Listening to the next generation

The aftershocks of Zohran Mamdami's victory over the Democratic field in New York City's mayoral primary just keep on coming. I've read and listened to a slew of them in the last few days. For an election operative/election junkie like me it's all fascinating.

From my own idiosyncratic background in decades of trying to get ordinary citizens to turn out for good causes as well as striving to enlarge the electorate, what Mamdani did is astonishing. About 975,000 people voted according to the final ranked choice tallies: 545,000 for Mamdani; 428,500 for Andrew Cuomo.  Mamdani's campaign organized something over 50,000 campaign volunteers (most of whom we can assume were New York voters.) That is, nearly 10 percent of his voters volunteered in some way. And this number doesn't count whatever percentage of Mamdani's over 20,000 small donors gave money but didn't actively work in voter contact in the campaign.

Getting this high a percentage of an electorate activated is extremely rare. I'm not sure I've ever seen any thing close; perhaps for Obama in 2008, though I doubt it. Mamdani must have combined good fundamentals -- a deep appeal -- with extraordinary organization.

John Della Volpe has been polling director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics for over 20 years. He has a specialty, he explains: "I spend most of my time talking with, surveying, and thinking about young Americans." 

Young people campaigned for Mamdani and voted for Mamdami in very high numbers. Della Volpe describes what he thinks Mamdani evoked and what he has seen emerging for a long time: 

To Republicans, Mamdani represents everything they warn against: a socialist insurgent, a destabilizing force, a glimpse of where they fear the country is heading. Trump labeled him a “100% Communist Lunatic.” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis called him “very dangerous to the future of the city.” Charlie Kirk went even further, comparing Mamdani’s win to “9/11 2.0.”

But the louder panic came from inside his own party. Democratic leaders rushed to express concern — not just about his victory, but about what it might signal. ... What’s become clear is this: Mamdani didn’t just pull off a political upset. He revealed a deeper fracture — a generation of voters who feel unseen and unheard — and a political establishment that, instead of listening or re-engaging, is warning the rest of the country to look away. 

Della Volpe makes three observations about Mamdani's win. There were voters available to be persuaded.

#1: This Wasn’t About Labels. It Was About Lives.

Mamdani’s win wasn’t a fluke. It was the result of a campaign that grasped something most politicos and consultants still miss: in cities like New York, the real divide is no longer left versus center. It’s disconnection versus recognition. 

... Mamdani didn’t offer slogans. He listened. He took those stories seriously. Then he built a platform that sounded less like a press release and more like the people living it. ... And Mamdani didn’t manipulate it. He mirrored it — and then turned it into momentum.

Listening won Mamdani what money could not buy: 

#2: The Trust Recession

This election wasn’t just about housing or crime or affordability. It was about trust. And how little of it remains.

Sounds easy, but for a politician to choose to really listen and thereby win trust is a stretch for even willing politicians. Throwing oneself into the public arena is hard; you quickly learn there will be detractors, some of them unfair. Listening requires ego strength -- but also a strength that doesn't mask defensiveness. Mamdani seems to have such an equilibrium; this made for a perfect contrast to Cuomo's habitual arrogant bluster. 

#3: The Strategy Worked — But It Doesn’t Travel on Its Own

There’s already a rush to frame Mamdani’s win as a warning shot — or a roadmap — for Democrats nationally. But the truth is more grounded than that. What happened in Queens, Brooklyn, and across parts of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island wasn’t a template for the nation. It was a local reaction to a local crisis — a campaign rooted in New York’s specific pain points: housing, transit, affordability, and a growing sense that city government no longer works for regular people.

The lesson isn’t to copy Mamdani’s message. It’s to copy his method. ... In a post-election interview with Jen Psaki, Mamdani put it plainly: “We hoped to move our political instinct from lecturing to listening.

This New Yorker is going to have to be tough. Fortunately, he's suited for a tough city -- a city in Donald Trump's crosshairs.

Denouncing the war on those who have served

 

Every Wednesday at noon, veterans and friends gather at the entrance to the San Francisco VA Medical Center to protest Trump administration cuts and privatization plans.

Protesters are a lively bunch, spreading out to all four corners of the vehicle entrance and chanting loudly.

 

A vet explains the protest to a Med Center visitor exiting the campus. This crew makes a point of talkng with their people.

 

Choosing to alienate veterans seems a foolish move by Trump and MAGA.

When freedom seemed possible ...

Does history really have "turning points? The more deeply one looks into it, the less apt that metaphor seems. Human history is a long flow of events, accidents, and choices that could lead in different directions, but which are never entirely dictated by what came before and are uncertain in what future they may portend. 

But, oh, are there moments when something epic seems to have come along!

Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War by Lyndal Roper, a senior Oxford historian revisits one such moment which, looking backward, we seem to periodically notice and then forget. In 1525, in the wake of Luther's destabilization of Western Christendom, in what is now modern Germany, peasants undertook to overturn feudal society and it looked for a moment as if their marching columns had succeeded. 

The German Peasants' War was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. ... Peasants massed in armed bands in one region, then another, and rebellions would break out even in areas far away. At its height it involved well over a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, who joined with the rebels to bring about a new world of Christian brotherhood. And for several months they won. Authority and rulership collapsed ... People even began to dream of a new order. 

But this moment didn't last. ... The forces of the lords put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand peasants. ...

Insofar as the revolt can be said to have had an intellectual inspiration, Martin Luther's Freedom of a Christian published in 1520 served, despite Luther's quick repudiation of these ungoverned rebels. But the peasants, with input from other reforming clergy, created their own manifesto.

For them, freedom mean ending serfdom ... the peasants themselves ... formulated their complaints. The Twelve Articles then became a document that the movement everywhere acknowledged, even when the rebels didn't know exactly what the articles contained, and even though many areas revised them to suit local circumstances. Soon they were printed using the new technology made possible by the invention of moveable type, and they spread all over Germany. You could pick them up and hold them in your hand, point to each demand and the biblical passages that proved their godliness.

... The passions and dreams that drove the movement can seem inchoate, naive, and contradictory. ... this was not a movement driven by the literate few. It was a mass struggle by individuals who risked and lost their lives to try to bring about a new world. ...

The vision that drove them was about humans' relationship to creation. They were angry that lords claimed ownership of natural resources-- the water, the common land, the woods and forests -- when these were God's creation, given to all. They were enraged that the lords had stolen their freedom and claimed to own them when, as Luther showed, Christ had bought us all with his precious blood,"thus the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free." They were incensed by the growing inequality they saw around them ... They wanted men to live as brothers, in mutual obligation, not as lords and serfs. Theirs was an unabashedly male ideal, nourished by bonding amongst the peasant fighters, though that doesn't mean that women didn't support it too. They wanted decisions to be made collectively and to manage natural resources in a way that would respect the environment that God had created. ...

... for most of the war, the peasants were nonviolent; they humiliated but did not kill their lords. They questioned the established order at just the moment when capitalism was expanding and when Europeans were encountering new worlds, but they did not necessarily want to destroy authority of all kinds. Yet the authorities destroyed them, obliterated their movement, and built the structures of the current world on its ashes.

Roper's account of the peasants' brief but unprecedented revolt is detailed and granular. This is fascinating narrative history which for an American needs to be read alongside maps.

• • • 

The peasants' war is a huge historical event which 1) tends to be dropped from most accounts of early modern European history because its implications remain unclear, except that 2) Friedrich Engels brought a tendentious explanation of it to the fore in the context of articulating 19th century socialist thinking.

Roper's conclusion is her contribution to this historiography, to the academic theories and debates about what sort of frame in which to put the eruption. Here are some of those points, quotations from the book unless bracketed:

• ... [the peasants] were angry at how the lords treated them, but explaining the revolt in economic terms is not enough. Many richer peasants and even burghers joined the revolt ... if anything, conditions might have been improving as peasants engaged in markets and a long period of economic upswing continued after the Black Death. 

• ... the Reformation brought a religious transformation that did far more than legitimize or justify previous attacks on the abuses of feudalism; it brought a new vision of freedom, and of relations between human being as the environment. ... as some put it, all of us, rich and poor alike, are Christ's 'aigen,' his 'own', the same word as for serfs. 

• ... Marching together or taking over monasteries and convents allowed peasants to experience together a life of plenitude, where there was enough meat for all and more wine and beer than you could drink, a life of comradeship and brotherhood, not of dour monastic asceticism. These were ideals for which people were willing to fight. ... All could subscribe to the Twelve Articles, even those who did not know its specific contents. ... The rebels hatred of princes and 'top dogs' was now sealed in blood and gone was any reverence for rulers.

• ... the movement was held together by male bonding ... it is hard to know whether women would have felt included in their men's demands though the revolt could not have succeeded without women's support in running the farms and gardens their menfolk had left.

• ... the peasants' failure to bring the large towns in ... the cities were simply too populous, rich, powerful and well-armed to be seriously threatened by a peasant army.

• ... [yet] the peasants flattened the towers of lordship and wiped out the sacred geography of pilgrimage and monasticism. ... the war permanently undermined the power of the lesser nobility ...

• ... the ideas and dreams that had been formed in the war did not disappear but lived on in Anabaptism and in many varieties of radical thought. ... The war's legacy of blood desacralized lordship ... 

It's easy to think and feel that the present moment is another hinge point, a turning of some sort, what with climate change on top of the decay of Western capitalism and democracy. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But Roper's volume casts light on a time that felt and perhaps still appears to have been such a moment. I recommend it. 

Snippets from the Senate crime scene

They are voting on this abomination right now. It seems right to share a few tidbits from Democratic Senators denouncing Donald Trump's Big Ugly Wealth Transfer budget. After all, the poor will get over it ...

"This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT).

“[W]e're debating a bill that’s going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It's going to give a tax break to…massively wealthy people who don't need any more money. There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in…nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country.”

... “This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I've got a great idea. Let's give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’... I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

... “This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.” 

All by way of historian Heather Cox Richardson. 

 

If it were up to the Mission, heads would roll

 

We don't much like these guys.

They don't much like us either.

Tough people still rise. It's Gay Freedom season

It's a tough year for LGBTQIA+ celebrations. Not so much here in San Francisco where we've had four delicious days of Pride. But around the country and around the world. I liked these events better back in the day when we called the demonstrations  "Gay Freedom parades";  maybe that label will make a comeback in the season of MAGA.

We're tough people. Most of us have had to be tough in order to overcome conformity to normative gender rules. In the early AIDS days, many haters thought we'd all die, and too many of them thought that was just fine. But we survive and even thrive.

These Hungarian queers have shown what it is to survive and fight to thrive. Erin in the Morning reports on Hungarians braving their tough surroundings. 

200,000 March In Budapest Pride, Refusing To Capitulate To Anti-LGBTQ+ Law
The march can teach the world the power of organized solidarity in the wake of a global, anti-LGBTQ+ reactionary movement.

 

While American institutions wrestle with their commitment to the LGBTQ+ community, Budapest has just shown the world how to fight back: led by the city’s mayor, more than 200,000 people defied the ban and marched for Pride anyway.

... Hungary has increasingly restricted the rights of LGBTQ+ people—particularly transgender people—under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s far-right government. Laws enacted in recent years include a ban on legal gender recognition for transgender individuals, a so-called “LGBTQ+ propaganda” law designed to censor LGBTQ+ content in media and schools, and a prohibition on same-sex couples adopting children. Most recently, the Hungarian parliament passed legislation declaring pride parades illegal. ...

Organizers and Mayor Gergely Karácsony had other plans. The city officially designated Budapest Pride as a city-sponsored event—an action he argued exempted it from the national ban. ... 

... In the face of mounting attacks, it’s easy for LGBTQ+ people in the United States to feel crushed beneath the weight of it all. But moments like Budapest remind us that even under the most repressive regimes, our communities still rise. ... 

Let's keep up the good work against our homegrown haters. 

Keeping the pressure on in Colma

Neighbors gathered on Saturday on either side of Junipero Serra and Serramonte Blvds. in Colma (that's Auto Row)  to let passing cars know what they think of Elon, Tesla, and the Trump regime.

Sign waving demonstrators collected friendly honks from drivers passing every which way.

Our messages are serious.

This movement has created enough history so organizers come with a car load of highly appropriate signs.

Nobody is giving up.

Scenes from the gathering for the Trans March

We gathered in the sun at Dolores Park. The fog was nowhere about. Many are the years that Pride weekend at the end of June is one of the coldest in San Francisco. Not this time.

And the people came: joyous and determined.

When the world wants to erase you, delight in being together remains an antidote.

Trans youth have much to say ...

Trans youth and friends kicked off San Francisco's extended LGBTQIA+ weekend with a rally Thursday night on City Hall steps in response to the Supreme Court's Skrmetti decision allowing states to outlaw gender care for people under 18.

 

I asked this young person if I could photograph their sign. They agreed, so long as I didn't reveal their face.

There was defiance in the crowd ...

And earnest advocacy ...

And a goodly supply of allies. We are all in this together in the time of MAGA.

A few thoughts about Zohran from people closer than I am

I did live in New York City for a few years, way back in the hyper-energetic times of Mayor John Lindsay (1970-73) whose government epitomized the hope that a rich, diverse city could somehow have it all -- social peace, racial justice, and economic prosperity. Some look back on the moment with belated appreciation, while for others, it still seems a nadir of dysfunction. For a young person seeking her path, it was an exciting, if occasionally scary, backdrop to personal maturing. And then I got out in time not to witness the city's near insolvency and the blowback when the plutocrats reasserted their rule.

So I'm truly a remote observer of Zohran Mamdani's earthquake. Why NYC voters have dared to vote for someone/something new!

Evidently the money guys are terrified, reports Paul Waldman. Zohran has a excited a city they avoid noticing from their chauffeured limousines. 

Mamdani Win Causes World's Whiniest Babies to Melt Down 

... What exactly do these babies think Mamdani is going to do if he becomes mayor? They don’t like that he’s a democratic socialist; fair enough. Many of them just don’t like Muslims, which is sadly predictable. But what do they think the mayor is going to do that will be so catastrophic?

Granted, he has a lot of ambitious ideas in his platform. He wants to make buses and childcare free for all New Yorkers, for instance. Will that happen? Maybe, maybe not. It won’t be easy. But if he managed it, would it make the city some kind of intolerable hellhole for the rich?

... For many Americans, the idea that there are other Americans who feel safe and happy in environments of racial and ethnic diversity just doesn’t compute. Aren’t you supposed to only be comfortable around your own tribe? Aren’t you supposed to feel aggrieved when you hear languages other than English being spoken? For many people who have spent a lot of time in urban environments, the answer is that diversity is precisely what makes a place feel reassuring and comfortable. 

That's sure what I learned living in New York and I eventually settled in the place most like NYC with less crowding that existed in that decade. (San Francisco might no longer play that role ... times and cities change.) 

John Ganz at Unpopular Front tackles the touchy question of America's most Jewish city voting for a proud Muslim who supports Palestine:

... There clearly was an effort to smear Mamdani with Jewish voters as an antisemite, and it just didn’t work. 

The guy just does not come across as a hateful person. Also, New York has a population about the size of Israel, except compared to them, we are practically a utopia, where people of very different backgrounds live peacefully (if grumpily) side by side. Let’s not introduce ethnic hatreds into a place where they are largely successfully overcome. 

And let me tell you a little secret: most New York Jews really like New York’s diversity. We like that it attracts the Mamdanis of the world. We like sharing it with people of lots of different backgrounds. That’s what makes us feel safe and happy here. Especially when they are such a mensch like him: a nice college boy, his parents are a professor and a filmmaker, he went to Bronx Science, and then to a liberal arts school. 

I’m sorry, but you are gonna have a hard time convincing liberal educated, upper-middle-class Jews not to like a college-educated, left-leaning immigrant—and one who tried to make a career in the arts?! Forget about it. The guy is practically Jewish! Not to mention that his Muslim and Indian identity is no doubt sincere, but it’s also largely cultural in a way a lot of Jews recognize. ...

Ganz draws some conclusions which I think speak to how US voters might retrieve our democracy, if we get the chance. Most politicians, especially Democrats currently in the wilderness, have been mesmerized by messaging gurus who prescribe poll tested lines ... but mostly voters simply want someone who convinces them they can lead, in some new, better direction. That can be dangerous.  Trump's success points up the danger of a democratic populace feeling adrift -- a whole lot of people are finding out that the Leader might be leading them over a cliff.

Ganz again:

The problem with the polling and all the emphasis on data in contemporary politics is that it does not take into account that the electorate doesn’t really exist until election day, and the politician and his or her campaign are actively creating that electorate. All political errors, from the level of action to analysis, are based on reifying the situation, believing in a static, factual reality that cannot be changed. And all great political successes are based on the opposite: the art of the impossible; believing in a chance for something new.

Once upon a quite recent time, Barack Obama came across as something new; we're open to a novel direction again. Let's make sure it is a good one.

DEI reminder

It's good getting my health care from a medical system that wants its diverse patient population to know that it aims to treat us all rightly. That's even slightly brave in this moment ... posters encountered in the elevators.

 

Kaiser sure isn't perfect, but the track they've chosen at least mirrors the realities of the population of this city and state. 

A good use for the National Guard

In Chicago, a couple of soldiers accompanied their mother to her ICE appointment. Some Congresspeople turned up too, fearing what one called "scammy" summons from immigration authorities to their constituents. ICE denied the Congress guys entrance, despite their legal right to inspect the facility.

National disgrace abroad and at home

If he weren't so dangerous, it would be merely embarrassing to have elected a buffoon to the presidency.

Sorry dude, you spent a lot of our money, killed a few Iranians, and probably ensured more countries decide to race to get nukes ... and you aren't going to win a Nobel.

By way of The Guardian.  

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