Thread time. Why, you might ask, is the Trump Campaign (and yes the entire GOP is just the Trump Campaign now) willing to risk prison time defying a federal judge just to stop a census a month early? Great question. Here's the answer 1/ https://twitter.com/RawStory/status/1310707603450859522

The Census is THE most important thing that happens in America in any given decade. It determines how trillions of dollars of government spending are apportioned. It determines how much federal money goes into your roads, your police, your children's schools. 2/

And, perhaps most critically of all, it decides who represents you in the House. Every ten years, states gain or lose seats in the House, based on the results of the Census. Districts are created, redrawn, and destroyed based on the outcome. 3/

House seats are apportioned based on fractions of total population. The whole USA, carved into 435 districts of /roughly/ equal numbers of Americans (X). How many each state gets depends on how many times that state's population can be divided by X. But populations change. 4/

States lose or gain people all the time, through births, deaths, foreign immigration, interstate moves, all the different ways we end up where we end up.

But at the federal level, we only count heads once a decade to see who landed where.

And we're doing it right now. 5/

The only, repeat, THE ONLY reason Trump's GOP is trying to end the Census early is because it's not gone their way. America is becoming younger, more brown, more queer, and more urban. They are facing demographic DEATH. A death they are desperate to push off for 10 more years. 6/

That's what this is about. They, literally, don't want you to count. They don't want your lives to count. They don't want your race, your place, your gender, or your orientation to count.

They want to draw another decade of House districts as if you don't exist. 7/

Defy them, my beautiful friends. Fill out your census forms. Open the door to the census worker. Answer their few questions. Be counted. Force the GOP to confront your existence, and help put an end to theirs. 8/8

Go here. Fill it out. Hit send. It's important: https://2020census.gov/en.html