Atlanta: 31°, partly sunny — cold as a constitutional amendment this administration wants to repeal.

Detroit: 25°, cloudy — gray and sealed-in, like a deportation order nobody reads aloud.

Kansas City: 18°, sunny — knife-bright sky, clear as the ACLU's argument, brutal as the wind chill behind it.

New York: 31°, snowing — 96% chance of snow burying everything, same odds the Supreme Court ignores precedent.

San Francisco: 50°, partly cloudy — mild and restless, the Bay watching Europe elect gay prime ministers while we fight over birth certificates.

Miami: 57°, sunny — five miles from Mar-a-Lago, where Secret Service shot a 21-year-old dead Sunday morning and the president wasn't even home.

The 14th Amendment is heading to SCOTUS in April. The Netherlands just swore in history. TotalEnergies is sitting in a Paris courtroom answering for the burning world. Monday arrived with the weight of every consequence we've been told to wait patiently for.

First time here? You found the right place. thistleandmoss.com

Editor's note: The Gathering runs on the belief that clarity about hard things is itself an act of love — and today has three hard, beautiful, infuriating things worth naming.

— and the LGBTQ+ Movement Just Stopped Serving Refills

The cock-juggling thunder-cunts running this administration have issued over 100 anti-LGBTQ+ actions since Inauguration Day, and they are counting on the movement to fracture under the weight.

What she said: At the Creating Change 2026 conference in Washington D.C., Kierra Johnson — executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force — stood before her people and declared: "We are winning." Then she laid out the three pillars to make it true: electoral power, community infrastructure, and narrative control.

Her point cut clean: "They're not gerrymandering because our vote doesn't matter. It matters so much."

The damage:

Human cost: Every queer and trans person in America living under a federal government that has defunded global LGBTQ+ health programs, written trans erasure into federal HR policy, and pushed legislative riders targeting queer youth in schools.

Pattern: From day one — executive orders on "gender ideology," DOJ directives, foreign aid gutted — this is a coordinated campaign, not random cruelty.

Action: Find your local LGBTQ Task Force chapter. Show up to a Creating Change event. The vote they're afraid of is yours.

Response: National LGBTQ Task Force and allied organizations have logged over 40,000 pro-democracy protests nationally since January 2025 — more than 4x the resistance during the first Trump term. The infrastructure is built. Read

A French courtroom smelled like reckoning last week — two days of arguments against TotalEnergies, one of the world's 20 largest historical greenhouse gas emitters, in the first climate lawsuit in France to demand a multinational oil company cut its fossil fuel production.

Evidence:

Relationship breaking: TotalEnergies markets itself as an "energy transition player" while planning to increase hydrocarbon production by 3% annually through 2030, with two-thirds of investment still in fossil fuels.

Scale in felt terms: The case challenges not just past emissions — it targets future expansion, invoking France's 2017 Duty of Vigilance Law and Paris Agreement obligations.

Expert voice: IPCC scientists Valérie Masson-Delmotte and Céline Guivarch testified for the prosecution — the same researchers who have been telling governments what's coming for a decade. TotalEnergies admitted in court that production must increase. That's not a defense strategy — that's a confession.

The company's admission that it knows the climate emergency is real but intends to accelerate into it anyway is the most honest thing a fossil fuel giant has ever said in a courtroom — and it should haunt every judge in Paris this June.

Action: Support Notre Affaire à Tous and their coalition — ruling expected June 25, 2026. Track climate litigation at Earth.Org.

This morning, under the painted ceilings of the Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch in The Hague, Rob Jetten, 38, took an oath from King Willem-Alexander and became the Netherlands' youngest-ever and first openly gay Prime Minister — and the world felt the room shift.

Stakes:

Pattern: Jetten's centrist D66 party pulled off a stunning come-from-behind victory in October 2025, narrowly defeating Geert Wilders' far-right Freedom Party — a party that plummeted from 37 seats in 2023 to 26 seats in 2025 after a campaign widely seen as flailing and mean.

Timeline: Wilders shocked Europe when he won in 2023. His coalition collapsed in summer 2025. Snap elections happened. And then — the opposite of what the far right wanted.

What the fuck does it mean that a country had to fight this hard not to hand power to a fascist? It means fascism isn't defeated by history alone. It's defeated by showing up, running, refusing to yield the field while the polls look bad.

Movement: COC Nederland, the Dutch LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said Jetten's election proves "your sexual orientation doesn't have to matter." Jetten — engaged to Argentine field hockey Olympian Nicolás Keenan — leads a minority coalition with just 66 of 150 parliamentary seats. He'll need opposition cooperation from day one. He said yes anyway.

Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: Rustin didn't survive by waiting for permission. He organized from the margins of a movement that claimed to love justice while hiding his name. Today — birthright citizenship, climate accountability, a gay PM defying the far right — the question isn't whether history is moving. It's whether your body is in the machinery or watching from the curb. Call your rep about the 14th Amendment case. Show up to a meeting. That's the whole fucking calculus — where does your body go this week?

Sydney's Oxford Street went quiet this morning — Drag Race Down Under star Maxi Shield (Kristopher Elliot), 51, died today, five months after a cancer diagnosis, days before Sydney Mardi Gras. She performed at the 2000 Olympics closing ceremony and opened the 2002 Gay Games. Why it matters: Drag queens are community infrastructure. Read

Pope Leo XIV won't budge — Leo declared it "very unlikely" Church doctrine on LGBTQ+ rights will change "in the near future," citing internal polarization. He said attitudes must shift before doctrine can. Why it matters: 1.4 billion Catholics are watching the ceiling for cracks. Read

Cleaner wrasse fish dropped shrimp in front of mirrors to study their own reflections — "contingency testing" previously documented only in dolphins and manta rays. Scientists at Osaka Metropolitan University say self-awareness may be far more widespread in the animal kingdom than anyone imagined. Why it matters: The line between "us" and "them" keeps dissolving. Read

Stanford Medicine unveiled a universal nasal spray vaccine protecting mice from COVID, flu, pneumonia, and allergens simultaneously for up to 3 months — 700-fold reduction in viral lung levels. Phase I human trials are next. Why it matters: One annual nasal spray replacing flu shots is 5-7 years away. Read

News overload → 20-minute boundary — Set a literal timer for political doomscrolling each morning. When it rings, close the tab. Your nervous system isn't soft—it's finite. Structure saves it. Feeling: The exhale you forgot was available.

$600/year coffee habit → $120 — A $15 bag of whole beans brewed fresh at home costs about $0.33 per cup vs. $5+ daily café runs. Grind in 4-day batches. Invest the $480 difference in a cause that matters. Feeling: Sovereignty tastes surprisingly good before 7 a.m.

Cabbage surplus → three meals — One head: stir-fry night one, slaw night two, long-simmered soup night three. Single-ingredient discipline cuts food waste by half and grocery cost by ~15%. Feeling: "I handled it" fires clean in the brain.

Radicchio → Halve it, oil the cut face, lay it flat in screaming-hot cast iron for 4 minutes. Dress with honey, red wine vinegar, flaky salt. The bitterness breaks into caramel and you taste February's actual season. Eating what's real right now is a political act.

Regrow scallions → Place spent roots in a glass of water on the windowsill. Regrowth in 5 days, indefinitely. Free food from food you already bought. Sovereignty doesn't require a plot of land — just a glass and a south-facing window.

Late-night pantry pasta for 4 → Spaghetti, olive oil, 4 garlic cloves, 1 anchovy tin, chili flake, lemon zest, flat-leaf parsley. Brown garlic, melt anchovies in, toss with pasta and starchy water, finish with lemon and herbs. Under $6 and 10 minutes. A meal that costs less than a coffee shop croissant feeds a whole table.

Moving forward — your armor for today: Some days the news is a wall and some days it's a door. Today it's a door — Rob Jetten's oath is a door, Kierra Johnson's three pillars are a door, Paris putting oil companies on the witness stand is a door. You don't have to be loud to walk through. You just have to move. Pick one thing today that isn't just consuming — one thing that makes something. That's how you carry hope without it lying to you.

And now — the people making the cracks bigger:

Rob Jetten — At 38, he just became the Netherlands' first openly gay Prime Minister by refusing to concede the field to Geert Wilders' far-right machine. He leads with 66 of 150 parliamentary seats and zero apologies.

Kierra Johnson — LGBTQ Task Force executive director who declared "We are winning" before 40,000+ national pro-democracy protests and presented a three-pillar roadmap for sustained queer power.

Erik Bottcher — Gay Democrat who won a New York State Senate special election with 91.8% of the vote, cast his first ballot for the Medical Aid in Dying Act, and is already making noise about the Trump agenda in Albany.

The arc bends when bodies bend it — these three made it move.

How Democracies Fight Back — and What the U.S. Can Learn — Vox | Staff. Brazil jailed Bolsonaro. South Korea impeached Yoon. Poland voted out Law and Justice. The pattern? Legibility of threat drove mobilization — the more visible the authoritarian's moves, the faster the resistance organized. Read Trump moved faster than comparable backsliders; U.S. resistance grew to 40,000+ protests — the question is whether momentum holds through 2026 midterms.

Armed Man Killed at Mar-a-Lago Perimeter Sunday — Mother Jones | Staff. Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach County deputy fatally shot 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin of North Carolina at 1:30 a.m. after he entered the estate's inner perimeter carrying a shotgun and a gas can. Trump wasn't home. Read Political violence incidents spiked — U.S. Capitol Police investigated 14,938 threat cases in 2025, up from 9,474 in 2024.