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Thursday, July 03, 2025

3: AOC 2028

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls
Putin panics: Ukraine shreds Russian defenses in stunning blitz
US economy 'on wobbly footing': Why Wall Street strategists are cautious about stock market's recent records
WSJ Opinion: Iran Makes No Concessions as Trump Contemplates U.S. Military Action
Joe Rogan Unloads on Trump’s ‘Insane’ ICE Raids

Donald Trump's approval rating underwater across multiple polls
Trump’s Everglades Prison Can’t Even Withstand a Routine Rainstorm. Ron DeSantis Wants to Open It Anyway.
Iranian Nobel Laureate Says War Dealt Big Blow to Fight for Democracy After Israel’s 12-day war dealt a severe blow to the leadership of Iran, one of the country’s leading human-rights defenders warns that authorities will turn on their own people to consolidate power. ........ “The situation for Iranian people is more dangerous now than before the war,” Narges Mohammadi, who in 2023 received the Nobel Peace Prize for her three-decade fight for democracy, told The Wall Street Journal. The interview was conducted in writing because of the poor internet connection in the village outside Tehran where she sheltered from the bombings. ........ “I am deeply concerned about the situation of civil society activists, political activists, and especially youths who are active in social activities,” Mohammadi said. “Unfortunately, I think the repression will intensify further in the coming days.” ........ Scores of Iranians have been arrested on allegations of espionage for Israel and complicity in the attacks since last week’s cease-fire. Six were executed after hasty trials. Allegations of espionage have been leveraged in the past at opposition activists. ...... Despite decades of oppression, Iran’s civil society remains vibrant and active openly and underground. Protest movements spring up every few years, most recently after the death in police custody of a young woman in 2022, and have been crushed by authorities. .......... The weakened state of Iran’s military is unlikely for now to invite an open uprising, according to political analysts. While the conflict with Israel has diminished Iran’s ability to wage war on its foreign enemies, it is still fully capable of using force against its own citizens. .......... Despite her long fight against the Islamic Republic, Mohammadi said she didn’t want foreign powers to topple it and that any change in Iran should be pushed by Iranians. Regime change pushed by a foreign power would be illegitimate, she said. ........ “In Iran, there is a misogynistic and religious government helmed by Ali Khamenei who has taken us to hell while promising paradise,” Mohammadi said, referring to the country’s supreme leader. “Netanyahu is taking us to hell while promising freedom and democracy.” ........ Even hard-line opponents who spent years fighting the Islamic Republic were seen calling for “death to Israel,” said Narges Bajoghli, associate professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. ........ “The folks who despise the Islamic Republic, we saw them willing to put their lives on the line to fight the regime. Now, the same organizers are uniting, not around the flag of the Islamic Republic, but the idea of the homeland,” said Bajoghli, who wrote a book researched inside Iran about propaganda in the Islamic Republic. ........ She has been arrested 13 times, tried nine times and sentenced to more than 36 years in prison, of which she has served roughly 10. She hasn’t seen her twin teenagers in person since 2015, when they moved to France to live in exile with her husband after she was arrested. .......... Five days after Israel began its strikes on Iran, Mohammadi fled the capital, driving through traffic-clogged streets to a village. The war in Tehran brought back memories of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. ....... Iranian authorities imposed a near-total communication blackout, making it hard for Iranians to gauge the toll of the war and whether to evacuate. The blackouts also prevented them from receiving nongovernmental information or from organizing, Mohammadi said. ...........

Israel’s campaign was the most significant blow to the Islamic Republic in four decades, but Mohammadi said that attacks on the state, which destroy infrastructure and the economy and weaken its people, will undermine any drive for democratic change.

........ “War does not have the capacity for the fundamental transformation that the Iranian people seek,” she said.

Mexico Is Showing the World How to Stand Up to Donald Trump Donald Trump loves to try to bully Mexico. But President Claudia Sheinbaum is showing the world how to stand up to the MAGA administration without playing into its hands. ......... On Sunday, March 9, over 350,000 people crammed into Mexico City’s central square, the Zócalo, in repudiation of US president Donald Trump’s tariff threats. Just days before, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced the reaching of an agreement which, under the cover of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), would exempt Mexico from most of the levies. “Fortunately, dialogue has prevailed and, especially, respect between our nations,” Sheinbaum told the crowd. Sure enough, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, both Mexico and Canada had been excluded. ......... the administration — spurred by the reckless, nativist rage of his coterie — has taken the opportunity to ratchet up tensions again and again. This, in turn, has put to the test President Sheinbaum’s approach of handling her erratic counterpart with her now famous cabeza fría, or “cool head.” .......... On March 21, for the first time since a treaty governing shared watersheds was signed in 1944, the United States denied a Mexican request for water, in this case for the city of Tijuana. After several weeks of back-and-forth, the dispute was settled at the end of April. On May 11, the United States announced the suspension of livestock imports from Mexico due to the detection of New World screwworm (NWS) in the south of the country, to the visible frustration of Agriculture Secretary Julio Berdegué, who reminded the United States of its failure to respond to requests to assist in containing the northward march of the pest when it resurfaced in Panama back in 2023. As of this writing, the ban remains in effect. ......... In early May, a MORENA governor and her spouse had their visas revoked without explanation, setting off a froth of speculation and rumor. Then on May 16, in violation of any semblance of diplomatic protocol or ethics, newly minted ambassador Ronald D. Johnson spent his second day in the country calling the far-right, fledgling politician Eduardo Verástegui his “brother” at a chummy dinner; the moment, widely shared on social media, further heightened suspicions about Johnson — a former Green Beret, CIA agent, and one of fifty-five “advisers” to the junta during the civil war in El Salvador. ....... Shortly before, the Trump administration had allowed seventeen members of the Guzmán crime family to enter the United States, barely two months after designating the Sinaloa Cartel, among others, a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). As if to underscore fears that the designation could be used to justify US military intervention in the country, Trump told Sheinbaum in a phone call that he would be “honored” to go in and “help” with the cartels, an offer she obviously refused. ......... On May 21, House Republicans announced the creation of an excise tax on remittances, part of a larger plan to unload the cost of tax cuts onto migrants. Sheinbaum blasted the plan as double taxation and, in an appearance in the city of San Luis Potosí, broached the possibility of domestic mobilizations to demonstrate opposition to the measure. Some ten days later, Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem — who had been received with an excess of civility by President Sheinbaum at the National Palace in March — took advantage of an out-of-context clip making the rounds to claim that Sheinbaum was egging on violent protests in Los Angeles. This was too far even for Trump, and Ambassador Johnson was tasked with walking it back. .......... On June 12, in the context of both the Los Angeles protests and ongoing Trumpian threats to cancel the visas of anyone supporting any kind of protest whatsoever, a member of the MORENA party for the state of Jalisco posted an irreverent tweet regarding her own visa. The tweet, fueled by righteous indignation to the abuses of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against those of Mexican ancestry, was similar to thousands that get published every day. Nevertheless, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau — then in the midst of a visit to Mexico — responded that he had personally given the order to cancel the young woman’s visa, in the process revealing confidential information about her status for all to see. .......... As if that petulant display of bullying weren’t enough, Landau followed up a few days later with an out-of-place rant in response to a bland news bulletin published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) regarding opportunities in trade relations with China. In addition to the impropriety of a State Department official swaggering around social media like a triggered adolescent, the tweets were counterproductive in another way. By revealing visa cancellations to be arbitrary, motivated by little more than personal bile and pique, Landau inadvertently undermined the Trump administration’s attempt to use them as a pressure tactic. ......... The icing on the cake arrived on June 25 at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee when Attorney General Pam Bondi asserted that the Trump administration “will keep America safe . . . not only from Iran, but from Russia, China, and from Mexico. From any foreign adversary, whether they’re trying to kill us physically, or by overdosing our children with drugs.” To this impromptu lumping-in of Mexico as a US adversary on par with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Sheinbaum responded coolly that the attorney general “is not very well informed.” ........... Finally, President Sheinbaum’s long-simmering patience was to run out. The following day, the US Treasury Department, wielding the Fentanyl Sanctions Act and the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, sanctioned three Mexican financial institutions for being “primary money laundering concerns.” Sporting a more combative tone at her morning press conference, Sheinbaum challenged the Treasury Department to send proof of the allegations, “that is, if it has any.” ............ “We are not going to cover for anyone, there is no impunity, but it has to be demonstrated that there was money laundering, not with statements, but with conclusive evidence,” she noted.

“Our relationship with the United States is one of equals, not of subordination. We are nobody’s piñata.”

As the three institutions in question — CiBanco, Intercam Banco, and Vector Casa de Bolsa — do significant business with China, the Treasury’s maneuver gave every appearance of being an attempt to disrupt Sino-Mexican relations under the guise of fentanyl precursor tracing. ............ To be sure, Mexico is hardly alone in being on the receiving end of such treatment; indeed, inciting people the world over has been more the rule than the exception in the volatile relaunch of Trumpism. And in the face of his administration’s dogged determination to provoke reactions in order to justify a more aggressive response in turn, Sheinbaum’s stubborn refusal to be goaded has much to recommend it. It is also important to distinguish what in all of this is official policy and what — like the outbursts of the Noems, Bondis, and Landaus — may instead be the product of institutional disarray, personal toxicity, power trips, and racism. ............ That said, Sheinbaum’s belated change in tone likely reflects a growing realization that imperial antagonism cannot be impeded by charm and rational argumentation alone. The current spate of bludgeoning is simply an extension of the perennial US insistence that Mexico come to heel. And if it can do so without the messiness of an unpopular military operation, all the better. ........... To that end, every tool in the kit will be trotted out: official and unofficial slander, media smears, taxes, sanctions, border closings, visa cancellations, treaty disputes — carefully calibrated to start small so that they can be ramped up as needed. And all designed, moreover, to back Sheinbaum into a damned-if-you-do (provoking retaliation), damned-if-you-don’t (green light for further encroachment), no-win situation. .......... This is the bind Sheinbaum must avoid at all costs. The answer passes somewhere through popular mobilization, autonomous media, strategic alliances, sovereignty over core economic sectors, industrial policy, regional coordination — and, fundamentally, a rejection of any kind of naivety regarding US brinkmanship. Keeping one’s head down is no solution, nor is banking on the moderating effects of economic integration. ......... Playing nice, in short, is not going to make it go away. With the West discrediting themselves in their ongoing silence over Gaza, Mexico’s voice is one that is sorely needed on the international stage. As the world’s twelfth-largest economy and geographic bridge between the Global North and South, it must find that voice and stand up to the bully.

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3: Zohran Mamdani

How Extremely Online Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Learned to Embrace the Cringe The young democratic socialist has been building buzz and raising money from New Yorkers online, but it remains to be seen how that will translate into votes IRL. ........ and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who donned a $30 business suit he had bought the day before from one of his constituents’s thrift stores on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens. .......... “I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City,” Mamdani said to the camera. “Let’s plunge into the details,” he continued, before jumping into the 40-degree water and emerging soaking wet to talk about his affordable housing proposal......... The video went on to garner more than 800,000 views across social media platforms. ......... “I think that you’ll find more people heard about my policy on freezing the rent by me jumping into the water than me being at any number of political forums where I’ve said the same thing,” Mamdani told THE CITY in a phone conversation about his social media strategy on Wednesday. .......... Two days later, his campaign released a sincere video of him talking with some of the New Yorkers who gave to his campaign. That clip quickly racked up more than half a million views on Twitter. ........ Part of the reason Mamdani’s been able to appear so comfortable in front of the camera, he said, came from his experience of being a self-described C-list rapper — including attempts to sell CDs on public buses in visits to Kampala, Uganda. ........ (He was born in the African nation to award-winning indie filmmaker Mira Nair and noted scholar of postcolonialism Mahmood Mamdani before they moved to New York City when he was a child. Despite her filmmaking expertise, Nair hasn’t offered her son tips for his campaign videos, he said.) ........ Those moments of “humiliation,” he added, were part of what prepared him for the harsh truths of the campaign trial, especially the early morning attempts on subway platforms to stop people for petition signatures when they’d rather not speak to anyone. ........... “You have to throw yourself out there, you have to put yourself out there, you have to also just crave rejection like water on your back.” ........

Mamdani, for his part, likened campaign content creation to door-knocking.

........ “With low turnout events, any bit of turnout matters a lot,” Sanderson said — especially when New York City’s last two mayoral contests were effectively decided in Democratic primaries where the winner was the first choice of not even 300,000 voters. ........... “I began this race with most New Yorkers not knowing who I am, but if I want to change that reality I have to be everywhere all at once,” he said. “I have sought to fulfill that commitment by physically going to three to four boroughs in a single day and also by ensuring that when New Yorkers open their phone and they’re scrolling through Instagram or Twitter or TikTok, they may also see a video from this campaign.” ....... Mamdani’s isn’t just working with content creators. He’s also becoming one of them. ......... organizing and hunger-striking with taxi workers drowning in debt back in 2021.

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