I have said a lot of borderline-rule-breaking shit on the Birdshit App over the years. It was always just on the acceptable side of the Terms of Service, and I had avoided even temporary suspensions all but once since starting this account in October 2021.
This morning I woke up to a barrage of retweets from troll accounts, one with with a Russian flag emoji next to a Gay Pride flag emoji in his name, several with some (not to believed) “LGB not T” variations in their bio, and a few Firstname Bunchanumbers accounts, and as soon as I clicked one of the notifications of those retweets I saw that my whole account was permanently suspended. No reason was given as to why, but I believe my mistake was announcing (as I’ve done before), “If you don’t punch at least one TERF in the face this month, you haven’t celebrated Pride,” after replacing the clear notice of being a parody account with, “🏳️⚧️ Trans people should get to own Christians as slaves. 🏳️⚧️.” lol. I should have kept “paro-squeak” in there somewhere. Nuance is dead. If you don’t tell people you’re joking, fascist knob-slobberers will dogpile you with nuisance reports. (Proving, maybe, that they should be punched in the face.)
I checked, and the standard Nazi accounts belonging to Mike Dickinson & Pals were still active. You can still harass, stalk, and doxx specific trans people on the Birdshit App, you can badger their employers to fire them constantly, you can post their mugshots and dead-names and gloat about the state violence that traumatized them, but if you dare make fun of Christofascists or encourage the people they oppress to fight back with force, the man with the world’s thickest wallet and thinnest skin will take away your platform faster than he could pry the emerald from an exploited child’s hands.
I don’t think that this sudden attention from the Right Wing Silencers was an accident. My last Tweet was the only Tweet in months that actually mattered:
They were happy to let me prattle about burning Pulse Buses and chewing on our Mayor’s asshole with my big rat incisors when I was just the village idiot. But literally 12 hours after announcing I was considering a grasp at actual power, suddenly the concern trolls came out of their slime pools and undersea vents to clutch their pearls over the imaginary bruises on hypothetical TERF faces.
Meanwhile Mike Dickinson is still doxxing trans people to their employers and encouraging others to harass them, from multiple accounts, despite a court order to stop doing exactly that.
I still have this website. If I wanted to keep up my psychotic character of Ratfink McGillicuddy, the foul-mouthed trash-rat who embodies the skeevy convenience store in my neighborhood, I very much could. I did most all of my shit-posting on Twitter, but I could always just shit-blog here, reboot the shit-podcast and shit-merch, and contribute happily to the shit-discourse as if nothing happened, all outside of Twitter’s selectively-applied Terms of Service. But that sounds like work. And I don’t want to have to work to promote my shit-posting outside of the Birdshit App. That would be desperate and weird.
I’ve already achieved my original goal of annoying my former employer, and I did it well for nearly 2 years. It’s time to do something else.
The C.H.U.D.s won in taking away the shittiest free thing I had. They took the platform that I was just about to step down from, and that platform still elevates actual Nazis. Good riddance.
Here lies Ratfink McGillicuddy, the Belvedere 7-Eleven rat: killed by Nazi TERFs, hilariously right after he announced his own suicide.
Everything I have said in the guise of this character was satire: exaggerated rhetoric which conveyed the truth of my political reality, and which should be not be considered a 1-to-1 statement of my actual ideals but which absolutely embodied the spirit of protecting those who are oppressed and running their oppressors out of town. I’m sure I’ll have to answer for some of my dumber shit-posts, but I’ll stand by the dumb character and the brilliant community who rallied around it. The account will stay up as an archive until Elon deletes it.
So as promised, a reveal:
Hi! My name is Reed Bradenstone, and I am running for City Council in 2024.
My campaign website was quietly launched on June 1, and I will not be able to submit the official filing for my candidacy until January 1, 2024, but consider this a statement of my intent to run for City Council in Richmond’s Fifth District. Please take a moment to look over my website, especially the various photoshops of Stephanie Lynch smiling in front of car crashes (more coming soon!).
I will be updating this website regularly with blog posts and videos elaborating my YIMBY platform. My three main goals in seeking this office are:
- to build a 24/7 full-service shelter and service provider for displaced, homeless, and needy people, funded by the City and State without interference from faith-based organizations;
- to focus all new infrastructure spending on creating a safe Richmond for pedestrians and cyclists with serious improvements to public transit and pedestrian-only thoroughfares throughout the city;
- and to resist bullshit rezoning for things like casinos, stadiums, and high-end “Diamond” shopping districts in favor of rezoning Richmond to allow for more locally-owned small businesses and affordable housing in our neighborhoods and to diminish our reliance on obsolete office buildings.
If you live in Richmond, I encourage you to contact me at reed@bradenstone.com to tell me what needs to change. I will never stop listening to and learning from my neighbors. Active neighbors make great communities.
I promise only to be slightly more “hinged” than my dearly departed rat character.
I promise to always listen to my neighbors, and never to listen to a party or a corporation.
I promise this will be fun to watch.
It’s free transit: Come along for the ride!
