• protests against ICE raids have been intensifying around the country for months, alongside protests opposing perceived power-grabs by the Trump administration.
• Two notable surges of protest came on the nationwide Hands Offs protests on April 5 and No Kings protests on April 19.
• In 2017, we tallied 80 May Day protests nationwide, compared to over 1,000 this year. Overall, 2017’s numbers pale in comparison to the scale and scope of mobilization in 2025 — a fact often unnoticed in the public discourse about the response to Trump’s actions.
• The two days of organized nationwide protests account for most of these numbers.
• In addition to the size and scale of protest activity, the month of April alone saw a notable level of geographic dispersion. All 50 states and D.C. saw protests in the month of April. This suggests that the anti-Trump mobilization is truly nationwide.
• Anecdotal evidence suggests that some activists are intentionally demonstrating in their local town rather than just traveling to a nearby big city for events. One participant suggested they may do so because it attracts neighbors who are new to protest: “There are people who aren’t going to cities for events like this. They’re dipping their toes in local rallies and activism. We need to meet them where they are.”
• Throughout early 2025, Elon Musk and Tesla were a major target of protesters. Over 1,500 protests in April and May targeted Musk and Tesla.
• But immigration — and aggressive law enforcement responses to immigration-related protests — were key mobilizing issues in April and May.

6 more annotations...

• As tanks and soldiers paraded through the streets of Washington on Saturday, several million people around the country turned out to protest against the excesses of Donald Trump’s administration.

  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.
• 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,

• There were two early morning shootings of two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, one of whom was killed along with her husband, in what local officials called a politically motivated attack. The state’s police and governor cautioned people to not attend demonstrations across the state “out of an abundance of caution”.

  Many thousands of people still turned up at the main protest in Minnesota, at the state capitol, to make it clear that political violence wouldn’t silence them.
• Greg Abbott, the Republican Texas governor, deployed his state’s national guard to manage protests ahead of “No Kings” and amid ongoing demonstrations against Trump’s immigration agenda. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, said that people could legally run over protesters with their cars if they were surrounded.
• Early in the day demonstrations gathered strength outside Los Angeles city hall,

• Later in the day in Los Angeles, a crowd formed outside a federal building and started chanting, “Leave LA!” at the national guard members stationed outside and some reportedly threw objects at the building.

  At 4pm the LAPD also declared “unlawful assembly” for protesters who were outside the approved protest area, issued a dispersal order and began firing teargas and foam rubber bullets shortly after.
• Harvard University’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks political crowds, found that there had been three times as many protests by the end of March 2025 compared to 2017, during Trump’s first term, and that was before major protests in April and May. The biggest day of protest so far came on 5 April, with “Hands Off”, which the consortium estimated drew as many as 1.5 million people, a lower figure than organizers cited.

5 more annotations...

• A wide-ranging Economist/YouGov poll conducted over the weekend revealed that 53% of voters who backed Trump in the 2024 presidential election do not want the country to join in Israel’s strikes.

• Their views mirror those of Trump’s voters surveyed in the Economist poll, which revealed that only 19% of them favored the US getting involved militarily, and 63% wanted the administration to “engage in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program”.

  Among all voters, 60% agreed that the US should step back from involving its military.

• Many Democrats continue to believe that the racism of average Americans — many of whom voted for Barack Obama twice — explains why Donald Trump won. This moralism suits party elites who would rather demonize the public than address growing inequality.
• Within the liberal pundit class, the tendency to attribute Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss principally to racism or misogynoir (hatred of black women) runs deep.
• Harris’s not terribly surprising loss was owed to many factors, not just the electorate’s racism or sexism.
• on the context that gave us the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA
• roughly two-thirds of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the Crime Act
• Bernie Sanders voted for the bill because it included the Violence Against Women Act, he also warned, on the floor of the House of Representatives, that tough-on-crime policies absent programs designed to address poverty — a major contributor to violent and property crimes — would compound extant racial disparities in the US criminal justice system while swelling the nation’s already appallingly large inmate population.
• Since New Democrats had little interest in redressing poverty (recall Sanders’s warnings), tough-on-crime policies offered many blacks, particularly low-income African Americans, the only available pathway to safe and stable communities.
• New Democrats successfully papered over their disregard for class-oriented preventive crime measures like direct job creation. In place of these remedies, Democrats attacked the welfare state through a discourse on crime and punishment driven by a moralism — expressed often in both unambiguously racist but also race-reductionist-underclass-informed terms — that conflated any effort to contextualize crime as something caused by poverty or inequality with coddling criminals.
• A popular and even academic discourse in which white racism is the source of eternal black suffering cannot accommodate the complexities that shape the world human beings actually occupy. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that most blacks had once embraced the “rightness” of tough-on-crime policies.
• between the late 1980s and early 1990s, lower-income blacks, who frequently lived in communities with high crime rates, were more likely to support tough-on-crime policies than upper-income blacks, who infrequently lived in high-crime communities.
• The moralism that helped numb most Americans, blacks among them, to the antidemocratic implications of tough-on-crime policies absent efforts to redress precarity has been in liberals’ and Democrats’ rearview mirror for about a decade.
• However, the antiracist moralism that took hold during President Trump’s first term is performing similar work.
• race-reductionist sensibilities that animated support, even among blacks
• for the 1994 Crime Act as well as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, welfare reform legislation introduced in 1996.
• Prior to Trump’s first term, most of the discussions I had about racial inequality with black students, American and foreign-born alike, and nonacademic peers pivoted from my interlocutors’ insistence that “we need to stop talking about the white man” or even the disparate impact of the Crime Act and welfare reform on blacks. Instead, I was frequently informed, “What black people really need(ed) to do is focus on what we can do for ourselves.”
• contemporary disparities had less to do with blacks’ failure to take personal responsibility for their “own communities” (whatever that would mean in an industrial or postindustrial society) than the racial and economic politics undergirding a truncated welfare state that afforded African Americans, in the aggregate, fewer benefits than whites.
• Several years ago, however, the wheel turned. And now the popular discourse on inequality
• insists that white racism is the defining and foundational threat to black Americans, democracy, and perhaps even humanity.
• There is no doubt that racial resentments are an important part of Trumpism.

• Harris seems to have performed better with white voters than Clinton and Obama had in 1992 and 2012, respectively — when each captured less than 40 percent of the “white vote.”

   

  If Harris connected better with white voters than two other successful Democratic presidential candidates, then that means she didn’t lose because she underperformed with whites. The real problem is that Harris underperformed with voters of color. Indeed, Harris not only lost substantial ground with Hispanic and black men (-12 and -7 percent, respectively), but she failed to generate enthusiasm among women — underperforming with Latinas and Asian Pacific Islanders while performing no better with black women than Biden did.
• Harris’s candidacy marked the third successive presidential election in which the process for choosing a Democratic candidate strained the meaning of democratic participation (albeit to varying degrees). This, in combination with Gaza and inflation, likely contributed to depressed turnout and even myopic defections.
• t he undermined Harris’s prospects as head of the ticket by legitimating the view that she was, in fact, his “affirmative action [aka DEI] hire.”
• President Biden would do the same to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson when he pledged to appoint a black woman to the high court.
• the insistence on the part of pundits, scholars, activists, and even some within the Democratic Party itself that we might only placate black Americans with policies branded as black-specific — a perspective buoyed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s decision to use identity politics against Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns — informed Biden’s myopia here
• the righteous antiracist discourse that has gripped the liberal imagination since the summer of George Floyd has encouraged us to settle on a narrow vision of social justice focused on racial parity at the expense of redistributive programs
• With the aid of corporate and state power, racial ideology encourages us to view inequalities that are the product of social relations (dare I say, capitalism) as if they were ordained by God or natural processes.
• The Trump administration is unquestionably looking to roll back advances that African Americans made during the civil rights movement, if not Reconstruction. But the identity-politics-informed commitment to viewing Trumpism through a lens of decontextualized white resentments is not only an expression of the counterproductive moralism that has displaced sober analysis since Hillary Clinton’s not-so-surprising 2016 loss. It constitutes a rarely recognized expression of the reimagining of the meaning and parameters of “race” that, once again, smooths the contradictions between what we want to believe with the realities on the ground.

25 more annotations...

• I’ve heard the very real tales of what it was like when high heels once dominated society.
• My millennial and Gen X co-workers have attested to wearing heels to grimy college bars and buying their versions of the “Kate Middleton” nude pump for internships in the city. They regaled me with stories of a time when heels appeared to be the only acceptable footwear for women at magazine offices, an era when you’d be awash in a sea of thick platforms at the club.
• Many rejoice at this shift to comfortable, good-for-your-feet shoes. But—and I can already hear the sounds of a million wiser women groaning—I think we’ve made a mistake. We should not have stopped wearing heels.
• the right shoe can make or break the outfit. And sometimes, the rightful pair should be heels.
• I think heels stand undefeated in innovation
• There is nothing utilitarian about a heel. By freeing yourself from considering what’s practical, you can begin to craft alter egos. Who might you be in a strappy black pair that crisscrosses up your ankles? I imagine I’m an off-duty model headed straight to a South Beach dance floor. Heels are all about fantasy. They can help you fake confidence you don’t have. They create the illusion of longer legs. They are a shortcut to sex appeal, which is, of course, rooted in patriarchal beauty standards, and yet I enjoy the fleeting feeling anyway. (Hey, better than doing something permanent to your face.) Here is something I gleaned from the wise Patti Smith in her memoir Just Kids: The practice of dressing and adorning yourself can be just as powerful a form of artistic expression as any other. In that way, playing with your proportions, trying on shoe after shoe, and eventually landing on a short skirt with a tall heel, while not rocket science, can be its own form of art.
• hat I propose is not a return to outdated traditions. I suggest, instead, wearing heels in homage to the people who once loved their pumps and were sad to see them go out of style.
• we are all allowed our vices.
• This summer, after a hiatus from the entire category of shoes, I bought my first-ever pair of kitten heels and wore them out to a club in downtown Miami. I placed preventive Band-Aids in all of the places where the straps would rub against the skin
• They made me feel more like myself, and also nothing like her at all. Now I think I’m ready to graduate to a pair of stilettos.

8 more annotations...

• It wasn’t until 2023 that I began naming what many had experienced but couldn’t speak about: female on female bullying. For many of us, it had been hiding in plain sight. We’ve underestimated the damage of unrestrained feminine aggression, especially when it’s disowned, unacknowledged, and driven by soft control tactics. It’s no surprise that so many writers have since taken up the task of exposing toxic feminine traits across individual, maternal, family, group, institutional, and societal domains. This isn’t about hating women.
• Unsurprisingly, this topic gets more support from men than women. Yet speak to any woman one on one, and she’ll likely have at least one story about being mistreated by another woman
• Movements, once institutionalised, stop liberating and start controlling. Eventually, they’re co-opted by the billionaires funding them
• I began my Substack because of my experiences of woman on woman aggression.
• The ones who protest the loudest - those who insist they’ve only had uplifting relationships with women, or who brand themselves as tireless supporters of other women are often the ones working hard to suppress any narrative that challenges them. Some of them are likely the bullies we’re talking about.

3 more annotations...