🔥The Internet is Cooked: June 2, 2026
Good morning. Here's your dispatch from the corners of the internet still fighting slop: Carney's quiet move to weaken the right to strike, 55,000 postal workers ratify a deal even their president didn't recommend, Mamdani's first day of Pride is a masterclass while a Texas prosecutor goes after trans kids and their doctors in New York, a Snaxshot piece worth your morning, our two cents on Boots Riley's new heist movie (go see it), and Dua Saleh’s Firestorm is a wild, necessary piece of music for the times.
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Carney is coming for the right to strike. We wrote about the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirming the right to strike under international law on May 25. Meanwhile the Carney government is quietly consulting on whether to weaken it at home. CBC's Marina von Stackelberg reports that as Ottawa embarks on its massive infrastructure-and-exports buildout (the same one that just greenlit the Alberta–BC pipeline) the federal jobs minister is consulting on changes to the Canada Labour Code, which currently protects more than a million federally regulated workers. The Canadian Labour Congress issued a direct warning on May 26: don't weaken worker rights to grease the wheels for industry. The ICJ says you can strike. Carney is asking employers whether you should be able to. Watch this one very closely.
55,000 postal workers ratified — but their president didn't recommend it. Canadian Union of Postal Workers members voted overwhelmingly to accept the five-year tentative deal yesterday: 89% Urban, 85.9% RSMC. The vote ends two years of bargaining, multiple picket lines, federal back-to-work orders, and Section 107 interventions. But here's the part the headlines are skipping: CUPW National President Jan Simpson and four other union leaders filed a minority report urging members to vote no, saying the deal didn't make sufficient gains on compensation or worker rights. Members voted yes anyway. Simpson's response after the result was tempered, not triumphal: "Despite these challenges, postal workers made some gains and stopped drastic rollbacks first proposed by Canada Post." That's an honest union president, and a union that argues with itself in public. Democracy in action. Meanwhile out west: 99% of Coast Mountain Bus workers in Vancouver voted to authorize a strike. Unifor locals 111 and 2200 represent about 5,000 workers in the TransLink system, including Coast Mountain Bus Company (CMBC) bus drivers and skilled trades, service and SeaBus workers. Translink shutdown looming.
Mamdani's first day of Pride was a masterclass, and the stakes are real. Yesterday Mayor Mamdani and the NYC Commission on Human Rights launched the "Trans Rights Are Human Rights" campaign: banners, transit ads, and street kiosks all month, designed by artist Dez Stavracos, telling trans New Yorkers exactly what protections they have under city law. He also marked Pride with a post on Instagram: "It would take far more than a month to honor the contributions of queer and transgender New Yorkers. From the Cercle Hermaphroditos in 1895, the first trans advocacy group in the United States, to the drag balls of the Harlem Renaissance, to the Stonewall uprising, to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, to ACT UP!..." Here's why the campaign isn't just a flag-wave. As Natasha Lennard reported at The Intercept, NYU Langone shut down its gender-affirming care program for minors in February citing "the current regulatory environment," refused to resume care when AG Letitia James ordered it to, and on May 7 received a criminal grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Texas demanding records on every minor who received trans care between 2020 and 2026, plus the names of every clinician who provided it. New York's shield law buys patients until June 10. Hospital systems across the country are now on notice. A socialist mayor leading with trans history and trans policy on day one of Pride is what showing up looks like. And if you want your Pride without the corporate floats, find a local parade like the Queer Liberation March in New York — the anti-corporate alternative started by the Reclaim Pride Coalition in 2019, running again this month.
Snaxshot is still doing the lord's work. If you liked our Oasis takedown last week, go read Andrea Hernández at Snaxshot on the wellness industry's fear-mongering economy — "the intersection of fear-mongering and misinformation when it comes to food and beverage, particularly in the US, where the majority of the population isn't born with a connection to what feeds them, but whatever BigBox grocer has in store for them." She's been on this beat for years. Subscribe to her, support her, follow the memes.
Go see I Love Boosters. We did, it ruled. Boots Riley's second film, eight years after Sorry to Bother You, is everything we thought it would be: Keke Palmer leading a Bay Area shoplifting crew that boosts designer clothes from a fashion mogul (Demi Moore) who runs sweatshops in China and makes her own clerks buy the new line out of their paychecks. Riley refuses CGI, the colour palette is loud enough to give you a headache in the best way, and Guillermo del Toro is out publicly raving about his hand-made effects. For the bigger picture, Emily Witt's New Yorker profile "Marx Brother" is the read of the month on Riley. Eat the billionaires. Wear their clothes.
Soundtrack: Dua Saleh, "Firestorm" — go watch the music video. A callback to Of Earth & Wires, which we shared on its May 15 release. "Firestorm" is the one with the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles on backing vocals. It is a wild ride that feels spiritual, urgent and necessary. Justin Vernon produced the beat; Saleh wrote it as a coastal love song imagined from heartbreak after the LA fires. Climate collapse rendered as tenderness. The video matches with just presence and stunning visuals. A non-binary Sudanese-American artist refusing to flinch. For Pride, for Sudan, for the Trans Chorus singers, for everyone watching the world burn from the coast. Put it on.
Repeal bedtimes, it’s the NBA finals baby! Mamdani recently signed an Executive Order temporarily repealing bedtimes in the City of New York so that New Yorkers of all ages can watch their team in the NBA Finals. Filmed in classic Trump ceremonial-signing style, with kids using handprints to affirm, it was a layup. The positive beat to our week we all needed. Go Knicks.
P.S. Toronto Tempo fans, your WNBA team is now over 0.500. Worth remembering: this season exists because the WNBPA fought a year for the first comprehensive revenue-sharing CBA in women's pro sports. Players paid better. Toronto winning. Organizing works.
Solidarity forever,
The internet is cooked.