Kennedy has already addressed the body. Punish yourselves, if so inclined.
Trump speaks today. Some Libertarians it seems are down on authoritarians.
Leaving this right here.
Holy shit. A guy just made a motion at the Libertarian National Convention for “Donald Trump to go f*ck himself” and the crowd all applauded. Trump is scheduled to speak tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/GVbDndN6HZ
After comemmorating Memorial Day with a rally in Greensboro, N.C., Common Defense and Veterans for Responsible Leadership attempted to deliver a letter to the NC GOP state convention “calling on the GOP and on Donald Trump to reject calls for violence inflammatory rhetoric,” per Cardinal & Pine. Listen to the speeches below.
Veterans commemorate Memorial Day: Urge Trump and Republicans to Denounce Political Violence with Common Defense + @VetsForRLhttps://t.co/KrYfJ14iEV
We are demanding that Republican leaders now in Greensboro use all their influence to force Donald Trump to renounce these awful and dangerous threats of violence, which have no place in a democracy. Trump must commit to a peaceful and non-violent election season.
We have a duty to our fallen brothers and sisters, whom we honor this weekend. They fought battles abroad so we can live in a country free of such threats. Who among us will not honor their sacrifice?
We were on the scene in Greensboro today, where a group of veterans & military families from a broad coalition, including @VetsForRL & @commondefense, walked into the NC Republican convention to deliver a letter calling on the GOP and on Donald Trump to reject calls for violence. pic.twitter.com/JJ5GBhkG6O
A group of veterans and military families including members of @VetsForRL & @commondefense, were escorted out of the NC GOP’s convention in Greensboro on Friday after delivering a letter calling on the GOP and Donald Trump to reject calls for violence and inflammatory rhetoric. pic.twitter.com/JNAgQr04g7
I have little to add except that, from the video, the NC GOP chose Greensboro’s Koury Convention Center for its convention. It is a venue state Democrats stopped using some years ago, preferring to rent more cost- and donor-conscious space at public schools.
I just hiked to the top of the hill and what a view of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing with all of the girders installed. It’s now truly a bridge!!! pic.twitter.com/sgMi4BnzbW
The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is a public-private partnership of monumental scope that has leveraged the expertise and leadership of dozens of organizations and institutions to protect and restore wildlife habitats in Southern California. The crossing is currently in construction and is expected to be finished in 2026.
In 2015, the National Wildlife Foundation (NWF) and Caltrans proposed a massive corridor across the 101 freeway in Agoura Hills to provide wildlife with a safe place to cross into other habitats. At the time, the proposed plan was expected to take years to fund and even longer to build. Due to the bridge’s size and cost, its completion would be reliant on donations from the public.
In 2016, Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation took up the call for funds and made a $1 million challenge grant to spur the community and local leaders to donate. The grant provided the necessary test assessments by Caltrans to ensure that the bridge would not cause any environmental impact to the surrounding area.
Thanks to the Annenberg Foundation’s challenge grant, the project received donations from more than 3,000 private, philanthropic, and corporate institutions around the world and helped NWF raise enough money to begin construction – initially in the year 2025.
In 2021, Wallis Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation accelerated donations with a record breaking $25 million challenge grant to the NWF. The ‘Conservation Challenge Grant’ – currently the largest of its kind – serves as a call to philanthropists to help protect a threatened global biodiversity hotspot in Los Angeles. The funds raised were not only enough to fund construction, but moved up the construction timeline to April 22, 2022 – three years earlier than planned.
Construction is now on its way and when built, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing will be the largest wildlife corridor in the world and will restore habitats and an ecosystem that over time has been degraded by human development. The bridge will allow for wildlife to cross freely over the 101 freeway without the threat of death or accidents, and will ensure the survival of many isolated species.
In honor of LA’s beautiful mountain lions like the late Hollywood star, P-22:
FILE – This Nov. 2014, file photo provided by the U.S. National Park Service shows a mountain lion known as P-22, photographed in the Griffith Park area near downtown Los Angeles. P-22, the celebrated mountain lion that took up residence in the middle of Los Angeles and became a symbol of urban pressures on wildlife, was euthanized after dangerous changes in his behavior led to examinations that revealed poor health and an injury likely caused by a car. (U.S. National Park Service, via AP, File)
Nearly eight years ago, convinced that she’d been treated unfairly, Jessica Denson sued Donald Trump’s campaign for workplace harassment.
Then she discovered the lengths Trump’s attorneys would go to hit back — and their unwillingness to stop.
Immediately, the campaign filed a counterclaim for $1.5 million. It won a $52,229 judgment, and the campaign froze her bank account and almost forced her into bankruptcy.
She found it humiliating when the campaign lawyers branded her a “judgment debtor” in a subpoena. They monitored her Twitter account, which had 32 followers, and submitted hundreds of pages of printouts to a judge. They even deposed her mother, grilling her about the family’s religious practices.
The judgment was ultimately thrown out by a judge, but her legal fight continues.
The process has been “unbearable,” Denson said, describing the unrelenting pressure she felt from Trump campaign attorneys. “This had become my life. I had no income and had this lien against me. It crippled my ability to work.”
The legal resources deployed to try to crush Denson’s case are not unusual. At least four women of color involved in the 2016 operation have been embroiled in legal fights with the campaign over workplace harassment, discrimination or violations of nondisclosure agreements. They have been subjected to scorched-earth tactics. For years, the Trump campaign has persisted, despite losing consistently, in at least some cases after it was clear that its efforts had damaged the women.
Trump was regularly updated on the women’s cases, according to two people familiar with the matters. In one, he wanted to escalate the dispute by filing a federal defamation lawsuit against the former employee, but his lawyers persuaded him it was best handled through confidential arbitration. Campaign lawyers urged him to settle the ongoing “legacy lawsuits” from 2016 before the 2020 election, but he declined.
Now as Trump engages in another presidential run, a judge’s order in one of those cases may force into public view the new details about staffers who lodged similar accusations. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the campaign to produce by May 31 a list of all discrimination and harassment complaints made during Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential runs, allegations that the campaign initially tried to keep confidential through rigorously enforced NDAs. Last year, a federal judge freed 422 employees of the 2016 campaign from confidentiality agreements in a class-action lawsuit brought by Denson, a major crack in the campaign’s strategy.
Why haven’t we known about this before? It seems like a pretty big deal to me. Do other presidential campaigns get dozens of harassment and discrimination lawsuits filed against them? I don’t think so.
Trump and his surrogates have appeared to relish hounding or humiliating women who have verbally crossed him, including media and Hollywood stars and a long list of accusers who have complained over the years about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct. (He has denied all of the allegations.)
But ProPublica found that Trump’s campaign used similar bullying tactics against its own workers. These fights have been waged out of the public eye against women with few resources to stand up against the campaign’s battery of lawyers, paid from a seemingly bottomless trove of campaign money.
Chalk this up to yet more evidence of Trump’s monstrousness. He is an abusive cult leader as most cult leaders are. And he’s particularly abusive toward women. Apparently, tens of millions of people love him anyway.
New York’s ABC7 Reporter @jimdolan7 was on the ground and they had a helicopter in the air to tell the real story of Trump’s “big” rally in the south Bronx for the 11:00 news. The zoom out of Trump speaking and the real crowd size says it all. All they do is lie. pic.twitter.com/JDMVlupjz8
And yet I heard the CNN reporter on the ground talk about how big and diverse the crowd was and how the Biden campaign must be nervous about his appeal in this blue city. They interviewed the rallygoers (aka Trump fans) and earnestly listened as they complained about the economy without pushing back on their erroneous alternative facts. If you were just a casual viewer you would come away with the idea that Biden is in trouble in New York because tens of thousands of Democrats are abandoning Biden.
Donald Trump appears to have a few requirements for his running mate, including that whoever it is does what they are told and does not steal the spotlight. He would also prefer an Ivy League pedigree, according to The New York Times, which reported that Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a Harvard graduate, is now a “top contender.”
According to three anonymous sources who have met with Trump, Cotton is a favorite, alongside North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and three of Cotton’s Senate colleagues: Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Tim Scott, R-S.C., and J.D. Vance, R-Ohio. According to the Times, Trump is also considering the five men for posts in his administration, should he win in November.
Where Cotton is concerned, there are some issues to consider. Trump has privately expressed his admiration for Cotton’s reliability and abilities as an effective communicator, as well as praising the senator’s Army service and his elite education.
But Cotton voted to certify the 2020 presidential election, which could be a dealbreaker for a man who refuses to acknowledge his defeat. Still, Trump has slim pickings, as both Rubio and Scott also voted to certify the results, while Burgum verbally supported former Vice President Mike Pence’s choice to resist Trump’s pressure to overturn the election.
Elise Stefanik went to Harvard and she’s not on the list for some reason. I wonder why?
I had assumed he would want to pick a woman because his biggest problem is with suburban soccer moms. Or I think we all know that he could reach out to Black and Hispanic people with a pick and it might do some good. But when you think about it, isn’t the most likely choice a white guy? This is Trump we’re talking about. He’s a racist who believes in eugenics. He repeated his “racehorse theory” just this week on the stump. And he thinks the best way to hire people is the :central casting” method — does this person look like a Vice President? In his mind, the only people who look like leaders are white men.
I’m thinking it’s going to be Burgum. He got his MBA from Stanford (but who knows if Trump thinks that’s impressive enough.) He’s an energetic brown noser and really does look like he’s out of central casting. Unfortunately, he has more money than Trump which may be a deal breaker. But then, Trump lies about his fortune anyway and would just say he’s richer and Burgum is so desperate to be VP that he’ll probably go along with it.
But maybe Trump wants a Maga-jungen in which case Cotton or Vance are the picks. They are the future of the unending Reich.
If you want to know what’s causing all the pessimism look no further than him
I am loathe to discuss the polls right now because they’re all over the place and mostly within the margin of error which means the snapshot of the electorate we are seeing may be a mirage either way. There are arguments going on throughout the commentariat over whether the polling methodology is accurate and whether they are modeling the electorate correctly. I have no idea about that and frankly I don’t really care. It’s enough to know that the election remains close which I suspect is intensely frustrating to everyone in both parties at this point. It seems as though we are destined to re-enact this polarized groundhog day election every four years and it’s tiresome.
It’s especially difficult for Democrats to deal with this considering that the Republican opponent is once again the most odious candidate in American history, a crude brute currently facing 88 felony counts and a record that includes two impeachments and an attempted coup. It’s as if the world has suddenly tilted off of its axis and nothing makes sense anymore.
How is it possible that the Republican Party and its voters would support such a man running for president again, and how can we explain that he’s easily within striking distance of winning it? And how can it be possible that this would be happening in the face of what anyone in the past would have considered the successful presidency of Joe Biden, a man who brought us through the pandemic and the economic upheaval it caused without any of the scandal and drama of Trump’s chaotic four years?
So while I may not be reading the election polls closely right now, I am keenly interested in the surveys that may lead to an answer to those questions. Unfortunately, the data is downright disorienting.
This week The Guardian reported on a new Harris Poll survey of people’s attitudes about the economy which suggests that well over half the country is delusional. It showed that 55% of Americans believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think we are in a recession. Neither of those things are remotely true. 49% believe the stock market is down for the year even though it’s at record high. Even more bizarre, 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
The people who believe this blame Joe Biden for the allegedly bad economy with 58% saying that his mismanagement will only make it worse in the coming year. They think Donald Trump the failed businessman who just got dinged for almost half a billion dollars in fines for his fraudulent business practices will be better. Sadly, these numbers include around 40% of Democrats, so this isn’t solely a partisan response.
That’s just crazy. The American economy is the envy of the world right now, the only industrialized country that’s actually doing well. But Americans are so mired in negativity that they believe it’s terrible. At least they think it’s terrible for people other than themselves. Survey after survey shows they actually feel pretty good about their own finances and when asked how they think their local economy is faring they say that it’s doing well. It’s the rest of the country that’s in a recession.
This phenomenon even has a name: vibecession which says people’s beliefs about the economy are based on vibes, not reality. And the vibe is that the economy is terrible, we have out of control inflation, job losses and a general economic crisis. This seems odd considering that we actually went through a real economic crisis that lasted for years just recently with the Great Recession of 2008 but people’s memories are short.
That’s not to say that there aren’t many people who are still living paycheck to paycheck — a perennial issue that isn’t caused by current circumstances but is a huge problem for those who experience it. And it’s certainly true that the economy was turned upside down during the pandemic with sharp increases in unemployment and inflation from all the supply chain disruption. But the government provided unprecedented support and the country came through it without the kind of massive economic suffering we normally would have had. And yet Joe Biden is widely considered a massive failure on economics.
Recall that in 1984, Ronald Reagan ran on a campaign of “morning in America” and he won a historic landslide victory. Here’s what the economy looked like at the time. There was 7% unemployment, 4% inflation, and the average 30-year mortgage had a 13% interest rate. Compare that to the numbers I cited above.
So why are Americans so negative about a much better economy 40 years later?
I think there are a number of possible reasons. The first, which is backed up by the fact that people say their own finances are fine, is the media coverage of the economy. It has been relentlessly negative far beyond the point where it was justified and now that it’s focused on the horse race it flogs polls like this one which creates a negative feedback loop wherein people think since everyone else believes the economy is bad so it must be. This is where much of the “vibes” are coming from.
There’s also the toxic social media which is being manipulated from many different directions and distorting reality across the board. Whether people participate in it directly is immaterial. It seeps out into the broader culture and makes everyone less informed (or, at least, confused) in the process.
But I think there’s more to it than just that. The whole culture is caught in a negativity spiral that isn’t really about the economy at all. It’s about impotence. The public sees a whole host of institutions, norms, rules and laws disintegrating before its eyes and the feeling that there are no mechanisms that work to hold people accountable or reform the system, is creating pessimism and apathy.
But mostly, it’s just Trump. His followers hear nothing but a non-stop litany of lies, angry grievances, denunciations and resentments so it’s no wonder they’re enraged about everything. And Democrats are simply worn out. The effort it takes to oppose him is overwhelming and watching the entire Republican establishment willfully deny reality and supplicate themselves to this con man in order to achieve power for themselves is profoundly dispiriting.
He was supposed to be vanquished three and half years ago. And yet, like a zombie, he simply won’t go down. For all of Biden’s successes, he couldn’t put an end to the single biggest problem we face and a lot of people hold him responsible for that failure however unrealistic it may have been. He’s in charge and this abominable presence just looms over American society spreading poison day in and day out.
I suspect that phenomenon is what’s expressing itself in these economic opinions. Polls can’t really capture the Trump “vibe” very well and I’m sure most people don’t consciously know why they are feeling what they feel. The vocabulary that’s offered to them from the media and the pollsters is the vocabulary of “issues”, particularly the economy which is the one that’s used most often to define Americans’ sense of well-being. It’s not “the economy, stupid.” It’s Trump. I don’t think this will turn around for most of us until he is out of politics. We have to make sure that happens sooner rather than later.
Brian Beutler cautions against lefties shooting themselves in the foot in 2024:
The 2000 election turned out as it did in part because a small but decisive number of voters convinced themselves the major parties were fundamentally similar and similarly unappealing. (Plus the whole Supreme-Court-stopping-the-count thing.)
The consequences have shaped the entirety of my adult life; for people of a certain age—my age and just a bit older—the lessons against complacency and collapsing important distinctions have proven lifelong.
To see something very similar happen based on similarly lazy thinking in 2016 was a history-repeating trauma. One fateful hinge point ought to have been enough to create a whole oral tradition and stigma against falling into the same traps. Casting enough protest votes to hand Republicans a slim electoral-college victory against the popular will, only to watch them wreck the country, ought to be prime Fool Me Once material—the kind of thing that should be off the table for decades, to say nothing of twice more in two decades.
“Is our children learning?” is now folklore as a result of 2000, and still an operative question for the left.
But here we are in 2024 staring down the real possibility that it will happen again just like it did eight years ago, and 16 years before that. It’s even possible to imagine that enough Biden-2020 voters will defect or stay home to hand Trump outright victory.
Part of the reason this madness is on the table is that as the progressive movement has matured, it has overtrained activists to think of politics as little more than a series of high-stakes leverage standoffs: Condition support for candidates on a particular set of policies, threatening their electability if they dissent, and discipline officeholders by leveling similar threats whenever they veer from those priorities.
Beutler is referencing Joe Biden and Gaza. He’s appalled by what’s happening there and by his veering from “strong-if-wary support to reluctant or resigned support.” But:
I thus align myself with politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and thinkers like Mehdi Hasan, who dispense withering criticism, but also consider the whole picture, and prioritize harm reduction above all else.
Strategy on the activist left sometimes feels to me like a self-defeating “until your face turns blue” or “hasten the revolution” arrangement. Beutler concurs:
In American elections, progressives threatening to withhold their votes for Biden are playing the spoiler just like Manchin—except instead of coming up empty on an infrastructure bill, we’ll get Donald Trump. Some leftists will claim to prefer that outcome and were just waiting for a pretext to oppose Biden. They imagine, wrongly, that they’ll have more clout in the political system if he loses. Others are happy to let Trump burn the whole place down, “after Hitler, our turn”-style. This essay is obviously not for them.
People canvassing our neighborhood are over-concerned with having a doorstep response to the Gaza War. This week, one father lamented that his kids say they won’t vote because Biden-Gaza. Being lefties, canvassers want to arrive armed with a curated set of talking points for beating back that argument. That’s a waste of time and effort.
My response? Fine. Don’t vote for Joe Biden then. Go to vote the rest of the ballot. There will be over three dozen Democrats running on our fall ballot, from governor down to the school board. The GOP council of state slate in North Carolina is a cavalcade of Christian nationalists and MAGA election deniers crazier than any I’ve seen. Standing up to them are Democrats committed to public service, to equality and justice for all, to preserving the environment and ending gun violence. They are making personal sacrifices to serve their communities. There are a state supreme court seat and district court seats on the ballot, state legislative seats and city council and county commission races that will impact your life and your children’s for years to come. Don’t abandon your advocates because you’re pissed off about Gaza and Joe Biden.
What will objectors really do with the presidential race when they get into the voting booth? Guess.
And remember the dedicated election officials putting their necks on the line in the face of extremist threats so you can have a voice in your own future.
“Here’s the “Appeal to Heaven” flag flying outside of conservative powerbroker Leonard Leo’s home in Maine. Photo taken by a nearby resident who shared it with @ProPublica and gave us permission to publish it. – Andy Kroll
So this is what it’s like to live history. You may have read about the Civil Rights movement and watched coverage of Vietnam, the first moon landing, and the Watergate hearings as they happened. But in this century, American history is more personal. A friend who lost her fiancé on Sept. 11 and dreads every anniversary. We participated in electing the first Black president, lived through the Great Recession, and sheltered from COVID-19. We watched the Trump insurrection unfold live. At a remove like past events, yes, but the feeling is more visceral.
This week, we found out that key actors in our national drama fly flags representing support for unmaking our democratic republic and constructing in its place a white Christian theocracy. Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that the Appeal to Heaven flag has been on display “in front of the office of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and over the houses of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito and the architect of the right-wing theocratic takeover of the federal courts, Leonard Leo.”
“Slow-motion train wreck” may be overused but feels right here. The Supremes led by Alito overturned Roe. Plans like Project 2025 are public. “Baby Don” Trump broadcasts his revanchist plans for a second term. Half the country believes the country is in recession, unemployment is at record highs, and the stock market is in decline when the opposite is true.
Richardson references how Abraham Lincoln, in his June 16, 1858 “House Divided” speech, spoke of the actors at work to destroy democracy in his day:
Lincoln outlined the steps that the United States had taken away from freedom toward tyranny, and noted:
“[W]hen we see a lot of framed timbers…which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house… we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.”
Lincoln did not choose the names of his workmen at random. Stephen was Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, who had popularized the idea that local voters should be able to decide whether their territory would permit slavery, no matter what the majority of Americans wanted; Franklin was Franklin Pierce, who had presided over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting enslavement to move into the western territories; Roger was Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court that decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, saying that Congress could not keep slavery out of the territories; and James was President James Buchanan, who urged Americans to accept the judgment of the Supreme Court. By spreading enslavement westward, that judgment would create new slave states that would work with the southern slave states to make slavery national.
Together, Lincoln said, these four workmen had constructed an edifice to support human enslavement, an edifice working against the nation’s dedication to freedom established by the Declaration of Independence. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” he said. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
One step at a time, revanchist officials are turning back the clock on more Americans enjoying the fruits of liberty, unwinding what’s become a more perfect union since the end of World War II. They are shocked, shocked to find a majority of Americans took the founders’ “created equal” and “pursuit of happiness” vision seriously and expect the United States to live up to it. Appeal to Heaven flyers believe this land was bequeathed by Jesus as a Christian patriarchy led by white males, and damn the Constitution to which they swore oaths.
If democracy cannot deliver their theocracy, then democracy must go. Andy Kroll of ProPublica examines the “America First” movement’s red, white, and blue war against it. The Republican Party is its own “house divided“:
What divides the Republican Party of 2024 is not any one policy or ideology. It is not whether to support Donald Trump. The most important fault line in the party now is democracy itself. Today’s Republican insurgents believe democracy has been stolen, and they don’t trust the ability of democratic processes to restore it.
This phenomenon is evident across the country, in Georgia and Nevada, in Arizona, Idaho and Florida. But it’s perhaps the starkest in Michigan, a place long associated with political pragmatism and a business-friendly GOP, embodied by governors George Romney, John Engler and, most recently, Rick Snyder. It was a son of Michigan, former President Gerald Ford, who once said, “I have never mistaken moderation for weakness, nor civility for surrender.”
That wimp? That RINO? Ford would be drummed out of today’s GOP.
Kroll explains that several years ago, his home state of Michigan “stopped making sense to me.”
“We can’t keep going through election after election like this where a large plurality of the country just does not accept the outcome of the majority and refuses to abide by it,” said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who now works with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “That’s when the system falls apart.”
But that’s the America First plan, Jeff. Did you not get the memo?
Kroll maps out how America Firsters took control of the Michigan party. Washington, D.C. has Johnson, Alito, and Leo. In Michigan, America First has infiltrated down to the precinct level. Political fratricide is the name of the game.
Yet Richardson reminds readers that Democrats do not lack agency in this renewed fight to preserve the union:
Instead of sympathizing with the extremists, as Buchanan did, President Joe Biden has worked to undermine the sense of grievance that has permitted them to amass power. In the 1850s the federal government had few ways to weaken the ties of ordinary people to the state leaders who were determined to spread the institution of slavery that had made them enormously wealthy, but the modern administrative state has given Biden more options.
The administration has used the power of the federal government to begin to unwind the trickle-down economy that between 1981 and 2021 transferred $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of the U.S. to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. The result has been solid economic growth of 5.7% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023.
The unemployment rate has been at record lows of under 4% for more than two years, the strongest run since the 1960s. Inflation is not rising; it is falling and is now at 3.4%, higher than the Federal Reserve’s preferred mark of 2% but down significantly from its high of 9.1% in June 2022, just after the worst of the pandemic eased. At 4.5% growth over 2023, wage growth outpaced inflation, meaning that although prices have risen, workers have come out ahead. The S&P stock market index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
None of that will make an impression if people don’t know about it. And they don’t, as recent polling shows. Shout louder.
Update: Leo’s statement on why he flies the Tree of Heaven flag doesn’t exppain why he flies it from a tree along the road the way some Klansmen fly theirs, as a signal.
