Chuck Darwin

California Voters Will Decide On 14 Statewide Policy Proposals Come November, Including the High-Stakes
Amendment Billionaire Tax,
an $11 Billion Affordable Housing Bond
and Voter ID Requirements

See the Measures on California’s November Ballot
https://www.independent.com/2026/07/05/billionaire-tax-affordable-housing-see-the-measures-on-californias-november-ballot/

Mexico takes on England in a World Cup round-of-16 match in Mexico City at 5 p.m. PDT (Fox, Telemundo).
https://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/live/mexico-england-world-cup-start-time-watch-results-highlights-news

The biggest bullet dodged this week was the Supreme Court's decision in
Trump v. Barbara,

in which the court ruled against Trump’s executive order attempting to nullify the birthright citizenship rights explicitly granted by the Constitution.

One of the grand plans of this administration has been to ethnically cleanse the United States,

and had the court gone along with Trump and his aide-de-camp, Stephen Miller,
millions of Americans might now be facing the end of their citizenship
—including the U.S. World Cup team’s current leading scorer, Folarin Balogun.

Despite this rare victory of reason over right-wing nuttery,
I think we should be concerned that the conservative legal movement still has its eye on waging war on the
so-called Reconstruction Amendments

—especially the one that grants birthright citizenship in the first place: the Fourteenth Amendment.

Do the court’s conservatives disdain the Reconstruction Amendments?

“They definitely do, to a certain extent,”
says TNR’s Matt Ford.

“They’ve largely read the Fifteenth Amendment out of the Constitution,
in "Brnovich and Callais",
by making it impossible to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act,

and they more or less nullified the disqualification clause in "Trump v. Anderson".

There are parts they’re fine with,
like the equal protection clause in some circumstances,
but they’ll never interpret it as broadly as the liberals.”

Here’s where the biggest conflict lies,
as the liberal position is generally that the Reconstruction Amendments were a second founding,
not a postbellum clean-up.

“In this view,” says Ford, “Congress has broad powers to ensure that there is no American underclass or subaltern population
-- which Jim Crow nonetheless managed to create for about 90 years.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson got at this in her concurring opinion,
in which she took issue with Thomas’s dissent on these lines.

Thomas’s “narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification,”
she wrote,
adding that his take on the matter
“elides the entire point of the Second Founding:
The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation,
not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”

Thomas didn’t win the argument this week.

But the fact that these matters are being argued in the first place is cause for serious alarm,
according to former Massachusetts Senate candidate Alex Rikleen.

“By even considering the legitimacy of birthright citizenship,
the Roberts Court,
stacked with jurists ready and willing to make
anti-constitutional rulings time and again,
has helped transform a fringe white supremacist attack on the 14th Amendment into a question that millions of people now understand as up for debate.”

This is hardly a new or novel fear.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in "Trump v. Anderson"
—in which they essentially deleted the disqualification clause from the Constitution
—was enabled by the fact that too many were willing to countenance the idea that the plain English language of the Fourteenth Amendment was, in fact, open to interpretation.

I am still angry that The New York Times in 2023 referred to the disqualification clause as “an obscure clause of a constitutional amendment enacted after the Civil War,”

thus injecting a derogatory bit of editorializing into what purported to be a straight news piece.

In light of the tête-à-tête between Thomas and Jackson,
I’m disturbed anew by the way the Times casually denigrated the amendments
“enacted after the Civil War,”
-- as if they were some stitched-on appendage and not language that carries the same force and lawfulness as the founding-era amendments.

If the paper of record is skeptical that the Reconstruction Amendments are legitimate

(and they, like the court’s conservatives, do seem interested in creating a subaltern class beyond the Constitution’s protections, for what it’s worth),

this will only further the right-wing project to tear those amendments out of the Constitution
and undo the nation’s second founding.

So be glad that the worst didn’t happen,
but stay on guard
—we are not out of danger yet.
https://newrepublic.com/post/212686/supreme-court-constitution-14th-amendment

Dropping out of college after one year following his participation in the deadly white nationalist “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017,

Nick Fuentes launched a career as a racist, antisemitic, misogynistic far-right activist and livestreamer.

From this perch, he guides a largely online movement known as “Groypers,”
consisting primarily of “incels” (involuntarily celibate): racist, antisemitic, misogynistic disaffected young white men.

He works to infiltrate the conservative movement and push it further to the right.

https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/nick-fuentes-says-women-should-not-be-able-go-college-or-travel-alone

Trump, who will land in Ankara with a massive team of a thousand people for the NATO Summit,
will first visit Anıtkabir, the tomb of the Turkish Republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

After this visit, Trump will proceed to Beştepe for a critical meeting with President Erdoğan.

Ahead of the summit, Trump once again brought up his classic criticisms that the US single-handedly shoulders the financial burden within NATO.

Piling contempt on his allies through social media platforms,
the US President harshly criticized both the Alliance's budget distribution and members' attitudes during the Iran war.

Stating that the US made a massive expenditure of $999 billion between 2014 and 2025, Trump listed contributions from the UK, France, Italy, and Poland, while arguing that the budget shares of Germany and some other countries remained "too low."

In another post, Trump noted: "With no reciprocal relationship in sight, it's complete nonsense for the US to continue moving alone on this unilateral path. They didn't stand by us!"

https://en.haberler.com/trump-s-ankara-schedule-finalized-here-is-his-2278453/

Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career

I’d been asking people about Chris Butler,
the eccentric religious leader Tulsi Gabbard once described as her guru.

Gabbard grew up in Butler’s breakaway Hare Krishna group.

Her parents held senior positions in the organization. 

Butler’s followers practice a form of Hinduism that involves devotion to a single deity,
in their case Krishna,
and certain expectations around meditation, yoga and diet.

Some former members, however, have called the group a cult
and said disciples were isolated from the outside world,
characterizations the group has denied.

Former devotees had been telling me for weeks that Butler controlled his followers’ major life decisions
and demanded total obedience and secrecy.

They said he spent years working to extend his reach into politics
— and they suspected Gabbard’s rise in Washington was the culmination of that effort.

Since Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, had been picked by President-elect Donald Trump to be director of national intelligence, I wanted to understand: Just how much influence did Butler have on her?

Not much, Saltzburg told me in that first conversation. She also played down the importance of Butler’s organization, the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF).

“I don’t even really see it as a real group,” she said.

Nine months later, Saltzburg, then 53, got back in touch.

This time, she had a different story to tell. She didn’t want to say much on a regular phone line, so we switched to an encrypted messaging app.

Saltzburg told me she had worked for Butler as a secretary in the 1990s,
and lived for a time with Gabbard’s parents and other devotees in a rented property.

She said she had recently fallen out with the leaders of SIF, who she believed were mishandling allegations of physical and sexual abuse by some members of the organization.

A few months earlier, she said, she had been arrested for briefly housing a teenage runaway who alleged abuse by a parent associated with the group. Saltzburg claimed SIF members had engineered her arrest.

It all seemed a little conspiratorial and hard to follow, and I was deep into another story.

But there was a minor mystery that had been nagging at me since I had looked into SIF the previous year, a name I’d stumbled on deep within some records.
“One question,” I wrote to Saltzburg last September. “Do you know what Nine Isles is?”
Her answer surprised me, and it sent me on a nearly year-long quest to better understand Gabbard, who left office last week.

Saltzburg told me NineIsles.com was an email domain used by Butler’s office,
one reserved for his secretaries and select disciples.
She said she herself had received emails from Nine Isles addresses when she worked on Gabbard’s campaigns.

She thought she had deleted most of them, she said.

But when Saltzburg logged into an old Gmail account, she found hundreds of emails from her SIF days, many from Nine Isles accounts. She shared some with me.

Their content was extraordinary.

Dozens of attached memos appeared to document directives and advice for Gabbard from her time in Congress.

Some contained instructions on what legislation she should propose,
which policies she should embrace and how she should conduct herself on television.

They had an air of authority.

A memo about a proposal to partition war-torn Iraq into three states quoted an unnamed person as saying it was
“time for TG to come up with this idea.”

Some of the language was harshly critical.

One memo I found, from January 2015, contained a derisive assessment of a statement Gabbard was to give in response to President Barack Obama’s annual address to Congress.

“In the first place, nobody gives a shit what you think about his State of the Union speech, unless you’re going to say something of interest,”
the memo quoted someone as saying.

“You’re not even trying. You’ve become really intellectually lazy.”

In another, Gabbard was described as “chickenshit” and “mealymouthed” for her comments on a policy proposal.

I noticed that Gabbard for the most part was not listed as a recipient of these emails,
though many went to people around her, including her parents.

The attached memos appeared to be transcripts, often fragmentary, of spoken remarks or conversations.

Some of the memos had file names that included “Call with TG”
and attributed remarks to Gabbard,
while in others the spoken remarks referred to Gabbard in third person.

But the main speaker in each memo
— the person who appeared to be issuing directives and sometimes castigating Gabbard
— wasn’t named.

When I asked Saltzburg about this,
she seemed amused.
It was Butler, of course, she said.

No one else could speak to Gabbard like that, she added.

Saltzburg said the memos were unattributed precisely to mask Butler’s identity if they ever became public

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/06/21/tulsi-gabbard-her-guru-mysterious-messages-that-helped-shape-her-political-career/

Utah State University professor Robert Davies calculated that the heat from the completed Stratos AI Datacenter would raise local daytime temperature by five degrees Fahrenheit
and a staggering 28 degrees at night.

Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University,
warned that these temperature spikes would transform the local environment from semiarid into something more closely resembling the Sahara Desert.
There were also additional concerns that the center would be a massive water draw in a region already prone to drought and facing increasing water shortages.

Despite this, and the complaints of thousands of residents, the project was approved by the Box Elder County Commission in May 2026
—barely two months after it had been announced.
The relative alacrity of their decision-making was partially enabled by the fact that Stratos utilized Utah’s "Military Installation Development Authority", a state entity whose involvement let it bypass ordinary county zoning and the public review such projects normally require
(since the project could theoretically help improve military AI adoption and cybersecurity).

Stratos’s chief backer is Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity billionaire investor better known for his role on the TV show Shark Tank than as an AI infrastructure guru.
He has claimed that Stratos would create 2,000 permanent jobs
(despite the fact that Stratos is yet to have a tenant, and that data centers have historically created far fewer jobs than advocates claim).

But O’Leary’s promises have done nothing to dampen local opposition to Stratos.
In fact, opposition intensified throughout the month of May until Utah Governor Spencer Cox
—who had initially backed the project when O’Leary met with him in January 2026
—signed an executive order on May 29 to ensure that the state properly evaluates data center proposals.

While the Stratos Project was not specifically mentioned in the order,
the timing of the announcement, coupled with the significant statewide pushback to the project,
showed it was clearly an inflection point.
Less than a week later, O’Leary agreed to significantly scale back the proposed data center from 40,000 acres to just over 20,000.
“People are concerned about data centers,” Cox said in a press conference,
“they’re concerned about the lake, they’re concerned about resources, and they should be concerned.”

So, six months after the supposed “industrial marvel” of the Stratos Project was introduced,
the results have been an angry local community,
an embarrassed investor,
and a local state government belatedly searching for a sensible framework with which to govern data center growth.
The backlash has not stopped yet, either.
On June 23, Utah state Senate President J. Stuart Adams,
who was also the chairman of the Utah agency that initially approved Stratos,
lost his Senate seat to a rival who explicitly criticized his support of O’Leary’s project.
https://newrepublic.com/article/212169/stratos-data-center-utah-investors

A White House report brands the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution -- especially at the National Museum of American History -- as radical activists who cannot be trusted,
indicating that Trump may be preparing to install his own team of MAGA yes-men
The report released late on Independence Day by the White House Domestic Policy Council
comes in the midst of Trump’s aggressive campaign to overhaul some of Washington’s most sacred cultural and historic institutions.

Trump in March revealed his intention to force changes at the Smithsonian Institution
with an executive order that targeted funding for programs that advanced
“divisive narratives” and “improper ideologies" as he continued a broadside against culture he deems uncomfortably accurate

https://apnews.com/article/trump-smithsonian-leadership-activists-history-museum-cda2e8cff29f56a34e5a5d510bb45cda

Women in the US army are more likely to be killed by fellow servicemen than enemy combatants,
according to an analysis by the Intercept.

This found:
“Between 2011 and August 2025,
at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army
– more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans.”

The analysis further noted “that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers,
the opposite of national and global trends”.

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/30/army-women-death-domestic-violence-sexual-assault/

Sysdig’s Threat Research Team has documented what it assesses to be the first ransomware operation
driven end-to-end by a large language model.

The operator, which Sysdig calls #JADEPUFFER, broke into a server, harvested credentials, moved to a separate production target, encrypted a database, and destroyed data,

all without a human at the keyboard.

Ransomware has always needed a skilled person somewhere in the loop.

That may no longer be true.

https://securityaffairs.com/194713/ai/jadepuffer-first-end-to-end-ai-driven-ransomware-operation.html

The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations,
abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales,
restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness
and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.

The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected:
Trump campaigned as a champion of machismo and violence.

In the view of critics and even some A.T.F. veterans, the agency is enacting changes at the expense of public safety.
The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/us/politics/trump-gun-rights-laws.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

I could go on and on about Republican hypocrisy,
but there’s not really much value in pointing it out, is there?

You know they’re craven hypocrites,
I know they’re craven hypocrites,
but their voting base doesn’t care.

Indeed, far from being ashamed of their inconsistencies and lies and corruption, Republicans revel in it.

They seem to take great pleasure in the fact that there is one set of rules for them and another set of rules for the hoi polloi.

Trump has even said he believes the constitution gives him
“the right to do whatever I want as president”.

Many of his minions seem to believe they also have the right to do whatever they like

Another incident occurred last month in New York City, where a Brooklyn coffee shop said in a since-deleted social media post that
had staff recognized him, they would have turned away the Democratic congressman Dan Goldman,
who had been at the cafe with his daughter earlier that day,
over his support for Israel.

“We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers, or anyone in between,” the post read.

The incident sparked immediate backlash, with some accusing the shop of antisemitism.

The US justice department’s civil rights division has said it is investigating the cafe for potentially discriminating against a patron
“based on their race, religion or national origin”.

In an interview with CNN, Goldman called the episode “sad”
but said he would rather the justice department spend its resources
“investigating antisemitism against people who do not have a platform that I do, who are not elected officials”.

Goldman, an Israel supporter who was endorsed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac)
and received funding from aligned political action committees,
has since lost his primary to Brad Lander.

Both are Jewish,
but Lander is far more critical of Israel,
a stance that helped propel him to a resounding victory in the progressive Brooklyn and Manhattan district Goldman had represented.

Goldman has since said that his support for Israel has cost him the election.

“Ultimately this really did come down to Israel-Gaza,” he said in an interview with CNN.

“It has taken on a massive and outsized role in Democratic politics.”

Goldman’s loss was perhaps the most vivid example of how reflexive support for Israel
– once viewed as a prerequisite for political viability
– is no longer a safe bet,

and many otherwise progressive Democrats are learning that the hard way
as a number have lost seats in recent primaries to unabashedly pro-Palestinian challengers.

“It used to be that politicians on the broader left could be progressive on many issues except for Palestine,
but that’s really not the case anymore,”
Ashik Siddique, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has backed many such candidates,
said in a recent interview. “It has become a very clear litmus test.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/05/gaza-protests-democrats-debate-on-tactics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Scott Wiener,
a gay Jewish state senator and trans rights advocate who is currently the frontrunner in the race to replace the longtime representative Nancy Pelosi in California’s 11th district,
said he felt forced to leave last week’s annual trans pride march in San Francisco
after a group of people ran up to him at a local park where the event was taking place, surrounded him and screamed at him over his positions on Israel’s war on Gaza.
“They were so physically and verbally aggressive that it was impossible for me to safely remain in the park,” Wiener said in a statement shortly after the incident,
which was also filmed and shared on social media by a local activist.
The video shows activists surrounding Wiener and screaming profanities at him, with one of them at one point saying:
“You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel.”

“I have no objection whatsoever to anyone disagreeing with me, opposing me or protesting me,” Wiener said.
“But when opposition and disagreement transition to harassment, including cornering me, touching me or trying to physically bully me out of a public event, that crosses a line.”

The episode sparked widespread condemnation from scores of elected officials – including Pelosi and Wiener’s opponent in the congressional race, Connie Chan.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/05/gaza-protests-democrats-debate-on-tactics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Burgum was considered the
not-completely-crazy candidate for the GOP nomination in 2024.

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mpvq5so5qu2o

This passes for journalism—
allowing a liar to lie on your show without calling him a liar,
instead merely asking him to produce evidence for his lies.

Mother Jones notes that nepo baby Tom Kean
“voted against New Jersey’s historic "Earned Sick Leave Act",
which mandates 5 paid sick leave days per year for New Jersey workers.

He also voted against New Jersey’s "No Surprise Medical Bills act"
and two of its paid family leave laws, in 2008 and 2018.”

Kean also supported Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”,
which makes devastating cuts to Medicaid and Medicare,
and will make life a lot harder for people with disabilities.

Kean, in short, voted to ensure the most vulnerable people in the US suffer, all so the rich can get more tax cuts.

Kean, to be fair, is far from the only politician to be a raging hypocrite.

It’s basically a job requirement,
particularly for Republicans.

There are a number of Republican men who make a big song and dance about how evil abortion is,
but quickly change their tune when their mistress needs one.

In 2017, for example,
Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania resigned from Congress after claims he pressured a woman he was having an extramarital affair with to have an abortion.

The following year, Elliott Broidy, a top fundraiser for Donald Trump, resigned from the Republican National Committee after it was revealed that he paid $1.6m to a Playboy Playmate he had had an affair with.

Broidy got the woman pregnant and she decided to have an abortion.

Herschel Walker, a former football star who unsuccessfully ran as a Republican for a US Senate seat in Georgia in 2022, has also been accused of paying for an abortion.

Walker denied the claim but also said he didn’t know the woman. -- It later transpired she was the mother of one of his children.

Walker, by the way, is now United States ambassador to the Bahamas.

Elaine Chao’s China Trip Just Days After McConnell’s Health Emergency Sparks New Questions

As Sen. Mitch McConnell remains hospitalized following a serious medical emergency,
a separate development involving his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao,
has ignited fresh questions in Washington.

Just three days after McConnell was rushed from his Washington, D.C., home to the hospital,
Chao appeared in Beijing for a meeting with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng.
The timing has drawn intense attention.
McConnell, 84, was hospitalized on June 14 after emergency responders were dispatched to his residence.
His office initially confirmed only that he was receiving medical care, offering no public explanation for what had happened.

Later reporting based on emergency dispatch audio described a call involving an unconscious person,
a possible cardiac arrest and CPR in progress
— though McConnell’s office has not confirmed the details of that emergency call.

Three days later, on June 17, Chao met with Han in Beijing.
https://allchronology.com/2026/07/05/elaine-chaos-china-trip-just-days-after-mcconnells-health-emergency-sparks-new-questions/

Former CIA Director John Brennan is suing the Trump administration, claiming that their investigation into him is a vindictive prosecution.

Brennan, who is under investigation by the Justice Department, is seeking to make sure the administration preserves all records pertaining to that investigation.

In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court, he expressed concern that the DOJ wouldn’t preserve records and communications that would allow him to take legal action in the future if the administration decides to prosecute him.

“Administration officials from the Acting Attorney General to the FBI Director and the Counselor overseeing the Brennan investigations have been publicly declaring Director Brennan a criminal,
not only before securing a conviction in court but even before a full investigation and an indictment,”
Brennan’s attorneys wrote.

“And, certain officials in the Department of Justice are engaging in demonstrably irregular prosecutorial activity in order to gin up a case that will satisfy the President’s direction.”
Brennan wants President Trump, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, federal prosecutors in Miami who have investigated him, and intelligence officers to preserve any records related to him.

The Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office is reportedly involved in investigating Brennan and has hired
John Yoo, a former DOJ official from the Bush administration famous for legally defending torture after 9/11, to consult on a case that may concern Brennan.

One DOJ prosecutor who expressed doubts about the investigation into Brennan,
Maria Medetis Long, was removed from the case in April.
Long is chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, and would normally be involved in a case concerning intelligence.
This suggests that Brennan may have a point about the DOJ’s interest in him having to do with Trump wanting to punish anyone he perceives as an enemy.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/01/politics/trump-foe-john-brennan-sues-administration-records