Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA): Would you say a lesson plan on the Tulsa race massacre would be illegal DEI?
*rump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon: I’d have to get back to you on that.
Lee: Do you know what the Tulsa massacre is?
McMahon: I’d like to look into it.
1.
Many of my friends have been participating in demonstrations, calling their representatives, attending town halls, throwing postcard writing parties, etc. to do what they can to voice their opposition to all things *rump.
According to Rebecca Solnit, you can leave the country and stay with the struggle or stay in the country and not participate in the struggle, and to be blunt, the majority of people in the US are not participating. Turnout for the Hands Off protests on April 5th were the biggest since Trump came back to the White House, and though it might have been more than two million, that's well below 1% of the population.
David Robson of the BBC writes that nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
Robson actually gets this figure from research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University. One more reason *rump is going after Harvard? Here’s her TEDx Talk from over a decade ago.
With over a 347 million population, we need at least 12 million to step up to make any kind of difference. Chenoweth writes that overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.
She cites several reasons why nonviolent protests are more successful; violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground, nonviolent protests have fewer physical barriers to participation. You do not need to be fit and healthy to engage in a strike, whereas violent campaigns tend to lean on the support of physically fit young men, nonviolent campaigns are generally easier to discuss openly, which means that news of their occurrence can reach a wider audience, and nonviolent campaigns are also more likely to win support among the police and the military – the very groups that the government should be leaning on to bring about order.
Examples of successful non-violent movements include the People Power Revolution in Manila in 1986. It was a nonviolent uprising that ended the 20-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and involved a series of nationwide demonstrations and civil disobedience, culminating in Marcos's exile and the restoration of democracy. (I wrote a bit about the Philippines’ Maria Ressa and her recent book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator” a month ago)
And in 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.
Worth reading and thinking about right now is Thom Hartmann’s assertion that authoritarianism happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like. This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.
Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.”
If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.
Don’t get used to fascism. Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.
Take 10 minutes and check out HCR on holding Trump accountable the way forward for Democrats.
Michael Moore suggests a few simple actions that can and will make a difference:
Actions that take 30 seconds:
Example: Write to any one of your elected representatives (Go here and follow the links) with your one sentence demand of the day: “You must VOTE NO on Trump’s Big Ugly Bill!”
Actions that take one minute:
Example: Call your member of Congress (Call the Capitol Switchboard and tell them your zip code and they will connect you: (202) 224-3121 or go to 5Calls.org) and tell them something that you are for or against (for Medicaid, against the slaughter in Gaza, for abortion rights, against deporting 11 million people). It takes less than a minute. These calls matter mightily.
Actions that take 3-5 minutes:
Example: Sign up with a local organizing group to find ways to connect with people in your area. Do it now! Just Google “progressive groups near [insert town, state]” — or check these groups: SwingLeft | Indivisible | Choose Democracy. These are your allies in your community (you are not alone!) — and they’ve got lots of things going on. There’s no better time to join in than right now.
Actions that take 5-10 minutes:
Example: Create a handmade sign on a piece of cardboard that you will hold at your next big local march or rally (like the ones coming up nationwide on June 14th). Or call a friend or family member and get them to join the group you just joined. Or take a few minutes to decide which office you’re running for next year! (Take A Seat | Run For Something). Yes, you! Start small: Precinct Delegate. Library Board. PTA treasurer. Parish Council. Daisies co-leader. It’s all political. And it’s necessary that people like us see to it that our values are present and affecting and inspiring others.
Onward!
2.
An opinion piece in the NYTs finally outs Elon Musk as to who he really is—a man who's character flaws include a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty and a deadly incuriosity. As he famously told Joe Rogan earlier this year, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” referring to the emotion as a “bug” in our system.
The article is titled Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death, and refers to his termination of more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.
Even though Musk is ’stepping down’ from guvmnt work, Peter Thiel is picking up the reins. *rump has enlisted Thiel’s data analysis company Palantir to collect data on all Americans. If you watch any cop shows on the TeeVee, it appears that data on all Americans is already available to law enforcement.
But this might be taking it all a step further as the *rump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
There is some pushback within the company as this month, 13 former employees signed a letter urging Palantir to stop its endeavors with Mr. Trump. Linda Xia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it.
“Data that is collected for one reason should not be repurposed for other uses,” Ms. Xia said. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse.”
Investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who worked for the Guardian for 20 years, writes that Thiel is a master chess player who thinks strategically and long term. One of his most famous acts - destroying the media site, Gawker, was planned over years. JD Vance, the vice president, is a wholly owned Peter Thiel project that has been 15 years in the making. He first met Thiel when a student and he owes his entire career, first in finance and then politics, to him.
On the plus side, mass-murderer Musk has denounced the Big Beautiful Bill as a “disgusting abomination and it will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” Heh. Even Bernie said, “Musk is right: this bill IS a ‘disgusting abomination’. We shouldn’t give $664 billion in tax breaks to the 1%. We shouldn’t throw 13.7 million people off of Medicaid. We shouldn’t cut $290 billion from programs to feed the hungry. Let’s defeat this disgusting abomination.” (More on the recent feud in the Goddamn section below)
But as Jay Kuo writes on Wednesday, while many on the left understandably delighted in watching Musk trash Trump’s signature legislation, putting its passage in further danger, Musk’s critique comes from the right, along the lines of Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI). That is to say, these senators and Musk believe that the bill doesn’t go far enough in cutting spending, even though it guts Medicaid and food assistance for the poorest Americans. That puts them in the same camp as the far-right House Freedom Caucus, the very ones who capitulated by voting for the bill, even though it explodes the deficit.
Nowhere in Musk’s attacks is there any suggestion that the deficit problem can be resolved by, say, refusing to extend tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens. That is the elephant in the room, if you’ll excuse the pun, that no Republican wants to talk about. No matter how much you try to cut, it’s primarily a drop in tax revenues that is causing the deficit to balloon. Musk won’t say so, meaning he only wants to shrink the deficit if it’s someone else’s money.
Nor does Musk condemn the specific increase in defense spending authorized by the bill, likely because he and his companies are going to profit immensely from Pentagon expenditures. All this reveals that Musk is not a serious deficit hawk. If he were, he would raise revenues by taxing the wealthy at higher rates while cutting back on the most obvious source of “pork”—the Pentagon’s defense budget.
And you might enjoy Scott Galloway’s wrap-up on Elon Musk dished out to TeeVee personalities Piers Morgan and Kevin O'Leary.
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Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, also writes last week, the fiscal lunatics proved they are still running the asylum. The last fit of congressional sanity broke out during the Clinton administration. This week, House Republicans sent the Senate a budget that adds $3.8 trillion to the deficit. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” pairs unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy with a combined $1.1 trillion reduction in spending on programs including Medicaid and SNAP. The math isn’t mathing: Older/wealthier Americans are running up younger/poorer Americans’ credit cards to maintain their lifestyle. One especially offensive provision: a permanent increase in the estate tax exemption to an inflation-indexed $15 million, per person — letting couples pass $30 million to their heirs tax-free while slashing food stamps.
And finally, this piece by Ava DuVernay, American director, producer, and writer, who writes of Musk that mediocrity in this man and others like him is so normalized, so falsely praised, that it hardly feels worth noticing anymore. They get adorned with the language of genius and we’re trained not to question it and certainly not to rail against it.
Elon Musk is not a genius. He’s just another man who did what he wanted because nobody told him no. And while he was snorting, tweeting and spinning through the halls of power, everyone else will have to live with the wreckage he left. A wreckage that’ll last longer than most seem to realize.
3.
And in further ignorance and cruelty, my friend Kirk Astroth alerted me to Kristi Noem’s (as I’ve said before, the cosplaying mis-cast actress from South Dakota who now heads up Homeland Security) actions to waive any and all protections and/or restrictions regarding the construction of a new border wall starting at Border Monument 203 and extending south and east to Border Monument 191. "I reserve the authority to execute further waivers from time to time as I may determine to be necessary."
The acts rescinded include the National Environmental Policy, the Endangered Species Act, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (known as the Clean Water Act), the National Historic Preservation Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, the Clean Air Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the Paleontological Resources Protection Act, the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act, the National Trails System Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Noise Control Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act, the Antiquities Act, the Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act, the Eagle Protection Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the National Fish and Wildlife Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Wild Horse and Burro Act, the Military Lands Withdrawal Act, and the Sikes Act.
This is why we act. This is why we march.
4.
AZPM reports that the following locations would stop serving meals on Friday, June 13: El Pueblo Activity Senior Center, Quincie Douglas Center, Ellie Towne Community Center, Saguaro Christian Church, Casa de Esperanza (Green Valley), and the Ajo Community Center. Further, three meal sites operated by the city also will close next month. The sites closing June 27 are Fred Archer Center, Donna Liggins Center, and the El Rio Neighborhood Center.
This is just another instance of the GOP cruelty doled out by *rump, RFK, and Elon Musk. The Guardian reports that the Older Americans Act (OAA) nutrition program, which supports the health and wellbeing of seniors through nutrition services, is the network’s primary source of federal funding, covering 37% of what it takes to serve more than 250m meals each year. The exact mix of local, state, federal and private funding of Meals on Wheels’ thousands of on-the-ground community programs varies from provider to provider.
An essay, penned by Alison Barkoff, Kathy Greenlee, Sharon Lewis, and Henry Claypool (who are all founders and former leaders of the Administration for Community Living), writes that the Department of Health and Human Services fired nearly half of the ACL staff as part of the expansive HHS reductions in force.
If you are an older adult, person with a disability, or a family caregiver, you’ve likely participated in one of ACL’s critical programs. Annually, ACL’s nutrition programs provide more than 261 million meals through programs like Meals on Wheels. ACL’s family caregiver supports help over 1.5 million families each year, allowing their loved ones to remain at home. Nationwide, millions of Americans participate in programs at over 11,000 senior centers funded by ACL. Independent living services assist over 250,000 disabled people of all ages, from helping people transition home after a hospitalization or nursing home stay to help getting a job. ACL’s State Health Insurance Program provides counseling to 1.8 million low-income Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries to help them understand their options. ACL programs also include in-home supports, legal assistance, research initiatives, and support for families of children with disabilities, among many others.
In bringing together disparate programs previously housed across the federal government, ACL strives to improve coordination of limited resources, increase efficiency, and reduce duplication and fragmentation. The aging and disability networks — made up of 2,500 state and local organizations across the country — are now working together, reaching more people. ACL has become a hub for cooperation across HHS and other departments, leading interagency initiatives around caregiving, housing, workforce, prevention of abuse and neglect, healthy aging, and other efforts to ensure both positive outcomes and alignment of federal programs. States have followed ACL’s lead, better aligning and coordinating their own aging and disability programs.
The Arizona Luminaria reports that Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes joined two dozen states in suing the federal government. The lawsuit claims changes to AmeriCorps funding that affect staffing at social service centers and food banks violate federal law.
5.
I am sure you’ve read bits and bobs about the drone attack on Russian planes and other strategic sites by the Ukraine military. Known as “Operation Spider Web,” and 18 secretive months in the planning, it has redefined warfare as we’ve known it. Unlike Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians, this operation was strictly about targeting Russian weaponry, and successful it was.
Please recall, *rump told Zelenskky during his shameful Oval Office Ambush, “You have no choice but to make major concessions to Putin, or your country will be decimated by a much more powerful foe. You aren’t holding any cards.” Bwwaahhaahaaahaaaaaaaaaa…*rump’s a turd taco.
Zelenskky tweeted on June 1 that “Ukraine is defending itself, and rightly so – we are doing everything to make Russia feel the need to end this war. Russia started this war, Russia must end it.”
Roman Sheremeta, Ph.D., a Professor of Economics at Case Western Reserve University, writes the genius of Operation Spider’s Web lies not only in its technical execution or physical impact. It is equally a masterclass in psychological and economic warfare. Rather than hide the details of the operation, Ukraine chose to disclose them publicly — a strategic decision that sent shockwaves through the Russian system. By revealing how the mission was carried out, Ukraine weaponized paranoia.
Now, every cargo truck in Russia is a potential threat. Every driver is a suspect. In the days following the attack, massive traffic jams were reported in regions like Irkutsk, as authorities began systematically inspecting cargo trucks. Surveillance and internal security resources are being diverted to monitor tens of thousands of kilometers of highway. Military and civilian logistics are slowing down. Contractors are being viewed with suspicion. Bottlenecks are forming. Trust is eroding.
This is the new face of asymmetric warfare. Ukraine doesn’t need to match Russia plane-for-plane. It only needs to force Russia to doubt the integrity of its own systems. When a country as large as Russia begins to mistrust its own supply chains, it starts to break down from within.
The ripple effects of this operation are likely to be long-term. Russia’s military machine is deeply dependent on road transport, which accounts for approximately 70% of its cargo volume. The cost of delaying, inspecting, and rerouting this volume is immense. The psychological toll on a population already under stress from sanctions, conscription, and economic decline is even greater.
Russia’s retaliation? To be determined.
6.
Rebecca Solnit reports that a man named Jacob Harris has created a DOGE tracker website of his own accord. Harris writes, "We are now several months into the second Trump presidency. It’s been hard keeping track of all that is being damaged and lost within the federal government. Emboldened by Musk and the absence of oversight, the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) has been rampaging through agencies to subvert their security, cancel contracts, fire staff and siphon up confidential data into large data warehouses. ...I do enjoy working with data and seeing what patterns will emerge over time from data collection and analysis."
She also notes that HCR wrote that "Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration." To that end, Lawfare tracks those lawsuits, keeping a careful running tally.
When a regime is lawless, upholding the law is resistance; when a regime endeavors to operate in secret or tries to obfuscate with lies, bringing its actions to light and telling the truth about those lies is resistance, the kind we call journalism. A host of strong voices against the regime have emerged, including Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/), the sometimes profoundly inspired and often on-point writing by Anand Giriharadas at the Ink, legal experts on social media such as Lawrence Tribe and former Judge J. Michael Luttig, authoritarianism experts with newsletters including Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Timothy Snyder.
So much around us tells us we have no power: how history is taught, how entertainment focuses on muscly ubermenches doing their violence rather than collective nonviolent action, how the news narrates our world as, again, an elite handful making all the decisions, holding all the power. But we have a lot of power, and one way you can see that is by noticing that those elites are actually afraid of us. Elon Musk found out that people have power when Tesla Takedown protests and other activism helped make the brand suddenly repulsive to buyers. Musk thereby found that he was in retail, where the customer is always right. I hope someday to see Musk and every member of DOGE on trial for their crimes against the government and people of the United States.
7.
Greg Palast, former BBC reporter with a solid academic background in statistics, economics, and math, dissects *rump’s doubling the tariff on steel and aluminum from 25% to 50%. Steel employment is diving, not despite the tariffs, but because of the tariffs.
—Trump’s tariffs on foreign steel increased the amount of steel imported. Despite Trump’s tariffs, total steel imports are up 3.6% year to date compared to 2024 according to the American Iron and Steel Institute.
—Trump’s tariffs have reduced American steel production. Adjusted year-to-date output through May 24 was 36,287,000 net tons, down 0.5 percent from the same period last year.
—Trump’s tariffs on steel have raised prices on American goods from cars to computer mainframes. NUCOR, America’s largest steelmaker, raised its prices a stunning 38.5%, from $675/ton to $935/ton in the past year to March 2025. As steel is central to US production in all industries, these hikes are a big factor in inflation, adding 1.7% to prices throughout the economy, according to a Yale University study. This will cost the average American family $2,800 if the tariffs continue through the year.
—And the biggest shocker: Trump’s tariffs are costing American steel jobs. Despite Trump’s punitive tariffs, steel employment in the USA has flatlined and massive layoffs have been announced. In March, with Trump imposing the highest tariffs in a century, Cleveland-Cliffs, one of America’s largest steel producers, announced over 1,200 steelworkers will be laid off in Michigan and Minnesota.
The Orange Marauder is a business genius!
Tiny Tidbits of Goddamn!
— White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt on Tuesday blamed the Biden administration's immigration policies for the violent attack at a rally in Boulder, Colorado, that was held in solidarity with the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza. "This tragedy is a sobering reminder of the consequences of the Biden administration's failed policies.”
— A Republican from Weatherford, Texas, Sen. Phil King, sponsored a bill (Senate Bill 10) which would require school classrooms to display the 10 Commandments. The bill will require every classroom to visibly display a poster sized at least 16 by 20 inches. The poster can’t include any text other than the language laid out in the bill, and no other similar posters may be displayed. “It is incumbent on all of us to follow God’s law and I think we would all be better off if we did,” Rep. Candy Noble, a Republican from Lucas who is carrying the bill in the House, said during the floor debate Saturday.
—John Morales, a weather newscaster in Florida, actually speaks out on the TeeVee on National Weather Service cuts and how it will impact hurricane season.
—Drunken Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth orders Navy to strip name of gay rights icon Harvey Milk from replenishment oiler ship. An official from the Navy also said that the timing of the announcement -- occurring during Pride month -- was intentional. Because of course it was...
—And now *rump has banned travel from a variety of countries, including Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen (“We don’t want them”), and in the same stench-ridden breath orders an investigation of President Biden and his aides.
—It’s too early to know how the distraction of the fight between *rump and Musk, that broke out in a big way yesterday, will play out.
Joyce Vance writes it’s easy to get caught up in the bromance meltdown going on in real time on social media. The taunts and threats being lobbed back and forth between Trump and Musk today are as hard to look away from as a schoolyard confrontation between the two kids everyone wants to see get taken down a notch. We all need a good laugh to lighten the load, but I worry that when this is all over, the joke is going to be on us.
DOGE is still inside of our government—and our personal data. We are going into Hurricane season, during climate change, without a functional FEMA. A generation of scientific research is at risk. We are not preparing for the next pandemic; at this rate, we won’t even have updated Flu or Covid shots for the next season. The Justice Department is taking orders from the president to exact revenge on people he thinks of as his enemies. Pete Hegseth is still running the Department of Defense.
We are watching live as DHS, headed by cosplay-loving Secretary Kristi Noem—who is apparently increasingly desperate to meet the president’s deportation quotas—going after the easiest people it can find to deport. They’re not violent criminals. They’re people who work in our communities, our neighbors, and your kids’ school friends. They are people who are regularly reporting for scheduled meetings with immigration authorities—law abiding, tax paying, noncitizens.
And yes, school friends, because there is reporting from multiple cities that ICE is seizing kids and separating them from their families.
And this morning Thom Hartmann lays the blame squarely on John Roberts for the alpha-male dick-measuring contest between *rump and Musk, writing it’s the inevitable outcome of America’s complete surrender to oligarchy.
8.
Lastly this morning, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) launched the Madleen, a civilian ship now sailing toward Gaza carrying humanitarian aid and international human rights defenders in direct defiance of Israel’s illegal and genocidal blockade.
On board are volunteers from multiple countries, among them Member of the European Parliament Rima Hassan, and climate justice activist Greta Thunberg. The ship is carrying urgently needed supplies for the people of Gaza, including baby formula, flour, rice, diapers, women’s sanitary products, water desalination kits, medical supplies, crutches, and children’s prosthetics.
Here’s Greta being interviewed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.
And now…
Good sturdy stock here, Gar! Thanks again.