Linda Tirado, “a one-woman hurricane of making the world a better place”
As journalist Linda Tirado faces her end, her friend Noah Berlatsky reflects on some of her best work.
Journalist Linda Tirado shared a profoundly moving update on June 13 in her Stories From the Rail newsletter: She is dying. Her words captured the raw reality of facing mortality:
Getting ready to die is just as dramatic as it seems in the movies. There’s a lot of opera in the background while you try to take care of the paperwork, of the last details, of the tiny things that you’ve left to the last minute, the things only you can take care of but that would be a burden if you left them behind.
Tirado’s story, which was featured in Part 5 of Long Lead's The People vs. Rubber Bullets series, is one of resilience and courage. During the height of the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in summer 2020, she was documenting police actions when an officer shot her in her left eye with a 40mm foam-tipped bullet. This injury left her blind in that eye, drastically altering her life. But it didn’t diminish her voice or resolve.
On June 2, 2022, Tirado settled with the City of Minneapolis for $600,000, money she’s used for her ongoing medical expenses. This settlement, while a small acknowledgment of the injustice she faced, cannot undo the physical and emotional toll she has endured. As Tirado explained in a February interview with Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World newsletter, her brain is “deregulating” as a result of the impact-related injury to the left frontal lobe of her brain from the shooting. In June, Tirado, 42, entered hospice care in Tennessee, according to a National Press Club press release.
I asked a friend and peer of Tirado’s, Noah Berlatsky of the Everything Is Horrible newsletter, if he would be willing to tell us a bit about Linda and share some of his favorite pieces of hers.
In an email, Berlatsky says he was hesitant to round up Tirado’s work, for a number of reasons. “First, I worried that I would end up bursting into tears repeatedly as I wrote it — and that did in fact turn out to be the case. More substantively, it’s difficult to capture Linda’s contribution in a greatest hits list, no matter how lengthy. Linda is a journalist, but she is also a one-woman hurricane of making the world a better place.”
Berlatsky doesn’t remember when or how he met Tirado, but he knows she reached out to him online first. “She reached out to everybody,” he says. “After she went viral and was targeted by the right in ugly and predictable ways, she made it her mission to help people facing similar firestorms, offering support, strategies, and a friendly ear. On Twitter, she fundraised for people in need and offered to talk on the phone to anyone who needed help. Most recently, she organized assistance for people needing abortion services in Texas.”
“The list below, then, is just a very small representation of Linda’s writing, which is in turn a very small representation of what Linda did and why her friendship and her example has mattered to so many of us,” Berlatsky says. “I know I’m not the best person to talk about her — she was closer to many people than she was to me, and in any case, Linda Tirado has always been the person who speaks best for Linda Tirado. That will be clear when you read her writing.” —Parker Molloy
How to support Linda Tirado:
“She’s never asked for herself,” writes her friend Sav Adler in a newsletter. “However, she is dying. Slowly, painfully, and with none of the dignity she’s earned and all of the TBI-induced dementia that’s stealing her limited time left with her kids.
Palliative hospice care is fucking expensive. So, I’m asking. I’m asking for Tirado and her kids and her family. This time, it’s for Linda. Y’all know what to do.”
Adler says people can support Linda Tirado and her family by sending funds directly to her through these online payment services:
Venmo: Linda-Tirado-3
PayPal: Bootstrapindustries@gmail.com
Zelle: 806.433.6075
“Poor people don’t plan long-term. We’ll just get our hearts broken.” (The Guardian, Sept. 21, 2014)
“In October 2013, Linda was browsing a Gawker Media website, Killer Martinis, when she saw a question on the forum, ‘Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive?’ She responded with a searching comment — an essay, really — about the ways in which poor people’s choices are constrained, and why you don’t plan longterm when you know life is rigged to gut all your plans.
“The piece went viral, and huge numbers of people who hate the poor and don’t want to hear about their lives attacked Linda for supposedly not really being poor, or for being immoral, or for all the things people attack the poor for in order to convince themselves that poor people deserve to suffer. More positively, Linda got a book deal, and was able to write Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. The Guardian reprinted the original essay as part of a longer excerpt from the book.”
“Poverty Doesn’t Make People Racist” (Talk Poverty, Aug. 22, 2017)
“This short piece from Talk Poverty from 2017, written after the fascist riot in Charlottesville, reflects Linda’s continuing interest in poverty, as well as her longtime engagement with race, racism, and antifascism. The piece is a response to a former mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, who argued that ‘Klan types’ were ‘the poorest of the poor… the forgotten Americans.’ Politely, but eloquently, Linda explains why this is nonsense that blames the poor in the guise of sympathizing with them, and erases the sweeping, repulsive racism of the wealthy. The end of the piece has some of the prophetic power, fire, and clarity of James Baldwin.”
“Dear Dana Loesch: How Do You Sleep at Night?” (The Daily Beast, March 9, 2018)
“In 2018, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch posted a video threatening journalists who reported on gun violence: ‘We’re coming for you.’ Linda responded with an open letter to Loesch in The Daily Beast in which she mocked her bad tattoo, her acting, her failed Hollywood ambitions, told her she was ‘cowardly and pampered’ and added, ‘When you are old, you will consider your life and find it ash in your mouth.’ It’s glorious, and gives you a sense of what it’s like to talk to Linda in real life when she’s pissed off. Except in person there’s a lot more cursing. Add in a ‘fuck’ every four words or so and you’ll about get it.”
What does justice look like to Linda Tirado?
When Linda Rodriguez McRobbie wrote “The People vs. Rubber Bullets,” her definitional exploration of less-lethal projectiles’ deadly legacy, she not only profiled Linda Tirado, she also recorded their conversations. In this outtake, Tirado answers the question of what true justice would look like, after she had begrudgingly settled her lawsuit with the City of Minneapolis.
“Police Blinded Me in One Eye. I Can Still See Why My Country’s on Fire” (The New Republic, June 4, 2020)
“After police shot out Linda’s eye during the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, she wrote this blistering piece for the New Republic. Linda was at the protests as a reporter, but she insists that freedom of speech extends not just to reporters like her, but to all people demanding a better, less racist country and a better, less racist world. She links the George Floyd protests to the protests she witnessed in Ferguson, Mo., after police shot and murdered Michael Brown, and connects both to the rise of Trump — the embodiment of an old American hate.
“‘I think that I am angry — but no more than I was this time last week, when I was watching America burn for the pleasure of our vainglorious leader,’ Linda writes. ‘I lost an eye; George Floyd lost his life. What right do I have to rage on my own behalf?’ Linda has always insisted on seeing her own struggles and injuries as part of a larger structure of injustice, and as part of a larger fight. That’s why she’s a great writer.”
“I get to be the person I always wish I had been” (Welcome to Hell World, Feb. 23, 2024)
“Linda called her friend, the journalist Luke O’Neill, this February to talk about her brain injury, her career, and how she wants to be remembered. It’s a funny, heartbreaking, and brutal discussion — at one point Linda suggests people in crisis can call and talk to her in part because her short-term memory is gone, so they can be assured that anything they tell her will be confidential and immediately forgotten. She also reminisces about meeting and smoking pot with one of her heroes, Barbara Ehrenreich (‘That mad bitch’), and about her recent work providing aid for abortions for people in Texas.”
So very very sad hearing about this. She was someone I admired from afar.
Thank you so much for doing this Noah