Elon Musk has a problem

One of Musk's many sons (he's a determined, heedless procreator) turned out to be not a boy but a transgirl -- and he can't seem to face the facts. So his idea of trying to help MAGA win Senate and Congressional races this year is to charge Dem candidates with being pro-trans. 

Most of those Dems are only notional, unenthusiastic, supporters of gender equity; it's just noise to them. So when Musk beats them up, few tell the bully to F-off and most weave and dodge. (Amy Acton who is running to be Ohio's governor seems an actual trans-phobe; most of the rest of them are just politicians who are too ready to adjust to whatever they think constituents might like.)

Thing is, as Erin in the Morning reports, this is not really a winning pitch that Musk is buying with his millions. 

This week’s ad spend is largely driven by [Musk's] America PAC, which has dropped $100 million on anti-transgender ads targeting Democrats. “The PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking because that’s been a much less prominent theme in GOP Senate ads so far this election cycle, per AdImpact, which tracks political advertising,” Axios’s Mike Zapler reports. “On its face, the strategy is at odds with what voters say they want candidates to talk about. Concerns about the economy dominate; trans and LGBT issues barely register.”

Zapler’s point is correct. Anti-trans ads may scare Democratic candidates, but among the general public, polls consistently show that voters rank transgender issues among the lowest-priority issues they care about and vote on, with less than 1% of respondents naming “wokeness/transgender issues” as a top issue. Regardless of the public’s specific views on topics such as transgender people’s access to bathrooms or gender-affirming care for transgender youth, voters decide their ballots far more on issues such as housing affordability, gas prices, and jobs. 

Democrats who decide to capitulate on transgender issues in response to these ads, as some have, risk alienating their progressive base while gaining nothing from Republicans, who will simply move on to hitting them on another trans-related issue.

Nevertheless, anti-transgender advertisements will saturate the airwaves for the next two months as the election draws near. For transgender people, that means constant exposure to hateful messaging, running alongside the evening news and football and appearing on the internet without warning. These ads do incredible damage to unsuspecting viewers. They paint transgender people as predatory and disgusting to a national audience in a cheap attempt to win votes, and every viewing raises the temperature of the hate and abuse directed at a community that is already a target. 

Meanwhile, Democrats face a decision point of their own: capitulate and lend these ads credibility, or defend the transgender constituents being used as bait. So far, in some of the states Musk is targeting, they have chosen the former, and the ads have not stopped.

Musk is a sick puppy -- a damaged man with lots of money acting out his underlying fear that spewing his semen might not guarantee his immortality. You too will die in God's time, Elon; get over yourself. Life is better over here in the real world.

Nightmare or daydream for this moment?

Somehow I don't think this is how humanity's encounter with the smart machines we are building will turn out, but Politico's Matt Wuerker offers a nice fantasy.

 

Guess they found their preferred alignment.

LGBT+ Pride, Mongolian style

 

Our newly met friends in Ulaanbaatar sent along this short video from their recent Pride festival. There's a freshness and pure joy to their struggle -- too often delight has been leached out of our community here. But they know -- gay is good; they are good. Enjoy.

An insight into the pungent politics of endangering humanity

We live involuntarily in the same world with the ostentatiously vocal tech bros; it's not hard to think they often come off as more like shallow teenage boys than humanly useful geniuses. But amid the real world noise about Artificial Intelligence, it's worth teasing out exactly what some of them are doing in our ordinary politics.

The always annoying but frequently insightful Matt Yglesias reports on some grubby real world machinations in the AI business. Many workers and some tech barons are warning there should be more regulation -- but as always, the devil is in the details.

... [the company] OpenAI’s official position in its communications to its employees is that OpenAI is not behind the anti-regulation super PAC Leading the Future.

But nobody working professionally in American politics believes this.

Leading the Future is funded in large part by OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman and his wife. It was conceptualized, by all accounts, by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer... Unfortunately, his expertise in helping tech companies win regulatory fights in blue states — an endeavor I normally support — is in this particular case gravely endangering humanity.

Leading the Future has dumped huge amounts of money into primaries to try to defeat candidates who advocate for A.I. safety regulation. More than that, though, it’s trying to chill the whole topic. It exists not so much to spend money in the midterms as to convey to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer something like “nice anti-Trump thermostatic backlash you’ve got there … would be a shame if hundreds of millions of dollars came off the sidelines to be used against all your frontliners because party leaders embraced A.I. safety.”

So, again, if you work at OpenAI and believe that collective action is needed to address this problem, you have to understand that your company’s executives are massive stumbling blocks. 

Putting out fake statements distancing the company from Leading the Future is worse than doing nothing. You and your colleagues need to work together to demand that the company cease and desist from this effort to chill federal regulation. If the company won’t do it, you need to walk.

By contrast, while I would never in a million years say that [the AI company]Anthropic’s conduct as a company is beyond reproach or above suspicion — that’s the whole reason we need actual regulation here and not just to root for the “good guys” to win the race — their political conduct is consistent with the view that collective action is desirable.

Yglesias makes some prescriptions for reining in the many dangers that may be arising from the AI our tech barons are racing to build. I don't know if he is really onto something. But I do know that understanding the entanglement of the tech moguls with very conventional US political incentives has to be a big part of curbing the worst potentials of AI.

One more win for English speakers?

I have no qualifications whatsoever for chiming in on the current AI freak out. The tech boys seem on the verge of setting something loose that might bring tremendous benefits -- or extinguish us all. And they can't say which eventuality is most likely. 

Hell of a civilization we've built here when we have to ask whether human inventions will kill us all for fun and profit! (Though, it's not the first time -- once there was Hiroshima...) But here we are. And we're all subjects in their science experiment.

Anita Chabria writes an opinion column for the LA Times. I often can't believe she keeps her job. Maybe those writers have a good union? Her common sense seems to me the sort of reflection on this moment that we need. She asks what any sensible woman might ask:

... companies are hoping that these poorly understood but powerful machines can take over creating newer, even less understood but even more powerful AI systems — leaving humans largely in the dark about what they are creating and even what these beasts can and want to do.

The idea is that, because AI systems even right now are so fast and powerful, they can do the job of creating new versions of themselves at a pace and scale humans simply can’t.

Why, you ask, would this speed-without-understanding be a good thing? Isn’t it a bit like driving a race car while blindfolded?

Yes, yes it is.

But for-profit companies like making profit, and to do that, they want the most powerful product to sell.

Many in the industry are framing this recklessness as a necessity to prevent another country, China in particular, from creating a superintelligent AI system first. The Trump administration has so far grasped on to this greedy bit of misdirection like, well, oligarchs clinging to money.

Those who would prefer not to destroy humanity have urged international cooperation in the form of a slowdown while we figure out how to proceed safely.

We have no reason to believe China would not go along with this — in fact, China has more national-level AI regulation than the U.S. And humans have successfully controlled other technologies with catastrophic power, such as biological and nuclear weapons, through cooperation.

Does it matter which country creates the AI that kills humanity? The logic here seems to be that if anyone is going to cause a mass extinction event, it had better be an English-speaking AI, because it would be a huge loss to America if the planet were destroyed by one speaking a foreign language. ...

May Day 2026

Here in the Bay Area belly of the beast, the menace created by the tech bosses is not a new revelation. The tech workers are one of humanity's lines of defense. I doubt many think that is what they volunteered for. But here we all are.

Who has got "the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it"?

Lots of people whose opinions I value find Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo a pompous ass. Sometimes I agree. But, because I also seem hard wired to try to understand the present in the context of what I know about the past, I sometimes also find his thoughts worth pondering. He turns a historical lens on the current mainstream Democratic Party, an entity that seems way out of touch with many of its voters.

I think he is onto something:

... while Chuck Schumer and the consultants may suck, it’s probably not really about them. It’s about something more fundamental, a crisis of liberal democracy which we have to try to solve even though we only dimly understand it. Yes of course there are theories and one or the other of them are probably partly right. But this isn’t about criticizing theorists. It’s about living in history, when the things really driving change are seldom that clear to those living amidst the change.

The danger here is that we collectively fall into a kind of self-disgust which I see all the time. Our leaders suck. We suck. We’re weak and hapless. The political faction or movement I belong to sucks. 

These all flow rather naturally from most of the mainstream media narratives about whatever challenges Democrats are facing at a given moment. And this is of course enervating. Or it can be. And it can promote conflict which is not necessarily productive conflict.

And yet just because it’s happening in [much of Europe] and in countless other similarly situated countries doesn’t mean we can say, “Welp, it’s bigger than us. That’s just how it is. Nothing we can do about it.” 

Obviously the challenge is still the same for any of us who believe in liberal democracy, in freedom and general human flourishing. In fact the challenge is probably greater because it’s not just some incidental thing that’s going to be solved in time for the next election — better consultants, no politicians over 65, politicians who will fight. It’s big and goes beyond any single person’s mistakes or individual excellence. 

And this is what I mean by a dual approach, the necessity of not falling into a kind of cheap and demoralizing self-critique while also recognizing that it is very much our responsibility to have the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it. 

In a way it requires us to understand our situation both from outside of history, looking at it from the long view, and also very much inside it, in the moment, with every action and option on the table, with every decision mattering because we don’t know how the future turns out.

We know we can still be agents in our own lives. We're in a moment in which many women especially are being reminded that we are need not be bound by what others think we are capable of. That's what Gloria Steinem came to mean to millions over a long political life. That's what Dolly Parton meant -- to some of the same millions as well as others looking to different cultural reference points. 

People make fun of the gray haired biddies of the "Resistance," but we're right to notice and try to arrest the democratic backsliding which is the MAGA/Trump regime. We've witnessed both a lot of BS and a lot of progress toward freedoms over our lives. We don't want to go back. 

In November, we'll vote and get out the vote. We'll accompany targets of Trump's anti-immigrant racial pogrom to court. We'll rally if we must. This is our country and the world those who come after will inherit. We won't give up on it.  

We can begin to understand what it might require to "get over it"

This is just so much to the point, I find I can't retreat into needed rest without amplifying it. Just as in January, Minnesota is showing the way in envisioning how a healthy community recovers from MAGA violence.

Journalist Lisa Needham writes: 

Justice for ICE’s victims requires truth and reconciliation ... Moving on as if it didn’t happen is not an option.

... For communities crushed by President Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, there isn’t a world where people simply get over it. ... It’s a difficult and delicate thing to ask people to remember the hurt they suffered, even more so when the federal government that inflicted it remains in power. Speaking out against the administration has proven to be a dangerous, even deadly, affair, so the Truth Council (which was created by Gov. Walz after the occupation ended) partnered with The Advocates for Human Rights to create a process for collecting the stories of survivors and witnesses.

... Everyone knows some of these stories. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are indelible, as is the memory of five-year-old Liam Ramos’s abduction. But thousands of Minnesotans suffered at the hands of ICE, in ways ranging from abject cruelty to outright violence. The Truth Council is charged with documenting “the harms and abuses” experienced by Minnesotans, and the first public meeting last week was full of these brief stories, tiny sharp remembrances of pain and humiliation: 

    •    “An elder who needed new dentures was too scared to leave her home to access dental care. So she ate baba or kanji with little protein for months on end because she couldn’t chew her food without new dentures.” 

    •    “The mother taken at her child’s bus stop has an anaphylactic peanut allergy and ICE denied her food for six days because the federal government could not be bothered to provide a meal free of the allergen.” 

    •    “A convoy of SUVs filled with agents sped through an intersection where our kids were climbing on their buses to go home, raced towards the school and halted in front of the main entrance” 

    •    “She taught her mother how to crawl up into the attic space and hide in case federal agents came to their door for questioning.”

The Council is also tasked with making findings about how to “prevent the recurrence of unlawful or harmful conduct by federal agents.” Sarah Lopez, the policy director of Unidos Minnesota, relayed a story — which actually did receive media coverage at the time — that stands out as emblematic of the petty, relentless viciousness of ICE agents: 

“In Willmar, four agents sat down at lunch at El Tapatio,” she said. “And that evening, after the family closed early, agents followed them out and detained the owners of the restaurant and the dishwasher.” 

Imagine being one of those agents. Imagine going to a small family restaurant and being fed and cared for, only to turn around and arrest those same people later that day. Imagine how warped and broken you have to be to behave that way. 

... Along with the accounts of victims, survivors, and witnesses, it’s also important to remember the ICE agents at the center of stories like this. The Truth Council doesn’t exist only to amplify those voices, but also to document the behavior of the federal agents who terrorized the state.

Supporting Minnesotans in San Francisco, March 2026

But for every story of humiliation and harm at the hands of ICE goons, there were stories about Minnesotans coming together, demonstrating solidarity and resilience and resistance. And that’s part of the charge of the Truth Council as well, to “document how Minnesotans came together, supported one another, and persevered.”

What went down in Minnesota, what is going down in various forms all over the country, must be remembered, acknowledged, documented. Once again, Minnesota is showing the way to authentic healing which doesn't deny what has and is happening, but serves as a foundation to the new community we must build after MAGA. 

An unanticipated rupture ...

If anyone has wondered where I disappeared to, the picture tells the story:

Last Friday, at the end of a six mile walk in Golden Gate Park, I crashed onto my side on an asphalt road, broke my hip and cracked the head of the long leg bone, and embarked on a new exploration of both my pain tolerance and involuntary participant research into the US health care industry. After four days in a Kaiser hospital for surgery and immediate stabilization, I'm now in a rehab facility learning how to walk safely while healing.

All this is tiring. I'm giving myself what will probably be a ten day break from posting here. We, the American majority of the sane and the kind, have got this foul national situation in hand and we aren't going to let the bad guys keep us down ...

Where do we go from here?

Okay -- I can't make a case that this woman is going to win her campaign. (Maybe someone from Florida can show me I'm too pessimistic?) But that the Democratic voters of the Sunshine State chose her for their US Senate nominee is delicious and probably instructive.

 

The lady in pink wearing tennis shoes lets it all hang out. If winning is such an uphill slog, why not just tell the voters what you really think?

 

Obama political operative Dan Pfeiffer thinks he knows what he is seeing:

Despite being outspent by more than 10 to 1, Nixon beat [Lt. Colonel Alex] Vindman to become the Democratic nominee to take on Senator Ashley Moody.

And Nixon didn’t just beat him; she romped, winning by more than 11 points. ...

...  She is a dynamic candidate who ran on the exact message that has been resonating in Democratic primaries this cycle — a progressive, populist approach focused on lowering prices for working families.

...  Like Vindman, she made fighting a centerpiece of her identity — but it wasn’t just fighting Trump. Nixon was fighting for working people.

Embedded in Nixon’s success is a model for progressive populists. Candidates like [Wisconsin's Francesca] Hong ran up huge margins among younger, college-educated, and mostly white liberals, but struggled mightily with Black voters, who have historically resisted more liberal candidates in Democratic primaries.

Nixon did not. Like Hong, Nixon did very well in areas with college campuses and younger, more progressive voters. But [in the Florida state senate] she represents Jacksonville, in Duval County, and won that county — which has a large population of Black voters — by roughly 60 points. She also did well in the I-4 corridor and in Miami-Dade County, which also have significant numbers of Black voters.

There was a skinny Black guy with a funny name whose success Pfeiffer understood. That guy won, in part, by riding a popular wave of desire to move on beyond George W, Bush and also Democratic conventions. Might we, in Nixon, be seeing foreshadowing of the next wave, the one that comes after the Orange Man slinks from the scene?

Angie Nixon campaign: 

 

Do we choose to survive?

Erudite Partner is at it again. The syndication platform Tom Dispatch has moved to the Intercept and today publishes her latest: It’s Time to Rein in Lethal AI Drones. 

The dystopian future became the dystopian present last month when state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents went rogue and conducted a cyberattack of their own volition. Two experimental OpenAI agents escaped their supposedly sealed digital “sandbox” and hacked another AI-related company, Hugging Face.

... imagine lethal weapon-bearing AI agents escaping not an experimental sandbox, but the few constraints on their actions placed by the armies using them. Actually, no imagination is required. It’s happening already in Russia’s war against Ukraine.  ...

War -- death by independent machines raining from the sky -- is here and here to stay.

When the US Army releases publicity pictures like this one, they are playing to an impulse toward heroism which may have once served our species well, but which today threatens human survival. The Erudite Partner reminds us that international humanitarian law is in a race to keep up with lethal technology. Do we choose to survive?

Read Rebecca Gordon's latest here.  

Greg Abbott's theater of bigotry

Things I didn't have a mental picture of, but am glad to have learned -- from basketball great and good man Kareem Abdul Jabbar: 

Wudu is the Muslim ritual of washing before prayer, which we do five times daily, at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and night. We begin by saying “Bismillah,” which means “In the name of God,” then wash our hands to the wrist three times, rinse the mouth and nose, wash the face, wash our arms to the elbow, wipe the head and ears with our wet hands, and finally wash our feet to the ankles. It takes just a couple of minutes but is an essential and sacred part of our religious practice.

While wudu can be done in a restroom sink, it’s hardly ideal, and some public spaces, such as universities and hospitals that serve diverse populations, provide dedicated stations as an accommodation to Muslims. That is what two airports in Texas (Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth) have done, to little fanfare or controversy until Governor Greg Abbott decided to make it his personal crusade to end this small act of courtesy. Earlier this month, Abbott sent a letter to Dallas-Fort Worth, which was planning a second station, threatening to cut off grants to the airport if it went ahead with the project, calling such facilities “illegal” and a form of “discrimination.”

Kareem's short paragraphs explain what I used to see around the corner from my mother-in-law's apartment in Manhattan -- lines of cabs parked every which way while their drivers ran briefly into the Islamic Center on the corner ...

Texas should be as bigoted as possible if you are the Republican governor. So Abbott, running for reelection, grandstands against his Muslim citizens. He won't admit that this is just ugly hate theater.  

Abbott ... he should know better. As a paraplegic who has been confined to a wheelchair since 1984, he needs special accommodations on a daily basis. When he goes to Houston or Dallas-Fort Worth airports, he surely uses the ramps designed to make life easier for disabled people like him. Why, then, is he so eager to make life harder for other people who need accommodation, in this case Muslims?

Betting against Canada is dumb and dumber

A Canadian friend posted this warning yesterday. It seems about right to me. 

Growing up on the US-Canada border, our big neighbor to the north was simply an ordinary part of my youth. Cross-border Canadian TV stations were where I could watch the National Hockey League. The parkway along the Canadian side of the Niagara River was where I ventured for morning long flat runs; the river itself was where I sailed my Sailfish to a foreign shore. None of this seemed extraordinary.

Canada was another country, a nearby country, a different country, a country I liked and respected.

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has Donald Trump's number and calls him out:

“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”

US demands on Canada are mere bullying, rooted in a Trump fantasy of imperial annexaton.

Per historian Philips P. O'Brien: 

Canada is faced with a USA that is now fundamentally dishonest and rapacious. Moreover, it is faced with a US government that denies its ultimate right to exist and speaks openly (and regularly) about how Canada should be annexed into the USA.  

I bet on the moose; integrity and grit count and we've lost ours along with our brains. The Canadians, not so much.

Cheese heads for the win

Still a little brain fogged from the long trip back from Mongolia. But I encourage readers to click on this short introduction to Senator Robert La Follette, Wisconsin's fighting champion of the people. (By way of Heather Cox Richardson.)

They don't make public servants like this very often. He has great hair, doesn't he?

The narrator is Ben Wikler, the guy who seeded serious Democratic political organizing in the Cheese Head state over the last decade. His project may well result in a Democratic sweep of state offices this November. I've bought Wikler's book, This Is The Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy, and will comment further when I get to it.

People get ready ...

In the auditorium of San Francisco's Mission High School, a leftish segment of the Bay Area activist population was in the house this morning -- immigrant workers, organized teachers and nurses, the gray haired stalwarts of a hundred campaigns. Led by Bay Resistance, plans were laid out for the fall season. 

Here staffer Jane Martin lays out what we already know we have to do; I'll interpret her points in my own words.

• Work to win the election of anti-fascist Democrats in contested districts wherever located

• Make sure you are connected to whichever organization is available to do the work in your neighborhood and on your issues

• Join a pod; get into regular supportive contact with like-minded people

• More specific to the Bay: remind our tech oligarchs that the people won't give them a free ride on the road to ruinous rule!

Such meetings are how winning campaigns build!

• • •

And above all, resistance succeeds when there is room for everyone and we all find our own lanes. I'll give the last word here to one of my favorites in the broad national resistance movement, elder operative Simon Rosenberg. He's the last believing FDR Democrat and we could only wish there were more of him, even if some of us find a home elsewhere: 

There is nothing Trump and MAGA wants more than for us to be fighting with each other and not with him. We have one job now - elect as many of these [Democratic] candidates running for the House and Senate as we can. It’s where our focus must be. It’s a year of opportunity for us across the country. We must seize it, together. 

It's crunch time! 

Friday kitten blogging

 

At one of the farms we visited in Mongolia, an inquisitive kitten checked us all out.

She ran around the place, approaching every person and climbing everywhere, including in the rafters of a sort of outdoor eating structure and atop the various gers (yurts) where the people shelter.

 

Exhausted from all this kitten excitement, she plopped -- on my sleeping bag -- for a full night's sleep. I loved the fearless little thing ...

 

More on our Mongolia trip here.  

Mongolia on a happy trajectory

I'm back to San Francisco, refreshed mentally though not physically, after nearly two weeks as a tourist in Mongolia with a delightful small group of women. (Women Who Explore if you are curious; great company.)

I'm not going to pretend I really know anything deep about this fascinating country after this short visit, but here are a few photos. This a view of the capital and only large city, Ulaanbaatar (known in English as UB). A thriving core houses international commerce and the seat of government, then gives way to crowded haphazard neighborhoods and a sprinkling of the national Mongolian round tent housing -- gers.

More than half the national population of 3.5 million lives in the city. Younger people flock to the modern metropolis; older people continue the rural herding life which is what we were introduced to. Out of 244 countries in the world, Mongolia's population density ranks 240th. There's a lot of beautiful land and not that many people. Though green and pleasantly warm in the late summer, Mongolia sees temperatures of -20°F in winter and UB averages 29°F for the full year. 

The countryside is all about sheep, yaks, goats and horses whose human herders live in gers which they move for better pastures several times a year. One day we were shown how they disassemble a ger and then erect it again. Since it happened to be the one we were staying in, we laughed happily as we were shown how fast they could get it up again as rain began to come down on our beds!

Extended families raise and milk their herds while their young people find enough internet signal to study for college admission exams!

 

Inside a welcoming ger in Gobi province, we spoke in the evening about a Chinese-owned nearby fenced-off development, ostensibly for a gold mine operation. Like so many rural people everywhere, retired bookkeeper Tsingit was suspicious of the facility which have been set up despite herder protests.

About fifty percent of Mongolians are Buddhists and both city and countryside are dotted with monasteries and temples.

  

This is a proud country conscious of ancient greatness. A monument at Kharkorin displays the extent of three historic Mongolian empires.

 

The greatest of these empires was that of Genghis Khan in the late 12th century -- the largest contiguous land empire in world history reaching across Asia into modern Poland and east to modern Korea. 

Living today in our declining US empire, it was instructive to encounter this smart, proud, welcoming people whose history has taught them that empire comes and goes.

And Mongolians do welcome the world; we returned to UB in time to see signs for the COP17 UN conference on climate change in the central plaza.

Some of us took one more day after the tour to visit UB's LGBT Centre; yes, we are everywhere! 

With Director Enkhmaa Enkhbold

Mongolia feels like a place rising to renewed happiness and prosperity. They seem eager and ready for the challenges of the 21st century. 

Blog interrupted

We're off to see the world until late August. This isn't politics; it's curiosity. The destination is Mongolia, visiting sheep herders and yurts and the vast steppe. Hope to come back invigorated and somewhat rested and ready for a vigorous fall season.

When the shouting ends, it will be time to focus

Tonight -- the first Tuesday in August -- we'll find out who won the Michigan Democratic Party primary for the chance to contest an open US Senate seat in November. Polls and tea leaves tell us it will be a win for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed over Rep. Haley Stevens. If it comes out as expected, the good Doc with the fighting agenda will have knocked off the perfectly adequate candidate of the professional Democratic class. There will be rejoicing in one camp and hair pulling in the other. 

And then, if Michiganders can lean into what's good for them and us all, they'll get back to work promoting whichever candidate comes out on top as their state's contribution to taking their country back from the GOP MAGAs. 

Journalist Paul Waldman offers some smart and thoughtful commentary on this year's intra-party kerfuffles.

... While centrists often complain that Democrats are trapped in their self-reinforcing bubbles and disconnected from reg’lar, salt-of-the-earth Americans, nearly all the centrists that I’m aware of are just as disconnected, if not more so.

They live in Washington or other major cities, they’re immersed in politics, and they suffer from the Pundit Brain ailment that makes its victims believe ordinary voters have coherent ideological beliefs and respond to subtle changes in the policy-based appeals candidates make. There’s something else going on, too: Their view of the political world is dominated by their contempt for the far left, which convinces them that what we used to call hippie-punching is the cleverest of political strategies.

This is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in many normie Democrats I know who live in very liberal places. They can’t stand Trump, of course, but the people who really drive them up a wall are the ones they encounter all the time where they live: the lefties. ...

... the reason is familiarity. If you’re a mainstream Democrat who lives in San Francisco or New York, you almost never encounter MAGA-hatted, immigrant-hating, misogynistic far-right troglodytes in person. You see them online, you know they’re there, but you don’t have to pay more than a moment’s attention to them if you don’t want to. On the other hand, far-lefties are everywhere in your actual life, and everything you find annoying about them is right in your face, all the time. ...

Yup. I recognize that condition, being a long time San Franciscan. That's not the world of most Michiganders -- well maybe in Ann Arbor. It not easy for those of us who live, by choice, in blue state bubbles to imagine what these things look like beyond our context, just as other Americans don't get how we live. 

I hope lots of blue staters really do what I've done in the past and many plan to do this year: take some time to go talk election with people in more contested places. The candidates have to meet the people where they are, and volunteers can to. 

How others see us: US democracy in decline

The British opinionater Timothy Garton Ash is not one to hold back his thoughts. He seems to have been on a visit to our shores. A long time observer of the condition of democracy in Europe, he has summed up where he thinks the US stands under the rule of the Orange Toddler. We don't look very promising... but just maybe ...

The respected Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University argues that in 2025 the US saw one of the most rapid declines in liberal democracy on record. “Democracy in the USA,” says its Democracy Report 2026, “is now at its worst in 60 years.” As the imperial republic marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the danger seen at the very beginning of its constitutional order by anti-federalists such as Patrick Henry – that of an overmighty president abusing his executive power in an attempt to become a new king – has come closer than ever before.

V-Dem analysts note that in 2025 Trump issued no fewer than 225 executive orders whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed just 49 laws, most of them on minor issues such as “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the rules for postponing certain deadlines by reason of disasters”. ...

... As I saw in Hungary this spring, if the popular revulsion towards an incumbent is sufficiently widespread, and channelled into turning out to vote, it sweeps away all the obstacles that the would-be autocrat puts in place – and those obstacles were, taking all in all, larger in the Hungarian case than they are here. The election may not be fair; it may not even be entirely free; but the result is still irrefutably plain for all to see....

... As a European in the US, one keeps looking around and asking: “Where’s the leader of the opposition?” Where, to recall the Hungarian example, is an opposition figure like Péter Magyar, leading a disciplined, effective nationwide campaign, answering the widespread feeling that it’s time for a change with “and this is the change you need”?

Friends who study these things here at Stanford University tell me I’m looking for something that usually doesn’t exist at this stage. ... 

What’s at stake here is not the future of the Democrats; it’s the future of democracy. A normal midterm change in control of the House is the absolute minimum needed to start checking, if not actually reversing, the unprecedented erosion of liberal democracy under Trump. That check will come partly through Congress’s constitutional powers to control government funding, to investigate and to impeach. 

If there’s an electoral landslide, however, it will come even more through the psychological shift, as Trump begins to look like his own worst nightmare – being a “loser”. For that very reason, the man who would be king will try first to prevent, then to circumvent and delegitimate a Democrat-controlled House with all the means at his disposal. Nonetheless, this would be the end of the beginning. ...

We don't need a pretentious Brit to diagnose this. But perhaps it should be bracing to know this is how we look to a friendly observer of democracies.

Fundamentally derivative, based in a rotten nostalgia

Like all human endeavors, the American experience is complicated; MAGA responds to complexity with fear and fury. New York Times opinion-monger Jamelle Bouie derives much of his understanding of Trumpian follies from looking back at what we come through as a people and nation. [Gift link.] 

... You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshiped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.

The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.

The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. 

Its racist nativism is a throwback to both the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — which it recently defended in its tendentious critique of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which effectively closed the country to African, Asian and Southern and Eastern European immigrants for more than 40 years.

 Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

Of course this president, and this administration, would want to emulate the anti-communist hysterias of the 1910s and the 1950s. 

 ... Both Trump and his movement are, as you might surmise from the slogan “Make America Great Again,” fundamentally derivative. His vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past. ...

We're faced with a president and a mob that don't want to learn, who experience contradictory realities as assault on their very being. Tough luck, MAGA. Reality doesn't work the simple way you wish it did.

Friday cat blogging -- neighborhood watch

Nope -- he's not one of ours. Though we have a similar looking one, perhaps even larger. This one keeps guard on a nearby street and didn't bother to move when a big stranger pointed a camera at him.

Reality bites

What I appreciate about Paul Krugman is that the Nobel Prize winner in economics is willing to go out ahead of the consensus of the wise and important. Today's contribution is a humdinger:

Reality is a Communist Plot: Of MAGA and the totalitarian mindset 

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election. ...

Such is the wisdom of Trump, MAGA, and dimwits like Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley. If you want to control people, keep 'em stupid and uninformed as all good authoritarians have attempted to do.

... What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

... I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

... Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.  ... If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

... [Republican pols] behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping. ...

Read it all.  

What I would add that Krugman does not: he instinctively believes that knowing the truth of difficult things -- like why masses of New Yorkers were dying of an unknown illness in spring of 2020 -- requires intellectual work. He also believes that there are people who are equipped by training to figure mysteries out. And that those people work for all of us.

MAGA is for people who want or maybe need answers for life's mysteries without work. For many, perhaps there is no space in their lives for the intellectual work of discerning what's true. But for some, there's a comfortable indolence which outsources judgment to glitzy influencers and charlatans like the Orange Toddler.

By the way, this isn't about educational attainment. Lots of people without fancy degrees can see what is in front of their faces. They looked at things.

Historically, the mass cure for this debilitated condition occurs when unanticipated realities intrude on daily life -- kind of like when you bark your shins on a low end table you didn't notice. Oops, there's a hazard. Maybe I ought to move it out of here? Maybe I should figure out why ICE wants to kidnap my nanny? Maybe bombing Iran without a plan might lead to more war?

If representative democracy withstands the Trump onslaught, maybe we can bring some of these willing know-nothings back to consensus reality. On to November ...

Internal refugees and the return of the ballot measure wars

Transgender folk are fleeing to blue states. This didn't begin with Trump coming back into office; aggressive persecution in red states revved up the push out at the beginning of this decade.

Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis provides a statistical picture.

The American Transgender Refugee Crisis
If this were occurring abroad, to an ethnic minority, we would call it ethnic cleansing. 

... Annualized, what we are seeing is a displacement rate of roughly 15% a year. And because trans people are largely not fleeing blue states (which means that the pool of leavers would actually be the 47% of trans adults who live in the 29 states with at least one restrictive law), the rate among trans people in the states doing the persecuting is closer to 29%. Nearly a third, in a year.  

... the sheer scale of this movement is breathtaking. Hundreds of thousands of trans people have had to flee persecution within the borders of the United States ....

... To put this in perspective, the last time an American subgroup migrated at these rates was the Great Migration, in which roughly 6 million Southern Black people fled Jim Crow violence and repression. This occurred over a period of decades, in the face of political repression, systematic violence, and legal apartheid. In its fastest decade, the 1940s, 1.5 million left the South—against a Southern Black population of roughly 10 million. Black America fled Jim Crow at about 1.5% a year, at a time when baseline inter-state mobility was higher than it was today. Trans America is fleeing red-state persecution at ten to twenty times that. ....

This should be seen as appropriately alarming to every decent person in the country.

... trans people who cannot afford to run are forced to hide.

Since November 2024, 55% of transgender adults report taking steps to be less visible as an LGBTQ person in their community—at work, at school—compared to 24% of LGBTQ people overall. This is what “eradication” looks like in practice. Instead of forcing the trans person to leave the state, the fascists are forcing the trans person to leave themselves. ...

To subject some of us to this level of terror -- along with migrants and all people of color -- is simply not okay.

• • •

In general, many Democratic politicians know they have to hold the line on trans rights -- however little actual sympathy they may feel. But those who break ranks with trans rights should feel heat. It's sad to see this happening in Ohio where there's an actual contest for governor: Top Ohio Democrats retreat on trans issues, leaving some transgender activists feeling abandoned.

I can begin to understand Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur's defection; she's ancient, a good labor stalwart, and yet uniquely continues to hold a district that has been redrawn many times by Republicans to make it more hostile to her. But for the Democratic candidate for Governor, Amy Acton, to adopt a transphobic trope about "boys playing in girls sports" crosses the decency line.

• • •

Meanwhile, it seems that the trans haters are experimenting with the ballot box. In five states --Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Washington -- citizen initiative petitions have put anti-trans measures up for a vote this fall. This feels awfully familiar to anyone who lived through the gay marriage wars of the early 2000s. For a long time during that period, fear and ignorant revulsion enforced by initiative succeeded across the country -- until it didn't. Before the Supreme Court got around to upholding gay marriage, very blue states had legalized marriage and then voters in Colorado repealed one of these bans which they had passed a decade earlier -- marking the turning tide.

Erin in the Morning warns of this new danger from the transphobes and other all purpose MAGA zealots.

... For transgender people who have sought refuge in blue states to escape the bans spreading through Republican-controlled legislatures, these measures represent a new and more direct threat: the possibility that their neighbors, not distant lawmakers, will vote to strip their rights.

Erin's description of the Washington state proposition suggests to me that it might well encounter successful opposition. 

... a ballot initiative funded by conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood would institute a K-12 sports ban—and require every girl who wants to play to have her sex verified by a doctor first. The measure’s language is explicit: to be eligible, a student must provide a statement from her health care provider “that verifies the student’s biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” That requirement applies not to transgender students specifically but to every girl in the state who wants to play any sport with a sex-separate classification—from basketball and soccer to cheerleading, bowling, and golf.  ...

Yeah, sure -- subject every girl child to physical sex verification! I can imagine some resistant kids and parents. 

Washington state has a proud history of fighting terrible initiatives. I'm pretty hopeful about the voter's finding their way to turning down this one. 

The Missouri trans-hate initiative is a sneaky one. Republican pols have added the anti-trans stuff to an anti-abortion measure as a sweetener. Considering Missouri voters passed a citizen measure protecting abortion rights a couple of year ago, they've got resistance to overcome. Might transphobia get a new batch of abortion restrictions across the finish line? Read about Missouri trials and tribulations here.

• • •

Something delightful to close this catalogue of horrors; how about a little joy? Here's Dylan Mulvaney, a transwoman who appeared in a beer commercial and has been subjected to unrelenting persecution by MAGA bigots ever since, delighting in being herself: 

What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience. And they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has zero contingency on what they can provide for me, because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self, and every day since. And sharing that with the world? It’s just icing on the cake. But they don’t want me to be able to share that, because it would mean young people realizing that if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.

You go, girl! 

Ignorance by intent

You have to love Marc Rosenblum's parting shot on leaving federal employment: 

“I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration,” Rosenblum said in a LinkedIn post over the weekend. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”

Rosenblum served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics in the DHS (that's the Department of Heimat Security for the historically minded).

“He had one of the most interesting charges at DHS,” a former colleague tells WIRED of Rosenblum. “There's 22 component agencies, and so there are 22 different ways of aggregating data that were just completely siloed.”

“So Marc's charge was to consolidate all the data and put it in a way that internally, I at headquarters could know exactly how many Coast Guard interdictions happened off the Coast Guard station in Miami, and how many of those were Cuban, Haitian, Nicaragua, Venezuelan. And then kind of conceptualize that with the same population of people that were crossing the Southwest border,” the former colleague adds.

Knowing and showing that sort of information, it's no surprise he no longer felt he had a place in current government. Reconstructing the government's ability to understand what is going on in this huge, multifaceted country will be one of the more difficult tasks required when we evict the MAGA morons.

ICE is evil

Here's another San Francisco action from Saturday. I had thought to attend this one also, but accepted that getting to two had to be good enough. Do turn the sound on and listen when you open.

The Human Banner crew has done it again! 

ICE kills

 

San Franciscans gathered Saturday outside the Tesla dealership on Van Ness Avenue.

The national movement follows two recent, horrific killings by ICE agents. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a beloved father and worker, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston, Texas, while driving a work van. On July 13, ICE agents killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his partner and toddler. There have now been 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump was inaugurated, 33 deaths in fiscal year 2026 alone. 

ICE agents were not even looking for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Salgado Araujo, 52, was killed during a traffic stop by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, prompting thousands of Houstonians to take to the street in protest and to demand justice. 

Salgado Araujo was a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the US for more than 30  years without legal status, according to his family. He was not the intended target of the ICE operation that resulted in his killing. 

... Democratic Congressman Christian Menefee said ICE needs to be “torn down to the studs” and rebuilt as an agency that recognises the “dignity of the people that it encounters”. 

“But we all know that that will not happen under this administration,” he added.

Johan Sebastian Guerrero, shot in Maine, again was not an intended ICE target. 

Investigators have not released details of the shooting in Biddeford. But a spokesman for Senator Angus King said this week that the senator had been told by senior officials that Mr. Guerrero was not the intended target of the immigration operation. Mr. Guerrero was in his car just after 7 a.m., as he headed to work.

Benjamin Gideon, a lawyer representing the Guerrero family, said at the news conference that Mr. Guerrero had been working in the United States lawfully. “The Trump administration issued him a permit to work in this country legally,” he said. “And they issued him a Social Security card and a Social Security number.”

“Do we accept the idea that innocent, loving partners and loving and devoted fathers of 3-year-olds can be collateral damage to this government’s policies?” Mr. Gideon asked. “Do we agree that this is just an acceptable cost of doing business?”

Passing motorists on busy Van Ness Avenue honked enthusiastically. The Tesla dealership is a regular weekly protest site and drivers know what to do. 

• • •

Later in the day, members of Indivisible hosted a more contemplative memorial for ICE's victims at Sue Bierman Park, gathering around an improvised altar.