What Caught My Eye forJune 11 - 24 (#19)

While corporate media continues to act as though they’re all in for Trump, I hope they’ll take note of how many people willingly spent hours watching scaffolding get built just to see him fail. There may be big bucks in stroking his ego, but what’s emerged is an existing market ready to see it destroyed. If media executives can’t see the moral imperative for stopping Trump, perhaps the potential payoff will speak to them.

Virginia K. Solomon, president and CEO of Common Cause, disputed the notion that gerrymandering is just politics. “It’s not,” she said from the stage. “Bleaching congressional districts and maps in an attempt to silence Black and brown voters is court-sanctioned white supremacy. Let’s call it what it is.”

I wish more people were willing to not sugar coat the fact that we have one party trying to bring back the Jim Crow South.

But corruption also has a broader meaning. It can mean the malign use of power, the substitution of the public trust for your own private will, your own private interest. And that is more than anything else what is happening with the Supreme Court. You can see it in many different ways. The Roberts Court is quite fond of simply ignoring the plain text of the Constitution whenever it gets into the way of their particular political and ideological projects.

The Roberts Court wants to do a few things. It wants to gut the Reconstruction Amendments. It wants to aggrandize presidential power. It wants to free corporate speech. It wants to allow the wealthy to interact with the political system in any way they choose. And it wants to pursue the particular partisan interest of the Republican party. And so when the text of the Constitution gets in the way, they changed the text or they ignore it.

During a televised cabinet meeting at the White House in 2025, Musk, wearing a murdered-out MAGA hat signed by his boss, had a giggle about “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention. He said it was a mistake that would be fixed. USAID whistleblower Nicholas Enrich, testifying before Congress, said that fix never came. A little more than a year after Musk’s comments, Africa is facing what could become the worst Ebola outbreak ever.

Of course they’re not going to try to fix it, they just need to outlast the news cycle.

You might think Musk’s actions gutting effective global health programs clash with his downright creepy quest to raise birth rates, but not when you consider the guy is also a huge racist. The list is too long to keep score, but a few relevant highlights: He’s stoked claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa, spent most of January posting other white supremacist talking points, and most recently has been encouraging race riots in the UK all to gin up anti-immigrant sentiments. Is there any doubt about why this guy had so much fun destroying one of the most successful global health initiatives in history, which saved millions of Black people?

Sounds about right. The programs aren’t helping the “right” people, so just cancel them.

Musk hijacked the government to destroy these missions and dehumanize these people in service of the total lie that it would make the government more efficient. Of course, there’s a big difference between “efficiency” and incompetence. An agency isn’t more efficient if it doesn’t exist; it’s simply been murdered. A fire department with no firefighters looks good on a balance sheet if you can ignore that the city is ablaze.

All of these questions are still unresolved, and some of them could torpedo the latest agreement and upcoming negotiations. For now, Trump has agreed to at least 60 days of peace — and he seems more eager to make a grand deal with an Iranian regime he could not overthrow.

It really feels like we’ve gained nothing from this.

Carrie Gillispie, New America’s project director of early development and disability, voiced similar concerns. “Successfully supporting the education of students with disabilities requires a scientific and social understanding of disability and learning science,” she said, “neither of which is reflected in [Kennedy]'s rhetoric and policy decisions.”

Given RFK Jr.'s beliefs around medicine, this is devastating news for education.

An interesting interview with the NYT reporter talking about the warehouses ICE purchased to turn into concentration camps and some of the details around their plans now to try to sell them.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) says New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is going to have to smooth things over with congressional Democrats after backing several progressive candidates who ousted incumbents during Tuesday’s primary elections.

Why? Why is the incumbent Democratic Party so completely out of touch with what the people who vote for them actually want?

Anger at Donald Trump and Israel, frustration with the status quo, impatience for generational change—these sentiments have been boiling over in Democratic primaries from Durham, North Carolina to Los Angeles, California. In New York they are given greater heat by the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, along with two left-wing groups, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Justice Democrats.

It might be New York City, but the sentiment I believe goes much further. Democratic voters are tired of the status quo. They’re tired of a political party that refuses to stand up and fight Trump and the GOP.