🔥The Internet is Cooked: May 8, 2026

Good morning. Here's your dispatch from the corners of the internet still fighting slop: Tennessee gerrymandering Memphis, Mark Carney privatizing Canadian airports, 30,000 healthcare workers about to walk off the job, a queer artist worth your money, and the dumbest war propaganda ever produced by a global empire.

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Tennessee just redrew the map. Fuck. The state legislature passed a new congressional map yesterday, signed within hours by Governor Bill Lee, that breaks up the 9th Congressional District in Memphis — Tennessee's only Democrat-held, majority-Black district — and splits it into three Republican-leaning ones. Racial gerrymandering, plain and simple, and another open move to help Trump's midterms. This is on top of the Supreme Court gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year, and Republicans aren't pretending otherwise — the stated goal is more seats, full stop.

Mark Carney is trying to privatize Canadian airports. Gas prices are at an all-time high, healthcare workers are burnt out, people can’t afford homes, and now he's trying to flip our airports to private equity. Of course the Toronto Star is framing this as a way to cut costs and help the country. Let's get real: there's no such thing as a free market. This is late stage capitalism. We're headed toward more monopolization like the 407 — the privatized Toronto toll highway whose rates have skyrocketed since the sale of the lease. Krystal and Saagar shipped a banger this week on Trump's view of rising gas prices. Same question we should be asking Carney up here: why are oil conglomerates posting record profits while the rest of us bleed at the pump?

We're suckers for good merch, art, and zines. Right now we're connecting to our transcestors through the work of Ellis Jackson Kroese (they/them) at Trans Masc Studies, exploring the history of masculine-leaning gender diverse people. Check out the Queers for a Free Palestine T-Shirt Kroese designed — proceeds split between Haven for Artists, a cultural activist collective distributing aid in Lebanon, and Operation Olive Branch, a grassroots mutual aid effort for families in Palestine.

REI's anti-union playbook is going national. On May 14, 30,000 University of California healthcare workers (nurses, MRI techs, medical assistants) organized with AFSCME 3299 will walk off the job. They've been without a contract since 2024. The union charges that UC unilaterally implemented a healthcare plan without bargaining. Apparently the 13,000 union members who've already left UC since the pandemic weren't a loud enough warning. Healthcare strikes are up 58% year-over-year. The bosses are running out of polite ways to say no. Healthcare should be a right; private healthcare is an oxymoron. Go Unions.

In the dystopian "we are watching empires die in real time" way: while a Tehran propaganda firm of three guys in their 20s has been running circles around the State Department with Lego-style videos viewed billions of times (we covered them in our first dispatch), the Trump administration's official Iran-war content strategy has been to splice US strike footage with clips from Call of Duty, Top Gun, and SpongeBob SquarePants saying "You want to see me do it again?" When asked to defend this, a senior White House official said, on the record: "We're over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude." This is what $900 billion in annual defense spending buys, folks. How about a real banger: stop killing people. We imagine if Canada participated, it would feature Caillou, Timbits, and JBiebs singing "is it too late now to say sorry?" over bombing footage.

Soundtrack: A whole album about radical empathy dropped into a Strait of Hormuz war week. Young the Giant's Victory Garden (released May 1st), their first record since 2022, named after the WWII community gardens that fed neighbourhoods while empires made rubble of each other. Lead singer Sameer Gadhia framed it directly: hope and unconditional love as a form of extreme resistance. We couldn't have said it better.

Solidarity forever,

The internet is cooked.