Puff the Magic Hater

@mskellymhayes.bsky.social

98744 Followers 5356 Following

Menominee | Organizer | Co-author of Let This Radicalize You | Hosts Movement Memos podcast | Newsletter: organizingmythoughts.org | More: http://linktr.ee/KellyHayes

A sign with Spanish translations says: "Outside for a while? Air quality is very bad. Please protect your lungs. Wear a mask." Next to the sign, a box of masks is held off the ground by a rod.
AQI rating of 573 for Chicago area. Rated hazardous. There's an illustration of a man in a gas mask.
A grayscale political cartoon shows the Grim Reaper operating a claw machine filled with tiny human figures. The claw has grabbed one person, while the machine’s lower panel depicts smoke, a skull-shaped cloud, and a fleeing silhouette. Large white text reads: “THIS GAME IS RIGGED / YOU NEVER GET ANYONE GOOD,” followed at the bottom by “OMG IT’S LINDSEY GRAHAM.”
Text written on a book page reads: Looking to hear from people who are resisting the erosion of human thought, creativity, skill, and relationship through AI. If that sounds like you, reach out via kellyhayes.org.
Protesters on the pedestrian bridge over DuSable Lake Shore Drive hold up letters that spell out “Make corruption illegal again.”
A large crowd of people, some of whom are holding shovels, participate in a groundbreaking ceremony in an open field in Chicago.
Q from Star Trek TNG in his mock tribunal robes saying, "Oh, are the herteros upsetero?"
A selfie of Kelly with her head on a pillow laying next to a cat.
“Preparedness isn’t just about having stuff. It’s also about reducing the number of decisions you have to make while you’re scared, disoriented, or under pressure. So part of preparedness is asking: What can we decide now, while we’re calm, so that people have fewer decisions to make when they are not calm?” - Kelly Hayes
“Trump himself appears diminished, at times dragging himself through the motions of the spectacle he’s instigated. He is rarely convincing as the commanding strongman of his own mythology. He nods off, rambles, forgets, lurches, and often seems less like an author of events than a decaying mascot for forces that no longer require his full attention. But he’s the star—the right’s grotesque signifier. The spectacle is the moral language of the heist, and the show doesn’t work without him.” - Kelly Hayes
The final scene of Fight Club, just before a building within view explodes. Over the view outside the window, the words "The world turning to shit" are visible. The two characters holding hands and looking out the window have the words "me" and "Star Trek" printed over them, respectively.
Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer saying, "All you will get from me is my support, and my respect."
Giles on Buffy, smoking a cigarette. Giles says, "Listen to me." And Buffy says, "No, you listen to me."
Three frames from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. In the first, a demon named Anyanka says, "You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?" In the next, Giles replies, "Because it has to be." In the third, Giles breaks a cursed necklace, and in so doing, restores the better world that another version of him had known.
“We need more people highlighting solutions, practicing care, bracing for impacts together, and naming the openings we might push through—which is why the public broadcast of doom and despair deserves scrutiny right now. Pessimism is not foresight, and despair is not a synonym for political clarity. Not because people are obligated to be cheerful, but because resignation, transmitted as a factual conclusion, becomes an invitation to surrender.” - Kelly Hayes
Two strips of photo booth pictures of Kelly and Red Schulte. The two are posing and showcasing oddball expressions in various photos.
Kelly is standing beside a wooded area pointing at a nearby deer.
A deer and a duck on opposite sides of a creek.
A tabby cat lays on a bed.
Photo of Kelly with an ensemble of eight teen actors, most of whom are Black and brown.
A protester wears cardboard butterfly wings bearing the message "our roots run deeper than your borders" while carrying a sign that reads "hope is the only thing stronger than fear."
A Latinx worker speaks on the mic at a rally. They are surrounded by pro-labor, anti-ICE signs and protesters.
"We have changed the world profoundly. They want to change it back. Our job is to not let them, partly by remembering how powerful and successful we’ve been in changing it. By celebrating our victories, our heroes, and understanding the forces of change." - Rebecca Solnit
“The right is a really obvious enemy. We know what it is, we know why we oppose it, we kind of know how to resist it. But there’s another enemy which is within ourselves, our own defeatism, our own lack of faith in ourselves, our own lack of understanding how change works. Often, our own lack of an ability to be in coalition with each other, when the perfect is the enemy with the good, and people start nitpicking at minor differences when we have major things in common.” - Rebecca Solnit
Ben Wyatt on Parks and Rec holds out a doll and says, "You think a depressed person could make this?"
“Be curious about hope and the function of despair. Ask questions when someone says things are natural or the way that things just have to be. Push on those boundaries and look past those edges to see if there’s something else, something better on the other side. And get worried if you stop being curious. We don’t know what 96% of the matter-energy content of the universe is. So let’s take that as a proxy, the suggestion that actually, we don’t know most things. If you’ve gotten to the point where you think you’ve got it all worked out, you’re probably wrong.” — Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
A selfie of Kelly and activist Stevie Wilson.t
“I really want to hold onto the distinction between someone who is actually my enemy and someone who is talking out of their ass, or making me mad right now, or who has hurt me, or become my opponent in a particular moment. Those are not all the same thing. And if I start treating them as though they are, that distorts my politics and makes me worse at navigating conflict. When I am dealing with my own communities, my responses actually help define, not only who I am, but who I am in relation to those people, and if I am treating them like the enemy anytime we disagree, I am going to become their enemy, whatever my intentions are.” - Kelly Hayes
“People in the United States are more responsive to horror when it brushes up against us in some way. We are not unique in this regard, but we have too often had the luxury of exempting ourselves from reckoning with the damage caused by the US government and US corporations abroad. That pattern has created a social weakness fascists can exploit: yanking us around by our fears when it suits them, and battering us into moral resignation in the face of other people’s suffering.” — Kelly Hayes
Book cover for Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis. Features a drawing of a person wading into a body of water in a forest at night.
“We have a great opportunity in our movements to learn how to be opponents without being enemies. I think we would thrive in our groups and in our formations if we actually could hold space for lively disagreement, lively debate, exploring differences of opinions instead of doing this thing that I’ve also participated in, which is where we’re like, ‘Ooh, I don’t have the right opinion. If I don’t have the right opinion, I’m going to be out.’ Or, ‘You don’t have the right opinion. You’re out, you’re wrong, you’re not enough of a radical to be here,’ et cetera, et cetera.” - Tanuja Jagernauth
A still from Deep Space Nine. Julian Bashir is screaming with his hands over his head, as if pinned against a wall. His eyes are closed. The image is from the famously terrible episode Move Along Home.
A book that is an Italian translation of Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba is held in someone's hand.
Cassian Andor on the show Andor saying “I’m here for the money”
“We are all dragging ourselves along, trying to keep up with whatever version of normalcy has been reconstructed each day. We are weeping and writing emails. We are watching television and scrolling, alternately hiding and spiraling, but rarely grieving as we should. Rarely living fully in the reality of now, because that would mean killing the zombie dressed up as an ordinary Tuesday, and we do not know how to do that yet. Or maybe we’re just not ready." — Kelly Hayes
Kelly and her cat are both visible in a screenshot from a Zoom-like app.
“They are censoring knowledge because they want to censor human beings. They want to have certain human beings not count within our society, and therefore, they don’t want those human beings to have any sort of power, intellectual power, any sort of way to be able to see themselves represented in the world. They want those people stamped out. Downstream of that, then, is the censorship of people’s books and people’s knowledge and people’s access, and that is a huge part of the project that we are dealing with, the fascist project.” - Mariame Kaba
A cat jumps and then does a flip in the air while chasing a toy
“We don’t necessarily need to persuade a lot of people that we are right. We need to persuade a lot of people to do things, to take risks and do things, and to feel that what we do matters. And so unlearning apathy, unlearning a sense of nothing I do matters. That might actually be the thing that gets people into the streets.” - Lewis Raven Wallace
Kelly laying on her back with a cat on her chest.
A young man and a young woman who've been pied in the face with shaving cream playfully pose for a photo.
“There were thousands of us out there before Renée was murdered. The day after Renée was murdered, there were tens of thousands. Tons of new people came into this knowing they could die, because we saw it on video, and it didn't stop them. Almost everyone I know has been pepper sprayed or tear gassed or both in the last two months. They go home, they wash out their eyes, they decontaminate their clothes, and they go back out.” — Margaret, member of Defend the 612
Event flyer with an orange textured background featuring a drawn eye and an open mouth graphic. Text reads: “The Prairieland comrades need you! Kelly Hayes & DFW Support Committee talk zines & solidarity. Sat. Feb. 21st, 5–6:30 PM. Monkeywrench Books, ATX, 110 N Loop Blvd E.
Flyer for a Feb. 23, 2026 book talk with Kelly Hayes at the Texas Union (UNB 4.206), 4–5:30pm. It features a portrait of Kelly Hayes, the cover of Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis, a short description calling it “a survival guide for the heart,” logos for UT Austin programs, and a QR code to learn more and RSVP.
“There are very few systems — there are some, but there are very few in human history that reach the kind of scale that they’re talking about … what we’re talking about is something that will eclipse the U.S. prison system, which is already this unbelievably carceral institution.” — Andrea Pitzer
"There is no end point for the categorical hatred of a type of person or dehumanization. That process takes on a life of its own and can become lethal all on its own. So we should see the writing on the wall every time a political actor expresses it. And while it’s more frightening when someone with state power expresses this, it should also be a priority to stop those who seemingly have none. Fuentes was just an online micro-celebrity, someone few paid attention to, and now he has an influence on state police. Even Trump was a reality show star, not the leader of the most powerful imperial country in the world. We should work to fight our enemies when they are weak so we don’t have to struggle to fight back when they’re strong." — Shane Burley
A white and gray cat pokes her head out from under blankets.
An image of a DS9-themed Valentine with Gul Dukat's face framed by hearts. Text reads: "I think you deserve a statue."
A DS9-themed Valentine with Gowron's face framed by hearts. Text reads: "Glory to you and your heart."
A DS9-themed Valentine that frames Julian and Garak's faces in hearts. Text reads: "Gay for you."
An image of a DS9-themed Valentine with Chief O'Brien's face framed by hearts. He is winking at the camera. The text reads: "I'll be your union man," a play on O'Brien's "he was more than a hero, he was a union man" moment from the show.
“What our enemies are building is a sustained political project. They may scale down their operations in particular cities, as they did in Chicago, at least temporarily, or throw some of Trump’s lackeys under the bus — as they did with Gregory Bovino, when the public wasn’t buying the administration’s lies about Alex Pretti. But they are building a massive concentration camp apparatus, and they will not abandon the objective of filling those camps.” — Kelly Hayes
A lemon hanging on a tree with a split in its side that looks like a rotting mouth. There's also a mark that looks something like an eye, which gives the lemon a sort of evil Pac Man aesthetic.
“We practice with each other based on our relationships, our longtime relationships, and then we start to practice with all the other folks that want to come join us. We have this way of saying, ‘Yeah, welcome. We really missed you, but we know that we need each other right now. So come on home, come join us. This is what we’re doing together.’ And it’s been amazing.” — Andrew Fahlstrom
Garak's hands are resting on Julian's shoulders in Deep Space Nine. Julian looks alarmed and perhaps a bit titillated.
Ben Sisko on DS9, raising a glass and looking very serious. The still is from the famous "I can live with it" scene of the episode "In The Pale Moonlight."
The world's smallest violin, created by scientists at Loughborough University using their nanolithography system. This is an image of the violin created by scientists, compared with a human hair. The violin measures 35 microns long and 13 microns wide, with a micron being one millionth of a metre. A human hair typically ranges from 17 to 180 microns in diameter.
A mostly white tabby cat with blue eyes rolls on her side and begs for attention in her cat tree.
The character Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer saying "Because it has to be."
Selfie of Kelly with frizzy hair and water in the background.