Adam Schiff is generally a good guy on the issues, but like many Democratic leaders, he’s wearing rose colored glasses and has a weird view of the past.

Reagan was an unholy nightmare. Trump may be worse, but please don’t paper over the crimes of Reagan: the death of so many people afflicted with HIV, Iran-contra, the enabling of right-wing media, training the electorate to accept brain dead idiocy in the president. The roots of our current problems were planted in the 1980s by the Republican apparatus, and we should not be treating Reagan as a paragon.

Would we be better off with Ronald Reagan in the presidency? I don’t think so.

This new Superman movie has triggered the same hysterical over-reaction that Barbie did: accuse it of being “woke”, be outraged that Superman was portrayed as an immigrant (like he’s always been portrayed), centering the story on kindness and opposition to war (ditto). The spectacle here isn’t the movie — it’s just a movie — but the way right-wing pundits have exploded with over-the-top hatred of the themes of the movie. It’s bizarre and stupid. Amanda Marcotte has an explanation for why they’re doing this.

The reasons right-wing pundits engage in this are transparent. The biggest is simple attention economics. Glomming onto popular topics is a good way to attract new audiences, especially those who may not be that political, and lure them into engaging with reactionary content. It also helps feed the paranoia that fuels the right, by propping up the narrative that all of pop culture is out to destroy them and their way of life. The ultimate goal is to persuade people to reject movies, music, TV and other cultural artifacts as “woke” or “Satanic,” and turn exclusively to MAGA influencers for their entertainment needs. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire even has a movie studio where they turn out subpar content that only has an audience because they’ve convinced right-wingers to eschew quality films as too “liberal.”

My initial reaction when I saw right-wing media conduct its all-too-predictable tantrum over the new “Superman” movie was that it’s just more of the same: Claim it’s “woke” propaganda, work the audience into a tizzy of boycott threats and reap the reward of alienating their base further from the rest of society so that the MAGA cult is all they have left. Which, to be fair, is bad enough. But the actual content of the complaints made this whole exercise even more sinister. The attacks on “Superman” are part of a larger effort by the right to completely rewrite history, so they can pretend that being a patriotic American means embracing authoritarian values.

A positive story about an immigrant treating people with kindness defies the current Republican program. They need to demonize “wokeness” before people realize that mass deportations and concentration camps and giving a con artist a free run over the resources of the country is a bad idea.

This is part of a larger and far more serious effort by Trump and the MAGA movement to rewrite history, and therefore, to rewrite what the story of America even is. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been hyperfocused on erasing all acknowledgement that women, people of color and queer people have long served in the military, all to prop up his childish fantasy that the only real heroes are white men. Under the guise of stopping “DEI,” shorthand for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Republicans are waging war on libraries and museums, censoring books and displays that reflect the basic truth that the U.S. has always been a multi-ethnic society. Republicans are getting increasingly aggressive about spreading Christian nationalist lies that the U.S. was founded as a functional theocracy, when it was intended to be a secular nation.

The Superman gambit is the pop culture version of this. In one sense, it’s not as big of a deal as the Trump administration systematically removing Black historical figures from the public record. But it’s still deeply troubling, precisely because it’s an attack on a story that’s so fundamental to American culture. The right understands how crucial storytelling is to the way a society views itself. Superman’s origin story is as much a part of the American identity as Betsy Ross and Abraham Lincoln. Before most of us grow up and learn the more complex story of how the United States was built by waves of immigrants who often endured plenty of racist resistance, we were warmed up to the idea by learning that the Man of Steel is an immigrant who hid his true nature until he realized he needed to unveil it to be a force for good.

It is just a movie, but it’s also a story to instill values that still, despite all attempts to erase them, are part of the American myth, and myths matter.

I tried to be fair and compare this “woke” movie to a right-wing counterpart, and there have been several examples in recent years. I’ve actually seen Run Hide Fight, an example of conservative myth-building. This one reinforces those tales of “rugged individualism” with the story of a school taken over by a group of psychopathic students who are ultimately by a girl who has had gun training and isn’t afraid to gun down the bad guys. It’s…fine? Professionally made, but ultimately boring and about as realistic as Superman, and I don’t feel like shrieking that it’s heralding the downfall of America. It’s just a predictable power-fantasy, which to the right-wing means using that power to kill the bad people.

Another movie that I haven’t seen, but have seen enough clips and reviews that I think I can judge it, was Lady Ballers, a movie about male athletes triumphing by pretending to be trans so they compete against women’s teams. It’s another power fantasy, where they pretend that all men are physically superior to women so they can humiliate those women who play basketball.

Neither of those movies had the appeal of Superman. Maybe the right-wingers need to stop and assess and focus on whatever positive values they want to promote, rather than imagining their enemies, fellow Americans, caricatured and crushed. It’s going to be hard since they’ve already crossed out truth, justice, equality, fairness, and empathy from their list of goals, which makes any story they come up with un-compelling.

In the comments, we got a mild objection to the term “Alligator Auschwitz”, which is fair, except that it reminded me of this cartoon.

“Remember: When discussing modern atrocities that sicken the conscience, we must always be SCRUPULOUSLY FAIR.”

We have to give our regime time to mature and rise to the level of mass murder.

Although, to be totally fair to the other side, I’d rather we did the scolding before the death camp fires up the ovens.

The magnitude of the approval of immigration surprises me a bit. Almost 80% of Americans think immigration is a good thing? And approval has been about 50% for the last two decades? So how did these Republican assholes get elected? Hatred of immigrants and others was their big campaign issue!

What doesn’t make sense is that the Republicans are terrorizing Los Angeles with paramilitary goon squads; they’re making mass deportations of thousands of people; the worst Supreme Court in American history (that includes the Taney court) is giving carte blanche to Trump; and for some reason, the Democrats are practically supine and largely avoiding capitalizing on this weakness in the electorate.

It’s gotten so bad that one college in California is treating ICE like a plague.

California State University, Los Angeles, is giving professors the option of moving their classes online due to students’ fears about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Heather Lattimer, university provost and vice president for academic affairs, said in a letter to faculty this week, according to the Los Angeles Times, that she had heard students are “scared to take public transit and fearful of driving to campus.”

Lattimer said faculty have “the option of working remotely for a limited time due to extraordinary circumstances they are facing.”

I remember when we made those same accommodations for COVID. I guess Republicans are just another disease.

The word is that ICE agents are sad. You don’t like them!

he reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.

“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.”

Poor babies.

Recently, they’ve been whining about a “700%” increase in assaults on ICE agents, but that isn’t as bad as it sounds — they’re phrasing the numbers to make them sound much, much worse than they are. It’s just the standard conservative persecution complex.

While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.

For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).

They’re not getting beat up. ICE is recognizing that the general public holds them in contempt and that their own organization is authoritarian and abuses its own members. I’m not going to feel sorry for them, though.

I recently spoke with a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers about morale at the agency since Trump took office. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of losing their job or being subjected to a polygraph exam. They described varying levels of dissatisfaction but weren’t looking to complain or expecting sympathy—certainly not at a time when many Americans have been disturbed by video clips of masked and hooded officers seizing immigrants who were not engaged in any obvious criminal behavior. The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.

No mass resignations yet? That’s too bad. Crank up the pressure, everyone — not in the form of physical violence, but do let America’s brown shirts know that they are hated, that they are despised and hurting the America they claim to love. More effective than punching them (I know, that would be so satisfying, even if it puts you in jail) would be looking them in the eye, shaking your head sadly, and walking away to phone your representative and write a letter to your local newspaper explaining how wretchedly criminal the thugs of ICE are.

Department of Homeland Security agents are proud of their mission, which is to carry out mass deportations.

They might as well start wearing death’s heads on their belt buckles, except that would ruin their camouflage.

The swamp is just getting thicker and denser. Will we ever be able to get rid of it?

Ted Cruz had killed weather forecasting funds in the Big Beautiful Bill, and then zoomed off to vacation in Greece while his constituents died.

The Texas senator was spotted visiting the Parthenon in the Greek capital, Athens, with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday evening. That was a day after Camp Mystic announced that more than 20 girls had gone missing in the floodwaters.

On Saturday, July 5, at about 6 p.m. local time (11 a.m. ET)—more than 24 hours after the Guadalupe River burst its banks—Cruz and his wife were spotted by a Swamp spy lining up outside the iconic tourist site.

“He was with his family and a lone security guard,” said an eyewitness at the Parthenon. “As he walked past us, I simply said, ‘20 kids dead in Texas and you take a vacation?’

“He sort of grunted and walked on. His wife shot me a dirty look. Then they continued on with their tour guide.”

He’s a perfect example of Republican governance.

Sure, it’s just chance that weather disasters struck (or is it? Should Texas put up danger signs when Ted goes on vacation?), but when children are dying, you could at least set aside your Greek dinner and get on a plane home.

Over 100 dead, and the toll is still climbing. The deadly floods in Texas swept through an area full of camping sites and Christian youth camps, and people died because they didn’t get any warnings.

The thing is, the counties involved had been discussing buying flood warning systems for years — a network of sensors that would set off sirens if the river waters were rising at a dangerous rate. That sound sensible to me. We’ve got tornado warning sirens all over where I live, and I’d be glad to get a noisy alert to wake me up if dangerous weather was bearing down on me. The Texas county commissioners were discussing this threat back in 2016.

COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was. And I keep hearing these reports of the old, old system, and I know we’re not going to deal with that though. Expect that to be gone where the Jones call the Smiths, and the Smiths call Camp Rio Vista, and Rio Vista blah, blah, blah, along down the line. But it’s still there and it still works. The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.

Except it didn’t work. They didn’t install any sirens. What saved some people was that an old couple saw the rising waters and drove around honking their car horn.

But they debated this same thing in 2017, and again decided they didn’t want any “damn sirens.”

COMMISSIONER MOSER: So we’ve talked about, you know one of the things we said sirens and we said we don’t want sirens, too many many people said they did not want sirens when they had these — when we had these gatherings. Code Red, and I don’t know if Dub wants to chime in on this, but Code Red is the same that’s going to get information to a lot of people; not to everybody, okay. One of the things that we’ll do is identify a point of contact in all of the camps, we won’t communicate with everybody in the camp, but we have a point of contact at the camp so that they can disseminate people within — to people within the camp, like during the summer when kids are there, or to RV parks. Now, if the RV parks want to have a siren themself when something goes up that’s up to them. That’s not part of our thing. So getting the information to the public is the end item of this whole thing. The first thing is sense a flood, then communicate that information to the local authorities, to the right authorities, and then for them to have a system by with which to disseminate the information to the public.

In 2021, they argued some more. They had over $5 million in federal relief funds, but they didn’t want to spend Biden’s money. So they did nothing.

Resident: Are you accountable to anyone for how you spend it? Or is it a, kind of, a reward and shows your support for this particular program? It’s not free money. Being present as we talk. How do we know this? Immediately. Unless you want it on the COVID lies and vaccination pressure, you have to send it back. Those are heavy strings. And those are strings. The deep state harangue and vilified President Trump for calling COVID for what it was and then suggest responses that were non-draconian, and then when Biden took office, the leftist government took its gloves off. It has lied and lied more about this COVID — about COVID.

The temptation is great, you’re accountable, and we would like to know where your allegiance is.

Resident 2: And I’m here to ask this Court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House. And Kerr County should not be accepting anything from these people. They’re currently facilitating an invasion of our border, and we’re going to support these people? So that’s what I have to say. Thank you.

Resident: I happen to know that there is no such thing as free money. It’s never government-funded; it’s tax-payer funded. So they’re taking our money and they’re putting strings attached to it and then they’re giving it back to us. And they’re going to get their foot in the door in this county. We don’t want their money. I feel like the people have spoken and I stand with the people. Thank you for your time.

I think we can all see how the right wing has poisoned the minds of the people. The Biden administration was the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House? These people are demented and delusional.

So the county decided to hang on to the money (sending it back might mean New York or California would use it!) and dawdled and refused to do the simplest, most sensible thing.

JUDGE KELLY: And GrantWorks has been very helpful in — in getting us focused on what colors between the lines and what doesn’t. As of last Thursday, when I got a call from Bonnie White telling me about this — the problem that y’all were going to present at the meeting, I went and got on the telephone to their Senior Vice President from GrantWorks. And there — there are discussions that they want to have with us and so we want to sit down and listen to them. And we want — we want you to hear them, too. Because you’re the public. But we — we need to know and get very comfortable with where we are with this grant before we start taking that money. And the claw back was the first thing. As far as where that money sits for the next year or two, my old law partner John Cornyn tells me that if we send it back it’s going to New Jersey or it’s going to New York or it’s going to —

MRS. LAVENDER: Or California.

JUDGE KELLY: — or California. And so I don’t know if I’d rather be the custodian of the money until we decide what we have to do with it rather than giving it back to the government to spend it on values that we in Kerr County don’t agree with. So —

COMMISSIONER BELEW: And any spending of it would have to be done in Commissioners’ Court so you’ll be able to see it and know it.

You might be wondering what Texas senator Ted Cruz was doing. You can guess. He was doing what he always does in the face of disaster.

Ted Cruz has had quite a week. On Tuesday, the Texas senator ensured the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding, a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting.

Cruz, who infamously fled Texas for Cancun when a crippling winter storm ravaged his state in 2021, was seen visiting the Parthenon in Athens with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday, a day after a flash flood along the Guadalupe River in central Texas killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and counselors at a camp.

This would be an appropriate place to cite a face-eating leopard meme, but I just can’t do it. At least 28 children, innocently enjoying a weekend with other kids, many in Christian-run church camps, drowned in these floods, all because their guardians didn’t want sirens disturbing their sleep, didn’t want to spend money from a criminal treasonous communist government, and they just wanted to hoard money to prevent it from going to California or New York (which they probably also believe are communist states).

Many of those kids were attending Camp Mystic, a Christian all-girls’ summer camp. That one camp lost 27 campers and counsellors. I can’t imagine sending a child to a fun-filled summer camp only to get word later that their body had been fished up out of roiling flood waters, that they’d died in fear and pain, all because some Texas assholes (pardon the redundancy) had refused to make camps on a river with a reputation for flash floods safe.

Parents, you can come pick up your kids’ camping gear. They won’t need it anymore.