Friday Homestead Dispatch

There are two heroes that stand out this week…more on both below.

It’s a tempting position. But it’s a little like refusing to bail out a lifeboat, letting others keep at it while you sit quietly on your plank. If “negative resistance” has a flaw, it’s that you may wish to be done with politics, but politics is never done with you. Nobody, with the possible exception of the oligarchs, is that free. El Akkad seems to better understand this than Steiner. “I live here,” he writes, “because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles.” He lives here, he says, not because of the intellectual freedom it allows him (as Steiner claims), but because he is afraid.
— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad

1.
THIS is the current Supreme Court majority. They are laughing at us working class stiffs while grifting away…because they CAN. They owe the American people nothing because it was other grifters and con artists who handed them the robes. They only protect the wealthy and the elite, and you ain’t in that club (nor would you want to be…pttuiiiiiii).

This week Dean Obeidallah writes that we have watched these six GOP justices gut the Voting Rights Act, strip women of constitutional right to reproductive freedom, protect Trump from prosecution, legalize discrimination, given the wealthy more political power, overturn progressive federal/state laws and more. And they did this by invalidating federal and state laws, overturning nearly 100-year-old precedents and in essence legislating from the bench all in service of the GOP’s goals.

Even with the ‘win’ of the birthright citizenship case, the idea that Trump could sit at his desk and rewrite the 14th Amendment based on a whim to end birthright citizenship should have resulted in a 9 to 0 ruling against Trump. Instead, only the bare minimum of five Justices joined in the full opinion to invalidate Trump’s efforts as violating the Constitution. (Justice Kavanaugh joined with the five justices to say Trump’s order was invalid but not because it violated the 14th Amendment. Rather it. was because in his view, the order violated a federal law--which Congress could change to agree with Trump.)

The horrendous ruling in favor of the *rump administration’s attempts to end Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the ideologically-aligned 6-3 vote in Mullin v Doe paves the way for the potential deportation of around 350,000 Haitians currently living in the United States under TPS, despite the Caribbean country’s deteriorating humanitarian crisis.

Even some Republicans have expressed ‘concern’ about the ruling: The Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, issued a statement calling the ruling “a mistake,” citing the over 10,000 Haitians that “were working and contributing to our community and economy.”

Thanks for the hand-wringing, Governor.

A woman named Megyn Kelly, apparently a former Fox News mouth, ranted on her podcast, “Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us... GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI!”

Tell her, JoJo…

ProPublica reports that for the first time in two decades, decisions on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket outnumber the merits docket.

The modern shadow docket was born in 2016 when the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay against President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, experts say. Papers obtained by The New York Times show that liberal justices at the time urged Roberts not to decide the case on an emergency basis because it broke with longtime precedent. The conservative justices, meanwhile, forcefully argued that the president’s plan would eventually be overturned by the court anyway and that it would put too much of a burden on the energy industry.

Driven by its numerous losses in lower courts, the current Trump administration appeals to the emergency docket significantly more often than previous administrations, and the court has increasingly agreed to take quick action on its appeals.

Expanding or reforming SCOTUS needs to be a high priority for any left-leaning centrist, progressive, or socialist democratic candidate.

2.
And in that light, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term United States Representative Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary in a Denver-area district in Colorado.

Kiros, a refugee from Ethiopia, has beaten the odds, not only bouncing back from being fired from her law firm because she condemned Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, but winning handily over DeGette.

The Guardian reports that anti-Washington sentiment coursed through Colorado’s elections on Tuesday. In the race to replace term-limited Democratic governor, Jared Polis, Colorado’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, edged out the US senator Michael Bennet, according to the Associated Press. Though Bennet, who has represented Colorado in the Senate since 2009, had entered the race an early favorite, Weiser scuppered his campaign by accusing him of not taking a hard enough line against Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.

In the state’s most competitive House district, the progressive state representative Manny Rutinel defeated a more moderate Democrat, according to the Associated Press, to face Republican Congressman Gabe Evans in November. Evans is considered vulnerable and the seat is among a handful of congressional districts across the country that could determine control of the House.

Meanwhile, the incumbent senator John Hickenlooper fended off a progressive challenge from state senator Julie Gonzalesto win renomination. He will face the Republican nominee, Mark Baisley, a state senator who ran unopposed.

3.
In the meantime, active duty US Air Force Major Jason Paul Watson was arrested on the steps of the US Capitol on Wednesday after delivering a speech calling for the impeachment and removal of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

The press conference was organized by Jessica Denson, the founder of Removal Coalition. She interviewed Watson before he gave his speech and walked up the steps with his protest sign.

Another arrest was made this week when a couple climbed to the tiptop of the Empire State Building to hang a flag and propose marriage.

It’s been a good week for civil disobedience.

4.
The NYTs published a lengthy piece this week on *rump’s financial windfall during 2025: At least $2.2 billion.

I regular read Bryan C. Del Monte’s Substack, the Long Memo, and think his take on the *rump crime organization, especially as he is currently reading Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, is spot on.

He writes, it’s hard not to just feel a maddening RAGE while reading it. Everything is so much more fucked up than I imagined. This cancer has metastasized everywhere.

The level of corruption reported is not anywhere near the level of corruption occurring. If that book is remotely correct, Trump has turned the entire executive branch into an extortion machine.

As for the companies, they just basically decided to be Faust. They’ve concluded it’s cheaper to pay him off than it is oppose. They concluded early on that Trump would attempt to unlawfully use DOJ and other regulatory bodies as weapons. Thus, they decided to “join them” versus trying to resist them. Again, the result is billions flowing into his library, his campaign accounts, his kid’s pockets, and him personally.

This is what I meant by “Trump has turned the executive branch into an extortion racket.”

He’s basically telling donors and big companies, give me everything I want, or, shit will get ugly. Nice business you have there… be a shame if the EPA came in and found asbestos. Be a shame if your kid got nailed on fraud charges. Be a shame if that housing mortgage you had taken out had any inconsistencies in the paperwork. Be a shame if that merger you want didn’t sail through DoJ review.

The Kicker, and what DID NOT HAPPEN under the Biden administration, is if Democrats should actually win houses, it can’t just be non-stop impeachment. They have to dismantle effectively every bureaucratic agency in the Executive and reconstitute it. They have to investigate every donor to Trump (I’m talking the corporate and executive donors, not the rank and file).

To break the back of this machine, the Democrats have to approach Trump the way Guiliani and Chertoff approached the Bonanaos and Colombos… go after all the feeders as well as the capos.

That’s all the donors, all the companies, all the cronies. Every one of them needs to feel the heat of Congressional investigation, subpoena, etc.

Trump won’t be able to protect them, even with Pardons.

The Nation published a piece recently titled We Are in the Middle of a “Rolling Coup.” Richard Gephardt and Timothy Wirth ask the question, “Why aren’t more Americans seeing this? Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial: We are not deploying the military domestically; we are not declaring an emergency over elections; we are not coming for citizens.”

What makes this a “rolling” coup rather than a sudden one is that each part of the mechanism was built individually; each in isolation appeared to serve a defensible purpose, and no single step was dramatic enough to trigger unified institutional resistance. The public is not awake to the architecture, which is only visible when you begin to see the whole construct.

This all makes it imperative that you, me, and your neighbors all vote in November in numbers that cannot be denied.

5.
There are many candidates worthy of support across the country. In Arizona alone, if you can spare a few bucks, these folks could use their help:

Kai Newkirk in AZ-04. (Donation)
Analise Ortiz in LD-02. (Donation)
Brian Garcia in LD-08. (Donation)
Jacob Martinez in LD-09. (Donation)
Mariana Sandoval (Incumbent) in AZ-23. (Donation)
Lorena Austin (Incumbent) for AZ State House. (Donation)
Bobby Nichols for Tempe City Council. (Donation)

Here’s just one more reason to vote blue in November.

6.
One of the best rebuttals to the rise of the religious right I’ve heard, especially when it involves mandatory Bible teaching in the school systems. I’ve transcribed it for you below.

“Your religion is not special and you are not special for believing it. Your book has no authority over anyone except yourself. Between this mandatory reading list and the bills passed last year, like SB965, which would allow a teacher to preach these stories as if they were fact, it is clear that a special level of arrogance is infesting the Texas government.

Because it does take a truly special level of self-delusion to think that you are so star-spangled special that your preferred interpretation of your preferred translation of your preferred, unsubstantiated, unproven, unfalsifiable claim is correct to the point that you think you have the right to indoctrinate the next generation with it.

This is clearly a Christian supremacist agenda, if not evidenced enough by the fact that no other religions are on this list. Then, by the fact that you’ve had a parade of Christian supremacists at this podium openly stating that they believe their faith system is superior supporting this list.

This is not providing historical and cultural context, and to act like it is, is insulting to the intelligence of everyone here. Especially considering we’re talking about a religion that has done its best to erase history and wipe out other cultures in place that they’ve colonized.

And in a day when Texas government has removed restrictions on teaching these stories as if they were fact, we had a whole series of Supreme Court cases on teaching your religion’s objectively wrong claims as if it were equal to empirically verified facts and not once could Bible thumpers provide any evidence better than magic. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, not 6000. Humans are not descended from a dirt man and a rib. There was never a global flood, and a person cannot survive in a belly of a whale for three days.

I know that some of y’all are desperate to pull fact down to the level of religion by pretending evidence-based science is a religious idea, but like it or not, these are things that we can actually study and test and provide evidence for. Critical thinking, investigation and the scientific method encourage curiosity and learning, whereas the Christian religion is happy to end any investigation with except God did it or burn for eternity.

This dogmatic thinking has led to centuries of hatred, genocide, and support for slavery and to indoctrinate children into it is a direct harm. Vote against this list.”

And now…