The Don Jones Index

memitchell@usatoday.com CAREGIVERS

the DON JONES INDEX…
	GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED 10/30/25… 15,260.71 10/23/25… 15,256.59 6/27/13... 15,000.00
(THE DOW JONES INDEX: 10/30/25... 47,632.00; 10/23/25... 46,253.41; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

LESSON for OCTOBER 30th, 2025 – “DAYS of the DEAD!”

Deep, deep we dive for spooky season has arrived... tomorrow is Halloween, which holiday (or Un-Holy day, as some of the more vigorous Christians aver) is officially attributed to the more pagan suburbs of the English speaking Old World, but likely with corresponding beliefs across the rest of the world.

Some of these beliefs appeared in the old New World and, by a process of synchronization (the unholy miscegenation of national and/or ethnic beliefs and superstitions) engendered other days of note – immediately thereafter, November the first and second, being what was and is... in the Spanish-speaking America... days of the Dead.

Day of the Dead (Dia De Los Muertos) is a two day holiday that reunites the living and dead – “a rare holiday for celebrating death and life... unlike any holiday where mourning is exchanged for celebration.” (See Q&A’s at DAYOFTHEDEAD.holiday: ATTACHMENT ONE)

“Dia de los Angelitos (Day of the little angels) starts the holiday at midnight on Nov 1st, where the spirits of all deceased children are believed to be reunited with their families for 24 hours. Families construct an altar, known as an ofrenda, with the departed child’s favorite snacks, candies, toys, and photographs to encourage a visit from their departed children. The names of the departed children will often be written on a sugar skull.

“At midnight of the following day (November 2nd), the celebrations shift to honor the lives of the departed adults. The night is filled with laughter and fun memories, much like the night before. However, the Ofrendas take on a more adult-like theme with tequila, pan de muerto, mezcal, pulque and jars of Atole. Families will also play games together, reminisce about their loved ones, and dance while the village band plays in their town.”

At noon, there begins the grand finale and public celebration of Dia de Muertos. “In more recent times, people come together in their cities, dressed up with Calavera painted faces (Skeletons) and have parades in the streets. Cemetery visits are also common on the last day as families will go to decorate the grave sites with Marigold flowers, gifts, and sugar skulls with the departed’s name on them. It’s customary to clean the grave stone and restore the color...” (as opposed to some American military cemeteries where the dead heroes are dug up by hungry feral pigs)

Day of the Dead is not the “Mexican Halloween” like it is sometimes mistaken to be because of the timing of the year. “The two holidays originated with similar afterlife beliefs but are very different in modern day. Halloween began as a Celtic Festival where people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts but has recently turned into a tradition of costume wearing and trick-or-treating. Decorating your house with spiders and bats and wearing scary costumes is not done in most parts of Mexico... many Americans see Death as a sad event but those who celebrate Day of the Dead view the Reaper as benevolent. “That is why you will see brightly colored skeletons and skulls everywhere during the holiday. They often are seen smiling, as a friendly nod to death, even mocking death. This view of death began way back during the one month Aztec festival where they celebrated the dead and paid homage to the lady of death, Mictlancíhuatl, who protected their departed loved ones and helped them in the afterlife.”

Instead of Halloween (often considered diabolical by the religious right) some varied believers celebrate All Souls Day (also known as All Saints Day) during the same time as Day of the Dead. “The act of honoring the dead is widely celebrated around the world but Day of the Dead is unique in its traditions: the ofrenda, the meaning of life and death, the use of calaveras, the style influenced by La Catrina, and more recently, the festivals in the streets.”

In the English-speaking Americas (from which Canada, apparently now, has been expelled for the time being, at least, and from which Caribbean nations like Jamaica... itself now occupied with Miss Melissa... are seldom accounted for), the holdover of spooks and goblins to the real world upon the dawn of the undead-dead on November 1^st and beyond may take on cultural and/or political aspects.

There are those, such as President Trump and his believers, who assert that we are living in a Golden Age as soon... after the demolition and reconstruction of the East Wing of the White House into a Golden Ballroom in which the troubles of the nation can be danced away... will be manifest to all.

Other pessimistic, superstitious souls, fingering the worry beads of a government shutdown as well as other bugaboos... the wars, inflation, tariffs and taxes, poverty, crime, the alien invasion plague in our cities and its ICE-y respons and, to make the point that more of our political and cultural media make again and again and again: a climate of revenge and retribution for grievances as date back from only days or hours to years, centuries... even to a time before there was, even, America.

According to research sponsored by Rutgers University (October 8, 2025 – ATTACHMENT TWO), Days of the Dead in the U.S. "emerged as a form of resistance to dominant power structures and narratives based on histories of colonization, racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice."

According to Rutgers research, Day of the Dead in the U.S. "emerged as a form of resistance to dominant power structures and narratives based on histories of colonization, racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice."

While most Americans are likely accustomed to seeing the colorful Day of the Dead decorations, many are probably unaware of how Dia de los Muertos evolved into a popular holiday in the U.S., both as a spiritual and cultural celebration, as well as a lucrative commercial one.

"For Chicano artists in the 1970s, celebrating an indigenous Mexican ritual in an Anglo-dominant country was an act of political resistance as well as an act of cultural pride," said Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Regina Marchi, author of the award-winning book "Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon, published by Rutgers University Press (2009; 2022).

Questioneers from the Rutgers School of Communication and Information (SC&I) spoke with Marchi to learn more about the historic, cultural, and political significance of Day of the Dead in the U.S.

SC&I asked: “Why has celebrating the Day of the Dead become so popular across the U.S. over the past 50 years, particularly with non-Latino populations?”

Marchi replied that “(D)eep down, many people in the U.S. are drawn to the idea of having an annual event to collectively honor deceased loved ones... thinking about the inevitability of death actually makes people appreciate life more.”

“Chicano artists created the first public, secular Day of the Dead celebrations in the US in 1972. Since then, Chicano renditions of Day of the Dead have recirculated to Mexico, affecting how Día de los Muertos is celebrated there.

“For example, Chicano artists in Los Angeles began painting their faces like skeletons during Day of the Dead processions in the mid 1970s, fusing aspects of Halloween with Day of the Dead. This was not previously done in Mexico, but by the late 1990s and 2000s, urban Mexicans were doing this too. Skull face painting is now a major aspect of the celebration in both countries. You never used to see this in indigenous Mexican villages, but with social media, particularly after the 2014-2017 release of popular Hollywood movies like Coco, The Book of Life, and Spectre (which have Day of the Dead themes and characters in “skull face”), you now see skull face painting all over Mexico, including in remote indigenous villages.

“In the case of ethnic celebrations taking place in the US, these are often important not only for building community but also for expressing political messages.

“It’s important to understand these dynamics because while official state-supported holidays such as Thanksgiving or the 4th of July serve to promote national unity or patriotism, grassroots commemorations such as indigenous celebrations, pride parades, or Juneteenth, have emerged as forms of resistance to dominant power structures and historical narratives based on colonization, racism, sexism and other forms of injustice.”

Partisan pivots also arise. At the sunset of Trump 1.0, the President... on Oct. 30, 2020... “released a proclamation for a new national Remembrance Day to take place on Nov. 1, which would focus on Americans killed by “illegal aliens” and concentrating on border security.” (Charger.Bulletin of New Haven, Ct. ATTACHMENT THREE... Reprinted Thursday, October 23, 2025)

The proclamation went into detail over the deportation, particularly to the southern border. The statement was a message to bolster the president’s “Law and Order” rhetoric from his campaign, “increasing the number of national guard personnel (accomplished in Trump 2.0) and his goal of building a wall (still under construction, although ICE has inhibited new border crossings and even spurred “remigration” of alien invaders).

TANGLE, (ATTACHMENT FOUR) noted developments as of a week ago... including the Senate’s failure to pass a shutdown-shutdown bill for the 11^th time (13, now) and provided a short history of the dispute this month.

“On October 1, federal funding lapsed, halting some government services and suspending pay to many federal employees. The Senate failed to reach the 60-vote threshold required to pass a stopgap funding bill to keep the government open, with Democrats pushing for a permanent extension of temporary Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans have maintained that health subsidy negotiations should be held only after the government reopens.

‘Services designated as essential — such as air traffic control and federal law enforcement — remain operational during the shutdown,” Tangle alleges, but furloughs, firings and walkouts by some essential workers have left air traffic, in particular, affected. There have been delays and cancellations and even near-miss accidents (although, so far, no major catastrophes, despite angry passengers assaulting cabin crew, pilots and each other). A few potential calamaties have been reversed – notably the National Nuclear Security Administration, which Trump’s neo-DOGEies choose to protect (to the disappointment of maniacs, domestic and foreign terrorists).

Lawyers are swarming as Administration and Administration critics rassle over whether the shutdowns, layoffs and firings are legal... and whether stated statements from the President, OMB and other cabinet curiosities to the effect that the more discretionary punishments will be imposed only on “blue cities”. (See last week’s Lesson)

After publishing remarks upon the legality, morality and political implications from left and right, as is its wont, Tangler-in-Chief Irving Saul concluded that neither party “has a solution for runaway spending” and the gumment won’t open again unless and until the chicken game “starts to drastically impact the public...” which means “nightmarish travel delays, disappearing food stamps, impossibly long waits to resolve healthcare snafus, and reports of degraded military readiness before anyone comes back to the table. And then, unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for Congress to actually agree on something.”

POLITICS of the DEAD

While the House stayed home, playing golf or pickleball, fundraising and soliciting more bribes from the billionaires, Zombie Donnie and “nearly every Republican senator (Rand Paul excepted) staggered and stumbled to the semi-demolished White House on Tuesday for what was billed as a “Rose Garden Club” lunch to party hearty and eat “cheeseburgers, fries, and Rose Garden chocolates” (no brains and no roses) – a rallyish display of coerced party unity as the government shutdown entered its fourth (now fifth) week with no end in sight. (Time, October 21, ATTACHMENT FIVE)

Saturday’s massive “No Kings” protests—in which millions demonstrated nationwide against Trump—came and went without notable violence or notable impact on the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that Democrats should first agree to fund the government before policy talks resume. Democrats – vilified as terrorists – followed the example of Hamas in countered that reopening first would strip them of all leverage to secure the subsidies.

Hamas eventually TACO’d (HACO’d?) and set the remaining living hostages free only to have the cease fire ripped up and bombings and shootings resume in Gaza, just as its most extreme wing predicted.

Trump now seems delighted and ready for more partisan plunder. “Many of the things that they're cutting, like the New York Project, ($20 billion for subway, bridge and tunnel upgrades) we're cutting it. They're not going to get it back… Maybe we'll talk to them about it. But they're losing all the things that they wanted.”

Tangle (ATTACHMENT SIX) cited David Dayen’s argument in The American Prospect that “...this is a fight about extreme executive power and autocracy, with Democrats demanding that any government funding they pass must actually be spent, not withheld or rescinded. A No Kings Budget, in other words...”

They noted that, even as the leftist media like Newsweek and USA Today agreed that Democrats seem, at least now, weak and confused, Trumptastics like Daniel Huff (no involvement with the HuffPost) advised, in the Wall Street Journal, to “let Congress run an experiment it would ordinarily never attempt: Close the whole thing down and see what breaks. This is what Elon Musk did at Twitter. He fired 80% of the staff, watched what broke, and restored only what proved necessary.”

(So far, from the investor point of view, he’s been on target – the Dow reaching record heights day after day after day. Dow’s angels are Apple and Amazon, both of which are setting records and settling in ahead of Muskland and just behind Nvidia as our wealthiest corporations... but still finding a need to cut jobs and “hire” more robots.)

By Halloween, the stroke of midnight tonight, the government shutdown should be over, according to Matt Hickman of the Arizona Herald Review. (Sunday, ATTACHMENT SEVEN)

Hickman, apparently a ramblin’ gambling’ man, bases this contention on the Texas Hold ‘em parlance, when a player, between their two cards and the five community cards has the best hand possible, they are said to “have the nuts” and their opponents have no nuts. The strategy then becomes to “bleed the pot,” to subtly trick your opponent into thinking they just might have the better hand even though you know it’s impossible.

“In the congressional showdown that’s led to the government shutdown, the Democrats have the nuts and the Republicans are beginning to realize it. This is why the shutdown will be over by Halloween.”

“Why Halloween? Because on Nov. 1 the marketplace for Obamacare opens and 24 million people who get their health insurance through the ACA will log in to discover their premiums have suddenly doubled, due to the expiration of the tax credits in the One Big Beautiful Bill.” Mr. Hickman appears to be a conservative, at least in this regard... some insurers seem ready, able and gleeful to be quadrupling or even, in some cases, sextupling their premiums.

Some of the worst-off Americans are voters in red states like Texas, Alabama, Kansas and Wyoming... states that have declined — on ideological grounds — to expand Medicaid under the ACA, “leaving many lower income and self-employed people reliant on the ACA marketplace, which they can only afford because of the tax credit.”

“Trump is what is known in poker as a “blinds stealer,” a player who repeatedly bets way too high based on the first two cards that are dealt,” is Hickman’s estimate. “A blinds stealer is the most maddening and least fun person at any table, betting two, three, five, twenty times the big blind based on nothing but sheer bullying. Blinds stealers seldom win in the long run, though, because eventually someone gets a really good hand they can’t be bullied out of and the blinds stealer loses all the chips he won pre-flop, and then some.”

As blinds stealers go, Hickman gives the President credit for being a very effective player... “so good at it, in fact, he’s even got a nickname for it: TACO.”

Djonald, UnTold, Hickman believes, “knows if he goes all the way on this hand and cards turn up, he’s going to lose big-time. Trump hates to lose face, but if he can spin the narrative to make himself look like the hero sacrificing for the good of the country, he’ll take it.”

Will they ever actually get to work “fixing” the Affordable Care Act? Of course not, Hickman concludes, but it doesn’t matter. “Trump loses a hand he was going to lose anyway, but he gets to save face as the hero doing what’s best for the country. Oh, and the government reopens and 24 million people won't have to choose between health coverage and rent.”

This, unfortunately for the 24 million... as also for the SNAPsters losing their food, the blue states losing their funding and the Republican politicians caught in the middle between a Great Dealer (who doesn’t give a chicken nugget about them, no matter how they suck up) and a voting public who will be seeking their own version of retribution next year.

Today, the Senate... perhaps in envy of the long, long vacationing House... threw in their cards and went home for a long weekend of spooky fun amidst a masked donor class – many heeding police warnings to accept no unwrapped tricks nor treats and always let their parents open up collected Paydays and Mars Bars, even if they are likely to scarf up a few themselves. “Just testin’ Junior! And put on your scarf!”

For winter “is certainly coming,” USA Today’s Medora Lee predicted and holidary tricks like frozen paychecks, food stamps and gumment gridlock combined with soaring utility bills augur a grim and treatless season coming, too. (ATTACHMENT 8)

Fighting back, if ineffectually, the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), representing state directors of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), said last week ithat they were urging electric and gas utilities nationwide to “immediately suspend service disconnections for nonpayment until federal LIHEAP funds are released and households regain access to financial assistance.”

Congressthings like Don Beyer (D-Va), all among the class of asses, joined the Sierra Club in “pleas for utilities to keep the power on” for low-income Americans.

Crunching the NEADA numbers, household energy averages have risen by about 31%, from approximately $17.5 billion on December 31, 2023 to $23.0 billion by June 30, 2025.

“Shutoffs rose to 3.5 million in 2024 from 3.0 million the prior year, NEADA said. Shutoffs are expected to continue rising as more Americans face soaring energy costs they can't afford, it said. NEADA said 2025 could see potentially 4.0 million shutoffs.”

More NEADA numbers include a rise of 9.5% in electicity prices in September, as opposed to an overall rate of 3%; and a forecast that the average cost of home energy will increase 7.6% this winter, “led by a 10% jump in electricity costs to $1,205 from $1,093 a year ago. That's on top of average summer bill prices reaching $776, the highest in at least 12 years.”

Other energetic investigators have attributed at least some of the increases to the energy gobbling AI server “farms” that keep the fake news and Internet games working hard to distract the sheep and sleepers from reality.

"No family should be forced to choose between heat and food because of a federal funding delay," Mark Wolfe, NEADA's executive director, said. "Utilities must act in the public interest and pause shutoffs until federal aid is available again."

The utilities and gumment howled with laughter.

USA Today found that “ten states, plus the District of Columbia, averaged more than a 15% price jump in electricity costs, with five states registering more than 20% increases, between July 2024 and July this year. Americans in these states are seeing monthly bill increases of between $25 and $41 per month.” These were...

Illinois: 28.3%

Indiana: 25%

Ohio: 23.4%

Washington, DC: 23%

New Jersey: 20.6%

Massachusetts: 18.8%

Iowa: 17.4%

Missouri: 17.2%

Michigan: 15.9%

Virginia: 15.4%, and

Maine: 15%

DEAD CULTURE

While the dark little people... citizens or not... were cancelling their parades and hiding oftertas in basements and garages to avoid detection by the ICEmen, the White House has embarked on a campaign to drag Americans arts, like its own East Wing, to the Trumpian equivalent of cheeseburgers, superhero movies and Y.M.C.A.

“October is National Arts and Humanities Month, a time normally reserved for celebrating the creative and intellectual currents that enrich our nation,” according to Andrew Weinstein of Time (ATTACHMENT 9 But this year, the month began not with a celebration, but with a shutdown, the latest and most jarring blow in the Trump Administration’s long-running war against American culture.

In imitation of Trump 1.0, Weinstein virtue signaled that “I and 15 of my colleagues on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities made a not so difficult choice. In the wake of President Trump’s shocking refusal to unequivocally condemn the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, we resigned. We wrote to the president that his support for hate groups and the false equivalencies he pushed could not stand. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values,” our letter stated. “Your values are not American values.”

Their principles falling upon deaf ears and mocking tongues throughout the dreary recess of Sleepy Joe and – with Trump 2.0 – an upsurging “systematic, full-frontal assault on our nation’s cultural and intellectual life,” according to Weinstein... who singles out in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” as the template designed to replace our diverse culture with a single, government-approved ideology.

Not to mention Kid Rock.

Trump has Gaza-fied American culture by starving the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA – as also the other NEA, the schoolteachers’ one), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Adding ribs to this “very backbone of our nation’s cultural infrastructure” hundreds, if not thousands of local community theaters, museums, school plays and stations of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (a lifeline for independent journalism and educational programming, especially in rural America), facing sudden funding gaps or total defenstraton – even “for work already underway” Weinstein opines.

Then, pivoting to a “second, more insidious wave (of) institutional capture,” the president has installed Himself as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, fired 22 of the 26 members of the National Council on the Humanities, the expert body that advises the NEH, “leaving it without the quorum required to conduct business and clearing the path for politically motivated grant-making” and has launched a comprehensive review of the Smithsonian Institution with the stated goal being to purge our national museums of “divisive” or “ideologically driven language”—code for any historical analysis that critically examines issues of race or injustice.

The president himself has complained that our museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was.” Far from restoring sanity, the Timelies contend, “...these actions constitute a state-mandated campaign of historical revisionism” that prompted the American Alliance of Museums to issue a statement on the “growing threats of censorship.”

The campaign to defund the arts, capture our museums, and rewrite our history is “a prelude to silencing dissent itself,” contends Weinstein... spicing up his accusation with inevitable references to the authoritarian playbook, page for page - evoking echoes of Nazi Germany’s “Degenerate Art” exhibitions, the Soviet Union’s doctrine of “Socialist Realism,” and even adding the ghosted host of the latest failed Russo-Ukrainian summit, the sad little wannabee Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

“Authoritarians always target art first. They do so, because art and history are enemies of the myths a regime needs to survive. They foster critical thought and reveal uncomfortable truths that undermine nationalist propaganda. By silencing artists and historians, a regime seeks to control not just the present, but the past and the future as well, “ Weinstein concludes – declaring the MAGAnization of culture “a battle for the American soul, and for the sake of the freedoms we are guaranteed, it is a battle we must not lose.”

I have already pronounced my personal, political and professional opinion that hyper-aquisitive Oracle/Taleo mastermind Larry Ellison is the most evil human being in America and now, through his son, David’s capture of Paramount-Skydance (evoking the President’s delegation of his more corrupt business practices to family members), Paramount Skydance employees “are facing a broad across-the-board culling under David Ellison’s new management regime come Halloween. (Variety, October 18^th, ATTACHMENT TEN)

Like other traditional media companies, Paramount — parent of CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+ and Pluto TV, MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and BET — has seen longer-term downturns in traditional and distribution revenue as pay-TV subscribers shift toward streaming.

Even as Paramount Skydance is gearing up to slash jobs, and has inked new deals investing more heavily in right-wing and extreme right-wing content (including UFC rights, a deal with Activision to make a movie based on “Call of Duty” and the acquisition of Bari Weiss’ The Free Press for a reported $150 million – which may or may not be interpreted as a sort of “loyalty bond”), he’s trolling for Warner Bros.

Listing a few “C-level hires” of late (including employee steals from Meta, Roku) and using some text reported previously by Deadline, Variety’s PEANUT GALLERY include both defenders and dissenters of the layoffs. “Greedy people who care nothing about others,” one trolled, while a more hostile hater referenced “Luigi’s Mansion” (sic) as “a fun game”.

“This is how business works. Nobody has a job for life. What don’t you people get about capitalism(?)” declamed a Larrylicker... “Whether it’s a private company or the government job security is nonexistent. You want a “permanent” job? Go live in a communist country.”

Stacey Abrams, who ran for Governor of Georgia and lost big, has found a forum on the Guardian U.K. where she and Esosa Osa wrote an opinionator contending that “U.S. leaders are erasing Black history.” (October 22^nd, ATTACHMENT ELEVEN)

“Since the start of this year, Onyx Impact’s research has found, 306,000 Black women have lost their jobs and $3.4bn in grant programs investing in Black communities has been slashed – including $9.4m in sickle cell disease research, $42m in programs designed to address Black maternal mortality and $31m in cuts to address asthma rates and air pollution harming Black children.

Contributory takeaways included the good old days when Jim Crow was scared off and life got better for Native Americans, gays and women all because of DEI. Today, minorities are afflicted by scholarships and education programs being cut; support for Black-owned businesses and vital health initiatives have been slashed; Black stories have been removed from curricula, exhibits and public memory and, guest contributor Al Sharpton checks in touting the “10 Steps campaign”, a nationwide mobilization effort to protect democracy advising that, we “absolutely face coordinated attacks on truth, which are intended to sow despair or lead to inaction – but we cannot allow that.”

And so, along came WokeWaves back when spring was in the air (March 4^th, ATTACHMENT TWELVE) whose Olivia Bennett added Gen. Z youth (especially the techsters) to the roster of the oppressed in “rejecting traditional values” while claiming that “...(r)ather than the "death" of culture, this shift signals the creation of new traditions that fit the modern world.”

“Every generation looks back on its past with nostalgia,” Ms. Bennett contends. The “good old days” always seem simpler, sweeter, and more connected. “But for Gen Z, nostalgia doesn’t hit the same way. Instead of looking back, we’re looking forward—and we’re not afraid to leave old traditions behind.

“From holidays feeling less magical to cultural norms fading, something has shifted. The traditions that once defined family, community, and identity no longer feel relevant. And honestly? Most of us aren’t that mad about it.

But is this the death of culture, or are we just making space for something new? An American dictator? The robots? A new flavor of soda...

Holidays, rituals, and community moments have lost their collective magic,” Ms. Bennett concludes, and then states: “Here’s why...

“Commercialization: Holidays feel less about meaning and more about buying stuff.
“Online Overload: Seeing people post their celebrations makes our own feel less unique.
“Less Community Engagement: Fewer neighbors, fewer gatherings, fewer real-life connections.

“Traditions aren’t just about the event itself—they’re about the people who uphold them. And when people stop caring? The traditions fade.”

Asking whether the real question isn’t whether traditions will survive, her reply is, rather: “What new traditions will we build? And more importantly—will they be better?”

A DEAD ECONOMY (except for the billionaires)

Probably not, according to the powerful and publicized International Monetary Fund journal (IMF).

The International Moneymovers, while dismissing the Trump tariffs as a minor and, presumably, temporary spider on the wall, cite global growth projections in the latest World Economic Outlook (WEO) as pit the USA against the world.

“Global growth is projected to slow from 3.3 percent in 2024 to 3.2 percent in 2025 and 3.1 percent in 2026, with advanced economies growing around 1.5 percent and emerging market and developing economies just above 4 percent. Inflation is projected to continue to decline globally, though with variation across countries: above target in the United States—with risks tilted to the upside—and subdued elsewhere.” (ATTACHMENT TWELVE)

The MoneyFunders highlight three trends as render the overall environment “volatile”. They are...

Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies

With global growth projected to slow and growth prospects remain dim, the world must adjusts “to a landscape marked by greater protectionism and fragmentation.”

Chapter 2: Emerging Market Resilience: Good Luck or Good Policies?

The good news is that “Emerging markets” have shown remarkable resilience to risk-off shocks in recent years. “While favorable external conditions—good luck—contributed to this resilience, improvements in policy frameworks—good policies—played a critical role in bolstering the capacity of emerging markets to withstand risk-off shocks...”

Chapter 3: Industrial Policy: Managing Trade-Offs to Promote Growth and Resilience

While the moneyfunders agree with many of the economic policies of Team Trump – boosting productivity, reducing reliance on imports – the problem for the peasants, should they wake up and resist, include “higher consumer prices for a prolonged period” and, according to another global gargoyle, the World Economic Forum (WEF – September 28, ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN) as takes a deeper dive into “under-the-radar trends” which takes a stab at guessing who will win for the rest of the year, and who will not.

“Disruption, uncertainty, and long-term structural change are the big-picture trends shaping expectations for a weakened global economy, according to the World Economic Forum’s latest Chief Economists’ Outlook” – snapshotting a world where tariffs and trade tensions have realigned supply chains, the effects of a weakened US dollar are spreading, and the stunning pace of artificial intelligence development is creating uncertainty alongside new growth opportunities.

Some of these Chief Economists and their proposed remedies include Fabien Curto Millet, Chief Economist, Google, who contends that AI could not just be a breakthrough, but “a breakthrough in breakthroughs,” which he calls a tantalizing prospect.

Some of these breakthroughs include a better understanding of proteins, the detection of gravitational waves, deciphering of ancient texts, or the reasons why some superbugs are resistant to antibiotics... revealing AI’s potential to boost research productivity – “helping to drive economic growth as well as advances in health and wellbeing.”

Svenja Gudell, Chief Economist of Indeed contends that the global economy “will be shaped by a race between the effects of an ageing population with declining labour force participation, and the potential productivity boost represented by continued evolution and adoption of AI tools.” Her two key points to know about that race are these: “It has already started, and we are already losing.”

Why? Declining birthrates and ageing labor force are especially impacting construction and healthcare – and President’s Trump war on migrants is complicating the crisis – therefore, the key challenge and opportunity represented by AI will be “our own ability to harness the tools’ power to support human workers’ ability to adapt, reskill and upskill to meet not just tomorrow’s labour needs, but today’s too.”

Steffen Kern, Chief Economist and Head of Risk Analysis, European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), sees an increasingly helter-skelter market in which a successor to bitcoins... “stablecoins”, including cross-country multi-issuance stablecoins (MISCs), as will, Mister Kern hopes: “take finance to a new level of efficiency between crypto and traditional markets.”

But, he warns that the short history of stablecoins “includes 23 failures in just over a decade, and earlier this year the Bank for International Settlements warned, as other expert have done before, of their fragile “redemption-at-par” promise.” Even riskier varients... the so-called “fungible coins” issued by private persons and agencies of miscellaneous repute (Donald Trump being one mercher) are presently containable but, as Mister Kern postulates growth beyond $3.5 trillion within five years, including deep systemic ties to sovereign debt, money markets and beyond: “A failure at that scale would not remain within crypto. It would gravely affect institutional and retail investors and hurt the wider economy. This risk is not worth taking.”

Besides, a large proportion of these fungipeople are criminals.

Wayne Best, Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President, Visa says that what used to be the benchmark for healthy job growth (around 150,000 per month) “becoming less relevant (as s)tructural shifts in the labour market are changing what “healthy” looks like.”

Using recent population projections from the Congressional Budget Office, Veep Best says that our analysis “shows that monthly job growth of just 40,000 to 50,000 could be enough to maintain a stable unemployment rate in 2026 – and possibly lower in 2027.”

On the demand side, inflation... some of which is tariff-induce, more due to climactic issues... are driving up the prices on Halloween staples: chocolate candy and carved pumpkins.

CNBC’s Lori Ann LaRocco cites “year-over-year increases as high as 300% on relatively inexpensive items, such as pumpkin carving kits, with underlying import tariffs near 60%.” (October 27^th, ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN) “Retailers are forecasting a record Halloween sales season, but the reason is likely the higher prices across the board, according to experts.”

One such expert is DataWeave, which analyzes SKUs (stock keeping units), a scannable code retailers use to identify and track a product. DW “has seen big price hikes among relatively inexpensive Halloween items, led by pumpkin carving-related products. Pumpkin Masters, the popular pumpkin carving company (made in China) that offers a wide range of carving and decorating kits, topped the list in the percentage of price increases, with year-over-year increases as high as 300%.”

The National Retail Federation forecasts that Halloween spending will hit a record $114 per person this year, but that is likely a function of higher prices across the board.

“Prices are increasing across related categories, including costumes, candy, and pumpkin carving tools, as retailers deal with global uncertainty and work to manage the impact and total price passed on to consumers,” said Lauren Murphy, managing director, Wells Fargo Retail Finance.

Corporations, be their wares holidaical, homesome or homicidal are fending off the wiles of their purported friend, President Trump – whose hatred of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives (as stated in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Harmeet Dhillon) provoked the spooky warning to Wall Street that: "Either DEI will end on its own," causing dozens of the nation’s largest companies from McDonald’s to Facebook owner Meta to drop to their knees and pucker up their lips, "or we will kill it."

And, the unsaid appendage whispered, you. (Time (ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN)

“What you see are companies bending themselves to the will of the president,” Dhillon boasted. “The White House is in charge.”

In recent months, the Justice Department has signaled its intention to investigate federal contractors and grant recipients who “knowingly” violate civil rights laws.

“If a corporate DEI plan reads like a quota, then expect a subpoena,” Brandon Smith, a partner with the Holtzman Vogel law firm and former chief of staff and assistant solicitor general in the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, recently wrote in the National Review. “The era of accountability for violating state and federal civil rights laws has begun.”

During her Senate testimony, Dhillon promised the Trump administration would bring “numerous investigations and lawsuits against institutions that continue to offend our federal civil rights laws.”

In its first step the Justice Department created the “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative” and threatened legal action under the False Claims Act, a civil law that allows the government to recover funds lost to fraud.

Next, Time rocked and rolled, “the Justice Department has begun issuing civil investigative demands (CIDs) to employers across a broad range of industries, directing them to turn over information about their DEI programs.”

False Claims Act lawsuits are costly to defend and damages and penalties can quickly add up, the Morrison & Foerster law firm said.

“Violators can be held liable for up to three times the total value of the contract in addition to per-claim penalties of $14,000 to $28,000 for each time the government contractor billed the government.

“What’s more, the DOJ is encouraging whistleblowers to file lawsuits on the government’s behalf and potentially receive a portion of the windfall. Last year, the DOJ took in nearly $3 billion in False Claims Act settlements and judgments.

“Just the mere threat of a False Claims Act investigation is a powerful cudgel, lawyers say.”

Time also noted that the diversity (read darkskinned applicant and employee) police are probing the employment practices of state and local governments.

“The DOJ has announced investigations into possible employment discrimination, the state of Minnesota and the California Environmental Protection Agency. In May, the DOJ said it was probing Chicago’s hiring decisions after Mayor Brandon Johnson touted the number of Black officials in his administration.”

Private-sector employers should expect “similar aggressive positions,” the Perkins Coie law firm warned.

After Djonald Re-Elected fired two Democratic commissioners before their terms were up, leaving the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission without a quorum, the Senate confirmed his pick of wooden puppet Brittany Panuccio as commissioner of the EEOC, enabling Acting EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas to promise that eliminating “illegal DEI” in the workplace was a top priority.

“As head of the EEOC, I’m committed to dismantling the identity politics that have plagued our civil rights laws,” Lucas said during her confirmation hearing for a second term as a commissioner.

In addition to nixing the... uh... African, Asian and Latin Americans... the reconstructed EEOC is likely to reverse guidance on workplace harassment, “which last year strengthened protections for LGBTQ+ workers, such as the right to use bathrooms and pronouns that align with their gender identity” and, as DefSec Hegseth promised, do away with “dudes in dresses.”

Not even for Halloween costumarias.

DEAD HOLIDAZE

The Berkeleyside spiderwebbs from the People’s Republic out there (October 25, ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN) reported that “the annual Día de los Muertos event hosted at Berkeley High School has been canceled out of caution following the arrival of federal immigration agents to the Bay Area earlier this week.”

The ICE vise clamped down over the party and parade and, although local officials reported that Trump’s “surge” operation had been canceled, a decision to cancel was made “to prioritize the well-being and safety of all community members.”

Google’s AI overview on ICE raids upon Day of the Dead celebrations included cities like Long Beach, CA and Decatur, AL, which canceled their 2025 events, “citing concerns over the presence of law enforcement and the potential for family separation. Organizers decided to cancel rather than risk the safety of their community members.”

While alien migrants and people who look like alien migrants have been hiding from ICE mice, black cats... not boppin’ rapper gobble-uns but actual rat-catching, nite-howlin’ felines are having their day tomorrow.

Readers’ Digest... yes, that one... walked on the wild side Friday nite and took a shot at scaring its milk n’cookies readership with terrifying tales of the holiday’s most visible creatures. (ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN)

“The story of how the black cat became one of Halloween’s most famous symbols,” as told by Cynthia Sanz Carstens, is a dark and twisty tale that “dates back to the holiday’s earliest origins and the cat’s penchant for getting in the middle of everything.”

WHAT DO BLACK CATS SYMBOLIZE?

“It depends on what culture you’re in,” says Henning. Many Asian cultures view cats (of any color) as a symbol of good fortune, while Welsh and Scottish folklore holds that the arrival of a black cat at your door brings good health and prosperity.

“In England, black cats were considered lucky because they were thought to be better hunters who could move around quickly in the dark,” Meghan Henning, PhD, a professor of Christian origins at the University of Dayton in Ohio told the Digest. “But then black cats became associated with witchcraft and the devil, and it turned on them. If a black cat crossed your path, it meant bad luck was coming your way.”

THE SACRED FELINE

“In ancient Egypt, black cats were more than just beloved—they were worshipped,” Henning relates. “Bastet, the daughter of the sun god, Ra, was frequently depicted as a cat and was said to protect homes from evil spirits.” And rats! “In wealthy households, cats were treated as royalty, dressed in jewels and immortalized in paintings and statues. When the cats died, they were mummified in the hope that they would one day be reunited with their owner in the afterlife. And anyone who killed a cat was sentenced to death.”

Elsewhere, however, the cats were those sentenced to death. “In Greek mythology, we have Hecate, who’s the goddess of magic, and she has a cat,” says Henning. “The cat became Hecate’s familiar, helping her with her spells and her work as a witch.”

Black cats played a central role in the Celtic-pagan harvest festival called Samhain (pronounced SOW-in or SAH-win), and legend had it that a Celtic creature called the Cat-Sith, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its chest, was actually a witch transformed into a cat. “Leaving a saucer of milk out for the Cat-Sith on Samhain would bring blessings over the year ahead. But anyone who didn’t offer milk to the Cat-Sith would be cursed.”

The cats’ real troubles, Henning relates, began in the year 1233 when Pope Gregory IX issued his papal bull, ‘Vox in Rama,' in response “to a rumor that there were a whole bunch of Satan worshippers in Germany.”

The Inquisitor, Konrad von Marburg, declared that Luciferians in Germany were worshipping the devil in various forms, including that of a demonic black cat. “The devil that’s supposedly being worshipped is a kind of shadowy half-man, half-cat figure, and there are stories of the witches kissing a black cat’s butt,” says Henning. “You can see how that stuck with people, right? And it led to the widespread persecution of black cats, and other cats too...” even some fat cats with two legs, partial to having his behind kissed by supplicants.

“Some people say that cats were almost eliminated in Europe, and that’s part of what led to the spread of the bubonic plague—because there weren’t cats around to kill the mice,” says Henning. “It wasn’t a great time to be a cat.”

Nor, here and there, is the present a particularly great time for the felines adopted or hijacked by superstitious Satanists to be sacrificed during the spooky season, according toe Cyristina Thykjaer in Euronews.com.

The prevalence of cat sacrifice has even motivated the Spanish city of Terrassa to suspend adoption of black cats until the end of the month.

Black cats are customarily associated with demons and this led Penelope Geng, in the Conversation (October 27, ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN) to expostulate upon the similarities and differences between demons and other Halloween haints like ghosts.

“Belief in the spirit world is a key part of many faiths and religions,” Geng wrote, citing a 2023 survey of 26 countries, which revealed that about half the respondents believed in the existence of angels, demons, fairies and ghosts. “In the United States, a 2020 poll found that about half of Americans believe ghosts and demons are real.”

Through history (King James VI’s attack upon “detestable slaves of the Devill”), legends (Reformation Protestants blaming Catholics for inventing ghosts to “scare people into obedience”), tales (Hamlet, Faustus) and artworks (see images here).

While ghosts are often benevolent... from Banquo to Caspar... or, believed Reformation Lutherans, as in Ludwig Lavater’s 1572 book “Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Night”, simply the “falsehood of Monkes, or illusions of devils, franticke imaginations, or some other frivolous and vaine perswasions...” Geng contends that they “enthusiastically accepted the reality of devils.”

Demons, as opposed to ghosts, “were almost always malevolent tricksters who served the Devil. Demons lacked knowledge of what it meant to be human. Hell was the demons’ lair. Early modern texts describe them visiting the earthly plane to corrupt, possess or tempt humans to commit self-harm or violence against others.

Should you ever encounter an “apparition,” advised Lavater, “you must call it out for what it truly is: a devil pretending to be a ghost.”

USA Today (ATTACHMENT NINETEEN) profiled what is believed to be the largest gathering of corpses... the cemetery at Colma, south of San Francisco.

Reporter Chris Kenning interviewed the graveyard groundskeeper, Richard Rocchetta, who listed some of the celebrities in repose at Colma

“There’s Joe DiMaggio, the “Yankee Clipper,” Rocchetta pointed out. “There’s Wyatt Earp, the mustachioed Old West lawman. There's music impresario Bill Graham and William Randolph Hearst, the news tycoon.” And, in between, were the lesser-known: Bankers, priests, Hells Angels bikers and Alcatraz inmates.

Local denizens include George Moscone, a San Francisco mayor who was assassinated in 1978 along with Harvey Milk, a member of the board of supervisors who was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. Abigail Folger, the coffee heiress murdered by Charles Manson’s cult members and denim magnate Levi Strauss, “who lies in a domed mausoleum.”

And there’s Emperor Norton, a late-1800s San Francisco eccentric figure known for wearing a ostrich-plumed hat and sword and dubbing himself the "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.”

Colma, incorporated as a necropolis in 1924 after San Francisco banned new burials, is home to 1.6 million souls in 17 cemeteries that take up most of its 2.2 square miles. In one of America’s most grave-dense cities, there are Italian, Serbian and Japanese cemeteries. Majestic arched entrances and elegant columbariums. A Chinese cemetery whose entrance is flanked by giant panda statues and Pet’s Rest, where plots with animals from ocelots to iguanas honor pets with names like Yugi, Taco, Ludwig, Buster, Chico the Chihuahua. Here, also, Tina Turner's dog is buried with one of her fur coats.

This time of year, opined Kenning, “you might imagine that Colma would be Halloween mecca, that it would draw legions seeking gothic shenanigans and fog-shrouded backdrops for seances or selfies.

Former Colma Police Sgt. Tim Mackie told the East Bay Times in 2005 that. during nighttime graveyard patrols, he’d discovered naked lovers, people dancing on graves and the remains of seances, with candles circling a grave and pieces of a chicken strewn about.

“It was a free-for-all back then,” said local publican Owen Molloy, until the cemeteries put in fences and installed security cameras.

“Every Halloween, we get a call from some newspaper or whatever,” says Helen Fisicaro, a Colma city council member and former mayor who has lived in town since the 1970s.

“But there really isn't that kind of story here. It's not scary. It's not ghostly. There's this protection or reverence of the cemeteries.”

So now, rather as in the case of the “calavers” of the Day of the Dead, “this is not the haunted place many envision, but rather one of reverence that stands as a story of how we remember our dead and their place in history,” Kenning writes before soliciting some last words from Rocchetta – “who takes his matter-of-fact approach to a life spent among the dead from his father’s maxim:

“You need to worry more about those above ground than those underneath it.”

DEAD DEMOCRACY

The concept "democracy of the dead" was coined by English author G.K. Chesterton in his 1908 tome, Orthodoxy to explain the importance of tradition. (Google AI Overview: ATTACHMENT TWENTY) “In this view, democracy isn't limited to the votes of the living, but should also honor the "votes" of past generations, the deceased by encouraging...

A wider electorate: Tradition is described as "an extension of the franchise" to include the deceased, giving them a vote in the present.

A check on the "small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about".

Suggesting that the wisdom of previous generations provides important perspective on current affairs (contrary to the Gen. Zombie mentality expressed in Attachment Twelve, above), googly eyes read and googly brains (“Mmmm, brains!”) find Chesterton’s philosophy comparable to Mexico's Día de los Muertos (November 1–2) – which holiday is “a tradition that literally gives a voice to the ancestors.”

Ancestors, of course, have had a few unpleasant traits along with the virtues recalled by nostalgics... there have always been wars, famine, inequality (to the extent of slavery and genocide), strange and unpleasant superstitions and a recurring notion of nationhood as promotes isolation and bigotry.

Thus the exploitation of Halloween, the Days of the Dead and other holidays (including soon, probably unfortunately, Veterans’ Day) by predators like the ICE ethnic cleansers and their allies among police, National Guardsmen and the military.

Fear of the “catch and deport” authorities is, reports Minnesota Public Radio (itself slated for extermination in the near and probable future), is casting a “pall” over Minnesota’s Dia de los Muertos celebrations. (ATTACHMENT TWENTY ONE)

MPR sought out (Mexican) men and women on the streets of Mankato... citizens or aliens... and found that the national attention surrounding anti-immigration caused fear in Latino communities, “impacting them from going to grocery stores or gas stations despite holding legal statuses,” testified Luis Albert Orozco, who claimed to know close family friends who have legal status, but are still very worried about even just filling up their gas tank after work “just because you never know,” Orozco said. “I am scared because you never know what can happen.”

What happened last week was that U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem paid a visit to Minnesota on Friday to highlight the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and threaten citizens and aliens alike.

“The threat of ‘We’re going to deploy the National Guard,’ ‘We’re going to use force,’ that is something that is really extreme,” said Ryan Perez, organizing director for Communities Organizing Latine Power and Action, or COPAL, based in Minneapolis.

“We’ve seen the video of ICE agents, how aggressive they’re getting in pushing people down to the ground, slamming their faces against cement. A lot of folks have said that that’s a significant escalation in many communities than what was happening before.”

“We’ve heard a lot of families are not sending their kids to school. They’re afraid that the kid will come home and Mom and Dad won’t be there, and that’s a really scary reality.”

That’s why events like Old Town Day of the Dead in Mankato are important for Latinos embracing their identity and culture. Justin Ek, 35, of North Mankato, is co-founder of the event, MPR notes. “He remembers how much the event grew from its humble beginnings in his family’s painting business parking lot, to now spanning multiple blocks,” and says he hopes that it “inspires younger generations (to believe) that they do belong.”

“I love thinking about when I’m in this event, is how I felt as a kid in Mexico during this season,” Orozco said. “When the skies would get clear, and we were able to see all the stars in the sky, and that was sort of a sign that our ancestors were looking over us during this time.”

The celebration will go on, despite the ICE and despite the fear that has shut down the holiday in even ultra-liberal cities like Berkeley (Attachment Sixteen, above). “We’re all here just to celebrate and have a good time,” Martha Croyle told MPR. “We want to enjoy this colorful culture that brings everybody together. Don't let yourself be overcome by fear. We're stronger together.”

Also from the Gopher State, the Twin Cities Pioneer Press graciously reprinted the New York Times’ paywalled plea by David Brooks that “the death of democracy is happening within us.” (ATTACHMENT TWENTY TWO

Giving rare credit to Old Goneaway Joe, Brooks brought to mind that, after their “convincing election victory” in 2020, Democrats proceeded to do what all victorious parties do. “They passed legislation in accord with their priorities, including raising health insurance subsidies to families making up to 400% of the poverty line. They wrote the law so that the subsidies would expire in 2025.

“In 2024, the Republicans won a convincing election victory. They proceeded to do what all victorious parties do. They passed legislation in accord with their priorities, including letting the Democrats’ insurance subsidies expire as planned.

“If the Democrats were a normal party that believed in democratic principles, they would have planned to go to the voters in the next elections and said: These Republican policies are terrible! You should vote for us!

“But of course that’s not what the Democrats decided to do. Instead, they shut down the government. Why did they do that? Because we don’t live in a healthy democracy. We live in a country in which the norms, beliefs and practices that hold up a democracy are dying even in the minds of many of the people who profess to oppose Donald Trump.”

Channelling Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “Defining Deviancy Down”, Brooks opined that – while Trump is destroying democratic norms, Democrats “have decided to follow him into the basement.”

His evidence includes the gerrymandering in Texas and California, the ubiquitous “fighting” rhetoric and the sort of indoctrinarian education, he covered in the Soviet Union before it fell.

“Today, if you are a Republican you have basically turned yourself into a Trump bobblehead figure who gets to go on Fox News from time to time.” If you’re a Democrat, you’re just weak and confused.

“There has been a slow moral, emotional and intellectual degradation,” Brooks concludes — the loss of the “convictions, norms and habits of mind that undergird democracy. What worries me most is the rot creeping into your mind, and into my own.”

Crawling through the rot like maggots, MAGAbiles are cheering on Their President as he dons his Thomas Jefferson costume to revive the Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, which allows the President to use the military as they deem “necessary” to enforce the law or suppress insurrection in the U.S. under certain conditions.

Retaliating by pretending to be Rutherford Hayes, one of those darned Federal Judges ruled early in September that the deployment of Guard troops in Los Angeles this summer violated another 19th-century federal law... the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the President from using the military for law enforcement purposes within the U.S. But it’s a sort of Vice Presidential law; the Insurrection Act gives Trump “authority to deploy the troops domestically” — again, in specific circumstances whose speciality has now transported, of course, into the dimension of the lawyers. (Time, ATTACHMENT TWENTY THREE)

It’s not a statute of the rare, albino bald eagle sort... the Insurrection Act “has been invoked on multiple occasions over the years,” Time reported, lastly in 1992 “when President George H.W. Bush deployed the National Guard, at the request of former California Gov. Pete Wilson, ?to suppress unrest in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four white police officers who were filmed beating Rodney King.”

An earlier invocation occurred in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 “against the wishes of the governor to quell opposition to the integration of Central High School.” But in this instance – taking away the rights of Americans instead of expanding on them – Rachel Van Cleave, a professor at the McGeorge School of Law, calling resort to the Insurrection Act “pretty remarkable”, but also dangerous in that the California Guardsmen being sent to Oregon would be gone at the height of wildfire season.

The death of democracy was studied by Jonathan Schlefer (ATTACHMENT TWENTY FOUR), who cited How Democracies Die, by the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt as also the murdered democracies in Hungary, Thailand and Zambia as led Brian Klaas to warn in The Atlantic, three years ago, that “American democracy is dying.”

Schlefer accused Trump of doing all the same things as the authoritarians Levitsky and Ziblatt studied: “He has refused to accept electoral defeats; called political opponents criminals and tried to jail them even while backing his own violent supporters”; and has lashed out at opponents and the media as “enemies of the people” — a chilling phrase that echoes Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Schlefer writes, as well as the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

This is a dire moment for U.S. democracy, Politico reports (to use the established media’s ... to make it worse, the assassination of Charlie Kirk threatens to ratchet up “not only the recent surge of political violence but to reanimate “the poisonous tradition of political assassination that runs through Martin Luther King., Jr., President John F. Kennedy, the many Black leaders murdered during Jim Crow, and the Civil War.” Deranged individuals perpetrated the recent attacks, Schlefer admits, but “shared fear that U.S. politics is at an existential moment as the 2026 and 2028 elections approach surely portends more widespread and equally damaging threats of violence.”

Against the pessimism, however, Politico’s posits in favor of democratic survival include certain alienable premises, like...

WEALTH IS GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY...

PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER FOR DEMOCRACY THAN PRIME MINISTERS...

TRUMP IS LESS POPULAR THAN SUCCESSFUL AUTOCRATS

THE SUPREME COURT STILL HAS POWER

In opposition, and from cringing sources, the Guardian U.K. (Oct. 2, ATTACHMENT TWENTY FIVE) published EuroFears that American democracy might not survive another year. Evidence that GUKster Alexander Hurst presented for his contention include an overweight president who can’t pronounce acetaminophen and who bumbles, for a full minute, about how he would have renovated the UN’s New York headquarters with marble floors, rather than a terrazzo.

But the “comedic quality of the disguise” donned by Donnie is emblematic, Hurst opines, in Umberto Eco’s definition of Ur-Fascism (lighter and less competent than Hitler or Stalin, but still repugnant)... “ the call to tradition and the rejection of reason, the fear of difference, the hostility towards disagreement, the ressentiment, the machismo, the degradation of language into newspeak, the cult of a “strong” leader.”

GUK’s litany of sins that the American President has committed include deployment of the US

@begin a25

IN the NEWS: OCTOBER 23^RD to OCTOBER 29^TH, 2025

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Dow: 46,734.61

On the 23^rd day of Shutdown, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wi) opposes paying workers because that would prolong the strike. The VA no longer pays for medical care for vets, nor undertakers’ fees for burying them when they die (and then there are the wild pigs digging up untended graves). Soldiers in uniform line up at charity food banks; SNAP scheduled to run out of money and, as Ukraine War continues, Trump imposes sanction on Russian Lukoil and Mossnet.

The Shutdown halts construction on Alligator Alcatraz but not Trump’s Golden Ballroom and photos of the demolition called a metaphor for the administration (lateniter Seth Myers says “the first thing the aliens do when they come is blow up the White House). The President says he’ll have to raise costs from $200 to $300M, but private donors will step in (for a favor) and good bye to the famous Rose Garden,

Fans and haters argue the selection of Bad Bunny as Superbowl halftime act... 70.000 sign petition to replace him with (a white, English speaking) George Strait. ICE continues rounding up brown, black and yellow people, even Puerto Ricans and citizens while the Dept. of War continues sinking boats off Venezuela... 9 now, with 37 killed. Next ICE target, NYC’s Chinatown.

King Charles meets Pope Leo at the Vatican where they discuss world affairs and avoid Andrew.

Friday, October 24, 2025

Dow: 47,207.51

Trump finds America a new enemy – Canada. After Ontario releases an old anti-tariff video by Ronald Reagan, Trump cancels trade talks and, also, pardons a crypto crook Zhou who traded billions in Trump bitcoins.

FBI busts massive mafia-related plot to get NBA stars and coaches to defraud fans and suckers with rigged poker games and point shaving on games. The gambling scandal returns attention to the good ol’ American (and Italian) mafia as against Mexican and Latin crack and Chinese fentanyl. ICE, DHS, military and more continue rounding up migrants (some criminal, maybe not)... Border Czar Greg Bovino fights protesters by throwing teargas into the crowds... Trump sends 5.000 more troops south; denies he’ll declare war on Colombia, Venezuela, Canada or whomever: “we’ll just kill people.”

Out of jail, Letitia James claims indictment is invalid because deputy AyGee Lindsay Halligan is not a career prosecutor. She also asks for her case to be combined with James Comey’s as “revenge prosecution” – and perhaps John Bolton’s too.

Saturday, October 25, 2025

Dow: Closed

One hundred days to Winter Olympics in Milan. A ways east, in Paris, les flics catch two of the four Louvre jewel thieves at the airport, trying to escape... one to Algeria, the other to Mali. Two other remain at large and the jewels have not bee recovered and the Poirots, Javerts and other Inspectors say... “Inside Job?”

Bocker, makers of the ladder used by them to break in, is reportedly merching their tools

On Shutdown Day 25, half a million gumment workers miss first paycheck while President Trump begins his Asian tour that will include meetings with Chinese dictator Xi on Thursday and, perhaps, even with the NoKos. He sends the heavily armed U.S.S. Gerald Ford to the Caribbean to hunt drug smugglers, but actual punishment is imposed on Canada – more tariff hikes and sanctions because the state of Ontario circulated a video of Ronald Reagan saying teriffs were bad.

In sports, those dastardly Toronto Blue Jays beat America’s defending champion Dodgers 11-4 in game one of the world series. Fans are reportedly deserting the NBA over cheating and point shaving scandals by players and coaches (above) as include Charlotte player Terry Rozier and Portland Coach Chauncey Billups

Sunday, October 19, 2025

Dow: Closed

On Talkshow Sunday, Democrats may still be shrieking “No Kings!” but ComSec Scott (Bessent) is King for the Day, telling “the Talk” on ABC that he’s grooming Djonald DisOriented for his dealings with Xi and then crossing over to “Face the Nation”, expressing confidence that deals on rare earths and soybeans will be consummated and urges the asses to support a “clean” continuing budget & maybe get healthcare relief later.

Sen. Mark Kelly (R-Az) inquires if he, or anybody, can save Joneses from medical insurance premiums and slated to rise from $300 to $1,200 per month and says the Coast Guard, not the Navy, should prosecute the aquatic War on Drugs. Important Generals say that Kathryn Bigelow, director of the bam bam new nuke war movie “House of Dynamite” is mostly right to question allegedly perfect shootdown test scores given the arms control deal with Russia expires on New Years’ Day and Mad Vlad, anger is showing towards Trump and towards America.

The ABC roundtable discusses the shutdown – former DNC chair Brazile says healthcare is being gutted vs. former RNC chair Priebus, who says that when Trump comes back with his China deal, he’ll bring all the people together. Brazile says demolition of the East Wing for Trump’s Golden Ballroom is “vanity project”, RP says most people don’t care, other paneliss Sara Isgur says it doesn’t rank among America’ Top Hundred crises, while Charles Lane says it’s all “optics”. They also discuss upcoming elections: Virgina AyGee Ass Jay Jones proving a real ass with a loose tongue; house leader Jeffries stalled on NYC’s Zorro, knowing he will “drag the Democrats down in ’28.”

And speaking of a horrific 2028 race, Trump mulling running for Third Term despite the 22^nd Amendment while Kamala Harris says she’ll probably run again – setting up the perfect storm of dual despicability.

Monday, October 27, 2025

Dow: 46,706.58

President Trump arrives in Japan, preparing for his China conference with Xi on fentanyl, tariffs, and TikTok as Air Force One avoids the delays and danger facing other travelers due to the shutdown and its effect on Air Traffic Control that closes LAX. In the Himalays, south of China, Jim Morris (not that one) skis down Everest while two Navy planes crash in separate incidents further south in the South China Sea.

POTUS gone, Congress still on vacation and Senate still squabbline as the fourth week of Shutdown begins, USDA runs political ads blaming Democrats if SNAP is killed on the Day of the Dead and children starve... strangely enough, the Dow keeps rising to record heights. Inflation figures out late, due to shutdown... 3% price hikes override 2.8% Soc Sec benefits.

No price too high for “KPOP Dragon Fighters” costumes – so in demand that stores are running out and, with severe drought in West Africa’s cocoa plantations causing prices to double, Halloween candy becoming more cotly. Give ‘em lemons, instead?

Another anime “Chainsaw” beats Bruce bio at B.O. despite Angela Cartwright, (Penny on “Lost in Space” and now 73), paying tribute to “Mom” June Lockhart who, even at 100, was a rock and roll fan. And football fans, players and commentators remember Nick Mangold who played all his professional life for the New York Jets who, after starting 0-7, finally did him right by beating Cincinnati.

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Dow: 47,706.37

Melissa hits Jamaica as a Cat. 5 with winds of 185 and gusts of 215mph, then moves on to Cuba. Tourists stranded as airport is shut down. It misses the U.S.A. but heavy storms and unrelated tornadoes hit Florida while high winds in the West increase wildfire danger... just as Trump orders deep cuts in climate bureau.

The President prepares for China trip enraged at ICE for falling short of October’s catch and deport alien raids and at sub-SCOTUS judges (some his own appointees) for blocking the firing of more furloughed Federal workers. Some air traffic controllers now want Democrats to surrender out of concern for safety but the 13^th Senate shutdown votes fails, same as before. Combined with next week’s SNAP cancel, the influx of fired and laid off workers strains food banks and charities. Congressional chaplain Barry Black says that there is no award given out for setting new gumment closure record.

An even longer event, World Series game three, taken by the Dodgers in 18 innings.

As the markets soar, private business cutting jobs, too. Amazon kills 14K, plans 30K more firings (but is still advertising for holiday temps at lower wages). Nvidia, now world’s #1 at $5T, tells workers “you’re not going to lose your job to AI, you’re going to lose your job to the people who run AI.” Happy Halloween!

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Dow: 47,632.00

Brave (or foolish) journalists invade Jamaica, looking for and finding human interest stories like the tourist who called Melissa “crazy” with the winds, the flooding and landslides and... crocodiles! Rescue and relief workers enter, with only “dozens” dead so far, but stoners worry: “What about the weed?”

Rosa DiLauro, the Senator (D-Ct) with purple hair, calls the SNAPdown “Immoral.” Judge Sam Ellis greenlights ICE invasions of schools, children’s Halloween parties and shootings of meddlesome priests and parents, saying: “...if someone strays into a pepperball, that’s on them. Don’t trespass!”

President Trump signs trade deal with Japan and new SoKo right-wing female Prez gives him a golden crown. He Zooms his boass that, having stopped drug imports by sea, the US military will now invade and attack on land, leading to lawsuits and fears of forever wars – not alleviated when he tears up nuclear test treaties and promised more and bigger bombs to prosecute short, sweet, World War Three. Back home, his family business expands to opening up Truth Social as a crypto-gambling site while singer Drake’s “Stake” casinos face civil and criminal litigation and point shaving NBAsters suspended and indicted.

Gamblers and pollsters largely agree that people dislike the President, but dislike donkeys too.

THE DON JONES INDEX

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

Gains in indices as improved are noted in GREEN. Negative/harmful indices in RED as are their designation. (Note – some of the indices where the total went up created a realm where their value went down... and vice versa.) See a further explanation of categories HERE

ECONOMIC INDICES		(60%)
CATEGORY	VALUE	BASE	RESULTS by PERCENTAGE			SCORE		OUR SOURCES and COMMENTS
INCOME	(24%)	6/17/13 revised 1/1/22	LAST	CHANGE	NEXT	LAST WEEK	THIS WEEK	THE WEEK’S CLOSING STATS...
Wages (hrly. Per cap)	9%	1350 points	10/23/25	+16.12%	11/25	1,846.20	1,846.20	https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/average-hourly-earnings 31.46 36.53
Median Inc. (yearly)	4%	600	10/23/25	+0.047%	11/5/25	904.38	904.81	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 44,763
Unempl. (BLS – in mi)	4%	600	10/23/25	+2.33%	10/25	530.25	530.25	http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/ 4.3
Official (DC – in mi)	2%	300	10/23/25	+0.03%	11/5/25	215.35	215.29	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,282
Unofficl. (DC – in mi)	2%	300	10/23/25	+0.31%	11/5/25	231.35	230.63	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 14,868
Workforce Participation Number Percent	2%	300	10/23/25	+0.019% -0.012%	11/5/25	296.97	296.87	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ In 163,580 Out 104,226 Total: 267,806 61..082
WP % (ycharts)*	1%	150	10/23/25	-0.16%	10/25	150.71	150.71	https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 62.30
OUTGO	(15%)
Total Inflation	7%	1050	10/23/25	+0.4%	10/25	927.45	927.45	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.4
Food	2%	300	10/23/25	+0.5%	10/25	262.59	262.59	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.5
Gasoline	2%	300	10/23/25	+1.9%	10/25	255.11	255.11	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +1.9
Medical Costs	2%	300	10/23/25	-0.1%	10/25	274.20	274.20	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm -0.1
Shelter	2%	300	10/23/25	+0.4%	10/25	250.63	250.63	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.4
WEALTH								An official website of the United States government census.gov Notification Due to the lapse of federal funding, portions of this website are not being updated. Any inquiries submitted via www.census.gov will not be answered until appropriations are enacted.
Dow Jones Index	2%	300	10/23/25	+2.40%	11/5/25	354.93	363.45	https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/ 47,632.00
Home (Sales) (Valuation)	1% 1%	150 150	10/23/25	+1.015% -1.75%	11/25	125.77 272.70	125.77 272.70	`https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics` Sales (M): 4.06 Valuations (K): 415.2
Millionaires (New Category)	1%	150	10/23/25	+0.05%	11/5/25	134.09	134.15	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 23,816
Paupers (New Category)	1%	150	10/23/25	+0.019%	11/5/25	133.31	133.36	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 37,268

GOVERNMENT	(10%)
Revenue (trilns.)	2%	300	10/23/25	+0.11%	11/5/25	458.98	459.50	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 5,266
Expenditures (tr.)	2%	300	10/23/25	+0.03%	11/5/25	294.42	294.33	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,021
National Debt tr.)	3%	450	10/23/25	+0.38%	11/5/25	356.92	355.56	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 38,048
Aggregate Debt (tr.)	3%	450	10/23/25	+0.08%	11/5/25	378.79	378.49	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 105,067

TRADE	(5%)
Foreign Debt (tr.)	2%	300	10/23/25	+0.13%	11/5/25	259.70	259.37	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 9,342
Exports (in billions)	1%	150	10/23/25	+1.15%	10/25	174.76	174.76	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 280.5
Imports (in billions))	1%	150	10/23/25	-5.94%	10/25	151.56	151.56	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 358.8
Trade Surplus/Deficit (blns.)	1%	150	10/23/25	-23.12%	10/25	253.88	253.88	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 78.3
								An official website of the United States government census.gov Notification Due to the lapse of federal funding, portions of this website are not being updated. Any inquiries submitted via www.census.gov will not be answered until appropriations are enacted.
SOCIAL INDICES		(40%)
ACTS of MAN	(12%)
World Affairs	3%	450	10/23/25	+0.1%	11/5/25	470.08	470.55	King Charles and Pope Leo meet & pray under the shadow of Andrew. World’s oldest Prez, Paul Biya of Cameroon ((92), elected to 8^th term. In foodie news, Argentine’s Milieu re-elected despite peso sinking to new low – despite Trump’s beef bailout, China, post-summit, agrees to buy more American soybeans despite collapse of a silo in Illinois.
War and terrorism	2%	300	10/23/25	-0.3%	11/5/25	290.08	289.21	Trump says he doesn’t have to declare war on Venezuela (or Canada, or Chicago) – “I’ll just kill people.” His drug boat bombings pivot to the Pacific Coast and $50M “wanted, dead or alibe” posters circulate for VenPrez Maduro. Only sporadic killings in Gaza as ceasefire holds until Tuesday after Israeli solder snipered, but bombing resumes thereafter and aid trucks stalled, Russia keeps bombing so oil sanctions imposed while Trump declares nuclear testing to resume. ICE newest target: NYC’s Chinatown.
Politics	3%	450	10/23/25	-0.2%	11/5/25	461.15	460.22	Dems charge $300M private Golden Ballroom donations for favors are corrupt, Trump commands demolitionists to sign non-disclosure papers. Steve Bannon says he’ll defy the 22^nd and run against Kamala in 2028 as turnout dips to 3% in what pundits call a “ghoulish” election.
Economics	3%	450	10/23/25	-0.1%	11/5/25	430.93	430.50	Unfired Feddies cut interest rate by a quarter of a point – not the three points MAGA wants, but something. Target targets 1,800 jobs. 3% inflation beats 2.8% social security hike. Dems say SNAP cancel on Day of the Dead will kill children, Bobble wins praise for cutting prices on infant formula for laid-offs.
Crime	1%	150	10/23/25	+0.1%	11/5/25	209.48	209.77	NBA gambling scandal masterminded by good o’ (American) mobsters. Police killings: Georgia man shot while stabbing firefighters with machete, Sonya Massey shooter convicted of 2^nd degree murder. Killer killings: Seven shot at Lincoln Union college homecoming in Chester, PA, five more at Howard U., disgruntled worker kills two in Tennessee. 15 year old arrested for 30 violent sex crimes. Police warn of trange criminals sellng poisoned Halloween candy. Two more strangers busted for “inappropriate conduct” on a children’s playground device.
ACTS of GOD	(6%)
Environment/Weather	3%	450	10/23/25	-0.1%	11/5/25	284.36	284.08	Jamaica struck by Melissa, strongest since Gilbert in 1988 while flooding and tornadoes bedevil Florida and Western wildfires resume. POTUS approves more drill baby in newly un-rangered Alaska Natl. parks and all such – coast to coast and Nacodoches to Nome become poachers’ paradise.
Disasters	3%	450	10/23/25	+0.3%	11/5/25	457.94	459.31	Hero mom saves 22 kids from burning Minnesota school bus. Firefighter in California rescues Zeke the Dog from Oceanside cliff. Shutdown makes air travel more dangerous with crashes and near crashes skyrocketing (but no mass casualty incidents yet).
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX		(15%)
Science, Tech, Education	4%	600	10/23/25	-0.1%	11/5/25	617.69	616.67	Student loan debtors reduced to begging on TikTok. AI app mistakes potato chips for gun, so cops swarm puzzled teenager.
Equality (econ/social)	4%	600	10/23/25	+0.1%	11/5/25	665.06	665.73	Children cheer as lost Dr. Seuss book discovered,
Health	4%	600	10/23/25	nc	11/5/25	420.50	420.50	More women taking testosterone to maintain their sex drive. Unwanted side effect” beards. Sephora curling irons burn users, Bacterial Neutrogena face wipes recalled, Hormel frozen chicken and BBQ pork jerky both full of meal wire. Deli Express pulled (plastic) pork; 63K Tesla trucks with blinding headlights Truckful of infected monkeys crashes in Mississippi, 3 still at large.
Freedom and Justice	3%	450	10/23/25	-0.1%	11/5/25	482.57	482.09	After billion dollar deal in Trump bitcoins, cryptocrook Zhou pardoned. NY AyGee Letiticia James demands dismissal because Lindsay Halligan is not a career prosecutor. States accused of selling DMV data to brokers (who then sell it to criminals) while scammers merch mail-order bouncy houses that never arrive to sad children, teacher gets 180 years for sex with sadder children and angry 6 year old arrested for shooting teacher.
CULTURAL and MISCELLANEOUS INCIDENTS			(6%)
Cultural incidents	3%	450	10/23/25	-0.1%	11/5/25	571.13	570.56	Taylor Swift nominated for Songwriters’ Hall of Fame; Bad Bunny wins Latin Awards as fans and haters argue his Superbowl halftime hero. Sequels abound: George Clooney in “Ocean’s Fourteen”, Pirates, Miami Vice, Thomas Crown and on and on. Dodgers win on and on 18 inning game three, but Toronto takes the next two and a 3-2 lead. RIP: June Lockhart (“Lassie”. “Lost in Spacee”) at 100, drummer Jack DeJohhnette. NFL’s Nick Mangold (41), Isabel Tate (“Nashville 911”) at only 23. Cody “Beef” Franke “Barstool” golf influencer at 31. R(etire)IP: Misty Copeland, first black ballerina;
Miscellaneous incidents	4%	450	10/23/25	-0.1%	11/5/25	543.94	543.40	Mother of abandoned Penn Station baby found, arrested. Jim Morrison (not the dead one) skis down Everest. World traveler KAG to face deported on Halloween – Liberia now. “Chuknasaurus” wins Texas fat squirrel contest

The Don Jones Index for the week of October 23^rd through October 29^th, 2025 was UP 5.12 points

The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator. The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.

Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.

ATTACHMENT ONE – FROM

A1X01 FROM DAYOFTHEDEAD.holiday

One time a year, our departed come back to celebrate with us

A dedication to the deceased

Day of the Dead (Dia De Los Muertos) is a two day holiday that reunites the living and dead. Families create ofrendas (Offerings) to honor their departed family members that have passed. These altars are decorated with bright yellow marigold flowers, photos of the departed, and the favorite foods and drinks of the one being honored. The offerings are believed to encourage visits from the land of the dead as the departed souls hear their prayers, smell their foods and join in the celebrations!

Day of the Dead is a rare holiday for celebrating death and life. It is unlike any holiday where mourning is exchanged for celebration.

“Day of the Dead is a holiday to remember loved ones by sharing a meal with them as one would when they were alive.”

QUESTIONS and ANSWERS...

When is the Day of the Dead?

🌙Nov 1st, 12am

Dia de los Angelitos

Spirits of the children

Dia de los Angelitos (Day of the little angels) starts the holiday at midnight on Nov 1st, where the spirits of all deceased children are believed to be reunited with their families for 24 hours. Families construct an altar, known as an ofrenda, with the departed child’s favorite snacks, candies, toys, and photographs to encourage a visit from their departed children. The names of the departed children will often be written on a sugar skull.

🌙Nov 2nd, 12am

Día de los Difuntos

Spirits of the adults

At midnight of the following day (November 2nd), the celebrations shift to honor the lives of the departed adults. The night is filled with laughter and fun memories, much like the night before. However, the Ofrendas take on a more adult-like theme with tequila, pan de muerto, mezcal, pulque and jars of Atole. Families will also play games together, reminisce about their loved ones, and dance while the village band plays in their town.

☀️Nov 2nd, Noon

Día de los Muertos

Spirits of all the dead

The next day is the grand finale and public celebration of Dia de Muertos. In more recent times, people come together in their cities, dressed up with Calavera painted faces (Skeletons) and have parades in the streets. Cemetery visits are also common on the last day as families will go to decorate the grave sites with Marigold flowers, gifts, and sugar skulls with the departed’s name on them. It’s customary to clean the grave stone and restore the color.

How people celebrateDay of the Dead

Sugar Skull art, coloring pages, and more!

Calaveras “Skull”

Calaveras are ubiquitous during Day of the Dead. The skulls are often drawn with a smile as to laugh at death itself. They take many forms such as sugar candies, clay decorations, and most memorable: face painting. Sugar skulls are decorated and placed on ofrendas of loved ones. A Calavera, or sugar skull, is a decorative skulls made (usually by hand) from either sugar (called Alfeñiques) or clay which are used in the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead.

10 Day of the Dead traditions

How to Celebrate Day of the Dead in the US

Who is La Catrina?

Flor de MuertoMexican Marigolds

Marigolds are believed to be the pathways that guide the spirits to their ofrendas. The flower’s vibrant colors and scent attract the departed souls, as they return to feast on their favorite foods. They are called “Flor de Muerto” (Spanish for Flower of Dead) and they symbolize the beauty and fragility of life. Marigold flowers include around 60 annuals and perennials that are native to Mexico and Central America.

Day of the Dead foods you must try!

What happens on Day Of The Dead?

Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico City

The symbolism behind the flowers

Ofrenda“Offering” Learn how to make an Ofrenda

While the most recognizable aspects of Day of the Dead are the representations of skulls and skeletons, the tradition that holds the most meaning is the Ofrenda (Spanish for offering). The Ofrenda is what the whole celebration is about; it’s a collection of offerings dedicated to the person being honored.

A brightly colored Oilcloth covers the table and on top of that sits a collection of photographs and personal items of the departed person. The lower portion of the altar is where the offerings are placed, from traditional Mexican cuisine to other items that represent the honored person’s particular tastes.

Fun facts about Day of the Dead

1. Day of the dead is not Halloween

Day of the Dead is not the “Mexican Halloween” like it is sometimes mistaken to be because of the timing of the year. The two holidays originated with similar afterlife beliefs but are very different in modern day. Halloween began as a Celtic Festival where people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts but has recently turned into a tradition of costume wearing and trick-or-treating. Decorating your house with spiders and bats and wearing scary costumes is not done in most parts of Mexico.

2. It’s not somber but celebratory

Many of us see death as a sad event but those who celebrate Day of the Dead view death as a welcomed part of life. That is why you will see brightly colored skeletons and skulls everywhere during the holiday. They often are seen smiling, as a friendly nod to death, even mocking death. This view of death began way back during the one month Aztec festival where they celebrated the dead and paid homage to the lady of death, Mictlancíhuatl, who protected their departed loved ones and helped them in the afterlife.

3. Traditions are different by Country

Believe it or not, Mexicans are not the only ones to celebrate Day of the Dead. It is a widely celebrated holiday all over the world. In fact, many religious communities celebrate All Souls Day (also known as All Saints Day) during the same time as Day of the Dead. The act of honoring the dead is widely celebrated around the world but Day of the Dead is unique in its traditions: the ofrenda, the meaning of life and death, the use of calaveras, the style influenced by La Catrina, and more recently, the festivals in the streets.

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

A2 X12 FROM COMMINFO.RUTGERS

How Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) Festivities in the U.S. Connect to Questions of Power, Identity, History, Inclusion, and Resistance

October 8, 2025

October has arrived, and across the U.S., stores selling Halloween merchandise are also stocking their shelves with Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) decorations, such as plastic marigold garlands and manufactured sugar skulls painted in joyful pinks, blues, yellows, and greens.

Questioneers from the Rutgers School of Communication and Information (SC&I) spoke with Marchi to learn more about the historic, cultural, and political significance of Day of the Dead in the U.S.

SC&I: Why has celebrating the Day of the Dead become so popular across the U.S. over the past 50 years, particularly with non-Latino populations? Do you think it may one day be celebrated as widely as Halloween

RM: I’ve actually asked hundreds of people the same question. The answer I get is usually the same. Besides the colorful nature of the holiday, with its bright orange marigolds and multi-colored “papel picado” decorations, and besides the fascination people have with sugar skulls, deep down, many people in the U.S. are drawn to the idea of having an annual event to collectively honor deceased loved ones. People enjoy creating home altars or community altars to remember loved ones who have passed away. It can be very cathartic, and a way of communicating about family and community histories. It can be grounding, since thinking about the inevitability of death actually makes people appreciate life more. I think Day of the Dead is on the way to being almost as widely known as Halloween, given that celebrations now happen in all 50 states.

SC&I: In your book, you explain that U.S. Day of the Dead celebrations are inspired by indigenous Mexican traditions, but the holiday has very different meanings for Mexican communities in the US. What are the differences?

RM: The late 1960s and 1970s was a period of radical political activism around the world. In the US, there was the Black civil rights movement, the American Indian movement, the women’s rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and others. A lot of social change was happening! Ethnic and racial groups who had lived for generations as stigmatized minorities were tired of being treated as second-class citizens vis-à-vis the mainstream Anglo-American population. They had always been told to assimilate in order to become “real” Americans and were made to feel ashamed of their ethnicity or race.

That changed when many young Americans in the 1970s travelled back to their families’ ancestral countries – Italy, Mexico, Ghana, and so forth – to rediscover cultural practices, languages, and histories they hadn’t learned growing up in the US. The term Chicano is a self-identifying term used by Mexican Americans who are politically active in social justice issues. While it had roots in the 1930s, the Chicano Movement really took off in the 1970s (and continues today). It emerged to confront decades of racism in California and the Southwest, where people of Mexican ancestry had long faced segregation in schools, housing, employment, and restaurants as well as harassment and violence. The Chicano Movement was a political movement for equal rights, but it was also a cultural movement that proudly reclaimed Mexican traditions. Celebrating the Day of the Dead was part of that, and my book discusses this process of cultural adoption and transformation. Celebrating an indigenous Mexican ritual in an Anglo-dominant country was an act of political resistance as well as an act of cultural pride.

SC&I: Today, your book remains one of the few scholarly publications to explain how the rise of Day of the Dead celebrations in the United States emerged as part of Chicano Movement activism. How did this history unfold?

RM: In the 1970s, Chicano artists who were born and grew up in the US were interested in reclaiming and celebrating their indigenous Mexican roots. They were tired of the whitewashing of US history. For decades, if Mexican culture was commemorated in the US at all, it was usually the Spanish part of Mexican identity, flamenco dancing, bull fighting, or paella, not indigenous Mesoamerican rituals. So, Chicanos travelled to rural Mexico and brought indigenous traditions to the US via the mediums of visual art, public altar installations, street processions, craft workshops, Aztec danza and other community events. They celebrated Day of the Dead in ways that almost nobody in the US, including most Mexican Americans, had heard of at that time. Only indigenous migrants from central and southern Mexico (who were rare in the US back then) would have practiced elaborate Day of the Dead altar-making traditions. (The US didn't get large migrations from Oaxaca and other heavily indigenous Mexican states until the late 1980s, 1990s, and onwards.)

Based on ethnographic observation, interviewing and news analysis over a period of 20 years, my research tells the story of how Chicano artists created the first public, secular Day of the Dead celebrations in the US in 1972. Since then, Chicano renditions of Day of the Dead have recirculated to Mexico, affecting how Día de los Muertos is celebrated there. For example, Chicano artists in Los Angeles began painting their faces like skeletons during Day of the Dead processions in the mid 1970s, fusing aspects of Halloween with Day of the Dead. This was not previously done in Mexico, but by the late 1990s and 2000s, urban Mexicans were doing this too. Skull face painting is now a major aspect of the celebration in both countries. You never used to see this in indigenous Mexican villages, but with social media, particularly after the 2014-2017 release of popular Hollywood movies like Coco, The Book of Life, and Spectre (which have Day of the Dead themes and characters in “skull face”), you now see skull face painting all over Mexico, including in remote indigenous villages. In my book, I discuss the power of social media and film in the global spread of cultural practices.

SC&I: You've written that the holiday also provides an example of "the communicative capacity of public cultural rituals in identity construction, community building, education, and political protest." Why is this the case, and why is it important for SC&I students and the American public to understand this?

RM: Public celebrations are always about more than just the stated reason for celebrating. They are ritual opportunities to strengthen the community, reinforce collective identities and values, and reclaim public space to gain wider recognition. For communities that have been marginalized, this is especially important, and these celebrations serve as a form of ritual communication that has new meanings in new contexts.

In the case of ethnic celebrations taking place in the US, these are often important not only for building community but also for expressing political messages. Many Chicano Day of the Dead altar exhibitions have drawn attention to the millions of unnecessary deaths that disproportionately occur to minoritized, low-income people of color, whether because of unsafe working conditions, environmental injustice, violence, war, lack of investment in their communities, or diseases like COVID, which disproportionately devastated Black and Brown populations. Each year, around the country, hundreds of Day of the Dead altars are created in memory of people who died because of sociopolitical issues such as gun violence, police brutality, or hate crimes committed against immigrants, women, or LGBT populations.

It’s important to understand these dynamics because while official state-supported holidays such as Thanksgiving or the 4th of July serve to promote national unity or patriotism, grassroots commemorations such as indigenous celebrations, pride parades, or Juneteenth, have emerged as forms of resistance to dominant power structures and historical narratives based on colonization, racism, sexism and other forms of injustice. Thus, with MAGA, anti-american

Understanding the political dimensions of public cultural celebrations helps us see beyond surface-level festivity to understand deeper questions of power, identity, history, inclusion, and resistance, which ultimately helps promote critical thinking and respectful engagement with diverse cultures and histories.

See more info and photographs at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information website.

Photos: Courtesy of Regina Marchi

A3X11 FROM CHARGER.BULLETIN (NEW HAVEN, CT)

Donald Trump proclaims Day of Remembrance for Americans killed by “Illegal Aliens,” (same day as Día De Los Muertos)

Cameron Hailey, Staff Writer| November 16, 2020 Reprinted Thursday, October 23, 2025

On Oct. 30, Pres. Donald Trump released a proclamation for a new national Remembrance Day to take place on Nov. 1, which would focus on Americans killed by “illegal aliens” and concentrating on border security.

This remembrance day is on the same day as Día de Los Muertos, a holiday observed by Mexico and regions in the U.S. and abroad with Mexican populations. The holiday is about celebrating life rather than death for those who have lost their loved ones.

The holiday is primarily celebrated by the people targeted in Trump’s words. Undocumented immigrants make up a small percentage of the U.S. population, about 3.2 percent. Although there is no official tracker of crimes committed by the population, the number was falsely claimed to be higher than 10,000.

The Biden administration says its border priorities are, “Addressing the Trump-created humanitarian crisis at our border, bringing our nation together, reasserting our core values, and reforming our immigration system will require real leadership and real solutions.”

The Trump administration has yet to comment on the proclamation since its release on Oct. 30.

day of the dead

@ ICE

@ DEAD gumment

A4X21 FROM TANGLE

Today’s topic.

The latest on the government shutdown. On Tuesday, the federal government shutdown entered its 21st day, with Republican and Democratic lawmakers at an impasse over a deal to reopen the government. The shutdown is now the longest full government shutdown in U.S. history; only the 35-day partial funding lapse in 2018–2019 lasted longer. On Monday, the Senate failed to pass a GOP-backed funding bill for the 11th time.

Back up: On October 1, federal funding lapsed, halting some government services and suspending pay to many federal employees. The Senate failed to reach the 60-vote threshold required to pass a stopgap funding bill to keep the government open, with Democrats pushing for a permanent extension of temporary Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans have maintained that health subsidy negotiations should be held only after the government reopens.

We covered the beginning of the shutdown here.

Services designated as essential — such as air traffic control and federal law enforcement — remain operational during the shutdown. However, many other government functions have been paused or disrupted, and federal agencies have begun furloughing workers or asking employees to work without immediate pay. On Monday, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for overseeing and modernizing the U.S. nuclear stockpile, announced it would furlough most of its staff. Separately, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said the shutdown would begin to affect its operations this week, and the Supreme Court will be closed to the public due to resource limitations.

In addition to the furloughs, the Trump administration has sought to lay off thousands of federal workers during the shutdown as part of its ongoing efforts to reduce the size of the government. On Wednesday, White House Budget Director Russell Vought suggested that over 10,000 jobs could be cut, saying, “We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding.” However, also on Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily barred the administration from carrying out planned layoffs, then extended the order to a broader group of unionized federal workers on Friday. The judge suggested that the Trump administration was “fir[ing] line-level civilian employees during a government shutdown as a way to punish the opposing political party.”

Separately, Vought has paused billions in funding for projects in mostly Democratic-led cities, calling them “lower-priority projects” that may be canceled outright. The Office of Management and Budget director has also frozen or canceled infrastructure- and climate-related projects in major cities, drawing criticism from Democratic lawmakers.

Today, we’ll cover the latest on the shutdown, with views from the left and right. Then, my take.

What the left is saying.

Many on the left contend that Democrats should broaden the shutdown fight to address Trump’s abuses of executive power.

Some note that the shutdown has accelerated Trump’s efforts to cut the federal workforce.

Others say the politics of the shutdown are considerably different from past instances.

In The American Prospect, David Dayen argued “to win the shutdown, Democrats need a big switch.”

“In public, this is just a fight about a looming health care cliff, using the leverage of needing Democratic votes (at least under current Senate rules) to pass government funding to demand that Republicans avert a crisis of millions of people losing their insurance coverage or seeing the price of it double,” Dayen wrote. “In private, this is a fight about extreme executive power and autocracy, with Democrats demanding that any government funding they pass must actually be spent, not withheld or rescinded. A No Kings Budget, in other words.”

“If there’s a way to switch this out, to make the need for No Kings (which is quite popular) the primary focal point of the shutdown fight, Democrats have a better chance of getting out of this with something,” Dayen said. “But you don’t want to drop the health care conversation entirely — there really is a risk of millions of people losing insurance when enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire in December, and people in Republican districts will be disproportionately hurt, raising stakes that White House officials are keenly aware of, even if they won’t admit it in public.”

In The Los Angeles Times, Jackie Calmes wrote “this is Trump’s shutdown. But he’s been dismantling the government all year.”

“Trump has been dismantling many of the government’s domestic programs for nine months, with an abandon that disregards federal laws and the Constitution’s separation of powers, as numerous lower-court judges have found (only to be temporarily checked by the Trump-friendly Supreme Court),” Calmes said. “Even America’s foreign rivals and enemies couldn’t have conceived of a more shockingly self-defeating course than the one its commander in chief has his nation on — targeting education from pre-K through postgraduate studies, scientific and medical research, public health and general healthcare, clean energy, community development and so much more.”

“Yet even Trump & Co. have had to tacitly admit, repeatedly, they’ve gone too far. They’ve called back some targeted federal employees or sought new hires for the Internal Revenue Service, the National Weather Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others,” Calmes wrote. “Democrats are right to demand that Republicans support continued healthcare subsidies before Democrats vote to reopen the government. But the ongoing shutdown is at least as valuable for drawing Americans’ attention to the de facto Trump shutdown that predates it, and that unfortunately will outlast it.”

In Bloomberg, Matthew Yglesias explored “what makes this shutdown so different.”

“This shutdown has a different dynamic. The public is displeased with both sides’ behavior, but on balance tends to put slightly more blame on Republicans than Democrats. That means President Donald Trump has strong incentives to minimize the visible pain of the shutdown,” Yglesias said. “More consequentially, Trump isn’t letting a lack of authorized funds stop him from paying the troops or even maintaining the WIC program for pregnant women and young children. The legality of these moves is questionable. The White House is essentially daring Democrats to sue, in which case they would be responsible for the lack of military pay. But Democrats aren’t taking the bait.”

“Leaving aside the dubious legality of all this, politically this is not the usual form of pressure found in the shutdown playbook. The senators Trump is hitting by cutting funding to blue states are not the vulnerable frontliners who might be coerced into caving. They’re safe-seat Democrats whose constituents would rebel if they backed down. Trump, as is often the case, is more interested in punishing his foes than in winning an argument,” Yglesias wrote. “For now, there simply isn’t meaningful pressure on either the White House or Senate Democrats to cave. The result is a standoff that, unless Republicans choose to resolve it on their own, could persist for a long, long time.”

What the right is saying.

The right says Democrats’ shutdown strategy is a losing proposition.

Some argue Republicans should hold firm on not extending ACA subsidies.

Others say the shutdown is revealing parts of the government that should be permanently cut.

In Newsweek, Josh Hammer said “Democrats still haven’t learned any lessons.”

“Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) defended his caucus's latest vote, opining, ‘It's always been unacceptable to Democrats to do the defense bill without other bills that have so many things that are important to the American people in terms of health care, in terms of housing, in terms of safety.’ But to most Americans, such tendentious bloviating falls on deaf ears,” Hammer wrote. “Most commonsense Americans understand that there is no reason paying America's warriors should be held hostage to arcane debates over housing policy.”

“Democrats seem to be unable to avoid tripping all over themselves… Illegal immigration and gender radicalism are perhaps the two least popular issues right now for Democrats. Yet they are arguably the two issues most at the forefront of the current Beltway standoff — or at least the debate over the scope of taxpayer funding is,” Hammer said. “A rational political party interested in self-preservation and electoral success would certainly take a different approach. Such a party would ditch the post-2008 obsession with identity politics and wokeism and revert to the Clinton-era message of economic growth and cultural centrism.”

In USA Today, Dace Potas argued “Republicans have the perfect chance to stop wasting your money on the ACA.”

“Republican leadership remains unwilling to negotiate until the government is reopened. However, there has been some openness within the Republican ranks to extend the Obamacare subsidies for another year,” Potas wrote. “That's something Republicans should refuse. Not only can America not afford to continue subsidizing a failing health care plan, but it is the right political decision as well. It should be an easy choice.

“Health insurance premiums have skyrocketed since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. This rise in premiums can be chiefly attributed to the flurry of regulations imposed on health insurance companies under the ACA. Guaranteed issue and community rating regulations are expensive regulations that have driven up the cost of health care,” Potas said. “Democrats are right that people will lose health care, but the cost of keeping the enhanced subsidies far outweighs that downside. However, the existing subsidies under the base contents of the ACA, which will remain in place regardless of the outcome of this political fight, are still rather generous.”

In The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Huff wrote “government shutdown? No, an efficiency audit.”

“Since 1981, four major shutdowns have generated data about what government actually needs to function. Furlough rates have ranged from about 15% to 40%. The current 2025 shutdown sits at the low end, suggesting agencies have broadened their understanding of operational minimums,” Huff said. “Shutdowns let Congress run an experiment it would ordinarily never attempt: Close the whole thing down and see what breaks. This is what Elon Musk did at Twitter. He fired 80% of the staff, watched what broke, and restored only what proved necessary.”

“This approach—furlough broadly, identify failures, restore specific functions—is vastly more efficient than conventional budget cutting… For example, the fiscal 2014 shutdown generated data on which services generated outcry when suspended (national parks), which created safety risks (fewer inspections by the Food and Drug Administration), and which caused surprisingly little disruption,” Huff wrote. “Each funding impasse has collectively produced the world’s largest organizational efficiency study. Not a simulation or theoretical analysis, but a real-world test of which positions government can function without.”

My take.

This shutdown lacks a clear centerpiece issue — instead, it’s a standoff over power.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats are pressing to end the shutdown, and neither has a solution for runaway spending.

I’m afraid this won’t end until it starts to drastically impact the public.

Executive Editor Isaac Saul: Nothing about this shutdown feels normal.

Perhaps most importantly, there is no real centerpiece issue here. In 2018, the shutdown was about Trump’s demand to fund a border wall. In 2013, it was over the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In 1995, it was about cuts to Medicare and education demanded by Newt Gingrich.

What is this shutdown about? Democrats want to make it about healthcare, but the shutdown really isn’t about healthcare. It’s about power — it’s the Ezra Klein argument that Democrats need to stand up and fight back against Trump because funding a government operating the way his government is operating is no longer tenable. Republicans wanted to make the debate about Democrats trying to “fund healthcare for illegal immigrants,” but that story is misleading to the point of fabrication.

Now, Republicans have all but abandoned that argument and pivoted to the idea that they are the party of healthcare and are trying to reopen the government while Democrats refuse to. Truthfully, though, Republicans are fine if the government remains shut down — because President Trump doesn't care if the government remains shut down.

Which brings me to the second odd thing about this standoff: Nobody seems interested in actually reopening the government. There are no urgent meetings between the president and the House Speaker. Congress is not convening to find a solution. Democratic politicians feel their base is behind them, including the affected government workers. And why not? The threat of layoffs is not so harrowing given that Trump clearly doesn’t need the pretext of a shutdown to fire people, instead inviting DOGE and OMB to slash government staff. At least now Democrats can tell those government workers and their constituents they are fighting back.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, view the shutdown as a live audit, an opportunity to purge government employees and programs that they see as extraneous. If you’re quiet enough, you can hear Russ Vought rubbing his hands together. Of course, Republicans would be pivoting if it were politically advantageous; but they think they’ll win the messaging war the longer the shutdown goes on, and with Trump’s bullhorn they may be right.

The third unusual thing about this shutdown is that something specific has actually brought us to this point, and almost nobody is talking about it. It isn’t Trump being a fascist. It isn’t Democrats trying to subsidize healthcare for immigrants here illegally. It’s much more mundane: It’s that shutdowns are always about funding the government, and our current government funding is totally unsustainable. The Washington Post editorial board is one of the few places I’ve seen pointing out this dynamic explicitly.

Remember: The Affordable Care Act, however well intended and popular, is still not affordable for the government. During the pandemic, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats passed a massive expansion of emergency subsidies to support healthcare programs like the ACA. Those “emergency” subsidies for healthcare, student loan forgiveness, and food stamps were supposed to be temporary, but — as is typical — if voters acclimate to a government benefit, that program becomes much harder to cut. This has been the traditional conservative argument: These won’t be temporary. In this case, that argument was right. Congress massively expanded its spending during the pandemic without an accompanying funding mechanism, and it has not undone those expansions.

Meanwhile, Trump came into office with a dire fiscal situation that needed to be resolved by some combination of raising taxes or cutting federal costs. Instead, he tried to pass off the job of fiscal responsibility to DOGE — but that initiative was a farce that extended maximum pain onto government employees and axed overseas programs for little more than table scraps. The $20 billion Argentina bailout Trump just approved costs roughly double the combined savings from all of DOGE’s cuts (roughly $1.4 billion) and Congress’s $8 billion USAID funding cut.

As we keep saying, in order to seriously cut the budget the government has to reduce spending in Social Security, healthcare, and defense. The president hasn’t touched the first two, and he continues to approve historically large military spending bills — all while the Pentagon remains incapable of even passing an audit. Then, on the other side of the coin, Trump has extended tax cuts from his first term that were also meant to be temporary.

So, here we are: $37.9 trillion in debt; no plan to pay for the most popular, important or expensive government programs; and nothing to do but to try to distract voters into hating the other side on fabricated or irrelevant grounds.

Frustratingly — infuriatingly — none of that has anything to do with ending this shutdown. For that, we’ll have to see when Americans start to really feel pain and who they’ll blame it on. Ultimately, Democrats are the ones holding up a funding CR for their demands; their biggest pain point in the past may have been when food assistance programs and health service for seniors started to run dry. Today, though, more of their base is wealthy and highly educated. It’s a crude political calculation, but this shift may make Democrats more tolerant of these issues than they had been in the past. Conversely, a lot of Republicans are sounding the alarm about this coming cliff — and in a relatively new development, it might be more politically perilous for Republicans if these entitlement checks stop flowing.

Instead, the biggest pain point of this shutdown for Democrats may be when the lack of normal operations starts to impact day-to-day life. Thanksgiving week will be a key test — how chaotic and broken can U.S. airports get with limited TSA and air traffic control staff? And how tolerant will Democrats be of such a public mess when they can reopen the government with a vote at any time?

For Trump and Republicans, the biggest pain points are already arriving, but the president is trying to find ways to mitigate them. When military pay was supposed to freeze last week, Trump took unconstitutional (read: illegal) action to keep checks flowing to active duty soldiers. Republican senators described the move as varying degrees of “inappropriate,” but none seemed eager to take back the power of the purse; meanwhile, Democrats are unwilling to take legal action to hold the president accountable for paying military personnel. And in the end, I doubt many Americans noticed or cared (except for active-duty soldiers and their families, whom I presume are quite relieved).

The president seems keen to use a similar process to restart loans for struggling farmers (who are being hit hard by his tariffs) or keep other politically popular programs alive. Basically, the government is shut down, but the party in power is finding emergency funding to make it all a bit less painful for their favored constituents.

It’s anyone’s guess what happens now. We’re barrelling toward the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Republicans have a governing trifecta but also can’t move the ball without Democratic votes, and seem keen to sit tight. They’re displaying a sort of governing-by-breaking-it attitude, best exemplified by Trump but now expressed by the party wholesale. Meanwhile, Democrats have the strength of their healthcare argument (“costs go up if nothing is done”), but conveniently have no plan to pay for the billions in funding that, four years ago, was sold to the public as emergency and temporary.

Truthfully, my best guess is we see little to no movement until the problems become untenable for the public. It’ll take nightmarish travel delays, disappearing food stamps, impossibly long waits to resolve healthcare snafus, and reports of degraded military readiness before anyone comes back to the table. And then, unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for Congress to actually agree on something.

Staff dissent — Managing Editor Ari Weitzman: Isaac is leaving out one major power player in his discussion: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Isaac is right to remind us that funding shutdowns are always about funding, but the person whose job it is to shepherd the appropriations process is the Speaker of the House. When he first took the gavel, Johnson said he’d bring fiscal responsibility to that process. The House still does not issue periodic funding as Johnson said it would, and it still can only get one omnibus spending bill that can pass the Senate out a year, leaving partisans in a permanent battle over what to remove from a permanently underfunded budget. As I said in “My take” when we initially covered the government shutdown, Johnson didn’t invent House dysfunction, but he did say he’d help to resolve it. He decidedly has not.

A5X22 FROM TIME

Oct 21, 2025 4:15 PM ET

Trump and Senate Republicans Stage Rose Garden Show of Unity as Shutdown Ties For Second Longest

By Nik Popli

President Donald Trump invited nearly every Republican senator to the White House on Tuesday for what was billed as a “Rose Garden Club” lunch. It quickly became a rallying display of party unity as the government shutdown entered its fourth week with no end in sight.

Gathered under yellow umbrellas on the newly-built White House patio, senators dined on cheeseburgers, fries, and “Rose Garden chocolates” while Trump praised his budget chief, mocked Democrats, and insisted Republicans were “doing the right thing” by holding firm.

“This is the fourth week of the Democrat shutdown, but we are all here today because your Republican team in the Senate is unified,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said as the President nodded beside him. “Everybody here has voted now 11 different times to open up the government, and we are going to keep voting to open up the government. Eventually, the Democrats, hopefully sooner or later, are going to come around.”

Every Republican Senator except Rand Paul of Kentucky (who said he wasn’t invited) attended the event—a sign of how determined party leaders are to project cohesion as polling shows more Americans blame them for the impasse. According to a Reuters/Ipsos survey released Monday, half of Americans say congressional Republicans are most responsible for the shutdown, compared with 43% who blame Democrats.

Trump, whose approval rating in the same poll ticked up slightly to 42%, appeared eager to rally his party’s morale. “In a craven and pointless act of partisan spite,” he said, “Chuck Schumer and the radical left Democrats are holding the entire federal government hostage to appease extremists in their party.”

Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, dismissed the Rose Garden gathering as “a pep rally” and blamed Republicans for not negotiating with his party over extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. “Republicans may not have time to fix people's health care, but apparently they've got plenty of time for a mini pep rally with Donald Trump,” he said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

Three weeks into the standoff, Washington is settling into grim expectation that the shutdown—which on Tuesday tied for the second longest in history—could easily reach the one-month mark before any serious movement toward reopening the government.

The impact of the shutdown is being felt across the nation. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees—including thousands of air traffic controllers—have been furloughed or are working without pay. The National Nuclear Security Administration has furloughed more than 1,000 specialists. States are warning that programs such as Head Start and WIC—which provides nutrition assistance to more than 40 million Americans—could run out of funding within weeks.

The economic drag remains modest in national terms, but the human toll is mounting. About one in five Americans say they have been financially affected by the shutdown, while two in five know someone who has, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Yet on Capitol Hill, the standoff has only hardened. Trump and Republican leaders have refused to negotiate on any other issues until Democrats agree to reopen the government. Senate Democrats are continuing to block the House-passed continuing resolution, or CR, until Republicans agree to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, which they say are critical to preventing premium hikes for millions of Americans.

Republican leaders had publicly predicted that last Saturday’s massive “No Kings” protests—in which millions demonstrated nationwide against Trump—would mark an inflection point and that Democrats would compromise after the rallies. But the enormous turnout for the largely peaceful demonstrations appeared to stiffen their resolve.

Some lawmakers have begun discussing potential off-ramps, though none appear close. One involves a short-term deal that would reopen the government while setting up a vote on extending the ACA subsidies separately. Another would lengthen the continuing resolution beyond the current Nov. 21 deadline—perhaps into December, or even further—to buy time for broader negotiations.

But the two sides remain far apart. “Plan B is open up the government,” Thune told CNN Tuesday, arguing that Democrats should first agree to fund the government before policy talks resume. Democrats counter that reopening first would strip them of all leverage to secure the subsidies.

Even within the GOP, the path forward is unclear. Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the House in recess, saying his chamber did its job by passing a clean funding bill last month. “Ninety-nine and a half percent of House Republicans understand exactly what we’re doing,” Johnson said at a press conference Tuesday, insisting that Democrats are “eating up the clock” for political advantage.

“The American people would have an open government if Democrats were not terrified of their radical base,” Johnson added. “The Democrats are not governing in good faith—they’re covering their own tail.”

Republicans are now debating how long a new stopgap might last if and when one can pass. “We’re probably going to have to extend the CR date because the Democrats have held us up for weeks now,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, told reporters Monday. “Having said that, I don’t want to go into next year and I am adamantly opposed to having a long-term CR.”

For now, the two parties remain locked in a familiar blame cycle.

“Donald Trump should come to the negotiating table,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Tuesday. “Democrats have been very clear that we will sit down with any of them, anytime, anyplace here at the Capitol or back at the White House to reopen the government.”

Schumer added that he and Jeffries reached out to Trump on Tuesday about setting up a meeting to negotiate over the shutdown. Trump, meanwhile, seems content to let the crisis drag on. At Tuesday’s lunch, he touted spending cuts his Administration had made during the shutdown targeting Democratic priorities.

“They've really allowed us to do it,” Trump said of the cuts, which included the firings of more than 4,100 workers at nearly half a dozen agencies earlier this month. “Many of the things that they're cutting, like the New York Project, $20 billion we're cutting it. They're not going to get it back… Maybe we'll talk to them about it. But they're losing all the things that they wanted.”

A6X23 Tangle cited David Dayen’s argument in The American Prospect that “...this is a fight about extreme executive power and autocracy, with Democrats demanding that any government funding they pass must actually be spent, not withheld or rescinded. A No Kings Budget, in other words...” against the risk of “millions of people (in red states, too) losing insurance when enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire in December.”

Dissenting voices in Newsweek (Illegal immigration and gender radicalism are perhaps the two least popular issues right now for Democrats) and USA Today blaming the rise in health insurance premiums more upon the “flurry of regulations imposed on health insurance companies under the ACA than on passing an ostensibly temporary Big Beautiful Budget.

In The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Huff (no involvement with the HuffPost) wrote that shutdowns “let Congress run an experiment it would ordinarily never attempt: Close the whole thing down and see what breaks. This is what Elon Musk did at Twitter. He fired 80% of the staff, watched what broke, and restored only what proved necessary.”

Truthfully, Tangle founder and editor Isaac Saul concluded that “Republicans are fine if the government remains shut down — because President Trump doesn't care if the government remains shut down.” Nor do many Democrats, seeking optimum political optics, seem inclined to do anything but throw words at the crisis.

“Thanksgiving week will be a key test — how chaotic and broken can U.S. airports get with limited TSA and air traffic control staff? And how tolerant will Democrats be of such a public mess,” Saul calls out, “when they can reopen the government with a vote at any time?

While ICE is freezing citizens and aliens alike, ordinary people are taking to the streets while those who actually have power to do so hide in the shadows.

A7@X15 FROM HERALD REVIEW ARIZONA

Why the government shutdown will be over by Halloween

By Matt Hickman matt.hickman@myheraldreview.co Oct 26, 2025

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Q: Do you think the Government Shutdown will be over before Nov. 1?

Bottom of Form

In Texas Hold ‘em parlance, when a player, between their two cards and the five community cards has the best hand possible, they are said to “have the nuts.”

When one has the nuts, the first thing that player needs to remember is that their opponents do not know that they have them. The strategy then becomes to “bleed the pot,” to subtly trick your opponent into thinking they just might have the better hand even though you know it’s impossible. You want them to fall under the spell of the sunk cost fallacy, keep throwing good money after bad, and ultimately to go “on tilt” until they’re “all-in” and then all out of chips.

In the congressional showdown that’s led to the government shutdown that is now entering its 26th day, the Democrats have the nuts and the Republicans are beginning to realize it. This is why the shutdown will be over by Halloween.

Why Halloween? Because on Nov. 1 the marketplace for Obamacare opens and 24 million people who get their health insurance through the ACA will log in to discover their premiums have suddenly doubled, due to the expiration of the tax credits in the One Big Beautiful Bill. To make things worse for Republicans, 76 percent of those who will suffer this sticker shock live in states that voted for Trump.

Why so many in red states? Because the deepest red states like Texas, Alabama, Kansas and Wyoming are the states that have declined — on ideological grounds — to expand Medicaid under the ACA, leaving many lower income and self-employed people reliant on the ACA marketplace, which they can only afford because of the tax credit.

Republicans have never hidden their distaste for Obamacare, promising to “repeal and replace” it ever since 2010. In the build-up to the shutdown, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Republicans were working on a plan to “fix” Obamacare, but if they haven’t been able to come close to doing it in 15 years, they’re not going to do it in five days.

This isn’t the only hole in the OBBB, but it’s a big one, and it’s the first chicken to come home to roost. Trump knows this. It’s why he said publicly that he’s open to negotiating with Democrats on extending the tax credits, but not until they stand down and re-open the government. This, in Texas Hold ‘em parlance, is what is known as a "tell,” a change in mannerism or betting pattern that lets an opponent know your hand is not as strong as you want them to think it is.

Trump is what is known in poker as a “blinds stealer,” a player who repeatedly bets way too high based on the first two cards that are dealt. A blinds stealer is the most maddening and least fun person at any table, betting two, three, five, twenty times the big blind based on nothing but sheer bullying. Blinds stealers seldom win in the long run, though, because eventually someone gets a really good hand they can’t be bullied out of and the blinds stealer loses all the chips he won pre-flop, and then some.

A blinds stealer is not to be confused with a “bluffer.” A bluffer isn’t a bully. A bluffer is trying to take mathematics out of the game and replace it with psychology.

As blinds stealers go, Trump is a very effective player. He’s so good at it, in fact, he’s even got a nickname for it.

The term TACO stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. It was coined by Wall Street investors referring the President’s habit of making wild tariff threats — which is textbook blinds stealing — and then quietly walking them back when the consequences get too near and dear.

TACO was meant as an insult, but it’s actually a vital and rare skill to have in poker; to know how to push and push and push but then stop and fold just before you go on tilt.

The President is in Asia this week, giving pundits back home little hope that the shutdown can be averted before the month’s end. But I think that actually makes the promise of a deal all the more likely.

Trump knows if he goes all the way on this hand and cards turn up, he’s going to lose big-time. Trump hates to lose face, but if he can spin the narrative to make himself look like the hero sacrificing for the good of the country, he’ll take it.

Besides, judging by his "tell" you know he wants to back down and extend the tax credits, so why not, during a press conference in Singapore or Laos or wherever the hell he’s going to be this week, say:

“I just spoke with Speaker Johnson and told him to extend the ACA tax credits so we can re-open the government immediately. The Democrats have held this country hostage for too long. It needs to end so I’m going to end it. Very disappointed in the Democrats, the way they want to hurt poor people for political gain. They are very nasty. Nasty people. When I get back we are going to get to work on fixing Obamacare and we’re going to make it better. It will be so good people will call it Trumpcare and they’ll love their Trumpcare so much. Trumpcare will be so much better than Obamacare. That’s what all the people are going to say…”

And that’s all it takes.

Will they ever actually get to work “fixing” the Affordable Care Act? Of course not, but it doesn’t matter. Trump loses a hand he was going to lose anyway, but he gets to save face as the hero doing what’s best for the country. Oh, and the government reopens and 24 million people won't have to choose between health coverage and rent.

All great poker players will tell you some of the best hands they’ve ever played were hands they folded.

A7 X91/46 FROM USA TODAY

Why Americans behind on utility bills may freeze if shutdown doesn't end soon

by Medora Lee

USA TODAY

With winter certainly coming but no clear path yet to ending the government shutdown, states are sending out a SOS to keep millions of Americans from freezing soon.

The National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), representing state directors of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), said last week it's urging electric and gas utilities nationwide to immediately suspend service disconnections for nonpayment until federal LIHEAP funds are released and households regain access to financial assistance.

House Rep. Don Beyer, D-Virginia, and 53 other representatives also penned a letter to major utility companies to suspend late penalties and utility shutoffs for federal employees and contractors while the government is closed. Environmental nonprofit Sierra Club joined the pleas for utilities to keep the power on for low-income Americans.

The shutdown, which began Oct. 1 and is on pace to become the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, has delayed the release of energy aid, leaving some of the nation’s poorest families without the support they rely on to heat their homes as colder weather approaches, NEADA said. At the same time, electricity and natural gas prices have risen sharply, placing additional strain on already stretched household budgets, it said.

"The situation is really grim regarding (rising energy) pricing and availability of LIHEAP funds," said Mark Wolfe, NEADA's executive director. "Even if all goes well now, the earliest we will see funds will be December."

How many Americans are behind on utility bills?

About 21 million households, or 1 in 6, are behind on their energy bills, NEADA data showed. Since Dec. 31, 2023, household energy averages have risen by about 31%, from approximately $17.5 billion to $23.0 billion by June 30, 2025.

Shutoffs rose to 3.5 million in 2024 from 3.0 million the prior year, NEADA said. Shutoffs are expected to continue rising as more Americans face soaring energy costs they can't afford, it said. NEADA said 2025 could see potentially 4.0 million shutoffs.

Why are more people falling behind on utility bills?

Energy prices are soaring, with electricity bills climbing due to utility investment in transmission and distribution systems, the cost of natural gas used to power generation rising, and rapid growth in large data centers increasing electricity demand. Through July, electricity prices rose 9.5%, outpacing overall annual inflation of 3% in September, NEADA said.

NEADA forecasts the average cost of home energy will increase 7.6% this winter, led by a 10% jump in electricity costs to $1,205 from $1,093 a year ago. That's on top of average summer bill prices reaching $776, the highest in at least 12 years, creating a strain on household budgets.

Where are the largest price increases?

Ten states, plus the District of Columbia, averaged more than a 15% price jump in electricity costs, with five states registering more than 20% increases, between July 2024 and July this year. Americans in these states are seeing monthly bill increases of between $25 and $41 per month.

Here are the places with the largest percentage increases:

Illinois: 28.3%

Indiana: 25%

Ohio: 23.4%

Washington, DC: 23%

New Jersey: 20.6%

Massachusetts: 18.8%

Iowa: 17.4%

Missouri: 17.2%

Michigan: 15.9%

Virginia: 15.4%

Maine: 15%

Medora Lee is a money, markets and personal finance reporter at USA TODAY.

A8 FROM TIME

Trump’s Campaign to Defund the Arts—and Rewrite History

By Andrew Weinstein

October is National Arts n Humanities Month, a time normally reserved for celebrating the creative and intellectual currents that enrich our nation. But this year, the month began not with a celebration, but with a shutdown, the latest and most jarring blow in the Trump Administration’s long-running war against American culture.

In August 2017, I and 15 of my colleagues on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities made a not so difficult choice. In the wake of President Trump’s shocking refusal to unequivocally condemn the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, we resigned. We wrote to the president that his support for hate groups and the false equivalencies he pushed could not stand. “Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values,” our letter stated. “Your values are not American values.”

We took that step because to remain silent would have made us complicit in his hateful rhetoric. We warned that his pattern of attacking art, the humanities, and the free press was pushing our country “further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.” We feared what was to come.

We were not wrong. What we witnessed then was a preview. What America is experiencing now is the feature presentation, a systematic, full-frontal assault on our nation’s cultural and intellectual life. This deliberate strategy is outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” and is designed to replace our diverse culture with a single, government-approved ideology.

The first wave of this assault is a strategy of erasure through fiscal starvation. The administration has moved to eliminate federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)—the very backbone of our nation’s cultural infrastructure. Active grants have been cruelly rescinded, leaving community theaters, local museums, facing sudden funding gaps and uncertainty over expenses for work already underway.

Now, with the government shutdown that began on October 1, this long-threatened starvation has become reality, forcing the closure of national museums and halting federal grant payments to cultural groups nationwide. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a lifeline for independent journalism and educational programming, especially in rural America, is being systematically dismantled.

The second, more insidious wave is a strategy of institutional capture. The president has installed himself as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, purging its bipartisan board, replacing it with political loyalists. And last month he dissolved its entire Social Impact division. The president now boasts of his personal involvement in selecting honorees, rejecting those deemed “too woke” or “too liberal.” The Kennedy Center is being transformed from a national stage for artistic excellence into a political trophy.

In an even more stunning move, on the very day the government shut down, the White House fired 22 of the 26 members of the National Council on the Humanities, the expert body that advises the NEH, leaving it without the quorum required to conduct business and clearing the path for politically motivated grant-making.

At the same time, the Trump Administration has declared war on our nation’s memory. Under the Orwellian banner of an executive order to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American History,” the White House has launched a comprehensive review of the Smithsonian Institution. Its stated goal is to purge our national museums of “divisive” or “ideologically driven language”—code for any historical analysis that critically examines issues of race or injustice. The chilling effect is already palpable: in an act of protest, the acclaimed artist Amy Sherald recently canceled her upcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, citing censorship concerns.

The president himself has complained that our museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was.” Far from restoring sanity, these actions constitute a state-mandated campaign of historical revisionism prompting the American Alliance of Museums to issue a statement on the “growing threats of censorship.”

This sustained attack on our cultural institutions creates the conditions for overt acts of censorship. The campaign to defund the arts, capture our museums, and rewrite our history is a prelude to silencing dissent itself. By systematically undermining the very fields that cultivate critical thinking and historical consciousness, the Trump Administration could create a populace less able to recognize the foundational principles of a free society when they come under direct assault.

This is not a uniquely American tragedy. It is the authoritarian playbook, page for page. When a government dictates what art is acceptable, we hear the echoes of Nazi Germany’s “Degenerate Art” exhibitions and the Soviet Union’s doctrine of “Socialist Realism.” When a leader seizes control of cultural institutions to enforce ideological conformity, we see a direct parallel to the tactics of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

Authoritarians always target art first. They do so, because art and history are enemies of the myths a regime needs to survive. They foster critical thought and reveal uncomfortable truths that undermine nationalist propaganda. By silencing artists and historians, a regime seeks to control not just the present, but the past and the future as well.

In 2017, we resigned because our conscience demanded it. Today, as a government shutdown darkens our national museums and the National Endowment for the Humanities is gutted, the danger is no longer a matter of rhetoric but of radical, systemic action. This assault threatens our ability to think critically, remember our past honestly, and imagine a future that is not dictated by the state. This is a battle for the American soul, and for the sake of the freedoms we are guaranteed, it is a battle we must not lose.

A9 X32 FROM variety

Paramount Skydance Mass Layoffs to Start Week of Oct. 27

By Todd Spangler Oct 18, 2025 5:34am PT

Paramount Skydance employees are facing a broad across-the-board culling under David Ellison’s new management regime the week of Oct. 27, Variety has confirmed.

Major job cuts have been expected even before the Skydance Media-Paramount Global deal closed, as part of Ellison and his team’s goal of slashing upwards of $2 billion in costs. Previously, the company had been targeting layoffs by early November. The new round of cuts is expected to eliminate around 2,000 jobs in the U.S., with additional layoffs internationally.

Read More About:

Paramount Skydance

Jump to Comments

what a crime

October 18, 2025 at 10:02 am

Getting laid can be jarring if the HR department doesn’t use gloves or are overly hairy. Can I request they commence these massive layoffs to music?

tammyfay

October 18, 2025 at 7:59 pm

Close it all down.

wcat

October 19, 2025 at 4:27 pm

Luigi’s Mansion is a fun game, perhaps someone being laid off should show Ellison. It would make for a fine movie.

Dragomir Marinov

October 20, 2025 at 12:28 am

I hope these empty suits crash and burn.

Pam

October 20, 2025 at 4:11 am

These big corporations merge and then lay off thousands of people. More money in their pockets and for their shareholders. Greedy people who care nothing about others.

Stromr Smith

October 20, 2025 at 5:34 am

This is how business works. Nobody has a job for life. What don’t you people get about capitalism. Whether it’s a private company or the government job security is nonexistent. You want a “permanent” job? Go live in a communist country.

Mr. Smith Tastes Bootleather

October 20, 2025 at 1:01 pm

I love how you identify an existential crisis that impacts hundreds of millions of Americans, but your response is “you should bootlick the capitalist system more.”

blackbloc

October 20, 2025 at 5:27 am

At what point will we collectively admit that we are in an extraction economy whereby corporations purchase their regulations from self-interested politicians? When will we collectively recognize that trickle-down economics has literally never been a rigorous concept among economists? At what point do we realize we’re being fleeced by everyone at the top?

SCOTUS recently signaled its willingness to reexamine established precedent. How about they reexamine decisions mandating the house remains a static size or the “tech debt” of 19th and early 20th century corporate law? One state, Delaware, essentially governs corporate law. Take the power away from Delaware and we can finally get these rapacious elites under control. The window is closing and fascism is at the door. Good luck, America.

Stromr Smith

October 20, 2025 at 5:37 am

Baloney! If you don’t like it here go live in a communist country.

blackbloc

October 20, 2025 at 6:57 am

I fought for this country. I did a pump overseas as an infantryman in ’09. What have you done for this country? What have you sacrificed for the greater project?

mdavidjohnson

October 20, 2025 at 6:03 am

Perhaps they might at some point address the Paramount+ atrocious screen delivery which stalls, cuts out. loses sync, and other bad stuff. (In my case, most specifically with Tulsa King).

The problem is clearly on their end because Paramount+/Showtime No Commercials (and all my other channels) work perfectly.

This must really frost the advertisers that Paramount+ forces on us (despite paying extra for Paramount+/Showtime No Commercials). Those ads stall, cut out, and lose sync too. I say “forces on us” because, unlike DVR recordings, you can’t fast-forward through the commercials on Paramount+.

Fortunately, my mute button still works.

A10X33 from GUK

US leaders are erasing Black history. That threatens our future

By Stacey Abrams and Esosa Osa

DEI is being used as a smokescreen to roll back progress and consolidate power. The goal is to rewrite our nation’s story

Wed 22 Oct 2025 06.00 EDT

Democracy flourishes when Black Americans advance. The evidence is clear: birthright citizenship, constitutional due process, anti-discrimination laws from education to housing to employment and equitable small business investments, are all byproducts of the systemic corrections known today as DEI. Yet, in recent years, DEI has been used as a smokescreen by cynical politicians and activists to roll back progress and consolidate power. Across classrooms, museums, boardrooms and federal agencies, the key pathways to opportunity and success are under attack through a coordinated disinformation campaign of erasure, distortion and suppression.

The impact of these tactics is concrete and undeniable. Since the start of this year, Onyx Impact’s research has found, 306,000 Black women have lost their jobs and $3.4bn in grant programs investing in Black communities has been slashed – including $9.4m in sickle cell disease research, $42m in programs designed to address Black maternal mortality and $31m in cuts to address asthma rates and air pollution harming Black children.

Companies that spinelessly follow Trump’s cuts to DEI will pay a heavy price

By Miriam González Durántez

Concerted attempts to stifle the progress of Black communities is not new; however, history has proven that when progress for Black people is erased, everyone suffers. During Reconstruction, Black Americans made extraordinary strides – holding office, building businesses and founding schools. Less discussed is how other oppressed communities, from white sharecroppers to Latino gauchos, also benefited from increased access to legal and economic systems. When Black people faced a century of Jim Crow and state-sanctioned discrimination, other communities saw a similar retreat on their access to full citizenship. When the civil rights movement sought to eliminate the vestiges of Jim Crow, its practices of nonviolent civil disobedience expanded freedom and opportunity not just for Black Americans, but for communities of all backgrounds. From the Native American movement to the advancement of gay rights to women’s economic empowerment, Black civil rights opened the aperture for expanded human rights.

Nevertheless, every time Black communities gain ground, forces threatened by change work to push us back. As we face the current regime, DEI is the bulwark that guarantees a pluralistic democracy. Its power is rooted not in politics, but in the promise of America itself: that all people are created equal and deserve a chance to thrive. Defending DEI, accurate historical education and equitable access to opportunity protects the very principles that allow our nation to live up to its highest ideals. Authoritarians and their acolytes despise DEI because it secures the rights of all.

And when we do not recognize this, the consequences are immediate and real. The newly released Onyx Impact report, Blackout: The Real-World Cost of Erasing, Distorting, and Suppressing Black Progress, documents more than 15,000 instances, in just nine months, where Black lives, histories and pathways to success have been directly harmed or erased by the Trump administration and their legislative and judicial cronies. This report provides not only a stark account of harm but also a way forward. Its rigorous, data-driven analysis empowers citizens, journalists and policymakers to recognize the instances and patterns of erasure, distortion and suppression.

Distortion is one of the most insidious tactics. It reshapes reality in ways that narrow our expectations and cements bigotry as policy

We must, though, understand these attacks as part of a deliberate campaign. The goal is to rewrite our nation’s story and restrict the futures of Black Americans, and by extension, any American deemed unworthy. We can be tempted to view their actions in isolation, but that is by design.

Distortion is one of the most insidious tactics. It reshapes reality in ways that narrow our expectations and cements bigotry as policy. Scholarships and education programs are being cut, leaving Black students with fewer chances to pursue a quality education. These cuts also affect Native American students and served as a predicate for attacks on Hispanic students. Black families continue to live in districts with underfunded schools due to historical patterns of segregation and inequality, and the concomitant effect of slashing services disproportionately harms all low-income children and disabled people. Support for Black-owned businesses and vital health initiatives have been slashed, leaving our nation without the data necessary to address systemic disparities in our economy and healthcare system. The follow-on effect will undermine research and investment for women across racial categories. By rewriting who counts, who is valued and what histories are taught, these policies compound the barriers that communities have fought for centuries to overcome.

Erasure and suppression work in tandem, and practitioners predictably start with Black America. Those seeking to cripple democracy have removed Black stories from curricula, exhibits and public memory, costing us the lessons of confrontation, remediation and redemption. Rising autocracies know to pressure schools, universities, corporations and government institutions into silence. Together, these tactics do more than harm Black communities – they hollow out our democracy itself. Civic trust erodes, economic opportunity narrows and our national narrative becomes dangerously incomplete.

We demanded justice after George Floyd’s death. Donald Trump made things worse, but we fight on.

By Al Sharpton

The question before us now is: what will we do in response? Will we allow fear, disinformation and autocracy to write the next chapter? Or will we act, fiercely and deliberately, to defend the truth, honor Black progress and protect the right to opportunity for every American? The answer will shape not just this moment, but the very future of our country.

Protecting and defending the historic progress we’ve made is a moral imperative, one that demands concerted civil action. As the struggle for liberation has taught us, when we fight for freedom, we win. We absolutely face coordinated attacks on truth, which are intended to sow despair or lead to inaction – but we cannot allow that. The 10 Steps campaign, a nationwide mobilization effort to protect democracy, provides a clear playbook for understanding the threat that faces our country and the roadmap for action, helping individuals and communities navigate this moment and demand freedom and power. Additionally, Onyx Impact documents information threats, amplifies truth and equips communities to resist the harmful false narratives that are used to rationalize the dismantling of our democracy.

When linked, these initiatives show that protecting Black history and progress is a shared responsibility if we are to defend America – a responsibility that demands action from every corner of society.

Our nation’s future will not arrive on its own. Its success or failure will be determined by what we choose to do and resist today.

America’s story began by deciding that from many, we could become one. E pluribus unum is the essence of DEI, the lived reality of the Black experience and the proof that we can build something bigger than fear and despair. Together, we can preserve opportunity, honor truth and strengthen our democracy for generations to come.

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022, is the founder of American Pride Rises, a group dedicated to defending the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)

Esosa Osa is the founder and CEO of Onyx Impact, an organization created to fight digital harm, amplify Black voices and create healthier online ecosystems

A11X34 FROM WOKEWAVES

The Death of Culture: Why Gen Z Hates Tradition

By Olivia Bennett March 4, 2025

⚡ Quick Vibes

Gen Z is rejecting traditional values, favoring progress, individualism, and self-expression.

Technology, globalization, and changing social norms have reshaped how we see culture and tradition.

Rather than the "death" of culture, this shift signals the creation of new traditions that fit the modern world.

From Holidays to Heritage: Why Gen Z Is Ditching Tradition

Every generation looks back on its past with nostalgia. The “good old days” always seem simpler, sweeter, and more connected. But for Gen Z, nostalgia doesn’t hit the same way. Instead of looking back, we’re looking forward—and we’re not afraid to leave old traditions behind.

From holidays feeling less magical to cultural norms fading, something has shifted. The traditions that once defined family, community, and identity no longer feel relevant. And honestly? Most of us aren’t that mad about it.

But is this the death of culture, or are we just making space for something new? Let’s dive in.

Why Tradition Feels Like a Relic of the Past

Traditions thrive on repetition. They require communities to silently agree on what’s important and keep passing it down. But in 2024? That’s getting harder to do.

@begin

Here’s why:

🔹 Hyper-Individualism > Collectivism

Older generations grew up in tight-knit communities where family and societal values were the foundation of identity. Now, Gen Z is all about self-discovery, questioning norms, and choosing our own paths.

Instead of doing things “just because that’s how it’s always been,” we’re asking:

👉 Do I actually believe in this?
👉 Is this tradition meaningful to me?
👉 Why should I follow rules made decades ago?

For many, the answer is nope. So we’re ditching the old scripts and rewriting the rules.

🔹 Technology Changed Everything

The internet didn’t just connect us—it shattered cultural bubbles.

Our parents grew up in one culture, one community, one reality. We grew up with the entire world at our fingertips. Instead of only celebrating our family’s traditions, we’re exposed to thousands of other ways to live.

The result?
🌍 Globalization diluted cultural uniqueness
📱 Social media accelerated change
🚀 We don’t just inherit culture—we remix it

For Gen Z, the idea of a single cultural narrative feels outdated. Why stick to one tradition when you can pick and choose from a global buffet?

🔹 Postmodernism Made Us Skeptical

Modern culture once believed in progress, reason, and absolute truths. Then, postmodernism happened.

🔍 Is any tradition truly universal?
🔍 Do cultural norms actually serve us, or do they just limit us?
🔍 If traditions were made by people, can’t we just make new ones?

This isn’t just Gen Z being edgy—it’s a philosophical shift. We don’t trust blindly. We question everything, and that includes tradition.

The Nostalgia Trap: Why Traditions Feel "Less Special"

Ever wonder why Christmas doesn’t feel as magical as it did when we were kids? It’s not just because we’re older.

Holidays, rituals, and community moments have lost their collective magic. Here’s why:

🎁 Commercialization: Holidays feel less about meaning and more about buying stuff.
💬 Online Overload: Seeing people post their celebrations makes our own feel less unique.
🏡 Less Community Engagement: Fewer neighbors, fewer gatherings, fewer real-life connections.

Traditions aren’t just about the event itself—they’re about the people who uphold them. And when people stop caring? The traditions fade.

The Downside of Losing Tradition

Okay, so traditions are changing. No big deal, right?

Well… maybe. But there are some real consequences to this cultural shift.

👥 Less community = more loneliness
Many traditions forced people to connect. Holiday gatherings, religious services, neighborhood events—they created a built-in support system. Without them? Loneliness skyrockets.

📖 We lose our cultural history
Traditions tell stories. They link us to who we were, where we came from, and what matters. When we erase them, we risk losing important cultural identity.

🌀 Everything feels temporary
When nothing is sacred, everything feels disposable. Trends replace traditions, and without stability, life can feel directionless.

This is why some people cling harder to old ways—they fear that without them, there’s nothing real left.

Are We Creating New Traditions?

Just because we’re rejecting old traditions doesn’t mean we don’t want meaning. In fact, Gen Z is already building new cultural moments—we just don’t call them “traditions” yet.

✅ Online Rituals

Yearly Spotify Wrapped drops = The new end-of-year ritual 🎶

Memes & TikTok trends = Shared cultural experiences 📱

Virtual watch parties & gaming communities = Digital gatherings 🎮

✅ Reinventing Holidays

Friendsgiving over traditional family dinners 🍗

Non-religious holiday celebrations (Winter Solstice, New Year’s vibes) ❄️

DIY traditions (monthly vision boards, journaling, self-care days) 📝

✅ Cultural Fluidity

Blending global traditions (K-pop, anime, world cuisine, etc.) 🌎

Shifting milestones (choosing career/life paths over marriage & kids) 💼

Creating personalized belief systems (mixing spirituality, astrology, psychology) ✨

We may not be following old traditions, but we’re definitely creating new ones.

The Future of Culture

So, is tradition dead? Not exactly. It’s just evolving.

Gen Z isn’t rejecting culture—we’re redefining it on our own terms. Instead of inheriting meaning, we’re creating it.

The real question isn’t whether traditions will survive. It’s: What new traditions will we build? And more importantly—will they be better?

@ DEAD economy

A12X42 FROM IMF

Global Economy in Flux, Prospects Remain Dim

While the near-term forecast is revised up modestly, global growth remains subdued, as the newly introduced policies slowly come into focus

The global economy is adjusting to a landscape reshaped by new policy measures. Some extremes of higher tariffs were tempered, thanks to subsequent deals and resets. But the overall environment remains volatile, and temporary factors that supported activity in the first half of 2025—such as front-loading—are fading.

As a result, global growth projections in the latest World Economic Outlook (WEO) are revised upward relative to the April 2025 WEO but continue to mark a downward revision relative to the pre-policy-shift forecasts. Global growth is projected to slow from 3.3 percent in 2024 to 3.2 percent in 2025 and 3.1 percent in 2026, with advanced economies growing around 1.5 percent and emerging market and developing economies just above 4 percent. Inflation is projected to continue to decline globally, though with variation across countries: above target in the United States—with risks tilted to the upside—and subdued elsewhere.

Risks are tilted to the downside. Prolonged uncertainty, more protectionism, and labor supply shocks could reduce growth. Fiscal vulnerabilities, potential financial market corrections, and erosion of institutions could threaten stability.

Policymakers are urged to restore confidence through credible, transparent, and sustainable policies. Trade diplomacy should be paired with macroeconomic adjustment. Fiscal buffers should be rebuilt. Central bank independence should be preserved. Efforts on structural reforms should be redoubled. As Chapter 2 shows, past actions to improve policy frameworks have served countries well. As Chapter 3 demonstrates, industrial policy may have a role, but full consideration should be given to opportunity costs and trade-offs involved in its use.

Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies

Global growth is projected to slow and growth prospects remain dim, as the world adjusts to a landscape marked by greater protectionism and fragmentation. Global headline inflation is expected to decline further but remain above target in some countries. Risks to the outlook are tilted to the downside. Prolonged uncertainty and escalation of protectionist measures may further hinder growth. Larger-than-expected shocks to labor supply could reduce growth, especially in economies facing aging populations and skill shortages. Fiscal vulnerabilities and financial market fragilities may interact with rising borrowing costs and increased rollover risks for sovereigns. An abrupt repricing of tech stocks could threaten macrofinancial stability. Pressure on the independence of key economic institutions could undermine sound economic decision making. To navigate a global economy in flux, policymakers should restore confidence through credible, transparent, and sustainable policies.

Chapter 2: Emerging Market Resilience: Good Luck or Good Policies?

Emerging markets have shown remarkable resilience to risk-off shocks in recent years. While favorable external conditions—good luck—contributed to this resilience, improvements in policy frameworks—good policies—played a critical role in bolstering the capacity of emerging markets to withstand risk-off shocks. Improvements in monetary and fiscal policy implementation and credibility have reduced reliance on foreign exchange interventions, with central banks less sensitive to fiscal interference and holding sway over domestic borrowing conditions. Looking ahead, countries with robust frameworks face easier policy trade-offs and are better positioned to navigate risk-off episodes. In contrast, economies with weaker frameworks risk de-anchoring inflation expectations and larger output losses if monetary tightening is delayed, especially when persistent price pressures emerge. In these settings, costly foreign exchange interventions offer only temporary relief and are less necessary when policy frameworks are sound.

Chapter 3: Industrial Policy: Managing Trade-Offs to Promote Growth and Resilience

Countries are increasingly using industrial policy to reshape their economies by supporting strategic sectors and firms. Motivations include boosting productivity, reducing reliance on imports—especially in energy—and enhancing resilience. Industrial policies can help jump-start domestic industries, but their efficacy is sensitive to sector-specific characteristics that can be hard to determine in advance. And industrial policies present trade-offs. Onshoring production in a strategic sector might lead to higher consumer prices for a prolonged period. And the fiscal cost of industrial policy can be substantial at a time of elevated debt and constrained public finances.

Even when sector-level outcomes are positive, industrial policy can generate negative cross-sector spillovers and reduce overall productivity by drawing resources inefficiently away from sectors that are not targeted. Effective industrial policy requires careful targeting and implementation, strong institutions, complementary structural reforms and sound macroeconomic policy.

A13X43 X43 FROM WEF

What isn’t getting enough attention? These under-the-radar trends, according to chief economists

Published Sep 23, 2025 · Updated Sep 29, 2025

John Letzing

Digital Editor, Economics, World Economic Forum

Philipp Grosskurth

Insight Lead, Economic Growth, Revival and Transformation, World Economic Forum

The latest Chief Economists' Outlook reflects a relatively downbeat view of the global economy.

But while some parts of the world are expected to endure higher inflation and lower growth, sentiment is far more positive for others.

We asked leading chief economists about the most important-but-overlooked trends in different areas of the economy – including innovation and technology, labour markets, finance, and consumption.

Disruption, uncertainty, and long-term structural change are the big-picture trends shaping expectations for a weakened global economy, according to the World Economic Forum’s latest Chief Economists’ Outlook in which you can also find pertinent charts and graphs.

But what are some frequently overlooked developments likely to have a significant impact on specific areas of the economy in the year ahead? We asked leading chief economists for their thoughts.

See charts and graphs at website here

Patchy 'strong growth' sentiment among chief economists.Image: World Economic Forum

Tariffs and trade tensions have realigned supply chains, the effects of a weakened US dollar are spreading, and the stunning pace of artificial intelligence development is creating uncertainty alongside new growth opportunities.

Still, there have been remarkable signs of resilience. While some parts of the world are expected to endure higher inflation and lower growth, sentiment is far more positive for others.

All of this will play out in particular ways in different parts of the economy. Below, chief economists break down what they see as generally underrated trends and developments in the areas of innovation and technology, labour markets, financial markets, and consumption.

Fabien Curto Millet, Chief Economist, Google

Topic area: Innovation, technology and data

“Most of the discussion around AI has been focused on its immense potential to raise productivity across the economy via its contributions as a “GPT” (General Purpose Technology). But its impact could go further still. As discussed by the late economic historian Nicholas Crafts, AI could actually also be an “IMI”: the Invention of a Method of Invention.

“In other words, AI could not just be a breakthrough, but a breakthrough in breakthroughs. This is a tantalizing prospect.

“In recent years, economists have worried that the burden of existing knowledge means new ideas are getting harder to find. Some estimates suggest that the United States needs to double the amount of research effort every 13 years just to sustain constant growth in terms of GDP per person. AI could greatly ameliorate the situation. Proof points are accumulating in areas as diverse as the understanding of proteins, the detection of gravitational waves, the deciphering of ancient texts, or the reasons why some superbugs are resistant to antibiotics.

“These breakthroughs have been celebrated individually; joining the dots across them has been done more rarely, and reveals AI’s potential to boost research productivity – helping to drive economic growth as well as advances in health and wellbeing.”

Technology is driving some economies forward.Image: World Economic Forum

Svenja Gudell, Chief Economist, Indeed

Topic area: Labour markets and human capital

“The global economy will be shaped by a race between the effects of an ageing population with declining labour force participation, and the potential productivity boost represented by continued evolution and adoption of AI tools. Here are two key points to know about that race: It has already started, and we are already losing.

“Declining birth rates and shifting immigration policies have already begun chipping away at aggregate labour force participation rates in many nations, and the trend will only get worse over the next few years. Critical industries including construction and healthcare are currently dealing with worrisome labour shortages, despite a loosening labour market.

“The prospect of an AI-driven productivity boom that makes business more efficient with fewer workers is incredibly tantalizing. But our research shows that the “hands-on” economy of builders, farmers and care workers will see less impact from AI than the digital economy of developers and analysts. An ageing population will require more healthcare workers, not less. Improving housing affordability starts with mobilizing more workers to build more homes.

“While virtually every job will be impacted by AI to some extent, its impacts won’t be felt evenly across the labour market. Some industries will be wildly disrupted, others only mildly. The key challenge and opportunity represented by AI will be our own ability to harness the tools’ power to support human workers’ ability to adapt, reskill and upskill to meet not just tomorrow’s labour needs, but today’s too.”

Have you read?

Why AI is replacing some jobs faster than others

Steffen Kern, Chief Economist and Head of Risk Analysis, European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA)

Topic area: Financial markets and monetary policy

“As stablecoins go global, stability may falter.

“Geopolitics and technology dominate today’s headlines, but a quieter development could reshape finance in the years ahead: cross-country multi-issuance stablecoins (MISCs). At first glance, these seem like a welcome financial innovation, helping to take finance to a new level of efficiency between crypto and traditional markets.

“But things are not that easy. Stablecoins are not new. Their short history includes 23 failures in just over a decade, and earlier this year the Bank for International Settlements warned, as other expert have done before, of their fragile “redemption-at-par” promise.

“Yet just as this caution is becoming mainstream, MISCs mean that an even riskier variant is emerging. By issuing fungible coins in different jurisdictions backed by local reserve accounts, they propose to shift reserves across borders to meet redemption pressures.

“The incentive problems are clear. Cross-border reserve rebalancing is by design vulnerable to speculative attacks. Investors and supervisors may find reserves drained abroad before they can react.

“Today, the stablecoin market – about $250 billion – remains small enough to absorb failures. But projections suggest growth beyond $3.5 trillion within five years, with deep systemic ties to sovereign debt, money markets and beyond.

“A failure at that scale would not remain within crypto. It would gravely affect institutional and retail investors and hurt the wider economy. This risk is not worth taking.”

Have you read?

The GENIUS Act is designed to regulate stablecoins in the US, but how will it work?

Wayne Best, Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President, Visa

Topic area: Private consumption and demand

“The labour market is changing and so too should our expectations.

“For years, economists have relied on a benchmark – around 150,000 jobs per month – to define healthy job growth in the United States. That number shaped expectations for consumer demand and economic momentum. But this benchmark is becoming less relevant. Structural shifts in the labour market are changing what “healthy” looks like.

“A generational shift is underway as baby boomers exit the workforce in large numbers. Meanwhile, a sharp slowdown in immigration is shrinking the foreign-born workforce. These forces are tightening labour supply. Unlike tariffs or hiring freezes, which reduce labour demand, retirements and slower immigration reduce labour supply. With fewer available workers to fill jobs, the unemployment rate can remain steady even if hiring slows.

“Using recent population projections from the Congressional Budget Office, our analysis shows that monthly job growth of just 40,000 to 50,000 could be enough to maintain a stable unemployment rate in 2026 – and possibly lower in 2027.

“Other recent data supports this. Monthly job growth averaged just 29,000 from June to August, down from 82,000 during the same period last year. Yet the jobless rate in August was 4.3%, only 0.1 percentage point higher than August 2024.

“Slower hiring will take some getting used to, but it won’t derail consumption in the year ahead. Income growth and wealth effects remain strong. Going forward, the measure of healthy job growth is not how many jobs are added – it’s whether the growth is enough. And increasingly, it is.”

Have you read?

How much consumption is (just) enough for an economy?

A14X FROM CNBC How President Trump’s China tariffs are taxing the price of cherished Halloween pumpkin pastime

By Lori Ann LaRocco Published Mon, Oct 27 2025 12:49 PM EDTUpdated Mon, Oct 27 2025 1:44 PM EDT

Analysis of retail pricing data for Halloween items shows year-over-year increases as high as 300% on relatively inexpensive items, such as pumpkin carving kits, with underlying import tariffs near 60%.

Retailers are forecasting a record Halloween sales season, but the reason is likely the higher prices across the board, according to experts.

While President Trump said on Monday that the U.S. and China are near a trade deal, companies that order seasonal products are often planning a full year ahead and manufacturing overseas. A deeper dip into consumer wallets this holiday season is expected to last through Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it is already being seen in the Halloween product market.

DataWeave, which analyzes SKUs (stock keeping units), a scannable code retailers use to identify and track a product, says it has seen big price hikes among relatively inexpensive Halloween items, led by pumpkin carving-related products. Pumpkin Masters, the popular pumpkin carving company that offers a wide range of carving and decorating kits, topped the list in the percentage of price increases, with year-over-year increases as high as 300%.

According to customs agents who have reviewed the products, which are made in China, and calculated the approximate tariff costs for CNBC, the tariff burden paid by importers or Signature Brands ranged between 58.1%-59.6%. Nunzio De Filippis, a tariff mitigation expert and licensed customs broker, noted that at these levels, the importer is now paying tariffs and fees which are more than half the product’s value.

Joe Ens, CEO of Signature Brands, which owns Pumpkin Masters — in addition to Betty Crocker, Paas, Cake Mate, Gift Pop, and Brand Castle — told CNBC that while the lion’s share of the cake decorating business is domestically manufactured and produced in Ocala, Florida, Pumpkin Masters and Paas are 100% made in China. The company’s products were subject to the first trade war in 2018, but this time around, he says the increase in tariffs has made it hard to keep prices at original levels.

“I think with the scale of tariffs that we’re talking about here, it’s hard to imagine supply chains domestically absorbing that much tariff,” said Ens. “Frankly, it’s the retailers who make the final pricing decision when all is said and done.”

According to SKU analysis by DataWeave, the biggest increase among lower-priced holiday items was the Pumpkin Masters Xtreme Strobe Light White, with a retail price increase of a whopping 331%. In 2024, the same light, which is inserted into the pumpkin to illuminate it, retailed at $1.62, a price that has been consistent going back to 2022. In 2025, the product is retailing at $6.99.

Retailers have been discounting the item heavily from the list price, and it is selling. According to Kroger’s website, the product was initially listed at $6.99 but was later reduced to $3.49. It was marked sold out. Even with the discount, the price increased by 115.4%

Ens said even with the price increase, consumer demand remains strong. “Pumpkin carving is an annual tradition that we think they want to preserve. It’s such a cherished consumer behavior that for a pumpkin carving kit that’s less than $6, people are not going to radically change,” he said.

Ens said Signature Brands has become more familiar with consumer behavior in reaction to price increases on holiday items. Last Easter, for example, the cost of eggs was a key challenge. “It’s kind of the same relationship where the cost of the activity increased,” Ens said.

Other Pumpkin Master products were also listed at much higher prices this year.

At regional grocer Giant Eagle, the price of Pumpkin Masters Contest Winners Pattern Book was up 330%; Pumpkin Masters Fright Light Kit was up 302%; and Pumpkin Master Carving Party Kit was up 302%.

Kroger is also selling Pumpkin Masters Jack O Lantern Teeth, up 283% in price; and Pumpkin Masters Masters Collection, up 214%.

Pick and Save, which is a part of Kroger, has also listed similar items at price increases of over 100%.

Kroger and Giant Eagle did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment on pricing strategy.

William George, director of research at ImportGenius, said a review of the bills of lading, receipts detailing freight shipments to the U.S., shows that shipment levels of pumpkin carving tools have been largely flat over the past three years. Other shipments containing cauldron, skeleton, or tombstones in the product description are up. “I think the real takeaways are that Halloween-labeled shipments are slightly down, and that Halloween costume-labeled shipments are down significantly,” said George.

“A good chunk of our business is direct import, so our retail partners assume control overseas, so there’s been a little bit of a decrease in inventory brought in, just under the assumption that there might be moderated consumer terms,” Ens said.

Signature Brands has looked at reshoring manufacturing for both Pumpkin Masters and Paas, which makes popular Easter products, but Ens said it would be very difficult to be competitive based on labor costs in other markets, and for products made with injectable molds.

Seasonal items like Pumpkin Masters and Paas are usually planned a year in advance of the holiday.

“We’re in the midst of trying to define our demand for 2026 and we will see how this season goes,” Ens said. “While the increases are not desirable for this kind of once-a-year purchase, people are investing in a tradition with their grandkids or their kids, and we expect velocity to be just as strong as the past.”

The National Retail Federation forecasts that Halloween spending will hit a record $114 per person this year, but that is likely a function of higher prices across the board.

Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer of One Point Wealth Advisors, said the increase in prices from lower-cost items on up will have an overall impact on the consumer. For example, in addition to pumpkin carving products, candy for Halloween is also up 10.8%, nearly four times the overall inflation compared to last year, according to the Century Foundation.

“The period from Halloween to Christmas will be a huge test of the American consumer’s tolerance of tariffs as it will be right in front of their financial face in the coming months,” he said. “The problem with tariffs for a trade deficit country such as the U.S., where we import much more than we export, blanket tariffs on just about everything is like water filtering into every crack in terms of households and businesses having to eat most of it.”

A15X41 FROM TIME@

Trump's looming DEI investigations have corporations on edge

While testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, issued a warning about the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

"Either DEI will end on its own," Dhillon told senators, "or we will kill it."

Just hours after he took the oath of office, President Donald Trump issued executive orders to dismantle diversity programs and directed federal contractors to end “illegal DEI discrimination.” Fearing lawsuits and the loss of government contracts, dozens of the nation’s largest companies from McDonald’s to Facebook owner Meta rolled back or eliminated DEI programs.

Worried the Trump administration will target them next, executives are doing everything they can to comply with the president's directives and stay out of his crosshairs, said one lawyer on the condition of anonymity so he could discuss private client matters.

“What you see are companies bending themselves to the will of the president,” he said. “The White House is in charge.”

Government scrutiny has only intensified as the Trump administration moves aggressively to pressure employers into overhauling hiring practices to align with the president’s political agenda. In recent months, the Justice Department has signaled its intention to investigate federal contractors and grant recipients who “knowingly” violate civil rights laws.

DEI investigations loom

During her Senate testimony, Dhillon promised the Trump administration would bring “numerous investigations and lawsuits against institutions that continue to offend our federal civil rights laws.”

In May, the Justice Department created the “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative” and threatened legal action under the False Claims Act, a civil law that allows the government to recover funds lost to fraud.

In a first step, the Justice Department has begun issuing civil investigative demands to employers across a broad range of industries, directing them to turn over information about their DEI programs.

The use of CIDs – a legal tool that allows the government to gather information during a civil investigation – rattled corporate America.

“There is no doubt there is a new sheriff in town,” said Al Chakravarty, a partner with the Saul Ewing law firm. “It absolutely puts the corporate community in a very challenging situation because in many cases, not only was it tolerated in prior administrations, it was actually encouraged to have programs that increase diversity.”

False Claims Act lawsuits are costly to defend and damages and penalties can quickly add up, the Morrison & Foerster law firm said.

Violators can be held liable for up to three times the total value of the contract in addition to per-claim penalties of $14,000 to $28,000 for each time the government contractor billed the government.

What’s more, the DOJ is encouraging whistleblowers to file lawsuits on the government’s behalf and potentially receive a portion of the windfall. Last year, the DOJ took in nearly $3 billion in False Claims Act settlements and judgments.

Just the mere threat of a False Claims Act investigation is a powerful cudgel, lawyers say. Becoming a target of the Trump administration carries significant business risks, from reputational damage to shareholder class action lawsuits.

“I’ve had many leaders say to me, ‘we are very confident from a purely legal perspective in what we are doing,’” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the NYU School of Law. “And then a lot of them will say to me, ‘none of that really matters if we have been dragged through the mud by this administration.’”

Cities, states targeted in DEI probe

In a sign of what could come in the private sector, the Justice Department is probing the employment practices of state and local governments.

The DOJ has announced investigations into possible employment discrimination, the state of Minnesota and the California Environmental Protection Agency. In May, the DOJ said it was probing Chicago’s hiring decisions after Mayor Brandon Johnson touted the number of Black officials in his administration.

Private-sector employers should expect “similar aggressive positions,” the Perkins Coie law firm warned.

Corporate America may face challenges from states as well. Attorneys general in red states have launched investigations into private-sector employment practices.

In July, the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office sent a letter to Deloitte, one the state’s largest vendors that manages its Medicaid eligibility system, ordering the firm to hand over records on its DEI initiatives, reported The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. The contract is worth hundreds of millions to Deloitte, which said in February that it would end its DEI programs.

EEOC prepares DEI crackdown

This month, the Senate confirmed Trump’s pick of Brittany Panuccio as a commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates employment discrimination in the private sector. The confirmation established a Republican majority at the agency and cleared the way for the EEOC to make major policy changes again.

In January, Trump fired two Democratic commissioners before their terms were up, leaving the EEOC without a quorum.

Acting EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has said eliminating “illegal DEI” in the workplace is a top priority.

They were out. Companies were proud. Then came the DEI backlash.

The EEOC is likely to reverse guidance on workplace harassment, which last year strengthened protections for LGBTQ+ workers, such as the right to use bathrooms and pronouns that align with their gender identity.

“The confirmation of a second Republican EEOC commissioner will allow the agency to more aggressively push forward Trump-era priorities, including challenges to diversity programs and reducing LGBTQ+ protections,” the Littler law firm said.

A16X 52 X FROM GOOGLE AI

AI Overview

Several Day of the Dead celebrations, particularly parades, have been canceled due to fears of increased immigration enforcement activities by ICE and other federal agencies. Cities like Long Beach, CA and Decatur, AL have canceled their 2025 events, citing concerns over the presence of law enforcement and the potential for family separation. Organizers decided to cancel rather than risk the safety of their community members.

Canceled events and reasons

Long Beach, CA: The city canceled its 2025 Día de los Muertos parade at the request of a councilwoman who cited concerns related to activities of federal law enforcement in the region.

Decatur, AL: The city's Día de los Muertos festival was canceled due to safety concerns stemming from immigration raids and a new state law requiring local law enforcement to verify immigration status during stops.

Reasoning: In both cases, organizers expressed that the decision was made to protect the community and that they plan to continue celebrating in the future.

YouTube·FOX 11 Los Angeles

Día de los Muertos canceled due to ICE concerns - Yahoo

Oct 9, 2025 — Several news sources have also reported Día de los Muertos cancellations in southern California, where immigration raid...

A16a

X 51 X51 FROM BERKELEYSIDE (CALIF.)

Día de los Muertos celebration at Berkeley High canceled amid fears of ICE raids

Community members “just don’t feel safe,” an organizer said. The event was set for Saturday, Oct. 25.

by Vanessa Arredondo Oct. 25, 2025, 11:35 a.m.

The annual Día de los Muertos event hosted at Berkeley High School has been canceled out of caution following the arrival of federal immigration agents to the Bay Area earlier this week.

On Thursday, a caravan of border patrol agents entered Coast Guard Island, a base located in the Oakland Estuary, erupting local protests. Though the next day local officials reported they’d been told that the Trump administration’s planned “surge” operation was canceled in all of the Bay Area, residents are still wary.

Adriana Betti, director of R.I.S.E., the event’s organizers, confirmed to Berkeleyside Saturday morning that the event was canceled. Betti’s nonprofit organization has helped hundreds of low-income BUSD students get into college.

“It was a difficult decision, but we [want to] honor the mental health of our community, and they just don’t feel safe,” she wrote in the email.

The family-friendly event, planned for Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., would have included mariachi performances, access to resources, a lowrider car show, an altar and art exhibition and raffles. The event had support of the Berkeley school district, LifeLong Medical Care and the city.

In the days before, community members circulated information about the event’s cancellation. A flyer in Spanish said the decision was made “to prioritize the well-being and safety of all community members.” Updates would follow about future events or alternative ways to honor Latino traditions in Berkeley, the sign said.

A spokesperson for the Berkeley Unified School District did not respond to a request for comment.

A17 A17X04 FROM READERS’ DIGEST

Here’s How Black Cats Became One of Halloween’s Most Famous Symbols

Cynthia Sanz Carstens

By Cynthia Sanz Carstens

Published on Oct. 24, 2025

The story of how black cats became the furry face of the holiday is downright scary

Halloween is supposed to scare you. It’s all malevolent witches, goblins, ghosts and shadowy beings haunting the void between the world of the living and the world of the dead. So how did adorable black cats get lumped in with all those ghastly ghouls? I mean, cats are notorious for sneaking into places where they are not supposed to be, but the underworld?

“It does seem like cats got a bad rap,” says Meghan Henning, PhD, a professor of Christian origins at the University of Dayton in Ohio. In fact, the story of how the black cat became one of Halloween’s most famous symbols is a dark and twisty tale that dates back to the holiday’s earliest origins and the cat’s penchant for getting in the middle of everything.

Read on to discover how the superstition started and what legend says about the black cat‘s connection to the spookiest day of the year.

What do black cats symbolize?

“In England, black cats were considered lucky because they were thought to be better hunters who could move around quickly in the dark,” says Henning. “But then black cats became associated with witchcraft and the devil, and it turned on them. If a black cat crossed your path, it meant bad luck was coming your way.”

How did these superstitions about black cats start?

It’s a long and complicated story. “For centuries, cats were a symbol of the sacred,” says Henning. “But then, through a bad confluence of events for the cats, things took a dark turn.” Here are some key moments on the black cat’s reputation roller coaster:

The sacred feline

In ancient Egypt, black cats were more than just beloved—they were worshipped. Bastet, the daughter of the sun god, Ra, was frequently depicted as a cat and was said to protect homes from evil spirits. And rats! In wealthy households, cats were treated as royalty, dressed in jewels and immortalized in paintings and statues. When the cats died, they were mummified in the hope that they would one day be reunited with their owner in the afterlife. And anyone who killed a cat was sentenced to death.

“Cats were seen as these divine, supernatural creatures,” says Henning.

A magic helper

We may have the ancient Greeks to thank for the black cat’s link to witchcraft. “In Greek mythology, we have Hecate, who’s the goddess of magic, and she has a cat,” says Henning. “The cat became Hecate’s familiar, helping her with her spells and her work as a witch.”

While Hecate is a relatively minor goddess, she played a big role in establishing cats’ reputation as mystical creatures.

The Celtic Cat-Sith

Black cats played a central role in the Celtic-pagan harvest festival called Samhain (pronounced SOW-in or SAH-win). Like an early version of Halloween, it was an evening of fearfulness and feasts, as the Celts believed it was the one night of the year when spirits could pass from the world of the dead back into the world of the living.

Some believed that spirits coming from the dark side would inhabit the bodies of black cats and steal souls. And legend had it that a Celtic creature called the Cat-Sith, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its chest, was actually a witch transformed into a cat. Leaving a saucer of milk out for the Cat-Sith on Samhain would bring blessings over the year ahead. But anyone who didn’t offer milk to the Cat-Sith would be cursed.

“Over time, the tie between witches and black cats and Halloween starts to stick,” says Henning.

The Pope’s fateful degree

The real trouble didn’t start until the year 1233. “Shortly after Pope Gregory IX becomes pope, he puts out his first papal bull, ‘Vox in Rama,'” says Henning. “It was in response to a rumor that there were a whole bunch of Satan worshippers in Germany.”

At the time, the church was on a crusade to weed out heresy, and one of its most aggressive inquisitors, Konrad von Marburg, had reported back that Luciferians in Germany were worshipping the devil in various forms, including that of a demonic black cat. “The devil that’s supposedly being worshipped is a kind of shadowy half-man, half-cat figure, and there are stories of the witches kissing a black cat’s butt,” says Henning. “You can see how that stuck with people, right? And it leads to the widespread persecution of black cats, and other cats too.”

Although domestic cats aren’t even mentioned in the Bible (much less connected to Satan) and Marburg was later found to be torturing people to get the confessions he wanted, his outlandish allegations did their damage. “Some people say that cats were almost eliminated in Europe, and that’s part of what led to the spread of the bubonic plague—because there weren’t cats around to kill the mice,” says Henning. “It wasn’t a great time to be a cat.”

What is the black cat’s connection to witches, exactly?

As with that Greek myth about the goddess Hecate, witches were often said to employ black cats as “familiars”—companion animals who helped them with their witchcraft. The idea really took hold in European folklore during the Middle Ages. Some stories told of witches using black cats as messengers. Others had the witches disguising themselves as black cats to pass through society unrecognized. (They could reportedly accomplish the change only nine times, which may be the origin of the “nine lives” cat myth.)

“The tie between witches and black cats may be partly because of the respect that many pagan cults and witches had for plants and animals,” says Henning, “but there’s also, I think, a less obvious gendered connection there. Women who were accused of witchcraft were often caricatured as questioning authority because they had independent thoughts. And the cat is a symbol of independence and sometimes is characterized as being aloof. So the association is also a part of a gendered history of mischaracterizing women who display the same characteristics that we value in men.”

So how did black cats make the jump to becoming Halloween symbols?

“It’s not entirely clear,” says Henning, “though it seems they likely came along with the witches.” The origins of Halloween itself are a little murky. But there’s a well-documented overlap between pagan and Christian celebrations.

Originally called All Hallows’ Eve, it initially marked the day before All Saints’ Day, which the Catholic Church created as a way to honor the dead. But its timing—All Saints’ Day falls on Nov. 1, so All Hallows’ Eve is Oct. 31—meant it coincided with the pagan harvest festival Samhain. And it seems some of those traditions got blended in.

“People thought that on the night before All Saints’ Day, the barrier between the afterlife and this world was very thin,” says Henning, “so that saints would be especially likely to intercede in your life. But if saints could intercede, then so could demons and the devil, and then they added in witches, and the cats just came along too.”

Why did people believe that a black cat crossing your path brought bad luck?

As with the origins of other popular superstitions, it’s a little hard to say for sure. “But it’s probably the witches again,” says Henning.

Because people believed that witches could take the form of black cats, they feared being anywhere near one. “Black cats were associated with witchcraft and the devil, so no one wanted to be in their path because then you could be associated with those things too,” she says. And in the days when witches were being burned at the stake, no one wanted to take that chance.

Is there any truth to the superstitions?

Of course not! Anyone who’s ever owned a black cat knows that their magic is all for the good. Black cats are among the feline world’s most striking creatures—and some of the most cuddly.

Even better, some research suggests that black cats may have developed their dark fur not by chance but because it helps them live longer. (It offers camouflage, helps with heat regulation and maybe even increases their resistance to infection.) How’s that for luck?

@get mexico

A17aX04A

Black cats and Halloween: Why has a Spanish council banned their adoption?

By Christina Thykjaer Published on 29/10/2025 - 14:09 GMT+1

Terrassa City Council in Spain has suspended the adoption of black cats this month to prevent the animals being used and abused in Halloween rituals to stop superstitions spreading during the spooky season.

The Spanish city council of Terrassa, close to Barcelona, has decided to suspend the adoption of black cats until the end of this month to avoid their use in rituals or celebrations linked to Halloween.

Local authorities say it's an unusual but necessary measure.

"We have been alerted by organisations and members of the public that some people want to adopt a black cat to use it for ritual purposes. We have had to issue an instruction to stop the adoption and fostering of black cats on Halloween," explained deputy mayor Noel Duque on social media. "In Terrassa, if you want to adopt a black cat, it will have to be after Halloween and with proof that you are going to take care of it and love it," he added.

Although it may seem like a superstition of the past, animal protection associations claim that every year there are more cases of people asking for black cats as part of party props or, worse still, to use them in witchcraft rituals.

Witchcraft and bad luck

Terrassa's measure follows a number of other cities that already restrict the adoption of black cats and, to a lesser extent, white cats, in the weeks leading up to 31 October.

While the former are still a symbol of bad luck or dark powers, the latter are widely viewed as representing purity and good fortune, especially if you're a James Bond villain. Both, however, share a common fate: they are victims of human superstition.

A18 X92 FROM The Conversation

Etching of two creatures approaching two women from behind.

‘Death and the Devil Surprising Two Women,’ circa 1515. Etching of two creatures approaching two women from behind.

Daniel Hopfer/The Elisha Whittelsey Collection via The Met

What’s the difference between ghosts and demons? Books, folklore and history reflect society’s supernatural beliefs

Published: October 27, 2025 8:18am EDT

Author

Penelope Geng

Associate Professor of English, Macalester College

Disclosure statement

Penelope Geng does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

What’s the difference between ghosts and demons? – Landon W., age 15, The Colony, Texas

Belief in the spirit world is a key part of many faiths and religions. A 2023 survey of 26 countries revealed that about half the respondents believed in the existence of angels, demons, fairies and ghosts. In the United States, a 2020 poll found that about half of Americans believe ghosts and demons are real.

While the subject of demons and ghosts can inspire dread, the concepts themselves can be confusing: Is there a difference between the two?

Historically, communities have understood the supernatural according to their religious and spiritual traditions. For example, the terrifying ghosts of Pu Songling’s “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” operate differently than those haunting the works of William Shakespeare, even though both writers lived in the 17th century.

Engraving of three men agog at the appearance of a ghostly man in armor

‘Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost,’ from Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet,’ Act 1, Scene 4. Robert Thew/Gertrude and Thomas Jefferson Mumford Collection via The Met

Literary representations of ghosts and demons often reflect the anxieties of communities experiencing social, religious or political upheaval. As a scholar of early modern English literature, my research focuses on how everyday people in 16th- and 17th-century Europe used storytelling to navigate major social changes. This era, often called the Renaissance, was punctuated by the establishment of mass media through printing, the global spread of colonization and the emergence of modern science and medicine.

Digging into the literary archive can reveal people’s ideas about demons and ghosts – and what made them different.

Martin Luther and the Reformation

On Oct. 31, 1517, Martin Luther, an ex-law student and former monk, boldly published his Ninety-Five Theses. In it, he rejected the Catholic Church’s promise that monetary payment to the church could reduce the amount of time one’s soul spent in purgatory. What began as a local protest in Wittenberg, Germany, soon swept all the major European powers into a life and death struggle over religious reform. Towns were besieged, landscapes scorched, villages pillaged.

This period, called the Reformation, led to the establishment of new Christian denominations. Among these Protestant churches’ early teachings was the edict that purgatory did not exist and souls could not return to Earth to haunt the living. Protestant reformers insisted that after death, one’s soul was immediately judged. The virtuous flew up to God in heaven; the sinful burned in hell with the Devil.

According to Protestants, ghosts were invented by Catholic priests to scare people into obedience. For example, the English translator of Ludwig Lavater’s 1572 book “Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Night” insists ghosts are the “falsehood of Monkes, or illusions of devils, franticke imaginations, or some other frivolous and vaine perswasions.” Should you ever encounter an “apparition,” you must call it out for what it truly is: a devil pretending to be a ghost.

Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus” comments on these debates. Written in the 1580s for a primarily Protestant audience, the play features a scene in which Dr. Faustus and his devil companion, Mephistopheles, trick the pope by snatching away his meal. A bewildered member of the papal court concludes “it may be some ghost … come to beg a pardon of your Holiness.” The audience knows full well, however, that these pranks are committed by the necromancer and his demon.

Ghostly haunting

In spite of Protestantism’s official stance against ghosts, belief in them persisted in the popular imagination.

Archival records show that ordinary people held fast to popular beliefs despite what their religious authorities decreed. For example, the casebook of Richard Napier, an astrological physician, reports several cases of “spirit” hauntings, including that of a young mother named Catherine Wells who had been “vexed … with a spirit” for three continuous years.

Popular plays provide additional evidence. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” opens with a midnight visitation by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, telling his son he cannot rest in peace until his murderer is brought to justice. Ghostly victims seeking justice appear in other Shakespearean plays, including “Macbeth” and “Richard III.”

Cheap print, a form of common media, capitalized on the public’s interest in the paranormal. Part entertainment, part journalism, cheap print was read by all sorts of people. A 1662 pamphlet titled “A strange and wonderfull discovery of a horrid and cruel murther [murder]” describes Isabel Binnington’s unsettling encounter with the ghost of Robert Eliot. In her testimonial, she claims that Eliot’s ghost promised he would never hurt her. What he wanted was simply for her to hear his story: He had been murdered for his coins in the very house she occupied.

A 1730 broadside ballad called “The Suffolk Miracle” – still performed today – tells the tale of young lovers parted by an overprotective father. After the daughter is whisked away, her beloved dies of a broken heart. When his ghost later appears to her, she “joy’d to see her heart’s delight.”

Demonic possession

While reformed Protestant thinkers rejected the existence of ghosts, they enthusiastically accepted the reality of devils.

Reports of demonic possession were popular. Before his ascension to the English throne, King James VI of Scotland published a literary treatise on demonology in 1597. He argues that “assaultes of Sathan are most certainly practized” and “detestable slaves of the Devill” live among us.

The diaries of English Puritans offer further proof that beliefs about devilish encounters were common. In the 1650s, the Calvinist preacher Thomas Hall insisted that his godliness attracted the attention of Satan like a moth to a candle. From an early age, he complained, he was subjected to “Satanicall buffettings” and terrifying dreams. He believed, however, that surviving demonic temptation demonstrated his unwavering devotion to God.

Distinguishing ghosts from demons

Based on the literature, what can we conclude about how people saw ghosts and demons?

Early modern people often represented ghosts as sad and pitiable. They were depicted as the spiritual remainder of a recently deceased person, haunting their friends and kin – or, occasionally, a stranger. They retained some of their humanity and were psychically connected to a place, such as their former home, or to a person, such as their most cherished companion.

Demons, by contrast, were almost always malevolent tricksters who served the Devil. Demons lacked knowledge of what it meant to be human. Hell was the demons’ lair. Early modern texts describe them visiting the earthly plane to corrupt, possess or tempt humans to commit self-harm or violence against others.

Then and now, stories of ghosts and demons have provoked fear and wonder. Tales of the supernatural have inspired the imagination of kings, theologians, playwrights and everyday people.

Approaching the topic of the otherworldly with intellectual humility can inspire deeper curiosity about cultures across space and time. As Hamlet muses to his friend after meeting the ghost of his father, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

See references to etchings here

A19 FROM USA TODAY

Why it's good to be alive in this city where the dead outnumber the living

Those who live or work among Colma, California's silent majority eschew spooky romanticism – insisting this is not the haunted place many envision. Instead, it's a place of reverence and history.

By Chris Kenning

Key Points:

How does Colma balance Halloween events with reverence for the dead?

Why was Colma incorporated in 1924?

What role do Colma's cemeteries play as historical sites?

How does Colma balance Halloween events with reverence for the dead?

COLMA, CA — On a cloudless October afternoon, Richard Rocchetta piloted his Toyota through a sea of weatherbeaten headstones and mausoleums that sprawl over hilly, manicured lawns of his hometown. He points to some of his best-known neighbors.

There’s Joe DiMaggio, the “Yankee Clipper.” There’s Wyatt Earp, the mustachioed Old West lawman. There's music impresario Bill Graham and William Randolph Hearst, the news tycoon. And in between, the lesser-known: Bankers, priests, Hells Angels bikers and Alcatraz inmates. And the mass graves of corpses evicted from San Francisco cemeteries a century ago.

Rocchetta is a gravedigger’s son, and he knows this place by heart.

It's fitting that in a place where the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one, its roughly 1,600 above-ground residents have embraced the winking motto: “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”

Growing up in the “City of Souls,” Rocchetta built forts with friends in the trees that edge cemeteries and learned to drive on cemetery roads. Neighbors worked in flower shops or setting headstones. At the dinner table, his father, an Italian immigrant with a seventh-grade education, talked about his day as a gravedigger. Graveside arguments. Children’s burials. A body that had turned to bones when he had to move it.

Now retired, Rocchetta can still see gravestones from his window. Each day brings more permanent residents, arriving in black hearses trailing solemn convoys of hazard-flashing cars to a place still served by generations of locals who cut granite memorials or pour sympathetic whiskeys.

This time of year, you might imagine that Colma would be Halloween mecca, that it would draw legions seeking gothic shenanigans and fog-shrouded backdrops for seances or selfies.

To be sure, there are events like trick-or-treating and a showing of the film “The Haunted Mansion" in a cemetery. And it's not without a past that has includes occasional tales of nighttime cemetery sounds or strange events, such as the Virgin Mary appearing in a tree.

But those who live or work among the city’s silent majority eschew the spooky romanticism of Halloween – insisting this is not the haunted place many envision, but rather one of reverence that stands as a story of how we remember our dead and their place in history.

Rocchetta, who remains steeped in Colma's history as a member of the local historical association and museum director, said he takes his matter-of-fact approach to a life spent among the dead from his father’s maxim:

“You need to worry more about those above ground than those underneath it.”

The birth of the ‘City of Souls’

The city’s story starts about 10 miles up the San Francisco Peninsula.

By the late 1800s, San Francisco was booming, fueled by the Gold Rush. And its cemeteries had grown into an overcrowded mess.

Worries about health hazards from vaporous winds blowing from cemeteries were fueling newspaper headlines calling for the cemeteries to go, according to the book “City of Souls” by Michael Svanevik and Shirley Burgett.

In 1901, San Francisco banned new burials within city limits. Some of the city’s neglected cemeteries fell into ruin, with toppled gravestones and thieves scavenging mausoleum doors, Svanevik said in a 2021 interview, noting some people wandered in for boozing, late-night sex and even to steal skeletons.

Above all, many of the cemeteries sat on prime land that was “needed for the living,” according to the Colma Historical Association. By 1914, eviction notices were sent to all San Francisco cemeteries ordering them to exhume and move the dead.

The Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco had already purchased 300 acres of sloping cabbage and potato fields in the area known as Colma, where it opened Holy Cross Cemetery. Others followed suit.

Despite years of legal battles over the relocations, more than 150,000 bodies were exhumed from the 1920s to the early 1940s for the trip to Colma, each in various stages of decay.

Intact caskets − or boxes of bones if they had deteriorated − were loaded onto wagons and rail cars and moved to Colma in what could be a grisly affair. While some paid to have headstones moved, many stayed in San Francisco and were later used in building projects including gutters and a breakwater.

At Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, funeral rail cars would arrive multiple times a day at a station across the street, said Monica WIlliams, Director of Cemeteries for the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

“There used to be a bell on the top of the building, and they would bring the casket into the building, they would ring the bell, and that would signal the grave diggers to come down and pick up the casket,” she said.

Over time, the city drew a cross-section of San Francisco society: Wealthy socialites, artists, top political leaders and business titans including those known as the Potato King and Cattle King. There were also prisoners, paupers and unclaimed bodies who went into mass graves, including remains of 39,307 Catholics at Holy Cross.

After World War II, the above-ground population grew when veterans purchased bungalows in Colma’s Sterling Park neighborhood, some costing $8,950, with GI loans (some of which are now worth nearly $1 million). But the population of the living, which would only grow to about 1,600, will remain forever dwarfed by the dead.

By the 1970s, Colma's western edge attracted car dealerships and later big box stores, a rail transit station and apartments. Nurseries and a golf course clung to other parts of the city. In 1998, the Lucky Chances casino opened, surrounded by graveyards on three side, which critics saw as a sacrilege. But its 60-table card room, tucked into a low-key design, remained. It brings gamblers to play Pai Gow or Texas Hold'em and, city officials said, critical revenue to the town.

Today Colma's cemeteries are a peaceful island of calm among busy interstates, San Francisco’s airport and the bustle of Silicon Valley. One that draws not just mourners but tourists seeking out history.

They include George Moscone, a San Francisco mayor who was assassinated in 1978 along with Harvey Milk, a member of the board of supervisors who was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. Abigail Folger, the coffee heiress murdered by Charles Manson’s cult members.

And the Emperor Norton, a late-1800s San Francisco eccentric figure known for wearing a ostrich-plumed hat and sword and dubbing himself the "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.” Still more include a Hells Angel member who was buried in Colma grave with his motorcycle in the 1970s.

Fans leave baseballs or bats on the grave of Joe DiMaggio, or coins and other memorabilia on the black granite headstone where Wyatt Earp and his wife are buried. They visit denim magnate Levi Strauss, who lies in a domed mausoleum. There are sold-out tours of famous Northern California wine makers, merchants and bottlers.

And family members visit loved ones in non-demoniational (sic), Jewish, Catholic, Japanese, Greek, Serbian cemeteries. A Chinese cemetery whose entrance is flanked by giant panda statues and Pet’s Rest, where plots with animals from ocelots to iguanas honor pets with names like Yugi, Taco, Ludwig, Buster, Chico the Chihuahua.

“It’s like the United Nations of cemeteries,” Rocchetta said, each with its own vibe. The Chinese cemetery is “very Feng shui,” he said, “and, of course, the Greeks are all facing east when they bury them.”

The sun rose over the nearby San Bruno Mountains on a recent day, lighting misty cemeteries dotted with cedar and palm trees. Landscaping crews zipped along cemetery roads in carts as sprinklers shot water across green lawns.

At Holy Cross, it was another busy day for the nonprofit cemetery that houses more than 400,000 souls and adds another 1,500 a year, with plenty of room as more people choose to be cremated rather than buried in a coffin. But the work never stops.

“It’s like running a little city,” said Williams, who oversees a staff of 60 who mow lawns, weed, dig graves, plan services, install headstones, sell gravesites, give tours and help with genealogy and other research.

That research, for example, recently discovered a survivor of the 1912 Titanic disaster was – by sheer chance – buried within feet of a man who worked on the ship that rescued her.

"You have to be present to people who are grieving. And that's really meaningful work,” she said. “But the fun part is learning all these stories. And that's what cemeteries are about, telling stories.”

Across town, Mark Fontana leaned over a slab of granite in a monument manufacturing shop located right next to the Italian cemetery, full of headstones in various stages, giant stone cutting machines, diamond-grinders and a room for sandblasting headstones.

V. Fontana & Company was opened in 1921 by his grandfather, Valerio Fontana, a stone-cutter who immigrated from Italy and worked on San Francisco's city hall before moving to Colma. Its nearby office is full of historic photos, and Mark Fontana’s daughters live upstairs, just as he and his father once did. Outside is an open air patio, where family and friends gather for long dinners next to a kitchen plastered with family pictures.

While technology has changed – photo images can now be set on stone - he bases his business on quietly listening to what people want in a final marker and delivering it. Recently that ranged from a man in his 70s who lost his childhood sweetheart to cancer to a woman who was burying her beloved horse.

“It's the final thing anybody's ever gonna do for whoever they're doing it for,” he said. “And it’s there for all time.”

A mile to the west, Owen Molloy polished glasses at another local landmark — Molloy’s Tavern, opened by his grandfather in the 1920s in a former hotel and stagecoach stop across the street from Holy Cross Cemetery to capitalize on Irish wakes.

On a recent day, a patron drank a Guinness at the bar amid walls covered in funeral notices from people who had come for a drink after saying that final goodbye. Hung too were some of the many articles written about the bar. One story about it notes that “Though the Molloy’s dwell in the valley of death,” it was a place where “black clad mourners duck in for a soothing pint.”

Owen Molloy sits outside Molloy’s, the tavern opened across from a cemetery in Colma, California by his family in 1927.

Molloy grew up here, and after taking over from his father, now lives within walking distance. The history is all around him.

During prohibition, he said the bar was used to store alcohol smuggled in from Canada on timber ships and later sold in San Francisco gas stations. Wyatt Earp, before his death in 1929, would sometimes come in for a drink after refereeing nearby boxing matches held in the area.

Its location meant visits by mayors. Evil Knievel once rode his motorcycle through the bar.

Legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was a regular, drawn like many to its history and dive-bar vibes, Molloy said. “He used to write so many articles about Malloys, the editor asked him if he was on our payroll,” he said.

Rocchetta, for his part, heeded his father’s advice to stay away from gravedigging despite it being a union job with a pension back then. After working for the state, Rocchetta has played a key role in the historical society whose museum includes artifacts like a traveling embalming table.

A couple of years ago, Rocchetta purchased a grave site for himself in town.

But ask area residents how living or working in the City of Souls – surrounded by the unblinking fact of their own future – has impacted their perspective on death, and most respond with a shrug. Just a part of life.

Fences help quell cemetery misadventures

At night, things are generally quiet in the cemeteries, according to Helen Fisicaro, a Colma city council member and former mayor who has lived in town since the 1970s.

But it wasn’t always that way before cemeteries put in fences and installed security cameras.

Kids playing hide-and-seek in cemeteries and teenagers drinking beer at night weren’t uncommon, Molloy said.

“It was a free-for-all back then,” he said.

Former Colma Police Sgt. Tim Mackie told the East Bay Times in 2005 that during nighttime graveyard patrols, he’d discovered naked lovers, people dancing on graves and the remains of seances, with candles circling a grave and pieces of a chicken strewn about.

There was the time when police spotted a man with blood dripping from his ear and mouth in a cemetery who then seemed to disappear, the outlet reported, with Mackie noting that while there were “some cops who get spooked out at nighttime” he wasn’t one of them. An LA Times column from the 1990s cited what it said was the rare resident who claimed ghosts roamed one mausoleum for stillborns and infants.

Once a man shot and killed himself on his father’s grave at Holy Cross. Another time brass vases were stolen, Rocchetta said. There was one instance of vandals toppling monuments.

In 1997, a branch fell off a tree near Olivet Memorial Park, revealing a spot where people believed they could see the Virgin Mary in a gown with her hands folded in prayer, drawing large crowds.

“People would take photos and leave flowers,” Rocchetta said. “They had to have policemen out here because the traffic was so heavy.”

That too has been fenced off, and these days there’s little mischief – at least that they know about, said Fisicaro, the city council member. And in the era of remote cameras, it’s tougher to get away with hijinks.

Over the years, the cemeteries have also served as backdrops for movie scenes, from 1971’s “Harold and Maude” to 2006’s “Colma: The Musical.” The professional wrestler known as The Undertaker filmed a commercial at one of the Jewish cemeteries, Fisicaro said.

Ghost hunters have conducted paranormal investigations, Rocchetta said, but he recalled that at least once they came up short.

“I don’t think they found anything,” he said.

Balancing Halloween with reverence for the dead.

In the neighborhood where “Cinema at the Cemetery” was scheduled for a showing on a mausoleum lawn, homes are decorated with Halloween figures or skeletons, some within clear view of a real cemetery.

On Halloween, families come from nearby Daly City and elsewhere to trick-or-treat in the neighborhood, drawn by the peaceful streets and gothic backdrop.

But Fisicaro, who lives in the neighborhood, said the city has a complicated relationship with Halloween. The city works to balance fun with reverence, and discourages people from coming to the city to enter the cemeteries at night hoping for a ghostly experience. That also applies to a steady supply of writers who imagine the place to be haunted.

“Every Halloween, we get a call from some newspaper or whatever,” she said. “But there really isn't that kind of story here. It's not scary. It's not ghostly. There's this protection or reverence of the cemeteries.”

Reflecting the town's motto, she, too, takes living among the dead with a winking stride.

When she moved into her home years ago, built by an early cemetery figure who died in the home, at times it almost seemed as if doors closed for no apparent reason. “We’d just laugh and go, ‘That's Mr. Jensen.”

Later, when she and her husband removed their fireplace, they found grave markers had been used in its construction.

If you find bones, she told him, we’re moving.

@ DEAD democracy

The "democracy of the dead"

The concept was coined by English author G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy (1908) to explain the importance of tradition. In this view, democracy isn't limited to the votes of the living, but should also honor the "votes" of past generations, the deceased.

A wider electorate: Tradition is described as "an extension of the franchise" to include the deceased, giving them a vote in the present.

A check on arrogance: This idea serves as a check on the "small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about". It suggests that the wisdom of previous generations provides important perspective on current affairs.

How it relates to the Day of the Dead

Mexico's Día de los Muertos (November 1–2) offers a compelling real-world cultural expression of Chesterton's philosophical idea. The holiday is a tradition that literally gives a voice to the ancestors.

A20 X62 X62 FROM MPR NEWS MINNESOTA

ICE arrests, anti-immigrant sentiment cast pall over Minnesota’s Dia de los Muertos celebrations

A sculpture of La Catrina stands on display inside the Hubbard building on N. Riverfront Drive in Old Town Mankato ahead of Old Town Dia de Los Muertos on Oct. 22. It's a symbol widely used in celebration and represents the Mexican spirit in embracing and laughing at death itself.

See photos here

Volunteers in Mankato prepare for Old Town Day of the Dead, where more than 15,000 people are expected to celebrate. They hang colorful paper flags and line the streets with large vibrant traditional Mexican folk art. There’s mariachi music, Mexican wrestling, vendors selling cempasúchil–marigolds–and community altars where people can bring ofrendas to honor their deceased loved ones.

Luis Alberto Orozco, 27, of Mankato, serves as this year’s emcee. He loves everything about El Día de los Muertos, having celebrated the holiday since he was a kid from Michoacán, Mexico.

Orozco also plays a vihuela–a five-string small round-backed instrument—and sings in a mariachi band with his father. This time of year brings all kinds of joy.

“This is a party for our ancestors,” Orozco said. “Just seeing the joy in all the families as they’re celebrating is why I love doing what I do.”

Luis Alberto Orozco of Mankato, Minn. says the national attention surrounding anti-immigration caused fear in Latino communities, impacting them from going to grocery stores or gas stations despite holding legal statuses.

He and a group of volunteers help plan this festival every year. But Orozco says this year, “it’s felt more heavy and more scary throughout the planning months.” He added that the national discourse surrounding the federal crackdown on immigration has led to hard conversations with loved ones.

“I know close family friends, they have legal status, but they’re still very worried about even just filling up their gas tank after work just because you never know,” Orozco said. “I am scared because you never know what can happen.”

A fear intensified

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem paid a visit to Minnesota on Friday to highlight the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. But anti-immigration rhetoric and harassment has cast a pall over the state as Latinos make plans to celebrate their culture and family heritage with El Dia de los Muertos festivities.

This fear is palpable for many immigrant communities statewide, as many fear drawing attention to themselves. Ryan Perez, organizing director for Communities Organizing Latine Power and Action, or COPAL, based in Minneapolis, says while deportation fears are nothing new, the angst now has intensified.

“The threat of ‘We’re going to deploy the National Guard,’ ‘We’re going to use force,’ that is something that is really extreme,” Perez said. “We’ve seen the video of ICE agents, how aggressive they’re getting in pushing people down to the ground, slamming their faces against cement. A lot of folks have said that that’s a significant escalation in many communities than what was happening before.”

Perez says COPAL MN has heard cases of self-deportations to high profile ICE detentions. Many immigrants—and even second and third generation U.S. born citizens—are trying to keep a lower profile because of harassment. Perez said the impact of that is significant.

“We’ve heard of so many small businesses sharing with us that foot traffic is down, visits are down to restaurants, visits are down to the grocery store, and it’s been impacting school districts,” Perez said. “We’ve heard a lot of families saying [who] are not sending their kids to school. They’re afraid that the kid will come home and Mom and Dad won’t be there, and that’s a really scary reality.”

It’s not exactly clear yet how much this is costing Minnesota’s businesses, especially those that primarily serve Latinos, but immigrants do make significant contributions to the fabric of the state’s economy and communities.

And Perez says instead of letting the fear overwhelm and push people into hiding, he said that it's important to keep showing up and give people agency.

“My belief is fully that we need to stay present,” he said. “We need to stay visible, and that’s the power of our community.”

‘This is for everybody’

That’s why events like Old Town Day of the Dead in Mankato are important for Latinos embracing their identity and culture. Justin Ek, 35, of North Mankato, is co-founder of the event. He remembers how much the event grew from its humble beginnings in his family’s painting business parking lot, to now spanning multiple blocks.

Ek says he hopes that it inspires younger generations that they do belong.

“For our community to reflect that identity is a huge message to communities around Minnesota that Mankato is a safe place for people to come and enjoy culture,” he said. “It reflects the youth that are in our community ... to inspire hope and that you can see yourself culturally reflected in prominent things within your community.”

This year’s celebrations are challenging given what people have been hearing. But, Elisa Chavez, 46, of Janesville, Minn. says she’s hoping others will come to the festival this weekend.

“It’s a difficult time for our community, but we’re putting that aside,” Chavez said. “It’s a good time to get together and spend good time with family, do something different or something that we can relate to.”

Luis Alberto Orozco said he’s seen how much the event evolved over the years. When he arrived in Mankato more than a decade ago as a Minnesota State University, Mankato student, he worried about finding connections. He says Old Town Day of the Dead builds relationships.

“Not only did I get to see other leaders, but then all the people that came to the event themselves [are] like first-generation Latino, second-generation people,” Orozco said. “It’s grown so much that it really feels safe to be here for me as somebody that I can express my culture without feeling afraid.”

And for others, it’s also about bridging differences and finding common ground. Martha Croyle, 44, from the Mankato area, says she loves that she can share her customs with her children. Croyle said she hopes to share with others the purpose of El Dia de los Muertos.

“We’re all here just to celebrate and have a good time,” Croyle said. “We want to enjoy this colorful culture that brings everybody together. Don't let yourself be overcome by fear. We're stronger together.”

A21X61 X61 FROM TIME

Oct 7, 2025 6:21 PM ET

Trump Is Threatening to Use the Insurrection Act to Deploy Troops in the U.S. Can He?

By Connor Greene

As President Donald Trump’s National Guard deployments to cities across the country have met with opposition from governors, city officials, and the courts, he has repeatedly threatened to invoke a law that would extend his power to deploy the military within the U.S.

Trump has floated the possibility that he could use the 19th-century law, the Insurrection Act, to bypass court rulings that restrict him from sending Guard troops to American cities over the objections of local and state officials.

“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, calling it “a way to get around” pushback from officials and noting that he would invoke it “if it were necessary, but so far it hasn’t been necessary.” He described conditions that he said would prompt him to use the act, including “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or mayors or governors were holding us up.”

In a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney a day later, Trump was asked again if he would invoke the law. “It's been invoked before,” he responded, before seeming to suggest he would consider using it in his federal crackdown in Chicago. “Chicago is a great city where there’s a lot of crime and if the governor can't do the job, we'll do that job.”

The comments come as Chicago and Illinois have sued in an effort to stop what they described as Trump’s “patently unlawful” deployment of hundreds of National Guard members to the city, and a federal judge has twice blocked similar efforts to send troops to Portland.

A separate federal judge ruled early in September that the deployment of Guard troops in Los Angeles this summer violated another 19th-century federal law.

That law, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, bars the President from using the military for law enforcement purposes within the U.S. But the Insurrection Act gives them more authority to deploy the troops domestically—in specific circumstances.

Here’s what to know about the act, and how it could be invoked.

What is the Insurrection Act?

The Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, allows the President to use the military as they deem “necessary” to enforce the law or suppress insurrection in the U.S. under certain conditions.

The text of the law says it can be invoked at the request of a state, or at the President’s own volition when they believe that “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

But those conditions are vague, and largely left to interpretation, Chris Mirasola, a professor of law at The University of Houston Law Center, tells TIME.

“The statutes are variable, so they don't provide us any definitions about what these terms mean,” Mirasola says.

He notes that it is a “common technique of statutory interpretation to use examples of past practice to give meaning to terms in the statute that are pretty ambiguous,” pointing to instances when the Insurrection Act has previously been used—and how they differ from the current situation.

When has it been invoked before?

The Insurrection Act has been invoked on multiple occasions over the years.

The last time was in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush deployed the National Guard, at the request of former California Gov. Pete Wilson, to suppress unrest in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four white police officers who were filmed beating Rodney King, an unarmed black man.

The act has also been invoked without the permission or request of a state. President Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 against the wishes of the governor to quell opposition to the integration of Central High School.

Mirasola tells TIME that when the law was used before, it was in response to “situations that are far more extreme than what we currently see in Portland or Chicago,” in which there were “riots and civil disturbances that are so large that federal functions literally cannot be exercised” and necessitated the intervention of the military.

The current conditions, he says, “just don't rise to that level” seen in past uses of the act.

Trump himself previously threatened to use the Insurrection Act during his first term in response to protests that swept the country after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. While he did send troops to multiple cities that summer, he did not ultimately invoke the Insurrection Act, however.

The protests that have broken out in cities where Trump has deployed the Guard this year, such as Los Angeles and Chicago, have been notably smaller than the 2020 demonstrations, and have also been far more minor than the unrest that prompted the deployment of troops to Los Angeles in 1992.

Could Trump invoke it—and what would happen if he did?

Mirasola tells TIME that certain steps would need to be taken to invoke the Insurrection Act.

First, the President would have to issue a proclamation that “tells the putative rioters that they have to disperse,” he says. Then an Executive Order would need to be signed invoking the authority of the act.

These two steps, according to Mirasola, happen in quick succession, as when President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked the act to address unrest during the Civil Rights era.

If Trump did invoke the act, Mirasola says, his Administration would likely face litigation challenging his interpretation of the law and the conditions set forth in its original statutes.

“I expect that litigation is going to focus on whether the statutory requirements of the Act are met,” he says.

State and local officials have pushed back against Trump's deployment of federal agents and troops to combat crime and quell protests in their cities as unnecessary. And those leaders, along with rights groups and the residents of areas where Trump has sent the National Guard—or threatened to—have raised alarms about his use of the military in U.S. cities, whether under the Insurrection Act or not.

Rachel Van Cleave, a professor at the McGeorge School of Law, tells TIME that Trump’s recent deployments of the Guard and his comments about invoking the Insurrection Act threaten states’ abilities to govern themselves, which are protected from federal encroachment under the Posse Comitatus Act and the 10th Amendment.

“It's pretty remarkable sending federalized troops into a state over the objections of the state officials,” she says, calling it “an actual physical intrusion on a state's sovereignty.”

Van Cleave also noted that Trump’s deployment of the Guard might detract from the needs of the states where troops are being sent from, as California argued when members of its Guard were sent to Los Angeles.

“Yes, I'd be concerned about that. We have lots of fires in California, and they've been telling us that the big one is coming again,” she says.

A22X63 X63 FROM TWIN CITIES PIONEER PRESS (mn,)

David Brooks: The death of democracy is happening within us

In 2020, Democrats won a convincing election victory. They proceeded to do what all victorious parties do. They passed legislation in accord with their priorities, including raising health insurance subsidies to families making up to 400% of the poverty line. They wrote the law so that the subsidies would expire in 2025.

In 2024, the Republicans won a convincing election victory. They proceeded to do what all victorious parties do. They passed legislation in accord with their priorities, including letting the Democrats’ insurance subsidies expire as planned.

If the Democrats were a normal party that believed in democratic principles, they would have planned to go to the voters in the next elections and said: These Republican policies are terrible! You should vote for us!

But of course that’s not what the Democrats decided to do. Instead, they shut down the government. Why did they do that? Because we don’t live in a healthy democracy. We live in a country in which the norms, beliefs and practices that hold up a democracy are dying even in the minds of many of the people who profess to oppose Donald Trump.

Navy loses two aircraft from USS Nimitz aircraft carrier within 30 minutes, and other top stories from October 27, 2025.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote an essay called “Defining Deviancy Down.” His core point was that when the amount of deviant behavior rises, people begin to redefine deviant behavior as normal. This is a column about that.

In a functioning democracy, a politician’s first instinct is to go to the voters and let the voters decide. In a diseased democracy a politician’s first instinct is to amass power by any means necessary. In a healthy democracy politicians abide by a series of formal and informal restraints because those restraints are good for the nation as a whole. In a diseased democracy like ours all the decent rules and arrangements are destroyed. Anything goes.

Trump is destroying democratic norms. Democrats have decided to follow him into the basement. When both parties cooperate to degrade public morality, then nobody even notices as it’s happening.

Government shutdowns became a thing during the Carter administration. The first few shutdowns during the Reagan administration lasted a day or two. Leaders in both parties did not want to face the wrath of voters who would be offended by this level of gridlock and incompetence. Now we’re in our 20th shutdown (depending on how you count them) and nobody cares. Neither political party is paying much of a price because the public has been rendered utterly cynical about government. Nothing is shocking anymore because there are no moral norms left standing.

Let me try to illustrate how deeply this cynicism has penetrated the American mind. When Democrats did decide to shut down the government they could have done it to protest Trump’s historically unprecedented assault on democracy. But instead the Democrats decided to organize their messaging around the expiring health insurance subsidies. Why did they do that? Because they calculated that the American public doesn’t care about democracy’s degradation. It’s been going on so long voters are simply inured to it. So better to talk about Obamacare.

And in fact there are good reasons to think that Americans simply don’t care about their democratic rights. For example, several states are redrawing congressional district maps to come as close as possible to eliminating competitive races. If you live in Texas or California, then you probably will not have to vote in November 2026. The district maps will have been redrawn in a way that makes House elections largely predetermined. By then you will probably have been effectively disenfranchised.

You might think that proud Texans and Californians would be outraged, or that the ruling parties in those states would be destroyed for doing this. Didn’t our ancestors at Valley Forge and on the beaches of Normandy die to preserve our democracy? But do you hear an outcry? No. It’s just crickets. People are used to the idea that the game is already rigged. So what is there left to get upset about so long as your party is ruthless enough to do the rigging?

I don’t think I appreciated how much a democracy depends upon regular people standing up to defend their rights and their powers against the elites who try to usurp them. These days people are happy to give up their rights and power if they can find some strongman or strongwoman willing to take it. This is a much larger part of human nature than I thought.

For example, when I first started covering Congress, in the 1990s, backbench members could pass legislation if they had a good idea and some entrepreneurial mojo. Back then, congressional committees and their chairs were still powerful. Power was dispersed, in true democratic fashion.

But for at least 30 years members of Congress have been content to give away their power. First, they gave the power to leadership, so that today four people basically run the legislative branch. Then they gave power to executive branch agencies, letting more and more key decisions get made by the unelected civil service.

Today, if you are a Republican you have basically given away all your power to Trump. You are a duly elected representative of your constituents, yet you’ve turned yourself into a Trump bobblehead figure who gets to go on Fox News from time to time.

The blunt truth is that a lot of Americans don’t find our founding ideals sacred, so they don’t get upset when the Constitution is trampled, so long as it is their side doing the trampling.

Let me try to describe something that may seem trivial but which I believe is at the core of our rot. It is politicians’ tendency to use the word “fight” in their campaign rhetoric. I noticed this trope when Hillary Clinton ran for president. She was continually promising to “fight” for middle-class Americans. It didn’t bother me then. She was a woman running for an office that had been held entirely by men, so she had to prove she was tough.

But now the “fighting” rhetoric is ubiquitous. MAGA Republicans claim that the old Bush-era Republicans were squishes who didn’t really know how to fight. Democrats are upset with their party leaders because they don’t fight hard enough. Political analysts casually use phrases like “he brought a knife to a gunfight.” I hear “fighting” references constantly in political discourse and every time I do alarm bells go off.

This is no longer just a metaphor. It’s a mindset. We now have a lot of people in this country who do not believe that democracy is about trying to persuade people, it’s about fighting, crushing and destroying people. I don’t agree with philosopher Michel Foucault on much, but he had a point when he observed that a lot of life is about trying to repress the little fascist in each one of us. When people start describing politics as a fight, they are unleashing their inner fascist. Fighting is for fascists.

Democracy is about persuasion. Our Constitution is a vast machine that is supposed to increase the amount of deliberation, conversation and persuasion in society. Our elections are supposed to be raw, rollicking persuasion contests.

Trump’s idiotic rhetoric is not about persuasion. The Democrats’ mind-numbingly repetitive talking points are not about persuasion. The people who want their leaders to “fight” harder just want them to shout their side’s orthodoxies at higher and higher volume. They just want their leaders to ramp up the bellicosity of their rhetoric so that the extremists on their side feel good.

What defines extremists these days? It’s not that they hold ideological extreme positions. It is that they treat politics as if it were war. They use the language, mental habits and practices of warfare. They are letting their inner Mussolini out for a romp.

Denise Lorence: My daughter is the face of Operation Midway Blitz. I am reclaiming her legacy

John M. Crisp: How do you know when you’ve become an autocracy?

Let me give you one quick example of how widely this corruption has pervaded our society. Universities were once about persuasion, truth-seeking and the life of the mind. But over the past half century an ideology has spread through them that holds that persuasion is naive. Ideas are about power. Thus many professors decided their job was indoctrination, not truth-seeking. To impose power so that students think just like they do.

Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik recently published a study in the magazine Persuasion looking at college syllabuses. As you’d expect, professors assign a lot of left-wing books like Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” about the criminal justice system and race, that align with the official orthodoxy of academia. But there are a lot of other books that dispute the historical claims of books like “The New Jim Crow.” You might think that some professors would assign books on both sides of the issue so students would learn how to weigh evidence and be persuaded. But the researchers estimated that “less than 10% of professors assigning Alexander’s book actually teach the controversy surrounding it.”

Students are completely aware that they are not being educated; they are simply players in a cynical indoctrination game. At Northwestern and the University of Michigan, 88% of students told researchers that they pretend to be more progressive than they are because they think it will help them succeed academically or socially. I saw exactly this kind of performative dishonesty while covering the Soviet Union years ago.

Yes, Trump is launching an assault on democracy. But what worries me more is what has happened over the last few decades to the rest of us. There has been a slow moral, emotional and intellectual degradation — the loss of the convictions, norms and habits of mind that undergird democracy. What worries me most is the rot creeping into your mind, and into my own.

A23 X64 FROM DW (GERMANY)

Democracy falls in majority of countries worldwide

Kate Hairsine with AFP, Reuters

09/11/2025September 11, 2025

A new report has found serious concerns about the state of global democracy as more countries slip in democratic performance.

https://p.dw.com/p/50JGp

Global patterns show that democracy around the world continued to weaken last year, according to a new report.

The Global State of Democracy 2025, published by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), analyzed democratic performance in 173 countries in 2024.

In the report, 94 countries — or just over half of those surveyed — showed a decline in at least one of the key democracy indicators between 2019 and 2024, the report said. In comparison, only a third made progress.

"The current state of democracy in the world is concerning," IDEA Secretary General Kevin Casas-Zamora said.

Some of the biggest declines compared to 2019 were seen around the holding of credible elections, access to justice and having an effective parliament, the report found.

Africa accounted for the largest share of the global decline with 33%, followed by Europe with 25%.

West Asia is the region ranking lowest on democratic performance.

Europe dominates democracy rankings

The report highlighted some positive examples, such Botswana and South Africa making consistent advances when it comes to credible elections, with both countries holding polls in 2024 that led to historic changes.

Denmark was the only country in the top five of all four democratic categories explored in the study: Representation, rule of law, participation and rights.

These rankings were dominated by European nations such as Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Luxembourg, with Costa Rica, Chile and Australia also scoring well.

Press freedom sees biggest fall in 50 years

The "very acute deterioration in press freedom," was an important finding, Keven Casas-Zamora said.

Between 2019 and 2024, the world saw "the biggest drop over the past 50 years," he said.

Press freedoms declined in 43 countries across all continents, including 15 in Africa and 15 in Europe.

"We've never seen such an acute deterioration in a key indicator of democratic health," he said.

Palestinian journalist Issam Rimawi (left) and DW News correspondent Fanny Facsar were threatened with weapons and fired on with tear gas by Israeli soldiers while filming in RamallahImage: DW

Afghanistan, Burkina Faso and Myanmar — already among the poorest performers in press freedoms — posted the biggest falls, followed by South Korea.

The Asian nation saw a "spike in defamation cases initiated by the government and its political allies against journalists, and raids on journalists' residences," the report found.

Casas-Zamora attributed the global fall in media freedom to a combination of heavy-handed interventions on the part of governments, pandemic legacies and "the very negative impact of disinformation."

"Some of [this] is real disinformation and some of which is used as a pretext by governments to clamp down on press freedoms," he said.

Declining democracy in the United States

The report only includes data from before US President Donald Trump took power in January.

But it stresses that IDEA has documented instances in which the Trump administration has "eroded and abolished the rules, institutions and norms that have shaped US democracy."

The United States ranks lower than many other OECD countries, sitting at 35th place when it comes to representation and 32nd for rights.

It only scores highly for participation, coming in 6th place.

"Some of the things that we saw during the election at the end of last year and in the first few months of 2025 are fairly disturbing," Casas-Zamora said.

"Since what happens in the US has this ability to go global, this does not bode well for democracy globally," he added.

Edited by: Sean Sinico

X FROM POLITICO

By Jonathan Schlefer 09/19/2025 05:00 AM EDT

Jonathan Schlefer is a former senior researcher in political economy at Harvard Business School. He also served as editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review and is the author of two books, Palace Politics: How the Ruling Party Brought Crisis to Mexico, and The Assumptions Economists Make.

For the last 10 years, we’ve been hearing that President Donald Trump will preside over the end of democracy in America. In liberal circles, that assertion is often accepted as fact. For many, the proof is in the evidence from other countries’ democratic declines.

A whole genre of American political writing is issuing this warning. Perhaps the best known entrant is How Democracies Die, by the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The authors mention a few democracies that fought off authoritarianism but overwhelmingly recount just what the title says: how democracies die. There are many other examples of the genre. “I Watched It Happen in Hungary. Now It’s Happening Here,” announces a former U.S. ambassador. Having shaken hands with “democracy killers” from Thailand to Zambia, Brian Klaas warns in The Atlantic, “American democracy is dying.”

But the United States is different from many of the countries that feature prominently in the “death of democracy” literature. And for Americans concerned about what Trump will do in his second term, the ways other democracies have died isn’t the central concern. Those accounts are a bit like detailing how Covid can kill people but not assessing the chances, depending on age and risk factors, that the disease will kill you.

The real question is whether U.S. democracy will survive or not. The genre hardly asks that question, let alone answers it.

To be sure, Trump does all the same things as the authoritarians Levitsky and Ziblatt studied: He has refused to accept electoral defeats; called political opponents criminals and tried to jail them even while backing his own violent supporters; and lashed out at opponents and the media as “enemies of the people” — a chilling phrase that echoes Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

But Trump’s authoritarianism also resembles that of dangerous populists who failed to kill democracy. Careful studies that never seem to get much press find that only about a fifth of dangerous populists actually kill democracy, including in different regions and across different time spans. If you’re serious about weighing the Trump threat, you should be asking what makes the difference between countries where democracy died and countries where it survives.

A significant difficulty in answering this question arises from the structure of the political science discipline itself. When I got my doctorate some 23 years ago, American politics occupied one subfield and comparative politics (the study of all other nations, often via comparison) occupied another — and never the twain should meet. Levitsky and Ziblatt are comparativists. This division has only begun to soften. It’s difficult to apply lessons from elsewhere to Trump’s America because the U.S. political system does differ starkly from others, but this disciplinary divide has made that problem even harder.

I’m also a comparativist, but where Levitsky and Ziblatt focused on Latin America and pre-World War II Europe (plenty of failed democracies in both), I have looked further and wider, from the old Mexican ruling party to the Greek financial crisis, from how economists think to the divisions splitting American liberals. I have found research outside of the literature on dying democracies that asks relevant and important questions. What can we learn, for instance, from the advanced capitalist democracies that survived the brutal 20th century — two world wars, the Great Depression in the 1930s, stagflation in the 1970s, Soviet and Chinese threats? Only two fell to internal authoritarian threats: Italy and Germany between the world wars.

This is a dire moment for U.S. democracy. To make it worse, the assassination of Charlie Kirk threatens to ratchet up not only the recent surge of political violence but to reanimate the poisonous tradition of political assassination that runs through Martin Luther King., Jr., President John F. Kennedy, the many Black leaders murdered during Jim Crow, and the Civil War. Deranged individuals perpetrated the recent attacks, but shared fear that U.S. politics is at an existential moment as the 2026 and 2028 elections approach surely portends more widespread and equally damaging threats of violence.

What if Americans didn’t see the dangers to our democracy as existential? If we had more faith that our democracy would survive Trump 2.0, it might take some venom out of this political atmosphere. It might provide some institutions more confidence to fight unconstitutional Trump demands — to be more like the law firm Perkins Coie, which fought back and not cave like another law firm, Paul, Weiss. It might make ABC and its affiliates more willing to stand up to threats from the administration to police what comedians like Jimmy Kimmel say on the air. The Democratic Party might pay more attention to what they can do for voters instead of harping on the Trump menace — a theme that obviously didn’t work for them in 2024. All Americans might better see beyond this fraught moment to focus more on solving the problems of a democracy that was already in grave need of repair before Trump made the situation far worse.

A careful comparison with countries that fought off autocratic attempts, as well as those that succumbed, suggests that American democracy might be more resilient than you think. At a minimum, it has crucial advantages over democracies that failed. Three main things stand out: None was nearly so rich. None was nearly so long-lived. And none had a legal establishment tracing its genealogy back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

WEALTH IS GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY

Rich democracies rarely die. As the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in 1959, “The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.” In fact, he added, the idea goes back to Aristotle. Whether high per capita income can make a nation democratic is not so clear, and definitions of democracy, let alone calculations of income, can be squishy, but the general claim that wealth sustains democracy has repeatedly held up.

The prominent democracy theorist Adam Przeworski of New York University, born in Poland under the Nazis and raised under the Communists, famously observed in 2005 that while democracy had fallen again and again in developing nations, economies richer than Argentina when the military seized control in 1976 had survived a thousand years all told. None had failed, despite “wars, riots, scandals, economic and governmental crises, hell or high water.”

Turkey and Hungary have since broken the “Argentina 1976” threshold. Still, a 2020 study identified only three types of states where per capita income topped $36,000: democracies, petrostates and the wealthy trading hub of Singapore. Longevity matters, too. A 2005 statistical tour de force found that if a presidency survived more than 50 years and had a per capita income more than $23,000, it had a zero percent chance of failing. (Those studies used different base years for the income levels; I have adjusted them for inflation to approximate 2025 equivalents. By comparison, current U.S. GDP per capita is about $86,000.) Statistical studies do not guarantee there will never be outliers, as Przeworski learned. Still, such broad agreement over so many years is powerful.

Why rich, long-lived democracies are strong is actually puzzling, and despite a large literature on why nations democratize and (lately) why they fail, incredibly little has been written on it. Since the result holds for both parliamentary and presidential regimes, political scientists assume it arises less from the structure of political systems than it does from the underlying civil society.

Przeworski suggested that while lower-income societies can erupt in all-or-nothing struggle over scarce resources, wealthy societies develop an existential fear of losing the rule of law, dreading that fate as worse than any particular electoral loss. In fact, a commitment to the rule of law binds sectors of society in advanced capitalist democracies that might otherwise be in conflict. Educated workers are rewarded in those systems, so it makes sense that they want to protect it. But they are often seconded by those who hope they or their children can join this group. Recent immigrants find in developed democracies what their own nations may lack: a credible legal system, better schools, even drinkable water.

We’ve seen plenty of serious damage to democracy lately. But mostly such backsliding doesn’t kill democracy. Using the V-Dem database, which provides literally hundreds of indicators of governance on a scale from democratic to autocratic, researchers at the University of Texas find that in 30 instances of backsliding between 2000 and 2019 (including Trump 1.0), only eight led to democratic breakdown. That’s a failure rate, even once backsliding has occurred, of about 25 percent.

Civil society — big business, law firms, nonprofits, universities, media — fights backsliding. When Orban’s government creates businesses by showering them with contracts and keeps friendly media outlets afloat as the largest advertiser in the nation, they either submit or face ruin. A wealthy society provides such plentiful resources to independent institutions of civil society, and they span so far and wide across the political landscape, that they are effectively impossible to quash. Longevity surely contributes here, too, because the longer those institutions have to mature, the more established they become.

Most Read

Border Patrol chief leading Trump immigration crackdown in Chicago ordered to report daily to federal judge

California Republicans retreat as anti-Prop 50 campaign collapses

3 words in Letitia James’ mortgage contract could doom the fraud case against her

Red states are preparing for an end to the Voting Rights Act

Democrats face moment of truth as shutdown coalition frays

PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER FOR DEMOCRACY THAN PRIME MINISTERS

U.S. democracy has another strength: It’s presidential. The conventional wisdom used to suggest the opposite. Concerned more with the emergence and consolidation of democracy than its survival, theorists saw parliamentary systems as more secure. That’s because prime ministers often lead coalitions of multiple parties, giving diverse voices some say, and when things go wrong, they can be ousted in a vote of no confidence far more easily than a president can be impeached. Also, a few decades ago, presidencies looked unstable partly because the military routinely overthrew them in Latin America.

Recently, military coups are mostly out as ways to seize power. Instead, the current challenge to democracy has been autocrats who win election and try to grab authoritarian power from within to stay in office, and this is easier in parliamentary systems. Prime ministers by definition command a majority vote of parliament, so the opposition can’t even hope to check them by controlling an upper or lower legislative chamber like in the U.S. Congress. And when multiple parties split the vote, a small majority or even a plurality can sometimes win a supermajority in parliament. Notably, in 2010, with just 53 percent of the vote, Viktor Orban won a two-thirds majority in Hungary’s Assembly. It allowed him to gain domination over the Constitutional Court, rewrite the Constitution, and wily step by wily step, cinch autocratic control without even flaunting the letter of the law.

Presidential checks and balances also complicate the lives of aspiring authoritarians by making it harder to replace judges. Kurt Weyland of the University of Texas identifies 17 dangerous populists since 1980 in presidencies of at least middling strength, such as Argentina or Brazil. Only two succeeded in killing democracy, and those two had an important thing in common.

TRUMP IS LESS POPULAR THAN SUCCESSFUL AUTOCRATS

Trump’s support may dismay his opponents, but it’s far lower than he needs to kill off democracy. In presidential systems of at least middling strength, populists who defeated democracy since 1980 had approval ratings of 80 percent or more — nearly twice Trump’s approval rating, which has been stuck in the 40s both in his first term and so far in his second.

The two presidents who in succeeded in killing Weyland’s democracies were Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Both rose to power by solving major crises that helped them rack up public approval ratings of 80 to 90 percent. When a leader is that popular, centers that might check his power — the military, the courts, congress — may support him (they’re comprised of people too) or at least hesitate to coordinate in opposition.

In Fujimori’s case, one crisis was 10,000 percent inflation; the money that had bought a luxurious house five years earlier could purchase a tube of toothpaste when he took office in 1990. He drastically brought the rate down to much more normal levels. He also halted a civil war waged by Shining Path guerrillas, in which tens of thousands of Peruvians had died.

For his part, Bukele won El Salvador’s presidency in 2019 as a populist outsider who pledged to crack down on gangs that had overrun the county. Covid gave him that chance. He locked the nation down, which held the pandemic death rate to less than a fifth that of Mexico or the United States and also suppressed the homicide rate to a fifth of its 2015 peak. Securing a supermajority in Congress, he purged the judiciary, and that was pretty much that.

While Fujimori stars in the death-of-democracy literature as a cautionary example, President Jorge Serrano of Guatemala barely gets a mention. But Serrano’s experience is more common. Having accomplished little and seen his approval rating drop to 20 percent, in 1993 he tried copying Fujimori, closing Congress and the courts. Massive protests erupted, the Constitutional Court declared his coup illegal, he lost military support and he fled the country. Something similar happened last year in South Korea when an unpopular president’s attempt to impose martial law was thwarted dramatically by parliament and protesters.

The United States isn’t supplying the kind of crisis that could generate for Trump a Fujimori-style level of popular support. Advanced nations rarely do. And it’s doubtful the distractable Trump could solve a good crisis if he lucked into one. After all, he didn’t manage Covid particularly well in his first term, ending his presidency with an approval rating of just 34 percent. His attempts to manufacture crises in his second term, such as by sending troops into Los Angeles or Washington, so far seem more likely to hurt him.

Trump is also failing to expand his base of support. While competent autocrats built alliances with supporters, he keeps alienating them, from Elon Musk, still the richest man in the world, to Ileana Garcia, co-founder of Latinas for Trump. Pardoning Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted the police might fire up Trump’s base but is opposed by two thirds of Americans. Likewise, attacking officials his fertile paranoia imagines to be plotting against him; loosing new tariffs daily; passing a budget bill that will kick many of his supporters off Medicaid while cutting taxes for the wealthy — none of this is likely to help him build support. As job creation stagnates and inflation slowly rises, the very issues Trump campaigned on could weaken him. With around 8 percent more Americans disapproving than approving him, there’s little sign he is on track to reach the soaring level of popularity of successful populists-turned-autocrats.

THE SUPREME COURT STILL HAS POWER

Experience shows that, if all else fails, the judiciary is the last bulwark of democracy. So far, lower courts have repeatedly blocked Trump’s excesses. Still, the Supreme Court has the last say, and Trump is openly counting on its justices to endorse his expansions of presidential power. Granted, it is dominated by conservative Federalist Society justices who have long been committed to the idea of the “unitary executive.” That idea has led them to issue some awful emergency decisions: letting Trump replace agency heads with sycophants, fire government officials by the hundred thousand and block billions of dollars for programs Congress approved.

But it remains a Federalist Society Court, not a Trumpist Court. In his first term, Trump had the worst record at the Supreme Court in the modern era. Federalist Society judges threw out his ridiculous challenges to the 2020 election again and again. The acting U.S. attorney who recently resigned rather than obey orders to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams belongs to the Federalist Society. Federalist Society lawyers fired from the Justice Department are hanging out shingles to accept clients suing him.

There’s also less than meets the eye to some of the court’s pro-Trump decisions. Trump v. United States, which grants presidents immunity for any acts within their core responsibilities, would let a president order Navy Seals to assassinate a political rival, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged in her dissent. But that decision does not immunize the Seals. Assassinating a Trump rival would still be murder one for anyone who took part. Or suppose Trump tried to assemble fake electors. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out in her concurring opinion, managing elections is not a core presidential responsibility — actually, not a responsibility at all — so Trump could well be prosecuted for that.

And the administration has lost some key substantive cases in this term, as well. On March 15, Trump violated a district court order by sending 137 supposed members of a Venezuelan gang under the pretext of the Alien Enemies Act, along with 101 others under normal deportation procedures, to one of Bukele’s notorious jails. But when the administration tried to repeat that trick, the Supreme Court ruled nine to zero — without a single dissent — that the ancient right of habeas corpus requires that all of them be allowed to challenge in court both the constitutionality of the charges and their status as a gang member.

The bottom line is that, unlike Republicans in Congress who fear being primaried by the Trump political machine, federal judges hold life tenure and care how they’re seen by history. Even regarding that Trump v. United States decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch insisted, “We’re writing a rule for the ages.” And for all the court’s seeming willingness to strengthen Trump’s hand over the executive branch, the president’s chances of completely replacing all the justices, as Bukele did, or rewriting the Constitution, as Fujimori did, would seem to be close to zero.

Finally, violating a Supreme Court ruling would generate massive opposition. A Times/Siena College poll found that only 6 percent of Americans would support such a thing. As the examples of Guatemala and South Korea show, aspiring autocrats who grab for power as their popularity wanes are the ones who tend to land in jail or exile.

BAD NEWS AND GOOD NEWS

To be sure, U.S. democracy has some vulnerabilities most other advanced democracies do not. Inequality is a big one, contributing in no small measure to political polarization and democratic erosion.

High school graduates’ real wages rose a grand 27 cents over the past half century, and workers with less than four years of college did only slightly better. The United States is at the bad end of what political economists call the Great Gatsby Curve, where worse income inequality goes hand-in-hand with worse social mobility. Advanced firms abandoned flyover country for metropolitan areas, robbing public schools of funds, while deaths of despair — from drugs, alcohol and suicide — surged. The Biden administration’s immigration fiasco badly exacerbated existing racial tensions.

However, inequality need not lead to a democratic collapse. Latin American nations that foiled authoritarian bids — such as by Fernando Collor and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or by a small handful of Peruvian presidents since 2000 — struggle with equal or worse income inequalities, fierce racial and social divides, ideological antagonism from neoliberalism to reckless Marxism (sometimes alternately espoused by the same famous zealot), and weaponized social media. It’s hard to see why the United States should do worse than these nations.

Along with American democracy’s wealth, longevity and legal tradition, the people are its bulwark. Authoritarians don’t have to be political scientists to know that if they lose public support, they can fall — sometimes ousted at a sudden tipping point, as in Eastern Europe in 1989. To try to manufacture an appearance of strength, Trump exaggerates his support, broadcasts favorable lies, attacks critical media and tries to cow opponents.

This might help explain why Trump is unnerved by public protests. Drawing on a comprehensive database of civil disobedience, Erica Chenoweth of the Harvard Kennedy School has estimated that when 3.5 percent of the population has risen in nonviolent protest against autocrats, almost 90 percent of them have fallen. It’s a rule of thumb that mostly worked in the past, Chenoweth cautions, not a guarantee that a 3.5 percent protest rate will work now. Most of the protests in the database occurred before widespread social media, so the more sustained efforts needed to organize them might have been crucial.

Still, Chenoweth underlines citizens’ vital role in democracy. In fact, her analysis is that even 1 percent protests took down almost half of the autocrats they were directed against. Some 5 million Americans — 1.5 percent — joined the No Kings protest against Trump in July, according to organizers, which would make it the third largest protest in U.S. history.

Massive protests matter in part because they signal wider agreement. The drivers who passed No Kings protests across the nation honking in support weren’t among the 5 million, but they count too, as do those feeling discontent but taking notice as they were cleaning their kitchens or mowing their lawns. Living individual lives, citizens may not be aware of others’ thinking. Protest makes known resistance that would otherwise remain merely private and implicit.

Large, peaceful protests also signal to powerful elites in the military, business, courts, legislature, even the ruling coalition, that the current state of affairs is going badly. Elites are citizens, too, and often divided, even in military governments. Protests give some permission to powerful elites and allies to at least remain neutral, if not abandon support for a regime. Other coalition members, strategically calculating odds based on what they see, may keep an eye out for signs they should desert so as not to be caught on a sinking ship.

Despite his bluster, Trump is probably worried. He should be. American democracy is wounded. But, however awful its deterioration feels, it’s a long way from dead.

AS OPPOSED TO…

x@ FROM GUK
American democracy might not survive another year – is Europe ready for that?

Trapped between Putin and Trump, EU citizens understand the grave dangers facing the continent. Their leaders urgently need to face reality, too

By Alexander Hurst Thu 2 Oct 2025 00.00 EDT

Fascism is supposed to look a certain way: black-clad, uniformed, synchronised and menacing. It is not supposed to look like an overweight president who can’t pronounce acetaminophen and who bumbles, for a full minute, about how he would have renovated the UN’s New York headquarters with marble floors, rather than a terrazzo. But as Umberto Eco remarked in his timeless essay on identifying the eternal nature of fascism: “Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.”

Historians, scholars and even some insiders from the first Trump administration have seen through the comedic quality of the disguise. They appear to have seen in Donald Trump himself and those around him, Eco’s core criteria: the call to tradition and the rejection of reason, the fear of difference, the hostility towards disagreement, the ressentiment, the machismo, the degradation of language into newspeak, the cult of a “strong” leader. Almost a year ago, the historian Robert Paxton, in explaining why he had changed his mind about employing the word to describe Trumpism, remarked: “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.”

Since then, the Trump administration has deployed the US military and National Guard to cities against the will of their state governors. It has put pressure on state legislatures to disenfranchise opposition voters in extraordinary ways, and floated the idea of disenfranchising all voters residing outside the US by ending mail-in voting. It has used the power of the state to censor books, bully the media and “cancel” comedians who regularly make fun of Trump. It has seized executive power in alarming and potentially illegal ways, including the use of tariffs, immigration policy and targeted exemptions to generate subservience among powerful corporate actors.

An over-fixation on whether actions are legal or not misses the forest for the trees: constitutionality is, practically speaking, whatever the supreme court decides. If the supreme court acquiesces to fundamental changes in the nature of what the US is, that is merely one more sign of how deep the rot goes. And from concrete policy to the decision to publicly venerate the Confederacy, the intended direction of travel is clear.

The disguise dropped a little bit more, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder – one more tragic datapoint in the merging of the US’s epidemic of gun violence and its growing political violence. At his strange funeral-rally-spectacle, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, gave a speech dripping with everything Eco sought to warn us against, raging against a diffuse “they” who “cannot conceive of the army they have arisen in all of us”. “You are nothing,” Miller continued. “You have nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing.”

In the past year, as Trump and those behind him have dismantled the institutions of US democracy with incredible speed, the European conversation finally moved from denial to attempts at bargaining, with some acceptance of US disengagement and disinterest going forward. But there has been almost no space for a high-level, public conversation about what to do when the US government is, for the foreseeable future, in the hands of actors hostile to the EU’s basic raison d’être and its values.

I understand why European leaders don’t want to have this conversation openly with voters. They fear that alienating Trump, even slightly, will lead him to drop US support for Ukraine. The cleverest think they can buy time by flattering Trump, manipulating him just long enough to find a better footing, while the blindly optimistic look to the 2026 midterms as an inflection point, and some sort of “return to normal”. But the midterms will not save us. As the Democrats’ elections attorney Marc Elias laid out in detail for The New Yorker, the 2026 elections will probably not be wholly free and fair, and even where they are, Trump’s prior history of insurrection indicates that the results very well might not be honoured. And Trump is already laying the groundwork to drop Ukraine fully into Europe’s lap.

During the first Trump administration, we heard, ad nauseam, that he should be taken seriously, but not literally. It was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now. When Trump says, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them”, we in Europe (“a foe,” remember?) should take him literally. The radical authoritarian agenda the Trump administration is pursuing domestically matters to Europe. A US with a new, masked, secret immigration police with nearly unlimited funds, whose “red” government deploys its military to “blue” cities, and uses the criminal justice system to exact retribution on political opponents at the president’s behest – in short, the end of the rule of law – necessarily affects European democracy. Not least, because the Trump administration is engaged in a culture war against Europe, promoting forces that seek to destroy it as it currently exists.

European voters are out in front of the politicians on this one. The spring Eurobarometer survey showed that large majorities of citizens want the EU to protect them from crises and security risks, think the EU needs more financial means to do so, and support that new funding coming from the EU as a whole, rather than member states alone. A survey of the EU’s five biggest states, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland, found that 52% think the EU was humiliated in the recent trade deal with the US. They blame the commission for not “defending” Europe more ardently, with a strong minority of 39% wanting the bloc to become more “oppositional” to Trump.

Timothy Garton Ash recently gave Americans 400 days to save their democracy. As an American, I don’t think the country has that long. As Europeans, we should assume that it does not.

Europeans are ready for an honest conversation about the challenge Europe faces from Trump – the same way they’ve solidified in the face of aggression from Vladimir Putin. The danger lies in Europe’s leaders fudging, hesitating and avoiding this conversation. If they cannot lead with candour, voters will conclude that European democracy and its institutions are too weak to withstand the pincer move that is building against it.

Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist

X FROM ECRF.EU

Americans have 400 days to save their democracy

I never thought I’d see fear spread so far and fast. Next year’s midterm elections are now crucial for the Democratic party—and for democrats everywhere

By Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford 17 September 2025

I return to Europe from the US with a clear conclusion: American democrats (lowercase d) have 400 days to start saving US democracy. If next autumn’s midterm elections produce a Congress that begins to constrain Donald Trump there will then be a further 700 days to prepare the peaceful transfer of executive power that alone will secure the future of this republic. Operation Save US Democracy, stages one and two.

Hysterical hyperbole? I would love to think so. But during seven weeks in the US this summer, I was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality of Trump’s assault on what had seemed settled norms of US democracy and by the desperate weakness of resistance to that assault. There is a growing body of international evidence to suggest that once a liberal democracy has been eroded, it is very difficult to restore it. Destruction is so much easier than construction.

US democracy needs Congress, the principal check on presidential power envisaged in the US constitution, to start doing its job again. That will not happen so long as the Republicans, dominated and intimidated by Trump, control both houses

That is why all democrats, irrespective of party or ideology, must hope the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections on November 3rd 2026. Not because of the Democrats’ policies, which are a muddle, or their current leadership, which is a mess—but simply because US democracy needs Congress, the principal check on presidential power envisaged in the US constitution, to start doing its job again. That will not happen so long as the Republicans, dominated and intimidated by Trump, control both houses.

Much has been made of comparisons to other authoritarian power grabs, from Europe in the 1930s to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, but I am most struck by the distinctive features of the US case. To name just four: excessive executive power; chronic gerrymandering; endemic violence; and the way a would-be authoritarian can exploit the intense capitalist competition that permeates every area of US life.

The danger of executive overreach has been there from the very beginning. Revolutionary war hero Patrick Henry (“give me liberty or give me death”) voted against the constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 precisely because he thought it would give a criminal president the chance “to make one bold push for the American throne”. Throughout the 20th century, presidents of both parties extended the “executive power” that is so ill-defined in article two of that constitution. More recently, a conservative-dominated supreme court has given succour to the unitary executive theory developed by right-wing legal theorists, which gives the most expansive reading of presidential power. And now the Trump administration—well prepared, unlike in 2017—has exploited every inch and wrinkle of existing executive power, as well as simply breaking the law and defying the courts to stop it.

Tom Ginsburg, a leading US comparative constitutionalist, argues that the biggest single flaw of the unreformed US constitution is that it gives state legislatures the power to draw electoral boundaries. The word gerrymandering was coined as early as 1812. In recent times, partisan redistricting has become more extreme as US politics has become more polarised. And then, in 2019, the supreme court declared that it could not correct even the most blatant party-political gerrymandering (only that done on racial lines). So now, at Trump’s direct request, Texas sets out to change constituency boundaries explicitly to win five more seats for the Republicans in the midterms, whereupon California says it will counter-gerrymander to win five more for the Democrats. There is no longer even a bare pretence of impartiality about the most basic procedure of democracy.

No European society can compare to the US for the ubiquity of violence. Hardly a day passed this summer without the evening news reporting at least one violent crime, including yet another horrific school shooting. The US has more guns than people. France loves its pseudo-revolutionary political theatre, but the US had the January 6th 2021 mob assault on the Capitol. Now the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has been shot. Before the identity of the killer was known, Elon Musk said “the left is the party of murder” and Trump blamed the hate speech of the “radical left”. It will be a miracle if the US avoids a downward spiral of political violence, as last seen in the 1960s. That in turn could be the pretext for Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, bring more military on to US streets and further exploit an alleged state of emergency.

Meanwhile, universities, business leaders, law firms, media platforms and tech supremos have utterly failed to engage in collective action in response. They have either kept their heads down, settled humiliatingly like Columbia University and the law firm Paul, Weiss, or fawned on the president, like Mark Zuckerberg. Why? Because they all follow the logic of fierce free-market competition and fear targeted reprisals. I never imagined I would see fear spread so far and fast in the US.

Add in attempts to disqualify or intimidate voters, plus Trump’s threat to ban mail-in ballots, and there is a real doubt how far next November’s midterm elections will be fully free and fair. The task for democrats of all parties is to ensure they are, so far as possible. The task for the Democrats (capital D) is to win them in spite of any such obstacles.

The key to that will probably still be bread-and-butter issues. Here, in the economy, lies paradoxical hope. We are already beginning to see Trump’s tariffs feed through into higher prices. The job numbers are weakening. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will further increase an already gobsmacking national debt of $37tn (around €31.8trn). Already in the 2024 fiscal year, servicing that debt cost more than the entire $850bn (€731bn) defence budget. But until a debt crisis actually hits, such macro-risks remain remote and abstract to most voters, rather as predictions of diminished GDP growth made little impact in the Brexit referendum debate.

So the big question is whether the negative economic consequences of Trump will be palpable to ordinary voters before the midterms. One astute political observer suggested to me that Trump, flush with revenue from the new tariffs, could do a pre-election cash handout to voters, perhaps presented as compensation for the “temporary difficulties” of the transition to a MAGA economy. That would be a classic populist move.

The single most important thing for the Democrats in the next 400 days is therefore to bring those economic costs irresistibly home to voters. Democrats will not win just by talking about the defence of democracy, important though that is, let alone by engaging in culture wars. They need to follow the advice of Bill Clinton’s former adviser James Carville and focus relentlessly on kitchen-table issues. In doing so, they will also show that they do actually care about the ordinary working- and middle-class Americans whose support they have lost over the last 30 years.

Then there is stage two, the presidential election in 2028. But sufficient unto the day are the challenges thereof. Despite all the serious threats to democracy itself in the US, for now the first rule of democratic politics still applies: just win the next election.

This article was originally published in the Guardian on September 16th 2025

@ RESISTANCE

@ legal

A24X 71 X71 FROM USA TODAY

Trump can't deploy National Guard in Illinois, but troops can stay, court rules

President Donald Trump can still federalize the National Guard, the court ruled.

By Eduardo Cuevas

A federal appeals court on Oct. 11 said the Trump administration cannot deploy the National Guard in Illinois.

But the brief ruling by the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, located in Chicago, said President Donald Trump can still federalize the National Guard. The ruling said troops already deployed don’t need to return home for now.

The appellate ruling largely upholds an Oct. 9 temporary restraining order by a federal district judge in the Northern District of Illinois that prevented the administration from deploying troops in the state. In her opinion, Judge April Perry wrote the National Guard deployment “is likely to lead to civil unrest.”

The Chicago area has been at the center of the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown, dubbed Operation Midway Blitz. Protests have erupted in response, particularly in front of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the suburb of Broadview.

The administration had deployed National Guard troops from Illinois and Texas in response to what it described as violent clashes between protesters and agents in the Midwestern state and Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city. Local and state officials said the federal government is exaggerating facts on the ground.

The state of Illinois and city of Chicago sued the Trump administration to oppose sending troops to the Democrat-led city and state. U.S. Justice Department lawyers appealed Perry's ruling on Oct. 10.

Spokespeople for both Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson didn’t immediately respond to email requests for comment. The White House didn’t immediately respond to an email request.

Trump has also sent National Guard to other heavily blue cities, against local officials’ wishes. In Memphis, Tennessee National Guard began patrolling the city on Oct. 10, city officials announced. Republican state officials welcomed the administration’s action.

Elsewhere, Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles have seen federal troops sent by the GOP administration. Judges in California and Oregon have found deployments illegal and unwarranted.

a25X 72 X72 FROM TANGLE

Q: Stephen Miller said President Trump had ‘plenary authority.’ What does that mean?

— Rory from Princeton Junction, New Jersey

Tangle: First, the definition: According to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, “plenary authority” means power that is “complete, comprehensive, and not subject to significant limitation.”

As for the comment, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who has been responsible for much of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement policy, recently cited “plenary authority” to justify the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland. While giving an interview to CNN on Monday, Miller said “Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president has ‘plenary authority,’” before pausing during the interview.

The network said that a technical glitch resulted in audio from a different channel being sent to Miller’s earpiece, causing him to pause.

When the interview resumed, Miller clarified his point. “Under federal law, Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president has the authority, anytime he believes federal resources are insufficient, to federalize the National Guard to carry out a mission necessary for public safety,” Miller said. Title 10 is a portion of federal law covering the military.

Miller is correct that the constitution and federal law do give the president authority to deploy troops in the U.S. to respond to an invasion or insurrection, or if law enforcement is unable to execute the law without assistance. The president also does have narrow “plenary” power over the number of troops to send on a deployment.

However, Miller’s argument that the situation in cities justifies the use of this authority is not nearly as straightforward. For context, Miller has been publicly constructing an argument that broad illegal immigration and lawlessness in U.S. cities justify federal troop deployment. He has laid the groundwork for this argument by referring to illegal immigration as an “invasion” and, more recently, describing a confrontation between protesters and ICE agents outside Chicago as “domestic terrorism and seditious insurrection.”

Federal judges have blocked troop deployments to Los Angeles and Chicago under the president’s (and Miller’s) rationale, but an appeals court just allowed the Guard’s deployment to Portland. So, while the president does have meaningful authority over military deployments, Miller’s one-time (and potentially accidental) characterization of that authority as “plenary” is much more dubious.

A26X73 @get last legal

Time

Oct 28, 2025 2:10 PM ET

Stephen Miller Claims ICE Agents Have Immunity. Is That True?

By Rebecca Schneid

Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and architect of some of President Donald Trump’s harshest immigration policies, has claimed that federal agents carrying out arrests and deportations are immune from prosecution.

In a recent interview on Fox News, Miller hit out at opposition to the Trump Administration’s plans to carry out the largest mass deportation in United States history, accusing Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker of “seditious conspiracy” for his attempts to block those efforts and threatening his arrest.

Miller also announced in a message to agents with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency: “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop or obstruct you is committing a felony.”

ICE and Border Patrol agents have been the tip of the spear for Trump’s hardline deportation agenda, deploying to cities around the country to conduct arrests and raids of anyone in the country illegally.

Agents from those agencies have been accused of using increasingly aggressive tactics to meet ambitious arrest targets set by Miller and the Trump Administration, which has sparked protests and opposition across the country.

Several high-profile incidents have highlighted those tactics. ICE agents joined with Border Patrol to conduct what Pritzker described as a “military-style” raid at a Chicago apartment building earlier this month. One ICE officer in New York was removed from duty after he forcibly threw a woman to the floor at an immigration court, only to return a week later. Another ICE agent fatally shot a Mexican immigrant in Illinois during an arrest attempt, and incidents between ICE, protesters and journalists outside of an ICE facility in Chicago created the basis for the case against the Administration for alleged violations of First and Fourth Amendment rights, which led to a judge granting a temporary restraining order blocking federal agencies from using forceful tactics to stop protesters or journalists.

Those incidents have prompted some District Attorneys to say they would seek prosecutions of ICE agents who break the law in their jurisdictions.

So are ICE agents really immune, as Miller claims?

'Necessary and proper'

Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, argues no—at least on its face.

“The federal government absolutely retains the ability to prosecute federal law enforcement officers who break the law, even in the course of carrying out their duties,” Vladeck writes in a newsletter published Monday.

Vladeck argues that while these agents are protected by an immunity doctrine, that doctrine is not as absolute as Miller makes it out to be.

Miller is relying on the doctrine known as “Supremacy Clause immunity.” This immunity protects federal officers from state criminal prosecution when they are carrying out their official duties under federal law, provided their actions were "necessary and proper."

This makes sense, Vladeck says, since “[o]therwise, states could criminalize the very conduct that federal law enforcement officers engage in and thereby thwart the enforcement of any federal law with which they disagree,” including things like anti-discrimination laws.

The “necessary and proper” idea, though, is up for much debate, and could lead to holes in Miller’s claim, as Vladeck points to lower circuit decisions that federal agents are not given this immunity unless their behavior would be found to be “reasonable.” If these agents are acting outside of their federal authority, that immunity would not be as air-tight.

“Even at its most robust, Supremacy Clause immunity would not preclude a local or state prosecution of ICE officers for all scope-of-employment conduct,” Vladeck says.

Howard Bashman, an appellate lawyer and legal columnist, agrees.

"Even as an argument about state criminal prosecutions, that claim is overstated at best," he wrote on his blog.

The comments come a week after Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, who represents New York, sent a letter to New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, calling on NYPD officers to be trained and equipped to arrest and prosecute federal agents who break state laws.

“ICE’s own policy makes clear agents cannot assert civil immigration enforcement authority over U.S. citizens,” Goldman wrote to Tisch. “Yet, under the Trump administration, there have been dozens of credible reports—some recorded on video—showing the agency doing exactly that, with violence and impunity.”

Several other District Attorneys and lawmakers claim that their offices would file charges against ICE agents breaking the law. For example, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said her office would review any “clear, excessive use of force” by federal agents and file charges if warranted.

@ polls and protests

X81 X81 transcribe signs

A27@X81 FROM USA TODAY

The most poignant, funny and outlandish signs at 'No Kings' protests against Trump

Angela Letney, left, and Michelle Bryant participate in the "No Kings" protest against the Trump administration at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem on Oct. 18. From New York to San Francisco, millions of Americans are expected to hit the streets to voice their anger over President Donald Trump's policies at nationwide "No Kings" protests.

Abigail Dollins/Statesman Journal

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in New York on October 18, 2025.

TIMOTHY A.CLARY, AFP Via Getty Images People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 18, 2025.

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 18, 2025.

JOSEPH PREZIOSO, AFP Via Getty Images

Protestors gather for the second "No Kings" protest on October 18, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois.

Scott Olson, Getty Images People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Howell, Michigan, on October 18, 2025.

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Howell, Michigan, on October 18, 2025.

JEFF KOWALSKY, AFP Via Getty Images

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Howell, Michigan, on October 18, 2025.

JEFF KOWALSKY, AFP Via Getty Images A sign reads "1 King Dr. King" at a "No Kings" national day of protest in Los Angeles on October 18, 2025.

A sign reads "1 King Dr. King" at a "No Kings" national day of protest in Los Angeles on October 18, 2025.

Daniel Cole, REUTERS

A young attendee holds a sign that reads "Little Girls Against Big Egos," at the "No Kings" protest in New York City on October 18, 2025.

Shannon Stapleton, REUTERS A protestor holds a sign featuring cartoon character Bart Simpson at the "No Kings" protest October 18, 2025 in Washington, D.C.

A protestor holds a sign featuring cartoon character Bart Simpson at the "No Kings" protest October 18, 2025 in Washington, D.C.

Leah Millis, REUTERS

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in West Palm Beach, Florida, on October 18, 2025.

CHANDAN KHANNA, AFP Via Getty Images People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Howell, Michigan, on October 18, 2025.

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Howell, Michigan, on October 18, 2025.

JEFF KOWALSKY, AFP Via Getty Images

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Washington, DC, on October 18, 2025.

AMID FARAHI, AFP Via Getty Images People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 18, 2025.

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 18, 2025.

JOSEPH PREZIOSO, AFP Via Getty Images

Jessica Larned with her popular 'Let them eat cake' sign standing on 520. Thousands showed up for the ‘No Kings’ protest in Cocoa at the intersection of US 1 and Highway 520 on Saturday.

, Malcolm Denemark, FLORIDA TODAY Demonstrators begin to gather for the "No Kings" protest on October 18, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois.

Demonstrators begin to gather for the "No Kings" protest on October 18, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois.

Scott Olson, Getty Images

Protesters fill the North Green on the University of Delaware campus to demonstrate against the Trump administration in a No Kings protest in Newark, Delaware, Oct. 18, 2025.

William Bretzger/Delaware News Journal People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in West Palm Beach, Florida, on October 18, 2025.

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in West Palm Beach, Florida, on October 18, 2025.

CHANDAN KHANNA, AFP Via Getty Images

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in New York on October 18, 2025.

ROBERTO SCHMIDT, AFP Via Getty Images People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Washington, DC, on October 18, 2025.

People participate in a "No Kings" national day of protest in Washington, DC, on October 18, 2025.

AMID FARAHI, AFP Via Getty Images

A28X 82 X82 from TIME

Millions Attend ‘No Kings’ Protests Against Trump in Towns and Cities Across the U.S.

by Richard Hall and Rebecca Schneid Oct 18, 2025 1:13 PM ET

Millions of Americans took to the streets on Saturday in nationwide mass protests against what they perceive to be rising authoritarianism and corruption under President Donald Trump.

More than 2,700 “No Kings” rallies were due to be held in all 50 states in what is thought to be the largest mobilization against the Trump Administration over the president's two terms.

Organizers estimated some 7 million people protested across the country in suburbs, towns and most major cities. Huge crowds were reported in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston. Protests were also seen in deep red states—in Birmingham, Alabama and Billings, Montana. Some experts have speculated that the demonstrations could be the largest in modern U.S. history.

“Today, millions of Americans stood together to reject authoritarianism and remind the world that our democracy belongs to the people, not to one man’s ambition,” Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, co-founders of Indivisible, which helped organize the event, said in a statement.

The protests come in response to an unprecedented use of presidential power by Trump in his second term. Since January, Trump has ordered the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to quell protests and aid in immigration enforcement, launched a crackdown on left-wing and liberal groups, and implemented a sweeping mass deportation program that has seen masked federal agents engaged in military-style raids and detaining people without due process.

The 'No Kings' rallies earned the backing of Democrats from across the ideological spectrum. Former presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton have both given their support, along with progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and independent Senator Bernie Sanders.

Taking to the stage at the rally in Washington, D.C., Sanders told the crowd: "We're here because we love America."

“This moment is not just about one man’s greed, one man’s corruption, or one man’s contempt for the constitution,” Sanders said, calling out the billionaires who attended Trump’s inauguration, specifically calling out Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. “This is about a handful of the wealthiest people on earth, who in their insatiable greed, have hijacked our economy and our political system in order to enrich themselves at the expense of working families throughout this country.”

Bill Nye, beloved children’s television program host known for “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” also addressed D.C. protestors, lamenting the Trump Administration's treatment of scientists—likely addressing the major cuts that have occurred at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under new head Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"They do not promote the progress of science. They suppress it, to the detriment of our health, well-being, and international competitiveness,” he said.

Protests were organized all over the country so that most Americans were only an hour away from a planned event. Jill Ortman-Fouse, a community organizer in Silver Spring, Maryland, told TIME that the protest there had doubled in size since the last 'No Kings' event in June. Another woman whose job has been impacted indirectly by the federal furlough of workers, and who brought her one-year-old son to the protest in Silver Spring for the second time, told TIME she was Jewish and “grew up hating fascism, so to see it happening here is heartbreaking. It’s an assault on my soul.”

The first 'No Kings' day of protest in June, attended by an estimated five million people, was largely peaceful, although isolated clashes broke out between police and demonstrators in several cities.

Organizers had raised fears ahead of the protest that Trump and his allies would use the protests as an excuse to launch further crackdowns on dissent.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced National Guard deployments in Austin, citing what he called possible threats from “antifa-linked” demonstrators. Democrats there accused him of using the Guard to intimidate protesters.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Indivisible, MoveOn and the American Federation of Teachers say they are taking extra precautions, focusing on de-escalation and community safety, and distributing guidance on how to respond peacefully if met with aggression by law enforcement or counterprotesters.

“They might try to paint this weekend’s events as something dangerous,” said Diedre Schlifeling, the ACLU’s chief political and advocacy officer. “But the reality is there is nothing unlawful or unsafe about organizing and attending peaceful protests. It’s the most patriotic and American thing you can do.”

Kamala Harris was among many top Democrats who urged people to join the rallies.

“In our country, the power is with the people, and tomorrow I encourage everyone to get out there in peaceful protest of what is happening in our country and express our voice around the country we believe in,” Harris, who lost to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, said in a video posted to social media on Saturday.

Trump has said very little about the protests, but made a passing remark on Friday before departing for his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

"They say they're referring to me as a king. I'm not a king," Trump told Fox News.

The president arrived at his golf club in West Palm Beach on Saturday morning, a few hours ahead of the protests.

Top members of Trump’s Republican Party have condemned the protests. House Speaker Mike Johnson called the demonstrations against the Trump Administration a “Hate America rally” and claimed it would draw the “pro-Hamas wing” of the Democratic Party and “the antifa people.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described expected participants as “the farthest left, the hardest core, the most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas suggested the National Guard might need to show up.

In a press conference on Thursday, organizers accused Republicans of attempting to intimidate people from attending. “Now they are trying to smear millions of Americans who are coming out to protest so that they can justify and crack down on peaceful dissent,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, one of the groups that organized the event. “It is the classic authoritarian playbook—threaten, smear and lie—but we will not be intimidated.”

Demonstrators have also gathered in cities throughout Europe for their own versions of No Kings Protests, including in Paris, Berlin, Sweden, and Madrid. Dutch News describes the Amsterdam protest, including posters that decry the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown: “I like my Democracy neat. Hold the ICE,” one poster they photograph read.

This is a developing story.

— Additional reporting by Nik Popli and Lissa August

Must-Reads from TIME

Millions Expected to Rally Across U.S. in ‘No Kings Day’ Protests Against Trump

‘Free America’: Anti-Trump Administration Protests Planned Across U.S. on July 4

Anti-Trump Protests Planned Across U.S. for Labor Day: ‘We Have to Stop the Billionaire Takeover’

More Than 1,500 ‘No Kings’ Protests Planned Amid Trump Crackdown on L.A. Demonstrations

‘No Kings’ Organizers Predict Peaceful Gathering of Millions Amid Fears of Law Enforcement Crackdown

Anti-Trump Protests Take Place Across U.S. as People Rally Against Billionaires, Federal Takeovers, and More

A29X86 FROM THE NATION

How Blue States Can Fight the MAGA Backlash

The unconstitutional targeting of constituencies Trump dislikes calls for coordinated acts of resistance.

David Faris October 16, 2025

Shortly after the first government shutdown since 2019 began earlier this month, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced that he was freezing $8 billion in infrastructure projects exclusively in states that voted for Kamala Harris. The projects that Vought consigned to funding purgatory included a multibillion-dollar renovation and expansion of the Hudson Tunnel from New Jersey to New York City and an extension of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line. As has become the unapologetic norm in this vengeance-minded administration, President Donald Trump did not bother to hide the real motivation for these cuts. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things,” he said.

Since his election, Trump has talked about and treated blue states not as equals under America’s increasingly distressed system of federalism but rather like defeated vassals who must pay tribute to their new emperor in the form of policy capitulations and abrogations of their constitutional rights. The cumulative impact of these transgressions—inflicted under the explicit mandate to make blue states suffer—is the gravest threat to the centuries-old constitutional union of American states since the Civil War. And until leading Democrats at the federal and state level understand and articulate the scale of Trump’s plot to subjugate blue states as subservient, underfunded entities under the new MAGA regime of abusive federalism, they will be incapable of leading the national campaign of direct action that is the only way to stop it.

At this point, the litany of hardball maneuvers deployed against states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 is long enough that it can’t fit in a single article. The Trump regime has aggressively and illegally targeted both Democratic leaders and their supporters. Federal agents have arrested the Democratic mayor of Newark and a Democratic member of the House, and assaulted a Democratic US senator on camera. Trump’s Mob-like Justice Department has targeted prominent Democrats like California Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James for vindictive investigations and prosecutions, with more to come.

Last week, Trump escalated this campaign of autocratic intimidation by screaming on his fourth-tier microblogging website that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be imprisoned. His corrupt henchman—er, “immigration czar”—Tom Homan has distributed threats of arrest on cable news like he’s tossing paper towels to hurricane victims, against everyone from New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to California Governor Gavin Newsom. These forays into state-sponsored ideological intimidation no longer require even a fig leaf of legal pretext, since Trump and his cabinet goons can count on the reliably servile US Attorney General Pam Bondi to do whatever the administration asks—very much counter to the Justice Department’s mission.

ICE’s rapidly metastasizing deportation complex has also disproportionately targeted blue states and Democratic-run cities. These raids have involved tactics—like last week’s sickening and wildly unconstitutional raid of an apartment complex on the South Shore of Chicago—that have no place in a democratic society. In addition to visiting their reign of terror on ordinary civilians in the city, ICE agents have assaulted a Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois on camera, assaulted religious leaders for peacefully protesting, detained an alderman of the Chicago City Council, arrested reporters and charged a University of Chicago professor with a groundless felony in connection with the ongoing protests outside of the suburban Broadview detention facility.

The president, whether knowingly or operating on information fed to him by the curators of his narrow and conspiracy-riddled information diet, is also obsessed with crime in blue-state cities. He has ordered National Guard troops to be deployed in stateless Washington, DC, on the pretext of a hallucinatory crime wave, and is federalizing National Guard troops from Texas to send to Illinois. In his bizarre, rambling speech to the country’s military leaders on September 30, hastily summoned to Quantico from their posts around the world to see him and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cosplay as warrior princes, Trump singled out San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles as “very unsafe places” and promised to “straighten them out one by one” by using them as “training grounds” for the military. Our president is apparently incapable of thinking of the places where Democrats win electoral majorities as truly American or deserving of equal treatment under the law.

Citizens in blue states feel like they are living under a constant state of military siege, rhetorical harassment and punitive partisan budgetary cuts because that is in fact what is happening. And it is not sustainable for another three years. The compact between the states is not magical or self-executing or ordained by divine providence to ensure that it can’t be undone by ruthless MAGA tyrants. It has fallen violently apart once before, and there is no particular reason other than inertia and delusion to believe that it couldn’t once again succumb to corrosive pressures from within. The Constitution itself, after all, was the product of an extrajudicial coup against the Articles of Confederation, which contained no legal mechanism for replacing themselves with a brand-new political order.

If JD Vance is reading this article, in a publication he’s described as “esteemed,” I want to be clear: I am not advocating for secession and have absolutely no interest in living through the dissolution of this country. But the self-appointed mandarins of American Greatness in Trumpworld need to hear that what they are doing, hour by hour, is the most debilitating assault on American unity since the Civil War. And once the veneer of state juridical equality is stripped away under the Supreme Court’s delusional embrace of unitary executive theory, allowing presidents to just cut off the flow of funding to states they are mad at, it’s only a matter of time before enterprising leaders in the new blue-state underground imagine themselves as the rulers of an independent country rather than as the governors of second-class provinces.

That is precisely why we need to keep thinking about what, beyond protest in the streets, can be done to stop the administration from simultaneously dismantling the federal government that blue-state largesse props up while also constantly blackmailing those same state governments to forfeit their clear rights under the Constitution. Because there has never been a presidential administration that so unapologetically used this kind of gutter partisanship to punish entire states full of people, the policy options here are largely unknown. But some ideas are starting to bubble up.

It is common practice for municipal institutions like museums to charge one rate for residents and another, much higher rate for out-of-towners, a practice that most state university systems also follow. This principle could be extended to other forms of commerce. For example, Illinois could charge vehicles one rate to blue-state drivers who are using roads on the sprawling Illinois tollway system, and another for those from red states. They could pass laws enacting steep excise taxes for residents of red states in hotels and Airbnbs. Labeling her proposals “soft secession,” Mother Jones editor argues that blue states could also terminate licensing reciprocity agreements with red states while “disinvesting our pension funds from red-state companies like AT&T, American Airlines, ExxonMobil, and Tesla.”

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

While these are all fine and quite clever ideas to make the White House uncomfortable, communicate blue state outrage, and give red-state partisans a taste of their own medicine, they are unlikely to cause disruption at the scale necessary to force the hands of Trump and his apparatchiks. We also can’t count on the intended recipients of this campaign to connect the dots between the Trump administration’s actions and a blue-state counteroffensive. The country’s new MAGA overlords will only grasp the full scope of the threat before them via coordinated national action of the sort that is second nature for citizens of countries such as France or Italy—which recently staged a general strike in support of the Gaza flotillas—but virtually unheard of in the United States.

One idea is a tax strike. In 2024, California and New York alone combined to send nearly $1.2 trillion in income and other taxes to the federal government, making up close to a quarter of all revenue. The reliance of many small, rural Republican-leaning states on federal funding is well known, although there are a number of Democratic-leaning states like Maine and New Mexico in the same position. By themselves, the states that voted for Kamala Harris—leaving aside the consensus battleground states—represent half of all federal tax revenue.

Alas, there is no easy button to press to make a coordinated tax strike happen. It would require individual Americans to take enormous risks of after-the-fact penalties for withholding too much money or not filing their taxes at all. The gamble here would be that a diminished IRS wouldn’t be able to summon the resources or personnel to verify and punish citizens participating in a strike—but the massive mustering of ICE agents doesn’t suggest that the Trump White House would let a tax protest just take root on its own. When I floated this idea to one Chicago-area tax professional, I got this reply: “I am with you in theory, but I don’t know how that would play out in practice.”

That brings us to Italy’s recent example of a national general strike. In practice, it wouldn’t actually take much to bring society to a screeching halt. If federal workers in just the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs went out at once (they would need to resign, take time out under the Family and Medical Leave Act, or find some other workaround to avoid prohibitions on striking), and if they were joined by, say, public school teachers, the country would be snarled in an almost unimaginably chaotic crisis within 24 hours. Organizers could set the date for March 4, which marks the 236th anniversary of when the new constitutional order went into effect.

The big proviso here is that translating the inchoate anger of normie liberal soccer Moms wearing their first “Fuck ICE” T-shirts into a national strike will take time and work—and buy-in from Democratic elites. We would need strike funds, precinct leaders, legal defense teams, and considerable logistical preparation everywhere we’d expect people to take to the streets for extended periods of time, in red and blue states alike. Americans need to start exercising their protest muscles, and while many already are by attending No Kings protests and participating in IC

A30X95 FROM GUK

How can blue states fight back against Trump? With fiscal disobedience

By holding back federal tax revenues, Democratic governors can turn a one-sided assault into a constitutional showdown

By Eric Reinhart Sun 19 Oct 2025 07.00 EDT

Against Illinois governor JB Pritzker’s objections, Donald Trump’s Pentagon has ordered hundreds of national guard troops to join his regime’s assault on Chicago communities. Trump subsequently called for Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor, and Pritzker to be jailed for not supporting his agenda. These are simply the latest steps in Trump’s plan not to govern as the president of all Americans but to rule as the dictatorial head of a punitive factional state. Federal funding to Democratic cities is being slashed through executive maneuvers; the justice department is conducting politically targeted investigations and arrests; and the military is being deployed to intimidate fellow citizens. Los Angeles, Portland, my home town of Chicago and other cities have been cast as enemies to be subdued, not communities to be served.

This weaponization of federal power represents a sharp break with constitutional tradition. It’s not merely ideological hostility; it is economic coercion and the exercise of violence in service of a president’s whim. The Trump regime is selectively starving Democratic jurisdictions of federal funds, even as their residents continue to pay billions in federal taxes, with blue states accounting for over 60% of the federal government’s revenue. We are being compelled to subsidize our own political subjugation.

As the anthropologist Janet Roitman argued in her study of taxation and sovereignty in central Africa, acts of “fiscal disobedience” emerge not simply as refusals to pay but as political interventions that expose ruptures in the reciprocal obligations underlying fiscal authority. Taxation is never merely technical. It is the material expression of political belonging and shared obligation. When the state weaponizes fiscal power against certain communities while continuing to demand unquestioned revenue from them, it undermines its own claim to legitimate authority. In such contexts, withholding or conditionally redirecting tax flows can become a way to re-politicize the fiscal relationship. It makes explicit that the state has already broken the social contract. Blue states today occupy precisely this position: forced to fund a federal government that is actively targeting them, their residents and their institutions.

Faced with this reality, Democratic governors need more than legal complaints and rhetorical protest. They need fiscal strategies of resistance commensurate with the scale of the attack. And one of the most provocative – and potentially powerful – ideas available is the creation of state-administered escrow accounts, or “in trust” funds, to temporarily hold federal tax revenues until the federal government upholds its constitutional obligations and withdraws its authoritarian threats.

This may sound radical, but it is less secessionist than it may at first appear. It would not involve refusing to pay federal taxes outright, which would open individual taxpayers to prosecution. Instead, the state would act as a temporary custodian, receiving payments from residents and businesses equal to their federal tax liabilities, holding them in trust for the federal government, and releasing them only when certain constitutional conditions are met – such as the partisan cessation of federal defunding and the withdrawal of military deployments unauthorized by targeted states.

Such a maneuver would constitute a form of civil disobedience by a state, legally risky and certain to entail confrontation. But Democratic cities and states, progressive non-profits, universities, non-white immigrants, and public health institutions are already facing direct conflict with Trump’s government. This strategy would reset the terms of the conflict and reclaim power against an increasingly brazen Trump regime. It would also underline for everyone the authoritarian, violent nature of the federal government’s tactics rather than allowing them to proceed under the thin guise of “law and order”, as Trump leverages his control over legal systems to wage war against his personal enemies. It would transform what is now a one-sided assault into a constitutional struggle.

How it could work

States could establish this system through legislation to create a tax receivership fund, explicitly designated as a trust account for federal tax liabilities. Residents and businesses would make payments into this account instead of directly to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The state would acknowledge these payments as received on behalf of the federal government, and pledge to remit them in full once specific, legally defined conditions were met – say, the restoration of suspended federal funding and reversal of other punitive actions that violate constitutional guarantees.

Importantly, this scheme does not purport to nullify federal taxes or claim state sovereignty over them. It functions as a conditional remittance mechanism, akin to an escrow arrangement in contract law. Of course, the Trump-controlled IRS, which has already been weaponized by the regime, would not quietly accept this. It would likely treat payments into the state trust as non-payment and impose penalties. Legal challenges would ensue. But that is precisely the point: to force a constitutional confrontation over whether the federal government can target states for political punishment while continuing to demand unquestioned fiscal obedience.

For such a strategy to work, it cannot be the isolated action of a single state. A state acting alone could be punished, scapegoated, or financially squeezed into submission. But if multiple states act simultaneously, they can transform isolated legal defiance into a coordinated assertion of constitutional co-sovereignty.

Here, article I, section 10 of the constitution could offer an eventual tool: interstate compacts. These are agreements between states – subject to congressional consent, and thus not likely legally viable until and unless Democrats win back congressional majorities – that allow them to formally coordinate policy, pool resources, and create collective governance structures. With or without congressional approval, blue states could form a “fiscal sovereignty compact” to coordinate the legal, fiscal, and political strategies involved in holding federal taxes in trust. It could standardize escrow mechanisms across member states, ensuring legal coherence and shared administrative capacity; create a pooled legal defense fund to support court battles; coordinate triggers for releasing funds, so that the federal government faces a unified set of demands; and protect against selective federal retaliation by presenting a united front representing tens of millions of residents and trillions in economic output.

This compact would not need to involve all blue states to be effective. A coalition of economically powerful states – such as California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and Washington – could represent a staggering share of federal revenue. If even a portion of federal tax remittances from these states were held in trust, the federal government would face not an isolated legal challenge but substantial fiscal obstacles to its current belligerence.

Building an anti-fascist federalism

Trump’s use of the federal government to punish political enemies represents an authoritarian turn in American governance. It betrays the basic premise of federalism – that states are coequal entities within a constitutional framework, not mere provinces under imperial command – that was the supposed cornerstone of the Republican party before it sold what little soul it had to a conman. Lawsuits and press conferences are inadequate responses to this kind of assault. What’s needed are mechanisms that translate state and citizen dissent into material leverage. Escrow accounts, when deployed through a coordinated strategy, do precisely this: they turn the flow of money, the lifeblood of federal power, into the explicit site of political struggle.

Such a move could have wide-rippling political effects. It would give residents a concrete way to participate in opposing the Trump regime, transforming legal disputes into collective political action. It would also force the supreme court, which is increasingly aligning itself with Trump against the constitution, to directly confront fundamental questions about the balance of state and federal power. Given the corruption of the courts, courtroom victory is neither the expectation nor the point in this strategy; it is instead to use the law to draw clear constitutional and fiscal battle lines – to make states active protagonists rather than passive targets.

Big thinkers opined on what we can do to protect civil liberties and fundamental freedoms in a Trump presidency.

A31X97 FROM GUK
The massive No Kings protests may mark a new American political posture

The violence Republicans seemed to want did not materialize. Instead the event showcased liberal-democratic consensus

By Moira Donegan Mon 20 Oct 2025 12.54 EDT

Over the past week or so, it seemed as if some Republican leaders were hoping that Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations – the marches and rallies hosted by a coalition of liberal groups across the country and worldwide – would turn violent. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, called them “Hate America” rallies, a moniker that was quickly picked up by other Republicans, and described the No Kings protests as a crucible of potential riots, representing “all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people”. “You’re gonna bring together the Marxists, the socialists, the antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat party,” he said. Tom Emmer, a representative for Minnesota, described the rallies as a product of the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic party. And Roger Marshall, a senator from Kansas, fantasized that the protests would require action by the national guard. Others, such as the attorney general, Pam Bondi, mused about who might be paying the protesters to show up – an idea that seemed to dismiss the notion that anyone might oppose Donald Trump’s agenda for principled, rather than cynical, reasons.

At times they sounded almost wistful. Republicans, the president himself chief among them, have been fervently endeavoring to cast those who oppose their authoritarian consolidation of power as enemies – contemptible un-Americans who lack virtue, common values, or the protection of the law. In a world where it was once considered the height of inappropriate partisanship for Hillary Clinton to refer to a “basket of deplorables” among Trump voters or Barack Obama to mourn the conservatives who “cling to guns or religion”, it barely registered as news on Thursday when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News: “The Democrat party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”

A32X98 FROM GUK

How can blue states fight back against Trump? With fiscal disobedience

Eric Reinhart

But no matter how fervently and how deeply the Trump regime appears to hate the American people, the No Kings protests that brought millions to the streets on Saturday suggests that the American people hate them even more. In the densely packed streets of cities from New York to Austin to Oakland to St Augustine, Florida, the massive protests took on a tone of jubilant contempt, with Trump and his various lackeys derided on signs and in effigies, with jokes that ranged from the high-minded to the vulgar. At a protest in San Francisco, I saw one man holding a sign that quoted Walt Whitman, walking near a woman making a vulgar reference to Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. A number of people donned inflatable character costumes – I saw a starfish, a teddy bear, two unicorns, a rooster and a pickle. They originated from Portland’s protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and national guard deployments as cheeky ways to mock the Trump administration’s claims that the city was “war-torn” and in need of armed invasion. If the anti-Trump resistance movements of his first administration were characterized by a kind of self-serious righteousness, those of the No Kings era have devolved into irreverence and humor. At times I was reminded of a peculiar feeling I have sometimes had, in the desperate hours after funerals or bad breakups, when I have been crying for so long that I find I’ve started laughing.

The No Kings protests have been criticized for their capaciousness and indefinite agenda, and it is true that the demonstrations are the product of several large liberal groups and bring together people whose politics and inclinations would not ordinarily mix. At San Francisco’s protest, I saw the signature red rose of the democratic socialists, the Aztec eagle of the United Farm Workers, and a gold lamé sign held aloft by a largely unclothed man who declared himself a libertarian – in addition to a motley mix of men wearing the powdered wigs and tricorn hats of the founding fathers, women with white feathered sleeves and hoods posing as bald eagles, and a staggering number of people who wrapped themselves in the American flag.

The hodgepodge of symbolism might reflect the chaotic and disorganized nature of the anti-Trump coalition – which, containing as it does the majority of the US’s 340 million people, is rife with contradictions. This has long been a problem for the Democrats: the party fears that their tent is too big, their base is too far from swing voters, and the coalitions of Obama and Joe Biden are too fractured and fragile to ever be maintained. But Trump has perhaps created a new kind of glue that can hold together a different kind of political movement: something that vast swaths of the American people hate even more than they hate each other.

Amid the density of references and imagery, No Kings might also indicate a new political posture being born: a left-liberal popular front that mixes principle with irreverence. The aspiration of No Kings, in a way, is to abolish itself – to rebuild, perhaps a little sturdier and more honest this time, the kind of constitutional system in which law and persuasion replace Trump’s model of violence and domination. To put it another way: the people at the No Kings rallies all agree that they want to restore the kinds of liberal-democratic conditions that will enable them to disagree with one another.

Maga is painting Saturday’s protests as violent treason. Prove them wrong

Judith Levine

At any rate, the violence that the Trump regime seemed to long for did not materialize. In San Francisco, an organizer speaking into a megaphone urged attenders to ignore any pro-Trump agitators they might encounter, and to not engage with any federal agents. “If you see uniformed feds outside a building,” he warned the crowd, “it’s bait.” Before the marches, some seemed frightened of what might happen – whether Trump-aligned federal forces might crack down with mass arrests, or whether pro-Trump militias might instigate a fight. But the demonstrations seem to have been remarkably peaceful, even cheerful, avoiding provocations and meeting virtually no violence from Trump-aligned forces. In New York, an estimated 100,000 marchers participated in No Kings events across the five boroughs, and an official Twitter account associated with the New York police department reported that there had been no arrests of protesters.

Trump appeared disappointed. On Saturday evening, after the marches had largely disbanded and the millions who had turned out to oppose him went home, he took to Truth Social, his proprietary social media platform, to post an AI-generated video of himself. In the cartoon, Trump – wearing a crown – flies a fighter jet over the No Kings protests, and dumps feces on the protesting citizens. It was a peevish, petulant little display of contempt – the kind of behavior that you would punish in a child but which has become bog standard for the president of the United States. He evidently wanted Americans to know that he hates them. The feeling is mutual.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Skeptics will call the above proposal unconstitutional, impractical or politically reckless. They are not wrong to note the risks. Under current federal tax law, states have no role in federal revenue collection. Courts might enjoin such efforts quickly. Administratively, state governments would need to build new fiscal infrastructure to receive and track payments. And Trump will seize on any opportunity to paint blue states as “insurrectionists” who must be violently crushed – but the regime is already inventing fictions to justify this regardless of on-the-ground realities.

Acknowledging risks is not the same as accepting them as decisive. The legal barriers to fiscal disobedience are formidable in part because the federal government has never before faced coordinated, large-scale challenges of this kind from wealthy states representing a majority of national tax revenue. The courts are not mechanical; they are political actors that respond to the balance of power and the perceived legitimacy of claims. Even if states ultimately lose in court, the process itself would publicly expose the authoritarian abuse of fiscal powers, force constitutional confrontation rather than quiet capitulation, and potentially reshape the political terrain.

As is evident from Chicago – where I am writing this with Black Hawk helicopters flying overhead night and day and where my friends, patients, elected representatives, and neighbors are being assaulted in their homes, in hospitals, and on the streets by federal agents acting with total disregard for either reality or legality – a rapid escalation of political violence in America is well under way. The Trump regime has made clear that it will continue to expand its campaign of violence with total impunity if we do not respond. In this context, refusing to counter fascism because retaliation might follow is not prudence; it is surrender.

State-administered escrow accounts will not solve the crisis of American democracy, but they could help shift the terrain of struggle away from unilateral federal domination and toward a contested, negotiated, and coordinated anti-fascist federalism much better equipped to contest the destruction of US democracy.

Trump is breaking the outer limits of the constitutional order and bending law to his advantage. It’s time for blue states to do the same.

What’s giving me hope now

Although I’ve written above about large-scale strategy, it is small everyday acts of care between neighbors and co-workers seeking to protect one another within my Chicago community that give me confidence fascism will not consume us. I collaborate with local mutual aid and organizing collectives – such as the CHAAD Project, which supports vulnerable Chicago bar and restaurant workers – to remember that genuine change in society arises from giving and receiving care, and sharing joy and hospitality, with those around you. It is only from that basis that collective ethical and political life can acquire power great enough to topple fascism – and to replace it with a genuine democracy that fosters difference rather than seeking to annihilate it.

Eric Reinhart is a political anthropologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst

A33X99 FROM 1440

'No Kings' Protests

Millions of protesters turned out in cities across the US Saturday, demonstrating against what they described as authoritarian overreach by the Trump administration. Organizers of the “No Kings” rallies estimated the cumulative turnout to exceed 5 million people.

Crowds ranged from more than 250,000 in Chicago and 100,000 across New York City's five boroughs, to around 10,000 to 15,000 in places like Salt Lake City. Many attendees leaned into the current trend of wearing inflatable costumes; no major incidents were reported, though 15 people were detained after clashes with police at an ICE detention center west of Chicago. See photos from various cities here.

The marches come as the ongoing government shutdown entered its 20th day, and is on pace to tie the second-longest in US history (21 days) tomorrow. The impasse centers on the renewal of healthcare subsidies (see explainer), which face a soft deadline of Nov. 1, when insurance exchanges for 2026 open.

Now...

The "democracy of the dead"

A wider electorate: Tradition is described as "an extension of the franchise" to include the deceased, giving them a vote in the present.

How it relates to the Day of the Dead

POLLS

A34X 83 X83 FROM USA TODAY

What is Trump’s approval rating? See how it compares across states

By Kinsey Crowley

President Donald Trump's deployment of the National Guard in states remains controversial and elevates his disputes with several left-leaning governors.

It started with Washington, DC, and since Trump has deployed troops in California, Illinois, Tennessee and Oregon. Only Tennessee's governor welcomed the move, and the Trump administration has faced legal challenges from the other states. Plus, it has not been popular among Americans. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Oct. 8, 58% of Americans said the president should only send armed troops to face external threats.

California is also in the middle of a growing redistricting battle among states. On Nov. 4, Golden State voters will decide whether to pass a new Congressional map measure that aims to counter Texas' new map, which was designed to give Republicans more seats in the 2026 midterm elections. Missouri has also approved a new map that favors Republicans.

Here is what to know about Trump's approval ratings in the states and how that compares to his average:

What states give Trump the highest approval rating?

Trump has a net positive approval rating in 24 states, according to Morning Consult, which gathers polls over the course of three months to get a look at state-level data among registered voters. The Oct. 14 update shows two states have flipped to net negative approval since the September update. Georgia previously gave Trump a net positive approval, and Arizona was equally split; they're now net negative by Morning Consult's results.

Morning consult notes this is the first time his approval rating has been net negative in every 2024 swing state.

As previously, Trump received his best approval rating in Wyoming and worst in Vermont, though it should be noted small states have the widest margin of error in these polls.

In Oregon and California, 38% approve of Trump's job performance, both among the worst 10 in the U.S. for Trump, according to Morning Consult. In Illinois, 40% approve of Trump's job performance.

What is Trump's approval rating overall?

Averages based on RealClearPolitics and New York Times aggregators show Trump's approval rating is net negative but relatively stable over the last few months.

As of Jan. 27, 50.5% approved, giving Trump a net positive rating until March 13, when it flipped to net negative with 47.8% approval, compared to 48.5% disapproval, RealClearPolitics graphics show. The approval rating reached a low on April 29 at 45.1% approval, which fell around Trump's 100-day mark. It reached a new low on Sept. 30, the day before the government shutdown started, at 44.8% approving.

The New York Times aggregator showed Trump's approval fell from 52% approval in January to 44% approval in April, and has mostly held steady since. According to the Times, Trump's term low is 43% approval, which he first reached on Aug. 21, about 10 days into Trump's federal takeover of Washington, DC.

As of Oct. 16, Trump's average approval is 45.4%, according to RealClearPolitics, and 43% on average, according to the New York Times.

Crickets from Trump Mobile when T1 Phone was scheduled to launch. What happened?

Daylight saving time is approaching. What does Trump think about ending the time changes?

When will Trump head back to Mar-a-Lago? Florida social season starts soon

Did Ivanka Trump convert to Judaism? President Trump mentions her in Israel speech

What is Trump's approval rating ahead of 'No Kings' protests? See Illinois results

Trump's approval rating is low compared to other presidents

In a Gallup poll conducted from Sept. 2-16, 40% approved of Trump's job performance, unchanged from the previous month.

A historical analysis by Gallup shows Trump's approval ratings in September of his first years in office − both as the 45th and 47th presidents − are lower than any other modern president at the same time in their administrations. Here is how his September approval compares to other presidents in September of their first year of their term, according to Gallup:

Joe Biden (September 2021) - 43% approve

Trump (September 2017) - 37% approve

Barack Obama (September 2009) - 52% approve

George W. Bush (September 2001) - 76% approve

Bill Clinton (September 1993) - 50% approve

George H.W. Bush (September 1989) - 70% approve

Ronald Reagan (September 1981) - 52% approve

Contributing: Reuters and USA TODAY's Eduardo Cuevas and Kathryn Palmer

Kinsey Crowley is the Trump Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach her at kcrowley@gannett.com. Follow her on X and TikTok @kinseycrowley or Bluesky at @kinseycrowley.bsky.social.

X 84

A35X 84 FROM WORLD POPULATION REVIEW

TRUMP POPULARITY by STATES


	PRO	CON	CHANGE (since election)
Wyoming	69%	27%	-13%
West Virginia	68%	29%	-13%
North Dakota	67%	31%	-14%
Idaho	66%	30%	-10%
Oklahoma	63%	34%	-20%
Alabama	62%	35%	-8%
Arkansas	61%	37%	-19%
Kentucky	59%	38%	-17%
Tennessee	59%	38%	-16%
South Dakota	58%	38%	-11%
Indiana	57%	40%	-13%
Kansas	57%	41%	-20%
Mississippi	57%	41%	-20%
Louisiana	56%	42%	-10%
Montana	56%	41%	-18%
Utah	56%	42%	-16%
South Carolina	55%	43%	-12%
Missouri	54%	43%	-11%
Nebraska	54%	43%	-17%
Florida	53%	45%	-19%
Arizona	50%	47%	-19%
Ohio	50%	48%	-15%
Texas	50%	47%	-13%
Alaska	49%	48%	-19%
Iowa	49%	47%	-14%
Michigan	47%	50%	-18%
Nevada	47%	50%	-21%
North Carolina	47%	51%	-13%
Georgia	46%	51%	-16%
Pennsylvania	46%	52%	-11%
New Mexico	45%	52%	-28%
Wisconsin	45%	52%	-17%
Minnesota	43%	55%	-8%
Virginia	42%	55%	-13%
New Hampshire	41%	56%	-19%
Connecticut	40%	57%	-22%
Maine	40%	57%	-14%
New Jersey	40%	58%	-14%
Colorado	39%	59%	-14%
New York	38%	59%	-28%
Illinois	37%	61%	-27%
Oregon	37%	61%	-23%
Delaware	36%	61%	-18%
Rhode Island	36%	62%	-14%
Washington	36%	61%	-28%
California	33%	64%	-22%
Massachusetts	32%	66%	-22%
Maryland	30%	67%	-12%
Hawaii	28%	69%	-8%
Vermont	26%	71%	-37%

A36X85 FROM PRRI

Survey: Majorities of Americans Say Trump Policies, Including Cuts in Health Care and Research Spending, and Implementation of Tariffs, Have Gone Too Far

56% of Americans view Trump as a “dangerous dictator”

WASHINGTON (October 22, 2025)— A new national survey released today by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in partnership with the Brookings Institution reveals Americans’ responses to the unprecedented actions taken so far by President Donald Trump during his second presidential term. The survey — the 16th annual American Values Survey — also examines Americans’ concerns about the economy and how democracy is working, what it means to be “truly American,” and opposition to building internment camps for undocumented immigrants and allowing ICE agents to mask their identity.

Majorities of Americans say that the Trump administration cuts in federal funding for health care (60%) and universities and research institutions (55%), the implementation of new tariffs (54%), and the increase in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (52%) have gone too far. Across all areas, independents hold views more aligned with Democrats. For example, most Democrats (90%) and independents (67%) say that cuts in federal funding for programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act have gone too far, compared with only 25% of Republicans.

“Amid unprecedented actions, most Americans, including political independents, believe the Trump administration has gone too far,” said PRRI President and Founder Robert P. Jones. “A growing majority of Americans, including two-thirds of independents, now view the president as a dangerous dictator, but most Republicans continue to approve of Trump’s actions.”

Asked to choose between two statements, increasing numbers of Americans view Trump as a “dangerous dictator” rather than a “strong leader.” A majority of Americans (56%) agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,” up from 52% in March 2025; by contrast, 41% agree that “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.” Nine in ten (91%) of Democrats and 65% of independents see Trump as a dangerous dictator, compared to only 15% of Republicans; by contrast, 82% of Republicans see Trump as a strong leader who should be given the power he needs. Majorities of white Christians, including 73% of white evangelicals, say that Trump is a strong leader, while majorities of Christians of color and other religious groups view Trump more as a dangerous dictator.

“Strong majorities of Americans, across party lines, say believing in the core values and freedoms espoused in our founding documents are essential for being truly American,” explained PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman. “At the same time, Republicans are more likely than independents or Democrats to believe identifying as Christian matters for American identity.”

Far more Americans say shared civic ideals, rather than religious beliefs or ancestry, are important to being “truly American.” Majorities of Americans, across partisan lines, say believing in individual freedoms (93%), the Constitution (91%), accepting diverse backgrounds (89%), the Declaration of Independence (88%), respecting institutions and laws (88%), and speaking English (75%) are important to “being truly American.” Partisans are divided on whether being born in the U.S. (54%) is essential for American identity. Republicans are the only partisans among whom a majority say belief in God (78% of Republicans vs. 57% of all Americans), being Christian (68% vs. 43%), or having ancestors who served in the military (55% vs. 42%) are important to being truly American. Few Americans say being of Western European heritage (23%) is essential to being truly American.

Majorities of Americans view both the Democratic and Republican parties unfavorably. Majorities of Americans view the Democratic (60%) and Republican (57%) parties unfavorably. Most Republicans (86%) hold favorable views of their party (consistent since 2012), while fewer Democrats (76%) hold favorable views of their party, a significant decline from 93% in 2012. Independents’ views of both parties have dropped 15 percentage points since 2012.

Among independents who hold unfavorable views of the Democratic party, 47% say it is because the party is extreme and too left-wing; 28% say it is because the party is not fighting hard enough against Trump; 18% say it is not progressive enough; and 15% say it is anti-religious. Among independents who hold unfavorable views of the Republican party, 56% say it is extreme and too right-wing; 59% say it is either because the party is too deferential to President Trump; 6% say it is not conservative enough; and 30% say it is too closely aligned with religious groups.

Democrats are now more likely to agree that things have changed so much, they often feel like strangers in their own country. Nearly half of Americans (46%) agree with the statement “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country,” up slightly from 41% when PRRI first asked the question in 2016. Today, Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to agree with this statement (59% vs. 30%), the inverse of patterns that held consistent since 2016.

Democrats and independents are more than twice as likely as Republicans to oppose both allowing ICE agents to mask their identity and the building of internment camps for undocumented immigrants. About six in ten Americans (58%) agree that “ICE officers should not be allowed to conceal their identity with masks or use unmarked vehicles when arresting people,” including most Democrats (84%) and independents (64%), but only three in ten Republicans (31%). Similarly, 58% of Americans oppose allowing the federal government to detain immigrants who are in the country illegally in internment camps until they can be deported, including 86% of Democrats and 64% of independents, but only three in ten Republicans (29%).

Other notable findings:

Just half of Americans are extremely or very proud of being an American (50%). American pride has declined sharply since 2013, when 82% said they were extremely or very proud. Most Republicans (80%) are proud of being an American, compared with 46% of independents, and 31% of Democrats.

Majorities of Americans say the economy (65%), the way the federal government is functioning (65%), dealing with other countries (60%), and dealing with undocumented immigrants (57%) are headed in the wrong direction.

28% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the controversy over the Epstein files.

Nearly seven in ten Americans (69%) agree with the statement “The ability of Americans to freely criticize the government without fear of punishment is a right that seems less protected than in previous years,” including majorities of Democrats (86%), independents (73%), and Republicans (54%).

Most Americans (70%) disagree that the federal government should have the authority to control student admissions, faculty hiring, and curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities to ensure they do not teach inappropriate material, including most Democrats (84%), independents (75%), and Republicans (58%).

While Americans are somewhat split — largely along partisan lines — on whether society has become too soft and feminine (42% agree vs. 54% disagree), three in four Americans reject the notion that the gains women have made in recent years come at the expense of men.

Methodology

The survey was conducted by PRRI among a representative sample of 5,543 adults (age 18 and up) living in all 50 states in the United States, who are part of Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, and an additional 412 who were recruited by Ipsos using opt-in survey panels to increase the sample sizes in smaller states. Interviews were conducted online between August 15 – September 8, 2025. The margin of error for the national survey is +/- 1.79 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence, including the design effect for the survey of 1.84.

About PRRI

PRRI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and politics.

Happy news

X FROM GPB

A treat during a tricky time: Unions offer free Halloween costumes to children of federal workers

By: Amanda Andrews October 29, 2025 5:10 PM

Unions have been providing food and supplies to federal workers without pay. Now they're donating costumes to help workers save money on seasonal shopping.

Federal workers in Georgia missing paychecks during the government shutdown will not have to miss Halloween. This week, the unions who represent them are handing out holiday supplies, including costumes.

Members of the American Federation of Government Employees and the Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council gave away 100 children’s Halloween costumes. The Tuesday event was hosted at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees local 479 headquarters near the Atlanta airport.

Recently, the Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council has been holding food drives, supporting striking workers, and distributing Kroger gift cards. Program coordinator Marie Thompson said the organization welcomes any chance to help union members.

“So those who can't make it here, we’ll be headed to day care after that,” she said. “We'll meet them where they are. Even if that means going to their jobs. You know the others who are still working or maybe not getting paid, and things like that, we'll still pull up and drop a costume.”

Aaron Barker is president of AFGE Local 554. He said when families are living paycheck to paycheck, they appreciate the little things, too.

“I mean costumes can be anywhere from $20 to $30,” he said. “So if they're able to save that money and maybe buy food or pay rent or whatever the case may be — whatever their necessities are, they don't have to spend that and they can get these costumes.”

The Labor Council will also host a "trunk or treat" event at the IBEW headquarters from 5 to 7 p.m. this Thursday.

A37X from people mag.

Melania Trump Reveals This Year's White House Halloween Decor as She Kicks Off First Holiday Season Since 2020

The first lady broke out the pumpkins and fall decor to prepare for the annual White House Trick or Treat this week

By Meredith Kile Published on October 28, 2025 04:59PM EDT

NEED TO KNOW

First lady Melania Trump revealed the 2025 White House Halloween decor on Tuesday

The first lady covered the back of the Executive Residence with pumpkins and leaves, evoking a non-spooky fall theme

Though the first lady has a controversial history with holiday decorating at the White House, insiders predicted to PEOPLE last year that she would rise to the occasion during her husband's second term

Amid ongoing controversy about the wide-ranging White House construction projects, first lady Melania Trump broke out the Halloween decorations this week to prepare for the upcoming holiday celebration that will take place just steps from the demolished East Wing.

"The @whitehouse is getting ready for Halloween 🎃," her office posted on X on Tuesday, Oct. 28, alongside a photo of the decorations in progress.

In contrast to past years in the White House, Melania — who took some heat for stylistic decisions during her husband's first term — seemed to keep the decor simpler for the start of her busy holiday season, which lands in the middle of a particularly lengthy government shutdown. The back entrance and staircases are lined with pumpkins, and colorful leaves cascade between the South Portico's columns.

It seems more decorated for a generic "fall" theme than Halloween; however, that could be a deliberate decision so as not to spook any of the young guests who come for the traditional trick or treat with the president and first lady.

Melania has gone a bit spookier in years past. Her 2019 look featured spindly trees and orange lighting that helped set the mood.

The socially distanced trick-or-treating event during the 2020 COVID era also had autumn vibes, but with far more variety among the decorations than there appears to be this year.

Melania has not always had an easy relationship with holidays in the White House. In 2020, an audio recording of the first lady was leaked to CNN, in which she was heard complaining about being held accountable for both the aesthetics of the Trump presidency as well as her husband's more controversial policies.

“I’m working … my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a f--- about the Christmas stuff and decorations?” Melania said in the recording, which was made in 2018. “But I need to do it, right?”

“OK, and then I do it and I say that I’m working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that they were separated?’ Give me a f------ break," she continued.

Following her four-year respite from the White House, a mix of Melania's friends, political sources and Mar-a-Lago Club members told PEOPLE in December 2024 that she will step up and carry on with White House traditions during her husband's second term.

"Melania will do what she is asked as first lady but under her own terms, and that includes decorating the White House for the Christmas holidays," a social source in Palm Beach told PEOPLE. "She will set her own schedule, make her own rules, and use her own taste."

See All of the White House Halloweens Through the Years

Donald Trump Is Expected to Name the New White House Ballroom After Himself: Report

However, according to a recent report, the first lady is not taking any credit for the controversial destruction of the White House's East Wing to build the president's highly touted ballroom.

While some of the president's early White House renovations — like the paving of the Rose Garden — were said to be done in collaboration with his wife, The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Melania is not on board with the ballroom plans.

In investigating how Donald is pulling off the controversial demolition of the historic building at a breakneck pace, the publication alleged that Melania "privately raised concerns about tearing down the East Wing and told associates it wasn’t her project, according to administration officials."

PEOPLE reached out to Melania's office for comment about WSJ's reporting.

WEDNESDAY

A@ from AI OVERVIEW

The "democracy of the dead"

A wider electorate: Tradition is described as "an extension of the franchise" to include the deceased, giving them a vote in the present.

How it relates to the Day of the Dead

A@ FROM YOU TUBE

Day of the Dead Press Conference Honoring Lives Lost to ICE Detention

Detention Watch Network and Popular Democracy will mark Day of the Dead with a press conference outside of Capitol Hill and an altar to honor people who have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. The press conference will underscore the cruelty of Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda, which has a tremendous human toll and cost to all Americans. Shockingly, there have been at least 24 deaths in ICE custody in just ten months, a record number of deaths within a calendar year since Detention Watch Network began tracking in 2006, including three deaths by suicide.

A@ FROM DISAPPEARED in AMERICA

Disappeared In America – Dia de los Muertos Home Depot Action with NELA Alliance for Democracy

Solidarity Event · Volunteer organized

Time

Saturday, November 1

3 – 7pm PDT

Location

2055 N Figueroa St

Los Angeles, CA 90065

Map

About this event

JOIN us as we heighten our weekly Home Depot protest/boycott into a larger community event to fight for those who are being targeted.

We will have face painting, music and an altar honoring those whose lives have been cut short due to the kidnappings! Come for a celebration of life, and say clearly: We will not stand by as families are disappeared, rights are dismantled, and democracy itself is eroded.

We will have signs at our usual corner at the front of Home Depot, but will be gathering for activities at the Los Angeles River & Aliso Creek Confluence Park (by the turnaround) behind the Home Depot parking lot.

Across the country, immigrant communities are under attack — targeted by raids, detention, and dehumanizing policies that tear families apart. These tactics are being weaponized as part of a broader authoritarian crackdown that threatens the rights and freedoms of everyone.

The Disappeared in America Weekend of Action is a nationwide mobilization to defend our shared values of dignity, freedom, and justice for all. Together, we’ll shine a light on the human toll of detention and demand an end to corporate and government complicity in this cruelty.

Accessibility

Mainly flat ground

Dedicated parking spots

No stairs or steps

Have accessibility questions? Reply to your registration email to confirm your requirements or request more information.

Map

Top of Form

First name *

Last name *

Email *

Mobile number (optional)

ZIP code *

Attend

By clicking the button above, you agree to Mobilize's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Mobilize is a service provider and will share your information with the event organizer, who may contact you. Message and data rates may apply. Text STOP to cancel, HELP for help.

I want to receive text messages from Disappeared in America about how to stay involved.

Bottom of Form

Contact organization · Report this event

Disappeared In America is a project hosted by Public Citizen, National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON), The Workers Circle and Detention Watch Network. By providing your mobile number and email address, you agree that these organizations may periodically contact you with additional opportunities to get involved in our campaigns. You may of course unsubscribe at any time. For text: Message and data rates apply, reply STOP to unsubscribe.

A core principle behind all of our events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. Weapons of any kind, including those legally permitted, should not be brought to events.

More events from Disappeared in America

Closest events this week

This weekend Sun, Nov 2 @ 4pm EST

Disappeared In America Day of Action

Volunteer organized

Atlanta, GA

See details

This weekend Sun, Nov 2 @ 8pm EST

Día de los Muertos - Communities Not Cages Day of Action

Volunteer organized

Jefferson, GA