July 27, 1919 A riot began in Chicago when police refused to arrest a white man who was responsible for the death of a young black man, Eugene Williams. The 29th Street Beach on Lake Michigan was used by both black and white Chicagoans. But the man had been throwing stones at the black boys swimming there before hitting Williams. The Coroner’s report on the riot described the events as follows: “Five days of terrible hate and passion let loose, cost the people of Chicago 38 lives (15 white and 23 colored), wounded and maimed several hundred, destroyed property of untold value, filled thousands with fear, blemished the city and left in its wake fear and apprehension for the future . . . .” The city’s booming economy, especially jobs in the stockyards, had drawn many blacks during the Great Migration from the South, more than doubling their population in just three years. Only one policeman died in the chaos, Patrolman John Simpson, 31, an African American working out of the Wabash Avenue Station. Gangs and the 1919 Chicago Race Riot.
July 27, 1953 After three years of bloody and frustrating war leading to stalemate, the United States, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea agreed to a truce, bringing the Korean War—and America’s first experiment with the Cold War concept of “limited war”—to an end (South Korean President Syngman Rhee opposed the truce and refused to sign). U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had taken office six months earlier, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin had died that March. Korean War Memorial photo: Heather Stanfield The armistice signed this day ended hostilities and created the 4000-meter-wide (2.5 miles) demilitarized zone (DMZ), a buffer between North and South Korean forces, but was not a permanent peace treaty. It also set up a system for exchanging prisoners of war: 12,000 held by the North, 75,000 by South Korea, the U.S. and the U.N. allied forces. There were four million military and civilian casualties, including 16,000 from countries which were part of the U.N.-allied forces; 415,000 South and 520,000 North Koreans died. There were also an estimated 900,000 Chinese casualties. 36,516 died out of the nearly 1.8 million Americans who served in the conflict.
July 27, 1954 The democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, after receiving 65% of the vote, was overthrown by CIA-paid and -trained mercenaries. There followed a series of military dictatorships that waged a genocidal war against the indigenous Mayan Indians and against political opponents into the ’90s. Nearly 200,000 citizens died over the nearly four decades of civil war. “They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company [United Fruit, which controlled more land than any other individual or group in the country. It also owned the railway, the electric utilities, telegraph, and the country’s only port at Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic coast.] and the other U.S. monopolies which have invested great amounts of money in Latin America and fear that the example of Guatemala would be followed by other Latin countries . . . I took over the presidency with great faith in the democratic system, in liberty and the possibility of achieving economic independence for Guatemala.” Jacobo Arbenz More about Arbenz The real coup story through official U.S. documents
July 27, 1996 Trident sub being loaded Known as the “Weep for Children Plowshares,” four women were arrested for pouring their own blood on weaponry at the Naval Submarine Base at Groton, Connecticut, on the morning of the launch of the last-built Ohio-class submarine, the U.S.S. Louisiana. The 18 such submarines carry about half of the U.S. nuclear deterrent – 24 Trident I & II missiles with a range of 7400 km (4600 miles), each with several warheads known as MIRVs (multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles). Details of the action
This is long. Even long for a news nerd like me. But it is well worth it if you want to see how the current administration is using the military in ways it was not designed to do and against the laws to make it easier for them to be used in civilian control to enforce the will of tRump should he again refuse to accept the fact he has to leave office or if he wants something a governor / state won’t give him. The article shows how the military is tRump’s big stick to hit anyone who disagrees with him. Hugs
A U.S. Marine with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, attached to Task Force 51, guards a federal area in Los Angeles on July 12, 2025. Photo: Lance Cpl. Andrew Whistler/U.S. Marine Corps/DVIDS
In his first six months in office, President Donald Trump has overseen the deployment of nearly 20,000 federal troops on American soil, including personnel from the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, according to the Pentagon’s public statements.
But the true number of troops deployed may be markedly higher. When asked directly, the Army said it has no running tally of how many troops have been deployed. These federal forces have been operating in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — with more deployments on the horizon, all in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.
Experts say military involvement in domestic anti-immigrant operations undermines American democracy and has nudged the United States closer to a genuine police state.
“If the president can use the military as a domestic police force entirely under his control, it can be used as a tool of tyranny and oppression.”
“This level of involvement of the military in civilian law enforcement in the interior of the country is unprecedented — and really dangerous,” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program, who told The Intercept that recent deployments violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a bedrock 19th-century law seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America which bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement.
She added: “If the president can use the military as a domestic police force entirely under his control, it can be used as a tool of tyranny and oppression. We’ve seen it all around the world and throughout history.”
The norms surrounding the use of military force within U.S. borders are eroding, and the executive branch is operating with free rein, emboldened by a legislature and judiciary seemingly uninterested in curtailing its actions.
These soldiers have been sent to patrol the border, put down popular protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, participate in ICE raids, and assist in immigration enforcement missions from coast to coast. Here, to the extent of what is known so far, is what they’ve been up to.
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President Donald Trump began the further militarization of America on his first day back in office. “Our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics,” Trump announced on January 20, directing the military to “assist the Department of Homeland Security in obtaining full operational control of the southern border.”
Despite the fact that Trump’s fearmongering was his typical hyperbole, more than 10,000 troops are deploying or have deployed to the southern border, according to U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which oversees U.S. military activity from Mexico’s southern border up to the North Pole.
Under the direction of NORTHCOM, military personnel — including soldiers from the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Carson in Colorado, one of the Army’s most storied combat units — have deployed under the moniker Joint Task Force-Southern Border, or JTF-SB, since March, bolstering approximately 2,500 service members who were already supporting U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s border security mission.
One-third of the U.S. border is now completely militarized due to the creation of four new national defense areas, or NDAs: sprawling extensions of U.S. military bases patrolled by troops who can detain immigrants until they can be handed over to Border Patrol agents.
The Air Force is responsible for the recently created South Texas NDA, which encompasses federal property along 250 miles of the Rio Grande River. The Navy controls the Yuma NDA, which extends along 140 miles of federal property on the U.S.–Mexico border near the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range in Arizona.
The New Mexico NDA, created in April, spans approximately 170 miles of noncontiguous land along that state’s border, serving as an extension of the Army’s Fort Huachuca. Another NDA was created in May in West Texas and covers approximately 63 miles of noncontiguous land between El Paso and Fort Hancock, serving as an extension of the Army’s Fort Bliss.
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Around 8,500 military personnel were assigned to JTF-SB to “enhance US Customs and Border Patrol’s capacity to identify, track and disrupt threats to border security,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said at the beginning of the month. JTF-SB says the current number of personnel deploys stands at 7,600, while NORTHCOM says the current number of federal troops providing border security is closer to 8,600.
No one actually knows how many troops have been involved in border operations this year. “We do not maintain a running total of Service Members who have served with JTF-SB since its inception, so the total number since March is currently unavailable,” Kent Redmond, a spokesperson for JTF-Southern Border told The Intercept. NORTHCOM didn’t have a number on hand either. But more than 10 Task Forces have assisted JTF-SB, including Task Force Mountain Warrior, consisting of soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team; Task Force Castle, made up of soldiers from the 41st Engineer Battalion; 500 Marines and Navy personnel from Task Force Sapper; and 500 Marines and sailors from Task Force Forge. The latter replaced the Task Force Sapper troops and are now conducting patrols in the Yuma NDA.
Since March alone, Parnell said, the JTF-SB has conducted more than 3,500 patrols, including more than 150 “trilateral” patrols with CBP and the Mexican military. There have, however, been only seven temporary detentions by troops within the National Defense Areas, according to Redmond. He said the seven persons were “detained in place” by JTF-SB personnel for less than 10 minutes.
“The amount being spent to have the world’s best fighting force walk around the border to pick up a handful of people is shocking.”
“Setting aside the threats to democracy and liberty, the sheer waste is staggering. The amount being spent to have the world’s best fighting force walk around the border to pick up a handful of people is shocking,” said Goitein, who also noted that the detentions violated the Posse Comitatus Act.
“They may think if they detain people for only 10 minutes it’s not a violation, but that’s not how the law works,” Goitein explained. “They may also say that the Posse Comitatus Act simply doesn’t apply when the purpose is to protect a military base, but here it’s clear that the primary purpose is enforcement of immigration law.”
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The military has even dispatched Navy warships offshore to secure the border. After battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Gulf of Aden earlier this year, for example, the USS Stockdale — a guided-missile destroyer — was deployed to support NORTHCOM’s southern border operations alongside the Coast Guard on the U.S.–Mexico maritime border. That ship took over for the USS Spruance, another guided-missile destroyer drafted into anti-immigrant operations.
“We are dead serious about 100% OPERATIONAL CONTROL of the southern border,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a post on X in March.
Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly announced historically low apprehensions along the southern border. “The numbers don’t lie — under President Trump’s leadership, DHS and CBP have shattered records and delivered the most secure border in American history,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month. And as early as April, DHS announced, “Customs and Border Protection now has total control of the border.”
Despite all of this, as well as the huge influx of troops and weapons of war deployed at the border, when The Intercept inquired whether full operational control of the border had been achieved and “if not, why not?” DHS demurred. A senior DHS official, who offered comments on the condition of anonymity for no discernible reason, provided rote talking points and praise of Trump and Noem. The official added that the department was “grateful” for JTF-SB’s “support.”
More than 5,000 troops have also been deployed to Los Angeles since early June.
The National Guard soldiers and Marines operating in Southern California — under the command of the Army’s Task Force 51 — were sent to “protect the safety and security of federal functions, personnel, and property.” In practice, this has mostly meant guarding federal buildings across LA from protests against the ongoing ICE raids sweeping the city.
Since Trump called up the troops on June 7, they have carried out exactly one temporary detainment, a Task Force 51 spokesperson told The Intercept.
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Parnell, the Pentagon spokesperson, described this deployment as Task Force 51 supporting “more than 170 missions in over 130 separate locations from nine federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Marshal Service, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security” in a briefing in early July. Task Force 51 failed to provide any other metrics regarding troops’ involvement in raids, arrests, or street patrols in response to questions by The Intercept.
Troops were sent to LA over the objections of local officials and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In addition to guarding federal buildings, troops have also recently participated in raids alongside camouflage-clad ICE agents. An assault on MacArthur Park, a recreational hub in one of LA’s most immigrant-heavy neighborhoods on July 7, for example, included 90 armed U.S. troops and 17 military Humvees. Its main accomplishment was rousting a summer day camp for children. No arrests were made.
California National Guard soldiers also backed ICE raids on state-licensed marijuana nurseries this month. The troops took part in the military-style assaults on two locations, one in the Santa Barbara County town of Carpinteria, about 90 miles northwest of LA and one in the Ventura County community of Camarillo, about 50 miles from LA. ICE detained more than 200 people, including U.S. citizens, during the joint operations. One man, Jaime Alanís Garcia, died while trying to flee from the raid in Camarillo.
On July 1, Task Force 51 announced that it would release approximately 150 members of the California National Guard from their LA duty. That same day, NORTHCOM said that the Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment were leaving Los Angeles but would be replaced by the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment.
Last Tuesday, Trump administration officials announced that about 2,000 more National Guard members deployed to LA would be released from service. On Monday, the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing the 700 active-duty Marines from Los Angeles. The withdrawals followed repeated reporting by The Intercept highlighting the failure of the troops to do much of substance.
All told, since the deployments began, around 5,500 troops have been sent to southern California, according to Becky Farmer, a NORTHCOM spokesperson.
On the other side of the country, Marines are being hustled to Florida to aid the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. Responding to a DHS request, Hegseth approved a mobilization of up to 700 active, National Guard, and Reserve forces.
The first contingent — approximately 200 Marines from Marine Wing Support Squadron 272, Marine Corps Air Station New River, North Carolina — have been mobilized to support ICE’s “interior immigration enforcement mission” in Florida, NORTHCOM announced earlier this month. The command noted that they were only the “first wave” of ICE assistance. NORTHCOM says additional forces will be deployed to Louisiana and Texas. Hundreds more Guardsmen are expected to be sent to assist in more than a half dozen other states, including Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.
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Some of these same states are also using their own National Guard members in their own anti-immigrant operations. More than 4,200 Texas National Guard soldiers and airmen on state duty are engaged in Operation Lone Star, a border security initiative launched by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in March 2021. Texas’s forces were bolstered, until April, by members of the Indiana National Guard.
Nearly 70 Florida National Guard members are also on state duty, conducting base camp security at the remote migrant detention center in the state’s Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” While Trump insisted that the swamp gulag was reserved for “deranged psychopaths” and “some of the most vicious people on the planet,” it was revealed that hundreds of detainees had committed no offense other than civil immigration violations.
“Governors should be doing everything in their power to avoid their state’s national guard troops being pulled into this lawless, authoritarian power grab, not spending precious resources to help it along,” Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, told The Intercept.
The Trump administration’s use of military forces in its anti-immigrant crusade has been criticized as a publicity stunt and an authoritarian power play.
The directive signed by Trump calling up the California National Guard, for example, cited “10 U.S.C. 12406,” a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
There was, however, no rebellion. Vice President JD Vance even recently vacationed at Disneyland in Anaheim, about 25 miles from LA.
Still, experts say that the stunt deployments represent a clear danger to American democracy by violating the Posse Comitatus Act; normalizing the use of the military in civilian law enforcement activities; and further transforming the armed forces into a tool of domestic oppression by aiding ICE, which increasingly operates as a masked, secret police force.
“ICE is running a nationwide campaign of violent, racist kidnappings, and Hegseth’s Pentagon is bending over backward to make the military into ICE’s chief sidekicks,” said Haghdoosti. “Troops abetting violence against their own neighbors isn’t tenable for our communities, our democracy, or the troops themselves.”
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.
We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?
This is what I meant when I mentioned that while Google’s AI always volunteers information when I search, which info I do skim before I scroll down for the real search. I can well see people thinking they can depend upon the AI overviews of what they think they’re reading. Here’s the scoop:
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.
Yesterday the Pew Research Center released a report based on the internet browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults which found that Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who don’t encounter an AI summary. To be precise, only 1 percent of Google searches resulted in the users clicking on the link in the AI summary, which takes them to the page Google is summarizing.
Essentially, the data shows that Google’s AI Overview feature introduced in 2023 replacing the “10 blue links” format that turned Google into the internet’s de facto traffic controller will end the flow of all that traffic almost completely and destroy the business of countless blogs and news sites in the process. Instead, Google will feed people into a faulty AI-powered alternative that is prone to errors it presents with so much confidence, we won’t even be able to tell that they are errors.
Here’s what this looks like from the perspective of someone who makes a living finding, producing, and publishing what I hope is valuable information on the internet. On Monday I published a story about Spotify publishing AI-generated songs from dead artists without permission. I spent most of my day verifying that this was happening, finding examples, contacting Spotify and other companies responsible, and talking to the owner of a record label who was impacted by this. After the story was published, Spotify removed all the tracks I flagged and removed the user who was behind this malicious activity, which resulted in many more offending, AI-generated tracks falsely attributed to human artists being removed from Spotify and other streaming services.
Many thousands of people think this information is interesting or useful, so they read the story, and then we hopefully convert their attention to money via ads, but primarily by convincing them to pay for a subscription. Cynically aiming only to get as much traffic as we can isn’t a viable business strategy because it compromises the very credibility and trustworthiness that we think convinces people to pay for a subscription, but what traffic we do get is valuable because every person who comes to our website gives us the opportunity to make our case.
The Spotify story got decent traffic by our standards, and the number one traffic source for it so far has been Google, followed by Reddit, “direct” traffic (meaning people who come directly to our site), and Bluesky. It’s great that Google sent us a bunch of traffic for that, but we also know that it should have sent us a lot more, and that it did a disservice to its own users by not doing that.
We know it should have sent us more traffic because of what when you search for “AI music spotify” on Google, the first thing I see is a Google Snippet summarizing my article. But that summary isn’t from nor does it link to 404 Media, it’s a summary of and a link to a blog on a website called dig.watch that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT. The blog doesn’t have a byline and reads like the endless stream of AI-generated summaries we saw when we created a fully automated AI aggregation site of 404 Media. Dig.watch itself links to another music blog, MusicTech, which is an aggregation of my story that links to it in the lede.
When I use Google’s “AI mode,” Google provides a bullet-pointed summary of my story, but instead of linking to it, it links to three other sites that aggregated it: TechRadar, Mixmag, and RouteNote.
Gaming search engine optimization in order to come up as the first result on Google regardless of merit has been a problem for as long as Google has been around. As the Pew research makes clear, AI Overview just ensures people will never click the link where the information they are looking for originates.
We reserve the right to whine about Google rewarding aggregation of our stories instead of sending the traffic to us, but the problem here is not what is happening to 404 Media, which we’ve built with the explicit goal of not living or dying by the whims of any internet platform we can’t control. The problem is that this is happening to every website on the internet, and if the people who actually produce the information that people are looking for are not getting traffic they will no longer be able to produce that information.
Luckily for Google and the untold number of people who are being fed Snippets and AI summaries of our Spotify story, so far that information is at least correct. That is not guaranteed to be the case with other AI summaries. We love to mention that Google’s AI summaries told its users to eat glue whenever this subject comes up because it’s hilarious and perfectly encapsulates the problem, but it’s also an important example because it reveals an inherently faulty technology. More recently, AI Overview insisted that Dave Barry, a journalist who is very much alive, was dead.
The glue situation was viral and embarrassing for Google but the company still dominates search and it’s very hard for people to meaningfully resist its dominance given our limited attention spans and the fact that it is the default search option in most cases. AI overviews are still a problem but it’s impossible to keep this story in the news forever. Eventually Google shoves it down users’ throats and there’s not much they can do about it.
Google AI summaries told users to eat glue because it was pulling on a Reddit post that was telling another user, jokingly, to put glue on their pizza so the cheese doesn’t slide off. Google’s AI didn’t understand the context and served that answer up deadpan. This mechanism doesn’t only result in other similar errors, but is also possibly vulnerable to abuse.
In May, an artist named Eduardo Valdés-Hevia reached out to me when he discovered he accidentally fooled Google’s AI Overview to present a fictional theory he wrote for a creative project as if it was real.
“I work mostly in horror, and my art often plays around with unreality and uses scientific and medical terms I make up to heighten the realism along with the photoshopped images,” Valdés-Hevia told me. “Which makes a lot of people briefly think what I talk about might be real, and will lead some of them to google my made-up terms to make sure.”
In early May, Valdés-Hevia posted a creepy image and short blurb about “The fringe Parasitic Encephalization Theory,” which “claims our nervous system is a parasite that took over the body of the earliest vertebrate ancestor. It captures 20% of the body’s resources, while staying separate from the blood and being considered unique by the immune system.”
Someone who saw Valdés-Hevia post Googled “Parasitic Encephalization” and showed him that AI overview presented it as if it was a real thing.
Valdés-Hevia then decided to check if he could Google AI Overview to similarly present other made-up concepts as if they were real, and found that it was easy and fast. For example, Valdés-Hevia said that only two hours after he and members of his Discord to start posting about “AI Engorgement,” a fake “phenomenon where an AI model absorbs too much misinformation in its training data,” for Google AI Overview to start presenting it uncritically. It still does so at the time of writing, months later.
Other recent examples Valdés-Hevia flagged to me, like the fictional “Seraphim Shark” were at first presented as real by AI Overview, but has since been updated to say they are “likely” fictional. In some cases, Valdés-Hevia even managed to get AI Overview to conflate a real condition—Dracunculiasis, or guinea worm disease—with a fictional condition he invented, Dracunculus graviditatis, “a specialized parasite of the uterus.” Google
Valdés-Hevia told me he wanted to “test out the limits and how exploitable Google search has become. It’s also a natural extension of the message of my art, which is made to convince people briefly that my unreality is real as a vehicle for horror. Except in this case, I was trying to intentionally ‘trick’ the machine. And I thought it would be much, much harder than just some scattered social media posts and a couple hours.”
“Let’s say an antivaxx group organizes to spread some disinformation,” he said. “They just need to create a new term (let’s say a disease name caused by vaccines) that doesn’t have many hits on Google, coordinate to post about it in a few different places using scientific terms to make it feel real, and within a few hours, they could have Google itself laundering this misinformation into a ‘credible’ statement through their AI overview. Then, a good percentage of people looking for the term would come out thinking this is credible information. What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.”
I wish I could say this is not a sustainable model for the internet, but honestly there’s no indication in Pew’s research that people understand how faulty the technology that powers Google’s AI Overview is, or how it is quietly devastating the entire human online information economy that they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.
The optimistic take is that Google Search, which has been the undisputed king of search for more than two decades, is now extremely vulnerable to disruption, as people in the tech world love to say. Predictably, most of that competition is now coming from other AI companies that thing they can build better products than AI overview and be the new, default, AI-powered search engine for the AI age. Alternatively, as people get tired of being fed AI-powered trash, perhaps there is room for a human-centered and human-powered search alternative, products that let people filter out AI results or doesn’t have an ads-based business model.
But It is also entirely possible and maybe predictable that we’ll continue to knowingly march towards an internet where drawing the line between what is and isn’t real is not profitable “at scale” and therefore not a consideration for most internet companies and users. Which doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. It is very, very consequential, and we are already knee deep in those consequences.
“People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in Search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for people to connect with websites,” A Google spokesperson told me in an email. “This [Pew] study uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic. We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested.”
Update: This article has been updated with comment from Google. We’ve also updated our description of the Pew study to clarify one percent of Google searches resulted in users clicking the link to the source of the AI summary.
Legacy media is very concerned with the ‘Gen Z Stare’
In the past week, there’s been robust discourse in legacy media about the so-called ‘Gen Z Stare’ and the bursts of generational conflict it reportedly captures.
It’s gotten write-ups by The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, NBC News, ABC News, CNBC, Newsweek, Indy100, Axios, Fortune, Vox, Vice, Business Insider, The Independent, Forbes, Buzzfeed, Slate, HuffPost, Glamour, People, and Marie Claire, among others.
As a millennial, I am apparently urged to be concerned about this phenomenon of Gen Z folks supposedly failing to appropriately interact with me through sufficiently pleasant facial expressions, so I thought it might be helpful to offer my thoughts:
The sitting president of the United States is currently covering up a massive sex trafficking operation that targeted children and likely implicates a number of powerful people who are currently out in the world and free to continue preying on children.
The sitting president of the United States just successfully pressured Paramount and CBS to cancel the #1 late-night talk show on broadcast television as part of what appears to be a blatant bribery deal because the host has been critical of him.
The sitting president of the United States just got the extremist Republican majority in Congress to strip 11 million Americans of health care coverage by the end of 2026 and upwards of 17 million Americans when you account for new federal work requirements. (snip-MORE; it’s succinct and quick, and it’s all good facts for grocery/other places lines, for discussion.)
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.”
We did not record a podcast last week because Donna was traveling to Austin, where her family was celebrating Fourth of July AND the arrival of a new baby (her grand-niece!).
She expected hot, humid weather. What she got was four days of torrential rain, and the specter of over one hundred deaths from flooding in the nearby hill counties – including children at a sleep away camp that was overcome by the deluge.
One week later, this tragedy is ongoing. People are wondering how much DOGE’s cuts to the National Weather Service and NOAA factored into it. Journalist Marisa Kabas has reported that as of Monday, only 86 FEMA employees were on the ground in Texas (they usually deploy hundreds of people to disaster zones like this). “We are doing a lot less than normal,” a FEMA staffer told her.
No shit.
In the meantime, $450 million from FEMA’s budget has been allocated to that concentration camp in the swamps of Florida. And Trump’s big, ugly budget bill allocates billions to expand ICE and build more “detention centers” throughout the country.
ICE continues to terrorize immigrant communities, kidnapping law-abiding parents, gardeners, day laborers, and others who just happen to have brown skin (including US citizens).Donna returned home to Los Angeles in time for a show of military cosplay in MacArthur Park. No one got hurt in that one – but it felt like a dress rehearsal for something worse.
We talked about that and more in this week’s podcast.
We are living through history and it really sucks. Aliza says that the best way to deal with the continual onslaught of terrible events is to DO something. Anything. Volunteer in the community. Participate in events. Write postcards for candidates, donate to good causes.
And allow yourself the down time you need to muster up the energy to do it again.
We talked about some of the everyday heroes who are helping us all muster through this.
Like Joshua Aaron, the developer of the ICEBlock app that alerts people of ICE activity in their area. (Currently just for iPhones; we are anxiously awaiting news that this app will become available to Android users.)
The ACLU has done heroic work for over a century. After recording this week’s podcast, we were dismayed to learn that their Mobile Justice app Aliza has relied upon for years is no longer available.
To ensure compliance with a growing number of consumer privacy laws and the ACLU’s own privacy policies and to minimize risk with surveillance technologies currently used by law enforcement, the national office has made the decision not to renew our contract with Quadrant 2, the vendor behind Mobile Justice, and shut down the app on February 28, 2025.
But the ACLU is still a source of valuable information. Here are a couple of pages that you may want to bookmark:
There are things you can do as a bystander, too. This Yahoo article talks about New York City, but much of it applies anywhere in the U.S. It’s completely legal to film an ICE encounter, and the article has great suggestions for how to narrate and what details to include. There is advice on how your video can help, but it’s also important not to post your videos online without the consent of the person being detained.
The National Immigrant Justice Center is just one of many organizations with so much information on how to handle encounters with ICE or DHS, whether you are the target or a bystander.
The coalition of anti-authoritarian groups that has risen since the start of this regime continue to organize. The next big nationwide gathering is “Good Trouble Lives On,” which will be held in honor of the late John Lewis, around the July 17 anniversary of his death. Find an event near you here.
And in case you’re one of those “DO SOMETHING” people who love to bash Democrats, remember that they ARE doing something. A LOT. If you want to know what, you should follow Ariella Elm on any of the socials. She makes posts like the ones below, and daily posts like this one that list the wins for democracy and actions all over the country that are helping stem the tide of fascism, and we need to thank and elevate these soldiers for democracy.
July 7, 1863 The first military draft was instituted in the U.S. to provide troops for the Union army in the American Civil War. Once called, a draftee had the opportunity to either pay a commutation fee of $300 to be exempt from a particular battle, or to hire a replacement that would exempt him from the entire war.
July 7, 1903 The March of the Mill Children watch a video – highly recommended Labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones led the “March of the Mill Children” over 100 miles from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s Long Island summer home in Oyster Bay, New York, to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor and to demand a 55-hour work week. It is during this march, on about the 24th, she delivered her famed “The Wail of the Children” speech. Roosevelt refused to see them. “Fifty years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.” –from Mother Jones’s autobiography Read more about Mother Jones
July 7, 1957 Convened at the onset of the Cold War, a group of scientists held their first peace conference in the village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada. The mission of the Pugwash Conference was to “. . . bring scientific insight and reason to bear on threats to human security arising from science and technology in general, and above all from the catastrophic threat posed to humanity by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction . . . .” Bertrand Russell Wealthy industrialist and Pugwash son Cyrus Eaton had invited the world’s greatest minds to his family home in Nova Scotia and address the emerging threat of nuclear war. The Conference became the basis for an ongoing organization that deals with issues of weapons of mass destruction. The 1995 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Joseph Rotblat (one of the original signatories of the Pugwash Manifesto) and to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Albert Einstein Pugwash home
Fifty years later . . . 25 scientists, diplomats and former military officers from 15 countries gathered for a “Revitalizing Nuclear Disarmament” strategy workshop. The meeting was held near the Thinkers’ Lodge, the site of the first meeting in 1957. “Fifty years ago from Pugwash, Nova Scotia, nuclear scientists helped alert the world to the dangers of nuclear weapons, and especially the newly developed hydrogen bomb,” said Paolo Cotta-Ramusino, Secretary General, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. “Today, we are working with experts from around the world for global action to revitalize nuclear disarmament and the final elimination of nuclear weapons.” Senator Roméo Dallaire, Honorary Patron of the Pugwash Peace Exchange, said “It is appalling to observe the increasing potential for many regional nuclear arms races, shameless plans to modernize nuclear arsenals and bald-faced threats of pre-emptive nuclear use,” said Senator Dallaire. “Only by revitalizing discussion and implementation of disarmament leading to abolition can we ensure that these genocidal devices will never again be used.”
July 7, 1977 The United States conducted its first test of the neutron bomb. The neutron bomb was a tactical thermonuclear weapon designed to cause very little physical damage through limited blast and heat but was designed to kill troops through localized but intense levels of lethal radiation. A neutron bomb explosion at a test site
July 7, 1979 2,000 American Indian activists and anti-nuclear demonstrators marched through the Black Hills of western South Dakota to protest the development of uranium mines on sacred native lands.
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