Mabel Dore in '44

LOS ANGELES — The Democratic establishment swung back in California on Tuesday.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass advanced to a November runoff in a better-than-expected showing in her reelection bid, while Xavier Becerra was in solid position to make the runoff in the race for governor — both blunting a surge of outsider energy and massive spending in the nation’s most populous state.

While the governor’s race was still not called early Wednesday, and Bass still has a runoff to contend with, early results suggested the limits of anti-establishment currents that threatened for months to upend the party apparatus in this heavily Democratic state.

“We've been fighting, because we're not going to let somebody turn back our clock,” Bass said in a fiery victory speech after dancing across the stage to the podium.

It was the same for establishment Democrats elsewhere. In deep-blue San Francisco, a union-backed proposal to impose a surtax on companies with “overpaid CEOs” trailed in early returns, though with the race still too close to call. In the race to succeed Nancy Pelosi in Congress, Scott Wiener, a prominent state senator, and Connie Chan, a progressive city supervisor who received Pelosi’s endorsement, advanced over a third Democrat, Saikat Chakrabarti, who had been deeply critical of Pelosi and the Democratic Party. And across the Rockies in Iowa, in one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races, Democrats picked establishment-supported Josh Turek on Tuesday night.

Trump supporter tries to completely change his tune at sentencing after vowing to execute judges handling cases against the president and Jan. 6 rioters

A Nevada man is headed to prison for threatening federal judges who handled cases involving President Donald Trump and Jan. 6 rioters, as well as public officials, saying things like, "I'll spill your blood" and "you can't do s— to Donald Trump."

Julianne McShane at MS NOW:

Veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley has been fired from CBS News a day after he excoriated the show’s new executive producer and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss in a staff meeting. The venerated show’s newly named executive producer, Nick Bilton, announced the network “parted ways” with Pelley in a Tuesday note to staff obtained by MS NOW. “I know how much Scott meant to many of you, and I don’t say this lightly,” Bilton wrote. “I made repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend, and this afternoon I tried to find common ground. That was not the path Scott chose.” Pelley’s firing deepens a seismic shift for the network, which has seen an exodus of journalists since David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, appointed Weiss as editor-in-chief last year. Last week, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s contract expired after she criticized Weiss for pulling her segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons from the air. (Weiss maintained that the story was not ready. A revised version aired a month later.) Pelley has worked for the show since 2004 and has won more than 50 Emmy Awards, according to his bio on the network’s website, which also notes he won half of all major awards earned by “60 Minutes” during his tenure.

In a staff meeting Monday, Pelley told Bilton — a journalist and filmmaker who has no prior experience in broadcast television — he had “slender” qualifications for the job, and that Weiss was “murdering” “60 Minutes,” according to The New York Times, which obtained a recording of the meeting. “She does not love this place,” Pelley reportedly said of Weiss, according to the Times. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

The news of Pelley’s firing was first reported by journalist Oliver Darcy, author of the newsletter Status.

See BS News fires Scott Pelley after he righteously unloaded on Nick Bilton and Bari Weiss over the MAGA direction 60 Minutes (and CBS News in general) is headed towards under the Weiss/Ellison axis of evil.

See Also:

HuffPost: Scott Pelley Fired From ‘60 Minutes’ Following Explosive Showdown With New Boss

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

On Sunday, May 31—the day before Pride Month—a Twitter user posted a photo from Vivian Jenna Wilson's new Savage X Fenty Pride campaign alongside a sweeping claim: that were it not for Vivian, Musk would have never purchased Twitter, never gotten involved in politics, and Kamala Harris would be president. The notion that Musk's Twitter acquisition was connected to his daughter's transition has been the subject of speculation for years, bolstered by leaked text messages from the Delaware court filings that linked his purchase directly to the suspension of a transphobic account, and by his own biographer's reporting that his “anti-woke sentiments” were "partly triggered" by Wilson's transition. But Musk had never confirmed it in his own words. This time, he replied with a single word: "True"—seemingly confirming what the court filings, the Isaacson biography, and Musk's own public statements had long suggested: that the $44 billion purchase of Twitter was driven, at least in significant part, by his reaction to his daughter's transition and the platform's treatment of anti-trans content. "We should never forget that if not for Vivian, Elon Musk never would have gotten involved, never would have purchased Twitter, Kamala Harris would be President and the Left-wing would have total instrumental control over the construction of Skynet," read the post by Twitter user Syd Steyerhart, in response to Vivian's photo and news about her campaign for Rihanna's lingerie brand. "True," Musk responded. Then, today, he doubled down, writing that Vivian "was murdered by the woke mind virus, now it will die."

The exchange is striking, but it is not a revelation so much as a confirmation. Evidence that Musk’s purchase of Twitter was substantially influenced by transgender people has been accumulating for years. In March 2022, Twitter suspended the Babylon Bee, a right-wing satire account, for posting a headline naming U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Rachel Levine—a transgender woman—its “Man of the Year.” Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon confirmed that Musk called him directly to verify the suspension and “even mused on that call that he might need to buy Twitter.”

[...] Musk has since used the platform he purchased to wage a sustained campaign against transgender people.

kos at Daily Kos:

Last year, on June 26, I wrote a story headlined, “Trump’s DOJ is targeting Daily Kos.” At the time, I couldn’t explain what was happening. A gag order prevented it. Now I can. It started on May 5, 2025, when I received an FBI order demanding that Daily Kos preserve records related to a user account on this site, which I will not identify.

[...]

At the time, our systems retained sign-up email addresses, password recovery emails, and IP logs tied to account activity for one year, including sign-up IPs and IP addresses attached to comments and stories. We’ve since dramatically reduced what we retain. The FBI letter included the following: “I request that you not disclose the existence of this request to the subscriber or any other person, other than as necessary to comply with this request.” At first, I interpreted that as a request, not a command. I hoped maybe the whole thing would quietly disappear. Instead, on May 15, we received a subpoena. It required us to turn over all user accounts and IP data we had retained for that account. The order offered no explanation why. [...]

Our legal counsel made clear that violating the gag order could carry serious consequences. So for weeks, this entire fight happened completely in secret. At first, our attorneys advised near-total silence. Their position was straightforward: don’t test the order, don’t antagonize prosecutors, don’t create additional legal exposure. You know me, I seethed.  wasn’t willing to quietly sit there while Trump’s DOJ targeted this community in secret. But I also wasn’t eager to trigger a second legal battle over violating the gag order itself. I even wondered out loud, would it be so bad if I was jailed for violating the order? My lawyer disabused me of that notion—the sanctions would be financial. We couldn’t afford those. So internally, we spent weeks arguing over where the line actually was and whether there even was a safe line at all. 

Meanwhile, we immediately reviewed the targeted user’s comment history to figure out what could possibly have triggered FBI scrutiny. What we found was someone who had made just 12 comments on the site, most of them highly critical of Trump. There was nothing suspicious about the account. None of the comments had ever been flagged by the community, as routinely happens anytime someone comes close to making an actual threat. We even considered the possibility that the request had nothing to do with Daily Kos. Maybe this user committed a potential crime elsewhere, and they had tracked them to our site.  But without further information, I wasn’t interested in playing ball. We needed to know why the DOJ wanted this information. Until then, we weren’t turning anything over. 

The lawyers warned that resistance would probably fail. Courts give the government enormous deference in cases like these. Meanwhile, internally, people worried about staff morale, financial strain, and what a prolonged fight with Trump’s DOJ could do to the company. Those concerns were legitimate. Running an independent media organization is expensive in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. But to me, this was existential. How could Daily Kos remain a trusted space for political participation and community engagement if we simply handed user data over every time Trump’s DOJ demanded it without explanation? No way in hell was I going to normalize that. And at that point, we still had no idea how we were going to pay for any of this. But we moved forward anyway. I hired a criminal defense attorney—the first time in my life I’d ever needed one—and because Daily Kos is based in California, we also retained Denver counsel to challenge the subpoena issued out of the FBI’s Denver office. We committed to the fight before we knew whether we could realistically afford it. That was a bit scary.

Around June 17, our Denver counsel contacted the prosecutor’s office to determine exactly what they were after and discovered the original prosecutor had already left for private practice. That turned out to be part of a broader pattern. DOJ offices around the country were already experiencing serious brain drain as Trump’s politicization of the department drove career attorneys out. Any hopes that this meant the end of the case were dashed when the replacement prosecutor came in hot the next day, June 18, informing our lawyers that this case had “some priority” and confirming they were investigating “threatening posts.” Having reviewed the comments ourselves, we were flummoxed. A handful of posts expressed the belief that the country wouldn’t truly escape Trump’s political grip until he was gone, saying things along the lines of (paraphrased): “The only real end to this Trump nightmare is him no longer being around. As long as he’s alive, he’ll keep directing his movement and loyalists, whether he’s free or locked up.”  That was the gist of it.

And objectively speaking, it was true. Trump dominates American politics as long as he remains alive and politically active. Nobody was advocating violence. Nobody was instructing anyone to do anything. The comments were so innocuous that none had ever even been flagged by the community. But the prosecutor escalated anyway. “The prosecutor also mentioned that the government can get this information by subpoena or by search warrant,” our lawyer wrote to us. “By sending a subpoena the US attorney’s office was attempting to do this the quiet, easy way instead of the public, hard way.” The fuckers thought “quiet” was the “easy” way when I’m involved. On June 19, I replied to our lawyer with two separate emails: “I’m happy for them to do it the public hard way.” “I fully endorse them coming in the public hard way.” Apparently I wanted the emphasis documented twice.

The U.S. attorney’s office seemed genuinely confused by our refusal to fold. They repeatedly pressed our lawyers, asking why we were being so difficult.

[...] At that point, I no longer believed staying completely silent was sustainable. We needed community backup.  So our legal team went back to work trying to determine whether there was a legally defensible path that would allow us to alert the community without violating the gag order itself. Eventually, they concluded that we could discuss broader threats facing Daily Kos without explicitly disclosing the subpoena itself or protected details of the investigation.

That became our strategy. So on June 26, after weeks of carefully navigating the gag order and legal restrictions, I published “Trump’s DOJ is targeting Daily Kos.” [...] That’s how authoritarian systems function—not through constant dramatic displays of force, but by making examples out of a few targets so everyone else learns to preemptively comply. But with us, they picked the wrong target. And we were able to stand firm because this community had our backs. Your donations turned what they assumed would be a routine compliance exercise into a time-consuming, difficult legal fight backed by serious counsel and a community unwilling to be intimidated. At some point, they clearly decided to focus on easier targets elsewhere. And that’s the story. The DOJ came after Daily Kos, and we told them to pound sand until they decided to move on.

A Foreign Agents Registration Act filing from October 2025 says Trump’s former national security adviser is working for the Republic of Srpska, the Bosnia and Herzegovina entity run by Milorad Dodik, a Putin ally. That was enough to set off parts of MAGA, including Catturd asking, “$100,000 per month?”

Sebastian Gorka piled on too, saying he had to promise never to work for another government when he joined the first Trump administration and assumed Flynn signed something similar. Flynn, of course, is the same guy who pleaded guilty twice to lying to federal agents during the Russia investigation before Trump pardoned him.

So now MAGA is mad that one of its own is getting paid by a Putin-aligned government, which is almost adorable considering how long they’ve spent pretending the Putin thing was invented by Rachel Maddow in a candlelit basement.

Is this where America First gets a currency conversion chart?

Edith Olmsted at TNR:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is continuing his discriminatory campaign to remake the U.S. military in his image. Last month, a list of nearly two dozen one-star promotions included no women and only two nonwhite officers. On Monday, The New York Times was able to reveal exactly how that happened. Hegseth personally intervened to block the promotion of several senior Navy officers, including at least two female officers and two Black male officers, four current and former defense officials told the paper.  

This is not the first time Hegseth has moved to block or delay the promotion of female and Black military officers. He did the same thing to Army officers in March, and has reportedly thwarted the advancements of more than one dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marines.  [...] Pentagon rules say that the secretary can only block promotions if there is an issue related to a service member’s fitness to lead—not their identities, or whatever other problem Hegseth seems to have with them. 

Sasha Rogelberg

Mon, June 1, 2026 at 10:00 AM MST 4 min read1.5k

Less than two months after the Trump administration rolled out its electronic tariff refund platform, it is now threatening to bring the operation to a standstill.

The federal government removed information from the site of George Washington's home about the nine enslaved people held there.

PHILADELPHIA (CN) — The Third Circuit is gearing up for a legal clash Tuesday between the City of Philadelphia and the Trump administration after the federal government dismantled a public exhibit about the people enslaved by George Washington.

In 2010, the National Park Service and Philadelphia unveiled “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” an open-air exhibit across the street from Independence Hall and directly atop the remains of Washington’s Philadelphia home.

Consisting of several informational panels and video presentations placed on walls indicating where Washington’s house stood, the exhibit told of the nine enslaved Africans held on the site by the first president: Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Moll, Joe and Ona Judge — the last of whom fled Washington’s enslavement in 1796 and evaded a subsequent manhunt, spending her final 51 years a free woman.

In March 2025, however, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of the Interior to review national park displays the administration argues “inappropriately disparage” the United States.

LONDON -- At least 17 people were killed and more than 100 people injured in a large-scale overnight Russian missile and drone strike on Ukraine, officials said, with the capital Kyiv the main target of Moscow's latest long-range barrage.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said in a post to Telegram that the most significant damage was wrought in Kyiv, Dnipro and Kharkiv regions. At least six people were killed in Kyiv and 11 people -- including a child -- were killed in Dnipro, local Ukrainian officials said.

Ukraine's air force said in a post to Telegram that Russia launched 73 missiles and 656 drones into the country, of which 40 missiles and 602 drones were intercepted or suppressed.

WASHINGTON – A federal judge today issued a Temporary Restraining Order, prohibiting the National Park Service (NPS) from taking any action against Accountability Now USA for displaying an “8647” flag as part of the group’s permitted public demonstration on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. The demonstrators are represented by the ACLU of the District of Columbia (ACLU-D.C.).

Binaifer Nowrojee for The Guardian (05.31.2026):

The shooting at a mosque and school in San Diego has forced Muslim Americans to ask themselves painful questions. After the killing of three people in an armed attack last week, they now wonder if other places of worship will be targeted next, whether they can still send children to school and trust that they will return home unharmed, and whether they can still safely walk the streets as people identifiable by their faith. These are also questions that Jewish communities are reckoning with, most recently after the stabbings in London’s Golders Green neighborhood. Over the past three years, against the backdrop of wars in the Middle East, antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate have flared across the west, with each rising to record levels. But these two hatreds have rarely been seen as related dangers, let alone confronted as a common threat to societies.

On the weekend before the San Diego attack, tens of thousands rallied in London behind the anti-Muslim agitator Tommy Robinson, who declared a “battle of Britain” and called for “remigration”. “It’s time for many Muslims to leave this country,” he said. Across the west, as support for the far right surges, hostility towards Islam and Muslims has become central to its political platforms, and has spread beyond it. When Muslims prayed publicly in London’s Trafalgar Square in March to mark Ramadan – just as other religions have done on their own holy days – leading Conservative politicians denounced it as an act of “intimidation” and “domination”.

The violence in San Diego came out of the demonization of Islam and the dehumanization of Muslims that has been around for decades – by politicians, in the media, in popular culture and across social media. Islam is now widely, and even casually, described as a backward or inherently violent religion that represents a civilizational threat. Meanwhile, Muslims are portrayed as people whose customs and values are irreconcilable with western ones. They are cast as a threat to the majority’s identity, culture, security and demography.

Antisemitism has its deep roots in vile conspiracy theories about hidden power, claiming that Jews form a shadowy elite that manipulates events through the secret control of governments, banks, the media and courts. These libels are centuries-old, and they persist today. George Soros – a Holocaust survivor and the founder of the philanthropic organization I lead, the Open Society Foundations – is a frequent target of antisemitic attacks that deploy ugly tropes to allege his human rights philanthropy is a plot to subvert societies. In 2018, these conspiracy theories led to a pipe bomb being sent to his home and were used by an attacker to justify the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Sometimes, anti-Muslim conspiracy theories fuse with antisemitic ones. The clearest case is with the white nationalist “great replacement theory”, conjured up by the French polemicist Renaud Camus, who falsely claims that a conspiratorial elite is replacing white majority populations with non-whites, mostly from Muslim backgrounds. The term “replacist elites” is used as a code for Jews. In 2017, white nationalists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Nigel Farage accused Soros of encouraging people to “flood Europe” and claimed Soros didn’t want the continent “to be based on Christianity”. It’s a single conspiracy theory that requires two elements at once: a Muslim population to fear, and a Jewish elite to blame.

There are also echoes across time. The anti-immigration campaigns of today carry reminders of the antisemitic laws that were imposed in the UK and the US in the early 20th century to prevent Jews fleeing persecution in eastern Europe from finding refuge, including after the Holocaust. The “Aliens Act” of 1905 was the first British law to restrict immigration, with champions of the legislation describing Jewish people as “a race apart” and warning of the need to “push back this intolerable invasion”. Far-right groups marched into neighborhoods, claiming jobs were being taken from them. The press attacked Jewish communities for the “foreign” languages they spoke and the customs they practiced. Today, the two communities are frequently pitted against each other. When Zohran Mamdani was campaigning to become New York City’s first Muslim mayor, there was a torrent of hate directed at his identity, sometimes framed as concern for Jewish safety. In Germany, the chancellor has claimed that antisemitism has been “imported” by migrants, ignoring his own country’s history. And in France, Marine Le Pen – whose party has antisemitic roots – says her National Rally is a shield to protect Jewish people from “Islamist ideology”. In each case, the message was the same: for one community to be safe, the other must be feared.

Kevin Robillard at HuffPost:

The single-most viewed clip of the 2026 election cycle might be from Xavier Becerra’s appearance at the League of California Cities conference last month. A moderator asks Becerra, a former state attorney general and the frontrunner in the governor’s race, about other candidates’ criticism of his decision to accept a donation from Chevron, the oil giant founded in Southern California. Becerra argued that fossil fuels were a fact of life. “Chevron employs a lot of very hard-working people, talented folks — engineers, construction workers. That’s the problem with politics: They’re not the bad guy. Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle?” he says. “You need Chevron. I need Chevron. My people in the state of California need Chevron.” “If Chevron wants to give me a check, that’s their prerogative,” he adds. Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democratic activist who is Becerra’s most serious challenger for the job, made sure millions upon millions of Californians saw Becerra’s answer. He’s featured it in three different attack ads, omitting much of the answer to make Becerra’s statement that he “needs Chevron” sound like he needs the oil company to fund his campaign.

“Xavier Becerra is part of a broken system that delivers for them, not you,” the narrator says in one of the ads. Becerra’s answer, and the speed at which Steyer turned it into an attack ad, highlights an ongoing struggle within the Democratic Party over whether the party should adopt a more conciliatory approach towards the oil and gas industry as it seeks a political comeback.

And while Becerra does not appear eager to repeat his answer — his campaign did not respond to a request for comment — races outside of bright blue California show many of the party’s most-hyped candidates are taking a notably friendlier tack towards the industry.

“It is unrealistic for policymakers to only talk about oil and gas in a negative light, because people are deeply reliant on oil and gas in their day-to-day lives,” said Emily Becker, who works for the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “We can’t tell people that every time you gas up your car, you’re doing something wrong.” It’s a notable shift compared to how the party talked about energy issues following President Donald Trump’s first election and into Biden’s administration, when an overwhelming focus on battling climate change predominated and activist groups pushing for a “Green New Deal” led presidential candidates to compete about whose plan could complete the transition away from fossil fuels the fastest. Even when American oil production reached record highs under Biden’s administration, the president declined to boast about it. The shifting message has gone hand in hand with two trends: the clean energy industry’s viability has increased, and the Democratic Party has made fighting climate change less central to its message. But Tre Easton, a vice president at the moderate Searchlight Institute, said the party still needs to go further into turning its climate change policy into a broader energy policy.

“There’s still sort of this consensus from the past 10 years where oil and gas companies are persona non grata for most Democrats in D.C.,” Easton said. “That’s an untenable situation. If that’s the entirety of the conversation, Republicans are going to dictate the terms. And that’s not good for anybody.” So far, the message shift has been most pronounced in regions of the country where oil and gas is a major industry. Bobby Pulido, a former Tejano music star running as a Democrat in a rural district in south Texas, has been unapologetically positive about oil and gas production. More than 600,000 Texans work in oil and gas, and the industry makes up about 13% of the state’s gross domestic product.

“In many of the counties, some of the best-paying jobs are in oil and gas,” he said of his district in a phone interview. He said many oil company owners and executives play up Democratic threats to the industry to their employees: “They say ‘the other ones want to take your job,’ so vote Republican.”

[...] Some mainstream environmental groups, meanwhile, are largely accepting the shift as long as Democrats continue to contrast themselves with Trump’s unmitigated hostility towards wind and solar power, which has led his administration to make it as difficult as possible to get new clean energy projects off the ground.

Schools in England have seen a sharp rise in suspensions for homophobic, transphobic, racist and ableist abuse in the last five years, specialists have said. Department for Education data documenting the reasons for suspensions show that schools logged more than 13,000 instances of homophobic or transphobic abuse between the 2020-21 and 2024-25 school years. The figure includes 12,977 suspensions and 88 permanent exclusions.