Mendocino County Today: Sunday 10/19/2025

Cool | Local Protesting | Ed Notes | Aunt Tifah | Parking Garage | AV Events | Pet Peppa | PVP Discussion | No Charge | Yesterday's Catch | To Autumn | Oz | An Epiphany | Not Right | No Hurry | Not Yet | Marco Radio | Foreboding | Book Juggler | Office Bully | Interstate Closure | Political Speech | Being Dead | Same Game | Chicken Trial | Most Unhinged | Pete Muttonhead | Beatnik | Barenboim Berlin | Abusive Language | Hardest Fight | Petty Bourgeois | Lead Stories | Worse Shape | 100 People | Complete Failure | Peace Trap | Nickname Guide | Sick America | Big Crowds

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COOL marine influence will move across the area today with some very light drizzle along the coast. Warmer and drier conditions will rapidly return early this week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 48F under clear skies this Sunday morning on the coast. Some high clouds & a breeze moving in for today. Generally sunny this week until rain returns on Friday. The Friday system appears to be weakening since last check, we'll see ?

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NO KINGS PROTEST PHOTOS, Fort Bragg, October 18th, by Bob Dominy

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10/18/25 - FORT BRAGG, California; No King Demonstration 

Noyo Bridge today, lots of people--people I know, people I think I know--or knew--people I don't know, lots of people I may or may not know (bad memory for names, faces and such, I), lots of people I'd like to know (Christ, I sound like Donald Rumsfeld in his hayday). The mood was jubilant, weather the same.

It was a mob, a happy, smiling, orderly-disorderly mob, the biggest bunch I recall seeing in little ol' Fort Bragg since the Minerals Management Offshore Oil Hearing of 1988. That show was by artist Rachel Binah, among many others. Or maybe it was the Redwood Summer one of Judi Bari. That was big--and dangerous. Loggers and tree-huggers were way too close for comfort. Cops, keeping the peace for once, physically intervened, CHPs riding their motorcycles into the crowd, separating the potentially warring factions. Never have I seen such lovely cops!

Today, refusing the crowning of Donald Trump, was a happy, cheering crowd. Cars going by blew hard or just tooted. No matter: the crowd yelled back. Strangers affirmed their camaraderie with shouts, signs, car horns, waves and grins. I didn't see a cop anywhere, though no doubt they were generously deployed.

None of this will make Trump do or not do anything, but you gotta show numbers. You have to demonstrate to the world that Trump's opposition is gigantic, because he, the gods' favored one for this strange, terrible moment, has a way of swelling up till he seems like King Kong. (There were lots of inflatable animals, too. I watched a fabulous giant Newfoundland dog cringe before an even gianter dragon. Still, the action stayed happily peaceful--bit of music, a tall lady with her T-shirt off, kids, pets.)

It resembled a place I used to know, the United States of America.

— Mitchell Clogg

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FRANK HARTZELL: What was your take on the No Kings event today in Fort Bragg or the other four spots in the county? I will print anything from somebody who actually went. I wont print political rants from any side that are detached from today's event, in mendocinocoast.news

A Reader: Yes Frank, in a nutshell a very beautiful, positive day. Smiling faces expressing our dislike for any wanna' be kings or dictators while showing our overwhelming love for our democracy and our home, The United States of America. And to all who came to show the World just who we are on The Mendocino Coast, a well deserved thank you very much. Peace and love brothers and sisters.

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ED NOTES:

DAILY MAIL, Saturday morning: “Thousands of 'No Kings' protesters clutching obscene signs pack the streets to oppose Trump… as America braces for violent chaos.”

DOUBT IT, but violent resistance to Trump's daily crimes is the historically logical next step. Meanwhile, in Mendocino County, where quiet chaos is a way of life, as it is these days most places, heavily peopled and strictly peaceful anti-Trump rallies were held all over the county, the largest anti-government — or any kind of demonstration — in county history. Could Mendocino County's quiescent Trumpers manage anything approaching Saturday's rallies? Given their tepid turnout to honor the memory of the recently murdered and self-alleged “Christian,” Charlie Kirk, the guy who made millions lying to dumb kids, it seems pretty clear that Mendolib has the Magas cordoned off, leaderless, bereft, and surrounded by thousands of “leftwing lunatics.” (Without the late, volcanic Jerry Philbrick, the last Mendo rightwinger capable of rousing the Trumpers out of their Barca-Loungers, Mendo's Magas may as well not exist for all their visibility. Or maybe they've awakened to the obvious — Trump and his billionaires are not on their side.

MENDO'S MILK MONITORS were out in full force, as if the average age of the Mendo No Kings protester wasn't 75 and secure in the tepid embrace of the Democrats.

We expect all participants to:

• Act lawfully
• Stay on the sidewalks
• Carry no weapons of any kind
• Seek to de-escalate any potential conflicts
• Follow the instructions of our yellow-vested safety volunteers

No Kings events are not intended to be acts of civil disobedience. This is a peaceful and legal exercise of our constitutional right to public assembly and free expression.

THERE'S some political hope. Zohran Mamdani will apparently be the next mayor of ungovernable New York City. A democratic socialist, Mamdani has inspired young people to turn out for him, as have Bernie, AOC and few other Democrats trapped in the geriatic irrelevance of Schumer and Pelosi. He promises — “fast and free” buses, universal child care, a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, five experimental publicly owned grocery stores, and so on, ideas successfully deployed in many countries around the world. Natch, Mamdani is viewed as the reincarnation of Che Guevara by the Trumpers. But for young people, and Americans generally, the cost of living has made living at all problematical.

WHERE'S THE NORTHCOAST'S MAMDANI? Why are we stuck with Pelosi and Schumer knockoffs like Huffman, McGuire, Thompson.and their reactionary ilk occupying the political power slots up and down the Northcoast?

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A READER WRITES: The new courthouse frame structure looks like a parking garage. So by the time it’s finished it will be a parking garage with a barcode so the judges can set their GPS devices to home in on the parking garage from their nice homes on the west side and then their all-electric robo-cars will park themselves and their robed occupants in their nicely appointed courtrooms for the day at taxpayer expense. Appropriate for Ukiah, actually.

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AV EVENTS (today)

AV Historical Society Presents a Cemetery Walk
Sun 10 / 19 / 2025 at 1:00 PM
Where: Evergreen Cemetery More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4989)

The Anderson Valley Museum Open
Sun 10 / 19 / 2025 at 1:00 PM
Where: The Anderson Valley Museum , 12340 Highway 128, Boonville , CA
95415 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4913)

AV Village Monthly Gathering: Growing Older But Not Up
Sun 10 / 19 / 2025 at 4:00 PM
Where: Anderson Valley Senior Center , 14470 Highway 128, Boonville, CA
95415 More Information
(https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4901)

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UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Peppa is a big-hearted, big-bodied sweetheart who’s ready to waddle her way right into your life (and probably your couch). This mellow lady is all about the slow life — gentle walks, cozy naps, and plenty of belly rubs are her idea of a perfect day. She’s had a doggie roommate before and did great, so she’d likely enjoy a calm companion or a relaxed household that matches her chill vibes. Peppa does have some mobility issues due to her weight, but that doesn’t stop her from soaking up love and attention like a pro. If you’re looking for a low-energy, affectionate best friend who’s happy just being near you, Peppa might be your perfect match. She’s sweet, snuggly, and has a heart as big as her smile. Peppa is 8 years young and 75 pounds.

To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, tortoise, horse, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com Join us the first Saturday of every month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event.

For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.

Our dog kennels are now open to the public Tuesday-Friday 1:30 to 4 pm, Saturday 10 am to 2:30 pm, closed for lunch Saturday from 1 to 1:30.

Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

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SUPERVISOR MADELINE CLINE:

Friend—

No issue is more pressing for Mendocino County than the future of the Potter Valley Project. I remain committed to fighting for our water supply and as a leader, never shying away from the tough conversations.

On Tuesday, October 21, 2025, at the Board of Supervisors meeting, we will be doing just that. Supervisor Norvell and I are bringing forward a resolution regarding the Potter Valley Project and hope to have a robust discussion regarding what is at stake for our whole county. This agenda item, 4b, will be discussed at 11am and we would welcome your participation in the conversation.

Thank you for the opportunity to serve you and our community.

Sincerely,

Madeline Cline, 1st District Supervisor

Redwood Valley

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, October 18, 2025

DEREK EASTEP, 40, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, sex offender failure to report address change, probation revocation, resisting.

ROLAND ESKIND JR, 56, Ukiah. Parole violation.

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TO AUTUMN

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

— John Keats (1819)

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AN EPIPHANY

Makes no sense at all
Till it dawns on you it might
And then Wham! it does

— Jim Luther

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ERNIE BRANSCOMB:

I don’t personally need food assistance. However, having gone seriously broke three times in my life I can understand the need for some folks to need food assistance.

I have never filed for welfare or filed bankruptcy. Although, I would certainly have qualified for both. My wife and I struggled to pay what we owed. We take a certain amount of pride at never have been a burden to anyone.

Looking at how many people will easily accept food and welfare that they don’t need still bothers me.

Some of the folks that moved here in the seventies found great humor in how easy it was the rip off Humboldt’s welfare system. The locals at the time were offended by that attitude. People that will take what they don’t need by taking food out of some people’s mouths is just not right.

Maybe people should rethink their unfairness and start leaving food assistance for the people that might need it. Who knows, it might be you or I that seriously need it someday.

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“IF PEOPLE BRING so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those who will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

— Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Farewell to Arms’

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MEMO OF THE AIR: Sighing sigh after sigh.

Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (9pm PDT, 2025-10-17) 7.5-hours-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on KNYO.org, on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part.

https://memo-of-the-air.s3.amazonaws.com/KNYO_0666_MOTA_2025-10-17.mp3

Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

Back in high school I knew a girl who looked very like this. Her name was Dana. Just about the prettiest white girl I had ever seen. There was one moment when I should have kissed her but I was frozen with shyness and didn't. It's fifty years later and I still regret it. https://www.vintag.es/2025/09/anastasiya-vertinskaya.html

Rerun: Fa, circa 1939. https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-night-at-garden.html

Anti fa, circa 1945. Make a great gift. https://fremontclothing.com/product/antifa-c-1945-shirt/

The Latest and Best Conundrums, such as: "When is a door not a door?" I would have said, "When it is a jar," but apparently the answer is, "When it is an egress. (A negress.)" Hmm. Also, "When may you be said to imbibe a piano?" "When you have a piano for tea. (A pianoforte.)" And, "Why are married men like steamboats?" "Because they are sometimes blown up." (I don't get that one at all. I think that married people can be said to blow up, meaning to fight, but is that what's meant? And did steamboats blow up a lot?) And, "Why is a vote in Congress like a bad cold?" "Because sometimes the eyes have it and sometimes the nose." And the end of the book is all fun math problems. https://archive.org/details/conundrumsriddle00rive/page/n3/mode/2up

Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

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BOB ABELES:

Apropos of the times we’re suffering through, I thought it might be worthwhile to point out that at least someone saw it coming…

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

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PORTER NOT READY

Editor,

Anyone viewing the video of gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter yelling at her hapless staffer to get out of her shot during a staged Zoom interview with then Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm would not identify Porter as either “fierce” or a “fighter.”

This isn’t really an issue of former Rep. Porter’s “temperament with colleagues and co-workers.” Anyone who has worked for a terrible boss would recognize an office bully in the video, someone predisposed to lash out at those working under her for essentially trivial reasons.

It’s not a good look for an aspiring governor of either gender.

Porter’s non-apology apology sounds as contrived as her position on Gaza during her failed Senate campaign, when she called for a ceasefire yet chose not to break with the Biden administration by voting to cut off military aid to Israel.

Is Porter really the best person to administer and enforce state laws protecting workers from abusive employers?

Colin Gallagher

San Francisco

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'CHAOS': LIVE-FIRE MILITARY EVENT SURPRISE TO CLOSE KEY CALIFORNIA FREEWAY

by Farley Elliott

Despite earlier statements to the contrary, officials announced plans to close a massive chunk of Interstate 5 in Southern California through Camp Pendleton on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 18. The closure, which will likely snarl traffic for hours as commuters, locals and tourists navigate a 30-mile detour through the Inland Empire and rural San Diego County, is set to pinch off the busy but narrow freeway connection between greater San Diego, the state’s second-largest city, and Orange County to the north.

The surprise closure by the state comes just days after federal officials announced the opposite, saying, “No public highways or transportation routes will be closed,” in a news release from the Marines at Camp Pendleton on Wednesday.

The closure is part of a planned military celebration at the large Marine Corps base north of San Diego, dubbed “America’s Marines 250: From Sea to Shore — A Review of Amphibious Strength.” The event is planned to involve the firing of live munitions, per a statement from Gov. Gavin Newsom Saturday, and comes the same day as a nationwide series of No Kings protests against the Trump administration.

“The President is putting his ego over responsibility with this disregard for public safety,” reads the statement from Newsom’s office. “Firing live rounds over a busy highway isn’t just wrong — it’s dangerous. Using our military to intimidate people you disagree with isn’t strength — it’s reckless, it’s disrespectful, and it’s beneath the office he holds. Law and order? This is chaos and confusion.”

The California Highway Patrol further confirmed the closure, which will see the entire 17-plus-mile stretch from Harbor Drive in Oceanside to Basilone Road to the north closed between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Amtrak’s busy commuter rail line, known as the Pacific Surfliner, which connects from San Diego all the way to San Luis Obispo, is also slated to be closed along this same stretch of coastline.

“The Marine Corps did not request the closure of the I-5,” Camp Pendleton officials said in a statement emailed to SFGATE. “We appreciate the public’s patience as Marines and Sailors conduct realistic training during today’s historic Amphibious Capabilities Demonstration, showcasing the strength and unity of the Navy-Marine Corps team and ensuring we remain ready to defend the Homeland and our Nation’s interests abroad.”

(sfgate.com)

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THE WHOLE BEING DEAD THING

[BETELGEUSE, sung:]
Hey, folks! Begging your pardon!
'Scuse me! Sorry to barge in
Now let's skip the tears and start on the whole
Y'know
Being dead thing

You're doomed! Enjoy the singing
The sword of Damocles is swinging
And if I hear your cell-phone ringing
I'll kill you myself
The whole being dead thing!

Death can get a person stressed
"We should have carpe'd way more diems
Now we're never gonna see 'em!"
I can show you what comes next
So don't be freaked
Stay in your seats
I do this bullshit, like, eight times a week!
So just relax, you'll be fine
Drink your fifty-dollar wine
And take a breath!

[ENSEMBLE:]
Welcome to a show about death!

[BETELGEUSE:]
You're...
You're gonna be fine...
On the other side...
DIE! YOU'RE ALL GONNA DIE! YOU'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

I'll...
I'll be your guide...
To the other side...

[ENSEMBLE:]
Oh, and full disclosure: It's a show about death!

[BETELGEUSE:]
Everybody gets on fine here
Like Rodgers, Hart, and Hammerstein here
The women's bathroom has no line here
Just...
Pee where you want!
The whole being dead thing!
You're just gonna love the folks here
Yes, I know you're woke, but you can take a joke here!
And every show I do, like, a TON of coke here

The whole-
[*heavy sniffing*]
PAH-HAH! The whole being dead thing!

Nobody is bullet-proof!
"I work out, I eat clean!"
Jesus, pass the Dramamine
Time to face the brutal truth:
'Cause we're all on a hitlist
Might not live 'till Christmas
Choke to death on Triscuits
Hey, that's just statistics
So take a little break here
Kinda like a wake here
The scenery is fake here
But there's a giant snake here!

[ENSEMBLE:]
Welcome to a show about death!

[BETELGEUSE:]
You're...
You're gonna be fine...
THANK YOU!
On the other side...
HOW YOU DOIN'?
Not good!
Ba-be-ba-ba-be-bo-boo-bap-boop!

I'll...
I'll be your guide!
To the other side!
Seriously, though, this is a show about-

[ENSEMBLE:]
Death is taboo, but it's hardly something new
There's nothing medical professionals could do
'Cept maybe just bill you

[BETELGEUSE, spoken:]
If you die while listening to this album
It's still gonna keep playing

[ENSEMBLE:]
There's no destiny or fate
Just a terrifying wait
Filled with people that you hate
And on a certain date, the universe kills you!

[BETELGEUSE:]
That's the thing with life:
No-one makes it out alive!
Toss that body in the pit
"Gosh, it's awful, ain't it tragic?"
"Blah, blah, Bible. Jesus magic."
When you're dead, who gives a shit?
No pilates, no more yoga!
"Namaste", you freakin' posers

From the cradle to cremation
Death just needs a little conversation!
I have mastered the art (Dies Irae!)
Of tearing convention apart (Dies Irae!)

So, how about we all make a start (Dies Irae!)
On the whole being dead thing!

[ALL:]
God, I hope you're ready for a show about death!

— Eddie Perfect (2019)

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UC BERKELEY ACTIVIST TESTIFIES SHE SAVED SICK BIRDS, NOT STOLE THEM, IN CHICKEN RESCUE TRIAL

by Ko Lyn Cheang

Zoe Rosenberg, a 23-year-old UC Berkeley undergrad and animal rights activist, first appeared on the witness stand Friday, about two weeks into a criminal trial centered around the four chickens she took from a Petaluma-area poultry slaughterhouse in June 2023.

Before a jury in a Sonoma County courthouse, Rosenberg testified that she believed at the time that her actions, often called “open rescue,” were “lawfully justified” to prevent what she considered “criminal animal abuse” by Petaluma Poultry, a Sonoma-based operation owned by Perdue Farms, a major poultry supplier nationwide. Prosecutors from Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office argued that regardless of what she believes, what she did was unlawful.

For taking the chickens valued at around $24, Rosenberg is charged with three misdemeanors and felony conspiracy. She faces up to five and a half years in prison.

The thrust of Rosenberg’s legal defense lies in the idea that she thought it was necessary to remove the birds to protect them from animal abuse. At stake is the question of whether and to what extent animal rights activists can break the law in order to protect animals from what they consider animal abuse.

Rosenberg is part of a Berkeley-based animal rights activist group, Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, which has conducted highly-publicized, controversial “open rescues” for more than a decade, filming members taking animals that they believe are sick and injured from factory farms.

The practice has drawn criticism from farm advocates and farmers who say they felt scapegoated by DxE’s methods. That’s especially true in Sonoma County, an agriculturally rich region that produces close to a billion dollars worth of agricultural products annually.

In a bid to bring public attention to Petaluma Poultry’s practices and those of the meat industry, Rosenberg rejected a plea deal, though she also said the terms offered to her were not favorable.

Sonoma County just two years ago successfully prosecuted DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung for his role in two factory farm protests in Petaluma. Hsiung was sentenced to 90 days in jail and two years of probation.

If a jury decides to acquit Rosenberg, it could embolden animal rights activists and DxE in justifying their practices of “open rescue.” They wouldn’t be the first ones to do so: juries in Utah and Merced County have acquitted DxE activists for taking allegedly sick animals from factory farms in the past three years.

Rob Muelrath, spokesperson for Petaluma Poultry, wrote in a statement after Friday’s trial session that Rosenberg’s break-in was a “well planned deliberate breach of private property with intent to steal — a criminal act that was deliberate, strategic and bordering on corporate espionage or agro-terrorism.”

“As the court has already noted, their actions triggered a temporary facility shutdown and posed contamination risks that created a more dangerous situation than they claimed to be addressing,” Muelrath wrote.

During Friday’s testimony, Rosenberg said that she was motivated to join an “open rescue” operation at Petaluma Poultry on June 13, 2023, after seeing photos and videos shared by a fellow DxE member, Raven Deerbrook, that led her to believe chickens were being mistreated, including being scalded alive, at the slaughterhouse. Rosenberg also said she read an article in the Santa Rosa-based Press Democrat newspaper detailing how the factory struggled to eliminate a bacteria from chickens that makes people who consume them sick.

Deerbrook was an animal cruelty investigator for the organization at the time and was charged alongside Rosenberg in this case, but accepted a plea deal.

Lights in the courtroom were dimmed Friday as Rosenberg’s attorneys played a video allegedly filmed by Deerbrook during an undercover investigative visit to Petaluma Poultry in early 2023.

The video showed chickens on a conveyer belt where their throats were being automatically slit. Rosenberg testified that the conveyer belt led to a scalding tank where the chickens would be immersed in hot water to aid defeathering, a common process in commercial poultry processing.

Several of the chickens appeared to be alive, flapping their wings, and their throats were not slit. Rosenberg said that she believed chickens were being scalded alive at the slaughterhouse.

Rosenberg said she and Deerbrook then snuck into Petaluma Poultry in May to investigate the conditions and because Rosenberg wanted to see what she saw on video for herself. Rosenberg said she saw no chickens in the facility that night but saw documents in the building’s office that recorded how many birds had been scalded alive.

“It’s very distressing to me,” she said in the trial.

Rosenberg, who is vegan, has run a chicken sanctuary with her mother in San Luis Obispo since she was 11 called Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary. She said she has cared for more than a thousand chickens.

“I try to imagine my chickens in that place,” she said, referring to being scalded alive.

Rosenberg said she then reported their concerns to numerous law enforcement agencies, including the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office, and various county animal care services agencies, but not the Petaluma Police Department. She said she did not hear back from most of them. The District Attorney’s Office told her that they do not accept reports from citizens and suggested she report it to law enforcement, she said.

The prosecutor on Friday’s trial questioned why she didn’t report it to Petaluma Police before breaking into the slaughterhouse and taking four chickens.

“It made me feel like I wasn’t being listened to and helpless on behalf of the animals,” she said. That’s when she took matters into her own hands. On June 13, Rosenberg testified, she went into Petaluma Poultry’s slaughterhouse and found a truck full of chickens that smelled foul, like nothing she’d ever smelled at a chicken sanctuary. She said she inspected the trays of chickens and removed one that was covered in feces and had a bare, red and raw underside.

She said she removed three others that appeared lethargic and were covered in feces. One had blood on its tail. Later, when she’d moved the chickens to a house prepared by DxE to give them medical attention, she said she found wounds and scratches covering their skin under their feathers. She said that they did not want to stand up, eat or drink.

She named the birds Poppy, Ivy, Aster and Azalea and said, eventually, they got better.

Rosenberg said she did not think open rescue was always legal, only when the birds are sick, injured or suffering. California’s animal cruelty laws make it a felony to subject an animal to “unnecessary cruelty” or “needless suffering.”

She said she did not believe it was legal to remove birds simply because she had a moral objection to them being slaughtered.

Rosenberg also testified she thought what she was doing was legal because she had sought a legal opinion from Bonnie Klapper, a former federal prosecutor who’s served as legal counsel for DxE.

She also said she had previously conducted open rescues, including in the presence of law enforcement, without being arrested. In 2018, she said, she carried a hen out of a factory egg farm in Sonoma County past a Sonoma County Sheriff’s officer who did not stop her.

A few years ago, she said, she and her mother were escorted by a San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s officer onto a cattle farm to tend to two allegedly sick and dying cows.

The trial will resume next week.

(SF Chronicle)

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FRAIDY-CAT AT THE PENTAGON

by Maureen Dowd

It is a truth generally acknowledged that Pete Hegseth is a muttonhead.

But I come not to bury the self-proclaimed “secretary of war,” rather to praise him.

He is going to spur some superlative Pentagon coverage. Because nothing gets a bunch of reporters going like being forced out of the building where they work and being told they aren’t allowed to do their jobs.

The Pentagon has said it will deny credentials to reporters who seek information that has not been approved for release. Hegseth already cut off access to large swaths of the Pentagon to reporters without escorts.

Journalists have walked the Pentagon’s halls since its opening in World War II. They could stake out Jim Mattis, a defense secretary in President Trump’s first term, when he picked up his clothes at an in-house dry cleaners and have an off-the-record chat as he walked back to his office, shirts slung over his shoulder. They might bump into the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a Pentagon Starbucks and have a conversation that could turn into a story.

Pentagon officials liked it because they could clock what the reporters were working on, and the reporters liked it because they could get tips.

Mainstream news outlets have generally been careful, responsible, sometimes even overly deferential, about covering our military and handling sensitive information.

This crackdown on reporting supposedly would protect such information, even though the secretary himself personifies the motto “loose lips sink ships.”

He was embarrassed by the revelations that the Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been mistakenly added to a chat about classified war plans on Signal, and that Hegseth had shared details of strikes against the Houthis in Yemen in a Signal chat that included his wife and brother, and that Elon Musk had been invited to a briefing on top-secret plans in the event of war with China.

And Hegseth, the former weekend Fox News anchor, does not like how the media covered him as he ascended — utterly unqualified and looking like the third lead of a cheesy spring-break movie.

As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote at the time, a trail of documents indicated that Hegseth was dumped from prior leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior and drinking on the job.

His tenure at the Pentagon has been marked by chaos as he pushed out several top Black and female leaders and derided “fat troops” and “fat generals.”

Knowing he’s in over his head, Hegseth has grown more paranoid and resentful — qualities we need in the supervisor of a nearly trillion-dollar budget, supervising troops and weapons all over the world.

When I covered stories in Saudi Arabia, officials attached minders to us. But imposing such undemocratic, restrictive protocols at the Pentagon makes it seem as though we’re run by tinpot dictators.

Trump can seem more open with reporters. Attention is his oxygen, after all. But he continually maligns the media.

And there’s a creepy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feel to the press corps at the White House now, as the perches of legacy media get filled with MAGA ringers — like the two White House “reporters” from Mike “MyPillow” Lindell’s “news” network.

One of the pillow reporters, Cara Castronuova, was among the handful of media representatives allowed in with Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday. Castronuova’s penetrating “questions” consisted of gushing over Trump, who “stuck out his neck” for a Middle East peace deal, and chiding Zelensky for wanting the weapons that Trump had suggested he might give Ukraine. “As he said,” Castronuova tartly told the Ukrainian president, “we need our Tomahawks, too.”

Trump dodged Vietnam with his bone spurs excuse, and he has called the Iraq war “the single worst decision ever made.” So, somewhere, under all that bombast and desire to be praised rather than challenged, he knows we need a vibrant Pentagon media corps to ferret out the truth when our leaders are lying to us to prolong or start wars.

America’s greatest fiascos happened because there wasn’t enough sunlight cast on them. As a chastened J.F.K. told The Times’s managing editor, Turner Catledge, after the Bay of Pigs: “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”

After reporters — including those from Fox News and Newsmax — refused to agree to Hegseth’s 21 pages of conditions, the Defense Department’s official X account trolled them with a puerile meme.

Hegseth, immature and unconfident, cannot accept that a free press is integral to democracy. As Thomas Jefferson put it: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Hopefully, the defense secretary who will take over when Hegseth is undone by the press for his ineptitude and un-American diktats will understand that.

(NY Times)

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WALLS OF SHAME, HALL OF FAME: BARENBOIM IN BERLIN

by David Yearsley

The Berlin Wall was breached on the night of November 9th, 1989. The German Democratic Republic was done. East Berliners poured through the suddenly opened border, stood on top of the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall) with Westerners, where they would have been shot down during the nearly four decades since construction on the barrier had begun in the summer of 1961.

The Berlin Philharmonic quickly organized a free concert for East Berliners to take place a couple of days later on the morning of November 12th in their home auditorium, the Philharmonie.

Designed by the celebrated West Berlin architect Hans Scharoun, the concert hall had taken up its position on the front line—culturally and geographically—of the Cold War in a desolate, bombed-out area close to the city’s Russian sector. Construction of the West’s new, exuberantly modern concert hall began in 1960, the year before the border was closed. As the Wall went up, so did the Philharmonie. Once completed three years later, it would be crowned by a stylized eagle, symbol of the Federal Republic. The bird could peer over the Wall to the socialist blocks of East Berlin beyond, and a few hundred meters to the northeast to the Brandenburg Gate, stranded in No Man’s Land.

The night the Wall fell—figuratively, its full-scale demolition began the next spring—Daniel Barenboim was making a recording with the Berlin Philharmonic. Members of the orchestra approached the maestro and proposed the idea of a spontaneous concert. Barenboim agreed, but with two conditions: he would not be paid, and the only ticket for admission would be an East German passport. Even before the sun had risen that Sunday morning, long lines had formed outside the Philharmonie.

Barenboim would not only conduct but also serve as soloist in a program made up of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto and his Seventh Symphony. The least exuberant, but spiritually most uplifting, of the Symphony’s four movements is the second, marked Allegretto. Its funeral march gives way to transcendence and hope and then returns resolutely to face the fate of great heroes. Throughout the rest of the symphony, exultant dynamism prevails. Wagner called the work the “apotheosis of the dance.” In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Wall, it not only captured the thrill of unexpected liberation but also joyfully enacted freedom of movement.

In that 1989 concert—available on DVD, on the Berlin Digital Concert Hall, and through glimpses to be snatched from YouTube—Barenboim is pure vitality at the keyboard and at the podium, fingers flying, fists shaking, a heroic figure of vigor and idea. His body commands the music to the depths and raises it up to the heights, poised and imperious, uplifted and uplifting. He directs as much with his elbows, head, eyes, and torso as he does with his baton. It is moving to watch him as he radiates joy and purpose.

The applause when Barenboim enters for the first time is thrilling. The ovation after the symphony concludes the program is volcanic.

As the clapping crests, Barenboim raises his hands to quiet the audience and tells them this is no normal day and no normal concert, and therefore the orchestra will play an encore—Mozart’s Overture to Così fan tutte, which they had been in the midst of recording. The camera searches out people in the audience—amazed, rapt, disbelieving, believing, teary, smiling, entranced, enraptured. The audience’s attire is not dark and serious West Berlin evening concert wear, but Socialist Sunday best—lots of sweaters in the muted Eastern Bloc color spectrum.

A supernova of applause explodes after the last elated chord of the Beethoven. Without permission—none is required—a woman hurries from the audience onto the stage and puts a white carnation into the sweating, smiling Barenboim’s lapel, then begins to hand out flowers to members of the orchestra. Bouquets, still in their cheap plastic wrappers, keep being brought up by people in the audience. No ushers or security guards are there to turn them back. The communal feeling is overwhelming. The ovation wants to go on forever.

A lot of water has flowed under the geopolitical bridge between East and West (and not just Berlin) since that Sunday morning. Thirty-six years on, the Wall has been gone for longer than it stood.

The day of political reunification, October 3rd, 1990, is now a national holiday—Tag der deutschen Einheit / German Unity Day—in the reunited country. On the recent 35th anniversary of the holiday, Barenboim, for many years now the Berlin Philharmonic’s honorary director, returned to the Philharmonie to lead the orchestra in a festive program that concluded, as it did on that Sunday morning in 1989, with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Barenboim is 82 years old and in poor health, beset by Parkinson’s. In 2023, he decided not to renew his contract as director of Berlin’s State Opera, leaving the post after thirty years because of his worsening condition.

I wondered if any audience member from November 1989 was in the audience this past October 3rd. Like those who have seen him conduct the Philharmonic so often in the intervening years, they would have been shocked and saddened at his decline. In a gently bowed profile, he trudged from the wings, then with mighty effort slowly ascended each of the four steps to the stage. The concertmaster stood at the ready to help him up to the podium.

The welcoming reception from the audience was huge and heartfelt—encouragement, gratitude, and anticipation in equal measure.

The program began with Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon Overture. Stricken by tuberculosis, Weber disregarded his doctor’s urgent advice and journeyed to London in the spring of 1829 to conduct the work’s premiere. He died a month later while still in England. Given the composer’s fate and Barenboim’s condition, the rising solo horn invocation that opens the overture took on a mortal cast. The ensuing whimsy of the music worked in mournful counterpoint to Barenboim’s halting movements. An overture is intended to start things off—an opera, a suite, a concert. But this one, for all its frivolity, sounded less like a beginning than a valediction.

The opera itself is a European fantasy of the Middle East that Barenboim’s friend and colleague Edward Said shone devastating anti-imperialist light on in his classic 1978 study, Orientalism. In 1999, Said and Barenboim founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together young musicians from across the Middle East: Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria. For this ensemble, music becomes not only the representation but also the practice of peace.

In 2008, Barenboim became the only person on the planet to hold both an Israeli and a Palestinian passport. He has long called the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands “disastrous,” and on the website of the Barenboim-Said Akademie issued a statement this past summer that included these lines:

More than 19 months later, we are devastated by the tens of thousands of innocent victims claimed by the atrocious ongoing war on Gaza. I condemn this war in the strongest possible terms, and I also condemn the escalating acts of aggression and violence between Israel, Iran and the USA at the expense of the civilian population.

Little more than a decade after the Berlin Wall came down, another one went up—the so-called West Bank barrier that runs along parts of the Green Line and into Palestinian territory. Barenboim has called this Wall “catastrophic.”

Ten days before the current ceasefire was announced, it was hard not to see in Barenboim’s physical decline a metaphor for the devastations of occupation and the Gaza War.

His body is frail, but his mind remains sharp. Barenboim conducts, as he always has, from memory. He stood alone, no music desk to hold on to, no score in front of him to lean on—either figuratively or physically. The podium has a handrail at the conductor’s back that he used to pull himself up with and, for much of the concert, relied on to stabilize himself with his left hand, while the right made small, often nearly imperceptible movements with the baton, or leaned against when both arms were called to musical action. Even during the exuberant passages that would have previously consumed his physical and mental attention, he let go of the guardrail to scratch his ear or brow or fiddle with the cuff of his sleeve. His body seemed to distract him.

The first half closed with Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. It is a sad piece, not because its two movements make for only half the standard number. Passages of power and even violence alternate with rapt lyricism, both extremes and everything in between brought into poignant, sweeping relief by the Philharmonic, even as these musical emotions seemed not to be animated by Barenboim but to wash past him. The orchestra played the famous theme (the second of the first movement), heard first in the celli, as an intimate prayer for better things to come. Yet the piece seems to yearn for something it cannot attain—the Romantic condition. The composer lived for six years after abandoning the work, but its message on that Unity Day seemed to be that all plans and dreams cannot be realized in one lifetime, however many years or measures its duration. Incompleteness is an absolute. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony ends not with a Beethovenian bang, but with a whisper.

The relentlessly rising scales in the slow introduction of Beethoven’s Seventh conjured struggle and apotheosis—not just Beethoven’s, but Barenboim’s. The famed orchestra played not so much under him as for him, carried him through the funeral march and held him on his feet onward into the exhilarated dances that followed.

After the orchestra swept Barenboim through the Beethovenian charge of the finish, applause erupted—heartfelt and huge, but of a different quality than that of 1989. Now it seemed grateful, empathetic, elegiac. This time, it also didn’t want to end but went on too long, asking too much of the maestro. At his fourth and final trip back up to the stage for another set of bows, the concertmaster had to catch him when he began to fall over.

With all his flaws and frailties and enduring, invincible gifts, Barenboim faced the music and his audience, as musician and man.

He has said of that Sunday morning fall of the Wall long ago that it was one of the greatest experiences of his life. This Day of Unity concert in Berlin now counts among the greatest I have been lucky enough to experience.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)

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“ABUSIVE LANGUAGE and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.”

— Leon Trotsky

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I KNOW THIS was the hardest fight I ever lost. It was against a fellow known as Mexican Pete - a tough guy. The referee was even tougher. He was Horse Johnson. Around the middle of the first round I got set and nailed Mexican Pete on the chin with a full left hand. The back of his head hit the floor and Mexican Pete was colder than a mackerel on ice. But Horse Johnson leaned down and lifted Mexican Pete's right hand. 'Here's the winner,' Johnson said.

I was ready to kill him. I rushed at the referee and said, 'You're either crazy or crooked. That was a clean knockout.'

'I say Mexican Pete won,' Horse Johnson said. And as he said it he pulled out a forty-five and stuck it in the pit of my stomach. I didn't even think twice, for we were fighting in a tough town where everyone had backed Mexican Pete. 'You're right,' I said. 'Mexican Pete wins.'

Those were tough days in the fight game. We fought in rain and sleet and snow, and no champion ever aspired to be a gent. We fought with a bunch of guns around the ring, looking for trouble. They were hard days - very hard days.'

— Tom Sharkey

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“THERE IS NOTHING more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I do.”

— Anton Chekhov

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LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

U.S. Is Repatriating Survivors of Its Strike on Suspected Drug Vessel

U.S. Military Plans to Fire Artillery Over California Freeway

The Shutdown Is Stretching On. Trump Doesn’t Seem to Mind.

Venezuela Announces Sweeping Military Exercises as U.S. Escalates Pressure

Protesters Denouncing Trump Unite Across the U.S.

Case Against Bolton Raises Questions Over Justice Dept.’s Use of Espionage Act

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I AM SURPRISED and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.

— Hunter Thompson

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Democrats would feed 100 people to ensure not one of them goes hungry; Republicans would let 100 people go hungry fearing one might not deserve food.

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WHY DOES THE TRUMP-NETANYAHU GAZA ‘PEACE’ DEAL FEEL LIKE A CLINTON-STYLE TRAP?

by Scott Placer

The first person to become President with a mindset of tricking ordinary people for their own gain, then screwing them over after falling for their schtick was Bill Clinton. For those who may have forgotten, here’s how the Clinton-style trap worked (both Clintons, btw), as described by former Nixon White House staffer Roger Morris in his groundbreaking dual bio of the Clintons back in the early 1990s called “Partners in Power”:

“Advertising in publications like Mother Earth News and targeting low-income retirees and senior citizens looking for pleasant rural property to live out their years, the Clintons and McDougals always made a point of offering what seemed at first glance the most attractive terms. ‘Poor man's real estate financing,’ as a local lawyer called it, the deals appeared to be the Whitewater application of Diamond Jim McDougal’s ‘populist banking’ or Bill Clinton's own perennial claim to be a champion of consumers. Elderly couples on fixed incomes could buy lots for low or token down payments, with no credit checks or appraisals and only modest monthly installments at low interest. Many did just that. They were generally retired blue-collar workers from Texas, Missouri, or Oklahoma, as well as Arkansas, husbands and wives planning to build a small fishing cottage or a place where grandchildren could come. Commonly they used the bulk of their savings for money down and barely scraped together monthly payments. It was they who provided much of the $300,000 that Whitewater collected in lot sales between 1979 and the summer of 1990.

“But what began as a modest dream often ended in painful nightmare.

“Behind the Whitewater advertising lure was the fine print of a harshly punitive real estate contract. If the elderly buyers defaulted on their monthly installments for more than 30 days they found that all their previous payments were classified merely as ‘rent’ and that they had no equity in the land at all, regardless of how much they had put down or paid in. The results could be devastating. Clyde Soapes, a grain-elevator operator from Texas, put $3,000 down and faithfully made 35 monthly payments of $244.69 to the Clintons and McDougals, altogether just short of the $14,000 price of the lot. When he fell desperately ill in 1987, however, he could no longer make his payments and quickly lost the land and all his previous investment.

“Soapes was a typical case. More than half of those who bought Whitewater lots from the future president, his wife, and their extravagant partners would lose their land and all their equity payments. Partial records showed at least 16 different buyers paying in more than $50,000 and never receiving property deeds. “Meanwhile Whitewater carried on a flourishing traffic in repossessions and resales, selling some lots over and over when aged buyers faltered or when someone else simply came along and unilaterally bought out the purchasers and took the land by completing the payments. Typically, Clyde Soapes's planned fishing retreat was resold to a couple from Nevada for $16,500, then taken back again after only a few payments, and resold to yet other buyers — all for the same middling but pitiless profit wrung from the struggling and the old. ‘That is clearly not a very consumer-oriented method of selling at all,’ an American Bar Association real estate expert would say. Others were less delicate. ‘They screwed people left and right,’ said a local businessman who watched the sales. ‘Taking advantage of a bunch of poor old folks on a land deal… The future President and First Lady. That ought to be the real Whitewater scandal’.”

“It was all technically legal and not that uncommon in the Clintons’ Arkansas…”

In other words the person with the power sets up the weaker person with an arrangement fraught with strict requirements that the power-person included as a condition for the deal, making it very likely they will fail and then when victim inevitably fails the requirement is invoked in the deal maker’s own interpretation and the weaker person is blamed for not living up to the agreement that they were tricked into signing. In this respect (and a few others) Trump and Clinton are both slick realtors taking advantage of powerless people for their own personal and/or political gain. It’s a time-worn strategy that corrupt people having been using going all the way back to Machiavelli.

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HATE & FEAR RULING TRUMP’S SICK AMERICA

by Paul Street

‘The Children of MAGA’

Cambridge Dictionary online defines the meaning of the phrase “pearl clutching” as follows: “a shocked reaction in which you show more shock than you really feel in order to show that you think something is morally wrong.”

Why do I bring this up?

Bear with me, I’ll get to that in the next section below.

If you ae a political news junkie, you may know that POLITICO recently published a leaked tranche of online Telegram chats in which leaders of Young Republican groups, including a number of government employees and Republican staffers, said a whole bunch of racist, sexist, and fascist things. Here’s part of POLITCO’s write-up:

‘They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery…William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.” Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.’

Chat participants joked about the Third Reich’s gas chambers: ‘ “I’m ready to watch people burn now”… ‘We gotta pretend that we like them. Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax. Boom – they’re dead”…“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”… “I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committee member, said.’

Another chat participant said, “I love Hitler.”

As the anti-Trump traditional Republican Steve Schmidt said on his podcast, The Warning, three days ago:

“There are no words to describe the sickness revealed by these young people’s texts…These young people who venerate Trump and Hitler, and who celebrate the gas chamber, the murder of millions of people, these sick MAGA young men and women who denounced Jews, who denounced their fellow Americans, who want to put millions of Americans up against the wall, or to walk them into the gas and then to toss them into the ovens…They have been marinated in the stew of a sick society…They are the creations of a broken media and of even more broken politics. They are the fruit of COVID, and the school closings, and the social isolation. These are rotten, spoiled, degenerate, broken young Americans who hate with the deepest passion, and they’d be happy, joyous, even, maybe even sexually excited, to watch up close the violence that they cheer on in these texts….They are the children of MAGA, They love Trump and they love Adolf Hitler. These are the text messages. These are the words they use. The language is vile, it’s racist, it’s antisemitic, it is cruel, and it’s depraved.”

Yes. This is the kind of horrific discourse that the Republi-fascist Party has been cultivating among its young staffers for a long time and at an accelerated pace since the deranged and debased fascist Donald Trump rose to power.

The former leader of a putsch attempt, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump campaigned for his second term on his Mein Kampf-like claim that brown skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth is a neofascist Christian white nationalist appointed for his readiness to deploy US military troops domestically against “the” very disproportionately Black, brown, and urban “enemy within.”

Trump complained to one of chiefs of staff during his first term that his generals didn’t properly obey him “like Hitler’s generals.”

Trump’s top and fascist political director Stephen ”Camp of the Saints” Miller recently told Trump’s “radical left” enemies that MAGA is “the Storm” who will crush them with righteous force, openly channeling Joseph Goebbels’ 1932 speech honoring the martyred Nazi brown shirt Horst Wessel.

JD Vance: Pearl Clutching Poster Boy

Asked about the horrible comments leaked by POLITICO, Trump’s noxious sociopath of a Vice President JD Vance dismissed them as harmless “college chat” twaddle, adding that “kids do stupid things. Especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives.”

Vance said that he “refuse[s] to join the pearl clutching” over the Young Republicans’ comments.

Beyond the dark absurdity of writing off the adult Republican staffers’ racist, sexist, and fascistic comments as harmless childish clowning, Vance’s response is a good example of the pot calling the kettle black. In 2016, Vance wrote a New York Times Op Ed in which he said that Trump was “unfit for the nation’s highest office” and told a former roommate that Trump was a threat to become an “American Hitler.” He said, “I can’t stomach Trump.”

It’s unlikely that his horror over Trump was sincere. In 2021, following a horrific first fascist Trump presidency that ended with an attempted Trump coup (January 6) – a presidency that validated Vance’s warning to say the least (see my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America) – Vance said that he’d changed his mind and that monstrous tyrant Trump had turned out to be a “great president.”

Why the switch? Vance was running for the US Senate and wanted the top fascist’s endorsement. And now Vance would himself like to be a future “American Hitler,” as is indicated by his creepy downplaying of the Young Republicans’ sick rhetoric, by his campaigning for the neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany earlier this year, and by his spreading of the vicious racist and animalizing lie that (legal) Black Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs and cats” of their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio last year.

Vance is one of history’s great poster boys for pearl-clutching inauthenticity.

Ruling by Fear

Speaking of fascism…at some point this year I saw an interview in which the former Russian dissident and current New York Times columnist Masha Gessen smartly said that you know you are living under an authoritarian state when the fear of retribution and punishment from those in state power makes people seriously afraid to speak, write, and otherwise act in accord with their beliefs. Gessen was talking about the Putin and Trump regimes.

Here it might be useful to distinguish between different levels of retributory threat. Moving from lowest to highest, they include exclusion from participation in decision-making roles, private criticism, public criticism and shaming, cancelling, loss of employment (job or promotion) opportunities, demotion, firing, de-funding, surveillance, prosecution, incarceration, and actual and even murderous physical violence against oneself and/or one’s family members.

All of these and other threats are constantly in play to some degree in any society based like ours (a capitalist social order) on class, race, gender, national, and imperial oppression and exploitation. (I’ll never forget a fellow history professor sheepishly telling me in the fall of 2005 that he occasionally dared to tell his students that he personally opposed the mass murderous and monumentally criminal US invasion of Iraq.) In what Gessen calls an authoritarian state, the threats are dramatically elevated and often include very real threats of violence against people thought to present obstacles to the reigning regime’s authority. One among many examples of this is the significant number of journalists Trump’s “good friend” Vladimir Putin has liquidated with impunity on the path to making formerly/briefly independent Russian media into an authoritarianism-normalizing organ of Russian state power.

That such menace and fear is part of life under the deranged fascist lunatic and racist kidnapping champion Trump47 should be clear as day. I do not have time now or space here to list all the different examples of the menace and retribution the orange fugitive slave-catcher-in-chief is inflicting across US government and society, including our educational institutions, political parties, and media. But I do want to highlight six parts of the “authoritarian” Trump “story” that I think deserve special mention.

First, it’s not for nothing that Trump pardoned 1500-plus January 6 criminals and commuted the sentences of the nation’s top two paramilitary fascist leaders on his very first day in office. This was a clear message that he intends to prominently include the threat of violence from the “worst of the worst” parts of the MAGA Amerikaner base in his toolbox of rule.

No doubt many of his January 6 putschists are being purposefully accepted into the expanding terrorist wing of government known as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – Trump’s 21st Century Gestapo along with its junior partner Border Patrol.

Second, Trump and his fellow top Republifascist allies’ reckless and incendiary rhetoric about next Saturday’s No Kings Day II protests, calling them “insurrectionist,” “terrorist,” “Marxist” (I wish), and about “hating America,” is an endorsement and provocation of violence – state and/or extra-state violence– against mainstream bourgeois constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly.

Third, it’s not just Democrats, liberals, progressives, and leftists (“radical” and not-so radical) that the Trump regime seeks to intimidate. The targets include elected Republicans and other right-wingers who might dare to voice any opposition to anything Dear Leader Trump does or says. It is by now routine to hear Washington insiders remark that Trump’s lockstep control over nearly every Republican in Congress and state government reflects those legislators’ fear not just of “getting primaried” (losing primary races to more fully Trumpified candidates) but also of literal physical violence against themselves and their families. It is not far-fetched to think that Republican members of the judiciary (including Supreme Court justices) have reason to fear the same. Fascists tolerate no dissent first and foremost in their own party (Google up “the Night of the Long Knives” for some historical context from the Third Reich).

Fourth, Trump may now sit back in power a second time thanks in large measure to this fear. If Mitt Romney and others high in the Republican (now Republi-fascist) Party are to be believed (and I do), the US Senate would have convicted Trump after the US House impeached him for January 6, bringing the upper Congressional chamber’s vote to the two-thirds supermajority required for conviction but for Republican Senators’ fear of violence from Trump’s MAGA enforcers. Conviction would have prevented the deranged fascist sociopath Trump47 from running again in 2024.

Think about that: the debased tyrant and his vicious fascist coordinators (Stephen “the Storm” Miller and Herr Vought among other neo-Nazis) would not be back in the saddle inflicting a second and far worse Trumpocalypse except for right-wing Senators’ fear of MAGA bloodshed in January of 2021.

Fifth, the fear extends into the upper ranks of the US bourgeoisie, many of whose members’ grotesque capitulation to the “madness of King Don” reflects fear perhaps not so much of violence as of punishment through various executive branch agencies (the FTC, the FCC, the IRS, Treasury, the Commerce Department, defense/war contracts, etc.) and presidential shaming.

Sixth, something strangely underestimated and too poorly remembered (despite its recency and great significance) contributes to Trump’s freedom to use intimidation, including physical intimidation, to keep people in line under his widely hated regime. I am referring to the Christian fascist Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024 decision in the aptly named Trump v. The Unted States ruling. This epic dark judgement gave Trump blanket forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he has committed or commits past, present, and future for as long as that crime bears the imprimatur of “official presidential duties.” This was and is a blank check for authoritarian impunity, basically “a Reichstag Fire ruling.” And while it is true that the decision did not immunize federal agents who carry out criminal orders at Mein Trumpf’s command, the orange-sprayed wannabe strongman for life possesses the constitutional pardon power he used on day one of his second presidency to release more than 1500 January 6 thugs from jail and prison.

Never forget liberal justice Sonya Sotomayor’s ringing dissent in Trump v. the US. It included the following chilling passage:

‘The long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.

The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.

Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.

Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.

Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.’

The “nightmare scenarios” are in motion, with direction and momentum. Only a determined and sustained mass resistance movement can alter the terrible trajectory fascist consolidation as we await a 2026 Supreme Court decision on Congressional that will likely keep the US House in Republifascist hands and we face the specter of future elections where urban voters will vast their ballots in the shadow of federal troops.

(I have a bone to pick with Gessen: The Trump regime is more and worse than merely authoritarian. I am serious when I describe it as fascist, as has thankfully become common among sentient and politically and historically informed humans. The Trump regime and movement seek a new dictatorial form of governance beyond previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law not just for the sake of power in and of itself but in order to impose virulent white supremacism, toxic misogynist patriarchy, and xenophobic and palingenetic ultra-nationalism, all in the name of “traditional values.”)

‘A Harbinger of Elections to Come’

This just in vis dispatch from the brilliant Refuse Fascism activist C Clark Kissinger, reminding us that the Republifascist Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson’s refusal to seat the specially elected Congressperson-in-limbo Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) to the lower body of Congress is about a more than the Epstein Files:

‘Twenty-three days ago, Adelita Grijalva was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat by the voters of her district and her election has been certified by the secretary of state for Arizona. Yet Rep. Grijalva is locked out of her office, she cannot take her seat on the floor of Congress, nor can she vote on legislation. Why? Because the Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson has refused to swear her in.

Trying to put less ominous spin on this story, some pundits have asserted that this is all because the Republicans are afraid of adding another vote in the House to compel the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

If only the reason were that mundane! The real reason is that the MAGA Republicans are fascists who do not believe that any Democrat can or should legitimately hold public office. To this end, voting districts are being redrawn, voting rights laws are being gutted, Republicans who win by-elections are being promptly sworn in, and political power is step-by-step being concentrated in the hands of the executive branch and its military.

Those who are pegging their hopes on some future election to take power away from the MAGA fascists need to come to grips with reality. The Christian fascists of the MAGA movement believe that they are on a mission from God to “take back the country.” They have no intention of being bound by future elections that do not come out the way they want.

What is required now is a massive, nonviolence political earthquake from below with the central demand that TRUMP MUST GO NOW! Nothing less is commensurate with the threat we face. All out for No Kings Day, October 18. Then on to the national convergence on Washington DC, November 5.’

For a semi-comprehensive running record – with special recent on-the-ground emphasis on what’s happening in Chicago – of the Trump regime’s endless assault on democracy, decency, truth, social justice, the rule of law, environmental sanity, international law, immigrants, Black people, education, science and more, please see The Paul Street Report.

(Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022.) CounterPunch.org).

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