How Democrats are trying to turn MAGA's ‘flood the zone' strategy against Trump
With Donald Trump 's presidency reaching its 100th day and the US president plummeting in approval polling on issues that have historically been his strongest areas with voters, the broader left and a wide coalition of groups are coming together to capitalize on a groundswell of discontent caused by the administration's slash-and-burn tactics.
And there's little sign that anyone is heeding the grumbling complaint-warnings held by centrist Democrats and spoken either directly or laundered through friendly media outlets to avoid the 'distraction' of so-called 'woke' issues (immigration, transgender rights, mass incarceration, etc.) in favor of 'kitchen table talk' and reclaiming the narrative on the economy.
Instead, the party's backbenchers and even some members of leadership are embracing a strategy laid out (but hardly invented) by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker over the weekend. Pritzker, widely considered to be a potential 2028 presidential contender, made an appearance at a local Democratic Party event in New Hampshire on Saturday and laid out his vision for Resistance 2.0.
'It's time to fight, everywhere, all at once,' he told Democrats in Manchester. 'Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.'
Over Tuesday and Wednesday, Democratic activists and some of their allies on Capitol Hill lived up to that aspiration.
Morning rush hour traffic was even more chaotic than usual in the nation's capital on Wednesday, thanks to crowds of demonstrators who began marching in the streets (with police protection) around 7:45 a.m. A large banner representing the Constitution was unfurled as protesters marched down Massachusetts Ave. describing the administration as a 'fascist occupation' and calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil and other detained student activists on green cards (legal residency).
Though police escorts directed traffic and kept disruptions to a minimum, The Independent witnessed one unlucky driver rear-ending an officer's squad car just as the group was heading out, presumably distracted by the displays. The driver, a man appearing to be in his 30s, did not seem injured.
At the State Department early Tuesday evening, a crowd of Democratic lawmakers shouted through loudspeakers to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former senator. Denouncing their former colleague as a hypocrite, they urged him to step down or acknowledge the constitutional due process rights of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Vermont green card holder and legal resident of the US for a decade who was arrested and jailed after being lured to what he thought was an interview as part of the legal process to obtain full citizenship. He has not been charged with or accused of a crime.
'Does it matter to come out on the streets? Does it matter to protest? Absolutely, this administration needs to know that we are watching very carefully what they are doing, that we care about our rights,' Rep. Becca Balint, a Vermont congresswoman and the organizer of Tuesday's rally, told attendees. Other speakers included Senator Chris Van Hollen, who flew to El Salvador to meet with a Maryland man deported against a judge's order earlier in April, as well as other progressives — Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Maxwell Frost, Rep. Nydia Velazquez and Rep. Maxine Dexter.
Balint told The Independent after the rally that she expects the administration to proceed further with retaliation against judges and other members of the legal system who oppose or otherwise hold up the president's deportation orders if Americans are not vocal about such actions being unacceptable. She added that her party had work to do as well to reach voters and meet the urgency of the moment.
'[W]hat I want to see from my colleagues, and I'm already seeing a lot of that – I want to see more of people being unafraid to speak directly to the American people about what's happening,' Balint added. 'We need to get better both at listening deeply to what the concerns are of of our [voters], you know, regardless of what district you're in. But also, we need to be better at about articulating why something is important. And it sometimes takes throwing some elbows, throwing some punches.'
Even Hakeem Jeffries, the party's minority leader in the House of Representatives, joined Senator Cory Booker in a sit-down chat with passerby on the steps of the Capitol on Sunday, as he and others reforge ties with their base. Their talk, billed as a sit-in, attracted a crowd of at least a hundred people.
Booker, who recently set a record in the Senate with a 25-hour speech denouncing the Trump administration, was celebrating his birthday Sunday as he arrived for the sit-in around 6am.
'We can't keep doing things like business as usual,' he said.
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Daily Mail
13 minutes ago
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Trump's political guru Steve Bannon gives devastating take on fallout of Epstein debacle
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At the heart of the firestorm is the Justice Department's abrupt decision to close the book on the Epstein investigation - denying the existence of the long-rumored 'client list,' reaffirming that Epstein died by suicide, and refusing to release further records. The memo, jointly released by the DOJ and FBI, stated that further disclosures were neither appropriate nor warranted. But what was intended as a final word has instead detonated a whole new round of conspiracy theories on the right. Attorney General Pam Bondi, once a darling of the movement, had assured Fox News viewers that a list of Epstein's clients was 'on her desk' but the DOJ now says no such document exists Influential MAGA figures, already furious over Attorney General Pam Bondi's failure to deliver the promised bombshells, erupted. Alex Jones sarcastically tweeted that the DOJ would next claim 'Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed.' 'This is over the top sickening,' Jones added. Bondi, once a darling of the movement, had assured Fox News viewers that a list of Epstein's clients was 'on her desk' but the DOJ now says no such document ever existed. Far-right influencer Laura Loomer, close to Trump himself, didn't hold back. 'President Trump should fire Bondi for lying to his base and creating a liability for his administration. She is an embarrassment and she doesn't do anything to help Trump,' Loomer wrote on X. Meanwhile, Dan Bongino, Trump's deputy FBI director and himself a key player in cultivating MAGA loyalty, reportedly considered resigning after a heated clash with Bondi at the White House. Sources say Bongino was 'furious' over how the Epstein memo was handled and skipped work on Friday to contemplate his future. In an attempt to rally the base and refocus their fury, Bannon called for the immediate appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Epstein's clients and possible blackmail operations. 'There's only one solution,' Bannon insisted. 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The Independent
16 minutes ago
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DOGE sprouts in red states, as governors embrace the cost-cutter brand and make it their own
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Telegraph
23 minutes ago
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Britain's tortured relationship with free speech – from public floggings to gender ‘hate crime'
Many readers will know the neat witticism that begins 'In England, everything is permitted unless it is forbidden' and ends 'In Russia, everything is forbidden, especially when it is permitted'. It flatters a certain idea we have of ourselves as both law abiding and free. But it also gives an insight into our present problems over freedom of speech and thought – which include police targeting social media users for ' non-crime hate incidents ' while prominent musicians call for the death of Israeli soldiers live on the BBC, with apparent impunity. We do not have a clear, familiar and authoritative guarantee of freedom. Many countries do. The most famous is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: 'Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.' In France, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man (incorporated into later constitutions) described freedom of expression as 'one of the most precious' human rights. Germany, Spain and others have constitutional protection for freedom of expression. Our freedom, in contrast, relies on gaps in the law: what is not forbidden. There is no mention of freedom of speech in Magna Carta, needless to say, or in the 1689 Bill of Rights (other than the Bill of Rights setting out protections for parliamentarians over what was said during debates) – though even if there were, it would not be binding on today's courts. The consequence is that our freedom of speech, writing, discussion and even of thought relies on ever-changing and often hasty legislation and on court interpretation; hence, in reality, it is subject to changes in cultural norms, ideological fashions and political opportunism. I do not think that England or Britain can claim to have an established history of freedom of expression, and we certainly cannot be secure today in enjoying whatever freedoms we have. If we take a long view of history, the idea that freedom of expression is good in principle is fairly new. Heresy was made a capital crime in 1401 and moreover was a very unpopular offence, like possessing pornographic images of children today: wives denounced their husbands, for example. Treason – which, like heresy, could end in a very painful death – included talking or speculating about the monarch's death. Political discussion could be sedition. In Cromwell's Puritan Army, blasphemy or profanity – what today we might term 'hate speech' – was punished by having the tongue grasped in pliers and a hot iron forced through it, leaving a permanent speech impediment to remind all and sundry that speech could be sinful. When written down, thought crimes became various forms of libel and could be labelled blasphemous, obscene or seditious. These might incur a modest bit of mutilation (ears cut off) or a humiliating, painful and sometimes fatal spell in the pillory. A view developed in the 18th century (as the American and French constitutions testify) that some liberty of thought and expression might be desirable enough to exalt to the status of a universal principle. It began as an acceptance of the inevitable: an intellectual truce after generations of religious conflict had shown that unity of speech, thought and belief could not be imposed, even with hot iron. The end of print censorship in England came in 1689, when the law imposing it accidentally lapsed, and it seemed better thereafter to let sleeping dogs lie. Sensible Queen Anne kept losing the paperwork when her bishops brought prosecutions for heresy. Charles II had reopened the theatres – closed under Cromwell – but Sir Robert Walpole imposed censorship of plays by the Lord Chamberlain. England during this century was nevertheless, by comparison with most of its neighbours, a haven of free thought and expression. Yet when the self-promoting London radical John Wilkes (perhaps a distant forerunner of Nigel Farage) insisted on satirising the prime minister and publishing the hitherto secret debates in Parliament, he was prosecuted for obscene and blasphemous libel (in a rude poem featuring bishops), almost killed in a duel, forced to flee into exile and outlawed – pretty comprehensive evidence of the limits of Enlightenment liberty. The 19th century in some ways saw a tightening of the limits of free expression. Though the state no longer imposed draconian penalties for political criticism, and religious diversity was at last fully recognised, the general cultural atmosphere became less permissive. A Russian exile observed that 'the freer a country is from government interference, the more intolerant grows the mob'. This reflected a collective effort to civilise and regulate a turbulent and rapidly changing society through education, exhortation, economic pressure and, not least, strict policing. Churches, charities, political parties and trade unions were all agreed on the desirability of morality, self-reliance, discipline – in short, respectability. Leading socialists became advocates of forced labour for the unemployed and enthusiasts for eugenics. We might admire some of the outcomes: crime, drunkenness and domestic violence fell to probably their lowest ever levels. The economy boomed. Living standards rose. But it had become a stern and forbidding society compared with the uproarious 18th century. Respectability imposed strict limits on what could be said and written. In the 1880s, a radical reformist movement including socialists and feminists started cracking down on immorality. This included stricter regulation of music halls, the seizure and destruction of immoral pictures, sexual repression (especially of prostitution and homosexuality) and, of course, baleful scrutiny of publications. In 1889 the publisher of English editions of Émile Zola's novels was sentenced to three months in prison. A series of French paintings of scenes from François Rabelais, the French humanist, was narrowly saved from being destroyed, and there were scandalised protests when Degas's L'Absinthe was shown in 1893, depicting the dangers of a highly alcoholic spirit that was later banned. Artists and writers flocked to France, where all censorship had been abolished. Victorian repressiveness did not, of course, end with Victoria. In the 1930s the legal writer AP Herbert wrote, only half jokingly, of 'the curious delusion that the British subject has a number of rights and liberties which enable him to behave as he likes… There are few if any such rights', in particular 'the alleged rights of public meeting and free speech' based on 'the vague belief that this ideal is somewhere embodied in the laws of our country'. Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park was often shown off as a proof of freedom of speech, but of course it was a licensed exception. The director of public prosecutions sent detectives to lectures of the Cambridge literary scholar FR Leavis when he spoke of James Joyce's Ulysses. The 1950s saw a revival of Victorian values. Magistrates ordered the destruction of more than 1,500 works of fiction, including Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, published a century earlier. The BBC did not permit anything 'derogatory to political institutions' or the impersonation of 'leading public or political figures'. The sensational acquittal in 1960 of Penguin Books for publishing DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover ('Is it a book you would wish your wife or your servants to read?' asked the prosecuting counsel) has rightly been seen as a landmark. But the acquittal was based not on a right to freedom of expression, but because the book was seen as a work of literary merit – effectively a get-out clause in the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. Less distinguished literature was successfully prosecuted: the underground magazine Oz in 1971 (its editors were given prison sentences, later overturned), and Gay News for blasphemous libel in 1976 (fines and a suspended prison sentence). This was the last prosecution for blasphemy, at least for the time being (the common law offence of blasphemy was abolished in 2008). The House of Lords rejected Gay News 's appeal, and Lord Scarman suggested that the law of blasphemy should apply to all religions, punishing those who 'cause grave offence to the religious feelings of some of their fellow citizens'. Nevertheless, the three decades beginning in the 1960s were undoubtedly the greatest age of free expression in Britain. It became generally accepted in all but the most conservative circles that such freedom was both a human right and a benefit to society. The Lord Chamberlain stopped censoring plays in 1968. Toleration of ideas that one disliked was seen as a necessary part of living in a civilised country. It would have been unthinkable for writers or academics to be threatened, dismissed or discriminated against for their words or opinions. How long ago this now seems! When or why it began to end is a proper subject for debate. One obvious moment was the death sentence passed by the ruler of Iran against Salman Rushdie in 1989 for his novel The Satanic Verses, winner of the 1988 Whitbread Award. This was followed by a series of riots in Britain and elsewhere, assassination attempts and the murder of a translator of the book in Japan. Attitudes to what could be said or published rapidly changed, at first through fear and later through conformism. The golden age of free expression in Britain had lasted for roughly one generation. Most limits on free expression throughout our history have been based on the preservation of public order: in other words, on the likely or possible outcome of what was said. At one end of the scale, treason attacked the political order. Sedition risked causing riots. Slander and libel upset the social order at the individual level. Hence, it made a great difference whether the words were true or false, intended or unintended, public or private. Falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre was an offence. In the privacy of one's home it was not. It seems to me – apologies to lawyers who might disagree – that blasphemy is essentially different. While it may also be seen as an offence against public order, it is principally an offence against an angry divinity: not only a crime, but a sin. In theory, blasphemy is not yet a crime in England, nor is it regarded even as a just cause of outrage when it concerns Christianity, once its sole concern. Nevertheless, blasphemy is severely punished. Not by law – at least not yet – but by illegal or informal action. This is most obvious in the case of Rushdie, or of the teacher at Batley Grammar School who showed pupils illustrations of Mohammed, and who was forced to go into hiding with little or no support from his employers or his trade union, and, it seems, no effective protection by the police. I could list many similar cases, but they will be all too familiar to readers. The present debate in Parliament over a new definition of 'Islamophobia' raises the possibility of the reintroduction of a blasphemy law by the back door. But blasphemy now goes much further than in its traditional religious context. There is severe punishment – including loss of livelihood and reputation, threats of violence and ostracisation – for blasphemy against current secular orthodoxies too: blasphemy that is termed 'hate speech' or various kinds of 'phobia'. An innocent remark taken the wrong way can destroy a career. An angry or sarcastic comment that does no material damage can result in prosecution or worse. The use, even inadvertently, of particular words is punished even though not illegal. Implausible claims of being harmed or made 'unsafe' by ideas or words have been used to attack individuals and silence debate. Certain police forces have been leading exponents of anti-blasphemy activism in their dubiously lawful pursuit of 'non-crime hate incidents'. The law is encroaching into the private realm, including overheard conversations. For example, how will employers, made liable for the harassment of their employees by third parties under the new Employment Rights Bill, prevent such abuses without deploying an army of snoopers? This eagerness to extend law into private spaces recalls Scotland's Presbyterian Kirk, with its 'searchers' of vices and its 'stools of repentance' – the most intrusive and repressive form of Christianity, which the SNP seems eager to revive for 21st-century use. Far more widespread than repression by governments is action taken by angry individuals and groups operating outside the law. They sometimes act with the complicity of official bodies, but often independently. Prominent have been lecturers, graduate students, publishers, diversity lobbyists, civil servants and trade unionists. Their reach has been extended by social media far beyond that of Victorian morality campaigners or 17th-century Puritans, though their psychology and vindictiveness seem amazingly similar. An individual accused of modern forms of blasphemy often has no legal protection and no redress. Like many readers, no doubt, I have personal knowledge of several cases of such persecution. I know how common intimidation and self-censorship has become in academic circles. Until recently, the only defence of people hounded out of their jobs for their opinions has been to seek compensation before an industrial tribunal. Those censored, 'cancelled' or otherwise penalised (for example by loss of contracts or denial of funding) have usually had no redress at all. For these reasons, to rely as in the past on a permissive void in the law – that everything is permitted if it is not legally forbidden – is evidently insufficient. It is no longer enough that freedom of expression should be permitted. It also has to be defended. That the law has not been fairly or equally applied in recent years is widely believed, and although such 'two-tier' justice is, alas, pretty standard throughout history, it is always an abuse – as Magna Carta so memorably declared 800 years ago. All those who value individual liberty and freedom of expression as the foundation of a civilised and functioning society must work to make the state and the law the active champions of freedom and not, as often, its enemies, not least through loosely drafted legislation that lends itself to repressive applications. The Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson learnt the hard way how such laws – in her case invoking the 'perception' of an unknown 'complainant' – could be used to intimidate critics of the police. An important step to defend freedom has been taken with the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, passed under the previous government and applied, with regrettable reluctance and watered-down provisions, by the present Government. The philosopher and free-speech campaigner Prof Arif Ahmed was appointed director for freedom of speech and academic freedom at the Office for Students, and has already taken firm action to require universities to 'protect and promote' freedom. Significantly, ideological tests for employment and promotion are no longer to be imposed by universities – amazing that this should be needed when the Test Acts (discriminating against religious dissenters in education and employment) were abolished in the 19th century. Universities have a special importance as pillars of freedom of speech, expression and thought. But they are not, of course, alone. Stronger protection for freedom of opinion is needed in other institutions and professions. It is a lamentable proof of the inadequacy of legal protection when medical professionals can be harassed or even dismissed for publicly upholding biology or resisting damaging treatments. In many and varied public institutions, it is unlikely that anyone would be employed in the first place if they were known to dissent from progressive orthodoxy – in other words, to share views held by the majority of the population. Such are the punishments for modern blasphemy. There is a long and hard road to follow before widespread damage done by activist minorities – sometimes taxpayer-funded – can be undone. But the indispensable first step must surely be to protect freedom of speech so that error and falsehood can at least be contested without risking dismissal or ostracism. England should be a country where 'what is not forbidden is protected'.
