Month: May 2025

I don’t think anything more needs to be said about this. It’s clear what it means. We have plenty of experience with this.

I wrote about the world’s democracies moving against Trumpism for Salon last week and it got quite a bit of play. The rightward movement, even the anti-incumbent push we’ve seen in recent times seems to be halted.

I haven’t written anything about the new pope because it’s not really my area. But it is fascinating to me that it appears that the Catholic Church is making a similar statement of resistance. It has enormous clout and I have to give credit where credit is due that they decided to make such a statement. They not only chose someone from the progressive wing of the church they chose and American to rival the fame and influence of you-know-who. Good on them.

Politico reports:

When the late Pope Francis challenged Donald Trump on immigration, climate change and poverty during the president’s first term, the White House and its allies responded with a collective shrug.

But with Catholic Cardinals choosing an American to lead the Church for the first time in its history, that will change. The Chicago-born Robert Prevost, America’s first pope, has a worldview that appears to be at odds with “America First.”

Elected on just the second day of voting, Pope Leo could become a global rival to the president, one who has the homegrown credibility to sway Catholic Republicans more than his predecessor did and speak with a voice that has a louder boom here in the U.S.

Trump on Thursday immediately praised the selection of Leo, who lived most of his adult life in Peru, promising to meet with the new pope soon.

“It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

But it’s not difficult to imagine the looming conflicts to come. Like his predecessor, Leo hails from a more progressive, inclusive wing of Catholicism, preaching peace and the importance of building bridges in his first address from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, though it appears he still holds traditional Catholic views on LGBTQ+ issues.

I’m pretty sure Trump thinks it will be a meaningful moment for the pope to meet him not the other way around. He’ll soon realize that his cult is not happy:

One of the president’s most prominent Catholic allies, Steve Bannon, called Leo the “worst pick for MAGA Catholics,” deeming him the “anti-Trump pope.”

“This is an anti-Trump vote by the globalists that run the Curia — this is the pope Bergoglio and his clique wanted,” said Bannon, referring to Francis by his given name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

A group of hard-line conservative Catholics had launched what was essentially a lobbying campaign for a more conservative pope. One of the hard-right candidates, Athanasius Schneider, a bishop in Kazakhstan, had claimed that refugees in Europe are a “mass invasion” leading to the spread of Islam, while another, American Cardinal Raymond Burke, actually endorsed Trump.

Pope Leo’s been on social media and he actually challenged JD Vance’s fatuous claim that true Christians know that their obligation is to love their family first, then their country then people in the rest of the world, pointing out that the faith is actually universal. But then JD isn’t really a Catholic. He’s a shape shifting incubus who needed a religion and picked that one. Still, then Cardinal Prevost must have known he was venturing into some pretty dicey political territory.

He’s also a registered Republican but his last known vote was in the 2016 GOP primary. What happened in the Republican party that year? Hmmmm. Apparently, this is another MAGA lie. There is no party registration in Illinois.

I don’t know who this guy is but he’s a roaring MAGA asshole. What an awful person to choose to run an agency that’s designed to help people recover from disaster. I think we might do better with Brownie the horse show guy.

I’ve had bosses like this. It never goes well.

What IS this? They look like a bunch of cos-playing militia not federal agents. Why are they armed like this? Why are there so many of them?

Interesting that it’s a bunch of women filming and protesting. Glad to see it.,

From her interview with Rolling Stone. She just nails it.

“It’s not just about money. It’s about being so rich that you actually believe yourself to be God. This is the corrupting influence.” 

Her comment above goes on:

We have all these slogans: “Every billionaire is a policy failure.” But it goes beyond that. When you have people who have more money than has ever been concentrated in the history of money — you do believe that you’re better than other people, in a way that I don’t think that we can totally fathom. 

What does Elon Musk think it means to be the richest person in the world? How does that change you? One of the ways that it changes people’s brains is you believe the rules shouldn’t apply to you. You believe you should be able to act like a king. And when you can’t — when you’re told by the state you actually have to follow these rules, or do other things — it ignites rage. And we’re in that rage. 

That describes Trump too. He’s a billionaire and he’s president of the United States! He’s one of the most famous people in the world! HOW DARE THEY TRY TO TELL HIM WHAT HE CAN AND CANNOT DO!

She says:

We underestimated the rage that inspired. So we’re in a counter-revolution. And it’s hard to understand, because these people have everything. But what they want is beyond that. They want to not be accountable to anyone. Because what they want is absolutely everything.

Gish-galloping America back to monarchy

Harvard University’s Danielle Allen this week “debated” right-wing influencer and monarchist, Curtis Yarvin, sage of the “dark enlightenment.” It was a non-sanctioned event. “His work is not of a caliber that passes an academic bar. It is too full of historical error and sophistical argument,” she told Harvard magazine, but students asked her to engage them.

“I think people do need to understand Yarvin’s argument, both what people experience as its attractions, and its errors, which are profound,” she added.

The Guardian reported last week:

“Students asked me to participate,” said Allen, when asked about why she was debating Yarvin. Multiple requests for comment sent to Harvard about the debate went unanswered.

In a meandering and widely cited interview with the New York Times in January, Yarvin tried laundering his ideas under the guise of advocating for a CEO-led US government, which is shorthand for an unelected dictatorship. Whenever challenged to answer direct questions on some of his most controversial blogs, Yarvin obfuscated.

Allen explained in The Wall Street Journal that Yarvin’s influence on students surpised her. (We’ve covered Yarvin here multiple times.) He calls for an absolute monarch and believes Donald Trump fits the bill. He should rule by decree. “Mr. Yarvin leads them astray with his vision of absolute monarchy and racial cleansing,” she explains.

Allen told MSNBC was it was not so much a debate as Yarvin gish-galloping (my word) his way through a slurry of ideas. Harvard magazine’s decription concurs:

As the conversation developed, Yarvin shared extended tangential anecdotes and name-dropped philosophers and historians. He twice discussed chimpanzees and early humans, first as evidence of the inherent human desire to dominate others and then as a rebuttal to innate human equality. Allen rarely engaged with Yarvin’s specific stories, but did question his reading of Aristotle.

Allen pushes back in the Journal:

He gets his first principles wrong, so we have to return to ours. Most important, human equality precedes human differences. We can identify differences among us only because we are all human, and in that regard equal. As humans we share a capacity for moral judgment and an innate striving to choose actions that make tomorrow better. This is how our drive and capacity for freedom show themselves.

The proposition that all humans are created equal has never meant that we are all the same. Our equality lies in these features of humanity that make us moral beings. Nor does human difference yield fixed and permanent groupings or determine where and how human talent in its immense variety will show itself. The government that will best help humans flourish will start by protecting human freedom. This requires maximal space for self-government, and also government of the whole people that is by and for the people. Not in the interest of those who govern, but in the interest of the governed.

The principle of equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence was meant so seriously that it grounded the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Vermont before the end of the Revolutionary War, and in Rhode Island even before the Declaration. The Confederacy’s own declaration of secession was explicitly a rejection of the founding Declaration. America’s history has always reflected this inconsistency, but the egalitarian principle has been there from the beginning. It isn’t a weak-minded invention of the 20th century.

Mr. Yarvin’s identity politics are the mirror image of the worst versions on the left. His historical inaccuracies mirror those of leftist historians who seek to paint all history as white supremacy. The past is a story of the contest between equality and freedom on the one hand and supremacy on the other. We face that contest again.

If our constitutional democracy is weak today—failing to help us meet our governing challenges—that may be because we have lapsed in civic participation. We have ceased to claim our own equality through our institutions, which offer it. We have allowed political parties to capture our institutions, and to govern for their own sake rather than the public good. We need to renovate our democratic institutions, starting with party reform.

Amen. Working on it while I’m polishing my greaves.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

This isn’t “unacceptable.” This is unAmerican.

The Trump administration is an exercise in an addled, 78-year-old man-child flexing autocratic power and encouraging cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Trump the Insecure needs to satiate his bottomless appetite for revenge and to impress the world’s real autocrats who will never accept him into their club.

Others in Trump’s circle, like “Discount Goebbels” and Russ Vought, flex their autocratic impulses from behind the curtain as operators of Audio-Animatronic Trump. The Trump White House is cosplaying a dysfunctional reboot of “The West Wing” as a reality show with poseurs pretending to be leaders. Just not leaders of a democracy.

“We are getting close now,” warns author Seth Abramson. Close to?

And Trump himself? He’s in charge. He’s not in charge. He’s in charge. He’s….

Politico:

Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President’s Daily Brief.

That’s a significant drop compared with Trump’s first term in office, according to a POLITICO analysis of his public schedule.

Trump doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Same as it ever was.

As the headline on David Graham’s Atlantic column declared earlier this week, “The president wants to seize new powers, yet he’s also eager to hand off responsibility for hard decisions.”

Kristen Welker (NBC News): Do people in the U.S. have a right to due process of law?

Trump: “I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer.”

Welker: “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”

Trump: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

And tax cuts?

Trump wants the power and the perks, just not the responsibility. Same as it ever was.

Can we stop pretending now?

ICE agents arrested Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka on Friday outside a privately owned ICE facility for “tresspassing” after inviting him inside the gate and asking him to leave. They manhandled three members of Congress who called the episode “unacceptable.”

 

View on Threads

It went as well as everything else under Trump 2.0. Fox News accused the visitors of storming an ICE facility.”

Menendez: I would not have waited an hour and a half if my intent was to storm the facility. If they’re so concerned about these things, they’d be more vocal critics of what happened on January 6th pic.twitter.com/m0JHi7AvAt

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 10, 2025

Can we stop pretending? It’s not unacceptable. It’s unAmerican. It’s Trumpism, something else entirely.

Behold. Trump is tripling down on ignoring the Constitution and the courts.

We’re not “close.” We’re there.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Elephants!

For most of her life, Pupy has lived in the center of a busy city, in what was once known as the Hindu Temple of the Elephants at Ecoparque Buenos Aires, far removed from the vast wild spaces that elephants need to thrive.

On Monday, April 14, Pupy and the transport team began the long-awaited road trip to sanctuary. On April 18, Pupy officially arrived at Elephant Sanctuary Brazil! Here she will have the space, care, and autonomy she needs to enjoy a more natural, dignified way of life.

Join us as Pupy takes her first steps onto sanctuary grounds.

May 5th: Pupy having a blast with dead trees:

About four and a half years ago, a fire swept through the sanctuary property. Those of you who followed us then will remember that no people, elephants, or other sanctuary animals were harmed, but the female African habitat saw heavy damage. We allowed the fire to run through that area because there were no elephants living there at the time, and we wanted to do our best to stop the fire in a safer place. As a result of the fire, there were a number of dead trees in the area, which we left in case the African elephants wanted something fun to destroy–and Pupy has been having a bit of fun with them. She seems to be getting a kick out of pushing the burned trees and knocking them over so easily. 

We decided to walk along the fence line to see what the paths she’s making look like and what she’s knocking down. So far, she’s only downed one large tree and she’s definitely making trails, though she doesn’t always stick to them. For those of you who are worried about the number of trees she’s knocking down, she’s definitely going to remodel a bit. Pupy has about 13 acres of land right now and will soon get half of the 80 acre expansion more. With the new welding team, they are making great progress. None of the trees, except for a few large old growth trees (which we are protecting with fencing) in the female African habitat even existed when the sanctuary was opened; it was almost all pasture grass for cattle. When the land is given time to recover, it flourishes, so there’s plenty for Pupy to have fun with now.  

We’re also taking note of what Pupy is eating inside the habitat. She will occasionally bring branches up to the barn, so she’s definitely not wasteful. We’ve also discovered that she has a favorite type of tree, and are drying out a sample to have it officially identified.  But she’s having a ball stripping the bark off these specific trees to eat and also eating full branches. Aside from knocking around the dead trees, she’s mostly sticking to smaller trees for the time being. She seems to be discovering that all of this greenery is hers for the taking. 

The Global Sanctuary for Elephants exists to create vast, safe spaces for captive elephants, where they are able to heal physically and emotionally.  There are elephants around the world in need of sanctuary, but too few places exist to be able to care for even a fraction of the elephants.  International support is necessary to build sanctuaries for elephants in need of rescue and rehabilitation.  

Elephants are the best and they are in trouble. It breaks my heart. You can follow their rescues at the web site. It’s a really great organization.