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sam nivola for dust magazine

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“I think it’s very possible that the U.S. is on the verge of a major, major military campaign that it wasn’t considering at all just a few days ago and that we may be doing that more or less solely because Donald Trump is jazzed about and attracted by the idea of “winning.” And Israel is now “winning.” So he wants in. It’s important to step back and recognize that there is really literally no one in the inner discussion of U.S. foreign policy today who has any level of foreign policy or military crisis experience at all. That’s a big statement. But I think it bears out. The two heads of the U.S. intelligence apparatus have zero experience in intelligence work. The head of the Pentagon is Pete Hegseth and he appears to have surrounded himself with lackeys. Marco Rubio is both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. He did focus to a degree on foreign policy in the Senate. But he’s never been involved in any national security crisis. He’s never worked in the executive branch. Even the people who are hardcore Trumpers but had some real level of foreign policy experience, like Keith Kellogg, now have other assignments. Kellogg is envoy to Ukraine. The current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs isn’t a career Army Officer. He spent a significant amount of his career in the Reserves. (I don’t think at least — but not certain on this point — that he ever served on the Joint Staff.) The point is that there’s really no one in the room, as it were, who is in a position to keep the President from just riffing. And I think there’s a decent chance that’s exactly what’s happening.”

— Thoughts on Israel’s Iran Campaign and Donald Trump

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All across America, people who have never before participated in a demonstration are feeling compelled to show their solidarity — with immigrants who are being targeted by Trump, with people who are determined to preserve due process and the rule of law, with Americans who don’t want to live in a dictatorship. This solidarity is to be celebrated. It is the foundation of the common good. The moral squalor of Trump has brought us back to basics: Why we have a Constitution. The meaning of the rule of law. The importance of checks and balances and separation of powers. The centrality of our judiciary. The significance of due process and habeas corpus. The connection between near-record inequalities of income and wealth, and the record levels of money corrupting our politics. Perhaps most fundamentally of all, the malignant narcissism of Trump has helped us understand the opposite — the true meaning of patriotism and the common good. Patriotism based on the common good does not pander to divisiveness. It does not vilify diversity, equity, and inclusion. True patriots don’t fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions. They aren’t homophobic or transphobic or sexist. True patriots confirm the good that we have in common. They seek to strengthen and celebrate the “We” in “We the people.” Trump is the opposite of a patriot. He is a traitor and a coward. His lust for power and wealth at the expense of the common good makes this one of the most shameful chapters of our history. Yesterday we reasserted “We.” We did it largely peacefully. We gained strength from our solidarity. We celebrated our numbers and our power. We will be steadfast. We will not cower to a dictator. We will win.

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“It’s easy to make too much of the ironies or contrasts history presents us with. But the contrast and ironies here are particularly potent. A crowning moment of the Civil Rights movement versus Trump’s intentionally inflammatory immigration raids on … Home Depots. (It gets somewhat lost in all the other high octane dimensions of this story that a raid on a Home Depot is literally an effort to arrest people who are eager to work and whose labor is in great demand. It’s about as far as you can get from just going after the bad guys, as the White House routinely claims.) But there’s a more specific point: all the federalizations during the Civil Rights Era were over the refusal of segregationist state governments to enforce federal law under court order. Trump’s argument is much different. And this is literally their argument, not one I’m imputing to them. It’s the right of the President to decide when a state government isn’t protecting or enforcing civil order to his liking and to intervene with federalized National Guard or the US military to do it at the point of a bayonet. Beyond all of our correct fears about Trump’s budding autocracy, this is in a very direct sense an attack on the sovereignty of the people of California.”

— Digging Into Trump’s Attack on the State of California 

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“The reason the National Guard was deployed to Los Angeles (for what appeared to be a pretty uneventful mission) is not that soldiers were needed to restore order. It was because Trump wanted to tell a story about the heavy hand he would bring down on anyone who attempted to stand in his way, even if the hand’s heaviness was equivalent to deploying a platoon against a ghost. Telling that story required sending hostile immigration officers into an unsympathetic community (precisely as the “border czar” warned) to pick up laborers looking for work outside a hardware store. The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation. Again, this is what Trump and his allies did to Harvard and promise to do to anyone else who stands in their way.”

— Trump seeks to punish California — and all other political opponents

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Oscar Curtis | via Instagram

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Thank you Doonesbury for helping us navigate this!🫤

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Enzo Carini

Gorgeous

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Sound on, this is really good and hilarious!

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Looking up

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William Franklyn-Miller by Edward Cooke