Mostly Monday Reads: Of Protests, Grass Roots, and Boycotts

“It’s a movement!” John Buss, @repeat1968  (me: Check his diaper)

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There are signs of democracy that indicate that a lot of us are not going to go peacefully into the dark night of authoritarianism. Instead, we’re going peacefully into the streets day after day to protest the takeover of American Cities by ICE and the military. The next big “No Kings” protest is on October 18th. It looks to be much larger than the first. The number of Americans concerned about First Amendment Speech Rights can be seen in the growing numbers impacting the Disney stock prices and sales. The outrage surrounding the firing of Jimmy Kimmel has grown into its own movement. You can see it in the numbers. Trump is extremely unpopular. You may see that in the numbers, too.

You may have noticed that I’m relying a lot on the Substacks of what are generally known as public intellectuals. Well-known researchers like Dr Paul Krugman and many others have switched from the Op-Ed pages of compromised newspapers to the platform. Happy little nerds like me thrive on folks who can produce the evidence.

Today, I give you “Strength in Numbers.” This is the substack of G. Elliot Morris, who calls himself a data-driven journalist. “A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is. The backlash to ABC/Disney canceling Kimmel shows why it’s important for businesses and the public to understand that two-thirds of Americans are not Trump voters.” It’s hard to fight back against an executive branch full of incompetence, extremist thinking, and chaos. However, underlying trends and events show that the resistance is clearly growing. Go look at the graph. To describe the increase in the number of Google searches for “Cancel Disney” is eye-popping.

Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest:

Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest.

This is not limited to internet posters and Google searchers; investors are worried too. Disney’s stock is down 2% over the last week, while the overall market is up nearly 1%.

This all intersects with a point I’ve been making in this newsletter for a while: many people fundamentally underestimate how unpopular Trump is. As the Disney episode illustrates, they do this at their own peril.

The graphs for Trump’s unpopularity are also astounding. Now, if we can just get out the vote and overcome all the anti-democratic election tampering going on in Republican States. The challenge will be a strong GOTV for all these Trump Haters. However, the intensity measures are astounding. We could do it.

Compare Trump’s topline job approval (-11) to that of other recent presidents, and he stands out quite clearly (not in a good way).

The president’s entire domestic policy agenda is underwater, too — especially on the economy and inflation, the two issues that won him the 2024 election.

This analysis by CNN’s Stephan Collinson highlights the nonsense performance by Trump and his cronies in an attempt to take the bases’ short, hateful, attention span away from military attacks, the destruction of the White House, and, however you frame all the nonsense surrounding Charlie Boy’s untimely death by gun violence that he clearly encouraged. “Trump will never change, but Kirk’s death shines a path to MAGA’s future.”

Of course, now that fascism has been clearly implanted in America, it is “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

President Donald Trump wants the world to understand that Charlie Kirk’s killing will not temper him or induce him to mend the country’s divides.

…

But Trump bluntly and deliberately signaled that forgiveness and unity were for others, and that he’d use Kirk’s assassination to intensify his efforts to impose personal power even more ruthlessly.

He therefore confirmed that the immediate political consequence of Kirk’s shocking assassination will be more political discord.

The president described the Turning Point USA founder as “a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose.”

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Trump said. But in a moment of brazen self-awareness that epitomized his presidency, he then broke from the script. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent.” Trump went on, “And I don’t want the best for them.” Trump seemed to almost apologize to Erika Kirk. But it was a moment when couldn’t stop himself. Or didn’t want to, so he could remain true to himself.

Statements like these are why we must remember the lessons of the civil rights movement. We cannot afford to surrender the high ground or make it invisible. We also must continue to shine a light on the ongoing grift that is the primary feature of any Trump endeavor. This reminder is from NOTUS and written by Jose Peliery. Trump’s public appearances are sideshows and attention grabs. Pulling the curtain back is mandatory. “The Justice Department Had 36 Lawyers Fighting Corruption Full-Time. Under Trump, It’s Down to Two. The Public Integrity Section is the latest casualty in the administration’s attacks on Nixon-era good-government reforms.”

All the other lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section have either quit under pressure, resigned in protest or been detailed to other matters across the nation, according to several sources who spoke with NOTUS. The section has also lost all but one of more than a dozen paralegals.

“To me, it just screams that public corruption cases are no longer a priority of DOJ,” said Andrew Tessman, a prosecutor who left the Justice Department this month. “I cannot understand why we would want to restrict that section.”

Sources with knowledge of the section’s operations say the reduction in staff means it can no longer advise the 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country on how to build cases against crooked government officials — let alone prosecute new cases on its own.

To protect against politically motivated abuses, the DOJ’s Justice Manual has long required prosecutors in local U.S. attorneys’ offices to consult with the Public Integrity Section on any “federal criminal matter that involves alleged or suspected violations of federal or state campaign financing laws, federal patronage crimes, or corruption of the election process.”

But Trump’s DOJ reversed that policy in June. “Department leadership is currently revising this section,” this part of the Justice Manual now says. “The consultation requirement is suspended while revisions are ongoing.”

Several former Justice Department employees expressed extreme concern that the change in the Justice Manual, coupled with the flattening of the Public Integrity Section, opens the door for the Trump administration to engage in partisan prosecutions of Democrats by assigning the job to prosecutors working for U.S. attorneys — political appointees nominated by the president.

This news is no surprise, given the rest of what we’ve examined today. Maybe we can get rid of them with the latest 2-day extravaganza Rapture that never happens.  Once again, I bring you William Kristol from The Bulwark: “Bag Man.”

Who uses cash anymore? Tom Homan, that’s who. On September 20, 2024, Trump’s border czar accepted $50,000 from undercover FBI agents. And no, it wasn’t Venmoed. The cash was in a bag from the food chain Cava. (Since you asked: I’m partial to the Spicy Lamb + Avocado combo. But I haven’t yet tried the newly minted Garlicky Chicken Shawarma Bowl. Morning Shots readers, let me know how it is in the comments).

The story broke Saturday afternoon in a detailed and well-sourced MSNBC News report by star investigative reporter Carol Leonnig, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner who left the Washington Post less than two months ago, and Ken Dilanian, who has covered the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies for NBC and MSNBC for a decade.

Here’s the heart of the story:

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.

The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.

The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case. The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Texas, working with the FBI, asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to join its ongoing probe “into the Border Czar and former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and others based on evidence of payment from FBI undercover agents in exchange for facilitating future contracts related to border enforcement.”

Remarkably, the Trump Justice Department isn’t actually denying the cash payment or any other fact reported by Leonnig and Dilanian. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche simply asserted that their review of the case “found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”

A New York Times report soon followed up on MSNBC’s story, adding the fun Cava bag detail and also the intriguing fact that the sting “grew out of a long-running counterintelligence investigation that had not been targeting Mr. Homan.” In other words, the Biden Justice Department was not out to get Homan.

Steve Levy of Wired has this interesting bit of news today. “I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong. Tech got what it wanted by electing Trump. A year later, it looks more like a suicide pact.” Go look at the artwork. It’s genius.

For decades, Mark Lemley’s life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He’s a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. “I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical,” Lemley tells me. What’s more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him.

But in January, Lemley made a radical move. “I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness,” he posted on LinkedIn. “I have fired Meta as a client.”

This is the Silicon Valley of 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, had turned into a MAGA-friendly mixed martial arts fan who didn’t worry so much about hate speech on his platforms and complained that corporate America wasn’t masculine enough. He stopped fact-checking and started hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. And it wasn’t only Zuckerberg. A whole cohort of billionaires seemed to place their companies’ fortunes over the well-being of society.

When I meet Lemley at his office at Stanford this July, he is looking vacation-ready in a Hawaiian shirt. In the half year since he fired Meta, very few powerful people have followed his lead. Privately, they tell him, you go! Publicly, they’re gone. Lemley has even considered how he might be gone if things get bad for anti-Trumpers. “Everybody I’ve talked to has a potential exit strategy,” he says. “Could I get citizenship here or there?”

It should be the best of times for the tech world, supercharged by a boom in artificial intelligence. But a shadow has fallen over Silicon Valley. The community still overwhelmingly leans left. But with few exceptions, its leaders are responding to Donald Trump by either keeping quiet or actively courting the government. One indelible image of this capture is from Trump’s second inauguration, where a decisive quorum of tech’s elite, after dutifully kicking in million-dollar checks, occupied front-row seats.

“Everyone in the business world fears repercussions, because this administration is vindictive,” says venture capitalist David Hornik, one of the few outspoken voices of resistance. So Silicon Valley’s elite are engaged in a dangerous dance with a capricious administration—or as Michael Moritz, one of the Valley’s iconic VCs, put it to me, “They’re doing their best to avoid being held up in a protection racket.”

Nothing ever surprises me when you separate the businesses where profits are the guiding light instead of the things Disney is suddenly learning about, like integrity and a sense of who your customers are, what they value, and what they expect from you in terms of corporate character. Speaking of lack of integrity and character, “Transcript: Trump Boat Bombings Get Worse as Damning Info Emerges/ As Trump’s military attacks on supposed drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea get worse, a legal expert explains what we know and what we don’t—and why we may be headed toward even darker lawlessness.”  This is from The New Republic‘s Greg Sargeant’s podcast.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Everybody seems to have moved on from the awful story involving President Trump’s decision to bomb a small boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea. That’s a shame because really bad stuff is continuing to happen on this front. The White House is now circulating a draft of a bill that would vastly expand Trump’s authority for exactly these types of bombings. We’ve also had another one of these strikes, and it appears just as dubious as the first one. And Trump announced that strike with an absolutely deranged tweet that should raise alarms everywhere, but isn’t. Meanwhile, Democrats just introduced a measure to restrain Trump, and the prospects for getting the GOP support it needs are approximately zero. Brian Finucane, an editor at Just Security, has been doing some great writing on this topic. So we’re talking to him about all of it. Brian, thanks for coming on.

Brian Finucane: My pleasure.

Sargent: So let’s start with the second bombing. It occurred in international waters, killed three people. Trump said these people were quote unquote positively identified as drug smugglers or narco-terrorists. But according to [The New York Times], he hasn’t identified the group or the people. Brian, has that changed? Can you bring us up to date on this bombing and how forthcoming the administration has been about it?

Finucane: Well, the administration has not been very forthcoming, unfortunately. We don’t have much additional information. We have various assertions from Trump and others in the administration, mostly in his Truth Social post, including the characterization of the people aboard the vessel as confirmed narco-terrorists, characterization of the supposed illegal narcotics aboard as, “a deadly weapon poisoning Americans,” representations about the threat this supposedly poses to Americans that would justify the use of lethal force here. But we don’t have information about the identity [of] people aboard the vessel, who they might have been affiliated with, the destination or the exact nature of the cargo.

Sargent: Yeah. And the reason he’s calling the drugs a deadly weapon is to try and recast this as a strike against a war combatant, right?

Finucane: Right. So the administration is trying to cloak its operations in the Caribbean under the mantle of counterterrorism and war more broadly. And it’s using  not just the wording, but also the tools and the tropes of counterterrorism and war. But that’s a misappropriation of those frameworks because this is not a war, this is not an armed conflict, and this is not like prior counterterrorism strikes the U.S. has been conducting for two decades post 9/11.

Sargent: It certainly isn’t, and the administration, by the way, still hasn’t even presented any kind of detailed legal rationale or any information about the first strike, which killed 11 people. Now the Times reports that the White House is circulating this bill that would essentially let him unilaterally wage war against drug cartels that he decides to label terrorists and against nations that harbor them. It seems to say that part of this would be done in consultation with Congress, but it doesn’t define what it would entail to consult with Congress. The Times says this bill is setting off, “alarm bells among some people,” at least in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Brian, what do we know about this, and what do you make of it?

Finucane: So I want to caveat at the top that it’s hard to know at this point how seriously to take this legislation. Reportedly, it was introduced or was put forward by Representative Cory Mills of Florida. It’s also been reported that it’s been circulated by [the Office of Management and Budget] to departments and agencies for comment. That’s normally a process associated with legislation that the administration takes somewhat seriously, but I don’t think we know for certain just how seriously the administration is taking this. But the text is really quite striking. It is modeled on the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force, which has been the principal statutory authority for the U.S. war on terror for the use of force against the Taliban, against Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al Shabaab, and other Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates. And it really gives the president a blank check to use force anywhere in the world against anyone he designates under the provisions of this as a narco-terrorist. There are no geographic restrictions, so potentially they could include the United States. It would provide detention authority. And I think it’s really important to note here that this represents a dramatic reallocation of Congress’s war powers to the executive. It would be the president deciding who the United States goes to war with and where that takes place.

A pirating we go! Ho Ho Ho!

I’d really like to say that this entire new Trump term is literally making me sick. The stress, the craziness, the dysfunctional brains of the cast and characters are like some kind of dystopian, D-grade horror movie. But my No Kings t-shirt is clean. I have a new pair of walking shoes coming via UPS soon, and I have grandchildren to think about. I’m still standing. Plus, I have to read this article from CNN before I see students tonight. The few with inquiring minds want to know and do ask. Plus, it’s data!  And I’m a numbers nerd! “The U.S. economy has a new problem: Democracy is under siege. The nation’s top economic statistician was fired. Central bank independence is being undermined. The federal government is buying chunks of private companies and demanding cuts of revenue streams. Presidential power to lob tariffs has been wielded in unprecedented fashion. And federal regulators are threatening media companies over late-night comics.” Matt Egan has the byline.

These events all took place this year, and not in a third-world country, but in the world’s preeminent democracy under President Donald Trump.

Some political scientists see a pattern that suggests American democracy is being undermined in real time. The stakes are massive for the US economy and the business world.

“I have never been this concerned about democracy in the United States,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow of governance studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, told CNN in a phone interview.

CEOs are growing alarmed — even if they’re publicly staying quiet to avoid the wrath of the White House.

Business leaders are “quite alarmed” in private about the state of democracy in the United States, according to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Yale professor known as the “CEO Whisperer” due to his extensive rolodex in the business community.

“We’ve had a serious erosion of the foundations of democracy,” Sonnenfeld, founder and president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, told CNN

Research shows that democracies tend to thrive financially.

“Democracy is just good for the economy. And autocracy is bad for the economy,” Williamson said. “Autocrats are just not good at managing economies. Policymaking tends to be erratic as democratic institutions decline.”

Democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20% in the long run, according to a 2019 study titled “Democracy does cause growth” that was published in the Journal of Political Economy, a University of Chicago peer-reviewed journal.

Researchers said the positive effects of democracy “appear to be driven by greater investment in capital, schooling and health.”

Well, I’ll just keep lecturing on this until they throw me in one of those made-for-profit prisons down here in Lousyana for people with brains and different viewpoints.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?