The political action committee of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is releasing bilingual advertisements targeting four Republicans in Congress over their support for former President Donald J. Trump and their votes on Jan. 6 to challenge the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.The advertisements from the caucus, which is made up of 38 Democrats, target Republican members who represent heavily Latino districts in Florida, Texas, New Mexico and California, and who each won in a close election last year. The first advertisement focuses on Representative Carlos Gimenez of Florida, the former mayor of Miami, who narrowly defeated Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. The remaining ads will target Representatives Mike Garcia of California, Yvette Herrell of New Mexico and Beth Van Duyne of Texas.“These four Republicans led a misinformation campaign and helped spread the ‘Big Lie’ on social media and conservative news media outlets by sowing doubt about the presidential election results,” said Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona who serves as the chairman of the caucus’s political action committee, BOLD PAC. “They tried to undermine our democracy and in doing so, they helped incite the insurrection. The best way to fight the Republican disinformation campaign is to hold them accountable for their actions.”Mr. Gimenez’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The advertisement opens with footage of the Jan. 6 attack, while a voice-over introduces a police officer describing his experience defending the Capitol.“I experienced a group of individuals who were trying to kill me,” the officer says. A narrator continues: “When an extremist mob attacked the Capitol, Congressman Carlos Gimenez was forced to hide. But hours later, with blood still on the floors of the Capitol, he voted with Trump and helped spread the same lies that left a police officer dead and many others injured.” More

Radicals are not my cup of tea, but I’m grateful for them. The radicals who brought us Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign gave the problem of income inequality a prominence it wouldn’t have had without them.The founders of the Black Lives Matter organization put racial injustice at the top of the national conversation. The radical populists who ultimately produced Donald Trump showed us how much alienation there is in Middle America.Radicals are good at opening our eyes to social problems and expanding the realm of what’s sayable.But if you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals. At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions.In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln. In the Progressive era, the radicals and anarchists who started the labor movement in the 1880s gave way to Theodore Roosevelt.Radicals are not good at producing change because while they are good at shaking up the culture, they don’t have practical strategies to pass legislation when you have to get the support of 50 percent plus one.They also tend to divide the world into good people and bad people. They think they can bring change if they can destroy enough bad people, and so they devolve into a purist, destructive force that offends potential allies.The people who come in their wake and actually make change are conservative radicals. They believe in many of the radicals’ goals, but know how to work within the democratic framework to achieve them.Conservative radicals, like Hamilton, Lincoln and T.R., begin with moderate dispositions. They have a reverence for the collective wisdom of the past. They have an awareness that the veneer of civilization is thin and if you simply start breaking things you get nihilism, not progress. They are acutely aware of the complexity of the world, and how limited our knowledge of it is. They are pragmatists, experimenters, liberals.But they also understand that in moments of historical transition, it is prudent to be bold. They understand that when your society is crumbling the only way to restore stability is to address the problems that are breaking it.When they are making big change — the American Revolution, busting the trusts — these conservative radicals channel revolutionary impulses into reformist action. Lincoln had to slowly bring a whole nation around to the abolition of slavery. He had to compromise and gather a broad coalition to pass the 13th Amendment.Today, we’re in the middle of another historic transition when dramatic change is necessary if we are to preserve what we love about America. The crises tearing our society are well known: economic inequality, racial injustice, dissolving families and communities, a crisis of legitimacy.To some, this feels like a revolutionary moment. In Commentary, for example, Abe Greenwald argues that the radicals have seized control. They are pushing radical agendas (No police! No rent!). Worse, they undermine the liberal fundamentals of our democracy — the belief that democracy is a search for truth from a wide variety of perspectives; the belief that America is a noble experiment worth defending.Many people smell in today’s radicalism the whiff of revolutions past: the destructive brutality of the French Revolution, the vicious thought police of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the naked power grabs of Lenin’s Soviet revolution.I am not as alarmed. I’m convinced that the forces that brought Joe Biden the nomination are far more powerful than a few extremists in Portland and even the leftist illiberals on campus. I’m hopeful that if given power, Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer will forge a new conservative radicalism.They have spent their lives within the liberal system, understand politics, understand radicalism’s advantages and dangers. They’re drawing support from an astonishingly wide swath of the ideological spectrum. I’m convinced that if Donald Trump is defeated, revolutionary zealotry will fade as debates over practical change and legislation dominate.During crises like these, each of us has to take a stand, to be clear on which causes we champion and which position we occupy on the political landscape. This is hard, because we’re in a period of flux.If your views haven’t shifted over the past four tumultuous years, you’re probably not doing much fresh thinking. I find I have moved “left” on race, left on economics and a bit “right” on community, family and social issues.Mostly I find myself supporting the conservative radicals, leaders who are confident that we can push for big change while defeating the illiberalism of radicals on left and right.The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said he occupied the “extreme right-wing edge of the left-wing movement.” If that’s good enough for Isaiah Berlin, it’s good enough for me.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Outdoor cafes and to-go cocktails are scenes from a privileged lockdown. What is the plan for neighborhoods that were struggling before Covid?On the rare occasions I have left the city over the past few months, I have been asked the same question repeatedly: “How is New York?” People want to know whether they should visit and what it will be like when they do, and I tell them that they should come immediately because they will find a place newly awakened to pleasure — to biking everywhere, to dining sheds covered in peonies, to jazz bands turning up in Prospect Park on random weekdays, to Little Island and drinking orange wine at lunch.In the city’s most prosperous quarters, people are still at home — much of the professional class is not expected to return to the office until September — and the pursuit of the good life, aided by vaccination, has now resumed unimpeded. On a recent Friday afternoon, I walked the length of Court Street in Brooklyn, to find an outdoor dining scene with the vibe of a late night in Madrid. New stores had already taken up residence in vacant spaces. March in Cobble Hill saw the arrival of Tavola Italian Market, for example, a purveyor of truffle cashews, truffle pecorino cream, truffle Gruyere and many other things that most of us were surely unaware could serve as repositories for mushroom-adjacent flavoring.The late-stage pandemic lifestyle is hardly a reality for most New Yorkers. To the contrary, a recent survey of 700 workers in Astoria, Queens, conducted by the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, found that of the third laid off during the past year, only 38 percent have returned to work. And yet from certain angles, a city once driven by ambition now seems to run on a vaporous languor. I suspect that this particular consequence of the pandemic, more than any other, explains the ocean of apathy surrounding the mayoral race, the most important election New Yorkers have faced in more than half a century. The pervasive sense of detachment has not changed even with the election a little more than two weeks away. Eight years ago, when Bill de Blasio was first campaigning to run the city, you could spot signs for his candidacy in apartment windows all over Brooklyn. Now you can walk your pandemic rescue dog around for hours and see posters for virtually no one.Embedded in the sort of neighborhood that is thriving, the high-information voter is distracted by the groove. The kind of Democrat already anxious about Abigail Spanberger’s prospects for re-election in Virginia’s crucial Seventh Congressional District next year is struggling to find evidence of a city at the brink of existential undoing. Without a reason to go to Midtown, she has little sense of how desolate it can feel. No longer in a consistent relationship with the public transit system, she might read about rising crime on the subway, but she isn’t feeling it. Whatever her worries, they are easily eclipsed by the realities of a robust housing market and the seeming permeance of the takeout margarita.What is at stake is what is always at stake — the fate of struggling communities that have only been further devastated by the pandemic, wrecked by lost lives, lost jobs, lost housing. Mayor de Blasio famously ran on a platform of mending an economically divided city, but he is leaving behind a place where the gaps between rich and poor have become only more obvious and horrific. The Covid death rate in Brownsville, Brooklyn, historically one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, was more than twice as high as it was on the Upper East Side. Gun violence has been a problem in the city, but in Brownsville, the number of shooting victims has more than doubled since January, compared with the same period last year; over a two-year time frame there has been a 300 percent increase.During the height of the pandemic, Rodney Frazer and his organization, Collective Fare, made hundreds of thousands of meals for people in the neighborhood out of the Brooklyn Community Culinary Center on Belmont Avenue. I met him in front of the center recently, where the crack trade resurfaced last summer as people in the area desperate to make some cash found an eager market among drivers passing through Central Brooklyn looking to buy drugs. What was different about Belmont Avenue all of a sudden, Lucas Denton, who runs a related organization, the Melting Pot Foundation, told me, was the parade of out-of-state license plates.I asked both of these men and others deeply invested in Brownsville what a new mayor could do to make a big difference and their answers were consistently simple and specific in a way that made it painfully clear how little the city’s ruling political class has really listened to people with deep roots in the community. Mr. Frazer wanted to know why the native tech talent of so many teenagers has not been harnessed and deployed to serve a food industry now ever more dependent on app-enabled delivery and digital marketing. “I mean you have a problem with your phone and can’t figure something out and you hand it to your kid, right?”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Daniel Goodine, a longtime activist in Brownsville, who lost one son to gun violence 17 years ago and another to prison, continues to be astounded by the fact that there is no trade school in Brownsville, something that would have a huge and immediate impact on the lives of teenagers who might otherwise be drawn to gang life.“Why don’t I have a trade school, like the one on 96th Street, when I can take a pistol out of a kid’s hand and give him a nail gun?” he asked. Mr. Goodine was very involved in getting food to the hungry during the pandemic, and what struck him was how this effort was nearly thwarted almost from the beginning by inadequate storage capacity. A lack of warehouse space in the neighborhood meant that the emergency operation had to rely on trucking, which complicated a process already full of logistical difficulties.That same effort revealed again the extent to which poor neighborhoods are regarded as dumping grounds for a broad range of economic problems. During the height of the Covid crisis, dairy farmers were in a panic; schools and restaurants were now closed to them. As a result, a lot of surplus milk ended up in Brownsville. “There was all of this infusion of dairy, and there was no infrastructure to receive it,” Rae Gomes, the executive director of the Brownsville Community Culinary Center, told me. “People didn’t necessarily want it. Because what do we know about Black and brown people? A lot of us are lactose intolerant.”Wednesday night’s mayoral debate focused on crime and public safety with not nearly enough discussion of the economic conditions that are intricately linked to their rise and fall. Eric Adams, who has strong support in Brownsville, did make the connection. But no candidate really has a comprehensive plan to eradicate deep poverty in neighborhoods where rates have remained virtually unchanged since the 1970s. No one really knows what to do with a neighborhood that cannot gentrify its way to glory. Brownsville isn’t struggling with the question of whether or not to keep outdoor dining sheds. It doesn’t have any. More

The districts would be among the most gerrymandered in the country. The Republican-friendly seat held by Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Trump antagonist, would be eliminated.Illinois Democrats on Friday proposed a new set of highly gerrymandered congressional maps that would consolidate Democratic power in the state’s congressional delegation, most likely cutting the number of Republican seats in the state to three from five.The proposal would eliminate the Republican-friendly seat held by Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Trump antagonist and a Republican whose current district hugs the Chicago exurbs and parts of northern and central Illinois.The maps, if approved by the state’s Democrat-controlled House and Senate, would be among the most gerrymandered in the country. Two districts, designed to elect Democratic candidates, would snake across hundreds of miles of rural areas to connect small Democratic-leaning communities. And 42 of the state’s 102 counties would be split up, according to an analysis from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.The current Illinois House delegation is made up of 13 Democrats and five Republicans. The proposal would most likely result in 14 Democrats and three Republicans. The state is losing a seat to reapportionment.State lawmakers elsewhere in the nation have also sought to maximize their partisan advantages during the once-in-a-decade redistricting process. Oregon Democrats drew just a single Republican district among the six in their state’s new map. In Texas, Republicans are aiming to press their advantage to minimize Democratic districts.The proposed 17th District of Illinois would stretch in a crescent along the state’s northwestern borders, connecting Rockford in the north to Peoria and the twin cities of Bloomington and Normal, home to Illinois State University. Driving the length of the district without leaving it would cover 332 miles.Cheri Bustos, a Democrat who is planning to retire, represents the current 17th District.The new map’s 13th District would connect the diverse suburban communities east of St. Louis, the state capital of Springfield and the college towns of Champaign and Urbana, more than three hours away by car.The proposal leaves in place one of the nation’s most crooked districts, the jaw-shaped Fourth that connects Hispanic neighborhoods on the North and South Sides of Chicago. In the mouth of the proposed Fourth District sits the Seventh, one of three districts drawn to have a plurality of Black voters.Mr. Kinzinger, a six-term congressman, has for months said he plans to seek re-election to the House and dismissed suggestions that he run for governor against the Democratic incumbent, J.B. Pritzker, or the Senate, against Senator Tammy Duckworth. But on Friday, with his home drawn into a Democrat-heavy district held by Representative Marie Newman, Mr. Kinzinger said he would consider seeking a different office.“Following the release of the new congressional maps for Illinois, my team and I will spend some time looking them over and reviewing all of the options, including those outside the House,” Mr. Kinzinger said in a statement released by his office.In a text message, Mr. Kinzinger said he was “just talking options” and declined to elaborate. More

Source: Elections – nytimes.com More