Technofascists v. the normies

Erudite Partner's latest article from TomDispatch opens with a vignette:

Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.

But before I could make the call, my phone rang.

“Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said.

“Mary! I was just about to call you.”

“But you did call me,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.”

It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. ...

I remember this episode well. Our household was a part of organizing a lot of demonstrations against Ronald Reagan's Central American wars. The SFPD could have simply asked us what were the plans. Or they could have attended some of the interminable organizing coalition meetings; actually, I'm sure they did that ...

I walked over this on a San Francisco street

Anyway, that crude surveillance seems quaint these days. Authorities have gotten far more sophisticated and they've found some frightening allies -- or are these overlords? Today E.P. asks "How Will Your Data Be Deployed In an Age of Dark Enlightenment?"

It's pretty scary stuff full of tech billionaires and pseudo-intellectual elite fantasies come to life. How do we reject these lost, desiccated aspiring techno-gods? The same way that people of good will always have: by loving one another and supporting each other in our messy humanity. Read Erudite Parther's latest.

What's God got to do with it?

Everything for the evangelical, Pentecostal segment of Donald Trump's base which is cheering his extra-Constitutional attack on what he hopes is Iran's nuclear capacity. (Thirty-six hours after, experts aren't so sure he's done the damage he hoped to, but what does expertise matter, anyway, when you are a boy ordering a big bang?)

 

Polling before the strike on Iran showed only 16 percent of us wanted this. This is not like GW Bush's invasion of Iraq which enjoyed majority support for a hot minute in 2003. Now that Trump's done it, YouGov still finds 46 percent opposed, 35 percent in favor of the strikes. And just wait until it all becomes more complicated ...

Diana Butler Bass brings historical perspective to evangelical Christian enthusiasm for the Trump's bombs: 

To his evangelical base, Trump is fulfilling end times prophecies before their eyes. Moving the embassy [to Jerusalem in 2018] was but the first step in reorienting US policy toward prophecy. What is happening right now — with the US joining with Israel in this bombing — is nothing less than God's work, and they believe that they are the recipients of the long-awaited promise of Jesus' return.

... the MAGA "Jesus" and their particular prophecy tradition only dates to the mid-1800s. It was a completely invented theology about 200 years ago.

Yet that theological innovation has been one of the most wildly successful heresies in the history of Christianity in terms of spread and influence — mostly via Pentecostalism, the largest and most sustained global religious movement of the last century.

Modern Pentecostalism began among the poor and dispossessed and was originally influenced by progressive politics. Movements change, however. And partisans often wind up far from where they started.

In the last four decades, Pentecostals fully embraced both prophecy theologies (previously these theologies had been the purview of rather staid evangelicals and fundamentalists — most of whom eschewed Pentecostalism) and nationalist politics. ...

... Trump’s evangelical and Pentecostal supporters — the core of MAGA — are cheering. ... Bombing Iran secures Trump’s status as God’s man, the one sent to fulfill the prophetic promises that lead to the return of Jesus. While the rest of us are trying to discern signs of fascism, many American are discerning the "signs of the times."

We think Hitler. They think Jesus. We think of the innocent suffering. They think of the final judgment. We pray for peace. They believe that the Prince of Peace is returning with a sword. ...

For a deeper dive into this crackpot theology, I recommend Jemar Tisby: Bombs for the Apocalypse? Ted Cruz, Trump, and Evangelical End Times Theology -- How Dispensationalism Drives American Foreign Policy and Military Aggression. This is an accessible easy read, if delving into lunacy can be easy.

A message of shared humanity and a warning

Historian of American Christian religion Diana Butler Bass offers a homily for this moment:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. — Matthew 25: 35–36

... People of faith may, of course, disagree about policies regarding immigration. But we cannot avoid that the call for compassion, safety, and welcome for those who have left their homelands due to starvation, violence, deprivation, persecution, and war.

We humans have always fled and wandered. We have experienced exile and homelessness. Immigration has been central to the human story from its beginning. But the story is taking an evil turn right now, even as the problems associated with the movement of peoples are intensifying. But immigration is not going away ... largely due to climate change.

How we deal with this is a measure of our moral health and our own souls.

It is incumbent upon us to resist the dehumanization and demonization of immigrants and refugees and refuse to participate in unjust deportations and campaigns of state terror against innocent people. We cannot give in to social and political movements that deny the humanity and dignity of immigrants and refugees.

We must not accept the wanton cruelty being perpetrated in our towns and cities right now. And we will not carry out orders from those who flagrantly deny the ethical imperative of Jesus himself.

I was a stranger and you invited me in.

• • •

Journalist and popular historian Garrett Graff studies our past experience to try to discern where we are going. He is not sanguine about the trajectory of the Trump/Miller migrant expulsion regime. 

ICE in just a few weeks has transformed itself into the closest thing that the US has ever had to a “secret police,” with more seemingly culturally in common with the Klan nightriders of Reconstruction than their federal agency brethren like the FBI or ATF.

... what worries me is that what we’re witnessing nationwide are not the actions of an agency that believes it will ever be subject to meaningful oversight or legal authority ever again.

This is not an agency that is treating members of Congress as if it will ever be held to account by the men and women who control its budget.

This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions on the streets will be subject to meaningful review by judicial authorities — or that any of its actions will be litigated in the courts.

This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions will be subject to meaningful review by the DHS inspector general, either for policy violations or criminal use-of-force abuses, nor reviewed by US attorneys or federal prosecutors at any level.

This is not an agency leadership that believes that anyone in government — at the Justice Department, the White House, or DHS — currently cares about public perception, misconduct, or violations of civil rights and civil liberties.

And this is not an agency that believes that Democrats will ever be back in charge.

That’s what should terrify us.

... the [Big Ugly Budget] bill before Congress right now would supercharge ICE and turn this increasingly secret-police-like organization loose on the country in ways that would be explosive. Various versions of the $150 billion proposal to boost immigration enforcement throw around numbers like adding between $8 billion and $30 billion for ICE hiring and operations.

ICE’s entire current annual budget is around $10 billion, so imagine an ICE an order of magnitude larger than it is now.

... I spent years writing about the corruption that followed a similar radical and rapid transformation of the Border Patrol — a decade of corruption during which one agent or officer of CBP was arrested almost every single day for misconduct or criminal activity, a decade during which it rushed new hires out into the field without proper vetting or training. ...

Now we appear to be set to repeat all of those mistakes by pouring gasoline on ICE’s misconduct — hiring thousands of new agents and officers in a rush just as surely problematic, if not worse and bigger, as the one that wrecked CBP for years — and turn it loose on the country’s interior, cities, and small communities in a way that the Border Patrol’s corruption and misconduct for the most part never affected ordinary Americans.  ...

• • •

Seen at No Kings demo, San Francisco

Pacifica will not go quietly

Along Highway One at Mori Point in Pacifica this morning, folks were alerting passing motorists to their anger at the Trump regime. There were plenty of friendly honks.

Mori Point is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area -- like the rest of the National Parks, attractive real estate that Trump would happily sell off to his billionaire buddies for development. Or turn over to mining interests if they want these places.

The MAGA Budget Bill now moving in the Senate would cripple many of our parks. The National Parks Conservation Association is leading the pushback.

Friday cat blogging

 

I am watched. I think it's about the opening of cans. Why don't I get on with it? It's dinner time and we're starving. ...

From the Department of Plain Speaking Politicians

 

A career foreign service officer, Bridget Brink served as US ambassador to Ukraine under Biden. Now she's running for Congress in her home state of Michigan. It seems possible that having been witness up close to a genuinely existential struggle leaves this observer with "no fucks to give" in a political race. 

Over images from the Russian assault on Ukraine, Brink declares: "Appeasing a dictator will never achieve a lasting peace..."

The House district is competitive. There will be other Democratic contestants. I have no idea whether this approach will "work" for Brink, but I find it refreshing.

• • • 

As we watch helplessly while Donald Trump playacts the strongman in the most volatile arena in today's world, it doesn't hurt to be reminded of what war, even a "small" war, looks like.

Juneteenth 2025

Today is the federal holiday of Juneteenth, created by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2021. This celebration of freedom, the end of enslavement won in war by the federal Union in 1865, is still a novelty to white America. So it seems worth sharing this short history from people's historian Heather Cox Richardson. 

 

In this country, freedom has always come through struggle.

• • • 

As in all else in our national life, Donald and his MAGA acolytes wish they could erase this memory of freedom won by blood and struggle. Judd Legum reports that big corporations are scurrying to cover up that they ever endorsed and participated in Juneteenth. Notable backsliders:

Amazon, Verizon, and other major corporations have ended or reduced their support for Juneteenth celebrations this year, forcing events in major cities to be significantly scaled back, a Popular Information investigation reveals.

.. Amazon rolled back its DEI programs in December 2024. An internal letter from an Amazon senior human resources executive stated that the company would eliminate “outdated” policies and programs. This included removing language from the company’s website about Amazon’s support for “Equity for Black people.” Amazon also removed all references to DEI from its 2024 annual report and donated $1,000,000 to Trump's inaugural committee. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

• • •

An LA Times political commentator wondered whether Donald Trump can just make the Juneteenth holiday go away. As in so much of American life which MAGA wants killed off, it turns out that is harder then they may understand.

Trump wouldn’t have the power to do that on his own, according to Loyola Marymount University Law School professor Jessica Levinson.

“Federal holidays are created and abolished by Congress,” Levinson explained, adding that presidents can make recommendations and sign and veto bills, but they cannot unilaterally create or cancel laws.

Our current reality seems to consist of an ongoing test of that proposition. The No Kings protests show there are are lot of us who think our system of government ought to mean we still have a say.

Justice for all

Trump/MAGA's substitution of the whims of the Leader for historic American democratic norms and law provokes our resistance from many viewpoints and among many very different people. Why would such a violent tearing of the national fabric not do so?; this a a country of 340 million individuals with very different histories, needs, and life experiences. MAGA desperately wants to erase all that and subjugate where it can't.

 

Many of us recoil from and repudiate MAGA's vision.

 

For some, the energy for that struggle comes from our visceral reaction to the abduction of family and neighbors.

 

For some, it's sheer stubbornness, a defiant sense of self that has kept us going through life's challenges and serves in this moment.

 

For some it's recoil from gratuitous cruelty in the service of a sick cartoon of a god rendered a nasty tribal totem. 

 

And for some, it's allegiance to a reasonably coherent ethical system which repels MAGA's fatuous formulas. The country has many such belief systems, but we are learning that in the past century the country had erected a legal edifice to embody our diverse core beliefs. Trump/MAGA can't stand for that.

Attorney and commentator Liz Dye reports how one federal judge reacted to MAGA in court:

Judge rules that anti-woke is just racism
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a rancid bigot.

 

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Boston explicitly called out the Trump administration for its “palpably clear” discrimination against racial minorities and LGBTQ+ Americans in a case involving canceled grants from the National Institutes of Health....

Judge [William] Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1985, called the terminations “arbitrary and capricious.” But he went further than other judges in the many impoundment suits, calling the administration out for its flagrant animus against racial and sexual minorities.

“I am hesitant to draw this conclusion — but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it — that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” he said, according to Politico. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.“

...“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” the judge hammered on. “The Constitution will not permit that.”

... In 1954, [lawyer Joseph] Welch’s “Have you no decency, sir!” marked the beginning of the end for Sen. Joe McCarthy. Public support for his witch hunt collapsed, and he died in disgrace three years later. But decency is in short supply these days, and the White House is digging in.

“It is appalling that a federal judge would use court proceedings to express his political views and preferences,” White House flack Kush Desai sneered. “How is a judge going to deliver an impartial decision when he explicitly stated his biased opinion that the administration’s retraction of illegal DEI funding is racist and anti-LGBTQ?”

A hit dog will holler. And maybe that dog will win a reprieve from the Supreme Court, too. But even so, it still matters when old bulls of the judiciary, particularly conservatives like Judge Young and Judge Royce Lamberth, who enjoined attacks on trans prisoners, call out the Trump regime for turning civil rights laws on their head.

“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Judge Young fumed. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.”

Once upon a time, (1782 to be specific) we affirmed a national motto: E Pluribus Unum -- out of many one.  That's in the national DNA and it isn't going away.

The end of the beginning?

Paul Krugman, economist and commentator, offers some useful thoughts on where we've come to in the country's ongoing Trump/MAGA emergency.

While there is a cadre of Trumpist true believers who will obey the Leader under any circumstances, most of those doing the dirty work of undermining democracy and the rule of law are cowards and opportunists. They’re willing to participate in the destruction of America as we know it because they believe that many others will do the same. As a result, they believe that they are unlikely to face any personal consequences for their actions and may even be rewarded for their lawbreaking.

And what of those who oppose Trumpism? While there are heroes willing to take a stand against tyranny whatever the personal cost, most anti-Trumpists are reluctant to stick their necks out unless they believe that they are part of a widespread resistance that will grant them some measure of safety in numbers.

 In other words, the victory or defeat of competitive authoritarianism will depend to a large extent on which side ordinary people believe will win. If Trump looks unstoppable, resistance will wither away and democracy will be lost. On the other hand, if he appears weak and stymied, resistance will grow and — just maybe — American democracy will survive.

So what we saw on Saturday was more than just the juxtaposition of a poorly attended parade that was supposed to glorify the Leader against massive, enthusiastic protests. We also saw a body blow to Trump’s image of invincibility and a demonstration that millions of Americans are willing to stand up for democracy.

... This isn’t the end of the assault on American democracy. It isn’t even the beginning of the end. But it may well be the end of the beginning. Trump spent his first 6 months in office trying to steamroller over all opposition, creating the impression that resistance is futile. Clearly, he hasn’t succeeded.  ...

I think Paul's got this right. The No Kings demonstrations across the nation on Saturday were a milestone. If the people lead, maybe we can get more of our leaders to follow. Let's take deep breaths and go forward together in the struggle for democracy and a better future.

No Kings in San Francisco

Part Two: the people mill about in Civic Center

In this household, we sometimes apply a principle about demonstrations: either the march or the rally. Not both. But Saturday, after recording the start, I took BART down Civic Center to record some of the huge crowd.

City Hall always makes a grandiose back drop.

 

It was a good day to be a Californian. The sound system was inaudible, but who cared? We knew why we were there.

To Trump and Stephen Miller, they are targets of hate. For us -- probably an amazing near 60 percent -- they are simply us.

We depend on each other, not bored military extras conscripted to boost your sick little ego, Mr. Trump.

 Together in the sun. 

 

All kinds, all the time.

Father's Day 2025

There he is, doing his father thing. Perhaps he got me started on my affection for football with that rubber ball he is offering. 1948, I think.

No Kings in San Francisco

Part One: the people assemble in Dolores Park. 

I'm told that by the time the march got underway it took two hours to get everyone into the street and off to Civic Center. From the viewpoint of the not-terribly-mobile photographer, it's easier to interact with folks on the grass perimeter. The San Francisco Chronicle says "tens of thousands" of marchers, whatever that means.

 

Hope in a "moral moment."

These women have something to say.

Here's a gent with some admonitions.

Waiting to get into the scrum.

Sometimes the strongest response to our rulers is mockery. "Oh really?"

And sometimes it is poetry recalled ...

 

Old friends keep on keeping on.

New friends make art.

 

American has a solid political core that loves democracy and has no intention of letting go of it.  

Former United States Attorney Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse