Category: Newsletters

Some newsletters have a theme, and this week’s focus is a rare one: good news. Let’s start with the subject of a recent column: Izzy Aly, the 40-year-old Egyptian national from Orlando who’d been in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for nearly six months, amid allegations of neglect around his worsening health. Today, I can happily report that Aly is a free man: released from detention and back home in central Florida. But he still needs assistance for his legal bills and replacing what was taken during his time away; you can help out here.

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Soccer, Obama, Knicks give a glimpse of the America we can be at 250

I’m old enough to remember when Lawrence, Kansas was the nightmarish vision of a dystopian U.S. future. The year was 1983, and the corn-fed university town seemed to producers the most fitting all-American location to decimate in a fictional Cold War nuclear apocalypse, ABC’s The Day After.

In 2026, Lawrence is not only still standing, but it’s putting the heart in the American heartland — making love, not nuclear war. And its obscure object of desire is, of all things, a soccer team from 5,000 miles away: the national squad from Arabic-speaking, predominantly Muslim Algeria.

When the Algerians chose Lawrence — about 40 minutes west of Kansas City, where two of its three World Cup matches are taking place — as its training base for the planet’s greatest sporting event, locals came out to greet the foreigners like rockstars.

“I was just so happy that they chose our hometown,” an older man, tearing up slightly, told an Algerian reporter in a video that went viral, as he waited in a rainstorm for the team to arrive. He said he knew three things about Algeria — that it touches the Mediterranean in the north, the Sahara Desert in the south, and that it fought for independence from France. “We don’t know too much, but we want to welcome them here.”

That they did in Lawrence. There are signs on all of the lampposts — “1,2,3, Viva l’Algérie!” — and an official welcome party featured the University of Kansas marching band nailing its cover of the Algerian national anthem while 800 Kansans saluted a rendering of the Algerian flag by local landscape artist Stan Herd. Herd told ABC News that what’s happening in his hometown is “not about football. It’s about cultures coming together. It’s about shared humanity.”

What’s happening in his prairie town is special yet not unique during the second-ever World Cup on U.S. soil. Greensboro, N.C. is festooned with the flags of the Norwegian team that’s training there (although the team chef did have to fly in the players’ halibut) while Chattanooga, Tenn. has gone gaga over sightings of the Spanish soccer superstars training in their city.

There’s a saying in soccer that if one team has all the momentum but then the other team nets a surprise goal on a counterattack, they’ve scored “against the run of play.” It’s hard to imagine anything more against the run of play than these outpourings of international love in states that have voted in the last three elections for the xenophobia of Donald Trump and his mass-deportation regime.

The affection for Algeria is especially remarkable in Kansas, where in 2012 Republican lawmakers enacted a largely symbolic ban against Sharia law in state courtrooms, and in 2017 a man claimed he’d murdered “two Iranians” — the victims were actually of Indian descent — after Kansas candidates ran scare campaigns warning that Muslim terrorism might come to Middle America.

Yet these World Cup welcomes in red America also seem to have captured what feels like a shift in karma that arrived just ahead of the summer solstice. Sure, the news on TV was still giving off bad vibrations — from the reality of a lost war in Iran to the cosmic metaphor of green slime in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. But everyday people seem determined not to let our government drown us in their muck.

With the United States less than two weeks from its 250th birthday, regular folks seem eager, even desperate, to celebrate what is good not just about our nation but the bigger world that’s showed up in North America with a soccer ball and a smile.

There was a brief moment of epiphany last Thursday when I started to wonder if — in spite of everything, and there is a lot of everything — America was on the cusp of a Summer of Love, and a much more successful one than the original 1967 iteration.

I’d hopped in the car for the only place I ever go — the dog park — and the dedication ceremonies for Chicago’s Obama Presidential Center were on the radio. I heard the former first lady, Michelle Obama, uttering words that are never formed on the lips of the 47th president: “equality, empathy, honesty, inclusion, fairness.”

She said of her fellow Americans that “deep down in our hearts and souls we all know right from wrong. We know selflessness from greed, righteousness from injustice.” This was just four days, 900 miles, and about 2,000 light years from Trump’s beclowning of the White House grounds for the Caligula-style spectacle of a blood-soaked Ultimate Fighting slate of cage matches that ended with a horrific slur against — wait for it — Michelle Obama.

The Obama Presidential Center was one window into the Bizarro World where America’s leaders are still deeply invested in democracy. Another was unexpectedly taking place in New York City, where the first NBA championship in 53 years for basketball’s Knicks spread joy from Fifth Avenue to Howard Beach, with bond traders high-fiving cabbies as old-fashioned ticker tape rained down on the hoops heroes.

“Neighbors invited neighbors over,” first-year New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in his City Hall speech. “Strangers high fived one another in the street. Subway conductors sang their announcements and bus drivers danced behind the wheel. So often, when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to by a moment of tragedy or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy.”

Indeed, it was a remarkable day, with the Chicago and New York celebrations wrapped around a full day of World Cup matches as Americans cheered the best players from Europe, Asia, South America and Africa — some from nations that have been travel-banned and others that have been bombed by a Trump regime that just doesn’t get it.

Some cynicism is always necessary. The World Cup is still over-commercialized and overpriced, the Knicks are still owned by a pro-Trump billionaire jerk, and Barack Obama often did not live up to his lofty rhetoric, as residents of drone-struck villages from Pakistan to Somalia can confirm. Trump is becoming a laughingstock, but a laughingstock with nukes, and we don’t know what dangers lie ahead.

Yet despite all of those things, it feels like America is having a People’s 250th birthday — one that doesn’t need Trump’s poisoned stamp of approval, or million-dollar donations from crooked corporations, or cage-fighting thugs, or rejects from the I Love the ‘90s Tour singing, or not singing, on the National Mall.

Millions of Americans are looking for a workaround — ways to voice hope over hate, seek joy instead of despair, and wave the U.S. flag while saluting the banners of Algeria or so many places where people may not look or talk quite like us, but share the same dreams. You could squint last week and see the America we are supposed to be at age 250.

Yo, do this!

• The one story that truly epitomizes where we are at in the middle of the 2020s is the rise of Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire, even as he spews racist bile on his social-media platform X. The veteran writer Charlie Warzel, currently with the Atlantic, looks at the shaky vessel behind Musk’s surge in wealth: SpaceX, the rocket-and-satellite company that recently went public at a valuation that for a time topped $2 trillion — despite currently losing billions of dollars a year. He writes: “SpaceX is a rocket company, a complex financial instrument, a meme, a monument to a broken financial system.” Here’s a gift link for all of Warzel’s must-read essay.
• One grossly underreported story that cuts especially hard here in Pennsylvania is the lingering health crisis in rural communities from the fracking boom of the 21st century. A journalist named Justin Nobel has been on the beat of exposing the health hazards of radioactive fracking waste for a decade now, and his latest report for the DeSmog blog from my long-ago western Pennsylvania stomping ground of Washington County is devastating. He finds waste with shockingly high levels of radiation right next to a popular hiking trail, and a possible link to the bone cancer that killed a local teen and devastated his family.

Ask me anything

Question: Is it possible to file against Todd Blanche now for disbarment and if so why is no one taking action or talking about it? — gordeaux (@gchdrake.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: This is a great question, as I’d been thinking about this as the topic for a future column. Blanche, the current acting attorney general who before that was the Justice Department’s No. 2 and before that Donald Trump’s personal attorney, has been accused of a smorgasbord of potential legal misconduct, from his mishandling of the Epstein Files to his role in sending immigration detainees to a Salvadoran hellhole prison. State bar associations are absolutely empowered to investigate misconduct by Justice Department lawyers not only in D.C. but around the nation. But they have been frustratingly slow in doing so. How worried is Team Trump? A recently proposed Justice Department rule would allow the attorney general — right now, this is Blanche — to block state bar-association misconduct probes. Stopping this rule would be one small step in the looming battle for truth and reconciliation in America.

What you’re saying about…

I got a healthy response to last week’s question about whether readers have stayed on X (formerly Twitter) since an openly racist, anti-democratic and extremely wealthy Elon Musk bought it in 2022. Not surprisingly, many of you left after his purchase, or the 2024 election in which he heavily funded Donald Trump. “I absolutely think governments, organizations, media companies and really just about everyone should at a minimum do as I have done and stop posting there completely,” Linda Mitala wrote. But Patrick Roan is conflicted. “I have stayed with it because there are some really good people who have not completely left, including a few who are only on X, but are good and knowledgeable writers with enlightened points of view,” he offered.

📮 This week’s question: The looming Fourth of July is one of those round-number birthdays, America’s 250th. Are you planning to do anything special or different for this Independence Day? Or will you do less because Donald Trump is president? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “July 4 plans” in the subject line.

Backstory on the quiet outrage of soldiers occupying D.C.

On Father’s Day morning this past Sunday, a longtime Washington, D.C.-based writer named Ian Livingston went out to get a breakfast sandwich. When he returned, he found a small platoon of National Guard soldiers, dressed in camouflage, patrolling an alley near his home. On a video that soon went viral, the troops smile slightly or ignore Livingston and his phone camera, which doesn’t make the scene any less disturbing. “Just a normal morning in our police state,” he wrote.

The normalcy is the problem. It’s been more than 10 months now since Donald Trump first took the extraordinary step of ordering the large National Guard deployment in the nation’s capital, with soldiers from the D.C. armory — authorized by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to carry weapons — soon augmented by detachments from red states, rising to an occupation force in the thousands. The move, which the president linked to a surge in “violent gangs, bloodthirsty criminals, and homeless people,” made a lot of headlines, then disappeared from the news. But soldiers haven’t disappeared from the streets. In fact, Trump recently authorized an increase to some 5,000 troops ahead of the July 4 festivities.

But what for? Researchers have found that the presence of the National Guard has had no apparent impact on violent crime rates — which were already at or near 30-year lows — although there has been a drop in “opportunistic crimes” like vehicle break-ins. But the legal parameters of their actual mission bar the troops from making actual arrests, although they can detain someone until district police show up. Typically, their squadrons have been spotted around D.C. picking up trash, although some are now deployed against the algae tourists of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

And at what price? The annual cost to taxpayers of the constant Guard deployment has been estimated at as much as $600 million — money that could otherwise be spent on things like actual solutions to the city’s chronic crisis of homelessness. The unbusy troops are, unfortunately, a magnet for America’s growing number of unhinged people, including the one who killed a West Virginia Guard member and seriously wounded another in a shooting last year. For most, the extended deployments mean unwelcome days away from family, actual work, and their hometowns.

But the real cost is a psychic one: the mental impact of living in an occupied city. Trump’s forever deployment of armed soldiers in our nation’s capital achieves some of the highest goals of his brand of strongman authoritarianism: a) a constant show of force aimed at demoralizing a population that’s increasingly unhappy with life under the 47th president and b) a threat that protesters should stay away from the White House and the Capitol when things really start to go south. We need to keep reminding ourselves what Ian Livingston conveyed to us this weekend: This is not normal. In the immortal 1971 words of singer Freda Payne, bring the boys (and the girls) home.

What I wrote on this date in 2020

This date six years ago was also nearly one month after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, and America — and especially Philadelphia — was still dealing with the consequences. On June 23, 2020, I wrote about an Amnesty International report about police brutality in response to those protests, including the cops’ tear-gas assault on protesters blocking the Vine Street Expressway in Center City. ” We should be shocked that police forces in the United States are acting like the so-called ‘state security forces’ in an authoritarian banana republic,“ I wrote. ”Tear gas is banned in warfare under the United Nations, yet police commanders don’t think twice about lobbing it into crowds of Americans from Seattle to the gates of the White House.” Read the rest: “Amnesty International won a Nobel Prize for fighting torture. Next up: Philly police.”

Recommended Inquirer reading

• Only one column last week as I enjoyed a Juneteenth/Father’s Day extended weekend. In that piece, I looked at the real reasons behind the federal conspiracy indictment against a group of an anti-ICE activists that some are already calling “the Minneapolis 15.” The charges — mostly centering on constitutionally protected free speech such as discussing their protests on the Signal app — are outrageous. But they also signal that the Trump regime is desperate to quash political dissent ahead of the November election.
• The World Cup is a remarkable moment for sports, but also an incredible time for journalism, because the stories in the stands are often as compelling as what’s taking place on the pitch. At The Inquirer, the five-week tournament has been a great way to reveal how Philadelphia relates to the wider world. Last week’s match between Brazil and Haiti might have been a rout on the field, but sports columnist Mike Sielski took in the scene with Haitian fans who were just delighted their violence-wracked nation was having a moment on the world stage. Alex Coffey spent the weekend with four French fans who played hooky from their jobs back home to spend an unforgettable week in America’s founding city. Longtime soccer writer Kerith Gabriel hailed the city’s joy over the World Cup as “the escape we didn’t know we needed.” It’s easy to join this party in print for the last three unforgettable weeks of the World Cup: subscribe to The Inquirer today.

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