Friday Homestead Dispatch

Week Number Sixteen

"We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.”
— David Lynch

Phin and Mitch have announced that on Saturday, May 17, 8:30 to 10:00, we will return to the four corners of River and Oracle to do what we do so well, that is, educate passing cars about the Trump/Musk outrages with our topical and creative signs! More info next week but save the date.

As far as the news this week of ol’ Bob Provost being elected head dude of the Catholics (Pope Leo XIV), I have to agree with Hamilton Nolan’s assessment on all the hoopla: There is a new Pope. As chief administrator of a religion that claims a billion adherents, he is an important man. He is important politically. He is important culturally. He is important as celebrity, as boss, as one who wields influence over many. He is, however, just a man. A man from Chicago. A man selected by his peers, in a political process, to occupy a seat of power. He is not infallible. He is not god’s representative on earth, whatever that means. The fact of his appointment to a high position does not grant him any particular mystical powers. He is a man from Chicago who has succeeded in an internal election. Good for him. Let’s not overdo it.

As a man of influence I am totally onboard that he’s not a right-wing fanatic and has spoken harshly of Vance and *rump. Go Pope!

In a bit of good news:

— In a long-running battle, The Downballot reports that a federal judge ordered North Carolina election officials to certify Democrat Allison Riggs as the winner of last year's race for the state Supreme Court on Monday evening, holding that state court rulings that would retroactively throw out valid votes violate the U.S. Constitution.

"You establish the rules before the game," wrote District Court Judge Richard Myers, an appointee of Donald *rump, in a 68-page opinion. "You don't change them after the game is done."

— The Downballot also reported that term-limited Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced on Monday that he would not run for the Senate, dealing a major blow to Republican recruiters who had for months pleaded with him to challenge Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.

The news, which was first reported by Politico, deprives the GOP of its strongest candidate against Ossoff. Just last week, a poll conducted for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found Kemp leading the incumbent by a 49-46 margin while every other potential contender trailed by anywhere from 9 to 17 points.

— And Newsweek reports that *rump’s support among one of his most loyal constituencies — rural Americans — is showing signs of significant erosion. According to the poll, just 46 percent of rural voters now approve of Trump's job performance, while 45 percent disapprove. In February, 59 percent approved and 37 percent disapproved.

— The U.S. Department of Agriculture has agreed to halt efforts to freeze federal funds for child nutrition programs in Maine. In exchange the state will drop its lawsuit against the agency. The funding freeze was one of several moves made by the Trump administration to punish Maine after Gov. Janet Mills clashed with the president at the White House on Feb. 21. "These bullying tactics, we will not tolerate them," Mills, a Democrat and former Maine attorney general, told reporters gathered in her Cabinet room. "Nobody in this country should tolerate them. You don't appease bullies. They never stop."

— In Lake Charles, Louisiana, Marshall Simien became the first elected black mayor. He ran as an independent but has a democratic history. He is very qualified and ran a campaign that led with dignity and respect. No name calling, no arrogance, no baiting. All this in MAGA territory where *rump won by a huge margin.

— Orlando, Florida, might be trending blue these days. Orlando City Commissioner Tony Ortiz has switched his party registration from Republican to Democrat as he ponders a run for Orlando Mayor. “Though my current role is nonpartisan, I’ve long been affiliated with the Republican Party,” Ortiz said in a statement to local media. “I once believed it stood for duty, accountability, individual freedom, and family values. But over time, that party has changed. And I can no longer stand by in silence as it turns its back on the very people I’ve sworn to protect.”

— CNN reports that *rump’s “big beautiful bill” is running into a wall in the sharply divided House Republican conference, with tensions spiking over Speaker Mike Johnson’s handling of the party’s biggest sticking point: overhauling Medicaid. Even our own Juan Ciscomani, U.S. representative for Arizona's 6th congressional district, is telling fellow Republicans he won't support steep cuts that could hit thousands of residents in his Arizona district who depend on it.

— Sen. Chris Murhpy (D-CT) doing his best to get straight answers from DHS Sec. Kristi Noem about Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

1.
I just finished reading Maria Ressa’s recent book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator.” If you’re not familiar with Ressa, she is from the Philippines and has distinguished herself as an investigative journalist covering the growth of terrorism in South East Asia, and in particular the use of violence and increasing authoritarianism of the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte. She has also focused much of her attention, as co-founder of the Rappler online news site, documenting how social media are being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021.

She writes, To understand terrorists’ reaction to authority, I turned to the famous experiments of Stanley Milgram (remember “six degrees of separation”?) and Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment. Milgram found that most people follow instructions, even when told to administer potentially lethal shocks to other people. Zimbardo’s study has been challenged, but he stands by his findings: that people lose their individuality and take on the characteristics of the roles they’re given. In other words, authority can give us freedom to be our worst selves. This goes a long way in understanding our problem with police brutality and the most recent rampage of ICE authorities in our own country.

The paragraphs below, however, resonated with me the most:

We have been laughing at memes and forgetting our history. Even our biology, our brains and hearts, have been systematically and insidiously attacked by the technology that delivers our news and prioritizes the distribution of lies over facts—by design.

I have lives through several cycles of history, chronicling the wild swings of the pendulum that would eventually stabilize and find a new equilibrium. When journalists were the gatekeepers to our public information ecosystem, those swings took decades. Once technology took over and abdicated responsibility for our emotional safety, history could be changed in months. That’s how easy it became to shift our memory through our emotions.

When that happened, it destroyed the old checks and balances on power and transformed our world. We elected incompetent populists who stoked our fears, dividing us and turning us against one another, fueling and feeding off our fear, anger, and hate. They appointed officials like themselves; their goal was not good governance but power. When termites eat away at wood, we didn’t see that the floor we stood on could collapse at any minute. Concerned with power plays, those leaders ignored the existential problems that demanded a global response.

Technology didn’t do all this alone; it was the accelerant to set fire to the kindling built up by decades of liberal progress. After all, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, Newton’s third law of motion. The more progressive we became—women’s rights, gay marriage, more pluralisitic societies—the greater the nostalgia for a simplicity that never really existed. The election of Barack Obama had an equal and opposite reaction, the perfect storm sparking the reemergence of fascism under a new name: white replacement theory. You only have to watch a hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capital to know that.

Today, an emergent wave of right-wing populist leaders uses social media to question and break down reality, triggering rage and paranoia on a bed of exponential lies. This is how fascism is normalized and where political outrage meets terrorism, the vanguard of mass violence.

These ideas have recurred in history again and again with violent consequences, from Benito Mussolini to the Ku Klux Klan to Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf, “This pestilential adulteration of the blood, of which hundreds of thousands of our people take no account, is being systematically practiced by the Jew to-day. Systematically these negroid parasites in our national body corrupt our innocent fair-haired girls and thus destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world.”

Here’s the modern-day echo in May 2022 by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbån, who includes replacement theory in state ideology: “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations—migrants.”

2.
While we are all riled up about *rump doing this and *rump doing that, the man behind the curtain, Stephen Miller, is seemingly instrumental in handing the orange buffoon the barrage of executive orders day in and day out. And, as in Maria Ressa’s warnings above, he has been implementing policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Miller’s been at it for years. At Duke University he was working with far-right hate groups early on including the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an anti-Muslim hate group, organizing events such as an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on Duke’s campus. He also served as the first national coordinator of the Center’s “Terrorism Awareness Project.” To Miller, the project existed to “make our fellow students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilize support for the defense of America and the civilization of the West.”

And now, as of May 2025, he holds two powerful roles within the Trump administration: White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. Now, with Mike Waltz leaving, he’s reportedly in line for a third: National Security Advisor, a position that would give him sweeping control over the nation’s most sensitive decisions.

Miller does not seemed concerned about being in the spotlight or taking credit for the vision being implemented right now in our country. But his interest in making America whiter than it has ever been aligns perfectly with dictators and authoritarians who, for years, have pushed ethnic cleansing as the natural order of things, and normalizes it.

We must do whatever we can to push back against this hate-filled rhetoric. Be loud, write emails, call your reps, rally and protest, get dragged out of town halls. For inspiration, check out what citizen journalists are doing across Wisconsin, quietly observing and documenting events that reveal a disturbing trend: elected officials evading accountability, dismissing public concerns, and restricting access to democratic processes.

3.
Speaking of good trouble, you have probably seen the videos and still images of Emily Feiner, a 64-year-old semi-retired social worker, who previously worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and is not registered with either of the United States’ major political parties, being forcibly removed from a town hall hosted by her Republican representative, Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.).

Emily Feiner

Mother Jones reports that Feiner’s offense was asking, “Given all the unconstitutional acts by this administration, did he have a red line, and what was it?” According to Feiner and a friend who filmed the incident and was also removed from the event, Jennifer Cabrera, who is also chair of the local chapter of the Working Families Party, Lawler did not directly answer the question, and instead started talking about the appropriations process. So Feiner called out: “Answer the question, answer the question.”

4.
If Republican Senators are too cowardly to push back against the lies and conspiracy theories of RFK Jr., we’ll take 9-year-old Teddy speaking at the Princeton (new Jersey) Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting. “I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr.'s lies."

In the meantime, Meidas reported that RFK Jr. fired another 200 employees of the National Institutes of Health. 50 of them worked at the National Cancer Institute. The move follows the dismissal of about 10,000 employees last month. One fired employee to CBS: "We thought the worst was behind us, and we were transitioning into this new phase, and the rug was just pulled out from underneath us."

5.
In one more instance of the Supreme Court kowtowing to *rump and associates, the majority ruled this week to allow the transgender military ban to go into effect. Erin Reed reports that if implemented broadly, the ban will have immediate and damaging consequences for both transgender service members and military readiness across the United States. SPARTA, a leading transgender military advocacy organization, estimates that removing 15,000 transgender service members would result in the loss of an $18 billion capital investment, with the Palm Center projecting an additional $1 billion cost to recruit and train replacements. Notably, up to 73% of these service members are senior enlisted personnel with 12-21 years of experience—expertise that cannot be easily replaced by the U.S. government.

And along that line, the *rump administration released a pseudoscientific literature review attacking transgender care for minors last week while simultaneously rejecting medical consensus on the subject. Dr. Jerrica Kirkley, the co-founder and chief medical officer at the trans healthcare provider Plume, said “Although the review states it is not intended to serve as a clinical practice guideline or treatment recommendations, it can easily be weaponized and be misused. The anonymously authored review lacks scientific merit, as it chooses to ignore decades of evidence, well-established care guidelines and goes against the consensus of the broad medical community.”

6.
In an email newsletter from Democracy Docket this week, Marc Elias suggests 10 ways to stand up for democracy and defend our elections.

1. Educate Yourself
2. Share What You Learn
3. Run for Something
4. Volunteer for a Campaign
5. Join or Support Pro-Democracy Organizations
6. Become a Trained Poll Worker
7. Engage Your Elected Officials
8. Vote in Every Election
9. Stay Engaged
10. Support Independent, Pro-Democracy Media

Read the newsletter for more detailed information.

7.
The Lincoln Project with another video warning that those who go along with the unconstitutional actions against American citizens will not go unpunished.

8.
The Tucson Sentinel reports the *rump administration is cutting funds to AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, leaving some Tucson-area community organizations that depend on the program for staff uncertain about their futures. Last Friday, Arizona officials received notice from the federal government of the termination of AmeriCorps grants, according to a statement from Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. Mayes joined a coalition of around two dozen states in suing the Trump administration Tuesday over its cuts to the national program.

At the same time, several arts organizations in Tucson and hundreds more nationwide received emails Friday from the National Endowment for the Arts informing them the agency had rescinded their grants, claiming that the projects didn't align with *rump’s new funding priorities. Peggy Johnson, executive director of the Loft Cinema, learned Friday via email the Loft’s $30,000 NEA grant was being canceled.

9.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts presented the 26th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to Conan O’Brien on March 23, 2025. Check out this excerpt from his outstanding acceptance speech.

10.
This Tuesday, May 13, is the last Tucson Hop Shop date for Dropped By Birds as summer is looming. Join us from 6-8pm for good friends, music, beer, and tasty dill pickle pizza. Yes, dill pickle. With Karl Hoffmann, Les Merrihew, and Alvin Blaine.

And now…