Our City in this summer of our discontent

For various reasons lately, I've had occasion to venture into quite a few San Francisco neighborhoods apart from my home in the Mission -- the Richmond (Inner and Outer), DogPatch, the Embarcadero and Fishermen's Wharf, Glen Park, Noe Valley, the Castro, Chestnut Street in the Marina, Fillmore Street in Lower Pacific Heights, core Downtown around Union Square. 

This city is not prospering, whatever the data may be saying. Everywhere there are empty store fronts. Though there are plenty of tourists in the touristy bits in this season, I wonder what they are seeing. This is not what thriving looks like to me. (Though the sea lions at Pier 39 look happy enough.)

This mural on a boarded up store front captures how the city feels in a way. Are the animals just watching, waiting for us all to go away?

Maybe that thought is what I get for reading Dave Egger's The Eyes and the Impossible in my book group. It's a haunting tale set in an imagined Golden Gate Park. 

Countrywoman inspiration

From rural Missouri's Jess Piper:

Sometimes I can see something that might be missed by others.

We are on a journey to reclaim our country and our very existence. Our country and our morality are decaying before our eyes. We have a rapist and cruel fascist in control of our country — he has employed other rapists and fascists. 

We are on a quest to not only survive this current regime, but to come out better on the other side. We can do just that. We do that by going back to our roots in the heartland. By remembering who we are and what we believe in. By shaking our neighbors awake…by showing them the decay creeping in and how we root it out.

"Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa" ~Field of Dreams

The space we currently inhabit is strange and dark, but I can see the light. It’s in the cornfields and the beanfields and the rural spaces I travel into. It’s the people standing for their neighbors and shielding them from the worst. It’s a failed ICE raid and women in their golden years standing with signs on old highways.

I may be a failed Missouri Democratic candidate, but I speak the truth and I am not scared of the fascist party trying to upend our country.

I don’t think they will win.

I see the truth in the heartland. I see the power in the people and the resolve to be better.

Let’s chase away the boogeyman together. We can do this. 

I sure hope Jess is right. I mostly think she is; those of us who give a damn are hearty survivors, whether in the country, or in the barrio or the urban 'hood, and in places in between. Some of our neighbors think there is a cut rate solution, bowing to a strong man who is really just an energetic, fast talking swindler. We can do better.

MAGA fuels techno-antisemitism

Unpopular Front from John Ganz can be pretty highbrow, immersed in the intellectual history of European fascism as much as his more local topic, the American variant of the same. He wants to know where our barbarism comes from. I like his writing.. 

Here he issues a warning about American antisemitism under Trump, when our rulers' loud protestations of combating anti-Jewish bigotry serve as cover for illegal censorship and power grabs in media and academia.

click to enlarge

... When Jews are thus singled out for protection by the state and otherwise seem to be doing economically well in America, and when Israel’s special relationship with the United States grows increasingly difficult to justify, this will only provide fuel for antisemitic demagogues. The shrill castigation of any criticism of Israel as “antisemitic” will only increase curiosity in an uneducated public justly outraged by Israel’s conduct about what’s in the rest of the antisemitic program.

... The Internet’s wholesale destruction of the role of literate cultural mediation threatens all those intellectual professions that Jews have historically held in high esteem and sought out. In this structural sense, one could even say that the Internet itself is antisemitic. Perhaps the mechanism—or more likely its creators in whose image it is created— “recognized” Jews as its competitors in the role of general informational factotum and stood for an older institutional regime, contributing to the “spontaneous” turn of AI to antisemitism. Even if one does not buy this admittedly speculative theory, the decay of national citizenship and the rule of law in favor of the regime of privileges and the manipulated enthusiasms of mobs creates the ideal conditions for the growth of antisemitism.

When the manifest failure of the project of Trumpism becomes clear, one clear course for what’s left of MAGA is to take its populism in a more manifestly antisemitic direction and blame hidden Epstein and Israel supporters for manipulating and hijacking the movement. There will also be a temptation to use antisemitism to distance itself from its contaminating Jewish element. Whether this would lead to its marginalization or its extension of mass support is anybody’s guess. 

We shouldn't be hostage to having to guess -- but here we are, swimming upstream against bigotries. 

Standing for our democracy in San Bruno

A Bay Area summer can be a chilly thing, windy with fog that could pass for drizzle. In this unpromising environment, faithful San Mateo county residents took their stand today, and do the same every Sunday afternoon, on El Camino Real at Tanforan shopping center. They set up adjacent to a bank of Tesla charging stations.

  

Organized by local Indivisible, they want passersby on the wide street to remember that something foul is happening in Washington.

 

They are not meekly pulling any punches.

The response from passing cars is friendly in this bedroom suburb.

• • • 

The Tanforan shopping center area was for years a horse racetrack and also a venue for early aviation. But during World War II, it became the site of one of those episodes in our history we hope not to repeat.

... Tanforan’s history is tainted by its use as an assembly center for Japanese Americans during World War II. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which incarcerated over 125,000 Japanese Americans in the United States. From April 23 to October 13th, 1942, the Tanforan Racetrack was used as a temporary detention center for Japanese Americans and had a peak population of 7,816. 

The San Bruno Public Library has compiled multiple interviews with people who lived in the assembly center... One of the interviewees was Frank Ogawa, a resident of Oakland when Executive Order 9066 was issued. “All we knew about Tanforan was that it was a racetrack,” he said. 

Ogawa continued, “We only had about 3-4 days’ notice to pack and sell everything to be ready to depart to Tanforan.” 

Japanese Americans living at Tanforan were forced to live in the horse stalls as they didn’t have any other form of shelter for them. “In this small horse stall were just 2 cots and a big canvas sack was on the bed, I didn’t know what that was for,” Ogawa said. “Later we found out that was gonna be our mattress.” The people living in the Tanforan Assembly Center had to fill their canvas with hay to have a mattress while living there. For many Japanese Americans, this was their first time at Tanforan and their only experience there.

Seems like a good place for today's residents to announce "never again!" 

They are coming for the gift shops ...

... I took myself on a field trip.

Kevin M. Levin is an historian and educator based in Boston with a particular interest in the history and memory of the Civil War era. If you have any interest in 19th century American history, I heartily recommend his Substack.

Levin warns that National Park sites and even their gift shops (!) are being altered to conform to the Trumpian white, male narrative of continental conquest that is balm to the weak little egos of MAGA fans. 

He takes off from a Washington Post article describing how the regime is aiming to rewrite and "clean up" our history

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March that instructed the Smithsonian and the national parks to remove “improper ideology,” which could include discussions of historic racism and sexism. 

Since then, the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, has issued policies instructing agency staff to report any information that might be out of compliance, including gift shop merchandise, signs, educational films and websites. Visitors were also invited to submit comments.

Levin sees more dangers ahead in this regime's effort to change our memory of the nation's past:

First They Came For National Park Service Staff. Then They Came For the Funds. Then They Came For the Books. Where Will It End? 

... Park service staff have no guidelines to work with as to what might be problematic, but the books that are being flagged deal overwhelmingly with the history and legacy of slavery, the history of indigenous peoples, and other subjects that the Trump administration has targeted as inappropriate. 

... NPS bookstores are important to the integrity of individual sites. These stores feature [used to feature?] the latest scholarship surrounding specific subjects, giving visitors the opportunity to deepen their understanding of site-specific subjects.

He suggests how ordinary people might resist: 

There isn’t much that we can do, but we are not helpless. One thing people can do to support interpretation and NPS sites in general is to buy their books from these parks gift shops/bookstores. 

If you have a park close to you, make the trip and find a reason to purchase a book on a subject that is currently being targeted. 

Do it as a statement of resistance.

• • •

Today I did just that, visiting the Warming Hut which sits on the San Francisco waterfront near the Civil War-era Fort Point and the Golden Gate Bridge. 

Inside, it took me a moment to realize that, in addition to attractive collections of cook books and birding manuals, there was a corner devoted to serious history and policies relevant to the waterfront. 

Not bad. Lots here for a serious student of California.

Then I ventured further into the sales area. Next to the cash register I found the real treasures offered to visitors: 

Wow! this is a book selection for young resisters which is the kind of kids many try to raise around here.

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area of which the Warming Hut is a feature may enjoy some protection from the Trump regime because it works here in partnership with the Presidio Trust. Trump hates the Trust, but he may have trouble killing it. It does not take federal money and was designed by Congressman Phil Burton and Speaker-Emerita Nancy Pelosi to resist interference with the city's historic army base. Trump attempted to use one of his executive orders to abolish the Trust, but will certainly run into legal resistance if he does more than fume against its independence. 

Checking in on the siege of Los Angeles: a summer of ICE

Those us of elsewhere shouldn't lose sight of the Trump regime's martial law play acting and real raids on immigrants in the Southland. We can learn a lot about what Stephen Miller and Tom Homan want for our future. And we can mourn and take heart from our California siblings.

When South African, naturalized-American, medical entrepreneur and newspaper magnate, Patrick Soon-Shiong cancelled the Los Angeles Times' endorsement of Kamala Harris, I cancelled my subscription to the paper. Since then, I've watched the paper bleed interesting journalists, much as the Washington Post has. It's sad. Unlike a lot of northern Californians, I am fond that overwhelming megalopolis to the south.  So interesting and so varied. And -- as so often -- where it is happening.

But losing the LA Times has not meant being altogether cut off. In order to try to entice me to resubscribe, the LAT still sends me a kind of editor's digest which gives me some access to the state of the metropolis as seen by the newspaper. A letter from Deputy Managing Editor Shelby Grad passes on a surprisingly upbeat and eloquent contextualization from the beleaguered city:

In today’s divided media world, these events were instantly cast as either a dangerous erosion of democracy or grandstanding by politicians searching for a viral clip, depending on your source.

But they underscored a clear message from our summer of ICE: Los Angeles isn’t afraid anymore.

A lot of very dark things have happened in Los Angeles over its 244-year history, events driven by misguided zeal, greed, bigotry and intolerance.

But they are always abetted by fear.

• One of the most notorious lynchings in American history occurred not in the Deep South but in 1870s Los Angeles, when a mob killed 19 Chinese people and some in the city were driven by blood lust.

• An estimated 170,000 Japanese Americans — many in California — were rounded up and taken from their homes, farms and businesses and held in prison camps. Both the right and the left put aside their differences to eagerly back the internment.

• A year later, in 1943, the streets of Los Angeles became the scene of shocking mob rule as scores of Mexican teens and young men were beaten, stripped of their ornate “zoot suits” and left bloody and naked on the sidewalk. Police officers laughed, encouraged the beatings, then arrested the victims. Politicians and the papers blamed the Mexicans.

Shelby Grad continues: 

 Fighting our fears

California historian Kevin Starr wrote eloquently about that part of the Los Angeles psyche that sets the city into “a state of psychosis, surrendering itself to the dream-fear.” Real events become magnified into anxiety that no one is willing or able to control. In 1993, Starr wrote about the paranoid rumors sweeping the city in advance of the verdict in the Rodney King civil trial. (More riots! Military occupation! A gang invasion of the Westside!) He thought immediately of the city’s past sins.

“Future historians will look back to these days and struggle to interpret a time in which fear became fact and rumor became the basis of policy,” he wrote. “It became its own horrible reality, and the City of the Angels, as it always feared it would, dreamt itself out of existence.” A city of dissent

There are a lot of reasons for L.A. to fear criticizing the sweeps and stay silent. It just gives Trump more ammunition. What will he unleash on us next?

But that is not happening this time. The protests, the aid efforts, and the many individuals speaking out against the arrests happening before their eyes show that dissent is alive and well here. Yes, living in a deep blue state gives them some cover. But isn’t it better to speak your mind and not fear the consequences? Isn’t that one of the things supporters love about Trump?

Taking a stand can also bring change.

The 1871 Chinese massacre occurred in an L.A. still ruled by vigilante justice, which made dissent hazardous to your health. But as John Mack Faragher chronicles in “Eternity Street,” the killing of 10% of the city’s entire Chinese population brought shame to L.A. — and forced some to finally speak for change. A few brave voices led to a larger movement that established L.A.’s first real criminal justice system and police force, marking an end to the vigilante era.

It didn’t curb racism or injustice, but it was a start.

• • •

Today's Angelenos are not a cooperative bunch when it comes to Trump's attempts to suppress speech in the city. From Talking Point Memo: 

A major new development out of Los Angeles, where the LA Times reports that U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli has been no-billed by grand juries in some attempted prosecutions of ICE protestors: 

The three officials who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity said prosecutors have struggled to get several protest-related cases past grand juries, which need only to find probable cause that a crime has been committed in order to move forward. That is a much lower bar than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard required for a criminal conviction.

Citizen jurors sometimes do speak for the people.

• • •

Politico notes that the Trump/Miller/Homan invasion merely reinvigorates California Latino revulsion against the Republican party, just as each wave of bigoted nativism has done for the last 30 years. 

“Grabbing people with criminal histories, I think there’s a lot of support for it,” [Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based GOP strategist]  said. “But catching people who have been here for 30 years, have family, work, contribute to the economy — and the only reason they’re undocumented is because America has failed to provide a program for them to be here legally — I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of stomach for that.”

 • • •

The New Yorker found an oblique angle from which to approach the city's struggles, a profile of the local consul-general of Mexico, Carlos González Gutiérrez. After a long, distinguished diplomatic career, he finds himself in the midst of an emergency for people he serves in a place that is their home and in some ways also his.

... The weekend after the Presidential election, he said, consuls-general across the United States called him to express their concerns about what the second Trump Administration would mean for Mexican nationals. ...

In June, González Gutiérrez began to see enforcement tactics that seemed unprecedented during his time in Los Angeles. ICE had begun raiding workplaces, snatching people off the streets, and arresting them as they waited to enter immigration courts. The government was apprehending people without criminal records, many of whom had been members of the community for decades. 

... On June 7th, he advised Mexicans with immigration hearings to inquire about the possibility of moving them online, and reminded them that, if they got detained, they should stay calm, not sign any documents they don’t understand, and, last of all, “remain silent and be in touch with your consulate.” Three days later, he still urged calm, and told people to protest peacefully if they protested at all. “In Mexico,” he said, “we’re deeply proud of you—of your work, your bravery, your dignity, and your identity as Mexicans. It is absolutely compatible to be a citizen or resident of this country who is both loyal and honest, and at the same time feel proud of your country of origin.” 

... As of early July, staff from the Mexican consulate had interviewed three hundred and thirty Mexicans who had been detained there during the previous month. Fifty-two per cent had lived in the United States for more than ten years. Thirty-six per cent had lived here for twenty years. Several more had been in the country for thirty years, and some for forty. Sixty-four of the people they’ve interviewed have already been deported, some forcibly and some voluntarily. 

Three hundred and nine of the interviewees were men; twenty-one were women. Immigration raids typically target men, but George Sanchez—a historian at U.S.C. who is perhaps the foremost scholar of L.A.’s Mexican and Mexican American communities—made the point that these latest raids have been particularly “masculinist.” “ICE has gone to Home Depots, not the transportation centers where buses pick up women every morning in East Los Angeles, taking them to the west side where they care for white people’s children,” Sanchez told me. “The Administration doesn’t want complaints from these families, whereas the day laborers at Home Depot conjure an image of the supposedly threatening foreigners they claim to be after.”  

... González Gutiérrez told me about two men who have lived in Los Angeles for forty years but had never applied for citizenship. Now they face deportation. “The fact that so many people have established roots in this country, that they have kids here, that they are a full part of communities they’ve helped prosper, that they still have to live in the shadows as undocumented people—this is the tragedy of this community,” he said. 

... González Gutiérrez cannot ultimately shape the outcome of immigrants’ cases. As a diplomat, he told me, he, too, is just a guest in this country. Like all other diplomats, he said, he abides by the rule of reciprocity: he can only do here what he would want an American diplomat to do in Mexico. ... 

... “When you are here, if you are a Mexican national, you realize that you belong, that, to a great extent, this is a Mexican city. I don’t say that in a chauvinistic way,” he told me. 

“What I mean is that L.A. celebrates diversity.” In a ten-minute drive, he noted, you might pass through Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Koreatown, the Maya Corridor. “L.A. belongs to everybody,” he said, “but Mexicans are part of it in a very central, essential, structural way.” ... 

... Los Angeles, as González Gutiérrez described it to me, is still the “political capital of the Mexican diaspora.” That’s why the Trump Administration’s actions there, and the resistance against them, have been so fierce. ICE officers will soon be bolstered by the billions that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gives them. With infinitely fewer resources, the protesters are becoming more organized, too.  

... On the morning that I met the consul-general, I had breakfast at La Chispa de Oro, in the predominantly Mexican American neighborhood of Boyle Heights, with the Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. He told me that “at first people were scared, but now they’re pissed. You get masked agents with guns pulling random people in public, that’s terrifying. Too many people in L.A. know that type of terror from our ancestral countries. You think it can’t happen here, then it does. So you feel sad about it, but then you’re, like, ‘No.’ ”

I weep for the city of the angels and I applaud its people. That's what this season of nativism is like.

Federal workers know who they work for ...

... they work for the Constitution and the people of these United States. Not the Donald. They rallied along with friends in San Francisco's UN Plaza on Wednesday.

 

They don't work for ICE either. 

Their union leaders were on hand.

So were the janitors who care for their buildings.

So were their friends from the City by the Bay. 

Federal workers are a patriotic bunch, which means these days that they have no time for that felon in office. In this moment of mass layoffs of loyal civil servants, many choose to speak out.

Cracks in the wall: church and state

Given the number of breaches of established law by the Trump regime, it would not be surprising if you missed this one: the IRS has freed churches to endorse political candidates. 

Since 1954, something called the Johnson Amendment to the IRS code had prohibited tax exempt religious institutions from taking a partisan side in candidate elections. When working campaigns, we would always assure diffident religious institutions that they could certainly offer a moral opinion on the issues of the day. But directly endorsing a candidate was a no-no. 

Right wing churches complained that the prohibition infringed on both their First Amendment rights of free speech and free exercise of their faith; besides the prohibition on endorsements was rarely enforced. (In the only slightly memorable mainstream instance of attempted application, the IRS did threaten the tax status of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena in 2006 over an anti-Iraq-war sermon by retired Rev. George Regas. That went nowhere.)

Now the Trump regime is getting rid of this theoretical impediment to pastors' electioneering. The legal standard is now: “communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted.” That means (I think) if it's part of a talk at the church or a sermon, the endorsement is just an intra-family utterance and that's fine.

Like journalistic explorer of the Christian right Sarah Posner, I can't get too exercised about this new IRS dictum: if a religious leader isn't able to convey social values in their preaching that lead congregants toward ethical political choices, there's something wrong with their communication skills. 

In our history, Black pastors have not been squeamish about standing and speaking for political messages. Historian of the Black church Jemar Tisby offers some strong opinions about which political interventions can empower religious communities and which would debase religious messages. 

What Do We Do? 

Pastors and church leaders should resist the temptation to endorse particular political candidates. 

Instead, they should teach their congregations how to think wisely and lovingly about the uses of political power, the call to public justice, and the pursuit of the common good. 

Congregation members have a responsibility, too.

Members of faith communities should pay careful attention to partisanship in the pulpit. They need to be prepared to ask pointed questions about the stance of their leaders on matters of conscience like choosing who to vote for.

And they should be prepared challenge their leaders, or even leave, if the faith community becomes a tool of partisan players. 

All faith communities should speak the truth in love to political leaders about the way power is being deployed in our nation. 

But when the church aligns itself with political power—endorsing candidates, seeking influence, anointing political “kings”—it abandons the self-sacrificial, justice seeking, truth-telling witness modeled by Jesus. 

A church that crowns candidates cannot carry a cross.

• • • 

Meanwhile a focus on what the Trump authorities might do to encourage already politically active white Christian nationalist religious bodies should not distract from what they almost certainly will do by way of the IRS to interfere with legitimate charitable activities. Faithful America passes on a warning: 

...  the chairmen of the Committee on Homeland Security -- Rep. Mark Green and Rep. Josh Brecheen launched an investigation into more than 200 organizations that provide aid to immigrants and refugees. These nonprofit groups -- including many religious organizations like Catholic Charities, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Global Refuge -- received a letter demanding to know if they used "taxpayer dollars to facilitate illegal activity." 

While these organizations are not required to respond to the inquiry, Green and Brecheen indicated that the Committee may take unspecified "further measures" if they do not comply. 

These organizations have well-established histories of refugee resettlement and serving immigrant communities -- in other words, of welcoming the strangers. ...

This is the arena in which we need to fight the good fight to keep the state out of our work and for our continued free exercise of the moral imperatives of religion.

My friend Kim Fellner has left us

 

If you were lucky enough to have known Kim, you know she spent her life struggling for justice with joy and grace. That's all anyone can do in whatever way is their own. 

Through the labor movement, through community organizing, through too many elections, she made the rounds, trying to make us better at our work. And making us laugh, often at ourselves.

There will be many obituaries, most from people who had worked more closely with Kim than I in recent years. And she wrote her own story of her coming death in her hometown paper, the Washington Post [gift links]: Field notes from the end of life: My thoughts on living while dying and Living with dying: A breathtaking collapse in the writer’s health.

How like Kim to have managed this one last task ... the world is a much sadder place without her. May the memory of Kim spur us to do the work of justice and compassion that she never stopped doing.

An apology: I have a vast archive of photos that I've taken of people I've known and sometimes loved. But when I looked for an image of Kim, all I found was this one from 2005. She avoided my camera, apparently. I scanned the web for the source noted on the photo, but it seems to have gone away ... 

We're going to be living with this question as long as we live

I hate the fashion online that substitutes video clips for text. For a person accustomed to learn by reading, video is slower, less precise, and less memorable than text. But, alas, perhaps we are becoming a post-literate world.

 

In any case, instead of writing frequently, Substacker Peter Beinart offers short videos at The Beinart Notebook. 

 

His most recent post is longer than the clips I usually share here. But if you've got 10 minutes, I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. The anguish in the original needs to be experienced.

An abbreviated transcript:

More deaths than Kishinev, Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday. Every Day. The astonishing scale of the killing in Gaza

So, one of the most difficult and depressing things about this moment is that the slaughter in Gaza goes on and on and on. And yet, it’s been relegated, you know, to the back pages of the newspaper. Americans are now more consumed by our own catastrophes. And so, there’s this way in which we’ve normalized, you know, in Western media discussion in the U.S, there’s been a kind of normalization of just that is kind of routine, that every day Palestinians are dying more and more and more. And it doesn’t even really provoke that much conversation anymore. And I’ve been thinking about how you can respond to that. 

And obviously the people who have tried the most are the Palestinians in Gaza themselves, journalists and others who are desperately kind of recording what’s happening to them and trying to speak to the outside world. ... But I also think there perhaps is a value in just trying to step back and look at the scale of this, and think about how desensitized we’ve become compared to other moments and places in history

... there’s a British academic named Michael Spagat—I actually quote him in my book—at the University of London, and he basically counts death in wars. That’s his academic specialty. He did this very, very large study with the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shakaki where they surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza in order to try to get a more accurate count of the death toll. ...

... obviously, in Gaza, where many of the hospitals have been destroyed, and there’s been many, many reports of widespread starvation that there would be considerable deaths from that as well. And so, of the overall death toll that Spagat comes to the number of about 100,000, which, as Haaretz reported in a piece about his research, is actually not very different from some other researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who’ve come to a roughly similar number.

... So, if one uses that figure of 100,000, that would mean that more than 150 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed per day since October 7^th. More than 150 per day.

... But 150 people killed per day over 650 days is really just an astonishing level of death and suffering that has been normalized. ... Even if we think about the horrors, the horrors, the war crimes committed on October 7th, where roughly 1,200 Israelis, mostly Israeli Jews, were killed, right? If you just think in terms of the numbers, there is basically a close to an October 7th in Gaza, in terms of the number of people killed, every week, right? Every week for now 21 months. And the band just kind of plays on, right?

... you can have 150 people killed per day, you know, over 650 days, and yet, you know, much of the world reacts with a shrug, and the world continues to give Israel the military and diplomatic support to make it possible. 

... I think that’s one of the things that people are going to be struggling to face and deal with, and contemplate, and understand about those of us who are alive in this moment. How—when there were other moments in history where far fewer people died, and it sparked the conscience of the world, and led to fundamental political change—how can it be that in this case that this can just be tolerated? I think all of us are going to be living with that question for a very, very long time. 

On MMMWA: Making the Male Military White Again for dear leader

 

A few years ago, this was a US Army recruiting poster. While I'm not much of a fan of armies, I kind of liked it when I passed it on the street.

 

Fintan O'Toole, an Irish journalist writing in the New York Review of Books, offers some insights into the role of the military cosplay and reality in the Trump regime. 

... For now at least, the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend. 

 

[The TV-jabberer who Trump installed as Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth writes in his best seller The War on Warriors (2024) that he “didn’t want this Army anymore.” This army is the one that actually exists: of its 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black. 

Trump appointed Hegseth to make many of these soldiers invisible. The War on Warriors is subtitled Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It offers “to recover a true vision of the value of strong men.” These are “red-blooded American men,” men who “respect other strong, skilled, dedicated men” and not “men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa.” ...

Strange posturing from a guy who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon to prep for his TV appearances, but there we are.

The Trumpian reimagining of the US Army has nothing to do with fighting foreign wars. It is all about reasserting the innately white and male nature of America. According to Hegseth, the military’s “key constituency is normal men”: “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” His vision, as he explains it, is to restore not just the value of strong men but also “the importance of normality.” ...

In this regard, putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained for loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. ... Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

O'Toole sees Trump as a would-be dictator trapped in a contradiction. 

As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. 

Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. 

The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America. 

Let's try to get rid of our tinpot Mussolini before he blows all of us up. His Iranian adventure was bad enough. We face a test.

He speaks for himself ... did he have a premonition?

By way of the journalists of ProPublica:

José Manuel Ramos Bastidas entered the U.S. with an appointment with border officials made via the CBP One app, which the Biden administration used to try to bring order to the soaring numbers of migrants attempting to enter the country, but he was immediately detained. An immigration officer and a judge determined he did not qualify for protection in the country. 

For almost a year, he waited in detention to be sent back home to Venezuela. In February 2025, when the Trump administration began a mass deportation campaign and news of the first immigrants being sent to a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, started trickling in to detention centers, Ramos panicked and asked his wife, Roynerliz Rodríguez, to record a message, “Just in case something happens to me,” he said. 

A month later, he called again. More upbeat, he said U.S. authorities told him he would be sent back to Venezuela. His family planned to bake him a cake and cook his favorite meal. 

But Ramos never arrived. Instead, he ended up being one of the more than 230 Venezuelans sent to the notorious prison in El Salvador known as CECOT on March 15. ...

Journalists are working to figure out who these men are. More here. 

Good Trouble Oakland

 

Folks in northern California aren't submitting to the Trump regime quietly.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson shares the philosophy which animated the deceased civil rights leader, Representative John Lewis of Georgia. 

Before Representative Lewis died, reporter Jonathan Capehart asked him “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”

The Congressman has plenty of local disciples.

Some with some artistic talent.

 

Many offer good words.

 

Some chat with acquaintances.

 

We are not going easily.

Who's that masked man? Frightened bullies fear shaming

With apologies to the Lone Ranger; yes, Donald and his ghoul Miller are inflicting the country with a made-for-TV movie of their violent fantasies. 

At the CalMatters news site, Michael Lozano has provided a useable guide to which agencies some of these masked thugs snatching up random brown people from the streets come from. This is what we are supposed to get used to.

 

 

Criminal justice journalist Radley Balko calls foul on the masking fetish.

The administration says the masks are to prevent “doxing,” and has cited a “700 percent” increase in assaults on ICE agents.

Both the defense and the statistic are nonsense.

First, unless they’re operating undercover, it is not illegal to publish or publicize the names of federal agents — nor should it be. They are state employees who have the power to arrest, detain, and kill. Of course their names and identities ought to be public information. Of course the people they stop, detain, arrest, or abuse should have names and badges to seek redress in court.

Second, the 700 percent figure is absurd. ... Don’t forget that the administration claimed that New York City comptroller Brad had Lander “assaulted” agents when video showed nothing of the kind. So there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical ...

I will not be surprised if, when ICE hires on its new army of thugs made possible by Trump's Big Ugly Bill, they don't even bother with this much identification. 

These big bullies should be ashamed of themselves. They hide their faces because whatever shred of decency they have left within them shames them as they carry out vicious, marginally legal orders.

• • •

Where government overreaches, not surprisingly Americans fight back. Hence the ICEBlock app which enables citizen sharing of ICE movements. Shades of the opening skirmishes of the historic national colonial revolt: "The British are coming..."

At the Intercept, Natasha Leonard explains: 

ICE watch groups and rapid-response networks have proliferated as a necessary response to Trump’s supercharged deportation agenda. Such efforts are not new but sit in the honorable tradition of the sanctuary movement of the 1980s to protect and shelter refugees, as well as local Copwatch networks, which have existed for over three decades as community efforts against law enforcement violence and impunity.

The agency’s response is itself in line with a storied tradition in U.S. law enforcement and broader efforts to shore up a white supremacist order. Namely, painting the oppressor as the victim and the real victim as the dangerous threat. ...

• • •

And now even ICE lawyers are refusing to admit their names in open court. Again from the Intercept: 

Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers. 

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. ... It is unclear how many immigration judges are failing to say ICE lawyers’ names...

For shame!

Recurrent panics fuel mobs. Everything old is new again...

Watching MAGA panic about the existence of trans and gender variant youth and by extension their elders, I realized I'd seen something very like this before. This is a country all too easily led into periodic hysteria about sex and gender, especially when it comes to actual children. Trump and the Republican Party are fanning the flames of fear for political gain.

Does this seem familiar? It certainly could. I remember when our culture in the 1980s was obsessed with the McMartin Preschool abuse trial. Something terrible must have happened ... or not. From a New York Times retrospective [gift] by Clyde Haberman: 

... Starting in 1983, with accusations from a mother whose mental instability later became an issue in the case, the operators of a day care center near Los Angeles were charged with raping and sodomizing dozens of small children. The trial dragged on for years, one of the longest and costliest in American history. In the end ... lives were undone. But no one was ever convicted of a single act of wrongdoing. 

Indeed, some of the early allegations were so fantastic as to make many people wonder later how anyone could have believed them in the first place. Really now, teachers chopped up animals, clubbed a horse to death with a baseball bat, sacrificed a baby in a church and made children drink the blood, dressed up as witches and flew in the air — and all this had been going on unnoticed for a good long while until a disturbed mother spoke up?

Still, McMartin unleashed nationwide hysteria about child abuse and Satanism in schools. One report after another told of horrific practices, with the Devil often literally in the details. ...

... Inevitably, perhaps, the mass frenzy over supposed Satanism and sexual predation invited comparisons to the Salem witch trials and to McCarthy-era excesses. Americans do seem prone episodically to this kind of fever. ...

Witness the widespread panic a few decades ago when people around the country convinced themselves that evil neighbors were handing children poisoned Halloween candy and apples embedded with razor blades. Arthur Miller highlighted this phenomenon in his 1953 play, “The Crucible,” which invoked the Salem trials to comment on a contemporary abuse, the scattershot McCarthy hunt for Communists ...

It seems to me obvious that Trump and MAGA are playing a very tired, very American, tune ...

So what's the other political party doing in response to MAGA's fantasies and bigotry? Far too often, cowering in closets. Most Democratic politicians are too timid to take on the assault on emerging medical science and anthropological understanding that the experience of many contemporary Americans is forcing into the light.

Parker Molloy, a Chicago media journalist, has some advice for timid Democrats:

There's a glaring omission in all the Democratic hand-wringing about trans issues: actual trans people. ... 

The disability rights movement has a motto: "Nothing about us without us." It's a simple principle that Democrats have completely abandoned when it comes to trans issues. Instead of talking to us about our lives and needs, Democratic strategists talk about us as an abstract political problem to be solved. ...

If Democrats actually bothered to have these conversations, they'd discover something ... we're not asking for much. We're not demanding special privileges or radical restructuring of society. We mostly just want to exist in public without harassment and access the same healthcare everyone else takes for granted. 

By and large, trans people are not demanding (who even asked for this?) that people announce their own pronouns or whatever corporate/HR nonsense Democratic politicians think trans people want...

Talk to trans kids and their parents, and you'll hear the same themes repeatedly: They want to use the bathroom in peace. They want to play sports with their friends. They want their teachers to use their names. They want to go to school without being bullied. They want to see a doctor when they need to. 

These aren't radical demands. They're the baseline expectations of any child in America.

Talk to trans adults like me, and the asks are similarly modest: Keep our jobs without discrimination. Update our driver's licenses to match our appearance. Access medical care our doctors recommend. Walk down the street without fear. Again, these aren't special rights. They're basic dignity.

But Democrats can't make these arguments because they don't know our stories. They've treated us as a constituency to be managed rather than human beings to be heard. They've let Republicans define who we are and what we want because they've never bothered to ask us ourselves.

This is more than just morally wrong; it's politically stupid. When you don't know the people you're supposedly defending, you can't defend them effectively. When you treat someone's existence as a political liability rather than a human reality, you've already lost the argument.

... they need to reframe the debate. Republicans aren't protecting children; they're weaponizing government to bully kids. They're the ones obsessed with bathrooms, genitals, and controlling people's bodies. Democrats should make them own that weirdness. ...

Democrats need to connect trans rights to broader freedoms. This isn't about special privileges or ideology. It's about the government staying out of personal medical decisions. It's about families, not politicians, making choices about their children's health. It's about the freedom to live your life without constant government surveillance of your gender.

These are winning arguments if Democrats would bother to make them.

... they need to tell human stories. Trans people aren't abstractions or political footballs. They're people's children, siblings, friends, and neighbors. When Republicans attack trans people, they're attacking real families in every community. Democrats need to make that real for voters.

.. Democrats need to show some backbone. Voters respect politicians who stand for something, even if they disagree. What they don't respect is cowardice. Running away from every fight Republicans pick doesn't make Democrats look reasonable. It makes them look weak.

Democrats have been down this road before. It leads nowhere good. You can't build a political coalition by constantly throwing people out of it. You can't inspire voters by standing for nothing. You can't protect some children by agreeing that others are disposable. ...

Get over yourselves, Dem politicians. If you can learn just enough to be real, people will respect you. Most of us aren't on the side of witch burners, soiling our pants and fleeing phantom dangers. You won't win the QAnons, but there are plenty of other people who might be willing to stop panicking, if you modeled some guts. 

Would you want Donald Trump deciding what your doctor can do for you?

 

Young trans and non-binary folk and their friends rallied yesterday outside Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto where institutional cowardice is retreating when faced with the Trump administration's bigotry. 

By way of the San Francisco Chronicle: 

The Trump administration has pushed to limit access to gender-affirming care for youths. In January, the president signed an executive order that directs federal agencies to prohibit hospitals and medical schools that receive some federal grants from providing gender-affirming care to children.

... Some Stanford patients received notifications this month that surgical procedures were being canceled, according to one parent of a child undergoing care for gender dysphoria at the gender clinic. ... The child had been receiving care at the clinic for more than a year, and the abrupt cancellation of the procedure is leaving the family scrambling to figure out how to get the care elsewhere. ...

... “The fear is we were totally blindsided by this and it has no legal basis, so I have no confidence or trust,” the parent said. “How do I know the other care will continue? That’s the biggest impact for us. The trust has been kind of taken away.” 

 

For all the fear in the moment, communities which have been rejected often remember they are FABULOUS!

Once again -- to remain human means to say NO!

Once upon a time -- when the New York Times revealed America's Vietnamese "allies" were torturing their enemies in "tiger cages," when photos revealed what US soldiers in Iraq were doing to prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- Erudite Partner and I would mutter to each other, when are they going to bring it home?

Yes, we knew that torture was all too prevalent in US prisons and jails, for example by Chicago police in this century. 

But local police malpractice and terror seemed a different thing than torture practiced on people who had been declared "the other" by the powers that be. 

But now we have that. 

My Erudite Partner Rebecca Gordon returns to the topic of her academic research in a current article for TomDispatch.

Everything Old Is New Again: The Trump Administration Revives Institutionalized Torture 

... in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). 

Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.

But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”

 

We face a test. How do we choose to respond to the barbarism of our authorities rooted in the fears of our neighbor citizens? We are not helpless.

... Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity.  

I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections — that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters – is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come. 

Go read it all. 

Now what? After the spring rallies ...

After serving as an MC at Baltimore's version of 2025 spring resistance rallies, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Lester Spence has tried to figure out: where do we go from here?  His edited reflections seem important to share.

Folks used the rallies to lash local efforts to national ones and to provide proof-of-concept and to present political opportunities for people who weren’t connected on the other.  ... If the May Day rally represented coalition proof-of-concept, No Kings represented proof that there were thousands of people looking to join something bigger than themselves.     

... However, both skewed older and white. ...

Baltimore has been and remains segregated, even though it is increasingly multi-cultural and multi-racial.  ... There aren’t that many of us connected to both worlds. Which makes political organizing between them difficult.    

Alongside local segregation there’s the political dynamic generated by the Trump administration. Its secret police attacks on Latinx populations ... have politically and socially demobilized them to the point where many find it difficult to conduct normal day-to-day activity much less engage in political activism. The level of courage required for Latinx public participation cannot be overstated. Nor can the viciousness of state attacks against them.  And then [there's the] “let’s sit this one out” rhetoric unique to black Baltimore communities ...

... I’d suggest that for the average No King’s Day attendee in particular, what they’re experiencing now—with cuts to USAID and other federal government bodies—may be the first time they’ve experienced the underside of the American state. ... This isn’t quite the case for Latinx populations although perhaps it hasn’t been as vicious as this. And this isn’t quite the case for black populations in Baltimore, particularly working class ones. ...

Neither rallies really spoke to this as effectively as they could have (and as I was one of the MCs, I bear responsibility). Going forward we have to bring together three populations—the white populations bearing government cuts (but not experiencing police violence), the black populations (experiencing local police violence), and the Latino populations (experiencing national police violence). At the very least that means showing up for rallies. 

But it also means generating popular education programs that can generate understanding about the shared (yet unique) nature of these struggles. And then lashing them up to political projects that combine electoral strategies—putting people in office at the local, state, and national level—with referenda strategies.  

What those of us connected to the efforts that skew white and old have to do is work within those spaces to get people within them to commit to broader action. That broader action has to first involve getting people within these groups to see that the fascist turn didn’t start with Trump and didn’t move from Germany to here.

In developing this new understanding people have to get that these dynamics affect all of us, no matter where we are. The ally point of view would have us believe that there are certain populations who are affected and certain populations who aren’t. The role of the ally is to recognize how certain populations are affected and then aid them in their struggles.

This is wrong. It quite simply isn’t the case that there are people who aren’t affected and people who are. It is true that there are populations who are the victims of discriminate indiscriminate police violence and populations who don’t tend to be. ... [but] everyone loses materially and psychically.

This dynamic has to then translate into action. And working on the idea that it’s just a bit at a time, it isn’t about generating the equivalent of a May Day march among people who haven’t ever marched. It is, though, about getting people to commit to actions designed to change local conditions. Knowing that changing those local conditions end up building the community we need to change national conditions.    

That last point is important. We need local actions. Some of this from Spence seems peculiarly Baltimore-oriented. Baltimore is not California. In California, Latinos and various Asian-origin groups and individuals are more easily central to the resistance mix and can lead the way. 

I don't know whether I agree with his implication that the time for big marches is past. There are plenty of people who still need to experience the high that goes with seeing our numbers. And our numbers are increasing according to all public polling. People don't like the incompetence and cruelty on display in the Trump regime. So long as we are able to come together at scale, it's good that we should.

When people ask what they can do to fight the BUMP,  the Big Ugly MAGA Power, my first answer these days is to talk with and bring in more of your neighbors. We need to grow. That increases the value of the little local actions blossoming everywhere. One such outpouring, the TeslaTakedown, went national and helped crash Trump's brother-in-destruction. 

Support all the little campaigns cropping up, as you are able. Support immigrants, individually and collectively. Support trans people, on whom the assault is life-threatening. Support teachers. Support union workers. Get the communities you belong to engaged. This is a time for creativity and boldness. The Trump project is vicious, but it is also phony, a house of cards. Let's blow their house down with our numbers.