John Ehrlichman, former top aide to President Richard Nixon, and three others were convicted of conspiring to violate a citizen’s civil rights. Ehrlichman had approved a recommendation for a covert investigation of Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 by writing on a memo: “If done under your assurance that it is not traceable.” Looking for information to discredit Ellsberg, agents of President Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into the office of his psychiatrist.
John Ehrlichman
Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, had been responsible for public release of The Pentagon Papers, a collection of documents outlining the U.S. history and strategy in Vietnam, that had been classified as secret to avoid public scrutiny.The world’s most famous filing cabinet
There is a video at the link below. I watched this. ICE went in to terrorize and prove they could. They had a military style attack helicopter. This is going to get worse. They are the tRump admin Gestapo, armed thugs who follow no rules attacking people who have violated no criminal laws. Even if they were undocumented they had broken no laws as crossing the border illegally is a civil offense like speeding. Hugs
Border Czar Tom Homan on Friday angrily condemned the violence at a California pot farm as proof anti-ICE protests will turn deadly, blaming the inflammatory rhetoric of Democrats comparing agents to Nazis.
Homan spoke out the morning after protesters were seen hurling rocks — and one even appeared to fire a gun — at agents stamping down on a massive marijuana operation where they found 10 illegal-migrant juveniles, eight of whom were there without an adult.
“What happened in California is just another example of protesters becoming criminals, and they’ve been emboldened by even members of Congress who compare ICE to Nazis and racists and terrorists,” Homan said on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning.
A protester flees as ICE officers fire chemical agents into the crowd during a raid in Camarillo, California.AFP via Getty Images
“I said months ago, it’s going to end up with a loss of life — and we had one the other day in Texas, and it’s not over,” he said, referencing the gunman who opened fire on border patrol agents walking into work in McAllen Monday.
Immigration agents who descended on Glass House Farms in the city of Camarillo — one of the biggest cannabis farms in Southern California — were met by dozens of demonstrators gathered on a road between fields where the uniformed officers stood in a line across from them.
A military-style helicopter flew overhead, video shows.
Tear gas billows from canisters thrown by federal agents toward protesters in Camarillo, California.via REUTERS
Protesters shouted and screeched until agents used canisters with an unknown substance and fired less-than-lethal rounds, forcing them to retreat. Several of the protesters threw what appeared to be rocks back at the officers, according to ABC 7.
As they retreated, a masked man in all black appeared to let off a few shots among a crowd of other protesters scampering away from advancing agents.
The FBI has now launched an investigation into the alleged shooting and is offering a reward up to $50,000 for information leading to a conviction.
An individual was spotted allegedly firing a weapon toward federal agents.ABC 7
The clash lasted four hours as US Customs and Border Protection set up a blockade with military-style vehicles in the pastoral region.
Video from ABC 7 shows numerous workers being taken into custody at the scene. It’s unclear exactly how many were detained.
Five people were taken to the hospital, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The farm is now under investigation for child labor violations, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott announced late Thursday night after 10 juveniles — “all illegal aliens” — were found at the facility, including eight without an adult, he said.
Protesters stand in front of ICE agents near a pot farm in Camarillo, California.Getty Images
Glass House Farms said it “fully complied with agent search warrants.”
The stand-off drew widespread criticism from California leaders, including U.S. Congressman Salud Carbajal, who was denied entry when he tried to get past federal agents into the farm.
Newsom’s office accused President Trump’s advisor, Stephen Miller, of sparking “terror” in local communities.
A protester washes eye with milk after federal immigration agents tossed tear gas during a raid in Camarillo, California.AP
“There’s a real cost to these inhumane immigration actions on hardworking families and communities, including farmworker communities, across America,” Newsom’s office said.
“Instead of supporting the businesses and workers that drive our economy and way of life, Stephen Miller’s tactics evoke chaos, fear and terror within our communities at every turn.”
• “In 1983, a request came in for a presidential telegram congratulating Trump on the grand opening of his eponymous tower on Fifth Avenue. A lawyer in the counsel’s office wrote ‘NO’ and explained internally that it would be inappropriate because it was a ‘commercial’ venture.
• In 1984, Trump requested that Reagan attend a gala to honor Vietnam veterans in New York City and said he would schedule it for any day that worked on the president’s calendar. The White House said no.
• In 1988, the New York Board of Trade gave Trump an ‘outstanding executive’ award. The head of the group sent the White House a letter asking if POTUS could come. ‘Advanced word is that Mr. Trump will have some stimulatingly interesting comments to make during his talk at the dinner,’ he wrote. The scheduling office never seriously entertained the idea.
• Around the same time, Trump sent a glossy pink invitation to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue inviting the president and first lady to an 11 p.m. LaToya Jackson concert at his Atlantic City casino. This was ignored.
• Back in 1983, Trump snagged a picture with the president during a photo line at a White House event. The president, not paying close attention, signed it ‘Reagan Reagan.’ Five years later, Trump included the image in his book The Art of the Deal. An aide in the social secretary’s office noticed the mistake. She sent an apologetic note and a corrected picture – signed with an autopen.
Trump appears to have embellished his relationship with the former president in multiple interviews over the past year (2016). During an interview with Good Morning America in August 2015, he said of Reagan, “I have great respect for him. I helped him. I knew him. He liked me and I liked him.”
“I didn’t know him well,” Trump later admitted to The Wall Street Journal, insisting, however, that friends told him Reagan was a fan. “He felt very good about me,” Trump said. “Frankly, he liked my attitude.”
Reagan’s son Ron, a political analyst noted for his liberal views, said in a recent radio interview that his father “didn’t know Donald Trump and wouldn’t have cared for Donald Trump.”
“My father would not have known Donald Trump if Trump stood up in his soup,” Ron said.”
I was struck by the backlash to the Texan pediatrician who was ostracized and lost her job because she pointed out that decisions have consequences, and all those who voted for drumpf in Texas are experiencing those painful consequences. Painful words uttered in despair, but damn – that doesn’t make them any less true.
How many times have we heard the line that “now isn’t the time to talk about this”? We’ve seen it with the debate on gun laws, and now we see it on this horrible consequence of firing those who warn us of dangerous weather.
But once again people have died, children have died, destruction and despair are gripping our nation, and the cause of that horror is not open for discussion? It’s being political in a time of national mourning? It’s insensitive? Decisions made in comfort and greed by those untouched by the disaster have exacted the ultimate cost, and they once again seek to control the conversation by denying the ability to explore how it happened!
So, is it safe to talk about these things now? Is it ok to talk about how stripping the social safety nets have consequences? Is it ok to seek to examine what we as a country believe in now, or are we waiting for the next disaster to blow through, the NEXT time parents weep looking for lost and dead children, or will it be one of the times after that? How long must we listen to the powerful deny the impact of greed, arrogance and ignorance.
And, to respond to this fool Abbott; Smart teams look to see if the wrong plays were called, or more likely, the wrong people were making the wrong decisions.
Far from the front lines of the climate crisis, 100 men and women in air-conditioned offices, 61 of them millionaires, are making decisions that could increase United States carbon dioxide emissions, and the warming of the climate they are driving, for decades to come.
In the latest political wrangle over energy and climate policy, a group of Republican senators over the weekend added provisions to the US federal budget bill that, as currently written, would end clean energy tax credits at the personal level and at utility scale and increase taxes on foreign-made parts for solar power equipment.
Ending federal subsidies for most renewable energy projects, including residential heat pumps, for example, would affect thousands of projects that are already in planning or development and jeopardize future investments in manufacturing renewable energy equipment.
Friday, June 27, hours before the Senate released the latest draft of the reconciliation bill just after midnight, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claimed on the Department of Energy website that wind and solar are unreliable and that federal subsidies have made energy more expensive, although he did not cite any official reports or peer-reviewed studies to support that claim.
On the Department of Energy website, Wright wrote, “wind and solar brings us the worst of two worlds: less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills …If sources are truly economically viable, let’s allow them to stand on their own,” he wrote, ignoring that the fossil fuel industry gets annual subsidies of about $20 billion annually, according to estimates by Oil Change International, a nonprofit watchdog group.
But hundreds of studies show that renewable energy is much less expensive and, in a well-planned grid, can make energy supplies more secure.
“The proposed GOP tax on wind and solar is a danger to the United States,” Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University renewable energy researcher who has authored numerous studies on wind and solar power, wrote via email.
The new tax provisions “lock in death and illness to up to 100,000 Americans every year due to fossil-fuel and bioenergy-fuel air pollution that wind and solar help to eliminate,” he said.
An early evaluation shows the administration’s planned energy policies would result in the drilling of 50,000 new oil wells every year for the next few years, he said, adding that it “ensures the continuation of land devastation… the poisoning of soil and groundwater due to fossil fuels and the continuation of gas blowouts and fires.”
There is nothing beneficial about the tax, he said, “only guaranteed misery.”
An analysis by the Rhodium Group, and energy policy research institute, projected that the Republican regime’s proposed energy policies would result in about 4 billion tons more greenhouse gas emissions than a continuation of current policies—enough to raise the average global temperature by .0072° Fahrenheit.
The overall budget bill was also panned in a June 28 statement by the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey.
McGarvey called it “a massive insult to the working men and women of North America’s Building Trades Unions and all construction workers.”
He said that, as written, the budget “stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country,” potentially costing as many jobs as shutting down 1,000 Keystone X pipeline projects, threatening an estimated 1.75 million construction jobs and over 3 billion work hours, which translates to $148 billion in lost annual wages and benefits.
“These are staggering and unfathomable job loss numbers, and the bill throws yet another lifeline and competitive advantage to China in the race for global energy dominance,” he said.
Research in recent years shows how right-wing populist and nationalist ideologies have used anti-renewable energy arguments to win voters, in defiance of environmental logic and scientific fact, in part by using social media to spread misleading and false information about wind, solar and other emissions-free electricity sources.
The same forces now seem to be at work in the US, said Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who studies how people respond to misinformation and propaganda, and why people reject well-established scientific facts, such as those regarding climate change.
“This is a bonus for fossil fuels at the expense of future generations and the future of the American economy,” he said. “Other countries will continue working towards renewable-energy economies, especially China. That competitive advantage will eventually pay out to the detriment of American businesses. You can’t negotiate with the laws of physics.”
18,000 individual donors, Instagram and TikTok views have kept Deja Foxx — a once long-shot Gen Z candidate — competitive in the race for a congressional seat in Arizona.
TUCSON, ARIZ. — On a Saturday afternoon, Deja Foxx is staging a TikTok Live in her living room. A phone tripod is set up in front of her kitchen table. The frame is centered on a slouchy sofa against an adobe wall, where a chile ristra hangs on one side.
“All right, everybody, take your seats,” she tells the mix of young volunteers, family members and campaign staff who are gathered to help her. “You have some really great mail to open, and I’m so excited because usually it’s just me and my mom that do this.”
She goes live and takes a seat next to her mom on the couch.
One volunteer reads a letter from a 19-year-old named Henry from California: “Even though I can’t vote for you, I adore your campaign,” he wrote. “We need more young leaders and new, fresh ideas from us, Gen Z. As someone who grew up on MediCal, and free public school lunch, who currently is uninsured, I enjoy your background and fighting for us.”
Another volunteer read a note from 20-year-old Julie, who wrote that while she’s been frustrated and overwhelmed by the state of politics, following Foxx’s campaign gave her hope. “I’ve been writing to my officials, but wanted to write something positive for a change. Keep doing what you’re doing.”
Other letter writers included a 22-year-old activist who started organizing after the Parkland shooting, a college student in Phoenix who offered to work for Foxx’s political office in the future, a 23-year-old from Chicago who started following her social media years ago, a North Carolina dad of a daughter moving to Arizona, and a Kentucky woman worried about Medicaid coverage. Volunteers spent 30 minutes reading that day’s mail. During the weekly segment, the audience is usually in the thousands.
Deja Foxx opens mail from her campaign post office box during a TikTok LIVE with her mother, Lisa Foxx, and close friends at her home in Tucson, Arizona. (Courtney Pedroza for The 19th)
Most of the notes included a donation, with the amounts ranging from $20 to $2,000. By the end of the read out Foxx had raised $4,000, mostly from people located outside Arizona. Just two days before, she announced she hit $500,000 in campaign donations, raised through 18,000 individual donors.
Just two months ago, Foxx wrote on Substack about the difficulties of running her campaign for Congress as a Gen Z candidate. She made a plea directly to her online followers: “Our biggest challenge and the only one that really matters: You haven’t invested in us yet.”
At the time, a slow trickle of donations was keeping afloat her campaign to fill the seat left by U.S. Rep Raúl Grijalva, who represented the southern Arizona district for over 20 years.
Shortly after the lawmaker’s death in March, his daughter Adelita Grijalva — who has served for decades in local politics on Tucson’s school board and more recently on the Pima County Board of Supervisors — tossed her hat in the ring for the Democratic primary. Then came the endorsements: Arizona U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, and progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The winner of that primary, which takes place July 15 and includes former state Rep. Daniel Hernandez, will almost certainly go on to win the September special election in this solidly Democratic district.
Foxx announced that she would take on Grijalva in early April. Most of her short political life — at 25, she would be the youngest woman elected to Congress — has focused on reproductive rights. She served on the board of Planned Parenthood in Arizona at age 17, worked in Tucson health clinics as a sex educator in high school, and more recently worked on the Prop 139 Ballot Initiative campaign in 2024, which enshrined the right to abortion in the state’s constitution.
If we want to win in 2028, I promise you that it is going to require electing leaders in this party who can be effective messengers.”Deja Foxx
Deja Foxx reaches for mail she received from her campaign post office box on Saturday, June 21, 2025, at her home in Tucson, Arizona. (Courtney Pedroza for The 19th)
But while Foxx doesn’t have the backing of “the establishment,” as she refers to it, or the name recognition of Grijalva, she’s created her own buzz by using her social media platforms to speak directly to her generation. Over the past month, her stories have been viewed almost 30 million times on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. She also has thousands of followers on Substack. That support and the donations that followed afforded her television advertisements, something that was out of reach when she started.
Her social media savvy has allowed her to bypass the need for big donors, build her own following, and capitalize on national support that’s percolated from the ground up. Along the way she’s making the argument that her social media skills aren’t just part of a campaign strategy, but necessary to communicate the politics of the party as the electorate grows younger and more disillusioned.
“We saw people in the party, in the traditional media, wringing their hands, ‘How did we lose young people in this last election? Why did they move toward apathy and the other side? … And it’s because we’re failing to compete in social media and new media spaces,” Foxx said. “If we want to win in 2028, I promise you that it is going to require electing leaders in this party who can be effective messengers.”
Foxx learned the power of a viral moment when she was a 16-year-old activist for Planned Parenthood. At a town hall in 2017, she asked former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake (R) why he would deny her the American dream by voting against funding that made birth control accessible to people who grew up in poverty. Foxx, who was insured through Medicaid at the time, got her birth control from Planned Parenthood.
A clip of the exchange went viral. “I woke up the next day and millions had seen the video,” she said. It’s a moment that changed how she thought about activism. The fact that millions of people watched her on their phones and computers put her on equal footing in public discourse with the United States senator, she said. “As a 16-year-old girl working at a gas station … that is remarkable.”
In the nine years since, the political world has grown to recognize the necessity of social media in campaigns, and politicians have turned to Foxx for her expertise. At the same time she was becoming a prominent reproductive rights activist, she used Instagram to build community among her peers through her organization Gen Z Girl Gang. She worked as an influencer and digital strategist for the Kamala Harris campaign in 2019 and later as a social media director at a political action committee. In 2024, she was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention in support of Harris as an activist and content creator.
But it’s in her own run for Congress where she has been able to test these communication strategies herself. On her TikTok and Instagram accounts, soundbites from her debates have racked up millions of views. More personal reels, like when she surprised her mom with her first batch of campaign literature, have gone viral. She’s embraced being interviewed by independent journalists with followings on places like Substack and YouTube.
She’s using communication styles and platforms that are meeting people where they’re at.”Jessica Maddox
“She’s using communication styles and platforms that are meeting people where they’re at. That style may turn off some older voters, but it’s going to excite younger voters who are particularly disaffected or disenfranchised or disheartened by American politics and even the Democratic party,” said Jessica Maddox, an associate professor of digital media at the University of Alabama. “I’ve been particularly impressed with her TikTok presence, because it feels very authentic.”
That authenticity is the main ingredient in connecting with young voters online, experts say. Maddox and others pointed to the success of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York as an example of how young politicians are tapping into social media to drum up real support at the polls. Both candidates utilized platforms to engage with people, like Gen Z, who are likely to sit out primaries where voters tend to be older.
The strategy puts lesser known candidates on a more equal playing field, allowing them to subvert the traditional hierarchies that fuel campaigns. “There’s always been a tight relationship between legacy media and politics, and social media kind of upends that,” Maddox said. “[Foxx] can kind of bypass more traditional outlets and get the message out herself.”
Social media has also turned a local race into a national fundraiser, which has helped her stay competitive. Candidates like Grijalva and Hernandez have benefited from deeper donor pockets, and outside support from political action committees. By early May, both candidates had already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the Arizona Republic. Their latest campaign finance numbers are expected to be released soon. Foxx announced she had hit $600,000 in donations at the end of June.
“It’s an interesting social media element that someone these days could have supporters kind of all over the country, even though they’re running for a very specific seat,” said Kathryn Coduto, a professor of media science at Boston University.
While there is a scarcity of polls in the race, a recent one commissioned by Foxx’s campaign shows her name recognition has risen significantly since May, when half of likely voters hadn’t heard of her. And, on Wednesday, David Hogg’s political action committee announced it would be endorsing her in the race. Hogg, who became famous for his activism after the Parkland mass shooting, now runs a political organization called Leaders We Deserve, aimed at building generational change for Democrats.
“If we replace one of the oldest members of Congress with the youngest — Deja is just 25 years old — we could send an incredibly strong message about which direction the Democratic Party is heading in, and show people how we are dramatically changing to meet this moment,” Hogg said in an Instagram Reel.
While Foxx has worked as an influencer in the past, now that she’s running for office that label has been used to undercut her years of political work and activism. At her first debate, Foxx also pointed out that some of her opponents have belittled her influencer experience. In recent news articles, people associated with Grijalva’s campaign have questioned whether Foxx’s national reach is the same as in-district community support.
The label “influencer” carries a lot of baggage, experts say. It’s still seen as superficial or trivial despite its power in activism and politics. It’s also another way of writing off young people, particularly women, as unserious.
“It’s seen as like little girls playing instead of actually utilizing this tool to accomplish something and talk to constituents,” Coduto said.
Deja Foxx poses for a portrait on at her home in Tucson, Arizona. (Courtney Pedroza for The 19th)
Jade Larson, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on political fandom and social media, said it’s also not surprising that there is such a stigma around being a politician-influencer.
“Every time media is used in a new way in politics, it’s this scandalous thing,” she said. “You can track it all the way back to Bill Clinton going on the ‘Late Night Show’ and playing saxophone, to Obama starting POTUS on Twitter, to Trump making his own social media [network]. It’s always something that’s scandalous, and people push back against it until it kind of becomes the mainstream and the norm.”
Arguably it is the mainstream now. The power of social media that Foxx tapped into nearly a decade ago has only grown more influential in politics and the media — two industries that are closely intertwined. A report from Pew Research Center found that over half of U.S. adults get some of their news from social media, with women and Democrats making up greater regular news consumers on apps like TikTok and Instagram. These users also skew younger, with those between the ages of 18 to 40 making up the bulk of social media news consumers. In a separate poll by Pew Research, 48 percent of TikTok users ages 18 to 29 say keeping up with politics is one of the reasons they are on the platform.
“A whole lot of congresspeople can give a very solid MSNBC interview,” Foxx said. But as someone who interviewed them as a content creator at the State of the Union, “I’m telling you that when they are put in front of an iPhone, there are so many members that fail to communicate. They don’t think the way that our generation thinks. They fail to understand sound bites and algorithms, and youth or even meme culture.”
At the same time that these social media strategies are taking off, voting power is also starting to shift to the very people that use them. Soon, Gen Z and Millennials will have just as much political sway as Gen X and the Baby Boomers — if they go out and vote, Coduto said.
“If you can cultivate enough excitement and you can find a way to really break through and get people to the polls by using social media, then I think it’s going to be an unstoppable strategy.”
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Community activists in San Francisco are rallying to support Hilary Rivers, an immigrant drag queen who was arrested by ICE agents after an asylum hearing nearly two weeks ago — one of the latest LGBTQ+ victims of the Trump administration’s campaign for mass deportations.
Rivers fled his home in Guatemala due to “traumatic and severe” persecution for being gay, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week. (His legal name is not being widely reported to protect his confidentiality, advocates told the nonprofit news platform 48Hills.org shortly following the drag performer’s arrest.) On June 26, Rivers attended a scheduled asylum hearing, where the government’s motion to dismiss his case was denied; Rivers was then arrested by ICE agents as he left the courtroom. That combination — in which the government attempts to dismiss an asylum case, then immediately arrests the asylum seeker for deportation — has become an increasingly common tactic for U.S. immigration police in the past several months, and one that is sometimes conducted with cooperation from courthouses themselves. (snip-MORE)
Transgender pilot Jo Ellis was falsely accused of killing 67 people earlier this year — and unfortunately, she isn’t alone: right-wing hoaxers have blamed trans people for at least 12 incidents of violent death in the U.S. since 2022, according to a new analysis in Wired.
Ellis, a part-time pilot in the Virginia Army National Guard, filed suit against right wing influencer Matt Wallace in April, after Wallace shared false claims that Ellis was responsible for the January helicopter crash at Ronald Reagan International Airport that killed dozens. The crash was later determined to be an accident caused by years of poor safety practices at the airport. But Ellis soon found herself on the receiving end of right-wing hatred thanks in part to people like Wallace, who posted on Elon Musk’s X platform that the crash “may have been another trans terror attack.”
Wallace has since deleted the post about Ellis, as Wired noted. But the key word in that post was “another.” In the past two years, right-wing disinformation accounts — such as Chaya Raichik’s “Libs of TikTok” — have spread similar false accusations against trans people on at least a dozen occasions, according to Wired’s analysis of news reports across that period. (snip-MORE)
Scottie's Playtime 