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.
This movement has created enough history so organizers come with a car load of highly appropriate signs.
Reporting in the U.S. on the Afrikaner "refugees" -- some nearly 60 white people -- that Donald Trump has imported to this country is driving me nuts. Even media nearly as unsympathetic to this human migration stunt as I am seem to me to fail to convey the many complexities of South Africa. I'm not claiming to know all the ins and outs of South Africa as it exists today, but I did live there briefly in 1990 working on an independent anti-apartheid newspaper and came away with some basics that are missing from many accounts.
• The local Black-led independence party that led the struggle against white rule, the African National Congress (ANC), has won majorities ever since the first free election in 1994. But it's majorities have declined over time and today it governs in coalition with the Democracy Alliance which has a history as white-oriented party.
• Despite its many faults, including corruption, the ANC has continued to stand proudly for the self-expression of peoples enduring European rule, including the people of Palestine/Israel. We can suspect that the racial views of Afrikaners are akin to white Mississippi in 1963. Most Black South Africans, knowing racism, assume Palestinians have lived under something like the apartheid regime. When the issue is the oppression and genocide of a people, nuance gets lost. (Properly on this in my view, but that's another topic.)
• Rather importantly, given where Donald Trump probably gets his "information," Elon Musk is NOT an Afrikaner. He's from the wealthy English-speaking former ruling imperial class of the country, a man unreformed after the fall of white rule apparently.
The BBC has published a very helpful explainer that rings true:
South African History Online sums up Afrikaner identity by pointing out that "the modern Afrikaner is descended mainly from Western Europeans who settled on the southern tip of Africa during the middle of the 17th Century".
A mixture of Dutch (34.8%), German (33.7%) and French (13.2%) settlers, they formed a "unique cultural group" which identified itself "completely with African soil", South African History Online noted.
Their language, Afrikaans, is quite similar to Dutch.
But as they planted their roots in Africa, Afrikaners, as well as other white communities, forced black people to leave their land.
As was true in the United States, this small colonizing minority population could only rule by repressing the vast majority population, indigenous Black and later "coloured" people of Asian and mixed race backgrounds. Unlike in the U.S., neither Afrikaners nor later British imperialists succeeded in killing off the "others," remaining a well-off, empowered minority. They therefore put the others to work on farms and in mines.
In 1948, South Africa's Afrikaner-led government introduced apartheid, or apartness, taking racial segregation to a more extreme level.
This included laws which banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands.
They were also denied a decent education, with Afrikaner leader Hendrik Verwoerd infamously remarking in the 1950s that "blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water".
Afrikaner dominance of South Africa ended in 1994, when black people were allowed to vote for the first time in a nationwide election, bringing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to power.
Afrikaners currently number more than 2.5 million out of a population of more than 60 million ...
... South Africa's most recent census, done in 2022, shows that Coloureds, (an officially used term meaning people of mixed racial origin) are the largest minority, making up 8% of the population. They are followed by white people, including Afrikaners, at 7%, and Asians at 3%.
The ANC has stood for what South Africans call "non-racial" government. There's plenty of grievance and prejudice, but by and large Afrikaners can have a chance in the country, certainly better chances than the Black African majority.
Even though white-minority rule ended in 1994, its effects are still being felt.
Average living standards are far higher for the white community than black people.
White people occupy 62.1% of top management posts, despite only accounting for 7.7% of the country's economically active population, according to a recent report by South Africa's Commission for Employment Equity.
The government has enacted a number of laws to try and redressing the balance, such as the Broad-Based Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity Acts. An amended version of the second act imposes strict hiring targets for non-white employees.
As in the U.S., this official affirmative action policy is not popular with white people who previously didn't have to compete so hard. The ANC's coalition partner, the Democracy Alliance, is challenging the acts in court.
Elon is telling Trump lies about his interactions with South Africa, according to its government:
... Trump's close adviser Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, has referred to the country's "racist ownership laws", alleging that his satellite internet service provider Starlink was "not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I'm not black".
To operate in South Africa, Starlink needs to obtain network and service licences, which both require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups.
This mainly refers to South Africa's majority black population, which was shut out of the economy during the racist system of apartheid.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) - a regulatory body in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors - told the BBC that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence....
Only a small minority of Afrikaners are thrilled with Trump's offer of refugee status:
After Trump's offer, Afrikaner lobby group Solidarity posted an article on its website headlined: "Ten historical reasons to stay in South Africa".
In parliament last week, the leader of the right-wing Freedom Front Plus party said they were committed to South Africa.
"We are bound to Africa and will build a future for ourselves and our children here," Corné Mulder said.
Let's give the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, the last word here:
[He] has said it was "completely false" to claim that "people of a certain race or culture are being targeted for persecution".
Referring to the first group who have moved to the U.S., he said: "They are leaving because they don't want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country and our constitution."
South Africa is one of the most violent and complicated places I have ever spent time. As is usual with Trump and MAGA, they are not doing justice to the intricacy of the nation. Complexity is hard.
According to CNN Business, Elon Musk has been having a bad season in his Tesla business:
The automaker reported its revenue fell 9%, with auto revenue falling 20%. Adjusted income tumbled 39%. Those drops were bigger than forecast. It’s net income, the strictest definition of its profitability, plunged 71% compared to a year earlier.
Tesla warned investors in early April that it had suffered its biggest drop in sales in its history during the first quarter, delivering 50,000 fewer vehicles compared to the first three months of last year. The sales plunge meant that Tesla recorded its lowest sales in nearly three years.
The decline is stunning for a company that until recently was reporting year-over-year sales growth of between 20% and 100% virtually every quarter, which was largely responsible for its lofty stock price that made it worth more than any other automaker in the world.
Europe doesn't want his cars; neither does China which makes better, cheaper electric vehicles. The Cybertruck is a complete bust with eight recalls in 2024 and 2025. Trump's tariffs will screw up the US market.
Elon's having a well deserved bad moment.
Sean McGarvey from the National Association of Building Trades Unions has a message for the Musk/Trump regime. These are not generally good people to piss off.
Abrego Garcia was a legally-employed sheet metal apprentice before Trump's immigration goons kidnapped him to El Salvador. He was here under a judicial order that forbade the government sending him to that country.
They thought perhaps 500 people -- a lot for a seasonal population of 20,000 on the Island. I noted the wide age distribution. A good day and the rain held off until the very end.
This morning we begin to get reports of the shitshow MAGA and RFK Jr are making of the American health complex. It's bad. It will be a few days before the newsmedia suss out the full catastrophe.
But this morning we get The Bulwark's new healthcare writer Jonathan Cohn taking up what those of us who live in the reality-based universe frequently find ourselves reverting to these day: why are these lunatics tearing down the country we have known? What motivates them? I found this summary helpful:
THE WRECKAGE FROM TUESDAY’S CUTS ONCE MORE raised the question of why, instead of undertaking a more carefully calibrated set of staff reductions, the Trump administration cut so crudely and destructively.
Most likely, multiple motives are at work, coming from different parts of the Trump coalition. For ideologues like Russ Vought, the Project 2025 participant who now leads the Office of Management and Budget, this is a chance to cut the federal government down to their preferred size—and to wipe out all the supposedly left-wing activists they believe have burrowed into the bureaucracy.
For Elon Musk and the DOGE team, quite possibly, there’s an element of techno-arrogance at work. And for Trump himself, the cuts would seem to fit in neatly with his agenda of attacking the “deep state” he believes thwarted him during his first term.
That leaves Kennedy, the secretary, who if so inclined could have pushed back on these reductions or at least demanded they proceed in a more deliberate way. There are no signs that happened. Instead, the one hallmark of Kennedy’s tenure so far has been a disregard—some would say disdain—for the department’s veterans and the way they do things.
You can see it in the expertise that the Trump administration cavalierly dispatched on Tuesday. You can see it, also, in how RFK Jr. is dealing with real-world challenges the department currently faces.
Right now the United States is confronting two serious threats that fall under HHS jurisdiction: the measles outbreak that started in Texas and has now spread to three other states, and the strands of avian flu decimating poultry flocks. ...
 |
| Photo from 2009. Will these Unitarian Universalists have to come back to the fray? |
The crowd outside the dealership on Van Ness Avenue just gets larger each week.
The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) -- that's the postal workers union -- held rallies all over the country today against the Trump/Musk threat to privatize the post office. They were out in force on San Francisco's Embarcadero today.
NALC sure doesn't trust Trump's Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and DOGE to identify inefficiencies in the complex nationwide mail system.
The union issued a letter:
As DOGE attempts to tackle [financial and pension issues] at the Postal Service, it is important that they know what our members do and who they are. Letter carriers are lifelines to American communities who uphold our Constitutionally mandated service obligation by delivering to 169 million delivery points, including 51.5 million rural households and businesses, six and sometimes seven days a week.
Five years ago, during a global pandemic when most businesses shut down, letter carriers did not take one day off. We did not work from home. Instead, we delivered every single day, just as we have for 250 years.
... Common sense solutions are what the Postal Service needs, not privatization efforts that will threaten 640,000 postal employees’ jobs, 7.9 million jobs tied to our work, and the universal service every American relies on daily.
As is true in so many arenas, the people most likely to be hurt by diminished postal service are poor and rural folks -- so many of whom were Trump voters. Let's all of us stand up for a strong national postal service. It's part of what brings us together as one country.
This Schimel guy is really a piece of work; take a look.
Wisconsin elects its Supreme Court judges. Right now, the court leans toward Dems -- that is, in support of abortion rights for women and against a Republican plan to disenfranchise half of Wisconsin voters by corrupt gerrymandering. Electing Susan Crawford holds the line.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party is probably the most effective state party apparatus in the country. If any Dems can go up against Elon, it's WisDems. Our small donations can still help get out the vote in this April 1 election. Voting has already begun.
I've contributed; if you can, you should too.
Why are Trump, along with Musk and his Muskrats, breaking government and the institutions that make this country a somewhat livable place? Seems crazy.
A couple of our most significant economic thinkers took up the puzzle in the last few days. Short answer: yes, the Trump regime is crazy -- and vile too.
Adam Tooze is the preeminent English language economic historian of the 20th and 21st century world capitalist system. (I have written about his highly accessible books here, here, here and here.) He does the work to engage what passes for economic theory claimed by Trump's intellectual apologists and wrecking appointees.
I began to wonder whether this search for a rational wing in Trump’s economic policy is not, in fact, a step towards sane-washing and whether this sane-washing is not driven by some engrained mainstream framings of America’s problems that react in sympathy with the Trump administration’s rhetoric of crisis and victimization even if they are out of sympathy with the Trump administration in general.
Is there a real and important continuity of problems in America’s political economy that at least parts of the new Trump administration are trying to address, thus forming a continuity with the Biden team and Trump 1.0?
Or is the shellshocked commentariat of 2025 in the grip of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in which our own inner fears lead us to engage with our captors in a way which denies the actual reality of being hurled into a mad house? Call it Mar-a-Lago (Accord) Syndrome.
... we are all struggling to find some kind of rational purchase on the unhinged situation created by the Trump administration.
Turns out, after serious engagement with some Trump apologists, that he finds "no there there" in Gertrude Stein's memorable formulation.
The Stockholm syndrome element kicks in when we come to the original framing of the problem: The belief that something must be done. Once you are convinced that “something must be done”, you become vulnerable to someone hawking a big plan to “do things”.
Why do sane people in contemporary America believe that “something must be done”? Ignoring the reflexive element of crisis by which Trump himself is the main reason something must be done, which renders one susceptible to any big idea that might fix Trump (even if elements of that “fix” are shared with analysis offered by the Trump camp itself) etc etc, there are two main schools of thought:
• 1. American deindustrialization and class balance. ...
• 2. American debt....
Both arguments 1. and 2. are well known. Both are also contentious. No reader of Chartbook will be surprised to hear that I find both 1. and 2. unconvincing. But that is not my point here. My point is that if you do believe either 1. or 2. you need to be on your guard against Mar-A-Lago syndrome.
Even if you disapprove of the Trumpites style and lawlessness, you may be tempted to take at their word the more reasonable members of the highjack team who insist that they offer a dramatic and comprehensive plan to address the crisis you also believe in, leading you to lose track of the fact that … they are highjackers and they are holding you hostage!
By buying into the reality of underlying problem that Mar-A-Lago claims to be addressing you run the risk of overemphasizing the rational element in Trump 2.0.
Tooze simply finds no rational element.
None of us really knows where this clown car is headed and what drives it on its crazy course. It seems like a mystery even to many on board. Quite reasonably we look for elements of rationality. We ask: who inside MAGA 2.0 is thinking and what are their thoughts? We then relate that to our own efforts to diagnose America’s history and the history of the world economy. ...
... To historically minded people it is appealing for obvious reasons. But it puts us at risk of is underestimating the radicalism of the break marked by the Trump administration. In search of historical context we miss what is most historically significant. We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it.
Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.
You can read the entire Tooze argument here.
Paul Krugman, former NY Times columnist and Nobel Prize for economics recipient, comes to similar conclusions, even more pithily expressed. In trying to understand the Trump/Musk vandalism in government, he sees no plan -- just the wounded egos of ignorant men.
My guess, instead, is that it’s an ego thing, that Social Security has become to Musk what Canada has become to Donald Trump. Both men at one point said something stupid, something that would have turned them into laughingstocks if there weren’t so much fear in the air. But both men have been unable to let go, doubling down in what amounts to an attempt to redeem their initial foolishness.
In case you’ve forgotten, back in December, when Justin Trudeau visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump taunted him by suggesting that Canada become a U.S. state, calling him “Governor Trudeau.” Some people suggested that it was meant as a joke, but it would be more accurate to call it a dominance display.
But once Trump realized how ridiculous the performance made him look, he refused to let go. Instead, annexing Canada seems to have become a fundamental plank of Trump’s foreign policy, with his demands getting ever more insistent the more obvious it becomes that Canadians loathe the idea.
Trump's chief of staff listens to him threaten to annex Canada
Since then, Musk has replicated his insecure co-president and put Social Security under the gun:
Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?
In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from any role in setting policy. But this is America in 2025, so Trump amplified the already-refuted claim when addressing Congress, and Musk seems more powerful than ever.
Furthermore, Musk refuses to give up his Social Security smears, making the completely implausible claim that fraudulent use of Social Security numbers accounts for 10 percent of federal spending. And I’d argue that that the plan to effectively cut off many disabled Americans is best seen as part of a desperate effort to find or pretend to find Social Security fraud, retroactively justifying Musk’s big mistake.
Still, does the plan have to be this cruel to the most vulnerable Americans? As I see it, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug.
... It's hard to escape the sense that DOGE staffers are actually enjoying this. And why not? We’re mostly talking about poorly socialized young men suddenly given the power to ruin other people’s lives, taking their cues from a leader who has declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” So why should we be surprised that the DOGE kids’ rampage through the government looks more and more like a remake of Lord of the Flies?
Krugman read Tooze's screed and agrees.
Look, I understand that it’s more fun to write an article about the supposed emergence of a new economic philosophy than to write yet another article about how ignorant men are, once again, saying stupid things. And I guess some journalists are uncomfortable at the thought that people with great power to shape policy have no idea (or rather nothing but false ideas) what they’re doing.
But trying to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpist international economic policy is sanewashing that misinforms readers rather than helping their understanding.
... My point is that Trump believes many blatantly false things that suit his prejudices. Why imagine that he and his courtiers have sophisticated ideas and a deep strategy when it comes to international economics?
On the surface, Trump’s trade policy looks stupid and destructive. Dig deeper, and you discover that this first impression was completely valid. Trying to pretend otherwise is just misinforming readers.
We don't have to be overawed because these guys are considered some of the best academia has to offer in their field. They care about being understood and they have given us the goods: Trump's economic antics are stupid and cruel, without any rationality beyond grift and grievance.
And it is. Carscoops thunders: Tesla’s Q1 Sales May Be Its Worst In Years As Analysts Warn Stock Could Sink 50%
And sales of the car are even worse in Europe than in the United States. If Elon weren't deluded by his inner conviction that he's an epic warrior for something or other, he'd notice he is on the way to brand failure. (Car publications will also tell you his cars aren't as good or innovative as they once seemed.)
The New York Times points out:
So many Democratic buyers appear to be fleeing Tesla that even Mr. Trump’s best sales pitch is unlikely to woo enough new customers to fill the vacuum, auto experts said. Analysts at JPMorgan predict Tesla will deliver its fewest cars in the first quarter than it had in three years.
“When you make your product unattractive to half the market, I promise you, you won’t increase your sales,” said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, an automotive research and consulting firm.
The Washington Post observes:
As Tesla shareholders press Musk to return his attention to the firm that made him the world’s richest person, the [photo op on the White House lawn] also highlighted how Musk’s deepening alliance with Trump has been boon and burden to his expansive business empire.
... Musk’s bet that serving — and helping to lead — the MAGA onslaught will benefit him economically is risky to say the least,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University. “Musk’s companies may get so tainted in the eyes of many ordinary citizens that they will suffer irreparable damage to their reputations.”
“The danger for Musk is that he becomes the embodiment of crony capitalism,” Barrett said.
It's going to take awhile for the impact of other Trump/Musk depredations on our lives to become widely felt and visible. Maybe when Social Security no longer issues checks? Or your kid gets measles? The possibilities get wider by the day.
But you can speak out right now in front of Elon Musk's Tesla showrooms. Visit #teslatakedown to find an action near you.
That is the common thread. Time and again this past week, Trump declared that he has the right not only to define American values, but to define who is excluded — and then to act on it.
That is wrong.
This is not the end. Trump does not have that right. The Constitution, many federal laws, and legal precedent all clearly block him from doing so in many respects.
That, as we have too often seen, is not enough. Many people will have to act to ensure it remains so.
Legal challenges, support for those challenges and the challengers, public officials lodging protests and insisting on accountability, and members of the public speaking out are just the start.
Judges will need to continue ruling against the administration when it acts illegally.
All people need to defend the law and oppose these sorts of actions, not because the law is always right or because it will be sufficient to moving forward and away from authoritarianism, but because the law is a foundational shared understanding that allows us to operate as a society.
Trump has regularly scapegoated groups of people — that has been a key part of his cruelty over the past decade and before. This week, to me, felt different because it went beyond broad attacks on large swaths of people. This was a series of directed attacks on individual entities that Trump believes have challenged him or his policies.
As I’ve written previously, the opening of the second Trump administration has been a series of efforts by Trump and others to see what they can get away with. Those have been extreme efforts at times, but they have, primarily, been about his authority within the government — in particular, when contrasted with other branches.
This week was a further escalation of that — testing out whether he can “get away with” taking a clearly more authoritarian path forward.
We must respond accordingly.
Trump and his acolytes and hangers on and enablers don't get to define what the American people value. We're being reminded that solidarity and empathy are the basis of communal civilization; the war of all against all leads only to collapse of what make us human. We need to take our country back from the stupid, shallow, and greedy.
Children Were Forced to Torture Sam Nordquist, Prosecutors Say
Seven people are now charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of Mr. Nordquist, a transgender man ... [gift article]
... The killing of Mr. Nordquist, who prosecutors have said traveled from his home in Minnesota to the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he was held captive and tortured, has prompted a national outcry over anti-transgender discrimination and violence.
... “To have two children have to participate in the beating of another human being, it’s deeply disturbing,” Kelly Wolford, an assistant district attorney in Ontario County, southeast of Rochester, said at a news conference on Wednesday....
... Mr. Nordquist was originally from the suburbs of St. Paul, Minn. Last September, prosecutors said, he traveled to New York to meet Ms. Arzuaga, who was living in Room 22 at a motel called Patty’s Lodge in Canandaigua, N.Y. The two had met online last year, according to investigators, and were in a romantic relationship.
According to the indictment, from roughly Jan. 1 to Feb. 2, Mr. Nordquist was kept in confinement, beaten, sexually assaulted and denied proper nutrition, among numerous other depraved acts. The torture, investigators said, eventually caused his death.
Ms. Wolford said that Mr. Nordquist’s body was then removed from the motel, wrapped in plastic bags and dumped on the side of the road in a field at a farm in nearby Yates County. Police discovered his body there on Feb. 12.
“In my 20-year law enforcement career, this is one of the most horrific crimes I have ever investigated,” Capt. Kelly Swift of the New York State Police said after the circumstances became public.Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk and their goons didn't kill Sam Norquist. But their vicious denial of the complexities of gender certainly eggs on disturbed people.
But no presidential proclamation can erase the truth of gender fluidity; the Trump administration executive order trying to do so is in a category with trying to declare the earth is flat ...
It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. ...So says Donald. As in so many areas, he's on a collision course with truth.
Hundreds of San Franciscans paid a visit to the Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue on Presidents Day.
Maybe they thought she was a pushover because she has blonde hair that hangs down to her shoulders. Women in the Trump world tend to present such an appearance. They were wrong. The glasses might give her away.
Emil Bove, Trump's flunky at DOJ, eventually did find such a cooperative underling. He also made his corrupt reasons for dropping the case clear in a vituperative letter, as did Trump's new more tame blonde Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Former US Attorney Joyce Vance immediately highlighted the human cost of these dramatic events. The attorneys at the Public Integrity Section proved their legal and personal integrity.
Rather than violate the oaths they took by following orders they could not abide by, they gave up their jobs, their incomes, and their benefits. It’s no small thing to forgo medical insurance when you’ve been living on a prosecutor’s salary and have given up your job with scant warning on a Thursday afternoon in February.
That’s the kind of courage that inspires us, and we hope it will inspire you, too. We have to stand up for what we believe in and what is right. We have to maintain our fight for democracy. It is up to us.Writing in the New York Times, Masha Gessen draws on experience of Putin's Russia to share lessons from this drama:
In a column published last weekend, I mentioned the concept of collective hostage taking, pioneered by the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada. He spent decades trying to understand the methods of enforcement used by totalitarian regimes and the accommodations people make in response. He identified collective hostage taking as one of the most important totalitarian tools. It functions by enforcing collective responsibility and threatening collective punishment.
In Stalin’s time, if people were arrested for a (usually invented) political crime, suspicion would also fall on their family members, their co-workers and their children’s schoolteachers and classmates. In later Soviet years, if dissidents were arrested, their colleagues would be scrutinized; some could lose their jobs or be demoted for “failing to exercise sufficient vigilance.” It is remarkable that Bove, if the reports are accurate, enacted collective hostage taking literally, by putting attorneys in a room and tasking them — over a video call — with finding at least one person to take the fall.
Levada had compassion for people who folded under conditions of collective hostage taking. Normal people confronted with abnormal demands will just try to survive, he wrote. Nothing prepares ordinary people for extraordinary times.
In fact, though, many life experiences do prepare us for times such as these. Most American schools, for example, practice collective punishment: If half of the class is unruly, the entire class may be docked recess. When I heard about lawyers being put in a room, I thought, “This has happened to my kids in New York City public schools.” In this way, U.S. schools are almost indistinguishable from the old Soviet ones.
The legal officials involved in the Adams debacle ... are only some of the first people to confront a choice most of us will face, if we choose to recognize it: Do you act like a schoolchild, who can survive and succeed only by conforming, or do you insist on your dignity and adult agency?
Even in situations where the end seems preordained, as it certainly seemed to be in this case, will you be able to say, “I won’t be the one to do it”? If enough people withhold their cooperation, the end is no longer preordained.The paragraph I've highlighted is our test. Opposing creeping tyranny requires both individual courage and collective solidarity. Americans aren't used to this, but we have many models in our history to draw on: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez, and so many more among the immigrants who made and are still making this land. The people who built this county weren't wimps and we needn't be either.
The institutions of US civil society seem to be getting themselves together to oppose the Trump/Musk coup. We'll find out whether they can be effectual as time goes on. I'm going to list a few of them here:
The new Department of People who Work for a Living:
It’s often hard to recognize the difference between a change, however important — say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade — and an actual break in the political structure of a nation. This country may have seen just one such event in the almost 250 years of its existence: the Civil War that killed between 618,000 and 750,000 combatants (something like 2.5% of the total population) and nearly divided the nation permanently. On that occasion, however imperfect the motives and the liberation, the forces of freedom triumphed over those dedicated to human enslavement. I hope that 100 years from now people will be able to feel the same way about this moment: that the forces of freedom triumphed.
A Paradigm Shift?
Could the second Trump presidency really represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War? It’s so hard to recognize a paradigm shift when you’re in the middle of one. It’s easier when you’ve been dumped out on the other side, but by then it can be too late....
Looks like speculations written 10 days ago hold up all too well. Read all about it.
At San Francisco's 24th Street BART plaza Wednesday evening, several hundred people reinforce the truth: the people are still here. Screw Trump/Musk! They don't get to take over our city and country! We don't quit.
