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.

Trumpism is our Brexit

Watching the British transition to a new governing Labour Party prime minister from afar, I had what is probably a very obvious insight about this country which seems worth musing on.

First the disclaimer: I know very little about British politics and the broad stroke observations that follow may be inaccurate. I only dare write this because the actual subject is our, American, political follies -- and those I know plenty about.

Andy Burnham's takeover as Prime Minister makes him the seventh person in the top British job in the last ten years. And there is overwhelming agreement that his country is not serving its citizens as well as they wish it would. There's a housing crisis; there's a health care mess; international standing is precarious; racial tensions are unremitting; and "affordability" seems a mirage. The level of government turnover suggests the political landscape is both full of pratfalls and beset with confusion.

From across the pond, it seems obvious that the passionate, the successful exercise of popular sovereignty that was the the narrow 2016 vote to leave the European Union has been a sad wrong turn. Without Europe, Britain is poorer and weaker and the governments trying to manage national assertion within economic and intellectual isolation have been feckless failures. They can't satisfy anyone. The majority of Brits seem to think that Brexit was a mistake; and also they don't want to jump back into heated controversy over it. That hurt. There's a sharp age difference among the people: 

It may also be, as one British pollster observed, that the 2016 majority for Brexit “has literally died out,” since the Leave camp at the time included a disproportionate number of elderly voters. And so the conversation in Britain is shifting to what can be done to reverse the damage ...

Sound familiar ... ?

There's flooding in Texas, there's strife in Iran ... Apologies to the Kingston Trio

Like the Brexiteers, the Trumpists in power destroy without building. Stick that old crank JFK Jr at Health and Human Services, throw out the scientists, and you get a cyclosporiasis epidemic. Two cheers for the microbes! Empower Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and government ceases to be able to do its job. MAGA cheers while emergency management is cut until no one answers the phone as flood waters rise.

Like the Brits, when the American people shrug off our impulse to destroy government without building (I think largely we do this so as not to have to deal with brown people ...), reconstruction is going to be tough. You can't stop the clock and you certainly can't go backwards. When people experience Trump's grafting minions, his anti-science religious know-nothings, and the gloating of our domestic oligarchs, we don't like it. The reaction will and should be extreme.

I trust we'll take government back. The federal system and the country's vast wealth gives us a fighting chance to pull out of our Trumpist national nosedive into self-pity, perhaps more smoothly than the Brits. But what are we going to do with our chances?

Centennials past ...

My family has been bumping about the United States for a long time, since well before this was a nation, since Europeans started expropriating New England from its inhabitants. I am fortunate to have come into considerable family archives; I find it interesting to catalogue ancestral markers of these observances

At the time of the first (1875-6) centennial, a great-great grandfather, E. G. Spaulding, was a prosperous civic grandee, a banker and former mayor of Buffalo. He erected his personal monument to the country which had been so good to him. He was full of energy and pride.

 

The ostensible purpose of this massive pseudo-classical stone horror was to mark 50 years since the passing of his ancestor, Levi Spaulding, who fought in the American revolutionary army from Bunker Hill through Yorktown. But one panel was also an affirmation of the struggle of this own lifetime; old E.G. was in Congress during Lincoln's fraught Civil War term. He knew where he stood on the battles of his day.

   

Click to enlarge images. 

 • • •

Come the 150th anniversary of the country in 1926, the city of Buffalo was in its commercial heyday. Most of the great civic monuments were in construction or planning in that decade, including Shea's Performing Arts Center, the Peace Bridge to Canada and the art deco City Hall. In addition to industry, Buffalo profited greatly being the gateway to booze smuggled in from Canada, defying Prohibition. I remember asking my mother about that year's sesquicentennial. She was unusually vague in her memories. She was 18 that year, graduating from high school, about to go off with her family on a summer cruise around the Mediterranean, then off to college. She remembered she took her flask with her. Under Prohibition, you had to be sure you didn't drink something that turned out to be paint thinner.

• • •

By the time of the Bicentennial of 1976, I can bring my own memories. I was 29 that year. While the tall ships sailed into New York harbor and the fire works lofted over Philadelphia, I was painting my parents' living room, the furniture swathed in tarps and the painter covered in roller spray. I don't think we wore masks when painting in those days. My chief memory is sweltering, with occasional breaks for the TV.

 

My generation, people who came of age in late 1960s, were often America skeptics. We had grown up inspired by the Civil Rights revolution, then watched the cities burn when hope for racial and economic justice was unfilled, while the boys were sent to Vietnam to die for what we knew was nothing good. Then a president turned out to be just a common crook and drunk -- and by 1976 we were left with Gerald Ford who seemed an interim stand-in for a national leader. 

 

By 1976 I was on board with Dorothy Day's one word reaction to the Bicentennial as printed in the National Catholic Reporter:

 

Dorothy summed up my feelings of the time. This still seems one appropriate response to the national festivites.

• • • 

So what's to make of America 250? 

 

I have to admit, I'm sort of enjoying the show. Donald Trump's ignorant, tacky effort to hijack the national celebration seems largely to inspire ridicule. This ia not a respectful country and never has been. This is also not really a backward looking country; we can wallow in MAGA's swamp of gloomy nostalgia for a season, but our history is that hope revives. Against all odds, we can still make that happen. Let's keep up the work.

These are just ordinary people, doing their best

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mad King disease

I remember Jonestown. I was shopping in a San Francisco thrift store in November 1978 when the news came over the store radio that hundreds of members of Jim Jones' weird cult had "drunk the koolaid" and, along with Jones, were dead in a Guyana jungle. So was a Congressman who had gone to investigate what was happening to his constituents. Staff and journalists had also been shot.

Jim Jones' followers, mostly older Black citizens, had been a visible presence in San Francisco. He'd bus them in to demonstrations for cheaper housing. The white hippies who made up the rest of the crowd were both welcoming and bemused at this addition to their numbers; then off the People's Temple folks would go, usually insulated from much interaction with rest of us. Jones' ability to deliver a crowd gave him a local political potency. Eventually Jones led his followers off to remote South America, and, in his madness, murdered them.

That's the sort of thing that can happen when a cult takes hold of a mass of people. We should be warned. 

Paul Waldman believes it is appropriate to think of MAGA as a cult. That resonates with me. And Waldman expects more madness all the way through the midterm elections.

When the cult goes bad

In cults like Jonestown, the leader’s own descent into madness pulls everyone down with him, and that’s pretty much what’s happening now. There may not be any way to avert a midterm blowout [written before the Supremes allowed Southern states to resegregate their elections mitigating the likely blowout], but a different president would at least be promoting policies that weren’t so directly and dramatically damaging to his party’s political fortunes. He wouldn’t be knocking down buildings and talking constantly about his ballroom, and he wouldn’t have started a war like the one we’re in and telling people that they just have to suck it up and tolerate $5 a gallon gas because things will magically get better.

But now you have two factors that together are dooming the party. First, Trump is basically decompensating; whatever ability he once had to attract and persuade people has withered away, and all that’s left are the most unappealing parts of his personality. He is gaining no new adherents; instead, he’s losing support among the electorate every day.

Second, he built the current incarnation of the GOP around absolute loyalty to him, enforced through the kind of petty revenge he’s still trying to carry out. With just a couple of exceptions (e.g. Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Trump is trying very hard to defeat), Republicans all decided that they would not only support him unequivocally but engage in regular rituals of public fealty, the result of which is that their own identities were subsumed and voters who are mad at Trump can reasonably take out that anger at anyone with an R after their name.

Put it together, and every Republican on the ballot is little more than an appendage of a mad king who grows more unstable by the day. ...

It's up to the rest of us -- we're the majority -- to work every way we can to enforce that we've had enough of the cult of the Mad King. And at the same time, to seek to break the spell holding so many voters in the cult.

Rural sacrifice zones courtesy of MAGA

It seems to be accurate to point out that much of the rural United States is being transformed into "Sacrifice Zones." The term is usually associated with devastating environmental exploitation which renders a place uninhabitable -- but can also include economic development which the local population doesn't support. A definition:

A sacrifice zone or sacrifice area is a geographic area that has been permanently changed by heavy environmental alterations (usually to a negative degree) or economic disinvestment, often through locally unwanted land use (LULU). 

Following the news of Trump's America, I find myself coming across two stories that are seldom told in the same frame, but which seem to me closely analogous. .

• All over the country, rural people a learning that some tech behemoth wants to transform or build what looks like a warehouse, but is actually an energy and water sucking data center. The locals might welcome more opportunity for economic activity, but they smell a rat. Jess Piper tells one story from rural Missouri: 

... I opened my local paper, The Maryville Forum, a few days back, and saw an article on a new AI data center that looks like it has been in the works for a while. I am sure you know that if anyone stays on top of the news, it’s me. If anyone regularly reads and subscribes and pays for news, it’s me.

And I didn’t know anything about a data center coming to my own county.

I had no idea, and by the time I did have an idea, it looked as if the “planning” part of the AI data center deal is well past the planning stage. It looks like some developers came in and met with county officials without making noise. It also looks like there may already have been at least one NDA signed with the data center developers, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. Why would anyone need to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a developer?

... What a ripoff, and for what? The data center is only projecting 100-130 jobs, and I am not sure I believe that number. There has been no transparency on what kind of jobs or how long they would last.

My god…I feel like we are being sold a pile of shit, and they aren’t even bothering to wrap it with a bow... 

Read the whole story, told in Jess's inimitable voice. 

• Meanwhile, wherever they see a likely target, ICE/DHS is scooping up rural warehouse spaces in which to lock up immigrants they want to deport, all to meet Trump and Stephen Miller's quest to Make America White Again. 

Neighbors don't much like the idea of having a warehouse/concentration camp nearby. Even Republicans don't want these uses in their town. Bolt reports from Roxbury, New Jersey:

On Christmas Eve, residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, a township 50 miles west of Manhattan, learned from a Washington Post article that the Department of Homeland Security had plans to purchase a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town and convert it into an ICE detention facility. The news was part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s larger plan to buy up warehouses across the country to house 92,600 new detention beds for expediting deportations, a scheme acting ICE director Todd Lyons likened to “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” 

By mid-January, Roxbury’s Township Council, an elected body of seven people, all Republicans, passed a resolution affirming that it “unequivocally opposes” modifying town warehouses for ICE use. Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo, who forms part of the council, stated during the vote that his approval of the resolution did not mean that he opposes the country’s immigration laws. 

The resolution was merely symbolic; it wouldn’t actually stop ICE from buying the warehouse in town and turning it into a detention center....

... The fight against the facility has brought together an unlikely coalition of immigrant rights advocates and town leadership who have said they support the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda but do not want to host an ICE facility. Small towns across the U.S. caught in clashes with DHS over warehouse conversions have turned to similar arguments in a bid to stop the projects. 

“The town council is unsurprisingly caught in a very difficult position, because they are having to fight efforts from the Trump administration, despite them being very supportive in general, of Donald Trump and the Republicans in power,” William Angus, the co-founder of immigrant advocacy organization Project No Ice North Jersey Alliance, or Project NINJA, told Bolts. ...

 The story goes on to explain the projected effect of turning the warehouse into a camp:

... The facility has just four toilets and is approved to supply 12,000 gallons of water each day. But increasing the capacity for 1,500 people would require roughly 187,500 gallons each day and add more than fifteen times the amount of sewage currently processed by the facility, according to the lawsuit. 

Despite DHS needing approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Highlands Council to complete the project, Spinelli said that the agency has not filed plans for changing the water system. The review of the site could happen quickly, he explained, but there would likely be new legal challenges to the final decision filed by the losing side that would stretch on for years.  ...

The Roxbury facility is not alone in facing challenges from neighbors. All over the country, ICE concentration camps are meeting resistance from rural people. The New York Times [gift article] reports on an array of challenges as rural communities resist the unexpected role the Trump administration has assigned to them: "Sacrifice Zone for MAGA bigotry."

Now they want to test the water to control women

If you live in a blue state -- and especially in a blue city -- it's easy to forget that a part of the MAGA authoritarian project is to rob women of our bodily autonomy.

If you live somewhere where the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision empowered state governments to outlaw abortion and the people have not been able to stop anti-abortion pols from implementing the ban, this will probably not surprise you.

Jessica Valenti who keeps track of the anti-abortion fanatics at Abortion, Every Day reports a new assault on women's freedoms. The Trumped-up EPA Tells States to Test the Water for Birth Control and Abortion Pills.

... After years of anti-abortion pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recommended that states test their drinking water for abortion medication and birth control, putting the drugs on a federal list of potential “contaminants.”

The move clears the way for Republicans to restrict abortion and contraception under the guise of protecting the environment—including humiliating regulations that could force women to bag up their pregnancy tissue as medical waste. And at a moment when pregnancy-related arrests are rising and states are moving to punish abortion patients, it marks a dangerous acceleration toward a full-blown reproductive surveillance state.

 ... Anti-abortion activists claim that when women use medication to end their pregnancies, remnants of the drug poison the environment and water supply. They also say that pregnancy tissue is getting into the drinking water, and that Americans are all “drinking abortions.”

As you can probably guess, there is no truth to any of this. ...

She explains that, yes, the scientific studies have been done.

We metabolize abortion and birth control pills like any other medication, and only trace amounts leave our bodies at all. Using anti-abortion logic, every single drug people take—from antidepressants to Viagra—would be a “pollutant.”  

This, like all the right's anti-abortion and anti-contraception hysteria, is about controlling women. We've had enough of this BS!

We must not become numb ...

A Pew Research Center survey in twenty-five countries asked respondents "to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country." According to the report, only people in the USofA thought a majority (by 53%) of their peer citizens were immoral and/or unethical.

There were other countries which came close to that judgement: Turkey (49%) and Brazil (48%) stand out. But people in most of the surveyed countries thought far fewer were off the ethical rails; the most trusting included Canada (7%), Indonesia (8%), and India (9%). 

We sure don't trust each other these days; I'd hazard the U.S. findings are just about Civil War numbers. We believe, earnestly, that those other guys must be despicable and dangerous. I certainly do think that what MAGA has wrought, through attacks on immigrants and people they see as queer, is quite simply evil. Not all Republicans, but hey ...

John Della Volpe of Harvard reports a finding from a focus group with young adults with mixed political leanings in Charlotte, NC. 

ICE Didn’t Just Target Immigrants

I’ve written before about how ICE has become a feeling for Gen Z, not just a policy. Charlotte made that visceral. Nearly every hand went up when I asked if ICE operations were affecting them personally — across race, gender, and political identity.

A 22-year-old Black behavioral therapist described what happened at her autism center: “The families were scared. They didn’t send their kiddos to therapy. Staff were losing out on hours, the kiddos were losing out on hours — nobody felt safe.”

A Hispanic caseworker and new mother described days away from her baby because parents were being detained and children had nowhere to go.

A refugee resettlement worker said even legally documented families stopped attending appointments out of fear.

When legal status doesn’t eliminate fear, enforcement has created something beyond policy.

It has created a climate.

Friday was the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, of the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, AL, which segregationist cops broke up with clubs and horses. 

Selma is nearby and feels live to Alabama-based legal commentator Joyce Vance:

... On the anniversary of Selma, a moment that reminds us that Americans are capable of coming together and doing great things, MAGA remains enthusiastic about where Trump is taking the country while many Americans seem to have become numb from the constant barrage of truly horrible things this administration does and is perfectly fine with. ...

... We need the kind of national courage that took us from Selma to the Voting Rights Act in the space of five months. It’s difficult in a sense because there are so many different outrages that it’s hard for people who love democracy to pick one to coalesce around. They all deserve our attention.

... There is great danger in moments like this, and that is precisely why we need to make sure we don’t let this go.

She's right. Wherever we fit in our kaleidoscopic patterns of mutual incomprehension and resistance to ignorance and cruelty, we cannot let go. 

Checking in on a National Park bookshop

Nestled under the Golden Gate Bridge next to the Fort Point historic site, the National Park Service runs a book and trinket shop to lure the many visitors who flock to the area. It's called The Warming Hut, a proper name for a place often wrapped in dense fog -- though not so often in winter as bright sun shone yesterday.

Since the MAGA wrecking crew took over, I've been watching to see whether their attempt to erase the true, messy, magnificent history of this state and country had yet prevailed in the book display. 

Last July, The Warming Hut displayed several shelves of both adult and children's books which explored the history and present conditions of which the regime is trying to keep us ignorant: lots of serious treatments of dispossession of California's natives, of Black soldiers, of looming climate change. 

By late September 2025, the adult books that offend MAGA had been pushed to a shelf in the corner, but they were still there. However, the children's section was still magnificent -- wildly diverse and clearly curated by some thoughtful employee who cared.

Yesterday, though depleted, the NPS is still selling books which MAGA would abhor. (Do they read? I shouldn't be snotty, I suppose.)

Here's the adult shelf, small but still there:

Meanwhile, the children's section is still imaginative, if not large as it once was:

Click to enlarge.

I'll check in again next summer and see how nuance, truth and complexity are holding up in this national park ...

Another murder in Minneapolis -- say a prayer and speak the truth

We gathered at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, memorializing Alex Pretti's murder in Minneapolis -- and finding comradeship with each other. The crowd was large, not so much militant as determined.

There was anger -- yes!

Apparently a good nurse, from the accounts of Pretti's life that are coming out. There were many in the San Francisco crowd who looked to be nurses themselves.

This crowd was determined ...

• • •

The Rev. Angela Denker pastors at an Evangelical Lutheran Church not far from the murder site in Minneapolis. She writes:

I write to you so sad - I feel like I cry every few hours - and also so, so mad. At the many who prepared the way for this gratuitous violence and hatred. At the Christians, Christian leaders, and politicians who stubbornly dig in their heels, who refuse to repent, who insist upon more and more bloodshed, sacrifices poured out to the gods of violence, war, and money.

Pray for Minneapolis, for Minnesota. For Alex’s loved ones. For the eyewitnesses. For the press who were teargassed and pepper sprayed. For the children who see it all and wonder, how they can ever possibly become adults in a world like this. For America. For our churches, embattled and exhausted. For neighborhood leaders who again host vigils and light candles. For brave observers. For the VA Hospital, where I served my chaplaincy internship, and where Alex worked in the ICU. For the woman whom Alex tried to help, who was being assaulted by ICE agents, who then turned their attention to Alex. For the ecosystem of lies and those who profit from them. For justice. For truth. For courage. For love.

Amen. 

Amen indeed on this third Sunday in the Christian season of Epiphany -- the season when we repeat stories of the Living God calling forth improbable followers from among the workers of his time and place to witness the Love he spoke.  

• • •

For a more secular reflection, here's the often lucid Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:

What Can We Do?

For starters, be grateful to the people of Minneapolis. Bearing witness today in America requires physical courage. Every single person who steps out their front door in Minneapolis to observe, document, and protest the actions of our government is taking their lives in their hands.

These men and women are the kind of patriots you would have seen at Lexington and Concord. I am in awe of their valor. They started this resistance to protect their neighbors, but what is happening in Minneapolis now is bigger than that. They are standing against the might of the Trump regime not just for themselves, but for all of us.

 Second, don’t look away. Don’t forget what is happening. Don’t give in to despair or exhaustion.

Third, do not tolerate false equivalence from responsible quarters. Anyone in public life who cannot call things by their right names here should be shamed, swept aside, and ultimately ignored.

Fourth, understand that this moment requires new structures and new thinking. The resistance in Minneapolis is unlike anything we’ve seen in recent American history. The political opposition must think anew as well. And any part of the political opposition that continues to act as though these are still ordinary times should be swept aside, too. ...

Fifth, as we identify ways to give material support to the Minneapolis resistance, be ready to offer whatever you can.

... They want us confused. They want us too exhausted to fight back. You don’t have to go into the streets of Minnesota to fight back. You can simply state plainly that our government is lying to us. Say it somewhere. Online. To a friend or family member. But do not let their lies go unanswered by truth.

MAGA sells a fiction of unearned ease and familiarity to its people

I genuinely don't understand why liberals/progressives/Democrats run away from defending what's called D.E.I. Diversity, equity and inclusion make this a more livable and interesting country. There are a lot of us; we're not all the same historically and culturally. We have different habits and customs. Lots of these are probably not to your taste or mine. 

But, as Rodney King asked after the L.A. riots touched off in 1992 by the police beating him to a pulp: "Can't we all get along?"

Okay, so I get it that bureaucracies can be stupid and ham-handed in the creation and implementation of policies thought to encourage D.E.I. I get that a society affirming diversity asks adjustments from all of us to accommodate our neighbors. But come on, we're grown ups -- mostly. And ALL our ethical and religious traditions say, at least more often than not, just get over yourself!

When we're taught to act stupidly and against our interests in getting along with neighbors, it's worth asking "who benefits?" Yes, I do see an entire MAGA party encouraging white people, especially men, to get all hot about other people getting the inclusion that they want too. Of course that distracts from real problems. But come on ...

The feminist journalist Jill Filipovic takes a swing at all this which I find convincing: 

... The Trump administration and his MAGA supporters want to do away with the very thing that has made our country exceptional that because they feel uncomfortable around people who aren’t like them. That’s it. They just don’t like people who are different. They don’t like the feeling of being cognitively or emotionally stretched. They don’t want the kind of friction that comes from having to share space with people who don’t think, speak, and live like them.

Conservatives have long mocked liberals for being snowflakes. But being unable to emotionally cope because your neighbors speak a different language is about as fragile as it gets.

“Life should be hard” is not a very good rallying cry. And to be clear, I don’t think that life should be hard. But I think life should be interesting. I don’t think an interesting life is built by engineering the world around you to feel easy and familiar and always in immediate service of your desires.

I think a good life requires trying at things, learning things, taking risks, facing fear, pushing through discomfort, getting hurt, feeling really fucking frustrated. It requires caring for other people even when they make themselves hard to care for, and accepting care even when it doesn’t come in its ideal form. 

As a culture, we are running away from the discomfort friction causes, which means we are running away from deep connection, from cognitive expansion, from the discipline that builds devotion, from creative spark, and from the invisible and painful work of effort and failure and abrasion and confrontation that all make room for that spark to light. 

I'm not ready to give up on trying for her idea of a "good life" because too many people are insecure. We can do better. 

• • •

And some folks are doing better. USA Today reports: 

Costco’s board of directors voted unanimously to recommend shareholders reject an anti-DEI measure, arguing that diverse employees and suppliers fuel innovation in the merchandise it stocks and the services it offers.

More than 98% of Costco shareholders voted down the investor proposal that called for management to investigate the business risks of its diversity initiatives. 

That wasn't so hard, was it? 

 

Roman Catholic bishops do right by immigrants

 

As pastors, we the bishops of the United States are bound to our people by ties of communion and compassion in Our Lord Jesus Christ. We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones. ...

... To our immigrant brothers and sisters, we stand with you in your suffering, since, when one member suffers, all suffer (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:26). You are not alone!

We note with gratitude that so many of our clergy, consecrated religious, and lay faithful already accompany and assist immigrants in meeting their basic human needs. We urge all people of good will to continue and expand such efforts. 

We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement. We pray that the Lord may guide the leaders of our nation, and we are grateful for past and present opportunities to dialogue with public and elected officials. In this dialogue, we will continue to advocate for meaningful immigration reform. 

The Roman Catholic hierarchy is not where I am accustomed to look first for affirmation of universal human dignity. 

But the MAGA agenda of deportation and cruelty offends them and most of us. 

Here they speak bravely and broadly for compassion and justice. 

No wonder the Commonwealth of Virginia turned more blue

It seems appropriate to pass on Diana Butler Bass' observations on what her Fairfax County suburban DC neighbors did yesterday. They have very good reason to hate the MAGA/Trump regime and they showed it.

Inside the tidy houses on my leafy street, they are ANGRY. They are hurt, furious, mad, distressed, and distraught. Because, in nearly every house on my street, Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Mike Johnson, and Donald Trump came calling — and destroyed their family’s sense of vocation, purpose, and well-being. These nice, middle-class families, committed to things like patriotism and service and the common good, had their work and incomes ripped from them in a fury of gleeful destruction. And the very government that once benefited from their labor, now laughs at their trauma.

The leafy suburbs have been, in effect, one more victim of political cruelty and a revenge crusade.

Some of my neighbors hang out signs. Some go to protests and “No Kings” rallies. But mostly, they are an introverted suburban lot. They protest by voting.

And on Tuesday, they turned out in droves to vote.

They voted against Donald Trump. They voted as if their lives and livelihoods — and those of their neighbors — depended on it. (Because they do.)

And they voted up and down tickets, in nearly every hamlet across the Commonwealth for Democrats. Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General (and yes, he had made some awful mistakes in his political career).

The really surprising thing? The people of Virginia handed the House of Delegates to the Democrats. Right now, it appears that Democrats will win 64 house seats, just shy of creating a Democratic supermajority in state government.

I don’t think the Democrats have won this many seats since the Jim Crow era — and things were very, very different back then (and those Jim Crow Democrats were definitely not good for democracy). 

Awaiting Virginia results (Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)

The Washington DC suburbs are not the country. 

But Trump and his Republican enablers have another 12 months largely unhindered by effectual Democratic opposition to tear up the rest of the country as they have these suburbs. Most especially they'll gleefully harm the parts of the country which are the antithesis of MAGA -- racially and ethnically diverse, educated, serious people intent on building a serious future for themselves and their children. 

It will be a struggle. But most of us don't want what MAGA is doing to the country and we intend to take it back.

Let them go hungry!

It's not okay to keep food which is readily available from reaching people who are hungry. Period. 

Yet that is what Budget Tsar Russell Vought is doing in order to try to force Democratic Senators to pass Republicans' big bill which takes money from healthcare and gives it as tax breaks to Donald's billionaire buddies. 

Along with other lawlessness, there goes SNAP food aid and some fishermen for desert.

Economist Paul Krugman summarizes this move:

Despite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? ...

He goes on to show a map of where the resulting hunger will be worst; looks to me as if the harm will be most severe in some native tribal areas and in pockets of the deep South that vote for Trump. They are beating up on the most vulnerable people, a lot their own supporters.

The Orange Toddler has other priorities. Like extorting the government for $230 billion in compensation for investigating his crimes during the previous administration.

And turning the People's House into a tacky monument to himself.

SNAP is a pillar of my working poor neighborhood. The little stores will be in trouble, as well as families, many of which include workers who simply don't make enough to get by without help.

This is what MAGA grievance has wrought. 

Nuggets from Paul Krugman

Busy today -- so I'll pass along some thoughts from the eminent economist and all round decent observer of American follies. 

After the No Kings demonstrations, Krugman seeks to understand why these big actions seemed to unhinge MAGA's always loosely ordered psyche. 

Civil Resistance Confronts the Autocracy

... to show their fealty to Dear Leader, Republicans must engage in bizarre rhetoric....

... what are we to make of the completely unhinged things Republicans were saying in advance of the protests? 

... Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, attacked the whole Democratic base:

The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.

These claims were all self-evidently absurd. So why make them? CNN says that it was a “weird strategy”: Calling grandmothers Hamas terrorists won’t convince anyone who isn’t already deep in the MAGA tank and will backfire as those not in the tank see the disconnect between this rhetoric and the reality of the protests.

But it all makes sense once you realize that what we have been seeing in operation isn’t the Trump administration’s strategy for dealing with its critics. It is, instead, the strategies of individual MAGA apparatchiks for dealing with He Who Must Be Obeyed. ...

Krugman has a label and an explanation for this weird behavior from Trump's circle:

... telling lies ... serves the autocrat’s ego. Call it “mendacity inflation.” Trump insists that he’s overwhelmingly popular and that only a lunatic fringe disapproves of his presidency. Well, to show loyalty his hangers-on must go further, declaring that grandmothers and parents pushing prams down 7th Avenue are illegal aliens and violent criminals. The humiliating absurdity is a feature, not a bug. 

Simply lying about demonstrators isn’t enough; to prove their MAGA mettle; people in Trump’s orbit must tell lies that are grotesque and ridiculous.

Again, what’s historically odd about this is that while Trump’s personal depravity may match that of historical autocrats, his power doesn’t. Call him Caligula, if you like, but he can’t order Senators — even Republican Senators — to commit suicide. ... 

One is moved to ask "Yet?" Republicans seem pretty far gone ...

• • •

Today, Krugman goes for Trump's insane essence. He's a mad king now.

... it takes the power of the presidency to threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. And Trump is doing just that – he is descending into states of delusion that are as he would say, like nothing anyone has seen before (notwithstanding Nixon’s nighttime drunken tirades).

On Sunday, the day after millions of Americans marched in the massive No Kings Day protests, Trump dismissed them:

The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective and the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.

Does Trump actually believe that? I suspect that he does. ... There are many, many more examples of Trump’s delusions. He really does seem to believe that Portland is “war-ravaged,” that Chicago is full of “beautiful Black women in MAGA hats” begging him to stop crime, that China is going to cave to his trade demands, that gasoline is $1.99 a gallon, that he will lower drug prices by 500%, and much more.

Granted, previous presidents have also been surrounded by flatterers. In the case of George W. Bush, it’s unlikely that we would have been lied into the Iraq War without Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz assuring him that we would be welcomed as liberators. And we know now that Biden’s inner circle hid his increasing physical frailty from the public and even from his own cabinet members.

Yet Trump’s disconnect from reality is uniquely destructive. No previous president has tried to overturn an election, sought to use the military against U.S. citizens, or sought to use the Justice Department as his own personal vendetta machine. 

The difference is that he’s the first president to live in an autocratic bubble, surrounded by a cult of personality within which nobody dares to criticize him, tell him uncomfortable truths or refuse to engage in blatantly illegal acts.

Furthermore, Trump is clearly getting worse, growing even more out of touch with each passing week. Regardless of whether it’s advancing age or growing frustration, even Trump, I think, realizes that his efforts to suppress all opposition are running into serious resistance. Putting out an AI video of himself dumping shit on protestors suggests panic, not strength. But his claims about what’s happening in America and the world keep getting stranger and wilder.

And Trump’s denial of reality is already having devastating consequences for America, with more to come. ...

We're in for a wild ride.  We don't know how it ends. There remains a fragility to MAGA's grasp on dictatorial power, complicated by its submission to a crazy man and the existence of a massive, probably majority, resistance. Like Krugman, I find it possible that the people will create enough friction so that things will come apart and massive change will happen. To what end? Time will tell.

MAGA's nihilism of grievance has been defeated before

It's almost a throwaway line in a post by European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, a post mostly calling out the failings of the New York Times. But I think it's critically important for understanding much of the behavior of much of MAGA:

Key to understanding [Office of Budget and Management director Russell] Vought’s worldview is the idea that the constitutional order - and with it the “natural” order itself - has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what is no more.

Vought is correct, to a substantial extent. Twentieth century America undermined, eroded, and finally largely tore down the unchallenged power of white supremacy and patriarchy (of which homophobia and gender absolutism are features.) Much of MAGA hates the America the majority of us have made. So they call us "the Left." Some of us may identify with some "Left"; but most of us are just ordinary Americans who have moved on from habitual white supremacy and woman hatred. The country is not perfected, but it has moved on from MAGA's cultural grievances. 

And Trumpism is wildly unpopular and getting more so with every price increase and raid on Black and brown neighbors.

So, because MAGA lost the culture, its supporters lost hope for the future. To replace an imperfect democracy, they think they've found their king. MAGA attracts losers, whose only unifying idea is to tear it all down. 

Paul Krugman catches this reality when he digs into the material and consequential stupidity of MAGA's war on science:

... Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want. ... A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. ... 

... Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over.

Historian of fascism John Ganz calls out MAGA as embodying the nationalism of losers. 

... MAGA’s base of support comes from those parts of the country and those social classes and regions that actually did lose out or never gained from the international system. Its bourgeoisie is mostly from the heartland, not from the coasts.  

Its intellectual class, or clerisy, is drawn from those who could not achieve the first rank under the old “meritocratic” system, who couldn’t fully enter the cosmopolitan elite, or decided to defect from its ranks opportunistically to gain pride of place in the new movement. ... 

This fear, hatred, and envy of the cosmopolitan elite, this anti-Atlanticist, anti-globalist current, sometimes called “isolationism,” but more correctly called sovereigntism or even just nationalism, is a longstanding constellation of ideas in American politics ...

Dorothy Thompson recognized these second-raters in her classic 1941 essay, Who Goes Nazi? 

For that matter, so did my mother, who, though a Republican housewife, recognized and participated in warning against European fascism during its rise in the mid-1930s.

This country has always attracted the world's desperate who hoped to become winners. Are we going to let the MAGA losers kill off that hope? NO KINGS! 

Red Scare all over again. We've been here before.

By now you've probably heard the story. MAGA is seeking its revenge against modern America by attacking cities and their inhabitants. Lawyer and activist Jay Kuo recounts the attack by Donald Trump's goon squad on a Chicago apartment building this week: 

... federal authorities, including agents from ICE, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), and the FBI sought to make good on Donald Trump’s recent threats against U.S. cities. 

In the dead of night, they swarmed a residential building in Chicago, even dropping in from Black Hawk helicopters like some sort of special commandos going after dangerous terrorists. They indiscriminately broke into people’s apartments and yanked them from their beds. Some residents were naked. They ransacked apartments and even zip tied small children. Some U.S. citizens were detained for hours. 

... The justification for this blatantly illegal and unconstitutional assault is a familiar one. The regime claims it was going after drug traffickers and gang members. But once again, it offered no proof. We just have to take their word for it. Authorities seized people first, without probable cause, treating merely living in the same complex as suspected undocumented migrants as a crime. 

Eboni Watson, neighbor

... “They just treated us like we were nothing,” [resident Pertissue] Fisher said.

She had come out to the hallway in her nightgown around 10 p.m. Monday, where armed ICE agents were shouting “police.”

“It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face,” Fisher said. “They asked my name and my date of birth and asked me, did I have any warrants?”—apparently meaning outstanding warrants for her arrest. “And I told them, ‘No,’ I didn’t,” she responded.

Fisher relayed that she was handcuffed and only released some five hours later around 3 a.m. ....

It's no surprise that this sort of government terrorism, backed by panic among the ignorant, has been a recurrent feature of U.S. history. After World War I, the country was unsettled. An unpopular foreign war and oligarchic exploitation of the country's workers provoked protest from society's underclass and fright in the ruling class. Might there be Reds under the bed?  David R. Lurie describes what came next: 

Out of control federal agents invading the nation’s cities and kidnapping people en masse, a president and his cronies fomenting public anger and fear of immigrants, and dissent suddenly declared to be an illegal threat to national security.

All of that is happening now. But it also happened in 1919, at the height of what came to be called the first Red Scare, when a young J. Edgar Hoover and his new federal police force led a crackdown on dissent, focused on “radical” Americans born abroad.

Hoover and then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had plans to use another tool now favored by the Trump regime — mass deportation. But while Hoover and Palmer did succeed in silencing prominent dissenters, their deportation scheme largely came undone as the public became increasingly revulsed by the government’s performative cruelty and lawlessness.

... But as the weeks and months proceeded, something else began to happen. Members of the American public, who previously seemed to agree with the mob that jeered at [defiant anarchist Emma] Goldman, began to change their minds as evidence emerged of the brutality and lawlessness of the G-Men. And the deportation scheme ended up failing. Out of 6,396 cases Hoover brought, fewer than 600 ended in deportations.

The people can be misled to applaud injustices for a season; we can also repudiate injustices. A recent report found that attempts by MAGA TV drunk and Trump's U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to charge protesters as felons in occupied Washington, DC, were collapsing at an unheard of rate. Grand juries made up of fellow Washingtonians refuse to indict.

We don't like this cruel BS. We can turn the tide. We've done that before. No Kings on October 18!

• • •

I thought it might be interesting to share how the 1919 Palmer raids played out for someone I once knew who was caught up in them.

In that year, Dorothy Day was swooped up in the general lawless repression in Chicago. Today Dorothy is remembered as a founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and potential Roman Catholic saint.  Then she was a drifting, loosely leftist, young intellectual. Being a young woman, her experience of the Palmer raids was different from that of male workers and agitators. She recounts this in From Union Square to Rome, a 1938 autobiography.

On wandering back from an aimless year in Europe after the war, she discovered: 

... The Socialists were too dull. They had too little vitality as far as I was concerned, and my allegiance for the most part was with the I. W. W.’s whose ideas in regard to solidarity and direct action appealed greatly to my youth.

 It was about this time that I had my second jail experience. ... I was associated at that time with some I. W. W.’s who had their headquarters on West Madison Street, Chicago. Across the street from their printing office was an old rooming house where a great many of them stayed, and where in true Wobbly fashion they had an everlasting pot of Mulligan on the fire. Everyone who came in was supposed to contribute to the pot whether it were a bunch of carrots, a piece of meat or a few pounds of potatoes. It was kept going from week to week, and when the funds were low the boys used to beg from grocers in the neighborhood. Those who had funds took care of their companions who had none, and there was a good spirit of comradeship. Their slogan was “An injury to one is an injury to all” and their sense of solidarity went even into housekeeping details.

... One day I opened the paper to find [a female acquaintance in these circles] had taken bichloride of mercury and was in the city hospital. They managed to save her life but when she was released from the hospital she went straight to the I. W. W. lodging house where she knew she would be taken in. I went over to see her in the evening to bring her food and planned to stay for the night with her. She was still ill and very much depressed and not altogether happy that they had dragged her back from death.

We were undressed and getting into bed when a knock came at the door and four men burst in telling us that we were under arrest for being inmates of a disorderly house. ... we were alone. It made no difference that radical headquarters all over Chicago were being raided and wholesale arrests being made. We could not feel that we were a part of a movement that was suffering persecution. Perhaps we were not sufficiently indoctrinated.

It had not occurred to us that it was unconventional or unseemly to be staying in a lodging house on West Madison Street. ... The ugly fact remained that we were two young girls arrested by four plain-clothes men who refused to leave the room while we got up and dressed for fear we would try to get away by the fire-escape. These were the days of the Palmer red raids when no one was safe. Those were times of persecution for all radicals. ...

Dorothy found her subsequent jail experience both brutal and enlightening.

... It was just a case of our knowing that these things were occurring every day and yet not realizing that they could occur to us. We were booked on the charge of being inmates of a disorderly house. We were not allowed to use the telephone to get in touch with a lawyer or our friends, although according to law we should have had this privilege. ...

... Before I had merely read about prison life and had agreed with Tolstoi that such punishment of criminals was futile when we were guilty for permitting such a system as ours to exist and that we, too, should bear the penalty for the crimes committed by those unfortunate ones. We all formed part of one body, a social body, and how could any limb of that body commit a crime alone?

We were photographed and finger-printed and finally taken to the morals court. Before we were placed in the detention pen we were examined for venereal diseases. When men are arrested during a red raid the police can express their brutality with rubber hoses and blackjacks. They can show their scorn and contempt for those who are trying to “undermine” our present system by kicking and beating them until their victims are a degraded mass of quivering flesh. 

They show more gallantry in regard to the women. They have a more subtle way of affronting their sensibilities. They can charge them with being prostitutes, make them submit to degrading physical examinations, and throw them into the company of those whom they feel should degrade them. But I felt more horror of the police and that police matron during this experience than I did of the [street walking] women. The women did not disgust me, it was their profession that disgusted me. They themselves may have been superior, as human beings go, to their captors. There was no pride or hypocrisy among them. 

The prostitutes Dorothy was jailed alongside worked for pimps who quickly bailed them out. Dorothy and her friend were locked up for several further days before a reporter friend who had discovered their incarceration managed to get them out.

Her short jail time reinforced Dorothy's conviction about whose side she was on.