Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I’ve posted this before but since Trump will be holding another “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, I thought you might want to see this again. It is chilling:

An interview with the filmmaker:

Q: How did you discover this event?
A: A friend of mine who was writing a screenplay about New York in the 1930s told me about it, and I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of it. When I found out it had been filmed, I asked an archival researcher, Rich Remsberg, to see what he could find. It turned out that short clips had been used in history documentaries before, but no one seemed to have collected together all of the scraps of footage – there was some at the National Archives, some at UCLA’s archive, some at other archives. So he gathered it, and I edited it together into a short narrative. When Charlottesville happened, it began to feel urgent. So I sent it over to Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook at Field of Vision and said, “Have you ever heard of this event? Would you be interested in supporting the film?” And they jumped on board.

Q: What struck you about the footage?
A: The first thing that struck me was that an event like this could happen in the heart of New York City, a city that was diverse, modern, and progressive even in 1939. The second thing that struck me was the way these American Nazis used the symbols of America to sell an ideology that a few years later hundreds of thousands of Americans would die fighting against.

It really made clear how the tactics of demagogues have been the same throughout the ages. They attack the press, using sarcasm and humor. They tell their followers that they are the true Americans (or Germans or Spartans or…). And they encourage their followers to “take their country back” from whatever minority group is ruining it.

Q: Why do you think that most Americans have never heard of this group or this event?
A: The footage is so powerful, it’s amazing that it isn’t part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget.

We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while that might be true for many Americans, there was a significant group who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, antisemitic message. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times more were passively supportive.

These were ideas that, if not universally accepted, were at least considered legitimate points of view. In a part of Fritz Kuhn’s speech that isn’t in the film, he applauds Father Coughlin, whose radio shows praising Hitler and Mussolini reached audiences of 30 million Americans. Henry Ford published excerpts from the antisemitic and fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

National hero Charles Lindbergh wrote in Reader’s Digest, “Our civilization depends on a Western wall of race and arms which can hold back… the infiltration of inferior blood.” In a speech for his America First Committee (which had 850,000 members) Lindbergh argued that “Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Press magnate William Randolph Hearst defended the creeping fascist movement, saying, “Whenever you hear a prominent American called a fascist, you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a loyal citizen who stands for Americanism.”

But two years after this rally in Madison Square Garden, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the U.S. At that point this philosophy became socially unacceptable. And when the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans had ever supported it.

In the end, America pulled away from the cliff, but this rally is a reminder that things didn’t have to work out that way. If Roosevelt weren’t President, if Japan hadn’t attacked, is it possible we would have skated through without joining the war? And if Nazis hadn’t killed American soldiers, is it possible that their philosophy wouldn’t have become so taboo here?

Q: Who was the guy who ran out on stage during the rally?
A: He was a 26-year-old plumber’s helper from Brooklyn named Isadore Greenbaum. When he ran on stage to protest, he was beaten up and had his pants ripped off as he was thrown from the stage. He was also arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25.

Greenbaum explained to the judge the day after the rally, “I went down to the Garden without any intention of interrupting. But being that they talked so much against my religion and there was so much persecution I lost my head, and I felt it was my duty to talk.” The Magistrate asked him, “Don’t you realize that innocent people might have been killed?” And Greenbaum replied, “Do you realize that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?” (New York Times, 2/22/39).

He went on to serve in the military during WW2 and was featured in Stars and Stripes magazine. (The Washington Post did a terrific article on Greenbaum after the film came out.)

Years later when Greenbaum was asked why he did what he did, in spite of the risk, he simply said, “Gee, what would you have done if you were in my place…?” I think that’s a question for all of us who are witnessing similar demagoguery today.

Q: What was the public response to the rally?
A: There was a debate at the time over whether the Bund should be allowed to have a rally, and that debate – like so many things about the event – seems eerily contemporary. 

In The New York Times, the American Jewish Committee argued that although the Bund was “completely anti-American and anti-democratic…because we believe that the basic rights of free speech and free assembly must never be tampered with in the United States, we are opposed to any action to prevent the Bund from airing its views.” Mayor LaGuardia, for his part, ridiculed the event as an “exhibition of international cooties,” and said he believed in exposing cooties to the sunlight.

Q: What happened to this group after the rally?
A: The German American Bund, who held the rally, had a significant presence in the 1930s. They had youth camps and training camps in New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and held a huge march down East 86^th Street in Manhattan. But their mainstream appeal was reduced by their leaders’ German accents and culture.

As Halford E. Luccock famously said, “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’”

The group’s leader Fritz Kuhn was eventually arrested for embezzling Bund funds, sent to prison, and stripped of his citizenship. After the war, he was deported to West Germany where he died a few years later. The Bund disbanded soon after the start of World War II, but the people who had supported it remained.

For three hours!!!

I don’t have it in me to watch the whole thing. But here are Tim Miller and Sam Stein giving you the highlights if you are curious.

Miller says it was like being at a country club bar listening to two rich guys sitting there talking about some articles they read in the Wall St. Journal about whales. I think that’s being generous. Get this:

Trump was three hours late for his rally because he was doing this podcast. Many of the attendees had already left and then he made the rest stand around in the cold and listen to Ave Maria. I’m not kidding.

30,000 people showed up in Houston last night in person too:

Betting that abortion access can be a winning message in Texas and across the country, Vice President Kamala Harris rallied more than 30,000 people in downtown Houston Friday night to “Vote for reproductive freedom.”

Those words were emblazoned behind Harris, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, Texas country legend Willie Nelson and global pop superstar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as they declared the next 11 days leading up to Election Day as the final push in an existential fight for freedom. 

In her 30-minute speech, Harris keyed in on her campaign’s closing message for the election’s final days, framing the issues of democracy and reproductive rights as two sides of the same coin. Harris argued Trump and other Republican officials will erode citizens’ rights, pointing to the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade and abortion bans across much of the South as proof that rights can be taken away. 

“We are 11 days out from an election that will decide the future of America, including the freedom of every woman to make decisions about her own body and her own freedom,” Harris said. 

While Harris received loud cheers from the crowd throughout her speech, the biggest roar of the night occurred when Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland walked on to the stage to speak. 

“I am not here as a celebrity, I’m not here as a politician, I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said. “A mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in. a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies. A world where we’re not divided.”

Beyoncé and Rowland spoke of their childhoods growing up in Houston, where they founded Destiny’s Child before going on to stardom. Rowland said the city has a role to play in this year’s election. 

“Now Houston, you’ve already had a hand in creating destiny, so do what you do and do this thing again,” Rowland said. 

By the way, this won’t work either:

Look at this:

Jamelle Bouie has an interesting observation in his newsletter about the gender gap. Why is everyone looking at the boys? (Yeah, I know…)

Every election cycle has its own story lines. This year, one of them is that young men love Donald Trump. Consider a few recent headlines.

From Politico: “‘They’re Just Over It’: How Trump Has Converted Male Frustration Into a Movement’.”

From NBC News: “For Him or Against Him, Young Men See the Election as All About Trump.”

And from NPR: “Why Some Young Male Voters Are Moving to Trump.”

Most of the evidence for this comes from focus groups and polls. In an August Times/Siena poll, for example, men aged 18 to 29 favored Trump by 13 points while women in the same age range favored Kamala Harris by 38 points.

To explain this swing to the right among young men, most observers look to the larger cultural environment. They say that our institutions stress inclusion and women’s empowerment in a way that alienates young men. They say that men feel undervalued and that Democrats don’t respect traditional masculine values. They say that young men are looking for a strong economy that would help them support a family, and that these men believe Trump will make it happen.

I think this narrative is a bit overstated. There’s no doubt that many young men are more supportive of Trump than they are of Harris. But overall, according to the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, young men who “definitely plan to vote” back Harris over Trump — 55 percent to 38 percent. For evidence in favor of the view that young men favor Trump, look no further than a recent survey of young male voters from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm: Most men ages 18 to 29 rank inflation, jobs and the economy as top issues and trust Trump to handle them over Harris. Still, most of men surveyed by Blueprint have a favorable view of Harris — more favorable, in fact, than that of men ages 30 to 49.

But to my eye, Trump’s inroads — however large or modest they might be — with young men are less striking than Harris’s enormous lead with young women. The gender gap among young voters is as large as it has ever been. According to the Harvard poll, 70 percent of likely voters among young women of color favor Harris, as against 15 percent for Trump. The former president leads among young men across the three most recent Times/Siena polls, but Harris maintains a similar 67-to-28 advantage among young women there as well. You can find similar spreads in every available poll of the national race. Women overwhelming favor Harris, and men largely favor Trump.

The gender gap among young women has not inspired the same level of analysis and deep focus as has the gender gap with young men. Even a close reader of election coverage may forget for a moment that this is the first presidential election since the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs more than two years ago. If there were ever an election in which to focus on the political behavior of young women, it’s this one.

I don’t make predictions anymore, so I won’t try to make a guess about what these gaps mean for the final outcome. But I will say that if Kamala Harris wins the White House, we may look back and say that we should have focused a little more on the women, young and otherwise, who most likely made the difference.

Yes, I believe that’s the case. But I will also bet that most of the analysis will be on how Harris and the Democrats are failing men. And so it goes.

Golly, I don’t know why people think Republicans are anti-democratic:

Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, appeared to voice support for a plan for North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Legislature to award former President Donald J. Trump the swing state’s electoral votes, according to video of a conservative gathering on Thursday that was posted on social media.

Mr. Harris, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, later walked back his comments in a statement on Friday, saying that the “theoretical conversation has been taken out of context” and that “every legal vote should be counted.”

His comments, reported earlier on Friday by Politico, came in an exchange with Ivan Raiklin, a lawyer and a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump who promoted a plan in 2020 to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence not to certify electors from several disputed swing states.

Mr. Harris appeared to use the hurricane-damaged region of western North Carolina as a rationale for the plan, falsely saying that the voters there had been “disenfranchised.” The North Carolina State Board of Elections approved several emergency measures this month to ensure that voters in the region who were reeling from the effects of Hurricane Helene could still cast ballots.

The Chairman of the House Freedom Caucus is floating the idea of a coup in North Carolina. But why not? Trump will be pitching this himself after the election is he loses. He’s just getting ahead of the curve.

The Republican Party is beyond hope.

Amazon owner Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris causing a major uproar. The LA Times’ billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong did the same thing two days ago. Editors are resigning, people are unsubscribing. It’s freaking out everyone in journalism. But this is actually bigger than journalism which is already in crisis for a hundred different reasons.

JV Last writes:

Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror.

It’s not.

It’s a situation analogous to what we saw in Russia in the early 2000s: We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.

[…]

Following Trump’s 2016 victory, the Post leaned hard into its role as a guardian of democracy. This meant criticizing, and reporting aggressively on, Trump, who responded by threatening Bezos’s various business interests.

And that’s what this story is about: It’s about the most consequential American entrepreneur of his generation signaling his submission to Trump—and the message that sends to every other corporation and business leader in the country. In the world.

Killing this editorial says, If Jeff Bezos has to be nice to Trump, then so do you. Keep your nose clean, bub.

Last reminds us of the early 2000s in Russia when Putin, realizing that the oligarchs who had supported still maintained enough power to oppose him if they chose to, arrested the most powerful oil tycoon in the country ostensibly on charges of corruption.

Khodorkovsky was convicted and sent to a labor camp in the Russian Far East while the government confiscated Yukos and redistributed it to Putin’s cronies. Khodorkovsky’s money, his power, his connections—none of it could protect him from Vladimir Putin.

The rest of the oligarchs got the message. If Putin could get to Khodorkovsky, he could get to anybody.

Trump isn’t even the president yet. He can’t arrest anyone right now and, God willing, never will be able to. But these guys have all seen that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the other tech-bro billionaires all lining up and they’ve decided that it doesn’t serve them to get on the other side of him.

Democracy expert Timothy Snyder has pointed out that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”

I don’t care about newspaper endorsements and most people don’t. But the fact that in both of these cases the papers’ ownership stepped in and stopped them at the last minute is seriously alarming. I don’t know if beating Trump can stop this premptive slide toward authoritarianism among the billionaires but I know that losing to him won’t.

This is yet another motivation to get out the vote. These billionaires only have one vote each. For now.

Or Russians, for that matter

America is perfectly capable of turning out its own ratfuckers:

“Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.

He’s also white.

With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Last month, the account posted what Black Insurrectionist claimed was an affidavit from an ABC News employee, alleging Harris was given questions in advance of the network’s debate with Trump — which ABC News vigorously disputed. Trump approved, though, declaring, “I love the person.” More recently, Black Insurrectionist posted a baseless claim alleging inappropriate behavior between Walz and a student decades ago, a falsehood that U.S. intelligence officials said sprang from a Russian disinformation campaign.

The reach that the Black Insurrectionist account attained with assistance from Trump and his allies demonstrates the ease with which unverified information from dubious sources can metastasize online to shape public opinion. The speed and scale of disinformation has been an animating force in the presidential campaign, with the potential to affect the outcome in a close election.

The Black Insurrectionist account is linked directly to Jason G. Palmer, who has his own questionable backstory, starting with the fact that he isn’t Black, according to an Associated Press review of public records, open source data and interviews with a half-dozen people who interacted closely with Palmer over the past two decades. The records and personal accounts offer a portrait of an individual who has repeatedly been accused of defrauding business partners and lenders, has struggled with drug addiction and whose home was raided by the FBI over a decade ago. He also owes more than $6.7 million in back taxes to the state of New York.

[…]

In emails and phone conversations, Palmer, 51, made a series of seemingly contradictory claims about his ties to the account, which was deactivated last week several hours after the AP first reached out to Palmer for comment.

He acknowledged in an email that he was involved with the account, but said that he did not create it. He also claimed to have owned it at one point before selling it in April or May to a person who he declined to identify.

“I do not know what is going on with this account,” Palmer wrote in an email last Thursday.

But in an interview on Tuesday he said he participated in making claims about Walz that were posted to the account this month. And he suggested that he worked as a “researcher” with a broader group.

“We did that with big people. National people,” Palmer said. “I have no comment on anything else regarding that.”

Maybe that’s true but it’s just as likely that he’s a lone wolf ratfucker. Twitter is awash in this garbage.

Also For The Win

Both The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post this week violated Timothy Snyder’s Rule No. 1 for opposing tyranny: Do not obey in advance. Both papers declined to issue a presidential endorsement. Many of The Post’s opinion writers objected vigorously. Whatever the papers’ ostensible explanations, we know the real reason. The owners are chicken shits.

The Philadelphia Inquirer? Not so much:

America deserves much more than an aspiring autocrat who ignores the law, is running to stay out of prison, and doesn’t care about anyone but himself.

The better angels of our nature demand it.

There is only one candidate — Kamala Harris — who will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States from foreign and domestic enemies.

So help us, God.

Confronted as we are with what not to do, Anand Giridharadas at The Ink asks “our go-to messaging expert,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, to advise readers on how to fight the good fight. I’ll just list the bullets (with some light comments).

• Do: Run like you’re leading the winning team
• Don’t: Act like underdogs
• Do: Call out what you’re against
• Don’t: Feed what you’re fighting

This cuts across the grain of progressives who insist on proving to everyone how smart they are by refuting (with facts) whatever lies our opposition tells. It doesn’t work. It leaves Democrats fighting on the GOP’s turf and arguing they are GOP-lite. To soften up Trump’s support ASO suggests, “You have to run against your opposition and not against the people that your opposition reviles.”

• Do: Tell the bigger story on gender
• Don’t: Accept received wisdom on male voters
• Do: Sell the brownie, not the recipe

We’ve been on brownies plenty of times.

• Don’t: Forget the job of campaigning

Don’t forget that political races are not just contests of ideas, but contests of skills. Go hone your skills with campaigns where you are. See if your county committee has “game.” (Many don’t.) They want and need you.

I recorded an abbreviated For The Win webinar on Tuesday for Illinois county chairs. “But they’re not a swing state,” a friend said. Why bother? Because they’re not a swing state. See all that red? How often do those less-populated rural counties covered in soybeans, corn, and wheat in not-a-swing-state see a presidential race set up shop there and show ’em how it’s done? Wanna guess?

• Do: Be the change candidate again

Reasons to be brave

Stuart Stevens, former Republican strategist, called back this week to a post he wrote in The Bulwark in October 2020 “imploring my new Dem friends to finish the campaign with confidence and swagger.” Were he a leading Democrat, his message would be:

We are going to crush Donald Trump and the sickness he represents. There are more of us than there are of them. We are right. They are wrong. This is our moment. This is our destiny. Walk with confidence. Do not falter. Victory will be ours.

I once again make the plea. Arrogance is walking on the field, bragging you will win without having done the work. The Harris-Walz campaign and thousands of volunteers are doing the hard work. You’ve earned it.

No team wins the Superbowl thinking, “We might have a shot.” This is yours. Walk out and take it. You will look back at this moment with quiet pride and satisfaction for the rest of your life, knowing that when America called, you answered.

James Fallows takes Stevens’s cue to offer more Reasons to be Brave.

James Carville is not my go-to for advice because you know what he’s going to say whether he agrees with Democrats’ strategy or critiques it. Nevertheless, Fallows excerpts his New York Times op-ed on why he thinks Kamala Harris will be our first woman president. Mostly, for this:

My final reason is 100 percent emotional. We are constantly told that America is too divided, too hopelessly stricken by tribalism, to grasp the stakes. That is plain wrong.

If the Cheneys and A.O.C. get that the Constitution and our democracy are on the ballot, every true conservative and every true progressive should get it too. A vast majority of Americans are rational, reasonable people of good will. I refuse to believe that the same country that has time and again overcome its mistakes to bend its future toward justice will make the same mistake twice. America overcame Mr. Trump in 2020. I know that we know we are better than this…

A movement that marches with hope is 1,000 times as thunderous as a movement that marches with dread.

Fallows is betting that in the privacy of the voting booth Americans, women especially, will not choose “a felon “a convicted felon, who admires Adolf Hitler, whose mind is obviously deteriorating, whose most senior national-security staffers have warned urgently against him, who scoffs at Constitutional limits, who has no plausible platform, who knows nothing of US history, who brags about the most divisive Court ruling in modern history (Dobbs), who is a pawn of hostile foreign interests,” etc.

Liz Cheney, Harris and Barack Obama are working the “blue wall” states this week. Republicans are clearly unnerved by the chorus of voices from Trump’s first term — Cheney’s especially — warning the country they’ve served not to allow TFG near the White House again:

In all of these locales the message was: Precisely because time is short and the stakes are high and the prospects can be discouraging, it’s time to work even harder, rather than to give up.

Obama made this a standard riff. Each time he mentioned some new outrage from Donald Trump, the crowd would start to boo—and he’d immediately cut them off with: “Don’t boo! VOTE!” It became call-and-response. In her Blue Wall conversations with Harris, Liz Cheney would lay out their policy differences, but then say: We are absolutely together, in the only fight that matters.

Trump’s fascist movement has seduced a large fraction of the country. He’s ignorant, vengeful, and his dictator friends are scary. Exhortations of “we’re better than this!” fly in the face of proof after proof that we are not. And yet.

I keep returning to Dave Neiwert’s German language professor explaining how in the overwhelmingly Christian home of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, villagers living adjacent the Nazi death camps each morning, in their tidy Teutonic way, swept away the ash that fell on their windowsills overnight. Like many today, they blinded themselves to what was happening right next door:

“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”

Yeah, we fought them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here. Well, that hasn’t worked out. But we beat them before. We will do it again.

Stevens yesterday concluded that’s a good bet:

Race is remarkably stable. 47% of country is MAGA or open to MAGA; 53% isn’t.

The goal of Harris-Walz is to coalesce as much of 53% as possible. Today, Liz Cheney and Bernie Sanders are on the same side. That’s not a bad coalition.

The differences in polls are about the percentage of the 53% that Harris is getting. Trump stays stuck at 47%.

If you were for Trump, you were for Trump months ago. You are looking for someone else to be acceptable. He’s functioning as the incumbent.

Harris is winning a larger percentage of R’s than Trump is of D’s. She’s winning independents.

Could Trump win? Sure. But is there any element of the campaign that Trump campaign is performing at a higher level than Harris campaign? Think of it as a sports team match-up. She has better organization, more money, a better message and is performing at a much higher level than Trump. Most candidates are trying not to make mistakes at this stage of the presidential race. Exhaustion is a key factor. But Harris is improving. Maybe because she hasn’t been a candidate for a year and a half.

In campaigns, the question you ask every night is would you rather be your campaign or the other guy? I’d rather be Harris.

The only poll that matters is on Election Night. Remember that. Then gird yourselves for the backlash and sedition that will continue through certification aall the way to January 20. For now, I’m prepared to shed tears on Election Night. Tears of joy.

A woman, 58, called our county Democratic Party headquarters Friday with the other kind. Registered unaffiliated, she was angry that her mailbox is filled with attack flyers from Republicans and no mailers from Democrats. They’d stolen Harris signs from her early voting location. I tried to explain that Trump’s field team is incompetent, that Democrats are dedicating their resources to more effective turnout tactics. But the quavering in her voice revealed the real reason she was angry. She’s terrified.

The military widow was on the edge of sobbing for almost 15 minutes. Her late husband had spent a career serving this country. She, in turn, had spent her marriage supporting his work upholding the values for which the United States claims it stands. Staring down a fascist movement that’s overtaken many, both in the country and in the conservative area of the county where she lives, is more than she can bear. It broke my heart.

By the end, I had her relieved somewhat and chuckling through tears.

Our story is not over. Don’t count out America. It’s never a good bet, Joe Biden reminds us. We have reason to swagger.

Fallows too offered up a message from the 2011 Super Bowl about never being counted out. Because that’s who we are. That’s our story.

Enjoy.

Update: Forgot to convert the Eminem photo from html and it displayed something else. Fixed it.

Bi-coastal sea otters!

Those eyes will charm you! Two adorable female southern sea otters, rescued off the coast of California, have made their New York City debut and will likely steal your heart.

Pumpkin and Clover were rescued at young ages, deemed non-releasable, and cared for as pups by caregivers at other accredited aquariums prior to arriving at the New York Aquarium.

They’re now settling in at the Sea Cliffs exhibit, where visitors can also enjoy exhibits featuring sea lions, harbor seals and penguins.

“We are happy to provide a home for these rescued southern sea otters,” said Dr. Leigh Ann Clayton, director of the New York Aquarium, located in Coney Island, Brooklyn. “These two otters have incredible stories, and we are pleased to see how well they are settling into their new home.”

The New York Aquarium has provided a home for 11 rescued sea otters since 1991.

Southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris nereis), also known as California sea otters, live on the coast of California.

Like all wildlife, they have an important role in the ecological health of the environment, according to the New York Aquarium. As a keystone species in Pacific Ocean near-shore waters, sea otters play an important role in their ocean ecosystem by eating sea urchins, which helps keep the populations in check.

Southern sea otters are listed as a threatened species under the United States Endangered Species Act (ESA) and are protected by the United States Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) and international treaties.