They just, you know, wanted to win elections or something

Robpos of the Daily Kos community discussed what they call a civil war in the Democratic Party between oligarchs and populists. The discussion begins with a Congressional House race in New York in which the “campaign spokesman” (there is doubt about the actual role) of one Democratic candidate bashed another Democratic candidate, saying the opponent was too far left, which would cause Democrats to lose the seat. The accusation of too far left is because the opponent supported or worked on the campaigns for Gary Peters (he’s radical?), Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Robpos then noted that the attacker was funded by various PACs that are funded by billionaires. Robpos wrote:

Since the financial crisis of 2008, which made visible, the devotion of the Democratic Party to its billionaire donor class, the billionaires, through dark money PACs and shadowy think tanks, have opened a battle for the soul of the party and sought to purge the influence of its progressive wing.

A quote from Lever News

MAGA has been trying to harness that [populist] outrage for its authoritarian agenda, much like the Tea Party did when Democrats squandered the Obama presidency by turning hope and change into more of the same. But center-left populists now have their own opportunity to channel the rage in a very different, more productive direction — into causes such as campaign finance reform, anti-monopoly policy, Medicare For All, and higher taxes on billionaires.

Robpos concluded:

Billionaires are not your friends, even if they support the Democratic Party. They have the bucks, but we have the votes if we don’t succumb to apathy, resignation and defeatism.

I long ago concluded that while Democrats aren’t (well, don’t appear to be) actively working for billionaires, they are also not actively working against them, either. What we as a country need is what Democrats are failing to do. That’s why, when not compared against Republicans, Democrats have such a low approval rating. Getting rid of the nasty guy and his authoritarianism is not enough. Even gutting the power of the current Republican Party is not enough. For our democracy to survive we must blunt the strength of the billionaires to control our politics. And that Democrats are not doing. The Supreme Court delivered another blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 yesterday. As I understand it, based on various news discussions, the Court attacked Section 2 that bans the use of gerrymandering to deprive racial minorities from seats in Congress. The law (and I think in an update to the law, not the original) said that if a district map appears to deprive minorities of a seat, it is illegal. The Court ruled that to challenge a map the challengers must prove the deprivation was intentional. That is exceedingly difficult to prove. By “Court” I do mean the six conservatives. The three liberals vigorously dissented. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Stacey Abrams, writing for MSNOW:

For decades, Section 2 gave Black voters in the South and brown voters in the Southwest access to the courts to remedy harm. There was something those voters could do when, for example, state legislatures split Black neighborhoods across districts or packed Latinos into as few seats as possible to minimize their broader influence. Section 2 was not a perfect safeguard but it worked, and it instituted accountability. ... Today’s ruling on Louisiana v. Callais strikes even closer to the bone by narrowing the very mechanism communities use to fight discriminatory maps in court. These decisions have steadily built upon one another, eviscerating the protections mandated by the 15th Amendment and perhaps altering the country’s memory of what the VRA attempted to fix. More than just a law protecting voting rights, the VRA stood as a guard against abuse of power by a racial majority that had — and has — repeatedly failed to act fairly.”

Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, discussing the claim that the Court is being “race neutral.”

The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people […] It is true that—thanks in large part to the protections that the Roberts Court is carefully dismantling—Americans experience less overt discrimination than they once did. But the obvious flaw in Alito’s logic was revealed when he defended the gerrymander as partisan and not racial by pointing out that most Black people support Democrats, “because race and politics are so intertwined.” In other words: Discriminating against Black voters is okay because they vote for Democrats. Many Democrats in the 19th century, when Black people overwhelmingly voted Republican, would have enthusiastically agreed with Alito’s assessment. But if you apply Alito’s logic to those white-supremacist Democrats, they weren’t racist either. They just, you know, wanted to win elections or something, and Black people were in the way. The fact that discriminating against Black voters would give Republicans an advantage today is not exculpatory; it only establishes a motive for discrimination.

I wrote all that before I had a chance to read an article by the Associated Press posted on Kos about the case. Yeah, I’m getting behind on my reading again after a time of carefully keeping up to date. The AP article begins:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Louisiana’s second majority Black congressional district in a decision that could open the door for Republican-led states to eliminate Black and Latino electoral districts that tend to favor Democrats and affect the balance of power in Congress.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent included, “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.” From the article:

The court did an about-face from a decision in a similar case from Alabama less than three years ago that led to a new congressional map for the state that sent two Black Democrats to Congress. The Alabama decision also prompted Louisiana lawmakers to add a second majority Black district. About a third of Louisianans are Black and they now form majorities in two of the state’s six congressional districts. Alabama has a separate appeal pending at the Supreme Court.

Emily Singer of Kos reported that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida released a new district map that seeks to flip Congressional seats from Democrat to Republican. Though a lot of state Republicans decried Virginia’s voter recently approved redistricting plan they heaped praise on this Florida plan. Yeah, we can gerrymander, you can’t. The new map was revealed only 48 hours before it was to be voted on – no chance for public comment. And it violates the state constitution. Back in 2010 Florida voters overwhelmingly added Fair Districts standards, which also outlawed partisan gerrymandering. Communities were not to be divided for political gain. I hear it passed the legislature. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included a tweet from Kimberley Johnson, who included a message from Trond Solberg:

Hi. Norwegian here. A big misconception about social democracy is that everyone makes the same money, and that you can’t get rich. But Norway has wealthy people, entrepreneurs, successful CEOs. The difference is that a janitor can afford healthcare. A teacher can afford a home. And the wealthy still live in a society that works. Social democracy doesn’t put a ceiling on wealth. It raises the floor. Follow for more glimpses into life in a social democracy, where dignity is not a privilege.

I went to Johnson’s tweet. It had a reply from Fac Americae Abire:

The complaint I kept hearing is “Why do I have to help ….” That’s one very good reason why social anything doesn’t work in US. Even “Love thy neighbour” doesn’t work.

And charlie859 included a meme:

“In America, people think social democracy is some kind of communism. They think capitalism is freedom. It’s not. It’s only freedom to exploit people.” – Oscar-nominated actor Skarsgård explains his egalitarian worldview

Bill also quoted an article from Mediaite that says Wall Street traders, the ones who described the nasty guy as TACO, have come up with another: NACHO – Not A Chance Hormuz Opens.

Didn't bend, didn't cower, emerged with dignity intact

I finished the book Leg, the Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It by Greg Marshall. This is a memoir of Greg growing up with “tight tendons” that cause him to walk with a limp and about recognizing he is gay and beginning to act on it. He doesn’t learn the true reason for his limp until he’s close to the age of 30. The setting is Salt Lake City in the 1990s and beyond. Marshall is one of the few in his school who is not Mormon. His mother cycles between bouts of cancer with chemo and remission, still hanging on decades later. Marshall seems to accept being gay more easily than walking with a limp. He is afraid that no one will love him. Between the short term trysts (with fear of AIDS) he does have three long-term boyfriends. He wishes that two of them were more honest, and he talks about why that matters. When he’s in middle school the French Club goes to France. His father is one of the chaperons and Marshall is a bit jealous how easily his father gets along with some of the natives, even though he knows little French. A decade later his father develops ALS and Marshall is a key caregiver, partly because his mother is going through another round of chemo. I enjoyed the book. My Sunday movie was The Adventures of Mark Twain, directed by Will Vinton, the subject of the documentary Claydream I watched last week. In my description last week I said it was rated PG-13, if that rating was around in 1985. I was wrong – it is rated G. What the documentary said was that the movie has adult themes, but marketed to kids. I had interpreted that wrong. The adult themes were not about sex. They were about topics children wouldn’t understand or have much interest in. Those topics were Satan and Heaven and Twain’s ridicule of them. The time is 1910 and Halley’s comet is in the sky again. Twain had held the belief that since he was born with the comet in the sky he’ll leave this world when it comes back. In this story to help that happen he has created an airship so he could rise up and actually meet the comet. Three of his characters – Tom Sawyer wanting to be famous, Huck Finn and his pet frog Homer, and Becky Thatcher – steal aboard. During the flight they encounter more of Twain’s stories. Homer becomes the star of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Then comes The Diary of Adam & Eve, Twain’s version of the story from the Bible. There is The Mysterious Stranger, a novella Twain never finished in which the main character is Satan who has a rather poor view of humans. Another was Captain Stormfield’s Diary, which gave Twain a chance to criticize the popular view of Heaven. These are some of the views a discouraged Twain developed later in life. Through it all the story takes advantage of all the things that Vinton had developed during his work on claymation. I enjoyed it. My favorite quote of the movie: Twain says...

The human race, in all its poverty, has only one truly effective weapon: laughter. Against the assault of laughter - ha-ha-ha-ha! - nothing can stand.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos quoted from Carbon Brief:

Renewable energy has overtaken coal to become the world’s largest source of electricity in 2025, according to think tank Ember. The growth of solar and wind meant that, for the first time since 1919, the share of coal power was lower than that of renewables. Fossil-fuel generation fell by 0.2% in 2025, the think tank’s latest annual review says, with wind and solar alone meeting 99% of the growth in electricity demand last year.

Nadra Nittle, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos, discussed book bans and libraries. Nittle tells the experience of librarians faced with demands to ban books and dealing with hostile school boards or city councils. It’s a story that’s been going on for a while, so here are some of the ideas included: Pennsylvania is behind Texas and Florida in highest rates of library censorship. Many people think other states would be higher. Because of the hostility “few fully certified librarians remain in the Philadelphia school district.” Back in the 1990s there were over 170.

“This is also a class war,” [American Library Association President Sam Helmick] said. “Whether people read freely and have access to information is really at risk. We’re in an information age. If we’re not willing to invest in our communities so they can successfully navigate the digital divide and digital citizenry, we will not be equipped to continue to be a nation of, by and for the people.” ... Despite a sustained years-long effort during the 2020s to restrict reading materials, Helmick finds hope in polls indicating that 70 percent of the public opposes censorship of any kind. “That’s quite incredible because I joke that 70 percent of Americans wouldn’t agree that water is wet,” they said. “The vast majority are uninterested in this, which makes me wonder why we’re attacking the public information sector in the middle of an information age.”

Tracy Fitzmaurice, a librarian in rural North Carolina warned her fellow librarians not to buckle to outside pressure.

Don’t do anticipatory compliance. ‘If I just move this book, maybe they’ll go away.’ They won’t. These people have been at it for five years. What it really comes down to is local elections.

Nittle linked to the American Library Association list of the most challenged books of 2025. There are 11 books in this year’s list because there is a four-way tie for eighth place.

The 2025 data reported to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) shows that the majority of book censorship attempts continue to originate from organized movements. In 2025, 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents.

As has been the case for many years the usual justifications for filing a complaint against a book are false claims of illegal obscenity for minors, LGBTQ characters or themes, or topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice. There were 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025. That’s second only to the 4,240 titles in 2023. In 2025, 1,671 (40%) titles were about LGBTQ people and people of color. Out of the 11 books in this year’s list three of them are definitely about LGBTQ characters. There are likely more, but book descriptions are not on the page of the list and I don’t recognize the titles. An email from March For Our Lives discussed the number of shooting deaths over the first quarter of 2026 compared to prior years. In these three months of this year there were 3,103 lives lost to gunfire. There were shooting deaths in every one of the 50 states. That is way too many. But MFOL sent the letter because that number is lower than every year since 2015, which was slightly above 2026. The death toll rose each year with the highest in 2021 at well more than 4,500 deaths in 3 months. The chart doesn’t show actual numbers. Since 2021 the death toll has dropped. The MFOL message is that the culture is shifting away from guns and their advocacy to reduce and halt gun violence is having an effect. A week ago Emily Singer of Kos reported:

Since retaking office more than a year ago, the amount of corruption and lawlessness President Donald Trump has engaged in has been truly staggering. Between his grifts and profiteering off of the presidency, his pay for play pardons, his use of the Department of Justice for political retribution, and his shredding of the Constitution to impose tariffs, launch wars, and commit war crimes without congressional approval, Trump is committing impeachable offenses at a fast clip. And now, a majority of Americans agree it’s too much, with a new Verasight/Strength in Numbers poll finding that 55% of Americans say Trump should be impeached for a third time. Another 37% opposed and another 8% said they were unsure. “That net +18 verdict puts Trump in the neighborhood of the numbers Richard Nixon saw at the peak of the Watergate scandal in August 1974,” “Strength in Numbers” author G. Elliott Morris wrote.

The nasty guy is losing support from Republicans – 21% of those who voted for him in 2024 now support impeachment. In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Kevin Kruse commenting on the Department of Justice dropping its criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve and its outgoing chairman Jerome Powell. That investigation was more about intimidating Powell to get him to lower interest rates to boost the economy before the midterm elections.

Didn't bend, didn't cower, didn't even feel the need to stand next to Trump grinning awkwardly like it was normal. And now he's emerged unscathed with his job and his dignity intact and his reputation even stronger than before. Huh. Seems like this could be a model for others in power.

Jonathan Last of The Bulwark

Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan was fired. Twenty-one days ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George was fired. Fifty-four days ago, the American military launched its largest war in a generation. These datapoints are linked. They are an admission by the president that America is losing the war. Because the simple fact of the matter is: You do not make high-level personnel changes in the middle of a war if you are winning.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quote Mike Brock of Notes from the Circus discussing an article Ben Shapiro wrote explaining why he voted for the nasty guy. Shapiro admits that the nasty guy is what every liberal critic says he is – a usurper who was constrained by strong American institutions. Brock then quoted and discussed Shapiro’s reasoning on why voting for the nasty guy was still a good idea.

The reasoning is the lunacy: “The guardrails would largely hold… his worst mistakes would end up being mitigated by the pushback of reality.” This is the argument. The president of the United States is a man who would, if he could, end the constitutional order. The reason it is acceptable to elect him is that he probably cannot. The institutions are strong enough to contain him. The Madisonian architecture will hold, the Supreme Court will strike things down, the Treasury Secretary lives on Earth, the bad picks will be replaced by the merely bad picks. The wannabe dictator is, in the Shapiro analysis, a manageable risk.

Sheesh, wasn’t that said about Hitler? In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

Donald Trump lost this war in its very first days. Everything that has happened in recent weeks — the threats, the negotiations, the live-on-social-media breakdowns — has simply been a matter of trying to get free of that fact. This isn’t a political attack. It’s simply an accurate appraisal of what we all see. More importantly, it is the only way to understand what is happening now. Everything that’s happening today and for weeks has been focused on breaking Iran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, something it didn’t have before the war started. That’s the definition of failure: fighting a war and continuing a war to clean up the mess the war of choice actually created. By this measure, the best way to achieve what is now the central war aim — opening the Strait — would have been simply not to start the war in the first place. You can see the reality of the power balance in the visible fact that Trump wants negotiations and an end to the conflict more than Iran does. He keeps asking for them or demanding them. Iran holds back. They have the upper hand, notwithstanding all the vast damage to infrastructure, civilian and military, Iran has suffered.

In today’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet from Anne Applebaum mentioning and linking to an article on Financial Times. Applebaum’s tweet:

Hungarian oligarchs begin fleeing the country, transferring assets, in anticipation of corruption investigations.

The article title and subtitle:

Hungary’s business elite pivots away from Viktor Orbán. Several loyalists have moved overseas while others vow to form ‘constructive co-operation’ with incoming premier.

David French of the New York Times:

A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine — a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion — has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the Western alliance, including in the war against Iran. Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence. This is what happens when, as Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a piece for The Atlantic, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States.” If that is true — and it looks as though it is — it may be worse news for the United States than it is for Ukraine.

Ask the taxi driver what their PhD is in

This episode of Gaslit Nation is titled The Untold Inspiring History Behind Mrs. Orwell That Terrifies the Kremlin. Host and author Andrea Chalupa and artist Maya Hayuk discuss Chalupa’s new graphic novel Mrs. Orwell. Both Chalupa and Hayuk are of Ukrainian descent and children of refugees. One might think that Hayuk is the illustrator of the book, but that was Brahm Revel (I looked it up – Goodreads gives it 4.05/5). The discussion between Chlupa and Hayak is over an hour long and was posted on April 7, a few days before the election in Hungary. I worked from the transcript. They do talk about Orwell, but not much. Most of their congenial discussion is about having similar Ukrainian ancestry. Chalupa began:

I want to remind everyone that Hungary, Orban's Hungary, is the Kremlin's agent in the EU. There's been several investigations confirming that, including a recent one, showing how Orban's government was on the phone with the Kremlin, doing everything they could to weaken EU sanctions designed to try to stop Russia's genocidal invasion of Ukraine.

Good to know Orbán has been booted. Mrs. Orwell is Eileen Blair, wife of George Orwell, who wrote Animal Farm and 1984, novels that explain fascism. His real name was Eric Blair. Chalupa wrote the film Mr. Jones about the Holodomor, Stalin's Genocide famine in Ukraine (I’ve watched and recommend it). George Orwell makes an appearance in that film and Chalupa wanted Eileen Blair to do the same, but she needed her own project. And this graphic novel is it. Chalupa says of the book:

It's a tribute to this unsung heroine of literature. There would've been no George Orwell without her. She is so important to his greatest works of art. It was really a reminder to us that it takes a team, it takes community, it takes a love affair to get the truth out into the world today. We all have to find our great loves in this moment. We all have to hold on tight to the gentleness inside ourselves and others and show ourselves in grace and get through this time together and create, create, create, whatever that looks like to you.

Hayuk, speaking through grief and rage over Ukraine, said that the Iran war is great for Putin. Sanctions were lifted because the world needs his oil. The nasty guy is upset with NATO for refusing to help him in Iran – and dissolving the West is one of Putin’s goals. Yet the Ukraine war was close to collapsing the Russian economy – until the sanctions were lifted. Chalupa added that puts Ukraine as the front in the global war between democracy and fascism. And Russia is one of the nodes of the transnational crime network we’re up against. Netanyahu is another node. Netanyahu has said the Iran war will be long. The nasty guy responds with the war being good cover to drop the Russian sanctions. Hayuk wondered how a guy with 34 felonies was elected president. He wouldn’t be hired at McDonalds. Chalupa noted there are laws, which is separate from enforcing the laws. America doesn’t have the moral will to enforce its laws. At minute 36 they begin discussing Orwell. He served in the British Imperial Police in India for five years. He was one of the “boots smashing the face.” Women helped him out and shaped him, such as his Aunt Nellie, who helped him find a job at a London bookstore. It was Eileen, a springtime spirit. She gave him a happy nest from which he could create. Hayuk then talked about becoming an artist. She inherited talent from her father, though he wasn’t a professional artist. For her art isn’t a career, but a way of living, of being an activist, engaged deeply in the world. She has drawn and painted, but is also a photographer and theater scenic designer and builder. It’s gig work with a lot of administrative work. It’s a decent living. Chalupa said that researching and writing Mr. Jones she saw the same forces face us today. Back in 2015 she warned people that the nasty guy is a Russian asset. Most of her warnings were ignored. That prompted starting Gaslit Nation. Part of being defiant is building something. Chalupa and Hayuk talk about their ancestry. While in a German refugee camp at the end of WWII one of Chalupa’s ancestors got a Ukrainian language edition of Animal Farm. Chalupa now has that book. In that camp the Ukrainians organized to teach kids – whatever your profession back home you had to teach it to the kids. Even ballet. And Animal Farm was assigned reading. That prompted Chalupa to say many refugees are quite talented. Their potential needs to be developed for the sake of the world. Hayuk added that “every time you get into a taxi cab, have a conversation with what the taxi driver's PhD is in.”

Destroying democracy by saying they protect citizens

Daily Kos community member LaFeminista has a few thoughts about the promises of AI. From an article in Le Monde:

“It will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.” S. Altman

Sam Altman has been the CEO of OpenAI since 2019, according to Wikipedia. LaFeminista wrote:

The amount of resources being thrown at basic AI is truly frightening, but worry not, AI will solve all the environmental damage done, it’ll solve most everything. Why stop at basic AI? Where is the gain in that mere bagatelle? The amassing of these colossal fortunes demands more, ever more. The race for Artificial Superintelligence and Artificial General Intelligence is on, the Prize for being first? Everything, it is the ultimate win. Ignore the damage! Perhaps not, methinks, but what do I know next to these titans of AI?

Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about an ongoing event, a major piece happened last Tuesday and I’m glad I missed it. This major piece is the nasty guy reading from the Bible while in the Oval Office. Noting like smearing the separation of church and state.

He’s not going to read it silently as a humble expression of faith, of course. That would be silly. This latest incursion into the separation of church and state comes courtesy of this grifty little America Reads the Bible production, where the world’s most ostentatiously Christian of Christian nationalist types in and out of government are reading you parts of the Bible over the course of a full week.

The other participants will be at the Museum of the Bible. And I’ll be happy to miss those too. I’m sure they will find the passages about war and ignore the ones where Jesus said love your enemy and feed the poor. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, discussed the latest book by Ibram X. Kendi. His book Stamped From the Beginning has been on my to-read shelf for at least a couple years. His bestselling book is How to Be an Antiracist, which became “a cultural touchstone” and a handbook for Americans “confronted with the depth and persistence of the nation’s history of antiblackness.” His newest book is Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, discussing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and its significance in the rise of fascism. Wrote Kaplan:

Kendi defines the Great Replacement Theory as the belief that global elites are enabling people of color to displace the lives, livelihoods and electoral power of white people.

Kendi is a professor, a scholar of racism, and a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient. He’s also attracted the fury of the MAGA movement, always a good recommendation. When attacked he responds as a scholar – doing research and writing a book. GRT has been around in various forms for a long time. This version...

was coined by French novelist Renaud Camus in 2010, when he became convinced that Muslim immigrants from former colonies were overtaking the white population of France and its traditions. GRT warns that Muslims and people of color, whether immigrants or citizens, are literally replacing white Christians and traditional European culture, and must be stopped.

GRT isn’t just racism. It claims that social justice movements are acts of “white genocide.” It’s a zero-sum view of the world. It declares Democracy and multiculturalism are threats to whiteness and cannot be tolerated. It should sound absurd. But it is promoted by Elon Musk, Viktor Orbán of Hungary (now out of power), far-right parties in France, and the nasty guy. GRT makes a distinction between a “good” immigrant who came in the past and a “bad” immigrant who came recently. The “good” came legally and assimilated. The “bad” came illegally and they’re destroying the nation. Black Americans, many who have been here for more generations than many white people are also declared to be “bad” based on comments by people like Thomas Jefferson who believed slaves should be freed, but could not live among white people and should be sent back to Africa. GRT and its zero-sum thinking also infects other populations. Black people believe they are being replaced by Latinos. Black Christians believe they are being replaced by Muslims. Black people may be below white, but they can be higher than black immigrants who fear being nabbed by ICE. GRT is insidious because it “causes people to consent to dictatorial states.” Some people choose the protection of privilege over democracy. That’s why authoritarians push it. They can justify destroying democratic infrastructure by saying they are protecting the citizens. GRT is a problem for black people because they’ve fought for democracy for hundreds of years. Kendi says that’s why they need to understand GRT.

There is nonetheless a hopeful cast to Kendi’s latest work, centered on his belief that “human groups are natural allies against inequities,” and that coming together is more instinctual than sowing division.

A week ago Jessica Huseman, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, reported that Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, also Republican candidate for governor, seized the ballots from a recent election. His reason is to do his own recount and open a criminal investigation into the election. The California Supreme Court ordered a halt to his investigation. There isn’t any more reason for this Republican to seize ballots than for any other Republican to dispute any election in a decade.

Elections in the U.S. are run locally. So is law enforcement. That overlap creates a real vulnerability. The same county responsible for storing and counting ballots is also overseen by a sheriff who can get a warrant, enter election facilities, and take materials as part of a criminal investigation. In contrast, federal authorities seeking to obtain election materials have to establish jurisdiction and work through multiple layers of oversight. A local sheriff can act much more quickly, often before state officials or courts have time to respond.

Thankfully, in California the state attorney general has some authority over local law enforcement and was able to tell Bianco to halt his investigation. This may have been before the Supreme Court could act.

Lots of things make Riverside a special case. Chiefly, Bianco’s candidacy for governor raises an obvious question of self-interest — he may be using the powers of his office to elevate a political issue that he thinks will benefit him as a candidate. He is also stepping into the administration of the same election system he wants to compete in — a personal conflict many have long complained about in relation to secretaries of state who run for office during their tenures.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing Virginia’s vote to approve gerrymandering the state to give Democrats a bigger advantage.

What Virginia Democrats did by redrawing the congressional maps was antidemocratic, and it should be illegal. But, for those who care about ensuring the future of democracy, it was the least bad option of those available. As the political scientist Seth Masket wrote last year, Democrats couldn’t force the Republican Party to “feel more reverent toward institutions and norms”; they could only “raise the costs of irreverence. In the long run, that’s the most effective tool available.”

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times asked Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism, how consequential the nasty guy’s time in the Oval Office has been. The choice of “consequential” isn’t about how much the guy benefited the country, but how long his actions will endure. Edsall wrote of Kettl:

On this measure he placed Trump in the Top 5 of American presidents, alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, noting, however, that “Trump’s consequences have been aggressive efforts to unravel the ideas of the other four presidents.”

I’d rather have an “emotional” woman at the nuclear button

My Sunday movie was Claydream, a documentary about Will Vinton who built a video studio based on claymation, the stop-motion technique using clay scenes and figures. He didn’t invent claymation, but certainly raised the level of quality of the art. If you’re a few decades old you probably remember the singing and dancing California Raisins of the 1990s. That was Vinton’s creation. Vinton attended the University of Berkeley in the 1960s, which contributed to his unconventional view of the world. He and a partner created the film Closed Mondays about a man who visits a museum while it is closed and all kinds of strange things happen. That won an Oscar for a short subject in 1974. After that he got four more nominations. He created feature films, one of them The Adventures of Mark Twain. It took three years to make and was released in 1985. Alas, it had at least PG-13 content (I don’t know if this rating was used then) yet was marketed to kids. It didn’t do well. I found it online and may watch it soon. For a while his studio was quite prosperous. But it didn’t last. He was a great creative guy, but not a good CEO. He went to the wrong people to be investors. A lot of what he did was replaced with computer animation. And he didn’t own the California Raisin characters (the California Raisin Board did), so didn’t earn anything off the merchandising of what his team created. One of his last gigs was to help market M&Ms. He was the one who came up with the idea that each color of M&M should have its own personality, such as the green one wearing high-heeled shoes. I enjoyed the movie and was fascinated by some of the characters he brought to life. Natalie Kon-yu, Michael Burke, and Tom Clark of Victoria University with Emily Booth of the University of Technology Sydney, all in Australia, wrote an editorial that appeared in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. Alas, the article is behind a paywall. They didn’t explain why Australians were writing about American politics. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost to the nasty guy in part because people said a woman is too emotional to be allowed near the nuclear button. Have you seen the guy who is near that button? The authors say that everything about the MAGA movement is steeped in emotion. The nasty guy bases is actions on his latest grievances (an emotion). The attack against Iran was title Epic Fury (and emotion). MAGA men are all about how their manhood has been slighted (and emotion) or who they are jealous of (an emotion). The nasty guy and many of his top officials yell at their staffs when displeased (an emotional response). His campaign was based on retribution (an emotion). I’d rather have an “emotional” woman in charge than these people. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported that yesterday Virginian voters narrowly passed a constitutional amendment to temporarily suspend what the citizens redistricting commission did and allow Democrats in the General Assembly substitute a map that would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in their delegation to the US House. This would replace a 6-5 map and give Democrats a national 10-9 advantage in the redistricting battle the nasty guy started with Texas. I found a map of the new districts put out by The Cook Political Report. It accomplishes its goal in the usual way gerrymandering is done – several new districts take a chunk of the huge Democratic population in the DC suburbs, then snake out into Republican territory. The AP article concludes:

A Tazewell County judge ruled that the redistricting push was illegal for several reasons. Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. said lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session. He ruled that their initial vote failed to occur before the public began casting ballots in last year’s general election and thus didn’t count toward the two-step process. And he ruled that the state failed to publish the amendment three months before that election, as required by law. If the state Supreme Court agrees with the lower court, the referendum results could be rendered moot.

Florida has yet to try redistricting and some of the Republican legislators see the likely blue wave and think the effort will leave too many districts with margins too small. Some of the other Republican redistricting attempts are still in court. Beyond Florida states are too far into the primary process and the election cycle to attempt a change. On Sunday – before Virginia’s vote – Andrew Mangan of Kos discussed why Virginia should approve their referendum.

Put simply, Virginia will go from having a very fair map to a very biased one. So how is that good for democracy? Because Republicans have rigged maps across the country for decades, skewing the House’s overall partisan makeup, and Virginia’s proposed map would be merely a minor corrective. In general, congressional delegations tend to be biased in Republicans’ favor. Among states with at least five House seats, there are five where Republicans regularly receive less than 50% of the statewide vote but hold a majority of that state’s House delegation: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There is not one state where the same is true for Democrats.

And this mid-decade redistricting skews states even more.

The big difference is that only one party—the Democratic Party—is pushing to eliminate partisan gerrymandering altogether.

So far they haven’t been successful. And some of their attempts have been blocked by Democrats. A voice I heard today while driving suggests that this redistricting battle will show Republicans the battle cannot be won and they approve a deal. I won’t hold my breath. Mangan included a 2025 poll by YouGov (about the time this redistricting arms race began) that shows 69% of US adult citizens say gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9% say it should be legal. Even among Republican citizens 57% say it should be illegal and only 14% say it should be legal. In today's pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a quote of an article on NPR that was posted late last week:

The more seats you try to flip with redistricting, the harder it is to win approval from the court and the public — and the harder it is for your party to hold the seats it has. In Virginia, some Democrats wanted to settle for a new map that could pick up three House seats. But Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas, one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, wanted to go for four seats. It could take the state’s U.S. House delegation from a near-even six Democrats and five Republicans to possibly 10-1 for Democrats.

Acyn, senior digital editor of Meidas Touch tweeted a clip of a speech by Pete Buttigieg talking to fellow Democrats. Alas, I don’t think he’s running for anything.

And my word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was. That’s not what we’re here to do. We’re not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say, “Here you go, I give you the world as it looked in 2023.” That’s not going to work. It’s not what we need. So much has changed, and the truth is they are destroying things right and left. They’re destroying a lot of good, important things. They’re destroying some useless things too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.

We’re not ready to live in space yet

I finished the book A City on Mars; Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith a husband and wife team. With Elon Musk wearing an “Occupy Mars” shirt this is a timely look at how feasible putting humans on the moon, in a space habitat, or on Mars really is. From the title one could easily guess that the authors don’t agree with Musk. They tackle all the reasons why people say we should put people in habitats. Here’s some of their responses: The belief is that giving humanity a home off earth will allow the species to continue in case we destroy our current home. But earth at its global warming worst is still a zillion times better than life on the moon or Mars. Also, we’re not ready for life in space so let’s keep working to save earth. Putting industry in orbit to protect earth’s environment is too expensive. Consider cement – yeah, there is enough material in space for all the cement we use, but space is too cold for making it and getting all that mass back to earth is expensive. Space resources won’t make us all rich because mining what little there is would be too costly. Sending humans to space won’t end or reduce war and property disputes in space may get fought on earth. When astronauts come back to earth they frequently talk of the new feeling of how fragile earth is and we’re all in this together. But that hasn’t gone much past the wonderful sounding slogans. The authors talk about the things we don’t yet know about living off earth. Does a fetus need gravity to develop properly? Do children need gravity to grow properly? Is moon or Mars gravity enough? What does a livable biome require? No research has been done on the first few questions, not nearly enough on the last. The moon is not a great place to live and would require living underground. Do we really want that? There aren’t enough resources in the regolith to support trade with earth. Mars is not better, partly because there is a poisonous chemical in the soil. Space habitats are better but would take such a huge effort they aren’t feasible, especially at the scale needed for a viable population. The authors spend a quarter of the book discussing current space law and why it matters. The space treaty that exists was created in the 1960s when there were two space-faring nations. Now there are six plus a couple corporations. Things have been fine so far, but what if one of those corporations sets up a mining operation somewhere that is illegal under the current treaty? The authors explain what a company town is and why they have such a bad reputation. What if the company town is on Mars where the employee can’t simply leave and the boss can coerce the worker by reducing the amount of oxygen? We’re not ready to live in space yet. The benefits aren’t as great as is claimed. The size of a viable population is much bigger than most theorist suggests. But if we still want to go to space, there are important things to research. The biggest is in addition to creating a rocket that can go to Mars, Musk should also be putting billions into biome research and space pregnancy. And that space treaty needs a serious update. I enjoyed the book, though my interest flagged towards the end of the discussion on why space law matters. The authors explain their positions well to the non-science reader, using slang and humor. Author Zach is a cartoonist and has lots of drawings to illustrate the points. I recommend the book to science fiction fans and space nerds. I would enjoy reading science fiction stories based on the ideas in this book. I get emails from March for Our Lives, the group founded by survivors of the school shooting in Parkland Florida. Yeah, they include requests for money. They also explain what they’re doing, both the gains and losses. The email I got a few days ago essentially says discussing the emotional and psychological damage of gun violence hasn’t made any difference in lawmaker actions. Instead, this email talks about the economic cost, Lawmakers want to talk about economic things a lot.

Gun violence costs the United States an estimated $557 billion every year, equating to roughly 2.6% of the entire U.S. economy, or more than $1,600 per person annually. To put that into perspective, these costs exceed what the federal government spends on education each year. And yet this burden is rarely part of the national conversation about guns.

The costs show up in medical costs and higher insurance premiums. Survivors face chronic pain and disabilities affecting their ability to work. Their family’s finances become more unstable through the loss of an income and future earnings. The losses hit the communities already facing economic hardship. In this way gun violence is a hidden tax on the country. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote:

President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission had its final meeting on Monday, and you’ll be hyped to find out that everything you ever learned about the Founding Fathers and religion is incorrect, you fools. Trump’s handpicked selection of zealots on the commission want you to know that the separation of church and state is a lie and has been all along.

Needham then quoted a few of those founding fathers to contradict that commission (whose name actually means Religious Liberty for me which includes permission to oppress you). First is Roger Williams, who founded Providence in what became Rhode Island: civic life must be separate from spiritual life with a “high wall” between them. Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote to Baptists:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

James Madison noted that if a government can establish Christianity over other religions it can also establish one Christian sect over others. Needham also noted that of the 12 members of the Commission all are members of Judeo-Christian religions. We know “exactly what church Trump doesn’t want separated from the state.” So the nasty guy having a spat with Pope Leo is rather curious. A lot of nasty guys supporters delight in claims and images that show him as a Christ figure. One of those images made the rounds recently. If not a Christ figure, the nasty guy is at least God’s Chosen President, as is preached to many Evangelical congregations. StanleyYelnats dotcom of the Kos community noted that some supporters have switched from calling him the Christ, to calling him the anti-Christ.

According to biblical prophecy and tradition, the Antichrist is a future, charismatic, and deceptive world leader who opposes Jesus Christ, sets himself up as God, and brings about a, “man of lawlessness” persona characterized by immense power, blasphemy, and the persecution of believers. He is empowered by Satan to perform fake wonders and establish a totalitarian global system.

Some characteristics of the anti-Christ are: He appears peaceful but is cunning. He opposes all things related to God (well, the nasty guy seems to bask in being compared to Jesus). He will control the world’s economic system. He will persecute followers of God (depends on whether one thinks Evangelicals actually follow God). He is focused on power. I will make no claim that the nasty guy is (or isn’t) the anti-Christ. Part of that requires the belief that the End Times are about to start and some Christians have been expecting the End Times for two thousand years. Instead, I will note some of the nasty guy’s Christian followers are turning on him and seeing him for who he is and as the opposite of what they had wanted. Oliver Willis, in his series of Explaining the Right column for Kos wonders, “Why conservatives think they own religion.” I can’t say he gets any closer to the answer than usual, which is not close. He does document Evangelicals think that. Willis goes all the way back to the rise of the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell, who rose to national attention when Ronald Reagan was president. Much of that political energy was put to use in opposition to abortion that came along with the rise of feminism and women asserting bodily autonomy. But all that loud noise convinced the media and too many Democrats that only the right is the true religion. Willis then gives several examples of the left using religion to make its point. The prime example is Martin Luther King and his work in the Civil Rights movement. Currently, James Talarico is using religion in his campaign to be the Democratic senator from Texas.

But conservatives continue to suffer the mass delusion that only their brand of faith is legitimate, falsely arguing that the more inclusive liberal tradition—where other religions and nonbelievers are on equal footing with Christians—is somehow hostile. It wasn’t Biden, Obama, Clinton, or any other Democrats who picked a childish fight with the pope—or who sold personally branded Bibles to their supporters. And Democrats certainly haven’t openly blasphemed against Christianity by posting images depicting themselves as Jesus Christ. That has been the domain of the so-called “religious” right. But they don’t own religion—not at all.

In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Mike Brock of the Notes From the Circus Substack.

You do not need intelligence services or insider access or political analysis to figure out what is going on in Donald Trump’s mind at any given moment. He is thinking zero steps ahead. As the philosopher Vlad Vexler has observed, Trump is floating through dispositional states inside very malignant pathologies. There is no strategy to decode. There is no chess game to map. There is a man moving from one psychological state to the next, driven by the same neurological machinery as any other organism in the grip of a compulsive disorder — seeking the next hit, escalating when the last one wore off, displaying dominance when the hierarchy feels threatened. That is all that is happening. That is all that has ever been happening. […] The commentariat keeps attributing chess to someone playing slot machines. I want to give credit to George Conway, and to the other clinicians and public intellectuals who have spent years trying to bring the public’s attention to this fact. Conway has been consistent and precise and largely ignored by the very establishment press that prefers the “distraction strategy” frame because that frame preserves the comforting fiction that someone competent is in control. The Duty to Warn coalition. The sixty thousand signatories. The people who were called alarmist and hysterical and politically motivated for saying, in clinical terms, what is plainly visible to anyone willing to look.

Daily Kos has upgraded to a new platform. Because of something between the new comment system and the browser I’m using, which is Vivaldi, I don’t have access to comments. And that means no access to the cartoons usually posted there. In Friday’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Christopher Hale:

Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical with no theological training, says Pope Leo XIV doesn’t understand Catholic just war doctrine. Pope Leo XIV’s patron, St. Augustine, invented the Catholic just war doctrine.

Tennis player Martina Navratilova added:

Pretty soon Mike will start telling me how to hit a serve or something….

James Patterson of Providence Magazine

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism. How is that possible? How did this happen? The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

A tweet by Mike Levin

It should be a much bigger story that JD Vance flew to Hungary, stood on a campaign stage, and told voters to return a head of government widely documented for human rights abuses and democratic backsliding. Then, after his candidate lost, Vance said what had happened during the Hungarian campaign was “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.” Was he describing himself? The Hungarian people rejected it all. Democracy held, despite America’s intervention, not because of American leadership. The United States has long argued that elections should be free from outside influence. That standard should apply to everyone, including us.

In the roundup from Saturday a week ago Dworkin quoted Lauren Egan of The Bulwark:

However understandable the downward trend in campus protests might be, the dynamic has become a point of frustration for some parts of the Democratic coalition who feel that anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists are tougher on Democratic officials than on Republicans. They note that even though Harris is out of office, she still gets interrupted at public events by pro-Palestinian protesters. “Every single speech that Kamala Harris gave in those 107 days, they found a way to protest her and call her a proponent of genocide. But they never did that throughout the campaign for Donald Trump, and then they never did it in 2025 when he was giving Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check to annihilate Gaza,” said a former Harris campaign official. “Now, when Donald Trump is threatening to do the thing that they accused Kamala Harris and Joe Biden of being complicit of, they’re silent.”

America loves to get to reconciliation without truth

In this episode of Gaslit Nation, host Andrea Chalupa interviewed Wajahat Ali, who is the author of the book Go Back to Where You Came From, which recommends how to become American. The episode is 40 minutes. I worked from the transcript. Chalupa posed the basic question of the interview. With America losing patience with the nasty guy, Republicans, and the MAGA movement so much that the Senate might be in play, how might Democrats screw it up? Ali said:

I've always said the three major sins in America are sins that we refuse to confront. Our white supremacy, greed and misogyny. And Donald Trump is the inevitable end result of us unwilling to confront this truth about ourselves.

Ali then listed some contradictory aspects of America. An example is the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants, including Ali’s parents. Then people like the nasty guy tell them to go away. A rage is building and Democrats don’t understand its cause. Democrats think restoring them to power is the answer. But Democrats and Republicans have the same donors. They go to the same golf clubs. Both are still wedded to the rich. Democrats are acting like the nasty guy is so corrosive we’ll gain power without having to promise anything. Have you seen a Project 2028? They intend business as usual. But the AI bubble will burst and the AI and crypto people will say their company is too big to fail. Things can change quickly. Eric Swalwell is suddenly out. Orbán is out. Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of NYC, seemed to come from nowhere.

I'm seeing like this is a massive populist vibe. People want accountability. They want fighters and they want change. And if you don't give it to them, my fear is, okay, Democrats win. You give them same old, same old. 2032, you get your first America First Nazi president.

Chalupa discussed the swamp of Washington DC. The nasty guys says he is cleaning it up, but he is actually at its center.

I want to point out, because my sister was in DC for many years, and word on the street is a lot of those partners, a lot of those wives are on the payroll of foreign governments like Saudi Arabia to further their interests. There was a social club of elite political women and media wives that Ivanka Trump was welcomed into during the first Trump term. And that is an underground, under the radar form of lobbying. Everybody is paid off in DC. And that's why we have the swamp in the first place. That's what the swamp is.

Ali said:

I could close my eyes and throw a pebble in DC and I'll hit someone being paid by UAE, Quatar, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. Notice I didn't say Democrat or Republican.

Ali told the story of working as a reporter at the White House. Sean Spicer, the nasty guy’s first press secretary, gave his first press conference. He lied to and mocked the press. And then the press people invited him to their party where he seemed to be pals with everyone.

For the average Jose who sees that, they're like, "Oh, you're actually friends with the guy who mocked you, ridiculed you, called you enemy of the people and is having the best time at your party."

Ali said that America loves to get to reconciliation without truth. We have monuments to Confederates. Nixon was pardoned. Financial criminals were declared too big to fail. Even though Joe Biden did great things, Ketanji Jackson being one of them, there are three major sins of his presidency that will harm his legacy. The biggest is Merrick Garland, who slow walked the investigations into the nasty guy. The Attorney General should have had brass knuckles. The second sin is his blindness of what was going on in Gaza. Biden’s base stayed home because they could see genocide unfolding. The third sin is he tried to run for a second term. That left Kamala Harris – or any other Democrat – insufficient time to effectively campaign. The blindness includes the Democratic Party. They still refuse to tax the rich. They still give unwavering support to Israel. If we vote for them things will be different? Ali said:

And folks, anyone who's waiting for the DNC to change, Andrea, it's been 10 years, 10 years. This is who they are. They won't change. They can't change. They're not made for this moment. They're not built for this fight. Thank you for your service. We appreciate you. It's time for you to either evolve or we have to cull you in the next six months and replace you with fighters. Too much is at stake.

Chalupa said that Democrats experienced the Capitol attack, an insurrection, and they did very little in response. They had Constitutional powers they didn’t use, powers that would have kept the traitors out of power. Yeah, the went after the foot soldiers, but not the coup plotters. Ali said:

That's what the lesson that Republicans learned was, "Wow, you're weak. You're pathetic. You guys don't know how to flex power. You didn't stop us. Awesome. That was a dress rehearsal. We'll do it again." And the one credit I'll give Republicans, I don't want to give them credit, but I have to, is when they get in power, Andrea, they flex. They don't give an F. They don't look at the polls. They're like, "We'll do whatever the hell we want. Stop us.”

That’s why most of the Democrats must be replaced. Another example. Randy Fine, Andy Ogles, and Tommy Tuberville say the worst genocidal and anti-Muslim stuff, and Rashida Tlaib, who has Palestinian ancestry, is the one Democrats censure. Democrats are overperforming in elections yet the Democratic brand is worse than that of the nasty guy. How does that make sense? Ali said,

People do not trust these institutions anymore. People are not voting for Democrats. They're voting against Trump. ... So Democrats are misreading this and saying, "Aha. People love the Democratic Party,” but then I give you the poll that the Democrats are ranked lower than Donald Trump, who has the lowest favorability rating.

Ali’s fear is Democrats end up back in office, perhaps even win the presidency in 2028, then proceed with business as usual. They won’t go after the infrastructure that made the nasty guy possible. And a fascist wins in 2032. The people are rising up. And the Democratic leadership remains tone deaf, to be Republican light. One key aspect of fighting this is to hold fast to our own humanity. They discussed Eric Swalwell. His team knew about his sexual harassment and still tried to get him to be the governor of California. Swalwell’s survivors held onto their humanity and declared they would not tolerate the hiding. And now he’s out. Republicans might worship a rapist. But people knew about Swalwell long before he was taken down. Swalwell was part of the Epstein class (and this identification does not rely on being an Epstein client). Chalupa said,

Ukraine is a laboratory of Kremlin aggression and Ukrainian civil society, the independent journalists, the activists, the anti-corruption reformers, they are the reason why Ukraine still exists as a country, as a democracy, and they hold Zelensky accountable. Their grassroots engine is extraordinary. It's historic. And we're seeing resistance here in America on the same level of Ukraine.

To overthrow the guy before Zelenskyy Ukrainians ran towards danger. We’re seeing the same thing in the US in Renee Good and Alex Pretti running towards danger. That’s what gives Chalupa hope. We’re not just fighting fascism. We’re fighting corruption generally. We’re fighting on two fronts. We’re fighting MAGA and fascism. We’re also fighting Democrats who are part of the system, who are complicit in genocide, who take money from AI and crypto and help them with “deregulation,” who think billionaires are part of the party’s Big Tent (a line Gavin Newsom has used), who are unwilling to hold the criminals accountable. Me talking: Not long ago I wrote that we should not blame Democrats for not acting now, because they don’t hold the levers of power and there isn’t much they can do. After working through this interview I see we can blame them for not loudly proclaiming all the things they will do to protect the country and democracy once they are back in power. They’ve been way too silent, which implies they don’t intend to protect democracy. I’ve got a few letters from various Democratic organizations, including from Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. In the recent past I’ve sent a few back, not with checks, but with writing on the donation form that says that I won’t send a check as long as they keep accepting checks from billionaires. I think I now need to change the message to be: If you accept donations from billionaires you’re not enough different from Republicans. That’s a project for tomorrow.

Do your fellow citizens act morally?

A while back I wrote that the nasty guy and his military had allowed Iranian and friendly ships to go through the Strait of Hormuz while the Iranians blocked all other traffic from passing through the Strait. That such a detail had not been thought of seemed strange. That has changed. The nasty guy’s military now has a blockade of the Strait. If a ship is friendly to the US Iran won’t let it through. If it is friendly to Iran the US won’t let it through. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit wrote that this reminds him of Sarajevo – in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot. Interlocking European alliances mobilized on the side of Serbia or Austria-Hungary starting WWI. As I mentioned before Hartmann wrote Israel’s Netanyahu has a reason for his attacks on Iran – he can claim emergency status to pause court proceedings in his fraud and bribery trial. Hartmann looked at the command authorizing the blockade. It is a global directive, meaning he says the US Navy may board Iran friendly ships anywhere in the world, not just near the Strait. Under international maritime law, that is piracy. China gets about 80% of its oil through the Strait. They will be desperate for it soon. China also has military ships in the region. China, along with Russia, has been providing targeting intelligence to Iran. So what happens if a Chinese ship challenges the nasty guy’s blockade? Does the nasty guy pull his famous TACO, collapsing the blockade? Or does the war escalate? Also Russia’s Putin, no matter how deep he is in Ukraine does not respond with moderation when cornered. He cannot be seen accepting defeat. He would love to see China humiliate the nasty guy.

When great powers are simultaneously cornered along with a smaller ally, when their leaders face domestic crises that demand the appearance of strength, when interlocking military commitments are already active and drawing them toward conflict, that’s when the world has historically stumbled into catastrophes that nobody wanted and nobody planned. ... The lesson of WWI is that leaders who think they can manage escalation usually can’t.

Hartmann ended the piece calling on us to call our senators to support another Democrat-led War Powers Resolution. I heard on today’s news it failed. Emily Singer of Kos wrote that Republicans know that they will lose the House and likely also the Senate in the midterm elections. One bit of evidence they know this: Republicans are suggesting that Justice Samuel Alito, now 76 and recently hospitalized with an unspecified illness, retire from the Supreme Court this summer so there is time to nominate and confirm his replacement before they lose that ability. They don’t want what happened to Ruth Bader Ginsberg to happen to Alito. Some are even suggesting Clarence Thomas, now 77, also retire. A month ago Andrew Mangan of Kos discussed a study from the Pew Research Center. It asked adults to rate the ethics and morality of the people of their nation. The US was worst with 47% rating their fellow citizens as ethical and moral and 53% rating them as unethical and immoral. The average of 25 countries matched Germany where 72% rated fellow citizens as ethical and moral. At the top of the list is Canada, where 92% rated their fellow citizens as ethical and moral. Pew hasn’t asked this question before, so they can’t offer a trend or speculate how long Americans have viewed each other this way. There are polls that have shows that over the last 20 years the intensity in which we view the other political party negatively has increased. These feelings have been made worse by the nasty guy, someone who relishes cruelty. And that explains why Democrats (at 60%) are more likely than Republicans (at 46%) to say their fellow citizens are immoral. But maybe he is a symptom of an already cantankerous citizenry. Those countries with better views of each other “don’t have such malicious, divisive heads of state, or their right-wing populist parties hold less power.” Kos community member cinepost discussed modern American composers that invested in society. These composers were the elites of their day. As society became more egalitarian, the elite composers did too. Aaron Copland incorporated American idioms into Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid and he wrote an opera to be performed by high school kids (this one I didn’t know about and I’m a Copland fan). Leonard Bernstein wrote Candide in response to the McCarthy hearings and gave the Young People’s Concert to bring in a new generation of listeners. Michael Tillson-Thomas composed From the Diary of Anne Frank in response to the Holocaust, created Keeping Score, a series of documentaries on how music gets to performance, and established the New World Symphony to train young musicians for professional careers. Turning to the Information Age elites, cinepost says they have done the opposite.

Rather than seeking to preserve their elite status by insuring strong societal support for that which made their position possible, the Information Age elites have decided that they will instead defend their position by eliminating any “threat” to their status. Bezos seeks to dispense with those “pesky workers” and their unionizing ideas by replacing industrial workers with robots. Musk, Thiel, Altman, Zuckerberg, et. al., want to “scrape” up the accumulated knowledge of mankind so as to hold title to it and sell it back to individuals “by the byte.”

But if they defend their position by destroying the working class, who will purchase their goods and services?

The lesson to be taken from the classical music “elites” is this: to maintain your position in society, you have to use your position to maintain the society in which you live, for without that society, you have no position at all. If they do not invest their time and resources in maintaining our society, they will find themselves lording over an impoverished land where even if the people might have the desire, no one will have the means to pay tribute to the Information Age elites. But if they do invest in society wisely so that it grows and strengthens, they will do more than simply maintain their position.

Sacred places profaned by the blasphemy of war

My Sunday movie was Sasquatch Sunset from 2024. It is the story of four sasquatch (also known as yeti or bigfoot) – two adults males, and adult female, and a juvenile male. They are perhaps the last of their kind. They live in a forest and we see them deal with the world around them. They encounter the other animals, decide what they can eat, groom each other, signal one another, have sex, all without language. Though one tries to count. It is billed as a comedy with plenty of hijinks. My reaction wasn’t so much laughter, but boredom. I thought we might get somewhere when they began to encounter evidence of humans, such as a road. But not much. Only at the end do we see they sense they are losing their habitat. I will give it credit for unique and bizarre. I rarely bother to see a movie with a Metacritic rating of 60 or less. This one got 42 reviews with a rating all the way from 100 to 25 with an average of 66. So I thought this would be decent. Alas, I agree more with the review that gave it a 50 – it would have been brilliant at 15 minutes, but this was 90. IMDb gave it 5.4 out of 10. I think that’s more accurate. Thankfully, I’ve watched very few duds. I had mentioned that Pope Leo has been criticizing the nasty guy and his wars. Emily Singer of Daily Kos has details. He’s been doing this for quite a while. Here are a few of his pronouncements.

God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. ... Absurd and inhuman violence is spreading ferociously through the sacred places of the Christian East, profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives, which are considered at most collateral damage of self-interest. But no gain can be worth the life of the weakest, children, or families. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood. ... I would like to invite everyone to truly think in their hearts about the many innocent people, so many children, so many elderly, completely innocent, who would also become victims of this escalation of a war that began from the very first days

Kos of Kos discussed the current national conversation. After the firing of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi the focus is back on the nasty guy. He’s crossed into more dangerous mental territory, to the point that even Tucker Carlson said he should not have nuclear codes. Others on the right have called for invoking the 25th Amendment. Yet, mainstream media has returned to sanewashing, filtering his comments and protecting him. Democrats aren’t much better:

Democrats push war powers resolutions that, even if passed, would spend years tied up in courts before a friendly Supreme Court neuters them. Everyone is still operating within boundaries Trump has already blown past, reacting to events instead of confronting the reality driving them.

And Republicans, who know they are in deep trouble in the midterm elections, have chosen complicity. On Sunday, the news out of Hungary was pretty sweet. Yeah, this is another story that got wide notice before I had a chance to write about it. Maybe I can share a view not widely reported. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister, who has been quite the dictator over his 16 years in office was defeated in Saturday’s national election. Even better, he conceded. The winner was Péter Magyar. Prime Minister is not a position voters elect directly. To be elected prime minister he had to create a political party, which he named Tisza, and recruit candidates to run for each seat. Then he had to convince the public to vote for them. And he did it – in an environment that Orbán made quite difficult, including extensive gerrymandering and public media in his pocket. TheCriticalMind of the Kos community reported Magyar won 138 seats of 199. That gives him enough of a majority he can undo the constitutional changes Orbán had made. Voter turnout was an impressive 78%. This means citizens soundly rejected autocracy and want democracy. They want to end Orbán’s veto of aid to Ukraine and resist Russia. The far right parties across Europe are taking note. AKALib of the Kos community has a bit on the night before the election. The photo of the nighttime rally with small torches is impressive. On Sunday afternoon Kos wrote about Magyar’s win. His party got 53% of the vote and Orbán’s party got 37%. Orbán had been following and promoting the autocrat’s playbook for quite a while. He spoke the language of MAGA (or they spoke his). He knew how to target scapegoats. He served as a model for and incubator of conservative power. And the people said no. Just a week before America’s vice nasty went to Hungary to campaign for Orbán. A tweet shows a Polymarket prediction of the winner moved sharply against Orbán after the vice nasty spoke. The nasty guy has lost a strongman ally. We’d like to lose him too. An open question is who is Magyar? He used to be a member of Orbán’s party. How much of that party platform is he keeping and how much is he rejecting? Where is he on the political spectrum? Probably more accurately, how far right is he? We don’t know yet. Rob Schmitz of NPR reported on the election. Citizens partied when the results were announced because they had doubts Orbán could lose. But with Orbán gone Magyar has aid he will rebuild ties with NATO and the EU. The EU had blocked aid to Hungary because of Orbáns anti democracy policies. Because the EU works on consensus Orbán, the leader of a small country, had enormous power through the use of vetoes, and could direct investment towards other authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, China, and Turkey. And members of Orbán’s government were caught handing EU memos about Ukraine to Russia. NPR host Michel Martin spoke to David Pressman, who had been ambassador to Hungary under Biden and is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He said Orbán’s attacks on the EU and on Soros and Zelenskyy and his conspiracy theories could not explain failing schools, crumbling hospitals, and why Hungary was the poorest country in the EU. His great propaganda system couldn’t hide the disparity between the common man’s poverty and the prime minister’s palatial estate. Hungarians voted for change because they “were seeing the cost of corruption in their daily lives.” Magyar countered that by focusing on corruption. With that focus he was able to reach the conservative rural voters. He was prepared to fight and go places that he was told were off limits, places where people used government talking points to ask questions. Pressman said the vice nasty’s visit didn’t help Orbán because it was all about the nasty guy’s interest in rewarding loyalists – it was about the nasty guy himself. In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a pair of tweets, first from Garry Kasparov:

Apologists trying to credit Orbán for conceding are intentionally missing the point. He would’ve done anything to stay in power had he thought it possible. Hungarians made it impossible. Trying & failing to destroy democracy receives no credit. He didn't stop; he was stopped.

Michael Weiss added:

It was an overwhelming result and impossible to fudge without risking a protest movement that would have been Euromaidan on steroids. Also don’t discount the fear of the ignominious Ceaușescu exit.

I remember the news of the execution of Ceaușescu, president of communist Romania. If you really want to know more his Wikipedia page is here. I looked for it to remember which country he had led. Isaac Stanley-Becker of The Atlantic

The prime minister’s loss is a crushing defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, who modeled their agenda in part on Orbán’s governance and staffed their movement with activists trained at his think tanks. As Trump alienated traditional U.S. partners, Washington looked to the like-minded leader in Budapest to represent its interests inside the European Union. The bond was so meaningful to Vance personally that he traveled to Budapest last week to campaign alongside Orbán as if they were running-mates.

A tweet from Jonathan Martin:

Orban's overwhelming defeat will, among other things, only prompt Trump to further question Vance's political utility. Perhaps tis not fair, the margin appears decisive enough that it woulda been same whether Trump or nobody from the U.S. showed, but Trump is who he is.

And a tweet from Harry Enten:

Vance's unsuccessful efforts to help Orban in Hungary are part of a larger problem. Vance's net approval has tumbled by over 20 pts since early 2025. He's the least popular VP at this point in a vice presidency. And most say the Trump admin is too focused on foreign matters.

Josh Keefe of the Maine Monitor discussing the race to be the Democratic nominee for US Senate between Gov. Janet Mills and Graham Platner. Mills says she will go toe to toe with the nasty guy, but is a part of the Democratic establishment.

Platner is up to something different. He isn’t running a campaign so much as seeking to build a mass movement against the status quo. He’s not trying to woo the working class to the Democratic Party; he’s trying to mobilize the working class to take over the Democratic Party and use it to fundamentally change the relationship between government and citizens. To him, Trump is a symptom of a larger rot, a fundamentally broken system, and the old rules of American politics are already beside the point. The Democratic establishment is “still existing in this world where they think that if you know the rules the best, you’re going to win,” he told me. “When the other side is just beating you over the head with the rule book, it doesn’t matter.”

Andy Kim, senator from New Jersey, commented on the single day effort by the vice nasty to try to get a deal with Iran.

Did Vance think he was going to solve decades of disputes with Iran in 1 day? He spent 5 days in Feb hanging out at the Winter Olympics. Iran got highest level negotiations with America ever and still controls the Strait of Hormuz, while Vance appears to be giving up. Diplomacy takes enormous planning, technical expertise, and persistent engagement, especially in war time. Our servicemembers in harm's way and Americans struggling with gas prices deserve serious negotiations, not the performance we just saw.

Another pair of tweets, first from Sami Gold:

Who’s gonna take over as world patron of the illiberal right now that Orban is gone? Trump clearly isn’t that concerned, Meloni’s too tactical, Bolsonaro’s in jail, Milei’s a libertarian, and Putin’s in a fortress mindset. Netanyahu? Fico? Modi?

Benjy Sarlin added:

Similar to Orban, Netanyahu also has high odds of being ousted by a somewhat less illiberal unity coalition in a few months.

Meteor Blades, Kos staff emeritus, posted without commentary a quote from an editorial board opinion from Israel’s left-leaning newspaper Haaretz. This is the entire quote:

Without a shred of shame, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again asked the Jerusalem District Court to postpone for at least two weeks his testimony in his corruption trial. In a letter to the judges, the prime minister’s lawyer claimed that “classified security and political reasons” related to the war justified the request. It is difficult to ignore the fact that the “dramatic events” due to which the request was submitted are the handiwork of none other than the person making the request. If Netanyahu uses the war as a pretext to postpone his trial, he should not be surprised when it is said that his military and diplomatic moves are driven by ulterior motives. This is how he manipulates the court time and again: With one hand he creates “dramatic events,” and with the other he points to them as a force majeure that prevents him from testifying in his trial and “proving his innocence.” But even if these are circumstances beyond Netanyahu’s control, the repeated delays in his trial in the wake of his requests confirm the logic of the petitions to the High Court of Justice demanding that he be barred from running in the next election precisely on account of the trial: There is an inherent conflict of interest between being prime minister and being a criminal defendant. […] Netanyahu and his lawyers behave like actors in a farce meant to ridicule the court and the principle of equality before the law. But those responsible for this farce are first and foremost the judges, who are letting the defendant play them as if they are the ones on trial, not Netanyahu.

Boise doesn't have to "fly" the Pride flag

Two weeks ago Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that Mark Zuckerberg, well, the social media industry, lost two lawsuits. This was in the news a lot so likely this is old news to you. The general complaint of one suits is the design of social media platforms – not the content on the platforms – is what is addictive to preteens. In addition, the platform designers knew that the design is addictive and that is why they chose that design. Both cases prove the companies want maximum profit even if what they do is dangerous to children. In the first suit the woman who brought it was awarded $6 million. In the second, the state of New Mexico was awarded $375 million. A large number of other suits around the country have been waiting for the results of this one. Also two weeks ago Shawn510 of the Kos community discussed an article by Paul Krugman. Krugman’s basic point is that immigration to the US has collapsed and it’s not because of policy, but because of fear. It may be spun as political success, but is actually economic sabotage. The US service industry – hotels, ride shares, landscaping, etc. runs on immigrant labor. In hospitality 31% of workers are immigrants. In agriculture it’s over half. In construction it’s over 30%. This is the backbone of daily life. These workers also pay taxes and support Social Security. When the workforce shrinks, economies shrink. Immigration is about the only thing working against that. We’re sending the message the US isn’t a place of opportunity, but of risk. Workers, students – talent – goes elsewhere. That shift doesn’t reverse easily. We’re not protecting the country, we’re hollowing it out. This is not something the public is asking for. A couple days ago Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the Justice Department is on its way to becoming a ghost town. Because the nasty guy wants it as a tool of vengeance only true believers and new, inexperienced attorneys are still around. The usual stacks of applications aren’t coming in. A lot of Judge Advocate Generals are being called in as replacements. Yes, JAGs are military lawyers who don’t know so much about civilian law. Yes, this is legal, though has never been done on this scale. Having JAGs work on Justice Department cases has an advantage. Because they’re military, they can’t quit. They also can’t refuse to do the nasty guy’s building. But shortages and inexperience means cases get dropped, such as when a defendant demands a speedy trial, which comes with a deadline.

Turns out that when you fire tons of people and demand that the remainder act unethically, you end up short-staffed. Who knew?

Down in the comments of today’s pundit roundup for Kos are a couple cartoons worth mentioning. The first is by Stephen Lillie. It shows a scene similar to the end of the movie Planet of the Apes, though this time those encountering the scene are the Artemis II astronauts and the statue looks like the nasty guy. The astronauts say, “Oh my God, we’re back!” The other cartoon is by Daniel Boris. He shows Putin saying to his smiling generals, “Now we just sit back and let Trump be Trump.” Haadiya Tariq of the Idaho Press reported the Idaho state legislature wrapped up its session last week and included several anti-LGBTQ bills. One demanded that the Pride flag could not be flown on city or county property. Another would require health care providers and schools report children that express interest in gender transition. The Boise City Hall at first kept their Pride flags flying because the bill didn’t include any enforcement mechanism. The legislature quickly changed that. But the city wanted to tell its gay citizens are still welcome. So instead of “flying” the Pride flag they wrapped the flag around the flagpoles. Pictures at the link. There is also a rainbow that clings to windows with the words, “Creating a city for everyone,” that appeared en many city hall windows. And a heart shaped rainbow sticker has appeared in many storefronts. Boise? Cool!

Federal agencies can simply be replaced by banks of computers

The nasty guy, the vice nasty, and the war nasty have been claiming they are doing their war-mongering with the encouragement and blessings of Jesus. Pope Leo has been doing a pretty good job saying those statements definitely do not align with what Jesus taught. Denver11 of the Daily Kos community wrote:

From the story at Alternet:

“In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture,” said Hale. “America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Colby and his associates informed the cardinal. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

It even got to the point where Colby

“reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.” Apparently Colby and his team were flummoxed that the Pope didn’t particularly like the [nasty guy]’s “might makes right” approach to diplomacy.

Don’t expect the pope to attend the American 250th birthday party. At 12:30 pm yesterday Oliver Willis of Kos posted an article about the Iran cease fire deal.

After the U.S. and Iran announced a ceasefire on Tuesday night, many of the details appeared to favor Iran’s cause, giving that nation more power in the Middle East than it had before President Donald Trump’s decision to engage in a bombing campaign. Despite this, the Trump administration took a victory lap that seems detached from the reality of the situation.

In the comments of a pundit roundup for Kos are a couple good articles and a couple good tweets. A comment by kurious discussed an article titled Dark Enlightenment Rising: The Billionaire Experiment to Kill Democracy, from the Hartmann Report of 3/21/25, a year ago. I don’t know why kurious is discussing it now. A couple excerpts of what kurious quoted:

A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is fueling a billionaire-led movement to gut our government, erase democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place. Trump and Musk aren’t just tearing down institutions—they’re laying the groundwork for an experimental new kind of authoritarian rule. ... The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on — which Trump probably doesn’t even understand — involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats… ...And once AI reaches the ability to think with the intelligence of a genius-level human...some of these guys believe that most of the decision-makers and agencies of the federal government can simply be replaced by banks of computers, deciding who gets what, when, and why.

In a later comment stream RandomNonviolence wrote:

Yep — first question: What is the purpose of an economy? 1. Facilitate the buying and selling of useful products for people 2. Provide jobs to workers 3. Ensure high profits for investors Second question: What is the purpose of AI? 1.Help produce more useful products and services for people 2.Reduce the number of workers 3. Ensure high profits for investors Right now, the third answer seems to dominate in each case. Maybe listening to what the humanities have to say might give us another answer.

A ways further down is a tweet by Richard Farr:

So we went to war with a country but during that period never once stopped their ability to pump nor ship oil. We allowed that to continue despite them blowing up our regional bases and their repeated attacks on their neighbors. They then shut down an international waterway, held the whole world hostage by it, and we just agreed they can control and charge fees for that waterway going forward. Meanwhile the regime didn’t change. They still have nuke materials and missiles. Americans are dead. We’ve spent and lost billions. But our leader claims we won the war.

And a tweet by Robert Pape:

The Iran ceasefire is being called a “pause.” It is not. It’s a revelation: The U.S. used overwhelming force – and still could not control the outcome. That’s a structural shift in power.

Emily Singer of Kos reported that the nasty guy has threatened to commit war crimes in Iran, yet that has “left the public screaming at Democrats to do something.” Like what? They don’t have control of levers of government. They don’t have power to actually stop the nasty guy. Many Democrats are saying how much they oppose what the nasty guy is doing. They are even calling on the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and forced multiple war powers resolutions to the floor that would call for Congressional approval of any more military action. They don’t have enough votes in the House for impeachment or in the Senate for conviction.

Just look at the responses to Democratic lawmakers’ criticism of Trump’s latest disturbing threats; they’re filled with leftists demanding action from Democrats and slamming their statements as weak and ineffective. But, sit down while I tell you this, that anger is severely misdirected and wildly unhelpful to actually stopping Trump. Rather than blame Democrats for “not doing something”—as many on social media accounts have been doing since Trump issued his threat—the public's anger should be directed at Republican lawmakers, who have both the House and Senate majorities and thus the actual power to stop this insanity. ... Anyone screaming at Democrats to do something needs to explain what, exactly, they think that Democrats can do at this point. And without a convincing answer to that question, they need to stop with the Democrat-blaming nonsense.

Audrey Carleton, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos reported that climate organizations have added another cause to their mission – fighting authoritarianism. For that they are starting to join up with organizations who protest ICE and the nasty guy’s administration in general.

The shift in strategy comes amid mounting environmental deregulation — there is an abundance of climate policy rollbacks on which these groups might normally focus — and a growing threat from the federal government to quash left-wing activism. ... The moves are also strategic — leaders say addressing what they see as fascism is a necessary precondition to climate action.

Helping in other movements is also a good way to recruit for your own. A tweet by Paul Rudnick from a couple weeks ago:

Trump can't read so he gets his briefings on video. Hegseth won't read because it's not manly. Rubio denies being able to read, to fit in. Pam Bondi fears reading because it's usually a subpoena.