When federal Housing and Urban Development workers clocked in this morning, they encountered this:
Enjoy.This morning at Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) HQ in DC as mandatory return to office began, this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source. Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 6:51 AM
[image or embed]
Orville Schell is a grand old man of American sinology, the study of China, as well as a long serving dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
He sees some resemblances between the dispositions of two highly disruptive despots.
When US President Donald Trump’s factotum, J.D. Vance, held forth on Europe’s “threat from within” at the recent Munich Security Conference, his audience was left struggling to make sense of America’s confounding new approach to foreign policy. Chinese President Xi Jinping, for his part, has been relatively silent since Trump’s return to the White House – but that doesn’t mean he is any less vexed by what it portends. Nor could he have been reassured by Trump’s brazen response to a question last October about what he would do if Xi blockaded Taiwan: “Xi knows I’m fucking crazy!”
... there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong. While Mao, who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology, or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection.Mao’s penchant for disorder was deeply rooted in his troubled relationship with his father, whom he described to writer Edgar Snow as “a severe task master” and a “hot-tempered man” who beat his son so brutally, he often ran away from home. But Mao learned from this “war” how to stand up for himself: “When I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained meek and submissive he only cursed and beat me more.”
This formative childhood experience shaped Mao as a person and drew him to the oppositional politics that helped catalyze the chaos and disorder that engulfed China for decades. ... his most epic political upheaval was the 1966 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in response to what he saw as his fellow leaders’ bureaucratic resistance to his absolutism. He wrote the first “big-character poster” (大字报), calling on China’s youth to rise up and “bombard the headquarters” (炮打司令部) of the very party he had helped found. ...
Certain of the righteousness of his crusade against what Trump supporters would call the “deep state,” Mao published a column in the People’s Daily newspaper counseling that there is “no need to be afraid of tidal waves. Human society has been evolved out of tidal waves.”
Mao’s abiding belief in the power of resistance led him to celebrate conflict. “Without destruction, there can be no construction” (不破不立), he proclaimed. Another vaunted slogan of the time declared: “World in great disorder: excellent situation!” (天下大乱形势大好). This impulse to disrupt or “overturn” (翻身) China’s class structure proved massively destructive. But Mao justified the resulting violence and upheaval as essential elements of “making revolution” (搞革命) and building a “New China.”
... Given that Xi came of age during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and was himself shipped off to the countryside to “eat bitterness” (吃苦) for seven years as a youth, he undoubtedly learned a thing or two about coping with such chaos. Still, Xi may have a hard time fully comprehending that the US – a country many Chinese have long admired, even using the expression “the moon is rounder in America than in China” (美国的月亮比中国的月亮圆) – has now produced its own grand progenitor of top-down turmoil.
Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness. Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.
I don't actually think dwelling on what's wrong in the psyches of these monsters is very important at present. Mao's dead and largely dishonored. What matters is how to stop our madman and his henchmen from inflicting the kind of death and destruction that Mao inflicted on China.
Noted in an account of a book club discussion, by way of Slate:
I know you are reading quite the tome for your book club right now. How many pages in are you, and have you, uh, been struck by anything in particular?
Luke Winkie: So, yes, our book club is currently about 300 pages deep into The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, the 1960 classic by journalist William Shirer, who lived and worked in Nazi Germany and had an up-close view on the country’s descent into fascism.By far, the most sobering passage I’ve read is when Shirer articulates the psychic toll of living in a totalitarian, propagandized state. Let me quote him:
“It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that … despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.
“Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers.
“Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”
When Shirer's opus was published, my mother immediately brought a copy home. I still have that classic volume; when I broke up my parent's house after their deaths over 20 years ago, it seemed important to ship it to California.
I first read Shirer when I was probably 14. As first hand observation, Shirer has held up well; historians have reasonable quibbles with his view from Berlin, but he knew what he saw.
We too need to believe our own eyes.
Jewish leaders have turned our commitment to one another into a moral sedative. ... By seeing a Jewish state as forever abused, never the abuser, we deny its capacity for evil. Before October 7, I thought I understood the dangers of this way of thinking. Turns out I had no idea. From Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A ReckoningPeter Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. In the late '90s and early '00s, Beinart was associated with an annoying cluster of bright young intellectuals at The New Republic magazine who eagerly sought to differentiate themselves from the historical liberal traditions of their perch. Their cheerleading for America's invasion of Iraq was boundless -- until that set of fantasies collapsed amid broken American and Iraqi bodies and a broken society.
... it’s worth remembering that the Bible considers states—which in its time meant kingdoms—very perilous things. While they may be necessary to avoid chaos, they can easily become instruments of oppression. When the Israelite elders ask the prophet Samuel for a king, God instructs him to both grant their wish and list the many cruelties a monarch will inflict. Kings are most dangerous when they view themselves ... as inherently holy and thus infallible.
In Jewish tradition, states have no inherent value. States are not created in the image of God; human beings are. States are mere instruments. They can protect human flourishing, or they can destroy it. ... The legitimacy of a Jewish state—like the holiness of the Jewish people—is conditional on how it behaves.
... Treating a state as a god is a very frightening endeavor. It confers upon mortals a level of veneration that we do not deserve and will always abuse.
... To defend Israel, American Jews are harming our community and our country. More than half a century ago, the writer I. F. Stone noted that “Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry.” Jews whose welfare in our own countries “depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies” were championing a Jewish state “in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist.”And now all humans between the river and the sea will be further afflicted by the antics of our own orange-faced toddler real estate mogul ... what more could go wrong?
Our Democratic "leaders" are (one element) of what we the people have on our side as we rebuff Trump/Musk's authoritarian onslaught. The demand that lawmakers speak up and lead is a hardy perennial; it required years of citizen pressure to peel Party big shots off George W.'s misbegotten War on Terror. We knew they knew better, but they were chickenshit and too many Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans died.
There are some Democrats who are exceptions: I think offhand of AOC, Jasmine Crockett, among the older generation Elizabeth Warren. But most just don't seem up to the moment. And that goes especially for Chuck Shumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
Charlotte Clymer offers gentle, but serious, advice to our Democratic officeholders:
I need Democratic lawmakers to understand something: there is a profound disconnect among many of you between the world as it should be and the world as it is, and we are in a moment in which many of you, bless your hearts, don’t seem to get that.
In a political environment in which even a little complacency leads to unfair consequences, many of you are not only failing to have the energy required in this moment but more importantly: simply not reading the room.
If you don’t know how to message in this moment, it’s time to pass the torch. If you’re tired of all this, it’s time to give up your seat for someone who’s ready to fight. If you don’t get that we are no longer living in the American Politics of Yesteryear, it’s time to allow people to thank you for service and make room for someone else.
It doesn’t matter how old you are. I truly don’t care about your age. What I care about is having leaders, regardless of age, who understand what we’re facing right now and act like it.
That may come across as mean, but your constituents really no longer have the luxury of being nice about this.
Please, for the love of all that’s good, ask yourself honestly if you’re being an effective messenger, and if not, maybe it’s time to ask yourself if someone else could be and decide accordingly.
They've served their time, but if they can't fight fascism, they need to get out of the way.
Hundreds of San Franciscans paid a visit to the Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue on Presidents Day.
Apparently these resisters have been written out of history to a large extent. But their ferocious protest is actually very interesting.
The Rebecca Riots: Why did Wales rise up & what lessons might that hold for the future?
A sustained campaign of attacks blazed across the Welsh counties of Carmarthenshire, Cardiganshire, and Pembrokeshire from 1839. Tenant-farmers and labourers, infuriated by increased charges on road travel that made their working lives and finances even more burdensome, took matters into their own hands by destroying tollhouses, gates, and bars in what became known as the Rebecca riots.
Perhaps the movement’s most recognisable aspect was its enigmatic leader ‘Rebecca’, purported to be taken from Genesis, in which Rebecca is told: ‘Be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.’ She was represented during protests by a participant in costume that combined masculine and feminine signifiers: a gown or petticoat thrown on over work clothes, or an elaborate wig paired with a false beard.
As the unrest spread across South Wales, reaching its peak in summer 1843, it grew to encompass workhouses, formerly common land enclosed by private landowners, and the estates of the local gentry.
Just as the targets of Rebeccaism went beyond tollgates, so their tactics went beyond rioting. Protesters organised mass demonstrations, stormed workhouses, resisted evictions of tenants and auctions of seized property, wrote threatening letters in Rebecca’s name, and collected money for unwed mothers and children. At public meetings, they drew up resolutions to Parliament that echoed the Chartist demand for the secret ballot and the vote for working men.
… Authorities at the time, from local magistrates to the young Queen Victoria, took the riots more seriously than many subsequent historians have. … Victoria’s adviser Lord Melbourne worried that the conflict might spiral into a revolutionary ‘general rising against property’.
Robert Peel’s Tory government, already shaken by the rise of Chartism, Ireland’s independence campaign, the general strike of 1842, and, elsewhere in Wales, popular uprisings at Merthyr Tydfil and Newport, sent in thousands of police and soldiers to occupy the area. As resistance continued, the government was forced to take the more conciliatory step of asking the people to air their grievances directly in the 1843 Commission of Inquiry
… Far from being – as some radicals sneered at the time – ‘an affair of middle-class farmers’, the Rebecca movement drew poorer farmhands, domestic servants, artisans, industrial workers, and even the commercial middle classes into its ranks. Its cross-class makeup, initially a strength, led to fractures and divisions
… Rebeccaism’s demographics also played a part in its rocky relationship with Chartism, which was entrenched in the Welsh coal and iron towns further east. While some leading Chartists cautioned against the class alliances that shaped Rebeccaism, citing the failure of this strategy in the earlier Reform campaign, others welcomed Rebecca as a potential partner in a radical popular front.
… David J.V. Jones’ Rebecca’s Children (1989) was the first exploration of events that acknowledged them as ‘larger than we thought and less respectable’. Meanwhile, in broader histories dealing with the early Victorian age and its transition to industrial capitalism, Rebeccaism tends to remain a footnote or curio, dismissed as a confused or reactionary ‘peasant rebellion’
... Rebeccaism deserves a more significant place in British radical history – partly because of, not despite, its messier and more militant dimensions. The study of movements like Rebeccaism, with all their oddities and contradictions, can be useful in the context of post-industrial politics and protest. Many recent struggles – from Occupy to the gilets jaunes – seem to be turning towards autonomous, localised, and self-sustaining coalitions in which the traditional conduits of parliamentary democracy are, at best, incidental.
Could attention to pre-modern forms of protest offer a guide to the present and future as well as a deeper understanding of the past? [via Adam Tooze. The source he cites is paywalled.]
I have to admit, reliance on localized protest worries me in the current moment. We need to be build the broadest coalitions of resistance possible across the widest social forces possible to achieve democratic (small "d") resilience. But until we do, localized resistance is better than none.
The struggle will be to find leaders and leadership structures with broad legitimacy in a country undergoing both generational and technological change. I believe we will do that; the Rebecca's did, however they are minimized today. I wait in hope -- and am on my way to today's little protest ...
Plaintiffs in this challenge are 12 national denominational bodies and representatives, 4 regional denominational bodies, and 11 denominational and interdenominational associations, all rooted in the Jewish and Christian faiths. Plaintiffs and their members are Baptist, Brethren, Conservative Jewish, Episcopalian, Evangelical, Mennonite, Quaker, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Reconstructionist Jewish, Reform Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, United Methodist, Zion Methodist, and more.
They bring this suit unified on a fundamental belief: Every human being, regardless of birthplace, is a child of God worthy of dignity, care, and love.
Welcoming the stranger, or immigrant, is thus a central precept of their faith practices.
The Torah lays out this tenet 36 times, more than any other teaching: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).
In the Gospels, Jesus Christ not only echoes this command, but self-identifies with the stranger: “For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35).
Plaintiffs’ religious scripture, teaching, and traditions offer clear, repeated, and irrefutable unanimity on their obligation to embrace, serve, and defend the refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in their midst without regard to documentation or legal status.
Recognizing the importance of communal religious practices “to the well-being of people and the communities of which they are a part,” the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) for over 30 years substantially restricted immigration enforcement action in or near places of worship. Although DHS has statutory authority to conduct a variety of enforcement actions—such as conducting stops and interrogations, serving process and other orders, and executing immigration arrests and raids without judicial warrant—DHS’s longstanding “sensitive locations” (or “protected areas”) policy provided that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) and Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) would do so at or near places of worship only under exigent circumstances or with prior written, high-level supervisory approval.
On January 20, 2025, DHS abruptly reversed course and rescinded the sensitive locations policy. Disavowing the need for any “bright line rules regarding where our immigration laws are permitted to be enforced,” the Rescission Memo instead directs ICE and CBP officers to “use [their] discretion along with a healthy dose of common sense” in deciding whether to conduct immigration enforcement actions at places of worship, during religious ceremonies, and at other sensitive locations. DHS’s website features a news article stating that ICE agents understand the rescission “to free them up to go after more illegal immigrants.”
The rescission reflects President Donald Trump’s goal of deporting all immigrants in the United States without lawful status during his current four-year term. To accomplish this, President Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan explained, DHS will conduct immigration enforcement actions “across the country, uninhibited by any prior administration guidelines.”
Federal officials have confirmed that the target of these enforcement actions will include undocumented immigrants with no criminal record. Over the first week of the current Trump Administration, ICE arrested over 4,500 people, including nearly 1,000 people in a Sunday “immigration enforcement blitz.”
At least one of these enforcement actions occurred at a church in Georgia during worship service. According to news coverage, an usher standing in the church entrance saw a group of ICE agents outside and locked the door. The agents said that they were there to arrest Wilson Velásquez, who had traveled to the United States from Honduras with his wife and three children in 2022.
Immediately after crossing the border, they turned themselves in to U.S. authorities and requested asylum. They were given a court date and then released after federal agents cinched a GPS-tracking monitor on Velásquez’s ankle.
After settling in suburban Atlanta, the family joined a Pentecostal church where they worshipped several times a week and helped with music. They were listening to the pastor’s sermon when ICE agents arrived to arrest Velásquez. Although Velásquez had attended all his required check-ins at an Atlanta ICE office and had a court date scheduled to present his asylum case to a judge, ICE agents arrested him anyway, explaining that they were simply “looking for people with ankle bracelets.” The pastor, Luis Ortiz, tried to reassure his congregation, but he “could see the fear and tears on their faces.”
Plaintiffs’ congregations and members face an imminent risk of similar immigration enforcement actions at their places of worship. Consistent with their call to welcome and serve all people, many have undocumented congregants and many offer social service ministries— such as food and clothing pantries, English as a Second Language (“ESL”) classes, legal assistance, and job training services—at their churches and synagogues that serve undocumented people.
An immigration enforcement action during worship services, ministry work, or other congregational activities would be devastating to their religious practice. It would shatter the consecrated space of sanctuary, thwart communal worship, and undermine the social service outreach that is central to religious expression and spiritual practice for Plaintiffs’ congregations and members.
The rescission of the sensitive locations policy is already substantially burdening the religious exercise of Plaintiffs’ congregations and members. Congregations are experiencing decreases in worship attendance and social services participation due to fear of immigration enforcement action. For the vulnerable congregants who continue to attend worship services, congregations must choose between either exposing them to arrest or undertaking security measures that are in direct tension with their religious duties of welcome and hospitality.
Likewise, the choice that congregations currently face between discontinuing social service ministries or putting undocumented participants at risk of arrest is no choice at all: Either way, congregations are forced to violate their religious duty to serve and protect their immigrant neighbors.
The brief goes on to assert that the administration's declaration of intent and ICE's actions prevent their free exercise of the dictates of their religion under the under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) and the First Amendment.
The rightwing in the United States makes much of their devotion to freedom of religious belief and practice. Often this feels like an effort to impose unpopular values on non-believers, as when they seek to suppress neutral historical and scientific information and education.
Here religious groups demand to be allowed to exercise and affirm their core values of welcome and broad inclusion of all humans as enjoined by their understanding of their religious traditions.
Sides have been drawn.
