"Can't we all get along?"

Senator Rafael Warnock of Georgia has a new book. I guess that means he's dipping his toe in the water, testing the temperature for a Democratic presidential run in 2028. Good for him -- the more the better, since we probably know clearly what we don't want: that would be Donald Trump, corruption and misrule, and more endless wars. But do we know what do we want? The people who want the job need to make their case.

Warnock sat for a long interview with David Marchese of the New York Times [gift link] which I found full of intriguing tidbits. Marchese's interjections are in bold type. Warnock affirms the traditions from which he comes:

We’ve only been a democracy in a real sense since 1965. What we are witnessing in real time is an assault on those basic voting rights. I think that the Supreme Court has committed violence against the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system. And as someone whose parents lived through that ugly history, I take deep offense....

Warnock's appreciation of democracy leads him to hate gerrymandering which enables politicians to pick their voters rather than the other way round. 

But he's a pastor also; he comes from a broad faith perspective. 

... For me, the acid test of one’s faith is the depth of your commitment to the people who are on the margins. I’m a Matthew 25 Christian.

“What you did unto the least of us, you did unto me.” 

I don’t understand how you read that, say a long prayer, hold hands with your fellow legislators and then cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. ...

... Part of the obligation of a person of faith is to ask yourself: “What are you actually worshiping? What are you actually committed to?” Are you committed to the poor? Are you committed to the despised and the rejected? Would Jesus agree with the actions of ICE in this moment, in which we’re seeing organized cruelty on our streets, masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, separating families, terrorizing whole communities of people, whether they’re documented or not, whether they are citizens or not? What is it in the Gospel, I would ask my colleagues, that says that this is right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There’s some variation of that in all of the great faith traditions, and that’s the question people aren’t asking themselves deeply enough. Because if you do, you might actually have to make some decisions that make you uncomfortable. 

... One of the animating ideas of your book is that America has lost its way morally. What sort of practical, specific signs are you looking for, or should any of us be looking for, that would make us think America has morally found its way again? What would that look like? Isaiah says that “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” As a preacher, I used to think that text meant that the glory of the Lord is so amazing and so overwhelming that all flesh will see it and you can’t help but see it because it’s God’s glory. 

I actually read it in reverse now. The insight that the prophet is laying out for us, whether you’re a person of faith or not, is that there are some things we can only see when we get together. 

On its face, Warnock's prescription here might seem almost laughably weak and inoffensive, a version of "Can't we all get along?" as the spurious quote from police brutality victim Rodney King asks.

But maybe Warnock is on to something about us: maybe what we will want in 2028 is someone who stakes out principled pro-democracy policy positions, but also credibly tries to bring us together. I'm skeptical, But Warnock seems to be exploring such a path ...

If you are looking for a fighter ...

I was born an underdog. 21 surgeries by the age of 12. I had spina bifida caused by my dad's exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Was a kid wearing Goodwill handme-downs with the wrong color lunch ticket. I knew nothing would come easy.

But I never doubted my right to the American dream. Sitting in my wheelchair, 9 years old, watching the Olympics, I dreamed of winning gold for my country, too. In 2016, I did just that in with the basketball team in the Paraolympic Games ... [then it he did again four years later.] ...

Josh Turek won his primary last Tuesday to run as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in Iowa. A state legislator, he's known for campaigning door-to-door in his hilly Council Bluffs district, along with his wheel chair. Watch him in the clip. He won his first contest by 6 votes. Six!! He knows in both body and mind what a tough campaign feels like.

Can an inspiring, hard working Democrat win in Iowa?  It's hard to recall now, but the Senate seat he is contesting was held by Democrat Tom Harkin for 30 years until retirement in 2014. The state followed him with Republican Joni --"we're all are going to die"-- Ernst, but now she's quitting; Turek's run may seem a long-shot, but polls show a good Democratic year in Iowa. The farm economy has taken awful hits from Trump's tariff policies. It seems he might have an opening.

Learn more about Turek's accomplishments here. 

Young women making their own fight

We know that much of MAGA hates women. They want to curtail our freedoms, starting with forced reproduction. They yearn for an imagined lost patriarchy where men were the only bosses and women were content with subservience. Many of them rage against the world that actually is, where young women expect to make their own choices, perhaps alongside a partner, but certainly not under a man's thumb.

Along with Jessica Valenti, Kylie Cheung writes Abortion, Every Day, a tireless chronicle of how right wingers are creating a minefield of barriers, state by state, for adults trying to make their own choices about when and whether to have children. Repression of reproductive freedom didn't start with the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs and it certainly doesn't end there. 

Recently Cheung took a break from reporting the daily details of these horrors to examine what is really happening among young women who are the targets of this coercion. She writes:

The Pink Pill Pipeline Isn’t Working: Conservatives’ tradwife push is losing to feminism. For now. 

... Anti-abortion leaders know their policies are unpopular with young people—certainly with young women who woke up [to the Supreme Court's decision] on June 24, 2022, with fewer rights over their bodies than their mothers and grandmothers.

But despite sweeping declarations of victory from outlets like Fox News, the truth is that this pink pill pipeline isn’t working: Gen Z women are the first feminist majority generation. According to a 2025 Ipsos survey, 53% of Gen Z women identify as feminists—compared with 46% of millennial women, 37% of Gen X women, and 39% of baby boomer women.

We know conservatives have a long-term goal: they’re looking decades into the future, building toward a reality in which women have no options but to marry and have children. They’re priming girls and young women, today, to accept this reality. And while we don’t know what the state of our rights and feminist resistance will look like in a few decades, we do know that right now, this propaganda doesn’t appear to be working on young women. In fact, conservatives’ attacks have activated the next generation—who are now on the frontlines for abortion and reproductive freedom.

The explosion of activism on their own behalf doesn't mean the young women don't suffer constraints that offer women-haters opportunities to try to mess with bodies and minds. 

... Of course, everyone has different experiences with different birth control methods, and our health system has failed many young women as they search for the right method for them. The U.S. economy has certainly failed many young women. Anti-birth control social media content flattens all of these complexities. These posts are solely meant to convince young women that birth control is bad and must be restricted, and marrying and having kids as early as possible is good, and even essential.

Conservatives aren’t interested in improving conditions within the health system or directing us toward real solutions—they’re interested in convincing us to blame feminism.

But it’s feminism that’s helping women see through the lies. [Reproductive rights organizer Stephanie] Spector says that after campaigning for over-the-counter birth control options for years, myths about birth control simply don’t work on her. But she still sees the disinformation everywhere.

Pink pill pipeline content often follows the same recipes and lines of attack: alternative health TikToks questioning the safety and efficacy of hormonal birth control, ‘tradwife’ videos starring young mothers of a whole litter of small children, or, increasingly, celebrity and tabloid stories with predictably misogynistic undertones.

... The right knows exactly what they’re doing: creating cultural support for their repressive, unpopular political agenda. They’re also replicating the success they’ve had with the “manosphere,” which attracts young men first with ‘apolitical’ content about weightlifting and dating. The pink pill pipeline similarly lures young women with seemingly apolitical content—ultimately steering them toward anti-birth control articles from the right-wing billionaire-backed women’s magazine Evie, or Candace Owens’ rants against voting rights. ...

Cheung know where this is going:

... This year, the Heritage Foundation—the architects behind Project 2025—articulated a 250-year plan for the U.S. in which young women will ‘voluntarily’ forgo work and school and pop out an endless flow of babies because there are no other options.

They don’t just want to take away women’s choices—they want to romanticize our oppression. But there’s nothing romantic or empowering about the actual impacts of denying young people options. ...

The whole article is worth reading. 

As we, the largely gray-haired resistance to MAGA, speak out against war and fascism, for democracy and taxing billionaires for the common good, let's never lose sight of the young women fighting for their freedoms.

All together now against MAGA

Immigrants, trans people, and friends gathered outside the San Francisco branch of the California Department of Motor Vehicles Thursday morning to protest plans to turn all of our state data over to a national contractor. The move creates reasonable fear that the Trump regime will use the data to harm people, especially those it is trying to expel or erase from our community.

 Per CalMatters: 

California is preparing to share with an outside organization detailed information about drivers license holders, including immigrants who do not have legal authorization to live in the U.S.

That breaks a promise the state made a decade ago when it began issuing licenses to unauthorized immigrants, advocates say, and it means more than 1 million people may face higher risk of deportation.

California issues an ID card that allows undocumented migrants to drive after they pass a driving test. 

California also protects the rights and privacy of people who have undergone a gender transition, issuing updated ID documents which match the chosen gender presentation. 

Representatives from ... advocacy groups ... told CalMatters the shared information will show whether a person has a Social Security number, meaning it could be used to identify people in the country without authorization. ...  advocates fear that federal immigration officials will try to gain bulk access to the data and use the fact that a person doesn’t have a Social Security number as a signal that they’re deportable.

The state received assurances from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators that safeguards will be added to prevent bulk searches for unauthorized immigrant license holders in the database and to prevent access by the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to people who joined [a] briefing with the DMV and governor’s office. ... 

“Once this data is uploaded to AAMVA, it’s out of California’s control, no matter what California wants, no matter what protests we may make,” said Ed Hasbrouck with San Francisco civil liberties group The Identity Project ...

 

Meanwhile trans people are all too aware of the threat from the administration to their very existence. So far, California has been a relatively safe place for trans adults -- but anyone who is paying attention understands that MAGA wants to end that.

This is about protecting the integrity of the diverse and welcoming California we have chosen to become ...

He's nuts and senile ...

 

Also preposterous. Let's say it out loud. I bet he aced kindergarten. Subsequently, not so much.

California picks a governor. The return of the gray?

I had thought I might wake up this morning and find myself miserable over the election results in California. But to my surprise, I look at what happened and it seems pretty good. Nothing to get excited about, but no reason to despair of the Golden State either.

The Governor's race: As I've written before, Californians have been spoiled for the last 16 years to have had energetic, intelligent and highly plausible Democratic governors. Yes, there have been multiple occasions on which I disagreed with and even protested Brown and especially Newsom, but they knew a lot about how the state works and tried to accomplish policy wins for their constituents. 

The title of this post refers to their Democratic predecessor Gray Davis who was recalled and replaced in the interesting Arnold Schwarzenegger interlude. Gray was indeed gray; I actually sat at a table with him once at some political dinner and the man had the charisma of a paper napkin. Brown and Newsom came along and set a new standard for high-octane Democratic leaders.

Then, this year, we looked to lurch from these two very qualified pros to a choice from a small bevy of Dems, all except one of whom had little experience in state government. This was jarring; this state is huge and rich and influential and also sometimes needy and fractious. Whoever got to be Governor was going to face a major learning curve.

From a doing-the-job perspective, Katie Porter seemed the best prepared; she understands government as policy and was my choice. But the California electorate quickly decided it wasn't up for an abrasive fat women; that's a reach too far apparently. Congressman Eric Swalwell imploded; lesson to ambitious guys, learn to curb your hormones. 

So for many Democrats, the election came down to which gray candidate could win enough votes to be sure to make the November ballot because, theoretically, if two Republican candidates got the most votes, the splintered Dems would not have a candidate at all. This seemed unlikely, but the horror of the prospect raised the sense of stakes as Primary Day approached. 

We were left with progressive billionaire Tom Steyer and Democratic political fixture Xavier Becerra, a former state legislator, state attorney general and head of Biden's Health and Human Services. And they battled it out. Because neither personally excited much excitement, online the campaign sometimes seemed to exemplify "the narcissism of small differences," the tendency in the heat of conflict to exacerbate minor conflicts in order to draw distinctions which we give excessive weight. I had friends in both camps and I hope they can come together in the aftermath. For a minute there, they were at each other's throats.

It worked out that Steyer's money couldn't overcome Becerra's comforting grayness. Democratic political consultant Gary South identified Steyer's fatal flaw: 

“It may sound facetious to say that you can have too much money in a campaign, but in fact the way these rich self-financing candidates spend their money becomes a liability. …They wear out their welcome.”

L.A. Times political pundit George Skelton catches our former Attorney General's appeal to many:

“Voters are exhausted by Trump. He makes it hard to sleep at night. ‘Cool and calm’ win,” says Chapman University political science professor Fred Smoller. “People want a candidate like a no-drama Becerra.

“The fact he has a charisma deficit may in fact be his political asset.”

But Becerra also has other assets, notes UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser — ”legislative and executive experience…. He was safe and predictable.

“And he’s second only to Gavin Newsom in opposing Donald Trump.” 

Besides -- isn't it about time we elected a Latino governor? Seems right. 

We count on Becerra to defeat the surviving Republican in the fall. Party identification plus disgust with Trump ought to do the trick in this blue state. And then we'll come to terms with our latest gray governor.

 • • •

Meanwhile in San Francisco: As well, I have reason to be happy this morning because in my home Congressional district where Nancy Pelosi is finally retiring, a billionaire tech-bro carpetbagger, Saikat Chakrabarti, got handed his walking papers -- driven off the ballot by a hard working Taiwanese immigrant, local Supervisor, Connie Chan. Chan now runs, from behind, against another local fixture, centrist gay policy wonk Scott Wiener. This one is a real San Francisco barn burner replete with scrambled coalitions; at least we haven't sunk so low that our representation in Congress was available to the highest bidder. On to November.

Primary day in CA

Not much here. Voting has been slow at polling sites. After all, eligible Californians received ballots by mail and have multiple options to turn them in. 

Spent the day piloting an election protection scheme, on standby for disruption that wasn't going to happen today. But come November, might it?

Two very quiet polling sites. 

Bibi boasts over Beaufort

Mainstream media have been sharing the news that Israeli forces have seized Beaufort Castle, a Crusader-era high point and fortification on the southern border of Lebanon in a region which is home turf to Israel's foe, Hezbollah. 

The Israelis seem very proud of this conquest, though in modern terms, the ancient "castle" is just some rock piles. Here's the story from Le Monde: 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to push deeper into Lebanon after his military took over the medieval castle of Beaufort on Sunday, May 31, calling it a "dramatic shift" in Israel's campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Iran-backed militant group, meanwhile, said it targeted Israeli forces near the fortress as well as army positions and infrastructure in Shlomi and Nahariya in northern Israel, while air raid sirens blared in the Acre area. Israeli forces used the Beaufort castle, also known as Qalaat al-Chakif, as a base during their previous two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon that ended in 2000.

"We have returned united, determined and stronger than ever," Netanyahu said in a video statement released after the military took Beaufort. "Now my directive is to deepen and expand our hold in places that were under Hezbollah's control. The capture of Beaufort is a dramatic stage and a dramatic shift in the policy we are leading."

Erudite Partner and I had the chance, thanks to a Lebanese friend, to walk about this eerie spot in 2006, just weeks before that year's Israeli assault on the proud and battered country.

The yellow banner of Hezbollah flew defiantly from the castle's pinnacle then. We didn't see any fighters, though there were rumors that they had tunneled somewhere underneath.

Looking south, across the deep ravine cut by the Litani River, we were looking into Israel where a neat modern settlement had been built.

 

Looking the other way, we could see the Lebanese village of Arnoun. It appeared prosperous in its own way that spring, but very much an organic growth on the hillside, not any kind of planned community.

The contrast between the two towns seemed to exemplify two civilizations. Meanwhile the Crusader castle endured, in between. 

 

I wonder if Beaufort will survive its latest occupants. 

 

I am quite certain that the adjoining Lebanese village is by now destroyed and depopulated. Poor Lebanon, fated to try to survive next to its belligerent neighbor.

Keeping the fire burning ... it's a forever thing

For over a decade, Erudite Partner has been publishing occasional essays at the news site TomDispatch. The editor, Tom Engelhardt, came to publishing from the New England Free Press where he worked in the late 1960s -- in those days, radical publishing meant literally becoming printers of physical flyers as well as books. When I passed through Boston and visited in the spring of 1969, I imagine I met him; there were a lot of nice, earnest young men in the loft where they ran the presses. He later built TomDispatch into a syndication service for writing and distribution of progressive thinking.

 

Like all of us who have worked since the Sixties to tend and sometimes ignite the smoldering coals of struggles for justice, Tom is getting on. Others plan to take up his work in some form as Tom retires. Tom, you have served the people well and truthfully. 

 

Erudite Partner looks back at the more than one hundred essays she has written for Tom in a final piece: About That Arc of the Moral Universe; Sometimes It’s More Like a Meandering Sine Wave.

Where we spend our treasure ...

I found this interview long, meandering, and finally a bit woo-woo. But one observation by Israeli popular intellectual Yuval Harari to the NY Times' Ezra Klein [gift] stayed with me:

... For most of history, a lot of the budget of every kingdom, empire, republic, city state was invested or wasted on soldiers and fortresses and warships and things like that and nobody felt safe. 

One of the miracles of the international systems of recent decades — and this is not about writing pacifist poetry, it’s about government budgets: You look at the budgets, and you see that on average, in the early 21st century, about 6 to 7 percent of the government budget went to defense, to the military, compared with 10 percent on average that went to health care. 

It’s the first time in history that humanity spent more on health care than on defense. They felt more secure than in any previous time in history because there was this taboo on invading and conquering other countries by force. 

If we now break this taboo, it will force everybody to arm themselves to the teeth at the expense of health care, education, welfare and so forth — and nobody will feel safer as a result. 

Because countries and leaders constantly miscalculate. 

In the Vietnam War, the Americans thought they were stronger. It turned out they were wrong. 

Putin was convinced he would crush Ukraine in 48 hours. He was wrong. 

So this vision of basing the peace and order of the world on a hierarchy of strong and weak, with the weak always obeying the strong and thereby buying peace, it has been tried over thousands of years, and we know where it leads. 

It leads, on the one hand, to empire — and on the other hand, to endless wars.

I am not confident I know enough history to confirm Harari's observation about where humans have spent the product of our labor, but it seems plausible. The strong always want to seize it for their lethal pissing contests. 

And I am willing to opine that ordinary people will always, if given a chance, turn the product of their labor to that which enables human flourishing, even though we can be greedy and foolish. Worth thinking about.

¡QUBA! -- Come out, come out wherever you are!

I don't know if this wonderful film is going to get very many more showings in the US. It's been winning awards at international film festivals for a year. We saw ¡QUBA! last night at the Roxie in San Francisco. It's the story of brave Cubans who won the election campaign for gay marriage on the socialist Caribbean island.

Erudite Partner and I visited the island in 1988 and saw some early stirrings which became an eruption of LGBT joy. Cubans are just SO gay and the people found their way to move beyond homophobia. Check the website for future screenings.

A morning walk around Bernal Hill

Actually just the lower flanks of the neighborhood, but it's quite clear what people care about here.

A new crop of signs spring up for the season. 

These San Franciscans are not only vocal, but also verbal.

No good options: Trump lost his war

If only most of the world weren't going to suffer for his foolish hubris.

From Noah Berlatsky: 

You lost a war. Now what?

Trump ... launched a war of aggression against Iran without clear goals, without building domestic political support, without coordinating with allies, and without logistical preparation.

This was not a formula for success, and sure enough, when Iran seized and closed down the Strait of Hormuz instead of capitulating immediately, Trump and his team of dunderheaded and cowardly fascists hesitated briefly and then gave up. Ever since, the president has been searching for a way to back out of his enormously unpopular war in a way that doesn’t make him look like the cowardly dunderheaded fascist he is.

Unfortunately for Trump, though, the people who won the war (that is, Iran) have little to no incentive to let him set terms to make himself look good, or even adequate. Neither do other leaders in the region. As foreign policy scholar Elizabeth N. Saunders explains, Trump has two choices: “Humiliation or (increasingly futile) escalation.”

Escalation is a terrible option for Trump. The US has already shown that bombing alone cannot defeat the Iranian regime. That leaves a ground invasion as the only possible path to something like victory. 

But a YouGov poll at the end of March found that only 14 percent of US adults support sending ground troops into Iran. Among independents, nine percent support ground troops against 66 percent who oppose, and even among Republicans an invasion is a loser, with 30 percent support against 37 percent opposition.

These figures are dismal enough to suggest that significantly ramping up the war could actually cause Trump’s terrible overall approval to fall even further — especially with Republicans (73 percent of whom support the war), and especially if significant numbers of US service people are killed in combat.

So that leaves accepting humiliation.

Unfortunately for Trump, taking the L is also a bad option, because while analysts and experts recognize that he’s lost the war, most of the public hasn’t yet gotten the message. In a poll last week, 32 percent believed that the US is winning the war, while only 16 percent thought the US was losing; 37 percent believed the US would eventually win. That is a significant number of people who are going to be startled if Trump negotiates a “deal” and there are weeks of headlines about how the US lost.

... To sum up, if Trump escalates, people are going to hate him. If he surrenders, people are going to hate him. If he dithers, people are going to hate him. He has no good options, which is why he’s spinning in place, hoping someone, anyone, will rescue him. 

My emphasis. Before reading this, I had not realized that the majority in the U.S. don't yet know Trump had managed to launch a military campaign that our armed forces could not "win" at an acceptable price in lives -- Iranian, U.S. and others. If they weren't being chickenshit, the relevant generals and admirals undoubtedly told him this. Even Trump isn't dumb enough to get his advice from Pete Hegseth. I think ...

For some reason, major U.S. media keep trying to pretend that Iran is going to give Trump a way out. The New York Times has one of those silly headlines as I am writing: "U.S. Officials Say They Are Closing In on Arrangement to Reopen Strait of Hormuz." And then the more likely accurate subhead: "President Trump has not signed off on the emerging framework, according to U.S. officials. But it could set the table for extending the cease-fire and more substantive negotiations." That is, no genuine deal.

Media outlets have been passing along the same false story for weeks. I'll believe it when I see it. I guess we can deduce why so many of us don't yet know the mighty USofA lost Trump's war.

Could we do better?

 

They title this video "Justice." I post this Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee video today, NOT because I think it is either uplifting or effective. I wish it were; there's plenty of injustice afoot in our MAGA moment to be called out and resisted. Take a look -- it is only one minute. What do you think?

My comments, for what they are worth...

• I love Rachel Maddow. She's a truth teller and smart and informed. But if we are to be enlisted by the long struggle of Black Americans, couldn't they have found a Black narrator?

• The historic footage of beatings and tear gas from the 1960s Civil Rights wave of struggle for Black justice are both moving and striking. They always are. We're certainly living in a moment when similar atrocities are possible -- even likely. Thousands of ordinary citizens have been risking their lives to protest thuggish federal overreach; two demonstrators lost their lives in Minnesota. In this time, a few legislators have gotten a bit of the same treatment -- New Jersey Senator Andy Kim tear gassed just a day ago; California Senator Alex Padilla tackled at an LA courthouse -- both on camera. The outraged Black Congressmen here can't verbally convey an authenticity to match the message of intense struggle implied by the Civil Rights era footage.

• The clip of former President Obama is just weird: he looks exhausted and, dare I say it, simply old. I've seen current clips that aren't like that; couldn't they have found footage with a little more energy? 

I don't know whether professional Democratic Party communicators can do better. I wish they would. The Trump shit show certainly demonstrates to all of us that effective resistance has to lead with the people. As the old saying goes, perhaps if the people lead, our leaders will follow.

When not to follow the leader...

Here's an addendum to my previous post about Phillips P. O'Brien's The Strategists: in the introduction to that 2024 book, O'Brien muses about what Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine might reveal about the Russian's capacities as a war leader.

... As this book is being completed, the greatest example of this reality of personal grand-strategy-making is playing out before us.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an attempt to create a greater, more powerful Russia, shows once again that grand strategy can be hijacked by deeply flawed individuals over bureaucracies or structures. In no rational world could the Russian invasion of Ukraine be seen as something well thought out or in the Russian national interest. It was poorly conceived, based on a hopeless misreading of Ukrainian intentions and capabilities. The Russian Army was also constructed in such a way that it was far less than the sum of its parts.

While Putin might have had an ends-ways-means plan in his own mind, we can say now that he had poorly constructed means, which he employed in wholly unrealistic ways in a vain attempt to achieve completely unrealistic ends. Yet just before the invasion he was considered perhaps the most savvy and intelligent leader of a major power in the world.

Putin’s grand-strategic performance has in many ways combined the worst strategic traits of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In a rational world, with a sober evaluation of the Russian Army, one would have imagined a state’s decision-making bureaucracy would have tried to halt his invasion of Ukraine—as one would have imagined the Italian state might have restrained Mussolini from invading Greece, or German influences might have kept Hitler from attacking the Soviet Union with Britain still fighting.

Like the Axis leaders of the 1940s, Putin made war on the Ukraine of his imagination with a military greatly debilitated by corruption and incompetence of which he was either ignorant or unconcerned. Russia ran into something unanticipated in Ukraine. O'Brien's substack chronicles the consequences. It's my go-to source on the Ukraine war and seems honest, though not objective. He knows who he supports.

Of course, Putin is not the only contemporary leader of a powerful military and country who ignorantly substitutes his fantasies for any coherent plan or strategy. 

 

Does the character of leaders matter?

Phillips P. O'Brien's The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler--How War Made Them and How They Made War approaches the history of what Americans call World War II from an angle that I found counter-intuitive. Studying history, I've absorbed the lesson that most of what happened in human societies had less of its origins in the foibles of individuals than in wide economic and intellectual forces which shaped the possible. But, of course, people with power play out their times in the terrain which those forces make possible. This book is O'Brien's whack at how five strong leaders shaped their European war.

And it's a delicious volume, human stories smoothly recounted and convincingly deconstructed on the landscape observed by a student of military history and international relations. I had been reading O'Brien's indispensable substack on the Ukraine war and wanted to explore his scholarship. This makes an easy introduction.

For the purposes of this book, the strategic decision is the choice by the leader, with or without the opinions of advisers, of the strategic plan that the state should follow. The implementation is the translation of that plan into action. ... One of the great tests of grand-strategic leadership is learning what not to do as well as what to do.

O'Brien's subjects were two men born in the 1870s (Stalin, Churchill) and three in the 1880s (Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler). They were all, in some sense, survivors. 

Stalin clawed his way through prison under the Tsar, civil war, and Bolshevik revolution to make himself the unchallengable ruler of the Soviet Union by 1930. He was something of an unlikely successor to that more complex and brilliant revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin:

Stalin’s fundamental problem was that he was not competent enough to fulfill the purposes of his command. ... You can work very hard to create the reality you want, and with enough power you can often succeed. ... Playing up the idea of a vast conspiracy of traitors in their midst ... helped Stalin appeal to Lenin. He might not have been terribly competent, but he would take extreme measures to protect the Leninist line against all possible enemies—even those who were not enemies yet. Lenin approved of Stalin’s willingness to use the most brutal means against possible enemies, even when he was aware Stalin was making things up. ...

Churchill traveled around the British empire as a young privileged adventurer, then took up political party politics, and got himself appointed in 1914 as First Lord of the Admiralty in time to be held responsible for the British/Australian landing in Turkey which ended in a massacre. More to his credit, he also used his position to inspect the trench warfare in France and took enduring lessons:

Churchill now understood that modern weapons had made a mockery of bravery. Machines would determine the outcome of this war, and exposing oneself was more likely to lead to injury or death than anything else. ... If he had retained many boyish traits when the war started, the man that returned to London was more sober, cautious and methodical in his strategic outlook. He now had a holistic war strategy that stretched from the production of weapons to the deployment of forces in the field, all underlined by a coherent geopolitical vision.

O'Brien skims only lightly over the personal crisis of which Roosevelt was a survivor. During World War I he worked for the Wilson administration in the Department of the Navy and came away with an understanding of how controlling the oceans might be America's great strength. He was a political up-and-comer, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate on a losing 1920 ticket. And then he barely survived polio and emerged with paralyzed legs. Despite this seemingly insurmountable setback, he won the governorship of New York State in 1928 and then the presidency in 1932, in time to confront the Depression depths of bank failures and mass unemployment. But he also repudiated his non-militarist foreign policy positions.

During a time of financial hardship and growing military threats in both Europe and Asia, Roosevelt’s agenda strengthened the US Navy while providing desperately needed industrial jobs in shipyards up and down the country. It would be the start of Roosevelt’s military preparations for World War II, and would reveal the enduring legacy of his earlier experiences.

The three who became the leaders of the Allied powers had held responsible, although subordinate, positions during World War I; the two Axis dictators had been ordinary soldiers in the Great War. 

O'Brien manages no respect at all for Mussolini. Of these five men, I had known the least about the Italian fascist, so will quote at some length.

Making Italy great, and himself even greater, would be his foundational strategic mindset—even if he had as of yet no clear idea [in 1918] how to achieve it. ...

... Much of the time within the narrative of World War I, the Italian experience is overlooked in favour of the great battles of the Western and even Eastern Fronts. Yet by Western Front standards, the Italian soldier made an equal, and in some ways greater, sacrifice to that of his British and French comrades. By the end of the war, five million Italians had served in the armed forces, and 650,000 of them had died (or would soon perish because of war-received wounds) 

... trincerocrazia (rule by those who had served in the trenches) would form the core of a “new and better elite” which [Mussolini] claimed should rule Italy after the war. Of course, he was too modest to point out that a prominent newspaper editor who had served in the army would be ideally suited to lead this new trench-ocracy. Mussolini was coming closer and closer to arguing for an overthrow of the Italian state. The journey to a personal dictatorship was shortening. ...

Mussolini had a prescription for regaining Italy's imagined former military greatness.

He said the Germans had made a terrible mistake going on the defensive on the Western Front in 1917, as this was actually “more expensive” than going on the offensive. How anyone who had witnessed how machine guns and modern artillery could devastate attacking infantrymen could still think the defensive was more expensive boggles the mind. However, instilling the right values remained to Mussolini the key to preparing soldiers to advance. 

... In the balance between morale and equipment, willpower always triumphed over steel. Mussolini was “certain that thousands of cannons and machine guns are not enough for victory, if the spirit of the soldiers is lacking.”

Having posed the question of Italian "greatness," he made himself the answer for attaining it after that war.

If the Allies had unfairly thwarted Italy at Paris [in the Versailles Treaty], Mussolini would be the man to make Italy great again. He created his own political movement in the midst of this supposed humiliation ... In November 1921 the Fascist Party itself was founded with Mussolini as its leader, and in 1922 he seized power over all of Italy. It was the culmination of his wartime learning. 

Mussolini viewed the Italian state, not insensibly, as too weak and chaotic to save itself. He thus threatened a march on Rome more as an act of bluster than any widespread violent action. Indeed, he was prepared to call the whole thing off if the government reacted with force. Luckily for him they didn’t, and the indecisive King was only too happy to invite Mussolini to take power to end the chaos. Il Duce was made. 

World War I had taught Mussolini how to seize and manipulate power, and the value of acting like a great power even if you were not one. The only trouble with this strategic outlook would come if someone called Mussolini’s bluff.

The rest of O'Brien's account of Mussolini's role in World War II amounts to how Churchill and then Hitler did indeed call the Italian's bluff. Italian fighters executed their deposed dictator in 1945.

Despite having been born in Austria, Adolf Hitler volunteered as a lowly dispatch courier for the Germans in the Great War. And according to to O'Brien, Hitler got lucky, suffering a minor wound that kept him out of the worst of the German rout and killing fields, while leaving some indelible impressions. 

Hitler’s wound, in the thigh, was relatively light, but he was pulled off the line and sent to a military hospital near Berlin. Once there, due to the vagaries of military bureaucracy as much as anything, he would wait approximately six months before returning to the Western Front. Hitler was shocked by what he discovered in Germany. Instead of a people united in support for the war, he came face to face with widespread dissatisfaction, even defeatism, in both the army and the general public. 

Though his doubts about the true resilience of the German people remained, he did not want to admit that Germans might honestly doubt that this miserable war, which had already killed hundreds of thousands and brought misery and famine to their doorstep, was a mistake. No, the real culprit had to be the Jews. In his fact-free world, the Jews had used the war to embed their domination throughout the production process and to stoke animosity between Bavaria and Prussia, all the while skillfully avoiding military service themselves.

He did take one practical if over-blown lesson from his war experience:

Hitler had a much greater focus on the importance of military equipment in determining the outcome of modern battles. ... Hitler’s fascination with the largest, heaviest firepower reveals something common in dictators: a stress on strength, without a corresponding ability to understand rational trade-offs. ...

Hitler's wartime service convinced him that he had found his destiny:

... To answer the question of why [the 1918 German] disaster had occurred, Hitler fell back on the conspiracy theories he had been nursing for years and magnified them to enormous proportions. An internal, criminal enemy had poisoned the mind of the German people, leading them to betray the valiant troops at the front and transforming a possible war-winning situation into a humiliating defeat. 

This is the crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding Hitler as a war leader in World War II. It combined his grasp of how to win wars (heavy equipment based on German technology which carried the biggest punch possible) with how Germany lost this one (home front weakened and then betrayed by evil influences—particularly Jews). 

The combination of these ideas also seems to have been the motivation he needed to change professions. If Hitler went into the army in 1914 still thinking he would become a great artist or architect, by 1918 he had decided to immerse himself in politics. 

Having explored the life lessons these five men brought to World War II, O'Brien's actual recounting of the events of that war is more sparse. Pretty much all of them acted in accord with pre-existing character. 

Hitler, whose ego was already massive, started telling people that everything now depended on him and him alone, and that he needed to act in case he died early and Germany was deprived of his historic leadership. ...

Hitler's war became a parade of strategic failures for Germany. 

On the other hand --

After December 7, 1941, neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Winston Churchill had any doubts about the outcome of World War II. They were both convinced that Germany, Italy and Japan would all be crushed. ... Their earlier experiences with war had taught both Roosevelt and Churchill the vital importance of controlling the air-sea super-battlefield—and in that way they had a massive advantage over Adolf Hitler, with his more parochial war and life experiences.

The Russian ruler was the one who learned and adapted most over the course of the war. Because Stalin enjoyed the material support of Britain and the United States and led a country where war had evoked patriotic nationalism, he had time and opportunity to learn to be a successful war leader. 

Stalin’s meeting with [Roosevelt's envoy] Harry Hopkins was just one example of how he reacted to adversity not by doubling down on his own brilliance, but by trying to cultivate and benefit from the support of others. This was not because of any change of personality; it was because he had calculated, accurately, that the chances of his personal survival and that of the USSR (and then later of their further successes) would be better assured by taking help where he could get it, even if this showed him doing things that ideologically or personally he had not done before. ... Stalin had the capacity to learn. In 1941 and early 1942, Hitler and Stalin were quite similar as military commanders. ... 

When Stalin let his generals lead, with Allied materiel arriving, the immense size and valor of the Russian army came into play and turned the tide against Germany. Stalin learned.

O'Brien faults Roosevelt for not being willing to face his own mortality and for failing to prepare his vice president Harry Truman. From having been an anchor of stability, Roosevelt risked the final success of the alliance. 

Though one does not want to analyse Roosevelt’s psyche too much, part of him seemed to believe that, as long as he was president, he could not really die. ... in 1944, Roosevelt would make one of the most selfish choices in international relations history, something so profoundly self-centred that historians still shy away from addressing it. He not only decided to run for office while dying; he decided to change vice president to someone he did not like, would not confide in and would not prepare in any way to be president. ... 

... In refusing to provide the US government with an idea of concrete war aims and purposes, Roosevelt was making a mockery of the Clausewitzian notion of strategy being a connection between ends, ways and means. Roosevelt, more than any war leader, had a clear idea of ways and means—fighting the war with air-sea power and many machines over soldiers, etc.—but [these] seemed disconnected from the ends. The ends were what he wanted at any given moment. 

... By the end of the war, three of the five were dead: Hitler by suicide, Mussolini gunned down on a street corner and Roosevelt whose body failed after all his exertions. Even the two survivors, Churchill and Stalin, had aged greatly because of the stress of war leadership. Neither was the same forceful figure after the war that he had been when it started.

O'Brien concludes by arguing in favor of greater focus in historical accounts on the character and capacities of leaders. (Yes, now as then, that seems forever to mean all men.) I greatly enjoyed this book; it rounded my understanding of massive events which I've studied through other lenses. But I wonder -- is this truly the best way to greater understanding?

... grand strategy in World War II was far more personal than we might believe. ... then, now and in the future—we have to try to understand the minds of the individual leaders who make the crucial choices. Though we use phrases like “national interest” or “greater good,” these are abstract concepts in grand-strategy-making. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt had very personal notions of what national interest was; in some cases, notions that led to the lives of their fellow citizens being made far worse. All of them also believed that they were personally indispensable in terms of making their countries greater, and all imposed their own visions on their states during the course of the war. As such, they regularly acted like their personal views of the world were in the national interest of their countries, when they were decidedly not. If we want to understand strategy, we must also understand the strategist.

Perhaps. Certainly any contemporary American is forced to see what horrors a leader with no moral character at all can lead to.

Was he a delayed casualty of his war?

Over the years, I've written a quite often on Memorial Day (and also on Veterans Day) about various relatives who served in the US military. But seldom about this one, who I actually knew.

My first cousin (my father's sister's son) Kirby Atterbury has been gone over twenty years now. When he was still with us, I was cautious about introducing or explaining him to my friends. The result of any encounter could be unpredictably explosive.

He was born in 1921; yes, the generations are long and screwy in my family. At age 20, he left college to serve as a navigator in the US Merchant Marine on the arctic Murmansk Run delivering essential war supplies to our Russian allies in World War II.

An historical description: "This was no glamorous sea campaign, with full-sail, tall-masted men-of-war firing broadside after broadside into their enemy’s rigging. It was a cold, dirty, dangerous business in which seamen might be blown into a flaming sea of burning oil and left to die of wounds, burns, or hypothermia."

By the way, because the US used private shipping for this hazardous duty, Kirby was not technically a veteran. That seems an injustice. He served.

Kirby came through, married, settled in Marin County, fathered five daughters (several younger than me) and became known as a bon-vivant restaurateur opening a place in Tiburon he named "Caprice." This was also the name of one of the daughters; I don't know which came first.

He was a local fixture according to this nice obituary by longtime Chronicle journalist Peter Fimrite. 

Reading between the lines even of this public obit, it's possible to discern what happened with Kirby. He became well known for consuming the fine alcoholic beverages he specialized in; by the time that, as an adult, I knew him he was a high-functioning drunk. A rage would come out; he needed to offend. When drunk enough, this man would insist "Hitler had some good ideas." 

I'm just glad this angry man didn't live to become an enthusiast for Donald Trump; I'm sure he'd have enjoyed promoting MAGA. Even when justified, war is terrible for living things, for living people.

A feel good story:: Billie Jean KIng graduates from college

I'm going to outsource this one entirely to another Greatest Of All Time, Kareem Abdul Jabbar:

“Shut up and dribble!” The phrase is so ubiquitous these days, and it seems like I’ve heard it said so many times, it’s hard to believe it’s been around for just eight years. That’s right, it was in February 2018 when Fox News personality Laura Ingraham first said those words which, as a basketball player who has always spoken his mind, I found so repugnant. Ingraham prefaced her “witticism” (“witlessism”?) by saying, “It’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball.” This, after LeBron James had the nerve to criticize President Donald Trump as “someone who doesn’t understand the people,” and whose recent comments were “laughable and scary.” Hardly a controversial take: anyone who doesn’t get their information from the so-called news channel that employs Ingraham had no doubt reached the same conclusion long before LeBron put it into words. In point of fact, athletes are just as likely to have something worthwhile to say about politics and contemporary society as Fox News talking heads, or the ten men who could buy the world—or certain Presidents of the United States.

This comes to mind now because Billie Jean King, one of the greatest tennis players of all time as well as one of the sports world’s greatest and most outspoken humanitarians, earned her college diploma earlier this week, at the tender age of 82… 65 years after first enrolling at Los Angeles State College (now Cal State Los Angeles). She originally left in 1964 after three years to focus on her burgeoning tennis career and returned last year to complete her class work and get her bachelor’s degree in history as well as serve as commencement speaker.

It’s not every day someone older than I am graduates from college, and it’s even more rare when that person was winning professional sports championships in my same era. Over the course of her career, King won 12 major singles titles, including six at Wimbledon and a career Grand Slam. (She also won 16 majors in doubles and 11 in mixed doubles.) In 1972, she won the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open, and became the first woman to win what was previously known as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year Award, sharing that year’s honor with one of my greatest personal heroes, my UCLA coach John Wooden. (I won my second NBA MVP Award that year and scored a career best 34.8 points a game; I was probably wondering what you had to do to win a Sportsman of the Year Award!)

But for all Billie Jean King did on the tennis court, her impact may have been even greater off the court. She led the push for equal pay at Grand Slam tournaments, and her threat to boycott the 1973 US Open led to that tournament becoming the first major where men and women earned the same prize money. That same year, she became the founding president of a new women’s player’s union, the Women’s Tennis Association, or WTA. She also helped found the first women’s professional tennis tour (the Virginia Slims) and World Team Tennis, offering many female players their first true opportunity to earn a living wage. And on top of all that, she defeated the former men’s Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs in the legendary Battle of the Sexes tennis match. Granted, Riggs was 55 years old to King’s 29, but Riggs had just destroyed the great Margaret Court in a similar match by the score of 6-1, 6-2, and the very idea of equal prize money was being called into question as a result. King embarrassed the self-proclaimed male chauvinist Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in front of more than 30,000 people at the Houston Astrodome, while an estimated 90 million watched on TV worldwide.

Outside of the tennis world, she was one of a brave group of women who allowed Ms. magazine to report that they’d undergone abortions in 1972, before Roe v. Wade made the procedure legal nationwide. In 1981, she became the first female athlete to come out as a lesbian at a time when discrimination and ostracization were all too common for anyone even suspected of being gay. As it happened, she came out unwillingly, when a former partner sued her for palimony; but the fact that she revealed her orientation rather than submitting to an extortionate settlement before the lawsuit was filed showed that she would face public opprobrium rather than be bullied or shamed into silence.

She was great friends with her fellow tennis champion and social justice warrior Arthur Ashe, and guarded the secret of his AIDS diagnosis for years before he went public. After his death, she remained a staunch advocate for people with AIDS. In 1999, she won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, and their names will be always be linked in the tennis world: the grounds where the US Open tennis tournament is played is called the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, while its showcase court where all its biggest matches are played is in Arthur Ashe Stadium.

As an athlete who always wanted to do something greater for my community and the rest of the world, Billie Jean King is someone I’ve looked to as a model for athletic activism. I don’t know what the tennis equivalent of “shut up and dribble” is—“shut up and serve” perhaps?—but you can bet that if Billie Jean ever heard those words, she would have ignored them.

Congratulations, Billie Jean, you’ve made all Americans proud!

I don't know of many male athletes who have responded to great women athletes with this kind of generosity and respect. There may be guys I've missed ... But Kareem not only affirms King's greatness here, but demonstrates his own.

Friday cat blogging

Here's a cute one.

Mighty curious too.

 Perhaps a distant relative of Janeway? In any case, this Mission District cat was eager to inspect the passerby.

Donald Trump's pecuniary presidency

In what amounts to a lament about the apparent shallowness of the California gubernatorial campaign, former Obama functionary Ben Rhodes reminds that the constitutional authors predicted our current national predicament.  

Benjamin Franklin portrait

The closing argument at the Constitutional Convention came from Benjamin Franklin. His speech defended the virtue of compromise itself. In it, he implored the delegates to rally behind an imperfect document as the best possible result. 

He also offered a warning. The new government “can only end in Despotism, as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

That hits awfully close to home. Old Ben had our number. We find ourselves confronted by a choice between accepting the flamboyant thievery of Donald Trump's regime or showing the character to seize the reins of power to construck something closer to opportunity and justice for us all.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has wise words to describe our predicament.

... what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?

You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the Union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.

This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).

The pecuniary presidency is a new frontier in the history of the office, the culmination of all that was dangerous about the vast concentration of power in a singular executive — “in all governments in which there is sown the seed of the rule of one man, no checks, no bars can prevent its growing into a monarchy or a despotism if the empire is extensive,” warned “a Maryland farmer” in the spring of 1788, on the eve of ratification — and the particular project of a particular man whose lust for gold rivals that of Cortés. ...

The founding generation knew that greed for gold might overthrow their handiwork. The country has seen this again and again, as when the great wealth of Southern planters provided a justification for human slavery and the great wealth of industrial capitalists undergirded the immiseration of working people for profit. Again and again, the mass of people had fought back, insisting we can be better than this. 

Donald is just an ordinary crook, robbing us every which way. The challenge of the moment is whether the majority of us can find the civic virtue to reform a system which makes rule by such a con man possible?

Donald Trump's travel posters

I thought you might be interested in one of the things the Trump Department of Homeland Security is doing with the $170 billion of our taxes a moribund Republican Congress has forked over to Trump's immigration thugs.

 

DHS wants their prey -- undocumented migrants but really anyone who has not jumped all the hoops to achieve citizenship -- to know that, if they come in voluntarily, they can get shipped away and get $2600.

 

I don't know if they actually pay what they promise. Nor do I suspect these tourist scenes are much like where folks come from, but what do I know?

These are just ordinary people, doing their best

If you follow the suggestion I am about to make and read what some of the people I've just encountered have to say for themselves, you may not immediately warm to them. But you might find the experience instructive, as I did. The country is in such straits under the Trump regime, it's important to learn we can become unlikely allies and maybe friends.

Rich Logis left MAGA and he created a community with others to share their experiences of detaching from the Trump cult. He calls it Leaving MAGA. Here are a couple of testimonies from among dozens:

Michael Sirback: I was born and raised in a small, Republican town in Ohio; I still live there today. I had a pretty good childhood. When it came to politics, my parents didn’t really talk about it much as I was growing up in the 90s.

My family started discussing politics in 2015, when I was in my early 20s. My parents had voted for Barack Obama, but they were drawn to Donald Trump on cultural issues. They saw him as a guy who was going to end gay marriage and transgender rights.

... Still, I just wasn’t interested in politics. I didn’t even register to vote in 2016, although I was hoping Trump would win. After he became president, I started paying a bit more attention. 

... My feelings started to seriously change around the beginning of 2024, thanks in large part to the fact that I am dating Shey, a woman from the Philippines. My relationship with her opened my eyes to how much damage Trump is doing when it comes to immigrants. When Trump ran for president this time, his campaign was nothing but non-stop fear-mongering and hatred towards immigrants, with all its rhetoric about them being rapists, murderers, and the like. ...

... With Trump, only White Christian Nationalists will get treated with decency. That really worries me.

I now believe the Jan. 6 attack was completely unacceptable, a big attack on our democracy. I’m still hoping Trump is held accountable for it, but I have a hard time believing he will be.

Looking back, I see how much disinformation there was about the pandemic. I’ve evolved with regards to women’s rights, as well. I was always pro-life to the core, but now I believe that a woman should make her own decisions, that it’s not my place to tell a woman what to do with her body.

Watching Trump lie about hurricane disaster relief money going to undocumented immigrants, and lying about Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, just reinforced my feelings. I now know that he would much rather tell a lie than admit to being wrong about anything. ...

• • •

PattyAnn Giles: I was born and raised in Connellsville, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the 1960s; my parents were JFK Democrats: pro-life, culturally conservative. My dad was a big union guy; he worked for West Penn Power. My mom was an administrative secretary for a local hospital. ...

I started paying attention to politics when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980. I liked his message, and my dad and I got into it a couple of times over Reagan. I remember asking my dad, “Can you explain to me how you’re pro-life and you support the Democratic Party?” He said, “Well, the Democrats aren’t forcing women to abort. I’m personally against abortion and I would try to talk someone out of it, but I’m not going to be a single-issue voter.”

... A huge influence on my politics came through my becoming a born-again Pentecostal Christian when I was 17. I had a friend in that branch of the church, and she told me Catholics aren’t real Christians. ...

That evangelical message coordinated very well with Reaganism. It became a spiritual journey for me. It reinforced for me that I needed to support the Republican Party, because I saw the Democratic Party as amoral, too secular. I thought if the country were more in line with Christian values, we’d be better off.

I would go to Republican rallies and it would feel like an old-time tent revival. I felt a real fervor; it was very exciting.

I got married in 1988 and moved to northern Virginia. I became a Licensed Practical Nurse. I was still a conservative evangelical, and I got involved with some local Republican groups. I was a delegate in 1994 to the state GOP convention in Richmond as a supporter of Oliver North for US Senate. I was a member of the Republican Women’s Committee, and I worked on some local campaigns. 

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, I thought, “How could anybody support this guy? He’s slimy. He cheats on his wife.” I thought he was a sexual predator, and so wasn’t morally fit to serve as president.

... Around 2003, when I got divorced, I found myself moving away from the evangelical movement. I still had those basic values, but I was noticing things going on in the church that made me uncomfortable. I started hearing about sexual abuse. ...

The next important chapter in my political development came around 2012. My kids were coming of age, and I had friends whose kids were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and terrible injuries.  ...

I started to think, like a lot of leftists, that the wars were just to enrich the weapons industry, and that the Iraq invasion was just the result of a Bush family vendetta against Saddam Hussein. I soured on the hawkish, neocon wing of the Republican party.

You can see how this tracks logically. By this point I’m saying to myself, “Both parties suck. They’re elitist, they’re working for their millionaire donors, they’re giving us a load of crap.”

Then in 2015 Trump came along. He had an anti-establishment message, and I was mad at the establishment. He wasn’t my first pick, but after he won the Republican primary I got behind him. He struck me as kind of creepy, crass, with a lot of bluster. ...

... I got more and more excited about Trump. I liked that he wasn’t beholden to big donors. He was paying for his own campaign. I liked that he talked tough, that he said patriotic things. I liked his America First anti-war message, that we needed to get out of all these expensive wars. I liked that he was saying, “I’m a rich guy, I have access, I know who the crooks are in DC, I’m going to expose them, we’re going to get rid of them, we’re going to hold them accountable, we’re going to be more transparent.” ...

... Over the next months, I didn’t like that he was playing footsie with dictators and autocrats. I thought, “What is going on here? You act like you want to date them. You said you were going to be tough on this kind of stuff. Where’s this coming from?” So my balloon started to deflate a little.

More credible information emerged in 2017 and 2018 about Trump molesting women, how he talked creepily about his daughter, and walked in on beauty pageant contestants while they were getting dressed. I’m a victim of rape; it seriously traumatized me. And it traumatizes me to hear how powerful men get away with this kind of stuff. 

I was still within the tolerable spectrum in terms of my support for Trump and MAGA, but I was starting to get a bad taste in my mouth. 

... Trump’s whole “stop the steal” campaign, his nonsense about the election being stolen because of widespread voter fraud, the January 6 coup attempt, and subsequent reports about how there was a coordinated plan to overturn the election, were the final nail in the coffin for me. I officially walked away from MAGA in 2021.

Then I asked myself, “In what other ways have I been lied to?” I started digging deeper, and I started to learn a lot. ...

The site provides dozens more of these stories of MAGAs who changed their minds. They are us, coming from different lives.