Atlanta: 49°, partly sunny — soft February light that lies; your rights are colder than the forecast.

Detroit: 24°, partly sunny — iron-cold air off the lake, the kind that reminds you survival is not passive.

Kansas City: 45°, partly sunny — plains wind scraping the skin, like bad legislation scraping the body politic.

New York: 29°, clear & sunny — brilliant winter light flooding the street where Stonewall stands, flag back up, middle fingers extended skyward.

San Francisco: 49°, cloudy — fog pressing down like a held breath — rain by Sunday, resistance every day.

Miami: 71°, sunny — warm and gorgeous and living on borrowed time, just like democracy without a spine.

The air smells like old paper and fresh bullshit this Friday — the EPA just torched the legal bedrock of American climate policy, a British school just decided trans kids are a problem to be reported rather than children to be protected, and Joe Rogan is doing his stunned-puppy routine after discovering the man he helped elect is the ass-hamster he always suspected.

First time here? Pull up a chair — this is The Daily Gathering, and we don't do comfortable lies.

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Editor's note: I read the UK schools guidance on trans kids while drinking my coffee, and now both of us need to be refilled — what kind of ass-snorting fuck-nugget policy takes scared children and turns them into surveillance targets for their own parents?

The irony is so thick you could choke on it.

What he said: "It looks fucking terrible. It looks terrible for Trump when he was saying that none of this was real, this is all a hoax. This is not a hoax." — Joe Rogan, The Joe Rogan Experience, February 2026.

Joe Rogan — the shit-gargling fuck-stick of the podcast industrial complex, the man who handed Donald Trump a 3-hour infomercial and an election — is now shocked, shocked, that the administration he coronated is playing games with the Epstein files. On Tuesday's episode, he explained his name appeared in the DOJ's January release of 3 million pages of Epstein documents because he refused a meeting — physicist Lawrence Krauss had tried to broker an introduction in 2017, and Rogan says he responded with "bitch, are you high?"

Good for him on that one. Truly.

But then the man who endorsed the president, who sat across from the FBI director and nodded along, turns around and tells us the DOJ redactions "look fucking terrible" and accuses Trump of "gaslighting"? Welcome to the conversation, Joe. We've been here since 2016. The damage:

Pattern: Trump claimed the files were "falsified" as late as November 2025. The DOJ issued a memo in July 2025 declaring no client list, no murder, case closed — and that Epstein "killed himself." Convenient.

Action: Support the Epstein Files Transparency Act and contact your congressional rep to demand full, unredacted release of all non-victim documents.

Rogan helped build the house. Now he's surprised it has no fire exits.

The water table in Texas still carries the memory of those 37 children who drowned at summer camp last summer — one of "a dozen once-in-1,000-year floods in the span of three days." Yesterday, Trump and his cock-juggling thunder-cunt of an EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, stood in the Oval Office and repealed the Endangerment Finding — the 2009 Obama-era scientific ruling that greenhouse gases endanger human health and that has underpinned every major US climate regulation since.

Evidence:

The relationship breaking: Without the Endangerment Finding, the EPA has no legal authority to regulate vehicle emissions, power plant output, or the oil and gas sector — the NRDC warns this "sets the stage to undo restrictions on other climate polluters next." Every tailpipe, every smokestack, now operates in a regulatory vacuum.

Scale in felt terms: Former VP Al Gore put it plainly — the repeal is "an insult to the people across the country who are already coping with the disastrous consequences of climate-driven extreme weather events." The EPA claims the repeal saves taxpayers $1.3 trillion. It does not account for the cost of floods, fires, or dead children at summer camp.

The system connection is simple: when corporations write climate policy by buying administrations, the law becomes their permission slip and the rest of us pay with our lungs and our flood insurance. Multiple AGs — Washington, Massachusetts — have already promised to sue.

Action: Support Our Children's Trust, which is filing in the D.C. Circuit on behalf of youth to reverse this decision. Read the full roundup of reactions.

Sovereignty means nothing when the air you breathe belongs to Exxon.

What she said: Marriage equality has produced "very concrete reliance interests" — financial, medical, familial — that make overturning Obergefell v. Hodges extraordinarily difficult. "Those are financial. Those are medical," she said. "Those are very concrete reliance interests." She also noted that under Chief Justice Roberts, the Court overturns precedent roughly once a year — less than under previous chiefs. The Roberts Court, she insisted, "takes precedent quite seriously."

Stakes:

Legal shift: Former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis — the turd-lapping cunt-cracker who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015 — has petitioned the Court to revisit Obergefell, claiming it was "egregiously wrong." Justices Thomas and Alito have already signaled openness to doing exactly that.

Pattern: This is the same legal architecture that dismantled Roe. The Dobbs decision in 2022 proved that Thomas and Alito are willing — that precedent is only as safe as the votes you have.

Timeline: 2015 — Obergefell legalizes same-sex marriage nationwide. 2022 — Dobbs overturns Roe. 2025 — Davis files petition. 2026 — the question is live, the Court is 6-3 conservative, and Barrett is the swing vote.

What the fuck does it mean that our rights depend on the restraint of a justice who once said marriage equality shouldn't be a fundamental right? It means we're playing chess on a board we didn't build, with rules that change when they become inconvenient for power.

Movement: Lambda Legal, the ACLU, and the Human Rights Campaign are monitoring Davis's petition — donate, get involved, stay loud. The Respect for Marriage Act provides some federal protection, but it is not armor. Read full coverage.

Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: Rustin knew the mechanism from the inside. He built the greatest civil rights demonstration in American history and then watched his own name get scrubbed from the program because his queerness made the movement uncomfortable. He understood — viscerally, personally, in his own erased body — that civil rights are never handed to you whole. They are rationed, conditional, and revocable the moment you become inconvenient to the people who hold the pen. Barrett's "very concrete reliance interests" language is not a guarantee. It is a postponement. And Rustin's point cuts straight through the reassurance: whoever sits at the bottom of the liberty test at any given moment tells you everything about how much the system actually believes in freedom. Right now — with trans kids being surveilled in their own schools, with marriage equality held together by one justice's sense of restraint — that test is ours to pass or fail collectively. The fight for queer marriage is not separate from the fight for trans dignity is not separate from the fight for racial justice. That was Rustin's whole damn point. He gave you the map in 1986. Use it.

Queer love is the news: On Valentine's Eve, Reneé Rapp and Towa Bird, Kristen Stewart and Dylan Meyer (married in 2025!), Colman Domingo and Raúl Domingo — 15 LGBTQ+ celebrity couples are out here being joyfully, defiantly real — because love existing loudly is a political act when governments are trying to erase it. Pink News

The Devil made them fly the Pride flag: Clay Parikh — Trump's fuck-stained cunt-waffle of a special election security advisor, a man whose conspiracy theories led to an FBI raid on a Georgia election office — recently declared that Pride displays in churches are evidence of the Devil brainwashing people. This is who advises our elections. Sleep well. LGBTQ Nation

Your gut bacteria are smarter than the EPA: New research from the Max Planck Institute shows that beneficial gut bacteria — particularly Clostridia — can sense and navigate toward specific nutrient signals in your digestive system, using lactate and formate as key fuel sources. Cross-feeding between bacterial species is what keeps your microbiome stable. The science of cooperation works at every scale — too bad our government missed the memo. Science Daily

21 million years of resilience: Fossils discovered in Qatar reveal a newly identified miniature sea cow species — Salwasiren qatarensis — that grazed seagrass meadows in the Arabian Gulf over 20 million years ago, at what is now the densest known fossil sea cow site on Earth. Their ecological role is identical to modern dugongs — who are currently threatened by rising temperatures, development, and salinity changes. Life finds a way. Governments undo it. Science Daily

Friction Point — Digital Surveillance Tax → Every "free" platform you use harvests and sells your behavioral data. Install uBlock Origin (free, browser extension) and Firefox Focus (mobile) this weekend. Takes 8 minutes. Your data stops being a product. Feeling: Like closing the curtains in a house you didn't know was glass.

Cost savings — $47/month average → Cancel one streaming service and rotate — most major platforms now offer free 30-day trials on new accounts. One rotating account = full library access for $0. Before you renew anything, check whether your local library card grants free access to Kanopy, Hoopla, or Libby — most do. Feeling: The specific satisfaction of getting something for nothing from a corporation.

Home Hack — The "Sunday Reset" → System, not willpower → Every Sunday, spend 15 minutes doing just three things: clear one surface, prep tomorrow's breakfast, and write down three specific intentions for the week. Not goals — intentions. The difference is the absence of shame when life intervenes. Feeling: Your nervous system believing, just barely, that next week might be navigable.

And now, your heroes — three humans doing the damn work.

Zanele Muholi — South African visual activist whose photographs of Black queer bodies burn like sacred fire against erasure and hate. Muholi doesn't ask permission to exist beautifully. Over 30 years of image-making, their work has circled every major museum on Earth while the communities they photograph fight for their lives.

Carmen Maria Machado — queer author whose memoir In the Dream House cracked open domestic abuse in same-sex relationships like a bone, exposing the marrow no one dared name. She wrote the book that told thousands of people what happened to you was real.

Chappell Roan — the Midwest queer pop eruption, drag-drenched and raw-throated, who handed a generation of girls permission to be ferociously themselves. She sold out arenas while refusing to perform for politicians who want queer people disappeared. She held the fucking line.

These three show us the same thing: visibility isn't vanity — it's survival infrastructure. When Muholi photographs a Black queer body, when Machado names abuse in queer relationships, when Roan refuses the stage at a MAGA event — they are doing the same work. They are making it harder for you to be disappeared.

Queer joy, queer art, and queer refusal are the most durable resistance we have.

Seasonal star — Roasted Cabbage Steaks → Charred with miso butter and sesame (15 min) → Slice a head of green cabbage into 1-inch rounds, brush both sides with a mix of 1 tbsp white miso whisked into 2 tbsp melted butter, lay flat on a sheet pan, roast at 425° for 12-14 minutes until the edges go deeply golden and the leaves crisp like paper lace. Finish with sesame seeds and a drizzle of rice vinegar. What looks like the humblest, most overlooked thing in the produce aisle transforms — caramelized, complex, nearly unrecognizable from what it was — and that feels like something worth paying attention to in February.

Corporate bypass — Grow your own garlic right now → Plant individual garlic cloves 2 inches deep in a pot on your windowsill. 8-10 weeks to harvest, cost: $2 for a head of garlic from the grocery store versus $0 ongoing. Snip the green shoots young for a mild garlic-chive flavor. You will never pay $7 for a garlic bunch again. Every food you grow is a small withdrawal from the corporate food system.

Pantry Quick Meal — White Bean & Tomato Stew, feeds 4, under $6 → Sauté 1 onion and 3 garlic cloves in olive oil (3 min). Add 2 cans white beans, 1 can crushed tomatoes, 1 tsp smoked paprika, salt, red pepper flakes. Simmer 7 minutes. Finish with a squeeze of lemon and torn bread for dipping. Seven ingredients, ten minutes, four people fed — access to nourishment should never be this complicated, and yet here we are.

Moving forward — your armor for today: Rich said "the making of ourselves" — not the performance of ourselves, not the survival of ourselves, but the making. That distinction is everything on a day when the EPA is dismantling climate law, English schools are outing trans kids to their parents, and a Supreme Court justice's restraint is the thing standing between queer families and legal catastrophe. You are not finished being made. The world is actively, aggressively hostile to the making — to every identity, community, and relationship that didn't come pre-approved by those in power. And still. You show up, you build, you name what is real even when the institutions insist on fictions. That is not toxic positivity — that's just the fucking truth: the making continues, even in the fire, especially in the fire.

Tumbler Ridge Shooter Built a Mall Shooting Simulator in Roblox — 404 Media | Emanuel Maiberg & Matthew Gault. The pixelated horror of a cartoonish avatar picking up weapons in a shopping mall level; the platform confirmed the account, removed it, and noted the game had seven total visits. Read Trump blamed video games for mass shootings in his first term; researchers have found no causal link — gun manufacturers, meanwhile, continue operating without meaningful federal regulation.

Trump Excludes Gay and Black Governors from White House Dinner — PinkNews | Siân Thompson. Out gay Governor Jared Polis and Maryland's Wes Moore — the nation's only Black governor and NGA vice chair — were not invited to the traditional governors' dinner, prompting all 18 Democratic governors to boycott. Read The National Governors Association canceled its formal meeting with Trump; Moore said on CNN, "It's not lost on me that I'm the only Black governor in this country."