This table’s a list of topics I’m reading related to it.
Scientific Research
Banning DEI
Arresting or Deporting Supporters of Palestine
RFK Jr.’s Whacked Out Health Policies
Deporting People and Preventing Due Process
Trump Refusing to Follow Judge’s Orders
Severe Cuts at Federal Government Agencies
Government Grift Schemes
DOGE
White South African Refugees
Zionism and Bombing Gaza
Welfare Recipient Data Collection for ICE Deportations
Erasure of POC History
Antivaxx
Deporting Labor Union Workers
Attacking Birthright Citizenship
ICE Raids and Coordination with local LE
Tariffs and Trade War with China
Autism
The material below is all the blog posting I’ve done about the Trump administration. It’s all out of date.
Beating the Oligarchy
Ideas for moving forward. This is my April 13th thinking.
I got this from a mass email to Bernie supporters:
These people are not showing up because I am running for something. There is no presidential campaign happening.
These are people attending in huge numbers who are not just saying NO to oligarchy, but they are saying YES to raising the minimum wage, YES to expanding Social Security, YES to guaranteeing health care as a human right, YES, to cutting the cost of prescription drugs, YES to paid family and medical leave, YES to equal pay for equal work, YES to more affordable housing, YES to making childcare and higher education affordable to all, YES to taking on the existential threat of climate change.
I think Bernie does a pretty good job creating an ideology for the Democrats. Ideology is where the party is weak; organizing is where it’s pretty strong.
Los Angeles City Council, Berniecrat, rode in with the Bernie wave. Member of and endorsed by DSA. Prison reform/abolition background.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez
D-Los Angeles district 34, did not endorse Sanders, but has coauthored bills with him.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal
D-Washington, early endorser of Sanders, wrote Medicare for All bill with Sanders.
Rep. Ro Khanna
D-San Francisco, early endorser of Sanders
Ysabel Jurado
Los Angeles City Council, DSA endorsed. Tenant rights attorney.
Ada Briceno
UNITE HERE 11, early labor union to break from labor mainstream to support Sanders
Rep. Maxwell Frost
D-Central Florida
Alex Aguilar
Laborers 742 Production Assistant union
Brandi Good
ILWU 13, not sure if 13 endorsed Sanders, but other locals have
Pair and Care (org)
Fire disaster mutual aid org.
Sandy Reding
Cal Nurses Association, NNU, early endorser of Sanders to break from labor mainstream, main organization pushing Medicare for All in California, CalCare.
NUHW Speakers
NUHW, early endorser of Sanders.
UTLA Speakers
UTLA 2020 endorser of Sanders.
Lorena Gonzalez
California Labor Federation
April Verrett
SEIU, late endorser of a Sanders bill to stop funding Israel. SEIU has generally not endorsed Sanders, but specific locals have.
Notably missing was the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (LA County Fed), the local central labor council. Most of the unions represented at the event are members of the LA County Fed. Historically, they have endorsed the same as the LA County Democratic Party.
The Cal Labor Fed is a member organization of AFL-CIO unions in California.
A few notable absences. Not speaking was Kenneth Mejia, the LA City Controller, who was a Berniecrat and Bernie volunteer. Also not speaking were DSA City Council members Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman. These are all considered to be the left of the Democrats.
The Hands Off protests were regarded by the left and Berniecrats as the more mainline Democratic Party protests. They were organized by Indivisible and MeToo and had more participation by the local Democratic clubs.
The participants on April 5 appeared to be mainly to the left of the organizations, from the few stories I’ve read.
I would say both events were liberal, and the Bernie event was for the progressive wing. The Hands Off protests were a big tent event that, maybe, excluded only the more conservative of the moderate wing.
On the whole, Los Angeles is a progressive Democrat city. Los Angeles County is a mix of mostly Progressive Democrat districts, with some centrist Third Way Democrats, with some Republican precincts, but no Republican congressional districts. (Based on the maps on factional caucuses linked from Wikipedia’s article above.) There are no LA Dems in the Blue Dog and Problem Solvers – though, at one time, Adam Schiff was a Blue Dog.
Orange County used to be solidly Republican, but is now flipping Democratic. Notably, the centrist/business Problem Solver’s Caucus includes Republican Young Kim of Anaheim Hills. The local Indivisible is seeking to replace her.
Comment on a Bernie Thread
Apr 13, 2025
… First off, both parties are bourgeois parties, and have always been. There have been moments of populism, but it’s always incomplete, because universal suffrage wasn’t really a thing until the 1960s. My basic thesis is that the past was shit, and to think otherwise is delusional.
The collapse of the Whigs was caused by the split over slavery. It was a conflict between two forms of capitalism – the more advanced northern industrialists, and the less advanced southern plantation system. The southern system was producing more wealth, but the northern system was the future of industry.
Perhaps there’s a split right now, between the techlords of social media, and older forms of capitalism, like trade in goods, or landlording (Trump’s thing). So, right now, there is an alliance between the social media techlords and a mentally ill landlord. They’re pushing wild tariffs that threaten trade in goods, manufacture, farming, anything that exports or imports. They threaten that kind of neoliberalism, too.
Perhaps, if this split is real, it will tear the parties apart, and there can be an opportunity.
For example, the Abolitionists were a small movement when they joined up in the Republican Party. I read that maybe they were 5%. They had elected, I think, a single Representative to Congress. (They were far smaller than the Free Soilers, who elected more than a dozen.) But, through the conflict of the Civil War, their influence grew to where they are now part of “American History”.
I always imagined that there were many Abolitionists, but, no. There were few. Once the war was over, a lot of people who fancied themselves abolitionists turned back into racists, capitalists, and flies upon a mountain of shit that would become Jim Crow and America.
FD Signifier on Kamala’s Loss
This is a better take than mine below.
Why Kamala Lost
Nov. 26, 2024
I have no clear idea, because I didn’t keep up on the campaign, but I am reading some long-winded arguments that don’t always hold water.
There’s the “class” argument, the “POC/Woman” argument, the “shift to the right” argument, the “uncommitted Gaza-supporter spoiler” argument, the “misogyny” argument, the “Latinos” argument, and even the “Asians” argument.
The one I like the best was pushed in a video by Unai Montes-Irueste, which is the “time” argument. She simply didn’t have enough time to contact enough voters to make the votes.
How do you win a Presidential election?
Get the most votes in the places that matter the most.
How is that done? I’ve only been a peon volunteer, but my impression is this:
Establish a strategy to target states, and districts. Dems target cities, mainly.
Establish a messaging strategy. Generally, positive for most of the campaign, with some negative campaigning that ramps up at the end.
Execute:
Get the local Dem Party clubs and county parties to activate their members and base (which includes politicians).
Do voter registration drives, because new registrants vote for you.
Have big rallies for these clubs. Celeb appearances matter – but WTF with paying for them?
Open offices and hire staff:
Run phone banks
Run canvassing door to door to help boost enthusiasm from the clubs
Run phone banks for volunteers
Run phone banks with targeted outreach, using targeted paid staff
Run phone banks with your best persuaders (usually good talkers who are elders)
Run texting campaigns to raise money
Run local rallies where local electeds build enthusiasm for voting
Buy a ton of media, mailers, and social media targeted ads.
The Harris campaign was something like 4 months long.
The Trump campaign started before he even announced, when people were spreading rumors something like two years before election day.
I recall people saying, well over a year ago, that Dems needed to really get behind Biden and boost his reputation against Trump’s attacks. Hindsight is 20/20, and I think they were correct.
The point of a campaign isn’t to have the best endorsements or rallies. It’s to reach the most supporters, and get out the vote. This requires work: education, phone calls, house visits, and lots of door hangers. All this takes time.
What about the issues?
This is going to sound mean, but people mostly don’t care that much. The pundits are, socially, around the top 2% of society, and around the top 25% intellectually. They’re writers. They’re readers. They’re somewhat unusual people.
The LA Times has an online circulation of 500,000 people. This is a paper that covers a county of 11,000,000 people. This is around 5% of that population (and the 500k includes many people outside LA Co). Most voters don’t care that deeply about all these issues. They are watching their news on social media or television, in video form. We are an unserious people.
Gaza? Exit polls said around 5% of voters cared about international issues. That’s all international issues, including Israel’s bombing of Gaza.
Race and Gender? White people claim not to care, as do many POC, but this is a straight up lie. These are two huge issues, but, their impact should be known, and accounted for. I don’t know what value race has, but it seems like a good ethnic candidate inspires people of that race in the opposing party to move around 10% to 20% of their votes to that candidate. I don’t know what gender does, but I suspect it moves a smaller amount, mainly because women are so used to voting for men, and have internalized misogyny. The social construction of gender identity operates differently than race.
Class and the Economy? Hell yes, but this is all twisted, because it’s mainly about white Rust Belt voters, and that’s not as typical of the working class. The working class in America is composed, mainly, by people of color and women, working in all the cities, not white people facing Rust Belt turmoil. “Working class” is sometimes code for “working class white people”, and sometimes, it’s not. Working class white people actually shifted a little bit away from Trump.
Latinos? Yeah, they contributed to the loss. Insert mean joke about deportations here. So did some of the Uncommitted who went “full Idiocracy” and voted for Trump instead of being uncommitted. Same for Asians, who used to shift left to support Black politicians, but have been drifting rightward ever since, and barely went for Kamala, I think in the mid 50%s. (There’s some racism happening in these groups as well.)
All these things matter, and had an effect, of course, but I think that the argument about not being able to scale up the operations in such a short time holds the most water.
My thinking is also influenced by the outsider candidate Kenneth Mejia’s campaign for Controller of the City of LA. It took two years, but a relatively small spend of something like 100k. He was up against establishment veteran Paul Koretz, who was backed by the local party, local machines, and so forth. With that much time, Mejia bent the odds in his direction, and garnered more votes than even the victorious mayor Karen Bass.
Erasing History at the National Archives
Colleen Shogan is accused of de-emphasizing racial conflict in presentations of history at the NA.
This is what the Trumpists fear: the truth about our country, about racial divisions, and gender divisions, that were part of the law, and utterly inimical to both individualistic and social values we strive to embody.
They are threatened by race and gender, and want to bury the study of these oppressions, because they open the door to understanding other social divisions, like ability/disability, youth/age, legality/illegality, and other divisions that have concrete effects, cleaving people into two groups, then four groups, then eight groups, and on and on.
These books, most likely, embody an ethos of repairing the rifts, so people can overcome their hatreds and fears, and become a unified people. They fear the rise of another Americans with Disabilities Act, another Civil Rights Act, another 13th and 14th Amendment, another 19th Amendment. They want to continue to prevent the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. They want us to hate asylum seekers (maybe because they don’t want us to be able to seek asylum).
They want the opposite: increased division, increased resentment, increased hopelessness.
They don’t want people to fight and struggle for their liberation. They want people to stew in their oppression, become passive, and accept the abuse. They want people divided to be suspicious of each other, to compete against each other, and fight each other. They want us to be satisfied with crumbs, as long as someone below us gets fewer crumbs. They don’t want us to share the whole cake.
Back in 2021, I wrote this letter to Congress, criticizing DeJoy. He was never removed.
Dear ____:
We need the USPS board to fire DeJoy and replace him with someone who isn’t out to sabotage the USPS.
I sometimes sell on Ebay and other online stores, and have sent around 1,000 packages in the past few years. USPS, in the past, was amazing. It was competitively priced and fast, especially if you used Priority Mail. The whole system ran especially smoothly, for people who printed postage at home.
I’ve lost several packages in the mail. I think I’ve lost five. Three were lost during this DeJoy regime.
Under DeJoy, the packages and letters take longer to arrive. In the past, they arrived ahead of schedule. If I was working hard to get the parcels done early, I could sometimes beat Amazon Prime delivery. The system was that good.
Today, they sometimes suffer long delays.
I know there’s a pandemic happening. We’re all able to accept slower delivery, but packages are going missing entirely.
I’ve heard horror stories of the USPS not giving out overtime… but the carriers are still staying late to finish their work.
From the outside, it looks like DeJoy is sabotaging the USPS.
Please, change the management, and let the USPS shine again.
Feb 5, 2025
The gang of young smart guys taking over, have been deleting their social media presence, because… I don’t know why. Why hide what you did last year? I think they’ve gone undercover to do nefarious things.
Meanwhile, agency officials are bowing to Trump’s orders, even when they are told to do things that will undermine the credibility of the agency.
Russell said the CDC website was also a reliable place to direct patients because the agency’s information must remain scientifically sound to maintain the public’s trust. That’s no longer the case. Doctors can now expect CDC guidelines to be edited based on the political preferences of whoever is in power, which means the nation’s top public health agency will no longer be a trustworthy source for the most up to date information on diseases and standards of care, Russell said.
The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) has published a list with the names and photos of over 50 people—many involved in programs focused on improving the health of people of color. The group claims these workers, included in their “D.E.I. bureaucrat watch list,” supported diversity initiatives, criticized Trump on social media, or made donations to Democrats.
Notably, many of the targets are Black employees working at health agencies. This disturbing attempt to intimidate and undermine public servants comes from AAF, a small right-wing nonprofit founded in 2020. Enough is enough.
Musk’s vision for America — a place of high personal and economic freedom, where political activity could become criminal, under the rule of tech-controlled joint-stock companies — is one of the most important stories of this election.
Update
This is a stunning summary of Trump’s EOS. I expect some corruption and favoritism, but Trump and DOGE are cutting at many basic parts of the government that have bipartisan support.
