If it were up to the Mission, heads would roll

 

We don't much like these guys.

They don't much like us either.

Tough people still rise. It's Gay Freedom season

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping the pressure on in Colma

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

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

Our messages are serious.

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

Nobody is giving up.

Scenes from the gathering for the Trans March

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

And the people came: joyous and determined.

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

Trans youth have much to say ...

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

 

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

There was defiance in the crowd ...

And earnest advocacy ...

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

A few thoughts about Zohran from people closer than I am

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

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

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

Mamdani Win Causes World's Whiniest Babies to Melt Down 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ganz again:

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

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

DEI reminder

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

 

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

A good use for the National Guard

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

National disgrace abroad and at home

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

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

By way of The Guardian.  

Technofascists v. the normies

Erudite Partner's latest article from TomDispatch opens with a vignette:

Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.

But before I could make the call, my phone rang.

“Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said.

“Mary! I was just about to call you.”

“But you did call me,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.”

It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. ...

I remember this episode well. Our household was a part of organizing a lot of demonstrations against Ronald Reagan's Central American wars. The SFPD could have simply asked us what were the plans. Or they could have attended some of the interminable organizing coalition meetings; actually, I'm sure they did that ...

I walked over this on a San Francisco street

Anyway, that crude surveillance seems quaint these days. Authorities have gotten far more sophisticated and they've found some frightening allies -- or are these overlords? Today E.P. asks "How Will Your Data Be Deployed In an Age of Dark Enlightenment?"

It's pretty scary stuff full of tech billionaires and pseudo-intellectual elite fantasies come to life. How do we reject these lost, desiccated aspiring techno-gods? The same way that people of good will always have: by loving one another and supporting each other in our messy humanity. Read Erudite Parther's latest.

What's God got to do with it?

Everything for the evangelical, Pentecostal segment of Donald Trump's base which is cheering his extra-Constitutional attack on what he hopes is Iran's nuclear capacity. (Thirty-six hours after, experts aren't so sure he's done the damage he hoped to, but what does expertise matter, anyway, when you are a boy ordering a big bang?)

 

Polling before the strike on Iran showed only 16 percent of us wanted this. This is not like GW Bush's invasion of Iraq which enjoyed majority support for a hot minute in 2003. Now that Trump's done it, YouGov still finds 46 percent opposed, 35 percent in favor of the strikes. And just wait until it all becomes more complicated ...

Diana Butler Bass brings historical perspective to evangelical Christian enthusiasm for the Trump's bombs: 

To his evangelical base, Trump is fulfilling end times prophecies before their eyes. Moving the embassy [to Jerusalem in 2018] was but the first step in reorienting US policy toward prophecy. What is happening right now — with the US joining with Israel in this bombing — is nothing less than God's work, and they believe that they are the recipients of the long-awaited promise of Jesus' return.

... the MAGA "Jesus" and their particular prophecy tradition only dates to the mid-1800s. It was a completely invented theology about 200 years ago.

Yet that theological innovation has been one of the most wildly successful heresies in the history of Christianity in terms of spread and influence — mostly via Pentecostalism, the largest and most sustained global religious movement of the last century.

Modern Pentecostalism began among the poor and dispossessed and was originally influenced by progressive politics. Movements change, however. And partisans often wind up far from where they started.

In the last four decades, Pentecostals fully embraced both prophecy theologies (previously these theologies had been the purview of rather staid evangelicals and fundamentalists — most of whom eschewed Pentecostalism) and nationalist politics. ...

... Trump’s evangelical and Pentecostal supporters — the core of MAGA — are cheering. ... Bombing Iran secures Trump’s status as God’s man, the one sent to fulfill the prophetic promises that lead to the return of Jesus. While the rest of us are trying to discern signs of fascism, many American are discerning the "signs of the times."

We think Hitler. They think Jesus. We think of the innocent suffering. They think of the final judgment. We pray for peace. They believe that the Prince of Peace is returning with a sword. ...

For a deeper dive into this crackpot theology, I recommend Jemar Tisby: Bombs for the Apocalypse? Ted Cruz, Trump, and Evangelical End Times Theology -- How Dispensationalism Drives American Foreign Policy and Military Aggression. This is an accessible easy read, if delving into lunacy can be easy.

A message of shared humanity and a warning

Historian of American Christian religion Diana Butler Bass offers a homily for this moment:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. — Matthew 25: 35–36

... People of faith may, of course, disagree about policies regarding immigration. But we cannot avoid that the call for compassion, safety, and welcome for those who have left their homelands due to starvation, violence, deprivation, persecution, and war.

We humans have always fled and wandered. We have experienced exile and homelessness. Immigration has been central to the human story from its beginning. But the story is taking an evil turn right now, even as the problems associated with the movement of peoples are intensifying. But immigration is not going away ... largely due to climate change.

How we deal with this is a measure of our moral health and our own souls.

It is incumbent upon us to resist the dehumanization and demonization of immigrants and refugees and refuse to participate in unjust deportations and campaigns of state terror against innocent people. We cannot give in to social and political movements that deny the humanity and dignity of immigrants and refugees.

We must not accept the wanton cruelty being perpetrated in our towns and cities right now. And we will not carry out orders from those who flagrantly deny the ethical imperative of Jesus himself.

I was a stranger and you invited me in.

• • •

Journalist and popular historian Garrett Graff studies our past experience to try to discern where we are going. He is not sanguine about the trajectory of the Trump/Miller migrant expulsion regime. 

ICE in just a few weeks has transformed itself into the closest thing that the US has ever had to a “secret police,” with more seemingly culturally in common with the Klan nightriders of Reconstruction than their federal agency brethren like the FBI or ATF.

... what worries me is that what we’re witnessing nationwide are not the actions of an agency that believes it will ever be subject to meaningful oversight or legal authority ever again.

This is not an agency that is treating members of Congress as if it will ever be held to account by the men and women who control its budget.

This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions on the streets will be subject to meaningful review by judicial authorities — or that any of its actions will be litigated in the courts.

This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions will be subject to meaningful review by the DHS inspector general, either for policy violations or criminal use-of-force abuses, nor reviewed by US attorneys or federal prosecutors at any level.

This is not an agency leadership that believes that anyone in government — at the Justice Department, the White House, or DHS — currently cares about public perception, misconduct, or violations of civil rights and civil liberties.

And this is not an agency that believes that Democrats will ever be back in charge.

That’s what should terrify us.

... the [Big Ugly Budget] bill before Congress right now would supercharge ICE and turn this increasingly secret-police-like organization loose on the country in ways that would be explosive. Various versions of the $150 billion proposal to boost immigration enforcement throw around numbers like adding between $8 billion and $30 billion for ICE hiring and operations.

ICE’s entire current annual budget is around $10 billion, so imagine an ICE an order of magnitude larger than it is now.

... I spent years writing about the corruption that followed a similar radical and rapid transformation of the Border Patrol — a decade of corruption during which one agent or officer of CBP was arrested almost every single day for misconduct or criminal activity, a decade during which it rushed new hires out into the field without proper vetting or training. ...

Now we appear to be set to repeat all of those mistakes by pouring gasoline on ICE’s misconduct — hiring thousands of new agents and officers in a rush just as surely problematic, if not worse and bigger, as the one that wrecked CBP for years — and turn it loose on the country’s interior, cities, and small communities in a way that the Border Patrol’s corruption and misconduct for the most part never affected ordinary Americans.  ...

• • •

Seen at No Kings demo, San Francisco

Pacifica will not go quietly

Along Highway One at Mori Point in Pacifica this morning, folks were alerting passing motorists to their anger at the Trump regime. There were plenty of friendly honks.

Mori Point is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area -- like the rest of the National Parks, attractive real estate that Trump would happily sell off to his billionaire buddies for development. Or turn over to mining interests if they want these places.

The MAGA Budget Bill now moving in the Senate would cripple many of our parks. The National Parks Conservation Association is leading the pushback.