A few days late (June 3rd, 1926) I wanted to wish a happy 100th birthday to Allen Ginsberg.
Editors’ Blog
We’ve talked a lot about what the Trump White House can and will do to subvert the 2026 midterms. The big picture is that with elections being run by states, based on the clear, black-letter law of the U.S. Constitution, what they can do is quite limited. And, as we’ve also noted, you build autocracies when you’re popular (often by goosing the economy in a smart and concerted way), not when you’re swirling the bowl with approval ratings in the mid-30s and falling. The point of returning to these facts is twofold. First is that a key aim of would-be autocrats is to demoralize the opposition, get people to lose hope and think there’s no point in fighting back. It’s important for democracy-defenders not to, with the best intentions, feed into that kind of psyop campaign. It is also to get people looking for the right things and not thinking in overly binary terms — elections vs. no elections, etc. This week we have news that focuses on the abuses of power we’re actually likely to see.
MS NOW broke the story that yesterday FBI agents fanned out across Ohio in pursuing some kind of investigation against a voting rights and voter registration group called Ohio Organizing Collaborative.
The Trump administration’s unrelenting anti-trans crusade has many familiar Trump II elements: performative cruelty; using the powers of the state to bully a vulnerable, marginalized, disfavored group; and outrageous misconduct in pursuit of poisonous policy objectives.
TPM Editor-at-Large David Kurtz was joined by Chris Geidner, publisher of the Law Dork newsletter and the leading American journalist covering these issues, to talk about this sweeping assault on transgender Americans.
Check out the full video on Substack Live.
I generally focus more on the iterative, step-by-step developments in a story like the Broadview Six case. So I want to make sure you see this Josh Kovensky piece on the context in which it all happened: Washington pressuring Chicago prosecutors to fall in line and abuse their power in the service of “Midway Blitz,” a U.S. attorney’s office hollowed out through high-level resignations and departures in 2025. All a mix desperation, violence and misconduct that brought us to that moment last October and today. Also don’t miss David Kurtz’s look at how the Broadview Six scandal is spreading to and endangering other cases which aren’t really tied to Midway Blitz at all.
I want to remind us of something that is easy to lose track of amidst the violence, predation and anger. Operations “Midway Blitz” and “Metro Surge” — both hideous faux-military operation tag lines — were never only or even mainly about mass deportation or even harassing immigrants (documented and not), though they did lots of both. Their aim was to terrorize blue cities, attack the communities that inhabit them and the states which are sovereign over them. This may strike some as a bold or ungenerous claim. But these operations were never efficient at rounding up undocumented immigrants. ICE has many more effective ways of doing that.
The U.S. and Iran have drifted back into active combat and President Trump is on Truth Social promising again to rain destruction down on the country and now more explicitly promising the outcome which triggered this conflict in the first place: the idea that Trump would duplicate in Iran what he has, kind of amazingly, pulled off so far in Venezuela. It’s a good moment to remember what’s going on here — what we’re doing here, big picture.
This war has been going on for almost four months. But most of that time has been under one or another kind of ceasefire, albeit often honored in the breach. A friend recently compared it to the so-called “Phoney War”, the eight-month period in 1939 and 1940 when Germany, France and Britain were nominally at war, though full-scale combat didn’t begin until the invasion of France in May 1940.
I’m not a huge basketball fan. A casual one, mostly. But it’s become more central to my sports interests over the years. When I was a kid, baseball and football were the only sports and baseball was … well, baseball. What else was there to say? At least in our home that’s how it was. But I’ve been pulled in the same way as the whole society has by the rise of American basketball over the course of my lifetime. And I’ve been pulled hard into Knicks’ destiny run. You’ll see other commentary about last night’s game, literally the biggest comeback in NBA playoff history. But I wanted to share one moment with you, one that came after the game when Knicks captain Jalen Brunson went on ESPN’s Inside the NBA post-game show.
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The White House recently published a new “Media Offenders” page on its official, taxpayer-funded website with a list of reporters and independent media who have criticized President Trump or the administration. This website included progressive content creators that it refers to as “deranged leftists” and “known liars.” My name is on the list.
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