Donald and Melania Trump were evacuated from the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday evening after the event was interrupted by loud gunshots.
A suspect was in custody, the FBI said, after the annual black tie dinner honoring the White House press corps was suddenly interrupted by confusion and chaos. Journalists ducked under tables as authorities rushed the president and members of his cabinet out of the room.
There were reports that the US Secret Service had guns drawn as White House pool reporters were rushed out of the room and Secret Service agents yelled “shots fired”.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump praised the Secret Service and law enforcement and said the shooter had been apprehended.
The FBI confirmed later on Saturday that a suspect was apprehended.
The Secret Service said in a statement that the shooting incident occurred near the main magnetometer screening area at the hotel.
Weijia Jang, president of the White House correspondents’ dinner, told the room that the president is planning a press conference from the White House later Saturday and that he wants to reschedule the dinner in the next 30 days.
“Thank God everyone is safe, and thank you for coming together tonight,” she said. “We will do this again.”
Guardian reporters in the room said there were initially mixed messages about whether press and guests should stay in the room. Many people who stayed in the ballroom said the program was scheduled to resume, although the presidential seal was removed from the podium.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer reported that he saw someone with a gun at the event.
“I did see the gunman on the ground after he started shooting,” he said. “Police officers threw him to the ground.”
Guests had just started eating dinner when the commotion began. The atmosphere in the room was tense as journalists waited to hear what happened and what to do next.
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, who was attending the dinner said he never saw a shooter, but “I think a Secret Service agent threw me to the ground and on top of some other people and people were screaming and yelling”.
“I heard some loud noises but I don’t know if that was people reacting or if that was something outside, it was hard to know, but people very quickly were saying that was a shot, that was the gunshot,” he added. “People were terrified; people seem to be relieved now.”
Outside the hotel, helicopters circled overhead.
This year’s dinner was already tense given the presence of Trump and top members of his cabinet, including Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. Trump agreed to attend this year’s dinner after refusing to attend last year and during his first term. The correspondents’ dinner tradition began in 1921, though the tradition of a presidential guest started in 1924, when Calvin Coolidge attended.
I don’t know if all republicans are racist bigots but they certainly do tolerate them in their midst. Pride month, pride flags, and black history month, MLK, and other non-white persons of note are too political, divisive, and too morally offensive to be displayed or talked about. No month to celebrate the oppressed minorities yet one to celebrate the oppressors? No pride flags on government buildings or school classrooms but confederate battle flags are OK to be displayed everywhere. Some how the people calling for the end of DEI as racist along with those saying the pride symbols and history months are divisive and too political, think displays of people wanting to own / deny rights to a group based on skin color are not divisive or political. Hugs
Two Confederate flag bearers walk across the lawn of the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Monday, July 6, 2015. A group of about 50 people participated in the rally sponsored by the Magnolia State Heritage Campaign as they opposed efforts to remove Mississippi’s 1894 Confederate-themed state flag. Five years later, in 2020, Gov. Tate Reeves would sign a bill retiring the old state flag, even as he continued declaring Confederate Heritage Month annually. AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
Nearly six years after signing the bill that removed the Confederate symbol from Mississippi’s state flag, Gov. Tate Reeves declared April 2026 as Confederate Heritage Month, continuing a tradition that began 33 years ago.
Though the governor does not publish the Confederate Heritage Month proclamations on any official government websites, the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans posted a copy of the latest proclamation on its Facebook page. The proclamation shows that the governor signed it on April 17.
Tap or click the preview image to read Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves’ April 17, 2026, Confederate Heritage Month proclamation. Courtesy Mississippi Division Sons of Confederate Veterans
As in past years, Reeves’ proclamation does not mention the central role of slavery and white supremacy in the Confederacy’s birth, instead speaking only vaguely about how April “is the month when, in 1861, the American Civil War began between the Confederate and Union armies, reportedly the deadliest war ever fought on American soil.”
“WHEREAS, as we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us,” says the governor’s proclamation. “NOW, THEREFORE, I, Tate Reeves, as Governor of the State of Mississippi, do hereby proclaim the month of April 2026 as CONFEDERATE HERITAGE MONTH in the State of Mississippi.”
Kevin M. Levin, a Boston-based historian whose work has focused heavily on the Civil War-era, wrote on his Substack, Civil War Memory, on April 18 that Reeves issued the document “with the quiet, almost regularity of a bureaucratic obligation.”
“There is no mention of what the Confederacy stood for, no celebration of Southern martial valor, no invocation of states’ rights, and—most conspicuously—no mention of slavery, even though it was the explicit cause Mississippi named when it seceded from the Union in 1861,” Levin wrote. “What the proclamation most resembles is a permission slip signed reluctantly, just legible enough to satisfy the requester and vague enough to require no defense.”
Slavery Defined the Confederacy
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is a neo-Confederate organization that espouses “Lost Cause” ideology, which promotes a revisionist version of the Civil War that whitewashes the Confederacy’s white supremacist history and downplays the role of slavery in the Civil War. SCV owns and operates Beauvoir, the museum and historic home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, located in Biloxi, Mississippi; the organization annually receives $100,000 from the State of Mississippi for development and maintenance.
The Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans issued this Confederate History and Heritage Month proclamation on April 1, 2026. Courtesy Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans
The Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans issued its own 2026 “Confederate History and Heritage Month” proclamation on April 1, saying that “states of the South, including Mississippi, did legally declare their independence from the United States in 1861, and … these states did form a Confederation to protect and defend themselves from an invading army.”
What the SCV proclamation left out was the defining issue that led Mississippi and other Southern states to secede from the Union—the “cause” the Confederacy fought for.
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” Mississippi’s 1861 Declaration of Secession declared. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”
The 2026 SCV proclamation, signed by Mississippi Division Commander Forrest S. Daws, says that the people of the Confederacy spent “four long years fighting and sacrificing for their independence” as part of “their commitment to defend the rights secured under the United States Constitution.”
But the historical record shows that that, too, is a revisionist view of history.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens said in a speech on March 21, 1861, that slavery “was the immediate cause of the late rupture” that led to the American Civil War and that the Confederate Constitution enshrined the idea that the enslavement of Africans to white men was “natural and normal.” Photo Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons Credit: NARA
In his 1861 Cornerstone Speech announcing the Confederate Constitution, Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens said that it made “great improvements upon the old constitution.”
“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution,” Stephens said. “(Thomas) Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the ‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’ He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted.
“The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.”
“This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. … Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong,” Stephens continued. “They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the ‘storm came and the wind blew.’ Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
The bust of Mississippi State University’s first president, Confederate Lt. Gen. Stephen D. Lee, has long been an iconic center of the Mississippi State campus from its perch on the Drill Field in front of the building bearing Lee’s name. He led efforts long after the Civil War to successfully rewrite history about the Confederacy and its documented motives out of school textbooks and classrooms, furthering the Lost Cause. Photo by Donna Ladd
In the decades after the Civil War ended, Confederate veterans, such as Mississippi State University’s inaugural president, Stephen D. Lee, and groups like SCV and the United Daughters of the Confederacy began the work of remaking history in a way that shone a more favorable light on the South—muddying the waters over the cause of the war and falsely describing it as a “war of northern aggression.”
White-supremacist leaders in Mississippi renewed efforts to enshrine Confederate heritage in the 1950s and 1960s in reaction to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.
Young white Mississippians wave Confederate flags at civil rights marchers near Highway 7 on the outskirts of Greenwood, Miss., on June 17, 1966, weeks after James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi, was shot while leading the group of marchers. AP Photo
Despite his campaign pledge to supporters of the old Confederate-themed flag not to use his power to change the flag, Gov. Reeves signed the bill retiring it, calling it “a law to turn a page in Mississippi today.”
“It is fashionable in some quarters to say our ancestors were all evil. I reject that notion. I also reject the elitist worldview that these United States are anything but the greatest nation in the history of mankind. I reject the mobs tearing down statues of our history—north and south, Union and Confederate, founding fathers and veterans,” the governor said in 2020, criticizing Black Lives Matter protesters from across the country even as he signed the bill with several Mississippi civil rights icons behind him. “I reject the chaos and lawlessness, and I am proud it has not happened in our state.”
‘An Ideology Reduced to a Form Letter’
The Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ 2026 Confederate Heritage proclamation notes that “in 1993 Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice, understanding the importance of remembering and preserving all history, did declare the first Confederate History Month.”
Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice issued the first Confederate Heritage Month proclamation in 1993. During his time as governor, he courted support from white supremacist groups, including the Council of Conservative Citizens. He is seen here on Aug. 22, 1996, with (from left) Donald Wildmon of the Tupelo-based American Family Association; then-Mississippi House Rep. Phil Bryant; and Mississippi Family Council’s Forest Thigpen. Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File Credit: AP
Since then, one Democratic governor and three Republican governors have followed Fordice’s lead.
Starting in 2016, Donna Ladd, then the editor of the Jackson Free Press and now the executive editor of the Mississippi Free Press, first reported on then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant’s Confederate Heritage Month proclamations. Despite issuing Confederate Heritage Month proclamations annually for his first seven years in office between 2011 and 2018, former Gov. Phil Bryant did not issue one in 2019, his last year in office; he opted instead for a “Month of Unity” proclamation on behalf of a Christian religious organization.
The Mississippi Free Press has since reported on each of Reeves’ annual proclamations, including in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Reeves’ ties to the Sons of Confederate Veterans stretch back long before his time as governor. In 2013, he spoke to the SCV’s national gathering in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in front of a massive Confederate battle flag and in a room decorated with smaller Confederate flags and cotton plants. After then-Lt. Gov. Reeves congratulated the organization for “keeping history for our youth,” speakers defended the Confederate “cause” and compared “Yankees” to German “Nazis” in World War II.
Then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves appeared at this July 2013 Sons of Confederate Veterans event in Vicksburg with a massive Confederate flag behind him. Photo via R.E. Lee Camp 239 SCV Facebook group
Long before entering politics, Reeves was part of a Millsaps College fraternity known for lionizing Confederate General Robert E. Lee and for Confederate-themed parties where members wore blackface. When it became an issue in his 2019 campaign for governor, though, he said he never participated in blackface during his time in the fraternity.
Reeves’ Democratic opponent at the time, then-Attorney General Jim Hood, was also in a fraternity at the University of Mississippi, where members wore blackface; he similarly denied ever participating.
Reeves defended issuing the proclamations in 2021.
“For the last 30 years, five Mississippi governors—Republicans and Democrats alike—have signed a proclamation recognizing the statutory state holiday and identifying April as Confederate Heritage Month,” the governor’s office said in a statement to WAPT at the time. “Gov. Reeves also signed the proclamation because he believes we can all learn from our history.”
The governor’s annual proclamation routinely notes that state law designates the last Monday in April as Confederate Memorial Day. However, state law does not require governors to issue Confederate Heritage Month proclamations.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, seen here speaking at a press conference in Ridgeland, Miss., on Thursday, April 9, 2026, has signed Confederate Heritage Month proclamations each year as governor from 2020 to 2026. MFP Photo by Rogelio V. Solis
The language in Reeves’ Confederate Heritage Month proclamations uses much of the same language as the one that former Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who served from 2000 to 2004, issued in April 2000.
In 2023, Musgrove told the Mississippi Free Press that Confederate Heritage Month is “something that should not continue in today’s world.”
“I cannot say why the practice started, but it was one that should never have been started,” the former governor said. “It was one that I should not have signed, and it should have ended a long time ago.”
Former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour also signed Confederate Heritage Month proclamations every year between 2004 and 2016.
In his Substack post, Kevin M. Levin wrote that the earlier proclamations that began with Fordice “were issued with more ideological confidence” and as “instruments of the Lost Cause.” Now, instead, the historian wrote, they appear on Sons of Confederate Veterans Facebook groups—a sign of the Lost Cause’s “crumbling infrastructure” and that it is now “an ideology reduced to a form letter.”
“A celebration conducted in secret, or at least in silence, is not really a celebration. It is a favor done for a diminishing constituency that the issuer would prefer the broader public not notice,” he wrote.
Members of the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign burn a Confederate battle flag at the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson, Miss., Monday, June 18, 2018. AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
Levin called it “the political logic of a cause in retreat.”
“The Lost Cause did not die in a single moment, not with the removal of Confederate statues after Charleston in 2015, not with Mississippi’s replacement of its Confederate-emblem state flag in 2020, and not with any particular court ruling or protest march. It has died the slower death of a story that fewer and fewer people believe, or are willing to say publicly that they believe,” the Boston historian continued. “What remains is a three-paragraph proclamation, quietly signed, quietly announced in a Facebook group, saying as little as possible about a cause its issuer is no longer willing to name.”
NB: originally this post was published under Sarah’s byline. This post is by CarrieS.
On May 1, you can fight fascism by staying home with a good book. A coalition of organizations across the country is calling for a general strike. This strike calls for no school, no work, and no shopping.
May Day Strong is made up of a coalition including but not limited to Indivisible, 50501, Sunrise Movement, and MoveOn. Many of the coalitions joining May Day Strong are local, so in addition to visiting the May Day Strong website, you should also keep an eye on your local groups.
In addition to withdrawing your labor and your commerce, you can join your community to make the strike even more visible. There will be a lot of demonstrations around the country and local sources are often the best places to get information about them. Because this is a one-day strike, it’s important to be as visible as possible and demonstrate just how many workers, students, and shoppers are on the side of democracy.
Here’s what the strike demands (taken from the main webpage):
That we tax the rich so our families, not their fortunes, come first,
No ICE. No war. No private army serving authoritarian power.
Expand democracy. Hands off our vote.
How is this relevant to the SBTB community? In addition to the fact that we support the causes that this strike promotes, strikes are an important part of feminist history. Women have been crucial in the success of the labor movement in the U.S.A., as leaders, strikers, volunteers, and educators. Here a just a few examples:
I’ve previously written about Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers Association.
Our Kickass Woman coming up in May will be Emma Tenayuca, a Mexican-American woman from Texas, who led a strike of 12,000 pecan shellers in 1938.
The Mink Brigade was the name given to wealthy society women who supported the garment workers’ strikes in the early 1900’s. By marching and picketing along with workers, they lent prestige and respectability to the cause, and their presence tended to reduce violence from police.
Lucy Parsons
Lucy Parsons led a march of 80,000 people in 1886 in the first May Day Parade. Among other causes, she championed the 8-hour workday.
Ai-jen Poo has been organizing domestic workers since 1996 and is currently the president of National Domestic Workers Alliance and the director of Caring Across Generations. Domestic workers had been considered too difficult to organize, making Ai-jen Poo’s success all the more remarkable.
My personal favorite, Emma Goldman, was a Russian Jewish immigrant who was described as “The most dangerous woman in America.” Despite dedicating her life to her work, she always prioritized joy. She is credited as saying, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” but what she actually said was: I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. . . If it meant that, I did not want it.
I’m closing with my favorite version of “Bread and Roses,” performed by Judy Collins and choir. In 1911, Helen Todd, a suffragist and labor rights activist, used the phrase “Bread and roses” in one of her speeches:
Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.
Rose Schneiderman
Rose Schneiderman, a remarkable woman who was born in Poland, came to America as a child, and campaigned for suffrage as well as improved safety condition for workers, used the phrase in her speeches, including this one from 1912:
What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.
In 1911, James Oppenheim wrote a poem inspired by the slogan. Mimi Farina set to music in 1974. The song will forever be associated with the Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, of 1912. This strike was largely organized and conducted by women, who, along with children, made up the majority of the workforce in the mills.
Women have always been crucial to the success of strikes in America and worldwide. Why stop now? On May 1, protest, march, or stay home and read, but if you are able, join the strike.
No work, no school, and no shopping: by ceasing these three actions, we honor our past and our future.
Last April, at the James Beard Foundation’s Chef Action Summit, food industry leaders gathered to discuss the political and economic landscape with one concern hanging grimly in the air: undocumented and immigrant workers were increasingly afraid to come into work after ICE raids ramped up at the outset of Trump’s second term.
But it just so happened the summit took place in Asheville, North Carolina, where activists had already asked, “What would it take to make this the safest state for immigrants in the south?” as Andrew Willis Garcés, senior strategist with the immigrant justice organization Siembra NC, puts it.
One answer: 4th Amendment Workplaces, a framework developed by Siembra NC and launched at the summit to help restaurants and other businesses train up on legally vetted protocols to defend employees against ICE. The idea quickly took hold — there are now over 1,000 4th Amendment Workplaces across North Carolina, with 4th Amendment Workplace resolutions passed in three cities and similar efforts underway across 12 states.
It’s emerged as perhaps the most powerful workforce training to help businesses prepare for ICE raids, but it is not the only one. Across the country, training, resources and hotlines have been developed for workplaces, alongside an effort to harness the wider labor movement as a force against ICE.
Though the ICE raids that make the news often take place on the street, workplaces are in fact a frequent target. “We’ve seen ICE this year go into workplaces more than a lot of other kinds of places where people are gathered,” Willis Garcés explains. “With workplaces, there’s usually an open door you can walk through.”
According to the American Immigration Council, ICE publicly reported at least 40 worksite enforcement actions resulting in over 1,100 arrests within the first seven months of the current Trump administration. Businesses employing noncitizen workers — restaurants, car washes, automotive shops, bakeries, nail salons — are typically targeted. ICE has also scaled up large raids at workplaces like meatpacking and manufacturing plants.
These raids often represent legal violations, which 4th Amendment Workplaces raise awareness around. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” without a warrant based on probable cause — that is, reason to believe that a crime may have been committed.
In North Carolina, volunteers canvas businesses across the state to share what it means to be a 4th Amendment Workplace: identify invalid ICE warrants, secure private employee areas, document unconstitutional actions and defend all workers, no matter their immigration status. Resources include a workplace guide, organizing toolkit, posters signaling opposition to unconstitutional search and seizures, employee handouts and tips for designating private employee areas.
Workplaces can request dedicated training, in which organizers help business owners and employees develop workplace-specific protocol, and lead them through roleplaying scenarios. “We help you think through … what would you do right after the fact? What would you do to preserve footage, how do you support families left behind, what’s the immediate triage that needs to happen [after a raid]?” explains Willis Garcés.
Scuppernong Books of Greensboro was an early adopter, participating in training, promoting itself as a 4th Amendment Workplace, hiring a lawyer, regularly keeping staff informed of ICE response protocol, even publishing a book on how to resist ICE. Co-owner Steve Mitchell says it is “absolutely essential” for business owners to step up on behalf of employees, especially if the owners are white and legally protected residents: “It’s important for people like us to say that this isn’t right, and we’re going to stand on this side of the issue.”
Even though there hasn’t been a heavy ICE presence in Greensboro, the bookstore’s work with Siembra NC “gives us some sense of confidence,” Mitchell says. “Whether that’s misplaced or not, it at least helps us know what our rights are in that situation.” He adds that using Siembra’s model has made the business feel connected to a broader network of activists.
Willis Garcés describes that model as “plug and play,” easily adaptable outside the state and across a variety of workplaces. Siembra NC recruited small businesses first, with the goal of expansion into higher-targer workplaces like factories and farms.
Today, some North Carolina farmers display giant vinyl banners about their constitutional rights, a riff on Siembra NC’s signage. In Oregon, organizers dubbed themselves “Baddies for the Fourth.” In Minneapolis, the 4th Amendment Workplace was a central demand in a public-pressure campaign around Target.
There have been other efforts to develop localized training. In New York, Nonviolent Peaceforce trains mostly within the city’s Asian American community, which it has worked with since the pandemic. Last year, ICE raids erupted across the city’s Chinatown.
Nonviolent Peaceforce’s in-person training happens with trusted community partners and focuses on de-escalation and self-regulation tactics, alongside scenario and role-playing. “We came to develop scenarios really at the request of community members who felt that they really needed to know what it was like to be in the moment,” says Roz Lee, head of the organization’s U.S. efforts. She says simple tactics to slow things down — like introducing yourself, asking ICE agents their name, asking for a warrant and taking time to inspect it — can shift a potentially intense and traumatic interaction.
Other groups have tied the urgency around ICE to larger labor organizing efforts. Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) emerged to help non-unionized labor organize in response to COVID-19. More recently, EWOC developed resources for resisting ICE, which are tied to broader workplace organizing tactics like facilitating conversation among employees, building a committee and planning collective action together.
“These steps are very universal, whether you work in an office, in a kitchen, at a nonprofit,” says Wes Holing, an EWOC organizer. “If you’re talking about bread-and-butter issues, or you’re talking about a workplace that’s safe from ICE, you’re still ultimately fighting for a place that respects you as a person.”
This January, EWOC partnered with Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America to hold a No-Work Workshop to train workers on their rights and protections to participate in the Anti-ICE General Strike. It was part of a much larger mobilization among Minneapolis residents and businesses responding to Operation Metro Surge.
The city mobilized far beyond one-off trainings; instead, an entire ecosystem emerged. “The sheer volume, the sheer magnitude of mobilization … it felt like every single person I knew was extremely active,” says Mike Urbanski, who helps lead legal observer training with Monarca. Monarca is a project under the immigrant justice organization Unidos MN, which canvassed businesses in Twin Cities’ immigrant communities. They’d then direct people to Monarca’s ICE hotline as well as its two-hour, in-person training, which focuses on “upstander” legal observation tactics.
Monarca’s trainings were also shared through social media, word of mouth and within community spaces and houses of worship. “We could post a training with 1,000 people in Minneapolis and fill it within four or five days,” Urbanski says, “And most of those people would come, and another 100 people would just show up.”
The Workers Solidarity Circle also canvassed and shared resources among Twin Cities businesses, channeling that energy into the Minneapolis Worker’s Assembly this February, which brought together over 300 unionized and non-unionized workers across sectors. “It was about building working class power and coordinated strike action, to really push people into action and not wait on managers, bosses or labor officials to save us,” says organizer Aminah Sheikh.
Now that Operation Metrosurge has wound down, organizers have turned their attention to this upcoming May Day: organizing strike committees, holding strike trainings, conducting labor education and committing unions and community organizations to strike on May 1st. Sheikh says there is a growing realization that workers must build political power far beyond their workplace.
“Listen, in order for us to really stop — abolish — ICE, like people are saying, from the grassroots,” she says, “then we need to do economic disruption.”
This video explains what everyone on the real left already knew instead of forgetting the trans / woke culture wars and moving right, the center left keeps demanding which is simply code speak for leaning right. While all the same democratic strategists since the Bill Clinton days demand candidates move to the right to “triangulate” to capture republican voters these polls show what we already knew. The culture wars are losing for the republicans. After republicans spent nearly 3 million dollars in ads against trans people the polls showed almost no one felt those adverts influenced their vote. Even as red states rail against higher education, acceptance, and tolerance of people who are different it is losing them votes. Some thing the Christian nationalists who are in the height of their influence now in political circles don’t understand is that people who grew up with LGBTQ+ classmates, friends, and even dated some do not find them the evil that these hate religions preach they are.
*** Personal note. I explained to Ali in an email that I am not functioning. For what ever reason wheither it be anemia or something worse I am desperately tired from the time I manage to get up. I often get up only to a few hours later go back to bed for four or more hours. I have started taking vitamin B-12 and a woman’s one-a-day vitamin. That with more red meat which was recommended to me in the past every time I go into anemia. How ever I get up, I have coffee and stuff with Ron then I need to go back to bed for normally 4 hours, get up and do dishes while watching The Majority Report. How ever some days like yesterday I did not even get that far, going to back to bed by 2 pm only to have Ron wake me and beg me to eat.
I have done better today only going back to bed for 3 hours later in the morning. I wanted to go to bed two hours ago, but Ron was all upset he couldn’t sleep due to the neighbors having new skirting put around their home outside our bedroom. So I got him in his recliner and moved his CPAP out to his chair. Still he was not tracking. Good news as I was falling asleep at my desk he woke up and is fixing supper. At this point I am so tired I don’t really care whether I eat or not.
I tried to reply to comments, but I couldn’t. I even started to move old saved open tabs out by making a new cartoon / memes post but I simply couldn’t do it. Right now the best I can do to function is make doctors appointments and watch videos that don’t take too much thought to understand. That means most political videos are outside my ability. I am sorry but right now I am functioning at the level of a confused grandpa. Sorry. I hope to get better soon. Ron says if I don’t clear up by next week we will demand the primary care see me and deal with it. I’m not sure if I want that as my last visit he was insisting I think about getting a colonoscopy. Anyway. This is a good video and one I watched several hours ago when I was much sharper than I feel now. *** Hugs
I subscribe for free to this one, so please do click to read the whole thing. He does great work, and deserves the reads. You do not have to sign in to read.
Remarkable reporting from the New York Times provides a peek behind the curtain of the February 2016 rulings that ushered in the modern emergency docket. And what it reveals is pretty discouraging.
Welcome back to “One First,” a newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support, and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks.
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Back in February, I wrote about the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unsigned, unexplained February 2016 rulings blocking President Obama’s “Clean Power Plan,” and how they ushered in what might be called “the modern emergency docket.” In my earlier post, I raised a series of questions about what had led the Court to do something that, in 2016, was completely unprecedented (blocking an executive branch program then under review in the lower courts), and whether the justices had any idea of the Pandora’s Box they were opening. As I wrote, “because the Court didn’t write then, and hasn’t explained itself since, we’ll never know (at least, until our grandkids can read the justices’ internal papers from that time period).”
It turns out, thanks to some truly remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak for the New York Times, that we didn’t have to wait quite that long. On Saturday, Kantor and Liptak published 16 pages of (leaked) internal memoranda from six of the justices providing a window into how and why the Court did what it did on February 9, 2016. And the memos are, at least to me, a remarkable combination of eye-opening and sadly unsurprising. As I explain below, I think there are at least five significant takeaways from these materials—none of which paint the Court in an especially flattering light. And at the heart of most of them is Chief Justice Roberts.
Behind the scenes, Roberts led the charge for the Court to blaze a new trail—relying on statements outside the record; invoking the wrong standard for the kind of relief the applicants sought; failing to even acknowledge the irreparable harm the government (and the environment) would suffer from the Court intervening; and pushing back aggressively when Justices Breyer and Kagan both urged a compromise that should have accounted for his ostensible concerns. I’ve suggested before that the real acceleration of the Court’s modern emergency docket behavior can be traced to 2018, right around when Justice Kavanaugh succeeded Justice Kennedy. But in the first major case in which the Court granted emergency relief as a means of shaping nationwide policy, it turns out that the justice who led the charge was the one who was doing quite a bit more than calling balls and strikes. (snip-the rest is on the page)
When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out.
Just when the people of San Francisco thought they’d seen every video—the sidewalk drug runners, the Louis Vuitton mob heisters, the men selling stolen laptops, the smash-and-grabbers snatching a camera from a Prius in traffic, the porch pirates porch pirates porch pirates into infinity, all indexed in the “Lawless San Francisco” section of the great internet video store—yes, just then: Stig Strombeck took out his cell phone camera on April 5 and hit Record.
It was around 7 pm, and Strombeck was on his way to his second job. He’d parked on Lombard Street. Not the famously crooked section up over the hill, but the wide gauntlet that jets toward the Golden Gate Bridge through the Marina district: the preppy hood of woo girls and boat guys and early-career Gavin Newsom and largely law-and-order Democrats. (“Everyone likes to shit on San Francisco, and San Franciscans like to shit on the Marina,” one resident told me. “It’s a victimless crime.”) But lately, even in the Marina, there was no escaping the rest of the city’s problems. The previous November, in a manicured playground just two blocks from where Strombeck was walking, a father said his 10-month-old baby had ingested fentanyl and had to be revived by Narcan—a San Francisco nadir that, to the presumable relief of civic boosters, hasn’t surfaced on film.
On the Lombard sidewalk, Strombeck pulled headphones from his ears and trained his camera on a disturbing scene playing out in the lot of a Shell gas station. Here’s the video: A bear of a middle-aged guy, 5’11”, 230 pounds, faces a rakish, apparently homeless man in his twenties who is wielding a 3-foot-long pole. The older bear of a guy holds his arms up like a boxer as the younger one jockeys with the pole, falls backward off a curb, then lithely spins back to his feet. The older guy blots his eyes and yells, “You’re going to jail, motherfucker.” The younger one, who wears a bright red stocking cap, whacks the bear of a guy across his face, sending him careening to the side. A male voice off camera says “Dude!”—the unmistakable Greek chorus of Wtf, this is insane. The younger guy looks toward the camera. The video stops.
⚠️ WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT The following videos contain graphic content, which some readers may find disturbing.
(see it, embedded on the page, linked in the title above; there are also several .gifs at various points throughout this. I can’t grab ’em, plus it’s easier to just read on the page)
Strombeck stowed his phone, but the action kept spilling into other frames. A daycare’s security cam showed the red-capped figure maniacally chasing the now bloodied man down the Lombard sidewalk before bashing him again. A neighbor pointed his camera down from his third-floor window as the younger guy strode below with the pole in one hand and what looks like the older man’s baseball cap in the other, pumping his arm, looking amped. Another video of the attacker that appears to be shot from a passing vehicle was uploaded to the crime-alert app Citizen, which pinged a software engineer sitting on his couch a few blocks away, who ventured over and filmed the crimson drips and Rorschach splotches of blood leading down the sidewalk. (Strombeck would later testify that by the end of the attack, the big guy was covered in “the most blood I’ve ever seen.”)
The following day, a Marina local named Joan wrote on Nextdoor that she was the mother of Don Carmignani, the man who’d been bludgeoned by the pole: “I want to thank all the neighbors that videoed what was happening & got involved to stop it. If they were not there my son would be dead!” Don was in the hospital, she wrote, with a skull fracture and a broken jaw. City politicians tweeted prayers and a call for more cops. Local news identified Carmignani as a former city fire commissioner, a lifelong San Franciscan and father of two. The assailant: 24-year-old Garret Doty, a recent arrival from Louisiana.
Reports said the attack kicked off when Carmignani asked some homeless people to move away from his elderly parents’ door, which they were blocking. In one TV newscast, a reporter mentions an allegation, from one of Doty’s companions, that Carmignani used “bear spray” during the altercation. The segment then cuts to a close-up interview of Doty’s homeless friend—a striking, red-bearded man named Nate Roye, speaking from under a filthy shearling hood—saying that Doty attacked because Carmignani had been “disrespectful.”
“Is that enough to beat him up?” the journalist asks, incredulously.
“Yeah, sometimes,” Roye replies, with a decisive nod.
San Franciscans know the larger drama that this episode advances, and you probably do too: Tech’s glittering citadel, fallen, with the footage to show it. Within some 40 hours of the Marina attack, in another swank part of the city, a widely admired tech executive named Bob Lee, the former CTO of Square and a founder of Cash App, had staggered past surveillance cameras while bleeding from several stab wounds and later died at the hospital. The two maulings—a beaten fire commissioner, a slain tech executive—upcycled to the national news, putting San Francisco under the national surveillance to which it’s become accustomed, with particularly lip-licking schadenfreude on the right. Here again was Newsom’s and Nancy Pelosi’s doom-looping dystopia, where remote-working techies and fleeing billionaires have ceded the city to IRL Grand Theft Auto.
Carmignani, his family, his attorney, and some witnesses provided images that flickered through the reports and social media: Strombeck’s video from the gas station. A laundromat’s street cam view of Doty grabbing the metal bar out of a trash bin and taking a practice swing. The daycare cam. In the neighborhood itself, the vigorous uptake of these images inspired a kind of hope. Marina residents—forever wary of being pegged as pearl-clutching Karens—thought they finally had their irrefutable proof of how clearly things had gotten out of hand. “Somebody got beat up. It was on camera multiple, multiple places,” one told me. “Like, the best evidence!”
But within days, the clarity crumbled. In the case of tech executive Bob Lee, police arrested not a person off the street but a tech entrepreneur whose sister had been hanging out with Lee. And in private, within the police department, the Carmignani attack was veering off narrative too. A police sergeant, sorting through the symphony of surveillance clips that captured the face-off, played the bodycam footage from a cop who had been interviewing Carmignani’s girlfriend after the attack. The officer asks whether she’d been inside when Carmignani went out to “confront” the guy. She says yes. Then from the ambulance, Carmignani interrupts her, barking a command through his broken jaw, seeming to thicken the plot:
“Don’t say nothing to nobody. Don’t say nothing to any cop, no one.”
In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale.
In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now.
True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by God, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage.
A guy who goes by the handle JJ Smith is probably the most vivid personification of this drive. A longtime resident of the Tenderloin whose brother died of a fentanyl overdose in 2022, Smith—not his real name—films unhoused people as he tries to cajole them into considering treatment. Then he posts the footage on X, where he has about 19,000 followers.
In happier cases, he’ll document when people check into a program and come out clean on the other side. But much of Smith’s footage is far grimmer: coroners rolling sheet-draped corpses out of residential hotels; a cold open on a woman’s face as she OD’s on a sidewalk. Smith explains that he’s just given the woman Narcan, pulling you into morbid suspense combined with an awful feeling of Are we really supposed to be seeing this? Other times, Smith dispenses a tough love that edges into trolling, like the time he snatched away a coat draped over a woman’s head so he could scold her for smoking drugs next to a park where his kids play.
People shrug off statistics, Smith says, but “when you’re actually seeing it, it really gets to you.” Supporters credit him with recording a humanitarian crisis. Critics tweet at him, even chide him on camera: He’s exploiting people who have no privacy with footage they haven’t consented to. (Hey, he says, it’s a public sidewalk.)
Some of the discomfort with Smith, who says he knows many of the people he films, stems from the simple fact that, by now, he’s part of a social media bandwagon. Even presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis once stopped by the Tenderloin to shoot a video. Today, Smith is joined by other accounts like FriscoLive415 and Tenderloin Tube—a cadre that lives somewhere on the border between citizen journalists and dystopic paparazzi. Consider the live birth video. Last spring, a Twitter account that typically posts store-looting vids showed something else: an infant, just born and naked, on a Tenderloin sidewalk, its dazed mother trying to pick the baby up. The event is morally excruciating, but so is its existence here, on X, overlaid with the account’s watermark as the video travels the internet to 1.5 million views, churned into headlines like “Caught on Video: Homeless Woman Gives Birth in Broad Daylight on Tenderloin District Sidewalk.”
It is Earth Month, and I’ve only posted a single acknowledgement of that, so far. Meanwhile, Ten Bears has us, with a full post of links regarding how things are, what needs to be done, and importantly, what we can still do.
Scottie's Playtime 