What can mass protests hope to achieve in the US?

Last Saturday saw the massive No Kings protest around the country (and even in other countries) that dwarfed Trump’s sad military parade in DC. While it was an impressive show of opposition to Trump and his policies, there is always the question of what such protests can achieve in terms of practical outcomes, because of the peculiar nature of the US government.

In almost any other country, massive and sustained protests can topple unpopular governments. But that is possible because elections in those countries are not rigidly fixed as they are in the US. In those countries, the leader must resign and dissolve the government if they no longer command majority support in parliament (because of breakdowns in coalitions or defections from the majority party) or they can do so if they feel that they need to seek a fresh mandate.
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A theory of jerks and jerk behavior

Back in 2017, I had a post arguing that a good personal motto to live by is ‘Don’t Be a Jerk’. While it does not have the high-minded elegance of other axioms to live by like the Golden Rule that one should behave towards others as one would like them to behave towards you or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, those need to be unpacked more and it is not always clear how to apply them in specific situations. I did not even try to define who a jerk is. I assumed that all of us have an intuitive sense of what constitutes jerk behavior and and can recognize it when we see it, and that a jerk is someone who routinely exhibits such behavior.

But while my post was a superficial take on this topic, I was amused to find that Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy, has gone into this much more closely and published an essay A theory of jerks. He says that the older use of the term was to label a fool or a chump, like the naive Steve Martin character, seen here at the beginning of the 1979 film The Jerk.


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Trump’s small crowd for his parade overshadowed by protests

Given the hellscape that is unfolding in the Middle East and the police state that the US has become (with the only good news being that India and Pakistan have pulled back from the threatened brink of a war), to talk about relative crowd sizes at the Trump parade and the No Kings protests seems trivial. But given Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes being a key marker of his popularity, I think it is worthwhile to needle him by pointing out that his parade was, to a large extent, a disappointment. Of course, his cult followers will claim that it was just gigantic but Trump was there and must know that it was a dud, nowhere near the spectacle that he sought to emulate, the Bastille Day parade in France or the Russian military parades in Red Square.

There is a report that he castigated defense secretary Pete Hegseth for the poor showing.
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This is what a police state looks like

Trump is desperate to detain and deport as many people as possible to meet his grandiose goal of removing the alleged millions of criminals from the US. To get the numbers up, his lackey Kristi Noem, the puppy murderer who is also secretary of Homeland Security, has created a quota for the number of people that need to be taken in by agents. This has resulted in pretty much anyone being a target, with no requirement of any criminality required.

Jacqueline Sweet writes about what happened in Long Island, NY.

A DOZEN OR more masked men, some with long guns, tried to enter a men’s homeless shelter without identifying themselves in a rural town with a long-standing immigrant community on eastern Long Island in New York. Officials from the local police department later admitted they didn’t know where the masked men came from — only adding to local residents’ concerns.
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Several hours after the men were seen at the Riverhead Fire Department, they were spotted again. Twelve to 14 of the masked men, some reportedly carrying long guns, were trying to get into a Riverhead men’s homeless shelter, according to a video shared by several immigrant advocates in the area. They would not identify themselves, a shelter employee told local news outlet RiverheadLOCAL.

A shelter resident told RiverheadLOCAL that one of the men, wearing a black U.S. Marshals vest, came to the front door seeking entry but would neither show credentials or a warrant, nor give his name. (A representative for the shelter did not respond to inquiries.)

A representative for the Riverhead Fire Department told The Intercept,
“We had no idea who they were.”

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Anti-Trump protests overshadow Trump’s parade

Saturday saw massive protests all over the country against Trump. There were an estimated 50,000 people in New York and also in San Francisco. This article gives an overview.

The protests, dubbed “No Kings”, took place at about 2,100 sites nationwide, from big cities to small towns. A coalition of more than 100 groups joined together to plan the protests, which are committed to a principle of nonviolence.
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No Kings organizers estimated the day’s events drew millions of people, with some hundreds still under way in all 50 states and to some cities abroad. These included more than 200,000 in New York and over 100,000 in Philadelphia, plus some small towns with sizable crowds for their populations, including the town of Pentwater, Michigan, which saw 400 people join the protest in their 800-person town, the No Kings coalition said.
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Open thread

I have not felt the desire to blog the least few days because the news has been so relentlessly depressing. With Israel seeming to be determined to start a war with Iran, Trump and his gang’s assault on immigrants and his use of the National Guard and federal troops to suppress protest, his stupid vanity project of a military parade, and the tragedy of the Air India plane crash, it feels like writing about any single thing is avoiding everything else.

So I invite people to use this post as an open thread to vent about anything they like.

Stephen Pinker slides down the slippery slope of a public intellectual

Stephen Pinker is in the news again, and again, not in a good way.

The Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker appeared on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for a revival of race science and have spoken of seeking “legitimation by association” by platforming more mainstream figures.

The appearance underlines past incidents in which Pinker has encountered criticism for his association with advocates of so-called “human biodiversity”, which other academics have called a “rebranding” of racial genetic essentialism and scientific racism.
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Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at UK anti-racism non-profit Hope Not Hate, said that Pinker’s “decision to appear on Aporia, a far-right platform for scientific racism, provides an invaluable service to an extremist outlet by legitimising its content and attracting new followers”.

He added: “By lending his Harvard credentials to Aporia, Pinker contributes to the normalisation and spread of dangerous, discredited ideas.”

This is just the latest controversy that Pinker has found himself in. Just recently he, along with Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, resigned from the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation because the foundation removed a blog post by Coyne.
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Musk’s groveling to Trump begins

Like almost all the Republicans who were once critical of Trump for whatever reason, Elon Musk has started his rehabilitation process by groveling to Trump.

Elon Musk is walking back his attacks against President Donald Trump. Just days after a furious barrage of posts on X, the Tesla CEO is trying to make amends.

“I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week,” the former director of DOGE wrote in a late-night post on X. “They went too far.”  
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This might be Musk’s second olive branch. On June 8, Musk shared a post from Trump on X, in which the president declared an “invasion” in Los Angeles, proclaiming that it will be “set free.” Musk added two American flag emojis to his repost.

I don’t think this will be enough. Musk will have to make several abject apologies and also praise Trump to get back into his good graces.

Is LA a rehearsal for the nationwide June 14th protests?

The recent flare up in the Los Angeles area caused by ICE agents sweeping up people for deportation without warrants has escalated as Trump has commandeered the California National Guard, over the objection of California governor Gavin Newsom, and also sent in Federal troops, both moves being of highly dubious legality, only supposed to be done in the case of war or a national emergency. The events in Los Angeles are clearly nothing of the sort. What sending those troops in did was inflame the situation and cause even more trouble.

Trump is as usual lying about everything.

Trump and Newsom’s rift continued with ferocity on Tuesday.

Trump, who has suggested Newsom should be arrested, said he spoke to Newsom by phone “a day ago” and told him: “He’s gotta do a better job.”

“There was no call. Not even a voicemail,” Newsom responded on social media. “Americans should be alarmed that a president deploying marines on to our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to.”

But the local community was uncowed by the presence of heavily armed and militarized personnel in riot gear and masks patrolling the streets and forming barricades. They defied the soldiers. Via Pharyngula I saw this image of a young person with a skateboard insouciantly ignoring whatever projectiles and gas grenades were being fired at him and, after dancing in front of the troops, calmly walked away and gave them the finger.

Just before the previous clip, the skater kid was practically taunting the Border Patrol agents by dancing around their munitions shots.

[image or embed]

— Jeremy Lindenfeld (@jeremotographs.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 3:47 PM


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NIH scientists risk careers to stand up for the public good

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have signed a declaration protesting the deep cuts in public health research and sent it to their boss Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH, as well as to RFK, Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees the NIH.

Named for the agency’s headquarters location in Maryland, the Bethesda Declaration details upheaval in the world’s premier public health research institution over the course of mere months.

It addresses the termination of 2,100 research grants valued at more than $12 billion and some of the human costs that have resulted, such as cutting off medication regimens to participants in clinical trials or leaving them with unmonitored device implants.

In one case, an NIH-supported study of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti had to be stopped, ceasing antibiotic treatment mid-course for patients.

In a number of cases, trials that were mostly completed were rendered useless without the money to finish and analyze the work, the letter says. “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million,” it says, “it wastes $4 million.”

Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at the agency’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., to talk about what’s happening at the NIH.

At the event, she masked to conceal her identity. Now the mask is off. She was a lead organizer of the declaration.

“I want people to know how bad things are at NIH,” Norton told The Associated Press.
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Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants.

The letter asserts “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety” and the agency is shirking commitments to trial participants who “braved personal risk to give the incredible gift of biological samples, understanding that their generosity would fuel scientific discovery and improve health.”

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