A premature footnote on 2024/2028

Since we're all going to be living with the promo for Kamala Harris's new book for the next couple of weeks, it feels worthwhile to pass on this reaction from the Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles to her decision to forgo running for governor in California next year. I found it interesting.

What does Bishop John H. Taylor know about politics? Well, in a previous life, he was Richard Nixon's post-Presidency Chief of Staff and then director of the Nixon library.

Taylor's thoughts about Kamala's moves: 

Kamala Harris is officially not the new Nixon. After he lost a squeaker to John F. Kennedy in 1960, party elders such as former President Eisenhower played on his sense of duty and persuaded him to run for governor of California in 1962 against a popular Democratic incumbent. The factors contributing to his loss included his palpable lack of desire and aptitude for the job. 

No one really thought Harris wanted to be governor, either. For that reason alone, she was wise to step back. 

If Nixon had won, he would've been the frontrunner for the GOP nomination to run against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. That's assuming that in this particular “what if?”, President Kennedy still would've been assassinated. Running against Johnson, Nixon would've been buried forever in a landslide. 

If Kennedy had survived, and Nixon had been tempted to run against him in 1964, Californians would've been understandably grumpy about him angling for a grudge match after just half a term in Sacramento. 

Running for president as governor would've entailed similar complications for Harris. By standing down, she becomes the leading contender in 2028. Just read her statement. She wants to help her party find "new methods and fresh thinking” without abandoning core values. 

That actually shouldn't be hard, if one assumes a core value, both democratic and Democratic, is not being sadistically cruel to immigrant workers, trans and non-binary people, the people of African descent Trump is attempting to erase from history, Haitians he accused of the blood libel of eating pets, and others he attacks for political advantage. 

Imagine a middle way that honors the principles of political and economic liberalism while respecting the dignity of every human being. What a concept, huh? It's an opportunity Democrats have but Republicans won’t unless they're willing to abandon Trumpism — which, in or out of office, he won't permit them to do. 

With Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the mix, Harris would have to tack to the center. Trumpy critics who claim she [Harris] has changed her view on one issue or another will have to explain their unstinting support for the formerly pro-choice, pro–gun control Manhattan libertine. 

Democrats will only be able to use #butTrump as a defense against hypocrisy, towering misconduct and dishonesty, and outright criminality for the next century or two. 

Harris also says she'll be "helping elect Democrats across the nation," which means collecting favors for the next three years, as Nixon did after his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 1962 as he prepared to run for president in 1968. 

Harris’s is the ideal situation for a popular candidate with high name recognition who doesn't need political office to pay the rent. Republicans would've preferred her in Sacramento, arguing with mayors and trying to balance the budget and hold Trump at bay. Instead, she can do what she wants, when she wants, where she wants, and with whom she wants. 

Running for president next time will be almost as fun as the job itself and twice as good as being veep. 

I am not nearly so happy or sanguine about Ms. Harris angling for another run in 2028. I loyally did everything in my power to try to elect her in 2024. If she were the Democratic nominee in 2028, I'd have to do it again. Sure, what Taylor suggests is plausible but ...

Because Harris has repeatedly achieved high office, people miss that she has NEVER demonstrated that she is any good at politicianing. The blocking and tackling of campaigning weren't part of her instincts or acquired expertise. Before last fall, the only truly competitive race she had ever run was against Steve Cooley to become California's Attorney General. In that one, she barely squeaked through in a state that simply doesn't elect Republicans not named Arnold to statewide office. For US Senate and Vice President, the runway was clear from the get-go and she didn't have to make the way. That weakness, along with so many other factors, contributed to her squeaker loss last fall.

My bet is she'll figure this out between now and 2028. She's a smart person. And I think one who actually wants to serve her country. I suspect it is time for an even younger generation to take center stage.

Standing for our democracy in San Bruno

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

  

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

 

They are not meekly pulling any punches.

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

• • • 

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are coming for the gift shops ...

... I took myself on a field trip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He suggests how ordinary people might resist: 

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

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

Do it as a statement of resistance.

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions for us all

Why do I read Matt Yglesias? He's routinely something of a know-it-all twit. But skimming through his broad range of topics does broaden my own thinking -- so yes, I do read him.

Today he answered an interesting reader question:

Vasav Swaminathan: In honor of the fourth of July, what was America's greatest moment? Of all time? Of your lifetime? Of the last decade?

Of all time, I would say World War II and the Marshall Plan. Of my lifetime, probably PEPFAR. And of the last decade, either the rapid development of Covid vaccines or the rapid deployment of emergency military aid to Ukraine. 

I can take a swing at that question. It's interesting.

Click to enlarge.

America's greatest moment of all time? Unequivocally, the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. By the middle of the 1860s, the Union army had obliterated the Confederate rebellion in a bloody war which ended slavery. At the conclusion of that war, the President -- Abraham Lincoln -- who had cautiously and bravely led the North through that terrible trial of the nation's values, was assassinated by a sympathizer of the losing South. His Vice-President, the south-sympathizing Andrew Johnson, was quite prepared make peace with the defeated states on terms that allowed continuation of white oligarchic rule over the freed slaves. 

Republican majorities in Congress (the GOP was a different animal then!) stumbled their way through complicated legislative maneuvers, including a failed impeachment of Johnson, to enacting the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution which were meant to ensure we'd be a democratically organized country observing citizens' rights. No more chattel slavery, the rule of law must be recognized by the various states, and no denial of the right to vote on the basis of race -- roughly speaking. 

Yes -- the current Supreme Court is trying to gut these accomplishments. But those 19th century Americans were right to enact their "rebirth of freedom" then and we are right now, to hell with John Roberts and his posse of black-robed crooks.

Of my lifetime? That's easy. The Black civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s which forced the reaffirmation and re-invigoration of Reconstruction amendment principles, including forcing one-person, one-vote districts, integration of public schools and public facilities, and, by extension, full citizenship for women and LGBT people.

The current MAGA party doesn't recognize any of that either. We're being subjected to the ascendancy of aggrieved ignorant white men. I guess we have to rise up against cruelty and bigotry again ...

Of the last decade?  On this I find myself agreeing with Yglesias: the development and deployment of the COVID vaccine pointed the way to species-survival in the world humans have made. We can make a livable world if we can overcome the fraction of us who are too dumb or too self-centered to understand the project.

Thanks Matt! How would you answer those questions?

This Independence Day, It's on us. As it always has been

 

I'm more comfortable with this image after having spent quite a bit of time recently in New England. To many people of that part of this huge country, the image feels fitting. Elmer Davis was a radio journalist who served FDR's war against European fascism and Japanese imperialism in the role of Director of the Office of War Information.

 

How might similar sentiments be expressed these days in my home state of California? Perhaps like this:

Here on the Left Coast, we'll take a dose of snark with our defiance of unjust rulers. But that doesn't mean we are not a force to be reckoned with when aroused. And we're getting aroused.

• • • 

The USofA has had quite a good 249 year run. Not saying we've always (or even most often) been on the side of justice, against oppression, for full liberation of all. In fact, this enterprise has always been murderous to some. It's taken us all those years to more fully recognize some people are really people. But in our better seasons, African people imported as slaves, and foreign newcomers, and women, and LGBTQ+ people, and even the native people whose land the rest of us stole have been increasingly recognized as fully human by the polity we have made for ourselves. 

 

Our institutions are creaky and not currently serving our best aspirations. We need to remember that there's more in our Declaration of Independence beyond the bold assertion that "all men are created equal' and should be understood to have "inalienable rights." The declaration goes on to insist that this understanding of where and from whom government acquired legitimacy means we can have expectations: 

... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Current US institutions -- the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Constitution of 1789, the various states -- are proving no match for an oligarchic aspiring king whose executive power derives from the votes of 31 percent of the citizens. (Kamala got nearly another third and the rest stayed home.) 

Trump is governing by arrogating to himself powers our system never gave him nor meant any executive to have. And the system itself is proving incapable of stopping him.

Looks like the future of the United States of America is up to the consent of the governed, once again. Are we going to let King Donald get away with his heist?

When freedom seemed possible ...

Does history really have "turning points? The more deeply one looks into it, the less apt that metaphor seems. Human history is a long flow of events, accidents, and choices that could lead in different directions, but which are never entirely dictated by what came before and are uncertain in what future they may portend. 

But, oh, are there moments when something epic seems to have come along!

Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War by Lyndal Roper, a senior Oxford historian revisits one such moment which, looking backward, we seem to periodically notice and then forget. In 1525, in the wake of Luther's destabilization of Western Christendom, in what is now modern Germany, peasants undertook to overturn feudal society and it looked for a moment as if their marching columns had succeeded. 

The German Peasants' War was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. ... Peasants massed in armed bands in one region, then another, and rebellions would break out even in areas far away. At its height it involved well over a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, who joined with the rebels to bring about a new world of Christian brotherhood. And for several months they won. Authority and rulership collapsed ... People even began to dream of a new order. 

But this moment didn't last. ... The forces of the lords put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand peasants. ...

Insofar as the revolt can be said to have had an intellectual inspiration, Martin Luther's Freedom of a Christian published in 1520 served, despite Luther's quick repudiation of these ungoverned rebels. But the peasants, with input from other reforming clergy, created their own manifesto.

For them, freedom mean ending serfdom ... the peasants themselves ... formulated their complaints. The Twelve Articles then became a document that the movement everywhere acknowledged, even when the rebels didn't know exactly what the articles contained, and even though many areas revised them to suit local circumstances. Soon they were printed using the new technology made possible by the invention of moveable type, and they spread all over Germany. You could pick them up and hold them in your hand, point to each demand and the biblical passages that proved their godliness.

... The passions and dreams that drove the movement can seem inchoate, naive, and contradictory. ... this was not a movement driven by the literate few. It was a mass struggle by individuals who risked and lost their lives to try to bring about a new world. ...

The vision that drove them was about humans' relationship to creation. They were angry that lords claimed ownership of natural resources-- the water, the common land, the woods and forests -- when these were God's creation, given to all. They were enraged that the lords had stolen their freedom and claimed to own them when, as Luther showed, Christ had bought us all with his precious blood,"thus the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free." They were incensed by the growing inequality they saw around them ... They wanted men to live as brothers, in mutual obligation, not as lords and serfs. Theirs was an unabashedly male ideal, nourished by bonding amongst the peasant fighters, though that doesn't mean that women didn't support it too. They wanted decisions to be made collectively and to manage natural resources in a way that would respect the environment that God had created. ...

... for most of the war, the peasants were nonviolent; they humiliated but did not kill their lords. They questioned the established order at just the moment when capitalism was expanding and when Europeans were encountering new worlds, but they did not necessarily want to destroy authority of all kinds. Yet the authorities destroyed them, obliterated their movement, and built the structures of the current world on its ashes.

Roper's account of the peasants' brief but unprecedented revolt is detailed and granular. This is fascinating narrative history which for an American needs to be read alongside maps.

• • • 

The peasants' war is a huge historical event which 1) tends to be dropped from most accounts of early modern European history because its implications remain unclear, except that 2) Friedrich Engels brought a tendentious explanation of it to the fore in the context of articulating 19th century socialist thinking.

Roper's conclusion is her contribution to this historiography, to the academic theories and debates about what sort of frame in which to put the eruption. Here are some of those points, quotations from the book unless bracketed:

• ... [the peasants] were angry at how the lords treated them, but explaining the revolt in economic terms is not enough. Many richer peasants and even burghers joined the revolt ... if anything, conditions might have been improving as peasants engaged in markets and a long period of economic upswing continued after the Black Death. 

• ... the Reformation brought a religious transformation that did far more than legitimize or justify previous attacks on the abuses of feudalism; it brought a new vision of freedom, and of relations between human being as the environment. ... as some put it, all of us, rich and poor alike, are Christ's 'aigen,' his 'own', the same word as for serfs. 

• ... Marching together or taking over monasteries and convents allowed peasants to experience together a life of plenitude, where there was enough meat for all and more wine and beer than you could drink, a life of comradeship and brotherhood, not of dour monastic asceticism. These were ideals for which people were willing to fight. ... All could subscribe to the Twelve Articles, even those who did not know its specific contents. ... The rebels hatred of princes and 'top dogs' was now sealed in blood and gone was any reverence for rulers.

• ... the movement was held together by male bonding ... it is hard to know whether women would have felt included in their men's demands though the revolt could not have succeeded without women's support in running the farms and gardens their menfolk had left.

• ... the peasants' failure to bring the large towns in ... the cities were simply too populous, rich, powerful and well-armed to be seriously threatened by a peasant army.

• ... [yet] the peasants flattened the towers of lordship and wiped out the sacred geography of pilgrimage and monasticism. ... the war permanently undermined the power of the lesser nobility ...

• ... the ideas and dreams that had been formed in the war did not disappear but lived on in Anabaptism and in many varieties of radical thought. ... The war's legacy of blood desacralized lordship ... 

It's easy to think and feel that the present moment is another hinge point, a turning of some sort, what with climate change on top of the decay of Western capitalism and democracy. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But Roper's volume casts light on a time that felt and perhaps still appears to have been such a moment. I recommend it. 

A message of shared humanity and a warning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was a stranger and you invited me in.

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what should terrify us.

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

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

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

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

• • •

Seen at No Kings demo, San Francisco

Juneteenth 2025

Today is the federal holiday of Juneteenth, created by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2021. This celebration of freedom, the end of enslavement won in war by the federal Union in 1865, is still a novelty to white America. So it seems worth sharing this short history from people's historian Heather Cox Richardson. 

 

In this country, freedom has always come through struggle.

• • • 

As in all else in our national life, Donald and his MAGA acolytes wish they could erase this memory of freedom won by blood and struggle. Judd Legum reports that big corporations are scurrying to cover up that they ever endorsed and participated in Juneteenth. Notable backsliders:

Amazon, Verizon, and other major corporations have ended or reduced their support for Juneteenth celebrations this year, forcing events in major cities to be significantly scaled back, a Popular Information investigation reveals.

.. Amazon rolled back its DEI programs in December 2024. An internal letter from an Amazon senior human resources executive stated that the company would eliminate “outdated” policies and programs. This included removing language from the company’s website about Amazon’s support for “Equity for Black people.” Amazon also removed all references to DEI from its 2024 annual report and donated $1,000,000 to Trump's inaugural committee. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

• • •

An LA Times political commentator wondered whether Donald Trump can just make the Juneteenth holiday go away. As in so much of American life which MAGA wants killed off, it turns out that is harder then they may understand.

Trump wouldn’t have the power to do that on his own, according to Loyola Marymount University Law School professor Jessica Levinson.

“Federal holidays are created and abolished by Congress,” Levinson explained, adding that presidents can make recommendations and sign and veto bills, but they cannot unilaterally create or cancel laws.

Our current reality seems to consist of an ongoing test of that proposition. The No Kings protests show there are are lot of us who think our system of government ought to mean we still have a say.

Justice for all

Trump/MAGA's substitution of the whims of the Leader for historic American democratic norms and law provokes our resistance from many viewpoints and among many very different people. Why would such a violent tearing of the national fabric not do so?; this a a country of 340 million individuals with very different histories, needs, and life experiences. MAGA desperately wants to erase all that and subjugate where it can't.

 

Many of us recoil from and repudiate MAGA's vision.

 

For some, the energy for that struggle comes from our visceral reaction to the abduction of family and neighbors.

 

For some, it's sheer stubbornness, a defiant sense of self that has kept us going through life's challenges and serves in this moment.

 

For some it's recoil from gratuitous cruelty in the service of a sick cartoon of a god rendered a nasty tribal totem. 

 

And for some, it's allegiance to a reasonably coherent ethical system which repels MAGA's fatuous formulas. The country has many such belief systems, but we are learning that in the past century the country had erected a legal edifice to embody our diverse core beliefs. Trump/MAGA can't stand for that.

Attorney and commentator Liz Dye reports how one federal judge reacted to MAGA in court:

Judge rules that anti-woke is just racism
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a rancid bigot.

 

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Boston explicitly called out the Trump administration for its “palpably clear” discrimination against racial minorities and LGBTQ+ Americans in a case involving canceled grants from the National Institutes of Health....

Judge [William] Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1985, called the terminations “arbitrary and capricious.” But he went further than other judges in the many impoundment suits, calling the administration out for its flagrant animus against racial and sexual minorities.

“I am hesitant to draw this conclusion — but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it — that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” he said, according to Politico. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.“

...“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” the judge hammered on. “The Constitution will not permit that.”

... In 1954, [lawyer Joseph] Welch’s “Have you no decency, sir!” marked the beginning of the end for Sen. Joe McCarthy. Public support for his witch hunt collapsed, and he died in disgrace three years later. But decency is in short supply these days, and the White House is digging in.

“It is appalling that a federal judge would use court proceedings to express his political views and preferences,” White House flack Kush Desai sneered. “How is a judge going to deliver an impartial decision when he explicitly stated his biased opinion that the administration’s retraction of illegal DEI funding is racist and anti-LGBTQ?”

A hit dog will holler. And maybe that dog will win a reprieve from the Supreme Court, too. But even so, it still matters when old bulls of the judiciary, particularly conservatives like Judge Young and Judge Royce Lamberth, who enjoined attacks on trans prisoners, call out the Trump regime for turning civil rights laws on their head.

“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Judge Young fumed. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.”

Once upon a time, (1782 to be specific) we affirmed a national motto: E Pluribus Unum -- out of many one.  That's in the national DNA and it isn't going away.

A king is only a king if we bow down.

We used to say, "be there or be square." That seems right for this weekend's No Kings Day on Saturday.

Indivisible does a good job of explaining why the nationwide demonstration.  

... our friend Reverend William Barber says: A king is only a king if we bow down.

A single mobilization won’t turn this ship around. But it can do a few very important things:

Change the narrative. A massive show of popular opposition everywhere in the country can disrupt Trump’s effort to project strength. It shows that resistance is big, powerful, growing, and everywhere.

Bring in new people. A mobilization of this scale and scope reaches people who aren’t yet engaged, and -- if done right -- helps to draw them into a cycle of action and relationships on the ground.

Foster community. When you show up, you realize that not only are you not alone -- you’re actually part of something enormous. And that helps to build the shared sense of identity we’ll need for the path ahead.

Spread courage. After Hands Off!, we heard from people in positions of power within institutions -- law firms, universities (one big university, in fact), and elsewhere -- who told us they were emboldened by the protests to push back on pressure from the Trump regime. As we often say, courage is contagious.  

Trump’s birthday parade and his attack on LA are all part of the same agenda of fascist theatrics, divide and conquer politics, and the consolidation of power.

Trump wants to look strong. What he doesn’t understand is that true power comes from the people. And on June 14th, we’re going to prove it.

Student of eastern European fascism Timothy Snyder calls for a new birth of freedom:

In the end, and in the beginning, and at all moments of strife, a government of the people, by the people, for the people depends upon the awareness and the actions of all of us. A democracy only exists if a people exist, and a people only exists in individuals' awareness of one another of itself and of their need to act together. This weekend Trump plans a celebration of American military power as a celebration of himself on his birthday -- military dictatorship nonsense. This is a further step towards a different kind of regime. It can be called out, and it can be overwhelmed.

Thousands of Americans across the land, many veterans among them, have worked hard to organize protests this Saturday — against tyranny, for freedom, for government of the people, by the people, for the people. Join them if you can. No Kings Day is June 14th.

Contemporary "slave catchers" at work in LA

The progressive journalist Harold Meyerson has long shared insights into his native Los Angeles even though he has decamped to DC. And leave it to Meyerson to usefully contextualize current events in the California Southland.

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE.

In the decade preceding the Civil War, the residents of Northern states resisted the efforts of the federal government to compel them to help Southern slave owners capture former slaves who’d escaped to the North. In 1850, the Southern-dominated Congress and a pro-Southern President Millard Fillmore enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring not just Northern police officials but all Northern citizens to aid in the seizure of Blacks who’d successfully escaped chattel slavery.

The North actively resisted these efforts. Boston abolitionists formed the Anti-Man-Hunting League, which hid escaped slaves and sought to impede the slave-hunters and the federal troops whom Fillmore deployed to help them out. But the resistance wasn’t confined to the abolitionist minority.

According to historian H. Robert Baker, there were whole neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Boston that became “no-go zones for slave catchers,” so great was the level of local resistance. As I wrote in these pages seven years ago, “Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Wisconsin all enacted ‘personal liberty laws’ forbidding public officials from cooperating with the slave owners or the federal forces sent to back them up, denying the use of their jails to house the captives, and requiring jury trials to decide if the owners could make off with their abductees.”

In the 1850s, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the Constitution's Tenth Amendment, which gave states the power to enact laws not specifically preempted by federal authority. What Trump and his troopers are engaged in now is the same kind of violent enforcement at complete variance with the local, state, and regional sentiment. 

The Tenth Amendment, however, doesn’t reserve immigration issues to the states; they clearly fall under the purview of the federal government, as does the president’s right to declare an emergency enabling him to employ troops domestically—a consummation for which Trump and Miller have long devoutly wished.  

California governor  Gavin Newsom has gone to court to block the federal intervention in Los Angeles, essentially claiming this is no emergency except the one caused by Donald Trump's radical deportation agenda. The case is before Federal Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco. That's a familiar name in this household as Breyer was the judge in our no-fly list lawsuit early in the War on Terror era. We found him a careful, judicious guy.

Trying to shove reality down a memory hole

We took down their monuments to the Confederacy, to the Rebellion as my Union ancestors would have said. We repudiate their slave drivers and "Indian killers." 

They try to erase our heroes, a different kind of hero.

According to Military.com, 

the Navy is also considering renaming other John Lewis-class oilers including the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and USNS Harriet Tubman.

Push-up boy Hegseth is putting the ultimate American culture war front and center: is this a country for blundering drunken white men or for all its people?

No quantity of racist laws and immigration restrictions can change the reality that in 15 years, this will be a country where the majority will be "non-white." Sorry dudes -- you are on the wrong side of history and evolution. (And you don't like that either.)

Never again is now. .. Justice takes sides.

Jemar Tisby, an historian of the justice struggle in Black America, reports from a pilgrimage to Manzanar National Historic Site with the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary. The Seminary is an evangelical Christian institution which aims to work broadly to encourage awareness of global human diversity. That is, these are ordinary Americans, not Bible-thumping Republican Christian Nationalists.

Tisby's little film (12 minutes) is a fine introduction to the last occasion on which an American government disappeared citizens using the Alien Enemies Act.

Traveling blog break

I don't think I can yet blame this on Donald Trump's meddling with the weather service (NOAA) or the FAA (air traffic control and airports). But nonetheless yesterday was such a miserable travel day from Martha's Vineyard to San Francisco that I need to take the weekend off from posting here.

Proud history here. Click to read.

It's easy to think of the Vineyard as a kind of precious retreat from American reality -- until reminded by experience that it is also a somewhat remote rock on the edge the Atlantic. And in the offseason, which is when we visit, the island is populated by incredibly tough, hard working folks who have to live off the short summer tourist season.

Our flight off island to Logan airport in Boston on a tiny regional airline, Cape Air, was cancelled at the last minute on Saturday; something about a torn up runway at the hub. So getting off the island suddenly turned into a marathon.

There was no way to catch our long flight home out of Boston. A lot of airline wrangling by Erudite Partner finally got us a different night reservation from Boston -- which would only work out if we could rush to a mid-afternoon ferry to Woods Hole, followed by an hour and a half bus trip. 

We managed all that and got seated around 9:30 EDT on a Jetblue cross country plane, only to sit for an hour and half on the runway, waiting for a bank of thunder storms somewhere on the route to clear. Finally got home at 2:30 PDT, grateful for pick up by insomniac house partner.

Doing democracy

I've never been very good at the necessary task of agitating my own Congresscritter for more action for better policies. I think I've been on two visits to Congressional offices in the last 35 years  -- of course for me the target has been Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi which gives me a sort of an excuse: for most that period her real constituents were not her local voters but more the recalcitrant members of her fractious Democratic caucus. As constituents, we felt a little beside the point and we were.

But I love reading accounts from people newly inspired to do this work of direct democracy. In the present moment, agitating slow poke Democrats and useless Republicans is part of the necessary struggle.

At my core I’m a storyteller. I love probing the past and the present to learn the “story of us” and how these true-to-life tales might inspire us to become better humans.

Dr. Jemar Tisby is an historian of religious faith focused on racial justice and a prolific writer and preacher. But he'd never done a Congressional visit before this past month: 

People Power

I'll be marinating on my time visiting offices of representatives and senators for a long time.

This was precisely what our government was set up to do--provide an avenue where constituents can let the elected officials who represent them know their concerns and have a reasonable expectation of being heard.

In its most basic sense, democracy means "people power."

That day I felt like a person who at least had the power to express my views to the people empowered to make policies.

The experience made the work of the federal government less opaque and intimidating.

At the end of the day, all the bills, all the laws, all the deliberations are done by people.

Regular human beings.

They are imperfect, they have fears, hopes, and worries.

They can also be influenced.

The most frequent refrain I heard throughout my day on Capitol Hill was, "Your voice matters." ...

... when we speak, we disrupt complacency. We remind officials and politicians that the people still have power.

As I looked back at the marble of the Capitol, I felt it again: this is our building, our Congress, our country. Our democracy. And we must never let them forget it.

If we can possibly stand it, more of us need to do it! Or at least call these reps up, frequently.

• • •

Tisby is author of several books. I've just finished reading one as an audio book and looking over the young adult version of the same material snagged from the wonderful Cape Cod library system.

Both tell stories of individuals central to the US Black experience -- central to "doing democracy" in the context of the long freedom struggle -- that may be unfamiliar to most white readers. Tisby is particularly attentive to the roles and accomplishments of women. Highly recommended.

Rendition returns

Erudite Partner points out: 

Trump Harvests Autocratic Powers Planted by Bush and Cheney

... It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001.  

... In those days of “enhanced interrogation,” I was already arguing that accepting such lawless behavior could well become an American habit. We might gradually learn, I suggested, to put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side,” and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us to torture people.

... One difference between the Bush-Cheney years and the Trump ones is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a genuine and horrific emergency. Trump’s version of such an emergency, on the other hand, is entirely Trumped-up. He posits nothing short of an immigration “invasion” — in effect, a permanent 9/11 — that “has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years.” Or so his executive order “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” insists. To justify illegally deporting alleged members of Tren de Aragua and, in the future (if he has his way), many others, he has invented a totally imaginary war so that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used during World War II to justify the otherwise unjustifiable internment of another group of dehumanized people in this country: Japanese-Americans.

Donald Trump has his very own “black site” now...

Remembering the recent origins of this country's embrace of security theater and rendition to law-free torture as foreign policy should also remind us of the disasters that followed. After 9/11, the US fought two wars in other people's countries; killed massive numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, and US and allied military; and eventually was driven away and lost any enduring influence in those places for its pains. 

Trump is another disaster; we have chosen this one when we could have been expected to have our eyes open. When will we learn better? It's going to be a tough patch for America.

The Patriots who moved the story forward in the US Northeast

Message at Martha's Vineyard rally on April 19

Today is observed as a holiday in Massachusetts -- Patriots Day -- commemorating the battles at Lexington and Concord where revolting American colonials routed occupying imperial British troops in 1775.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson told their story, speaking in Boston's Old North Church at the 250 year celebration of American revolt.

... On Easter Sunday, after the secret watchers had noticed the troop movement, [Paul] Revere traveled to Lexington to visit [Patriot leaders Samuel] Adams and [John] Hancock. On the way home through Charlestown, he had told friends “that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal.” Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

The plan was dangerous. The Old North Church was Anglican, Church of England, and about a third of the people who worshipped there were Loyalists. General Thomas Gage himself worshiped there. But so did Revere’s childhood friend John Pulling Jr., who had become a wealthy sea captain and was a vestryman, responsible for the church’s finances. Like Revere, Pulling was a Son of Liberty. So was the church’s relatively poor caretaker, or sexton, Robert Newman. They would help.

Dr. Joseph Warren lived just up the hill from Revere. He was a Son of Liberty and a leader in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On the night of April 18, he dashed off a quick note to Revere urging him to set off for Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the troops were on the way. By the time Revere got Warren’s house, the doctor had already sent another man, William Dawes, to Lexington by way of Boston Neck. Warren told Revere the troops were leaving Boston by water. Revere left Warren’s house, found his friend John Pulling, and gave him the information that would enable him to raise the signal for those waiting in Charlestown. Then Revere rowed across the harbor to Charleston to ride to Lexington himself. The night was clear with a rising moon, and Revere muffled his oars and swung out of his way to avoid the British ship standing guard.

Back in Boston, Pulling made his way past the soldiers on the streets to find Newman. Newman lived in his family home, where the tightening economy after the British occupation had forced his mother to board British officers. Newman was waiting for Pulling, and quietly slipped out of the house to meet him.

The two men walked past the soldiers to the church. As caretaker, Newman had a key.

The two men crept through the dark church, climbed the stairs and then the ladders to the steeple holding lanterns—a tricky business, but one that a caretaker and a mariner could manage—very briefly flashed the lanterns they carried to send the signal, and then climbed back down.

Messengers in Charlestown saw the signal, but so did British soldiers. Legend has it that Newman escaped from the church by climbing out a window. He made his way back home, but since he was one of the few people in town who had keys to the church, soldiers arrested him the next day for participating in rebellious activities. He told them that he had given his keys to Pulling, who as a vestryman could give him orders. When soldiers went to find Pulling, he had skipped town, likely heading to Nantucket.

While Newman and Pulling made their way through the streets back to their homes, the race to beat the soldiers to Lexington and Concord was on. Dawes crossed the Boston Neck just before soldiers closed the city. Revere rowed to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and headed out. Eluding waiting officers, he headed on the road through Medford and what is now Arlington. ...

Paul Revere was captured on the way and Dawes didn't make it to Concord either, but another man carried their message to the Massachusetts militias. Those militias were ready for the approaching British soldiers and harried the red-coated troops all the way back to Boston.

By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

Richardson concluded:

Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.

The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.

Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.

The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.

What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.

And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.

No place here for any monarch

The legal observation of Patriots Day -- commemorating American colonists' rejection of British rule at skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, Mass. -- isn't until Monday. But folks protesting Donald Trump's assault on our freedoms and Constitution were out in force Saturday on Martha's Vineyard.

Islanders seem just as allergic to kings now as they were then. 

That would refer to laws they made themselves through a democratic process, not some edict (like the Stamp Act) from a distant king and his parliament.

There are still feisty folks on this island outpost.

Trump's coup against law is not popular

Trump and his merry band of dictator's dupes think the American people share his hatred of migrants. We don't.

G. Elliott Morris is a data nerd. After a stint writing for The Economist, he ran the 538 poll aggregating site for ABC News -- until ABC bent the knee to Trump after the 2024 election. These days, like so many others, he writes a substack, Strength in Numbers, where he does what he has long done: try to understand opinion data.

And he is convinced that Trump and the mainstream media are misinterpreting what we the people feel about immigration.

Trump is popular on "handling immigration," but not specifics

 ... there is a dramatic amount of nuance being washed over with the binary yes-no framing and use of such broad topics.  ...

You might take away from this, for instance, that Americans approve of Trump's actions to deport Abrego Garcia and refuse to bring him home. That would be wrong though, as the same Reuters/Ipsos poll even goes on to show.

The vast majority — 82% — of Americans believe Trump should obey court orders even if he disagrees with them, and 56% think he should stop "deporting people" ...

Click to enlarge

The only policy Americans really favor is deporting unlawful immigrants who have been accused of violent crimes.

If people opposed to Trump's policies speak out, including especially Democratic Party leaders, Morris believes they'll be expressing the public's opinion.

... Trump's critics have an easy opportunity to fight the president in the court of public opinion. Americans do not approve of abducting fathers who have been in America for decades and sending them to torture camps in the jungle; And, contra Trump's wishes, they also oppose the extrajudicial transfer of U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails.

And while I generally try not to engage in partisan cheerleading here, the reality is that Republicans are united in support of Trump, and since we have a two-party system, Democrats are the only options for recourse on civil rights and the rule of law. This issue really isn’t about Trump or immigration at all anymore, it’s about the Constitution itself.

The Trump administration so far has gotten away with denying Abrego Garcia and other legal residents of the U.S. their constitutional rights of habeas corpus. Now, the Executive is asserting that it can violate court orders with impunity and that it wants to do the same for trouble-making U.S. citizens. If you stand for the constitution, the rule of law, majoritarianism, and just generally treating citizens with dignity, there is really only one option for you, even if you try to approach politics from an unbiased perspective, as we do here at Strength In Numbers.

So not only does the party currently have public opinion on its side, I think Democrats also have an obligation to speak out on moral and constitutional grounds. And, given the data, they have a clear opportunity to take bold action.

... Fighting is what democracy is for, after all. And if nobody is willing to fight for the Constitution, we don’t have a democracy anymore anyway.

 As an early and famous Patriot once wrote: "These are times that try [our] souls ... Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

No capitulation to MAGA here

So I'm stuck in the Harvey Milk Terminal of the San Francisco airport for a long day (boring story of weather near destination colliding with airline schedules) so I got a chance to try to get in my walking miles in the corridors. You'll be glad to know that SFO is paying no attention to Trump's commands to erase women, POC Americans, queers and history. 

 

Northern California was a center of WWII war production, so there is a lot to display.

 

Women had a job to do to defeat fascism. War mobilization broke a lot of barriers. Even knowing what we know now of the underbelly of US empire, it's possible to admire their spunk.

 

 

They weren't all eager pink-cheeked white girls either. 

The Harvey Milk terminal at SFO is a monument to all MAGA hates. Nice place to involuntarily spend a day.