Sunday Mailbag:

From videos I've seen, the streets look empty and the areas that are being shown are usually thriving and bustling, especially considering that D.C. has had some gorgeous weather the past few weeks with low humidity. Some officials are concerned that between the loss of so many federal workers, the loss of a great amount of tourism this summer, and now the economic fallout of this occupation, that a usually recession-proof city is now headed towards economic hardship. Again everything that Trump touches rots and dies.

There was another video I saw recorded by someone having lunch al fresco in another delightful neighborhood in D.C. He recorded a bunch of ICE agents, who pulled a man off his moped as he was about to deliver a DoorDash. A group of people gathered around demanding to know what was going on. These agents were masked and aggressive towards the bystanders. After one bystander said "Get out of our city," one of the ICE agents said "You liberals have had control for too long!" Oops, I guess someone said the quiet part out loud.

I also saw this great article in The Nation about how D.C. is resisting:

When the night comes, it is not just the National Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a jumpy police department walking the streets. In an otherwise eerily quiet city, the people are present as well. Armed only with cell phones, medical kits and the confidence to assert their dwindling rights, groups of local residents trail and record Trump's occupation forces. They are known as the night patrols.

These night patrols watch over the city to ensure that people are protected from state violence, false arrest, abduction and harassment. Failing that, their goal is to document the constitutional violations or brutality they witness, so people can see the truths about the occupation that a compliant, largely incurious media are not showing. Their footage has gone viral and exposed the mainstream media's lies about how happy DC residents are to see the South Carolina National Guard marching by their kid's elementary school.

These patrols constitute a variety of organizations trying to stop the occupation, including FLARE USA, which stands for For Liberation And Resistance Everywhere, and is comprised of fed-up military veterans, who want to stop these unnecessary ICE raids. People participating in these patrols tell of a man who was almost arrested for having a burned-out tail light. He had been pulled from his vehicle, while his two children were left frightened and crying inside. The only reason he escaped arrest was because a crowd had gathered to record the events. Another instance involves Paul Bryant, a Black corporate lawyer and West Point graduate who was arrested for walking through Logan Circle, another beautiful gentrified D.C. neighborhood, at 2:00 a.m. because he refused to say what he was doing, which is, after all, his constitutional right. A judge later released him and then tore into the prosecutors.

Just this week, I watched a video by one of these patrols, although this one was in the daytime. The reason this one caught my eye was that I recognized the Metro Station (Columbia Heights) as the one I used every day to go to and from work for almost 20 years. Most readers probably don't remember, but back in 2020 I wrote a letter that was published in the Sunday Mailbag, in which I talked about seeing then-Vice President Joe Biden picking up a pizza at a shop by a Metro Station. Columbia Heights is that Metro Station, and I can assure you that the Secret Service would not have allowed Biden to walk 30 feet from his limo to Pete's Pizza if there had been bullets blazing and people being murdered nearby. In this video from last week, a group of watchers were closely following the ICE agents, all masked of course, as they descended on the station. At one point in the recording, an ICE agent turns around and glares at the camera with such rage and loathing that I wondered if a crime was about to be committed by him. After all kinds of pointless folderol by the agents (going up and down the escalators trying to look tough), the agents swoop in to make an arrest. Before I tell you what the person was arrested for, I would like for you to imagine you're at the movies, watching the coming attractions. Now imagine you're watching a trailer for the next Spider-Man or John Wick film and that the trailer says these heroes would be going against the dastardly, vile and despicable Fare-Jumper, you would laugh out loud. Yes, that was the sole arrest of this group of about 10 heavily armed agents, someone who tried to jump the fare gates to ride the Metro without paying. Thanks to their actions and having such scum and villainy off the streets, people can now safely wear watches and jewelry while walking the streets of D.C., as our Adolf Eichmann lookalike Stephen Miller is fond of yelling.

Politics: The Democrats and Their Mojo:

IMO, the main reason Democrats lose to Republicans is because most of them have not embraced economic populism. The reason most elected Democrats don't embrace economic populism is because their big donors are against those policies and elected Democrats almost always side with the big donors over the voters. That's why I believe Democrats running for office should not take any money from big corporate donors or billionaire funded super PACs.

I was recently at an event for a local Democrat and Congressman Doggett was there. He asked me who represents me. When I replied that it is Chip Roy (R-TX), he said, quite correctly, that I have no representation at all.

Hopefully T.B. has had a chance to rethink their position since writing, for it is the very height of personal immaturity and self-centeredness to expect a political party to behave as though it were just for that person's self. For anyone who would have preferred the policies of a Democratic administration to a Trump administration, but withheld their vote in 2020 because they loved Biden, disliked Harris, thought the Democrats insufficiently or overly zealous on Gaza/the environment/racial equality/etc., I would ask, "are you satisfied when you look outside of your bubble?" We've had damaging tariffs, brutal cuts to social programs, gutting and weaponization of crucial parts of our government, essentially the biggest data breach in our lifetime happening with the consent of the President, just to name the crises that come immediately to mind... and you chose to waste your chance to stop all of that so that you could "teach the Dems a lesson"? How does that make you any better than the Trump voter who justifies voting against even their own interests just to "own the libs"?

I liken our electoral system to a unique sort of restaurant—the only source of a meal in a town without grocery stores or other restaurants, but one that serves the same meal to all based on whichever item on the menu gets the most votes. If you walk in on a night where the two frontrunners in the voting are pizza and manure sandwich on rye, and you abstain from voting, or you cast your vote for the Cobb salad because you had pizza for lunch, you have no cause to stand on principle (or on the table) to complain about the sandwich. A rational mind would have understood the situation and cast a vote for the best outcome, even if they didn't like the rules of the restaurant and didn't want another slice of pizza. It disappointed me bitterly in 2016 and 2024 that there were so many manure-sandwich voters in our country, and it disappointed me equally to hear from so many enablers afterward. "I'm not voting for the Democrats until they come around to my way of thinking"is their mantra, apparently not understanding that there might be just as many or more votes lost on the other side of the same spectrum for any movement that party makes. Meanwhile, Republican voters continue to hold their noses and vote for their manure sandwich, if for no other reason than to watch the rest of us try to choke it down. And they consistently win.

I do not expect the Democratic Party to support all the same things I do. But the beauty of a (functional) democracy is that I have a voice. If I want others to adopt my beliefs, I have agency. It's on me to try to educate and persuade people to come around. I can contact my representatives when there's a bill I want them to support or oppose, and I can urge other people I know to reach out as well. There are many opportunities to speak up and be heard, both formally and informally. If I advocate and work hard, I can make my beliefs more popular and more salient, and the Democratic Party will (eventually) move in the direction I want.

Our society and our politics deeply frustrate me, all the time, pretty much every day. But I try to put that frustration into action to make things better. I support the Democratic Party, because they are a big tent party that is responsive to public opinion, and they are at least trying to make things better, even if they don't always do what I want them to do.