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    Jimmy Kimmel is coming back. It’s proof that you still have power | Robert Reich

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    ABC says Jimmy Kimmel Live! will return to the airwaves next Tuesday – less than a week after Trump’s henchman Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said on a podcast that Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people”.Carr threatened that the FCC could “do this the easy way or the hard way” – suggesting that either ABC and its parent company, Walt Disney, must remove Kimmel or the regulator would have “additional work” to do.Why Walt Disney Company’s turnaround? As it limply explained: “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.”But now, apparently, all is well.“We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”How lovely. How reasonable. How, well, kumbaya. All it took were some “thoughtful conversations with Jimmy” and everything returned to normal.Don’t believe it. In the days since ABC’s decision, the blowback against Disney has been hurricane level.At least five entertainment industry unions, with at least 400,000 workers, spoke out, with the screenwriters’ union charging Disney with “corporate cowardice”.Celebrities Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep called out “government threats to our freedom of speech”.Kimmel was supported by his late-night peers including Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver, all of whom blasted Disney and ABC with rapier-like humor.Jon Stewart devoted his show to a takedown of Disney’s cowardice.Disney talent was up in arms. Damon Lindelof, a creator of ABC’s Lost, threatened that if Kimmel’s show did not resume, he could not “in good conscience work for the company that imposed it”.Michael Eisner, a former Disney CEO, added a rare public rebuke.Even the rightwing Republican senator Ted Cruz expressed concern, suggested Carr was speaking like a mafioso and calling his threats to retaliate against media companies “dangerous as hell”.“We should not be in this business,” Cruz said. “We should denounce it.”By Monday, Carr himself was busy minimizing his role in the whole affair – denying he had threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC stations (it “did not happen in any way, shape or form”) – and putting the onus on Disney for having made a “business decision” in response to negative feedback from viewers.“Jimmy Kimmel is in the situation that he’s in because of his ratings, not because of anything that’s happened at the federal government level,” Carr claimed.But the most intense pressure came from us – from Disney viewers and customers – who immediately began to cancel subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu and threaten a broader consumer boycott.Some stars, such as Tatiana Maslany, star of Marvel’s Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Rosie O’Donnell urged people to cancel their subscriptions.But the consumer boycott seems to have begun almost immediately.Shortly after Kimmel’s suspension was announced, Disney stock dipped about 3.5%. It continued to trade lower in subsequent days. The loss in market value has amounted to about $4bn.Investors got the message. Consumers were upset, which meant they’d buy fewer Disney products and services – which meant lower profits.There’s never one single reason for the ups and downs in the value of a particular firm’s shares of stock, but the timing here has been almost exact.Bottom line: We consumers have extraordinary power. We’re the vast majority. Like every other big corporation – especially one selling directly to consumers – Disney relies on us.Even if we can’t count on our elected politicians to protect our first amendment rights, we can rely on ourselves. When our outrage translates into withholding our consumer dollars, a big corporation like Disney is forced to listen – and respond.Next time you’re feeling powerless, remember this.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now More

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      When even Ben & Jerry’s can’t speak out, it’s clear: the era of corporate responsibility is over | Austin Sarat

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      When the history of this era is written, there will be much to say about the behavior of large corporations. And none of it will be good.As the Trump administration has ramped up its assault on American democracy, many corporations have chosen to look the other way or to curry favor with the president. They have fired employees who were too outspoken in their criticism of Donald Trump – ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talkshow, after Kimmel’s remarks about Maga’s reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk, is the latest example.Or corporations have muted their brand’s identification with progressive causes.One casualty is Jerry Greenfield, co-founder and namesake of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. This week, he resigned from the company.He did so because, he said in a statement, the politically outspoken company had been “silenced”.The consumer goods company Unilever acquired Ben & Jerry’s in 2000, for a reported $326m. At the time, it agreed to respect the company’s independence.No more, according to Greenfield.“Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important,” Greenfield noted in explaining his resignation. But, he said: “Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power.”Ben & Jerry’s crossed swords with Unilever last year when it sued the company for allegedly fighting its calls for a Gaza ceasefire and an end to US military support for Israel.The 2024 suit claimed that Unilever had threatened to dismantle the ice-cream company’s independent board and punish members if Ben & Jerry’s issued a call for a ceasefire. (Unilever said it rejected “the claims made by B&J’s social mission board”. Its motion to dismiss the lawsuit is pending.)Another flare-up occurred in March of this year, when, according to Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever fired its chief executive, David Stever, over his work to advance the company’s “social mission”.If those allegations are true, Unilever would not be alone in trying to avoid offending the Trump administration or its supporters. This is just the latest sign that the era of corporate social and political responsibility is over.Ice-cream lovers will now have to choose between their taste buds and their consciences.Corporate social responsibility (CSR) requires that business leaders recognize, as Harvard Business School explains, that they “have a responsibility to do more than simply maximize profits for shareholders and executives. Rather, they have a social responsibility to do what’s best – not just for their companies, but for people, the planet, and society at large.”The CSR movement really took off about 40 to 50 years ago when businesses realized that they could carve out a niche and attract investment from people who wanted to make money and stay true to their values. Ben & Jerry’s was founded in 1978 during the heyday of CSR, by Greenfield and Ben Cohen.It was upfront about the issues it cared about and the values it sought to promote. The list was long, but it included racial justice, refugee rights, climate, LGBTQ+ rights and democracy.The Association of Corporate-Citizenship Professionals traces the roots of CSR back to the 18th century. At that time, religious groups would not invest, and would urge their members not to invest, in businesses that did not advance their values. Those included the slave trade and businesses that supplied the instruments of war.Fast forward to the start of the 20th century, when in 1928, the Pioneer Fund became one of the first mutual funds to promote socially responsible investing, which meant avoiding companies producing alcohol or tobacco, or promoting gambling. Almost a century later, the Business Roundtable included in its statement on the purpose of a corporation the following: “We commit to … supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.”Some progressives have criticized CSR, describing it as a charade and a public relations tactic that left the profit motive intact and did not require substantial changes in the way companies did business. But Ben & Jerry’s did more than brand itself as interested in social justice and political equality.As its 2024 lawsuit made clear, Ben & Jerry’s has wanted to take political stands even if it meant that it would lose some customers. A year earlier, in March 2023, as Newsweek reports, Cohen “shocked many” by speaking out against the US providing military aid to Ukraine.” (An ally said he opposed Russia’s invasion but wanted a diplomatic solution.)While from time to time, the company has been accused of not living up to its values, not surprisingly, conservatives have targeted Ben & Jerry’s for being “woke”. Some have tried to organize a boycott to protest what they see as its radical left politics.That’s perhaps why Unilever apparently wanted to pull back Ben & Jerry’s activism.What we are witnessing now in the way of corporate acquiescence to the rise of authoritarianism is a familiar story. There are plenty of examples.Take Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. There, as the political economist Gábor Scheiring argues: “Since 2010 Orbán has been using the momentum created by popular anger at the failures of liberal policies to build up his own system: authoritarian capitalism. A system that is deeply illiberal but capitalist: private property and the profit logic still dominate, but the state bureaucracy and its institutions are subdued to the enrichment of the preferred national economic elite.”There is ample evidence that Trump is succeeding in that same endeavor. That’s why the era of corporate social responsibility is over. Greenfield’s departure is just the latest evidence.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      Trump’s Ice raids recall a painful past for these Americans: ‘I see myself in those children’

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      Mass expulsion, babies born behind barbed wire, intrusive medical exams for newcomers, families torn apart: these aren’t scenes from Donald Trump’s promised second-term immigration crackdown, but from the US’s extensive history of xenophobic immigration policy.While so many Americans watched in horror at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s military-like raids across Los Angeles this summer, US cruelty and violence towards immigrants is nothing new, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the mass deportation of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression. As the Trump administration escalates its attacks on immigrants – or those perceived to be immigrants – survivors of previous eras of xenophobia say it’s more important than ever to remember the past. The harms done to them and their families have lasted generations, and what’s happening now threatens to do the same.The Guardian spoke with four Californians who have lived through, or whose parents lived through, some of these dark moments in US history. They shared how these episodes shaped their lives, what it’s like to see these chapters of history repeat themselves today – and what gives them hope.Christine ValencianaView image in fullscreenWhen Christine Valenciana, 75, watched footage of armed, masked Ice agents in unmarked vehicles snatching people off the streets across southern California this summer, rounding up gardeners, car wash workers, veterans and US citizens, it recalled a familiar time in her own family’s history.In the 1930s, under the economic pressures of the Great Depression, nearly 2 million Mexican Americans – more than half US citizens – were forced out of their homes and unconstitutionally deported to free up jobs for “real Americans”. Valenciana’s mother’s family was among them.“The raids that took place at the time were not unlike now,” said Valenciana, 75.Mexican “repatriation”, which Valenciana prefers to call “expulsion”, consisted of military-style raids, mass deportations, scare tactics and public pressure that terrorized Mexican communities and broke up countless families. For American children like Valenciana’s mother, who was born in 1926 in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, the trauma was layered: leaving their home and country, adjusting to a new culture in Mexico and eventually returning to the US years later.Emilia Castañeda, Valenciana’s mother, was seven when her own mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died less than a year later on the day of Emilia’s first communion. “She told me what bothered her the most about having to leave was that she wouldn’t be able to visit her mother’s grave,” remembered Valenciana, now an associate professor emeritus at the department of elementary and bilingual education at California State University, Fullerton. “They went to the train station and she and other people were crying.”She told Valenciana that the girls in her school in Mexico referred to her as “repatriada”, which was meant as a put-down. “My mom was pretty miserable,” said Valenciana. By age 12, Emilia worked as a live-in babysitter, but at times she was not paid or given a decent bed or blanket, according to her daughter. Emilia was desperate to come back to Los Angeles once the repatriation period ended. During the second world war, she made the journey alone by train right before her 18th birthday with the help of her godmother, who gave her a place to live.View image in fullscreenAlong with Valenciana’s husband, Francisco Balderrama, who co-authored a seminal book on Mexican repatriation, Emilia eventually went on to become an advocate for others to learn about this previously hidden chapter in US history. In her 70s, she helped pass legislation that led to a formal apology from the state of California in 2005 and a monument in downtown Los Angeles in 2012. Emilia passed away in 2020 at age 94.While Valenciana sees parallels between the 1930s and today, there’s one big difference, she says: “There’s much more support for people who are being kidnapped and tortured today as opposed to the 1930s where people either didn’t know or care.” She says she better understands what her mother and others like her experienced when she sees members of her community leaving the US voluntarily or living in hiding, fearful of going to church or the market because of Ice.“I’m not just heartbroken,” she said. “I’m sad and angry. Racism is deeply rooted in this country.”Felicia LoweView image in fullscreenGrowing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Felicia Lowe, 79, was never taught about Chinese American history. She had plenty of questions, but no answers. Her immigrant parents refused to talk about how they came to arrive in the US from China.Lowe’s curiosity inspired her to become a television reporter and filmmaker, whose work has revealed the impact of Chinese exclusion, a series of racist immigration laws from 1882 to 1943 that restricted Chinese immigration to the US in response to growing anti-Chinese sentiment and competition for jobs.After reading the book Island about the Angel Island immigration station in the San Francisco Bay, which opened in 1910 to enforce exclusion and prevent “undesirable” immigrants from entering the US, Lowe knew she had to share this little-known story. In 1988, she released a film about it, Carved in Silence.“For all the immigrants, there was a very intrusive physical examination,” Lowe said. “Angel Island was built to jail people, to interrogate them and make them feel so unwanted.”View image in fullscreenImmigrants were detained for months and years at a time in crowded, prison-like dorms with locked doors and separated by race and sex. The station processed up to 1 million Asian and other immigrants, including 250,000 who were Chinese, from 1910 to 1940. Since Chinese people were effectively barred from entering the US, “paper sons” and “paper daughters” circumvented exclusion by purchasing documents that falsely identified them as the children of Chinese Americans.It wasn’t until after Lowe made Carved in Silence that she discovered a shocking secret about her own family’s history: her father had been detained for three weeks at Angel Island, according to transcripts from the National Archives.“Every time people were interrogated, they had to sign their names,” she said. “On one of those documents, my father’s handwriting was very shaky and I thought he must have been really scared that day.” She realized her father, who died of a sudden heart attack at 58, had been a “paper son” himself, which gave Lowe an even deeper understanding of the trauma and cost of leaving one’s homeland, and entering a country that did not want you because of your ethnicity. “The risks taken required courage and hope, that the payoff would be a greater opportunity for himself and his future family,” she said.Unlike the Angel Island era, where the public was largely unaware of detainees’ conditions and experiences, many of today’s immigration actions are being recorded on phones in real time and circulating online (the Trump administration has broadcast raids and regularly runs commercials encouraging people to “self-deport and stay out”). Lowe said people in 2025 have more evidence of their experiences and she believes that Ice’s hypervisibility has united people who may not have been activists to be more supportive of immigrants.“What we’re witnessing today is wholesale harassment, arrests with little to no acknowledgement of a person’s legal status,” said Lowe, who has been a leader in the preservation and restoration of Angel Island as a national historic landmark. “Rights are being ignored and innocent immigrants and/or those who have proper paperwork to be here are being locked up and, in some cases, sent to jails in other countries.“I don’t care what color you are – we need to understand how much we share humanity and pain. We cannot be afraid to tell our stories.”Satsuki InaView image in fullscreenDuring the first Trump administration, Satsuki Ina made multiple visits to family immigration detention centers, where she met with Central American mothers and children who were being held by the US government after fleeing horrific violence.“Mothers poured their hearts out about what was happening to their kids and I couldn’t help but see myself in those children,” she said. That’s because Ina, 81, herself was born behind barbed wire in a US concentration camp where she was formally listed as an “enemy alien” by the US government.It was the second world war, and the US had rounded up and unconstitutionally imprisoned more than 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry based on unfounded national security fears over their race. Ina’s parents, who were US citizens, were first sent to California’s Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno, where the smell of horses and manure lingered, then to Topaz prison camp in Utah.After failing a loyalty questionnaire, the Inas were sent to the Tule Lake segregation center, a maximum-security concentration camp with 28 guard towers, 1,000 military police officers and tanks patrolling the perimeter. Overcrowded barracks were useless protection against choking dust storms, searing heat and snow.View image in fullscreenWhile at Tule Lake, Ina’s father, Itaru, spoke out about his civil rights, which led to him being sent to a separate Department of Justice camp in Bismarck, North Dakota, that was less chaotic and filled with almost 4,000 German and Japanese men, leaving Ina’s mother, Shizuko, to raise two young children alone. After the war ended in 1945, the family was reunited at a camp in Crystal City, Texas, before finally being freed after four years of captivity. Ina had spent the first two years of her life imprisoned.Her parents’ San Francisco home and property were seized in 1942, and the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Satsuki became Sandy. Years later, when Ina said she wanted to be called by her real name, her mother repeatedly said: “Don’t do it. Bad things will happen.”“When I was a child, my mother tried to protect me from the stigma that was directed towards people who were resisters, so she would just say things like: ‘Don’t say you were born in Tule Lake. Just tell them you were born in Newell,’ which is nearby,” Ina remembered. “The message we were getting from our parents was: ‘You have to keep us safe. Don’t get into trouble, don’t cause problems.’ ”Decades later, Ina, who is now a psychotherapist and a professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, started connecting her experience with the expansion of family immigration detention first under the Obama administration and then during the first Trump administration, imprisoned children and separated Central American and South American families seeking asylum on a larger scale.Together with activist Mike Ishii, she co-founded the group Tsuru for Solidarity to help end detention sites and support immigrant and refugee communities under attack. “We felt like we had the moral authority to stand up and protest,” said Ina. “I never set out to be an activist. I just mostly saw myself as someone who was pissed off about what was going on.”It was only in the last half of Ina’s 40-year career as a psychotherapist that she started studying the effects of trauma and how it could be passed down to subsequent generations. She found that many Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated as children struggled with anxiety and depression as adults. Last year, she published a memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl, which follows the Ina family’s agonizing journey through incarceration, based on her mother’s diary and censored letters her parents exchanged while held at separate prison camps.“It’s more than 80 years since our incarceration and the effects of it are still impacting my community,” said Ina. “The mass incarceration solution is the most dehumanizing, long-term impact for whole communities. To imprison children, in particular, is inhumane and damaging. I think about the children I interviewed, and the amount of anxiety and depression that they’ve been filled with doesn’t get erased when you’re freed. It lies in you with each stage of life.”Eliseo MedinaView image in fullscreenAfter growing up in Huanusco, Zacatecas, in Mexico, Eliseo Medina, 79, came to the US with his family in 1956. His parents worked in the fields of Delano, California, an agricultural area in the San Joaquin valley known for its grapes, while he attended school. When he was a boy, immigration raids, arrests and deportations were commonplace. He recalled hearing loud knocks at the front door of their modest home in the middle of the night. “We’d get up and go to the door and find lights shining on our faces,” said Medina, whose family were legal immigrants. “These guys in uniform were there asking for our papers – we had no idea we had any rights.” Like today, these farm workers were mostly immigrants and their wages were often lower than US-born counterparts and workers in other sectors.Medina left school at 15 to join his parents and sisters working in the fields. In 1965, when Medina was off work due to a broken leg, he heard that Filipino farmworkers in Coachella had walked out on strike demanding $1.40 an hour and that they were coming to Delano next. He grabbed his crutches, got in his car and drove to 11th Avenue, where he saw about 200 people with signs shouting: “Huelga! Strike!” Although he was scared, Medina attended his first union meeting inside a local church just days after the historic Delano grape strike and boycott began. It happened to be Mexican Independence Day, which felt symbolic, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.“Every seat was taken, people were standing around the walls and there was electricity,” he recalled. “Cesar Chavez walked out and he talked about how we had rights even though we were poor, that we deserved to be treated with respect and dignity, that we sold our labor, not our souls.” Chavez called for a strike, and the whole hall erupted, chanting: “Huelga, huelga, huelga!” Exhilarated by what he had witnessed, Medina went home, broke open his piggy bank and joined the union and grape strike the next morning.“We went against some of the biggest growers and I saw them being scared for the first time and I got hooked,” he said. Dolores Huerta took a shine to the 19-year-old and recruited him to represent United Farm Workers (UFW) at rallies. Over the next 13 years, he worked alongside Chavez, leading boycotting efforts and organizing fundraisers and rallies around the country, and eventually became UFW’s national vice-president.View image in fullscreen“It was the most exciting thing that any person could have ever experienced for me,” he said. Medina later worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), pushing for equal labor and civil rights protections for workers. In 2013, the labor leader participated in a 22-day hunger strike on the National Mall, where he was visited by Barack Obama, to draw attention to the need for immigration reform.Medina, who lives just outside Los Angeles, sees sustained protests against Ice and other Trump administration policies as building the foundation for maintaining democracy and modernizing the immigration system. “It’s dark right now, but it’s also a great opportunity for organizers because people are paying attention across our society,” said Medina. “People are asking: ‘Who am I? Who is this country? What do I care about? What are my values?’”Some California farm workers are on strike following immigration raids at several farms, calling for an end to raids and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers (the United Farm Workers has not yet called for a strike or boycott). “I certainly understand and support their right to be heard and respected,” he said. “They are striking against a cruel and unusual government. In the end, they may lead the way for a broader worker response.”He said that the diversity of the anti-Trump coalition, and the public image of Ice as armed, masked soldiers terrorizing people, is helping to radicalize a new generation of activists. “I’ve been doing this almost 60 years. I saw the farm workers win, civil rights, a war ended. I saw women make huge impacts. I saw gay rights,” he reflected. “When you change minds, you also change policies and the laws, so I have hope.” More

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      The Cracker Barrel mess exposes the cynicism of the rightwing culture war | Sidney Blumenthal

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      First they came for the Smithsonian. Then they came for Cracker Barrel.Whether it’s the museums or the corporations – or the universities, law firms, federal departments and agencies – the attack lines of the Trump culture war and its culture warriors are the same. The vicious full-scale assault on the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain after the company naively wandered on to the battle zone by altering its “Old Timer” logo exposes the cynicism of the whole operation and its ulterior motive to impose an authoritarian regime over every aspect of American society.On 19 August, Donald Trump launched his purge campaign against the Smithsonian with a post denouncing it as “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE’ …where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”Within 24 hours, the son echoed the father, but with a different target in the crosshairs. The day after Trump denounced the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Jr took umbrage at Cracker Barrel, joining a rightwing social media mob.Cracker Barrel’s sales had gone flat partly due to its creaky image, symbolized by a logo featuring a geezer in overalls seated cross-legged and leaning on a barrel, promoted as the “Uncle Herschel” of the store’s founder. At the company headquarters in Lebanon, Tennessee, the “Uncle Herschel Memorial” features statues of “Uncle Herschel” seated on a bench listening to a Cracker Barrel waitress. Marketing research, however, showed that the rickety ambience was off-putting to a younger suburban clientele. So “Uncle Herschel” was retired, the logo cleaned up with just the brand name front and center, the interiors with dark brown log cabin walls whitewashed and more brightly lit.But this marketing facelift, a common corporate design “refinement”, as it is known, was a new frontier beyond “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE’”. Don Jr retweeted a post by an account called the Woke War Room attacking Julie Felss Masino, the Cracker Barrel CEO: “She scrapped a beloved American aesthetic and replaced it with sterile, soulless branding. She should resign and be replaced with leadership that will restore Cracker Barrel’s tradition.”If Don Jr had ever eaten at a Cracker Barrel, he would have had to leave the confines of Manhattan and Palm Beach. There is not a single Cracker Barrel to be found in any borough of New York City, or on Long Island either. His personal experience with “tradition” is not located in the biscuit mix section of the country store. If Don Jr’s complaint is with “soulless branding”, it does not extend to the sale of the $DJTJR (Donald J Trump Jr) crypto memecoin. But this bit of brazen hypocrisy is lost in the ocean of the Trump family’s grifting.When the right launched its version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, now with the power of the Trump administration behind it, nobody predicted that Cracker Barrel would become collateral damage. The Tennessee-based chain, founded in 1969, trafficked in faux rustic pre-second world war nostalgia, an image from before the existence of supermarkets, shopping malls and the interstate highways where most of the restaurants are located. Cracker Barrel was a little theme park. Customers entered through a retail outlet that resembled a country store. On the restaurant’s walls hung old advertising signs, farm implements and framed antique photos of 19th-century folk with a grim American Gothic look. The menu consisted of “homestyle food”, including “the best classic meatloaf” with mashed potatoes and gravy.But in the 1990s and early 2000s the business suffered protests after the firing of employees suspected of being gay and reached an agreement with the justice department to change its management practices after allegedly segregating Black diners. The clientele that favored the kitsch decor also dwindled. In response, the company shed its old prejudiced practices and recently unveiled its makeover to update its tired image. That provided the pretext for the calculated Maga explosion.Hillsdale College, a rightwing citadel in southern Michigan that has been vehement in ramping up the culture wars, posted on X the plain Cracker Barrel logo on one side of a frame with a statue of George Washington splattered with red paint on the other under the line: “Same energy.” The Hillsdale account added: “Cracker Barrel is a beloved cultural icon, tied to the lifestyle and memories of truth-seeking Americans.”According to this college, a center of conservative thought, the restaurant chain is apparently the cultural equivalent of the Smithsonian, or should be exhibited there, and its customers who have pulled in for the chicken fried steak are “truth-seeking Americans”, presumably as opposed to those who stop for the chicken wings at Chili’s. The culture war doesn’t stop at the logo’s edge.The Woke War Room that aroused Don Jr used the attack line that Cracker Barrel perpetrates a “DEI regime”. The CEO’s picture was placed next to the rainbow logo of the LGBTQ+ Alliance. The post also noted that America First Legal, a far-right group founded by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy involved in Ice raids, the culture war against universities and apparently much else, had filed complaints with the Equal Opportunities Employment Commission and the Tennessee attorney general alleging racial discrimination by Cracker Barrel because of its DEI policy. The Maga mob piled in with misogynistic tweets against the female CEO.A Maga social media influencer, Robby Starbuck, advancing himself within the rightwing constellation as an anti-DEI activist, threatened: “Oh my goodness. When you see what we’ve got on Cracker Barrel … Wow. I don’t think anyone knew it was as bad as the stuff we received. We’re talking total capture by leftism at the exec level. We have photos, videos, etc. Should I put it all in 1 video or release 1 by 1?”In 2022, Starbuck, whose given name is Robert Newsom, was excluded from running in the Republican primary for the Tennessee fifth congressional district by the Tennessee Republican party, which found that he was not “a bona fide Republican”. His exclusion was upheld by the Tennessee supreme court.On 23 August, Fox News featured his video denouncing Cracker Barrel for its involvement in gay pride events – “a microcosm of the parasitic operating procedure of leftwing activists” with a “soulless, godless, hedonistic vision of the future”. This month, he began advising Meta “on efforts to curb what they describe as political bias in its AI tools”, according to the Wall Street Journal. His advisory role comes amid a defamation settlement after a Meta AI chatbot inaccurately said he had been involved in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. He has only been part of social media mobs.Stoking the ferocity of the onslaught against Cracker Barrel, Starbuck spoke with Christopher Rufo, who has positioned himself among the chief culture war activists on the right. He had been the key adviser to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, in his crusades to ban books, attack the Walt Disney Company as “woke” and assail universities.Rufo is a certain kind of zealot who has achieved his greatest influence under Trump, like Miller and Project 2025’s Russell Vought, now the head of the office of management and budget, self-styled ideological commissars with a Bolshevik mentality.In a speech in 2022 at Hillsdale College, which Rufo titled Laying Siege to the Institutions, he boasted of his “very aggressive” campaign against Disney. “You have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good,” he said, in a Leninist spirit, describing a “narrative war” with American corporations and institutions. “We get in there, we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe following year, Rufo spent six weeks in Hungary as a fellow at the Danube Institute, a thinktank closely aligned with the country’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. “My deepest interest,” Rufo wrote, “was to understand how Hungary … is attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media … Hungary’s leaders are serious people combatting the same forces confronted by conservatives in the West.” One lesson Rufo drew from Orbán’s “culture-war strategy” was that there would be, “for the foreseeable future, a large state that has power over family, education, and culture, and conservative political leaders are abdicating their responsibility if they do not employ it to advance conservative aims”.When Trump won the 2024 election, Rufo contributed his battle plan alongside the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. “In the transition period, I laid out a counterrevolution blueprint that outlined my strategy for how the president and the administration could take decisive action in the war against these left-wing ideologies.”He crowed about the accusation of reverse discrimination against virtually every institution public and private – ”anti-white bigotry should face just as severe a sanction as anti-Black bigotry” – and said he sought “to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, Unless we change what we’re doing, we’re not going to be able to meet our budget for the year.”But until Rufo talked to Starbuck about the villainy of Cracker Barrel, he said, he had not paid attention. “At first, I dismissed the story as trivial. I have never set foot in a Cracker Barrel and, as such, have little stake in what is emblazoned above its doorways,” Rufo wrote in City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative thinktank where he is a senior fellow. “The logo change might have caught the public’s initial attention, but the underlying political story had real stakes. If companies that depend on conservatives adopt radical left-wing policies, they must face the consequences.”Rufo decided that Cracker Barrel was a worthy target for the overarching culture war. “Some might dismiss the Cracker Barrel campaign as minor, or even embarrassing … But there is enormous value in making an example of the company and cementing a fear that conservatives can spontaneously lash out at any institution that crosses the line. Today, it’s Cracker Barrel; tomorrow it might be Pepsi, Target, or Procter & Gamble.”Cracker Barrel’s “Old Timer” logo had to be manufactured into a cause célèbre for a larger purpose. “Even if we don’t care about Cracker Barrel in particular,” Rufo wrote, “we should all care about the ideological capture of American institutions and use whatever power we have to reverse it. And for that to occur, the Barrel must be broken.”With that call to arms, Rufo gives the game away. He doesn’t really take the conspiratorial fiction seriously. It is useful only as an instrument for bludgeoning those designated as objective enemies in order to build toward absolute power. In the gradation of his hierarchy of conservative principles, the highest value is cynicism. Rufo’s rhetoric has the characteristic tone of Stalin’s statement on 29 July 1936 declaring his Great Purge: “The inalienable quality of every Bolshevik under present conditions should be the ability to recognize an enemy of the Party no matter how well he may be masked.”On 26 August, Trump entered the fray, saying that Cracker Barrel should “admit a mistake … Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again. Remember, in just a short period of time I made the United States of America the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. One year ago, it was ‘DEAD.’ Good luck!”That evening, Cracker Barrel executives reportedly called the Trump White House to offer unconditional surrender. “They thanked President Trump for weighing in on the issue of their iconic ‘original’ logo,” Taylor Budowich, the cabinet secretary, posted. “They wanted the President to know that they heard him … and would be restoring the ‘Old Timer.’ So smart! Congrats Cracker Barrel and America!” The White House issued an official statement announcing the restoration as if it were a decisive presidential action: “Congratulations Cracker Barrel!” Nobel prize!“Uncle Herschel” was back, the “woke” conspiracy again defeated, another victory in the culture war. Today Cracker Barrel. Tomorrow the Federal Reserve.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist. More

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      Sixty years after the Voting Rights Act, our voices are being eroded | Al Sharpton

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      In a moment when we should be celebrating one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, we are in fact at a worse place as a nation than when it was passed. Those of us fighting to protect the right to vote find ourselves against a movement that doesn’t want to take us back to 1965. They want to create an America that more closely resembles the one of 1865.Sixty years ago, in a rare and profound act of consensus, Congress passed a law to end the centuries-old rigging of American democracy. Yet today the system is as rigged as ever, with the battered Voting Rights Act on life support.The erosion of our rights is playing out before our eyes. Purged voting rolls have helped to install a regime that arrests undocumented people and American citizens alike. A loss of faith in the system led many people to stay at home on election day; now they live in fear of walking outside their door. Empowering states to create restrictive laws has yielded less access to not only the right to vote, but to healthcare, jobs and home ownership.At the center of this is Donald Trump – a man whose legacy as president is marked by rampant voter disenfranchisement. This is a man whose claim to fame is fame itself, who views voting as nothing more than a popularity contest that he’s terrified to lose. It’s why he questioned the integrity of our democratic network in 2020 instead of graciously accepting that 7 million more Americans preferred Joe Biden over him.Trump’s campaign against voting rights marches on, as he fills the courts with judges who will continue to kill civil rights through a thousand cuts. Barriers to voting and the silence of those still able to cast ballots has emboldened and empowered him to bully media conglomerates into complacency and corporations into abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Free of fear from the voters, Trump has gone full bore in desecrating the legacy of the civil rights movement – going so far as to use government files on Dr Martin Luther King Jr to distract from his own political headaches.But we cannot in this moment forget the power King saw in the right to vote. In his 1957 Give Us the Ballot speech at the Lincoln Memorial, King declared to 25,000 people that with the vote: “We will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.”Yet today that fear persists, perhaps stronger than ever. We have indeed come full circle from March 1965, when the nation was rattled by the images of a young John Lewis and dozens of peaceful protesters getting their heads cracked open and their organs bruised on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The national outrage of Bloody Sunday that sparked mobilization toward passage of the Voting Rights Act has been replaced by a numbness to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, the arrests of elected officials and the snipping of social safety nets.The solution to it all remains the right to vote. A week after the brutal beatings in Selma, King declared voting “Civil Right No. 1” in the New York Times. He called it the “foundation stone for political action”, one we must build upon today. Within five months, Congress bravely voted to end racist literacy tests, enable federal examiners to protect voter registration, and fight the ugliest forms of voter suppression.America was stronger for a generation, until the election of her first Black president sparked a conservative backlash that is today at its peak. The opening salvo came in 2013, when the supreme court gutted the law’s core federal pre-clearance provisions in Shelby county v Holder. It chipped away more eight years later, giving states further authority to enforce stricter voter ID laws, purge voter rolls, and reverse early and absentee programs meant to expand access to the polls. In short, Shelby v Holder opened the door for a manicured version of Jim Crow.It is for these reasons that we will lead a March on Wall Street later this month. The 28 August demonstration, held on the anniversary of the March on Washington, will send a message to Trump and his Maga allies in Congress. You may restrict our ability to vote in the president, the senators and the Congress members we support. But you cannot restrict how we vote with our dollars. Black voters have a skyrocketing buying power expected to hit $1.7tn by 2030. We must use it to make sure those we support stand by us.Until we get to a day when the integrity of voting is restored, when we can finally pass the John R Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, we will use the power we have. Trump may use the bully pulpit of the White House to influence companies’ investments in Black America, but we have the ability to hit their bottom line.Celebrating this anniversary of the Voting Rights Act means honoring the sacrifices of those who shed their blood and laid down their lives for our most fundamental freedom and recommitting ourselves to the struggle by tapping into the unwavering hope and persistence that fueled the civil rights movement. To settle for anything less would be unconditional surrender to the segregationists against whom King, congressman Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer and the other great civil rights leaders stood.

      Rev Al Sharpton is an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and radio talkshow host More

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      How do we lead moral lives in an age of bullies? | Robert Reich

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      We are living in an age of bullies. Those with power are less constrained today than they have been in my lifetime, since the end of the second world war.The question is: how do we lead moral lives in this era?Vladimir Putin launches a horrendous war on Ukraine. After Hamas’s atrocity, Benjamin Netanyahu bombs Gaza to smithereens and is now starving to death its remaining occupants.Trump abducts thousands of hardworking people within the US and puts them into detention camps – splitting their families, spreading fear. His immigration agents are accused of targeting people with brown skin.He usurps the powers of Congress, defies the courts, and prosecutes his enemies.He and his Republican lackeys cut Medicaid and food stamps – lifelines for poor people, including millions of children – so the wealthy can get a tax cut.Hate-mongers on rightwing television and social media fuel bigotry against transgender people, immigrants, Muslims, people of color and LGBTQ+ people.Powerful men abuse women. Some of the abused are children.Powerful male politicians make it impossible for women to obtain safe abortions.CEOs rake in record profits and compensation while giving workers meager wages and firing them for unionizing.Billionaires make large campaign donations – legalized bribes – so lawmakers will cut their taxes and repeal regulations.Each such abuse of power encourages other abuses. Each undermines norms of civility.Every time the stronger bully the weaker, the social fabric is tested. If bullying is not contained, the fabric unwinds. Those who are bullied – who feel powerless, vulnerable, bitter and desperate – become fodder for “strongmen”, demagogues who lead them into violence, war and tyranny.This is hardly new. Throughout history, the central struggle of civilization has been against brutality by the powerful. Civilization is the opposite of brutality. A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutally treat the weak.Yet in my lifetime, I’ve witnessed a breakdown. I’ve seen a change occur – from support of decency and constraints on brutality, to tolerance of indecency and support for unconstrained cruelty.Trump is not the cause. He’s the culmination.So how do we lead moral lives in this age of bullies?We do everything we can to stop the brutality, to hold the powerful accountable, and to protect the vulnerable.Putin and Netanyahu are war criminals whose criminality must be stopped. Trump is a dictator who must be deposed.Rightwing politicians who encourage white Christian nationalism must be condemned and voted out of office. Pundits who amplify racism and xenophobia must lose their megaphones.Powerful men who sexually harass or abuse women or children must be prosecuted.Women must have full control over their bodies, including access to safe abortions.Police who kill innocent people of color must be brought to justice. Immigration agents must be prohibited from abducting people off the street or from their homes or court houses or places of work.CEOs who treat their employees like manure must be exposed and penalized. Billionaires who bribe lawmakers to cut their taxes or exempt them from regulations must be sanctioned, as should lawmakers who accept such bribes.This isn’t a matter of “left” or “right”. It’s a matter of what’s right.Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His next book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, will be out on 5 August More

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      We do not comply: how do we disrupt the momentum of Trump’s cruelty? | V (formerly Eve Ensler)

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      The exterminating force of Project 2025 is plowing through the culture, the government and people’s hearts and bodies like a drunk on a violent tear. We wake each morning, holding our breath to bear witness to the new devastation: PBS and NPR defunded, cuts to the fight against human trafficking, Medicaid gone for millions, Ice working to surveil critics, tons of food for the poor ordered burned and wasted.The momentum of cruelty always feels inevitable. Cruelty is by definition “a callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain”. For those of us who have suffered physical, political, racial and emotional abuse, it feels like a familiar steamroller of violence. We only have to witness the cries of parents being separated from their children, men screaming out for “libertad” from cages in Everglades detention center (AKA Alligator Alcatraz), non-violent protesters beaten for trying to stop a genocide, to be frozen in that same incapacitating dread and fear.What is the antidote to this destructive environment of mendacity possessing us now with fear, ennui and self-mutilating rage?Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a powerhouse activist and brilliant organizer, told me: “It’s not decided where we go yet. Which is why it feels tense. What we know is that there’s no going back to an old normal because our economic system has failed us and our governmental structure is being destroyed. They’re trying to replace what was with this minority rule of disgustingly wealthy humans dictating what can happen not only in this country, but globally.“We’ve gotta block and build at the same time. That means confronting both elected officials and the corporations that are lifting them up. We need to make sure that we are gumming up their ability to successfully implement any sort of action, whether it’s policy or otherwise, that takes more power and rights and access to life-saving resources away from our communities.”So how do we gum up their momentum; how do we become refusers, artists of disruption, interrupters of their hateful and life-destroying trajectory? How do we clear the noise and fear in our heads so that we are able to hear the call of our inner morality?“The thing that I love about being non-cooperative and non-compliant with the Trump administration,” Ash-Lee told me, “is its accessibility: people have all sorts of abilities, all sorts of means, regardless of class, regardless of identity, to find a tactic that fits for them. What keeps you up at night enough to make you active? Trump says we shouldn’t ask people for warrants. We demand warrants. When a business puts a ‘No Kings’ sign up or a ‘No Ice’ sign in their window, they’re not complying. And we need more people to do that wherever they are,” she said, “whether it’s a general saying, ‘I’m not gonna command my troops to do this,’ whether it’s troops becoming conscientious objectors, whether it’s us boycotting Target and T-Mobile.”This tyrannical white supremacist landscape is erasing our sense of existence and meaning. Daily forms of rebellion birth us back into our bodies and our purpose. Non-compliance is art, as art is meant to defy the status quo, question the givens, expand the boundaries of knowing and freedom. And as you courageously make your mark of refusal, you carve a path for others to be brave. Non-compliance is praxis, stretching and transforming the muscles of our discontent into impactful and embodied action.There are a multitude of ways that we can make their lives miserable by taking small risks and huge ones. Like folks in California sitting in their cars outside the hotels where the Ice agents are and just lying on their horn for hours. Or people towing Ice vans away that are parked illegally. Or the Harlem baseball coach who knew all his kids were American-born. When Ice invaded the field, he told his kids to get inside the batting cage and stay silent. He said he was willing to die for his kids to get home.“And non-complying is also filling in the gaps of resources and care that they are taking away. They’re already closing rural hospitals where we live because our governor didn’t expand Medicaid,” Ash-Lee told me. “So residents must build an alternative like country people and Black folks across the country have been doing on their own accord for decades, if not centuries, creating community spaces where we can both line dance, do some boots-on-the-ground organizing, get your blood pressure checked, get your mammogram in the mobile unit, get your teeth cleaned, whatever. All of those things are not complying.”I think of the man who suggested we all dress in Ice suits with masks and Oakley sunglasses and enter detention centers and free immigrants. Or my white British friend who was in a store in Nevada when Ice invaded and they started harassing Latinos for their identification. He stepped up and calmly asked why they weren’t asking for his ID. He asked simply without hostility. He asked it three times. Even though they continued, he momentarily disrupted the trajectory of cruelty and forced them to bring consciousness to what they were doing. Or the Rev Mariann Budde’s staring down Trump and his billionaire cronies in the first row of a Washington church in January, calmly and fearlessly demanding compassion for immigrants, refugees and LGBTQ+ communities.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd this is the time for artists to speak out, to disembed themselves from a fascist system, to place principles over profit and self-advancement. To be what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “disagreeable”. Yes, of course there are risks. But at this moment, with the jackboots in the streets and at our door, when each hour another liberty is being erased, and those who speak truth to power are being removed from TV, from universities, from cultural centers, when the cultural platforms are being removed themselves, speaking out is not just an obligation, it’s survival.And there are artists beginning to organize. The poet Michael Klein is creating a new podcast calling writers “to take our language back in writing a way through the various veils of deceit–an act, which in itself, has always been a form of resistance”. Meena Jagannath, a movement lawyer, is gathering artists and activists in salons to deepen our collective investigation and imaginative co-creation. She told me: “Our charge in these times is to support each other in building protagonism – a sense that we have agency to contest fascist narratives about how the world is and should be. It needs to be a collective, creative and responsive process that takes in what’s going out there and alchemizes it into a more expansive imagination of what could and should be.”So in a nod to the late great Mary Oliver, I ask you, what is the one precious, wild creative act you are doing to impede this nightmare?

      V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls More

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      The polls look bad for Trump – but tyrants don’t depend on approval ratings | Judith Levine

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      The fracas over the Jeffrey Epstein files – and declining poll numbers on every issue that won Donald Trump the 2024 election – indicate cracks in the Maga coalition and weakening support for the president’s self-proclaimed mandate.But reports of Maga’s death are probably exaggerated.Trump has cheated death, both physical and political, many times. And while every tyrant craves the adoration of the people – and claims to have it even when he doesn’t – no tyrant worth the title counts on public support to stay in power.Last week, when the administration pulled an about-face on releasing 100,000-odd documents related to Epstein – amid conspiracy theories of deep-state pedophile rings, which Trump promoted – it looked like Trump was on the ropes. “Trump can’t stop MAGA from obsessing about the Epstein files,” reported NBC. “Trump meets toughest opponent: his own base,” declared Axios. Trump was “on the defense”, NPR said. The Guardian reported on Maga hat burnings.Even after House Republicans blocked Democrats on a resolution to force a vote on releasing the files, even after the speaker, Mike Johnson, withheld from the floor a similar resolution, the far right would not be mollified. “Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies,” the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X. “The People … want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing less.”Now some of the commentariat are predicting that even if Trump survives, the damage to the GOP is done.In the Hill, Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman marshaled polls showing Trump’s sliding approval from before to after the Epstein affair and conjectured that it could sink the Republicans in the midterm elections.At the same time, the populace, including Republicans, is changing its mind on Trump’s master plans. Six in 10 respondents to a CNN poll oppose the federal budget bill; approval of Trump’s handling of the budget is down 11 points since March. On immigration, a Gallup poll showed a steep drop in respondents who favor more restricted admittance, from 55% in 2024 to 30% this June. The most striking change is among Republicans, from 88% who wanted fewer immigrants in 2024 to 48% in June 2025. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who think immigrants are good for America rose to a record 79%.The flood of TikToks showing masked men kidnapping people from the streets and manhandling elected officials has turned many people against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Two YouGov polls showed the agency’s favorability plummeting from a net positive of 15 points in early February to a deficit of 13 in late June. During Trump’s first term, “Abolish Ice” was the chant at tiny demonstrations by fringe-left organizations. Now more than a third of respondents to a Civiqs survey want to see the agency gone, including an uptick of six points among Republicans since November, to 11% .And as David Gilbert pointed out in Wired, even before the Epstein flap, some of the president’s most prominent supporters were defying him. The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson condemned the bombing of Iran. Trump whisperer Laura Loomer dissed his acceptance of a $400m plane from Qatar. Elon Musk defected over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And Joe Rogan deemed Ice raids targeting ordinary working migrants too much to bear.But Trump is not backing down. In fact, he’s doubling down on every policy. The deportation campaign has grown more vicious by the day. Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” is being rightly condemned as a concentration camp. A recent Human Rights Watch investigation of three Miami area Ice facilities found detainees denied food and medicine, held in solitary confinement, and shackled at the wrists and forced to kneel to eat, as one man put it, “like animals”.The president muscled his budget and rescission package through Congress without regard to the disproportionate harm they augur for red-state residents, much less the deficit, the public health, or the planet’s future. His tariffs are barreling ahead, exasperating economists, hitting crucial US economic sectors and tanking entire economies overseas. General Motors reported second-quarter profits down by a third. In the tiny, impoverished nation of Lesotho, “denim capital of the world”, Trump’s threatened 50% duties have shut down the garment factories, leaving thousands out of work, hungry and desperate.Trump may feel insulted, which he does most of the time; he may temporarily lose his footing. But he’s not relinquishing power without a fight.Tyrants don’t need high approval ratings. They intimidate voters, rig elections, or stop holding them altogether; suppress protest and jail, deport or assassinate their critics. The Nazis achieved peak support in 1932, at 37.3%. Of the 1933 plebiscite that ceded all power to Hitler, the German Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer wrote: “No one will dare not to vote, and no one will respond No in the vote of confidence. Because (1) Nobody believes in the secrecy of the ballot, and (2) A No will be taken as a Yes anyway.”Daria Blinova, of the International Association for Political Science Students, argues that autocrats cultivate approval while consolidating their own power through the “illusion of substantial improvements”, which are actually insubstantial. In 2017, for instance, nine in 10 Saudi youth supported Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman because of such reforms as allowing cinemas to reopen.The Trump administration has begun deploying some similar tactics. The justice department is pressuring state election officials to turn over their voter rolls and give it illegal access to voting machines. The Republican National Committee is training volunteers to “ensure election integrity” – AKA harassing voters and poll workers. It is trying to banish the opposition press. Homeland security is trying to deport the widely followed Salvadorian journalist Mario Guevera, who has covered Ice raids and protests. Migrants sent home or to third countries can face persecution, torture or death.Still, none of this means that Trump is invincible, even when his administration uses violence to achieve its aims and terrify its critics. First – simplest and most difficult –the resistance must show up. Get bodies into the streets. The second nationwide anti-Trump rallies were bigger than the first; the third, fourth and 10th can be bigger still.Gather bodies at the sites of injustice. Volunteers are swarming to immigration courts, where migrants who show up for mandatory hearings are being released into the clutches of waiting Ice agents. The court-watchers – experienced organizers and first-timers, retirees, students, clergy, elected officials, artists – are distributing “know your rights” leaflets in many languages, writing down names and contact information to inform families of their loved ones’ arrests or to connect arrestees to lawyers later on. Immigrants’ rights groups are holding training sessions. Spanish speakers are giving immigration-specific language lessons.This nonviolent gumming-up of the government’s criminal machine draws press and social media attention, multiplying participation, amplifying anger and mobilizing greater organization. At every step, people are bearing witness, storing it up for future accountability.The Epstein affair shows that no loyalty is unbreakable. The polls show that discomfort with Trump’s policies is growing. Discomfort can mature to rejection of injustice, rejection to resistance, resistance to action. A tyrant does not need majority support to maintain power. But neither does the opposition movement need majority participation to take power back. No tyranny lasts forever.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      To defeat Trump, the left must learn from him | Austin Sarat

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      In the first six months of his second term as president, Donald Trump has dominated the national political conversation, implemented an aggressive agenda of constitutional reform, scrambled longstanding American alliances, and helped alter US political culture.Pro-democracy forces have been left with their heads spinning. They (and I) have spent too much time simply denouncing or pathologizing him and far too little time learning from him.And there is a lot to learn.Not since the middle of the twentieth century, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt led a constitutional revolution, has any president achieved so much of his agenda in so short a time. But to recognize Trump’s political genius is not to say that it has been put to good use or that he has been a good president.Like others who see “connections and possibilities in circumstances that even people who are smart in conventional ways do not see,” the president has shown himself to be adept at reading the temper of the times, exploiting weaknesses in others, and assembling a coalition of the faithful that others would have never thought possible. What PittNews’ Grace Longworth wrote last September has been confirmed since he returned to the Oval Office.“Trump is not as crazy or dumb as his opposition would like to believe he is,” Longsworth said.Trump’s genius is demonstrated by his ability to transform “calamitous errors into political gold”. In the past six months, he has continued to do what he has done since he first appeared on the national political scene. From then until now, he has convinced millions of Americans to buy into his version of events and not to believe what they see with their eyes.Insurrectionists become patriots. Law-abiding immigrants become threats to America’s way of life. Journalists become “enemies of the people”.It’s magic.Of course, the last six months have not been all smooth sailing for the president, who is now embroiled in a controversy about releasing material about the child sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein.But Trump succeeds because he is undaunted by critics and unfazed by the kinds of barriers that would throw any ordinary politician off their game. When necessary, he makes things up and repeats them until what he says seems to be real.None of this is good for democracy.Trump has done what millions of Americans want done: transform the political system. He has not been afraid to call into question constitutional verities. The greatest, and most dangerous, achievement of the president’s first six months has been reshaping the balance of power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.The president has activated a political movement that has produced what Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman describes as “constitutional moments.” In those moments, fundamental political change happens without any formal change in the language of the Constitution itself.“Normal politics is temporarily suspended in favor of a ‘constitutional politics,’ focused on fundamental principles.” Since January, the Trump administration’s actions have indeed focused the attention of the nation on such principles.Like it or not, Donald Trump is turning the constitution on its head, changing it from a Republican to an authoritarian document. And with every passing day, we see that transformation happening.The Republican majority in Congress seems eager to let the president reshape the constitution and take on functions that it clearly assigns to the legislature. Tariffs, Congress is supposed to decide. Dissolving executive departments, Congress is supposed to decide. War powers, they belong to Congress.But you’d never know any of that from the way the president has behaved since 20 January.The supreme court has followed suit, giving its blessing to his aggressive assertions of executive authority even when they violate the clear meaning of the constitution. The court even severely limited the role of the lower courts by denying them the right to issue nationwide injunctions to stop the president from acting illegally.Beyond Congress and the court, it seems clear that pro-democracy forces did not do all they could have to prepare for this moment. Trump’s opponents have not learned from Trump how to effectively counter his “constitutional moment”.So what can we do?We can learn from Trump the importance of telling a simple, understandable story and sticking to it. Pro-democracy forces need to pick a message and repeat it again and again to drive it home. There is surely no one in America who has not heard the phrase Make America Great Again and does not associate Maga with Trump. We can learn to appeal to national pride and drive home that national greatness requires addressing the daily experiences of ordinary Americans in language of the kind they use.Make America Affordable Again. Make America Work Again for Everyone. Think X, Instagram, and what works on a podcast.Pro-democracy forces can learn to be as determined and undaunted in defense of democracy as the president has been in his assault on it. Take off the gloves. Show your teeth, take no prisoners. Trump has shown that it matters to voters not just what you stand for but also how you go about standing for it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSmile less, swear more.We can learn from the president that political success requires building a movement and not being trapped by the norms and conventions of existing political organizations. Remember Trump has gotten to where he is not by being an acolyte of Republican orthodoxy but by being a heretic.In the age of loneliness, pro-democracy forces need to give people the sense that they are caught up in a great cause.We can learn from the president that if the pro-democracy movement is to succeed, it needs to offer its own version of constitutional reform. Stop talking about preserving the system and start talking about changing it in ways that will make government responsive and connect it to the lives that people live.The six-month mark in his second term is a good moment to dedicate or rededicate ourselves to that work.What’s giving me hope nowEvery Friday since April, I have organized a Stand Up for Democracy protest in the town where I live. People show up.They hold signs and come to bear witness, even if what they do will not convert anyone to democracy’s cause. They want to affirm their belief that democracy matters, and they want to do so publicly.Some are fearful, worried that they will somehow be punished for participating, but they show up.In addition, Harvard University’s willingness to resist the Trump administration’s demands that threatened academic freedom and institutional independence set a powerful example. Whether or not the university reaches an agreement with the administration, Harvard’s example will still matter.It is also true, as Axios reports, that protests against Trump administration policies and allies “have attracted millions in the last few months: Tesla Takedown in March, Hands Off! and 50501 in April, May Day, No Kings Day in June, and Free America on Independence Day”. Another mass event, “Good Trouble Lives On,” occurred on 17 July, “commemorating the fifth anniversary of the death of civil rights leader and former Rep John Lewis”.Those events need to happen more frequently than once a month. But they are a start.Axios cites Professor Gloria J Browne-Marshall, who reminds us that “effective protesting often starts with an emotional response to policy or an event, swiftly followed by strategy … The current movement is reaching that second stage”. In that stage, it has a chance to “‘actually make change in the government’.”I think that the seeds of that kind of opposition have been planted. But there is no time to waste if we are to prevent Trump’s political ingenuity from succeeding in permanently reshaping the institutions and practices of our constitutional republic towards authoritarianism.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More