "conduct a review." We've heard that song before. thehill.com

What was once a white continent of ice and silence is now brown dirt, open water, and a bear walking 40 miles for a meal that isn't there.

Evidence:

The fuck-knuckle tit-weasels driving fossil fuel policy know this — they've known it for decades — and still gutted every environmental protection that might slow the Arctic's collapse.

Action: Donate to Polar Bears International's sea ice monitoring projects at pbears.org, or simply reduce your household's carbon footprint by 20% using the EPA's free calculator at epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator. The ice doesn't wait. earth.org

Activist Jaelynn Abegg opened her mailbox in Wichita Thursday morning and found a letter from the state of Kansas informing her, in the polite bureaucratic language of an eviction notice, that her driver's license no longer existed.

Stakes:

What the absolute fuck does it mean when a state government sends letters to 1,500 of its own citizens telling them their right to drive — to get to work, to get to the doctor, to get to the DMV to surrender the very document they're being told to surrender — has been revoked overnight? It means SB 244 also contains a "bathroom bounty hunter" provision allowing private citizens to sue trans people for at least $1,000 just for using a restroom. A class B misdemeanor — six months in jail, $1,000 fine — now hangs over every trans Kansan who starts their car.

Movement: Trans journalist Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning has issued a "Do Not Travel" warning for Kansas. Democratic Rep. Abi Boatman, herself a trans lawmaker in Kansas, called the bill "exponentially more difficult and dangerous." Support trans Kansans directly through the Transgender Law Center at transgenderlawcenter.org and the Kansas ACLU at aclukansas.org. lgbtqnation.com

Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: The shackles in Kansas are letters on government letterhead, and they are not metaphorical. Lorde knew that freedom is not divisible — that what happens to trans Kansans is happening to all of us who refuse the state's permission to exist. You don't have to be in Wichita to feel the weight of that envelope. Carry it. Let it make you damn fierce. Then do something with the fury.

Grocery bills eating you alive → Swap name-brand pantry staples for store brands on the 10 items you buy most often — average savings of $35–$50/month. Start with olive oil, canned tomatoes, pasta, and oats. Quality is statistically identical on all four. Feeling: An extra tank of gas. A little sovereignty back.

The fridge black hole problem → Every Sunday, move everything that needs to be used this week to a single dedicated shelf at eye level. Nothing hides. Nothing rots. You save an average of $1,500/year in wasted food by seeing what you have. Feeling: Your brain clicks into order, and that, friend, matters more than you know.

Meyer lemons — peak season, and they're begging for it — slice thin, toss with good olive oil, salt, cracked pepper, and lay over roasted salmon for 12 minutes at 400°. The citrus caramelizes at the edges. Seasonal eating means your food traveled less than 300 miles to reach you. That gap matters.

Grow your own garlic — plant cloves now in a pot on your porch, pointed end up, 2 inches deep; harvest green garlic tops in 6 weeks (free flavor) and full heads by July. Cost: $4 for a seed head, yields 8–10 bulbs. Every bulb you grow is one you didn't buy from a corporation that doesn't know your name.

Pantry pasta, feeds 4, under 10 minutes — 1 lb pasta, 4 garlic cloves (sliced), 1/4 cup olive oil, 1 can white beans (drained), zest and juice of 1 lemon, red pepper flakes, salt, parsley. Bloom garlic in oil 2 minutes. Add beans and lemon. Toss with cooked pasta and pasta water. Done. Seven ingredients. Hot on the table faster than delivery. Dignified food shouldn't require a budget.

Moving forward — your armor for today: Rustin built the March on Washington while being systematically erased from its history for being queer. He knew that troublemaking — the angelic, organized, intentional kind — was the only thing that moved the needle. Kansas wants 1,500 people to be quiet about having their licenses revoked. The DOJ wants you to accept "ongoing investigation" as an answer. Don't. Organize the damn trouble. Your presence in this conversation is already a form of refusal.

Willi Ninja (queer, nonpolitical) This self-taught, gender-fluid Black butch queen from Flushing, Queens built the House of Ninja in 1982 with zero institutional backing and turned it into a living archive of movement — training Naomi Campbell and Iman how to walk a damn runway while voguing his way through Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Thierry Mugler's shows across two continents. After Paris Is Burning hit in 1990, Willi took vogue to Japan and across Europe, so by the time Madonna dropped "Vogue" — one of the best-selling singles of 1990 — the form he spent a decade perfecting had already conquered the world; she just got the check.

Sylvia Rivera (trans, political/cultural) A Puerto Rican–Venezuelan trans woman who ran away at 11 years old, found chosen family in the streets of New York, and by 17 was inside the crucible of the 1969 Stonewall uprising — then spent the next three decades fighting the gay rights movement she helped birth to include the very people it kept discarding. She and Marsha P. Johnson co-founded STAR in 1970, housing trans youth in an East Village building they hustled rent for themselves, and when the movement tried to erase her at the 1973 Christopher Street rally, she grabbed the mic anyway and told a crowd of thousands exactly who had been standing on the front line the whole damn time.

Dolores Huerta (liberal/progressive cultural) In 1965, she helped organize a walkout of 5,000 farmworkers in Delano, California, then directed the five-year national grape boycott that pressured more than 20 growers to sign the first union contracts — higher wages, benefits, protections — in the entire history of California agricultural labor. She's been arrested over 25 times for nonviolent civil disobedience, coined the phrase "Sí, se puede" that eventually became a presidential campaign slogan, and in 2012 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for work that was already 50 years old and still not finished.

TFG: The Republican Party's Nazi Problem — Sweaty Spice | Geoff Anderson (partner publication). Geoff Anderson tears into ex-Republican pundit Tom Nichols' belated Atlantic essay asking how the GOP got "infested with Nazis" — and the answer is as obvious as it is maddening. sweatyspice.com Tom Nichols woke up after decades of building the house; Geoff explains, with appropriate profanity, why we're not impressed by the late arrival.

Refugees in Trump's America: "The Goal Is Cruelty" — Mother Jones | Reported February 2026. The Trump administration's new DHS memo directs ICE to "arrest and detain" legal refugees who haven't obtained green cards at the one-year mark — reversing a 2010 policy, with 68,000 people now in ICE detention, up 75% since inauguration. motherjones.com While the ass-ramming cock-sockets design the architecture of cruelty, faith leaders and immigration attorneys are suing DHS in federal court — and winning.