Put This On Your Calendar

October 18th. Put it on your calendar.

That’s the day that Indivisible and its partner organizations will mount a second “No Kings” day. As the email announcing that event reminded us, organizing a national day of action with millions of people takes time and resources– recruitment tools, map of events, supplies and resources for local protests and anchor events, so the advance notice is intended to allow for fundraising and the other tasks that ensure a successful turnout.

Speaking of turnout–the incredible number who participated in the first No Kings Day was the result of such careful organizing, and the goal is to build on that success–to ensure that the millions of Americans who are deeply opposed to the ongoing destruction of America’s government and our constitutional culture have a vehicle to send a powerful message, not just to the nation’s corrupt and incompetent MAGA administration, but to their cowardly enablers in the House and Senate.

In the announcement of the second No Kings Day, the email from Indivisible reported “round the clock coordination with our No Kings partners” and the intent “to make the next No Kings one of the largest days of protest in US history.”

I have posted previously about academic studies documenting peaceful protests by only 3.5% of a country’s population that have defeated other autocratic takeovers. That percentage would translate to some eleven million Americans–an enormous but doable number.

I frequently hear people minimize the effectiveness of taking to the streets in this fashion. Certainly, if nothing else is going on–if the resistance is limited to expressions of displeasure–that effectiveness will be limited. But that isn’t the case in today’s America. Literally hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against the administration’s illegal and unlawful actions, and–at least at the lower court level–over 80% of them have been successful. I’ve previously noted the multiple efforts being mounted by Blue state Attorneys General and governors.

There are also the numerous, less well-organized and promoted protests that have erupted more or less spontaneously around the country. Citizens have developed on-line systems identifying ICE movements, to assist immigrants in evading capture; small (but not insignificant) groups of protestors have gathered in response to other illegal and unconstitutional incursions. Social media is filled with advice for resistors (granted, not always helpful)–not to mention reports of lesser-known activities protesting our would-be King.

The great virtue of a massive protest of the sort being planned for October 18th is the message it sends, especially but not exclusively to the Republican elected officials who have refused to hold town halls or otherwise interact with angry constituents.  But we should not minimize the extent to which participation in such events also has a number of “spin-off” merits. As someone who participated in the first No Kings protest, I can personally attest to experiencing very welcome feelings of solidarity. Interacting with so many other people who clearly shared my concerns, encountering friends I might not have expected to see at such an event, reading the multiple (often very clever) signs–acted like a shot of adrenalin.

When an individual citizen gets up each morning and is immediately assaulted by emails, newsletters and media “breaking news” items detailing the most recent horrific, bigoted and unconstitutional actions taken by the Trump administration, demoralization can–and often does–set in. Gathering with others who share one’s determination not to surrender is a powerful antidote.

In any event, put October 18th on your calendar. Buy some poster-board, and maybe a t-shirt with an appropriately aggressive slogan. Sign up with Indivisible to indicate your intent to participate, and tell your friends and family members.

Let’s see if we can get eleven million people to send a message…

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Really, DeSantis?

Every day, media reports add to the already ample evidence that bigotry is the basis and glue of MAGA–racism, predominantly, but also very substantial amounts of misogyny and homophobia. If the constant, hysterical attacks on DEI and “woke-ism” weren’t sufficient to display the resentments and animus that fuel Trump’s base, a recent incident in Ron DeSantis’ Florida (or–as a cousin who lives there spells it–“FloriDUH”) provides additional confirmation of both the extent and the sheer pettiness of these Rightwing hatreds.

During his tenure in the governor’s office, DeSantis has waged war against such “woke” targets as higher education and Disney World, but now, as The Bulwark recently reported, he’s extended that war to sidewalk chalk. I kid you not.

A MAN WALKING ACROSS an intersection in Florida was arrested over the weekend.

His alleged crime? Felonious use of pink sidewalk chalk.

The man’s name is Sebastian Suarez. On Friday evening, he crossed a street in Orlando with chalk dust on his shoes, leaving pastel-covered footprints on the asphalt. Members of the Florida Highway Patrol, who had taken up a post on the corner, promptly arrested him.

The backstory to this ludicrous arrest is the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub by a gunman who killed 49 people and wounded another 53–at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in America’s sorry, gun-soaked history. The street in question is in front of the Pulse, which was a gay club. That street was subsequently turned into a memorial to the victims.

As part of the tribute, local officials and LGBTQ community leaders decided to fill in the empty spaces of a crosswalk outside the site with colorful paint, so that it would evoke a Pride flag.

They got state approval, laid down the paint one year later and turned the crosswalk into a rainbow—which is how it looked until late August, when state workers removed the colored paint. That set off a series of protests by LGBTQ activists and attempts to recolor the crosswalk, which is what police and state attorneys say Suarez was attempting to do with his chalk.

They charged him with defacing a traffic device, which can be a felony, and kept him in jail overnight.

A judge released Suarez the next day, holding that there had been no probable cause for the arrest. But DeSantis isn’t modifying his expanded view of what activities constitute a threat to “law and order.”

On Sunday, police arrested three more alleged street-coloring bandits. They too have been released from jail without charges, but this time the judge found probable cause, evidently because police—perhaps having been schooled by a state attorney in what the law in question actually prohibits—are now claiming that the chalk is causing more than $1,000 in damages.

DeSantis is following the Trump administration’s efforts to obliterate any and all messages of inclusion and acceptance. A Federal Highway Administration spokesperson responded to a question about the crackdown on such communications by saying that  “Roads are for safety not political messages or artwork.” As the Bulwark article drily notes, the safety defense would be a lot more believable if there were some evidence that painted crosswalks were actually endangering drivers or pedestrians. There doesn’t appear to be any such evidence.

On the contrary—and as articles in the Washington Post and Guardian have noted —a key 2022 study using crash data and observational studies from around the country found asphalt art actually improves safety, by making crosswalks more visible to drivers. As it happens, six of the seventeen intersections in the study were in Florida, which has the nation’s fourth-highest pedestrian fatality rate.

The Pulse crosswalk was not part of the study, but last week the Orlando Sentinel published its own analysis of traffic data and reached the same conclusion—i.e., that colorful street decorations make the city safer for pedestrians….

The safety excuse would also be more credible if Duffy, in his initial tweet announcing the policy, hadn’t explicitly singled out LGBT memorials. “Taxpayers expect their dollars to fund safe streets, not rainbow crosswalks,” Duffy wrote. “Political banners have no place on public roads.”

I wonder if the culture warriors determined to stamp out evidence that gay people exist realize how stupid this is–assigning police to monitor chalk use at intersections rather than spending their time catching criminals or even speeders. The men of MAGA must be incredibly threatened by us uppity women, Brown and Black people who have the nerve to act like they’re entitled to equal civic status, and of course, the mere existence of LGBTQ+ folks.  

But really–criminalizing chalk? Pretty pathetic.

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I’ll Just Leave This Here…

Just in case you haven’t been following the chaos at Health and Human Services–or haven’t recognized the probable effects of placing a demented conspiracy theorist at its head– nine former CDC Directors published a joint op-ed in the New York Times, titled “We Ran The CDC: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health.”

An excerpt will convey their concerns, which are informed by that hated thing called expertise. (You know that in this administration, it’s disqualifying to actually know what you are talking about..)

Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replacedexperts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championedfederal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.

We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost.

This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.

It is really difficult to get one’s head around the extent of the damage–not to mention havoc– being wrought daily by the proudly ignorant, intellectually-limited and thoroughly repulsive creature who inexplicably occupies the Oval Office. America’s stature in the world has cratered; domestically, we are slipping into fascism; economically we’re heading toward recession; and the cretins Trump has put in charge of our governing agencies are waging war against science, knowledge and expertise. (And history, culture, art and architecture, education…)

It’s not much comfort to recognize that the health of the racist, know-nothing MAGA base will decline with that of the rest of us.

I keep thinking about a meme making the rounds on social media: our best hope is that Trump is getting his medical advice from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

If the online speculation about his health caused by the sudden non-appearance of our publicity-hound President turns out to be accurate, perhaps there’s something to that…

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No More Dog Whistles

What has surprised me the most about America’s pell-mell plunge into autocracy and chaos under MAGA and Trump has been the rapidity with which the veil of civility has been discarded–how quickly a depressingly-large segment of our population has abandoned pretense and “dog whistles” and proudly paraded their racism. Even the pretense that DEI and “woke-ism” were really efforts at “reverse discrimination” has been so ludicrous it might as well have been delivered with a wink and a sneer.

We live in an ugly time–a time that has favored the emergence of some particularly ugly people. In a recent post, Charlie Sykes profiled one of them, an “out and proud” Nazi named Nick Fuentes. As he writes, “I confess, I still find it amazing — and deeply disturbing — that a Hitler-praising, crypto-Nazi troll has amassed a following in a movement already packed with cranks, bigots, and loons.”

Sykes quotes liberally from an Atlantic article that quite accurately notes, “Fuentes is not your garden variety racist — he serves it up in all its vile purity.”

Earlier this year, in yet another stream, Fuentes described Chicago as “n*gger hell.” He then laughed and added: “I just came up with that, just now. Isn’t that good?” Fuentes has also said that Hitler was “really fucking cool” and posited that “we need to go back to burning women alive.” (Fuentes did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.)

As Sykes observes, “this is shocking rhetoric even in 2025, when the far right has embraced race science and the federal government could be mistaken for pursuing the aims of the Proud Boys.”

And he quotes the Atlantic article for the observation that– in the deeply racist MAGA media ecosystem– “it’s working.”

Fuentes is among the most popular streamers on Rumble, a right-wing platform similar to YouTube; his videos regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. He’s gained more than 100,000 new followers on X since late June. The White House now posts on X in a gleefully cruel style that seems inspired by Fuentes’s followers, who call themselves “Groypers”—in fact, at the end of May, Trump posted a meme of himself that was first posted by a Groyper account. At least one Fuentes supporter, Paul Ingrassia, works in the administration as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Ingrassia, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has also been nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. No matter how far Fuentes pushes his bigotry, his influence continues to rise.

Those of us who live in a very different world–a world where we recognize that humans come in assorted sizes and colors, a world where the mere fact of difference doesn’t translate to “existential threat”–can only be disheartened and baffled by these numbers. Yes, there have always been deeply disturbed individuals clinging to hateful ideologies that reassure them that they are blameless victims of one or another “Other.” But we are now seeing evidence that their numbers are far greater than most of us could have imagined.

When we look at the horrific damage being done to American government every day, when we see the corruption and self-dealing and kowtowing to the wealthy, it’s tempting to blame America’s plutocrats–the all-too-sleazy billionaires who surround our Mad King. And they certainly are not blameless. But their weapon–the appeal that allows MAGA to win elections and exercise power–is the viciousness and extent of racism and other assorted bigotries.

The public emergence and popularity of figures like Nick Fuentes is a sign of a deep social illness. I have no idea how to cure that illness, but I do know that we dismiss its significance at our peril. There are obviously millions of damaged, unhappy, resentful Americans–people who are desperate for someone to blame for their problems, desperate to identify some “Other” whose perfidy explains why their lives haven’t gone the way they wanted.

They are MAGA–and their version of a “great” America is terrifying.

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What If?

A couple of years ago–even before the new “Dark Ages” we are experiencing under the Trump Administration–I posted about a question that has obsessed me much of my adult life: what is the common good? What would a truly good society look like, and why does it matter?

I came across that post a couple of days ago, and decided that–if anything–those questions have become even more pertinent today.

As I wrote then, maybe it’s advancing age, or–even more likely– my growing concern that I may be watching human civilization disintegrate around me, but I increasingly find myself mulling over what i call the “fundamental questions.” How should humans live together? What sorts of institutional and governmental arrangements are fairest? What sort of society is most likely to facilitate human flourishing? What sort of economic system might ensure the subsistence of all members of a society without depressing innovation and productivity?

These aren’t new questions. But for those of us with grandchildren who will have to navigate this increasingly chaotic and angry world, they are critical.

Aristotle described the good society as one that encouraged and facilitated human flourishing. It’s been awhile, so I no longer recall how–or whether–he defined “flourishing,” but I can’t imagine people flourishing (however defined) under a system that ignored the requisites of what we call the common good.

I favor John Rawls’ approach to questions of the common good. Rawls–the pre-eminent political philosopher of the 20th Century–begins by insisting upon a “veil of ignorance.” The veil of ignorance is a scenario in which  individuals are placed behind a metaphorical veil that strips them of knowledge about who they will be and where they will live; they cannot know whether they’ll be rich or poor, talented or not, brilliant or mentally disabled, healthy or sickly, etc. From behind that veil of ignorance, the individual must design a society that they  would consider to be a just one no matter where they landed and no matter what their personal attributes.

The goal of the veil device, rather obviously, is to encourage respondents to think deeply about the structure of society, and to ignore to the extent possible the influence of his/her actual attributes and situation.

If Rawls is a bit too theoretical for you, several years ago my friend Morton Marcus penned a more accessible but no less important set of questions. Morton distilled the study of economics and economic systems into the question “Who Gets What?” In that essay, he pointed out that social and material goods are allocated in a more complicated fashion than most of us recognize. Depending upon the good being accessed, it might be allocated on a “first come, first served basis” or via the force/authority exerted by one’s government or family. The allocation might or might not be tied to merit–or at least, what society at a given time regards as merit.

Morton’s exposition was lengthy, but its major contribution consists of the reminder that “who gets what?” is a question that permeates our social and legal relationships and involves multiple decisions by government and the private sector.

Humans have a habit of thinking that the culture into which they’ve been socialized is “natural”–it’s “the way things are.” When “the way things are” is challenged– by technology, displacement, social change, whatever–most people will dig in, defending our world-views and beliefs about the way things should be. Typically, we believe they should be the way we think they’ve always been–the familiar cultural touchstones to which we’ve become accustomed and with which we’re comfortable.

What if we used these scary, unsettled times to consider what human flourishing entails, and to think about the kinds of systematic and social supports that would encourage individual flourishing?

What if we responded to the uncertainty and chaos in Washington, D.C. and around the globe by purposefully retreating behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance, and trying to envision the outlines of a better, more just society?

What if we didn’t respond to uncertainty and fear by clinging more tightly to what we know, to our fears and prejudices and ideas about what constitutes merit, and instead pictured different ways of allocating goods, of answering the question “Who gets what?”

What if?

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