Mendocino County Today: Friday 3/27/2026

Brisk Morning | Seen Evelyn? | Vehicle Fire | Earl Ronald Crites | Cell Reception | James Michael Andersen | Different Coverage | Local Events | AV Honey | Redwood Drive-In | John Reitzell | Empanadas Today | Release Day | Arena Fundraiser | Library Events | Speaker Whiterock | Noise Machines | Redwood Sorrel | Nannie Flood Escola | Live Music | Yesterday's Catch | Character Flaw | Lahontan Shores | Billionaire Class | Offshore Drilling | Outside Bookstore | Tragic Anniversary | Hate Crime | Anger Escalates | B Traven | Bob Frost | Organ Pipe | Protected Speech | Beggars Conversing | Extreme Individualism | Lead Stories | Apache Woman | Shield Americas | Jap Lady | No Soul | Christ before Pilate

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STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A brisk 40F under mostly clear skies this Friday morning on the coast. A nice weekend is at hand with rain returning later on Monday. The details of the rain system for next week keep changing, we'll keep an eye on it of course.

BREEZY to strong offshore winds are expected through dawn for ridgetops. Dry conditions with above normal high temperatures are expected for the interior through the weekend. Potential for significant precipitation still on track for next week. (NWS)

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HAVE YOU SEEN EVELYN MEDINA-CASTANEDA? Ukiah Teen Missing Since March 19

by Lisa Music

Family and friends are urgently seeking information on the whereabouts of 16-year-old Evelyn Medina-Castaneda, a Ukiah teen who has been missing since March 19, 2026.

Evelyn is described as a Hispanic female, 5 feet tall, weighing 140 pounds, with black hair and black eyes, according to a missing persons report filed. She is listed as a missing person with the Ukiah Police Department.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Officer Lesli Campuzano at (707) 234-6687, the Ukiah Police Department at (707) 463-6262, or reach out directly to her family at (707) 489-2319 or (707) 293-0451.

Note: Their is a discrepancy between the spelling of the missing teen’s name by Ukiah PD and a social media post circulated by friends and family. That social media post spelling is Ebelin Medina Castañeda.

(kymkemp.com)

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VEHICLE FIRE NEAR AV FARM SUPPLY. Thursday, March 26, 2026

A little before 1 PM Thursday a car was engulfed in flames in front of the AV Farm Supply. Thanks to the AV Fire Department, by 4 PM there was nothing left to see except for a couple of puddles and a bit of glass. Phew!

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EARL RONALD CRITES

April 2, 1951- February 19, 2026

Earl Ronald Crites passed away in the early hours of February 19, 2026 at home in the loving care of his life partner Judy Turney. He was 74 years old. He fought the cancer that eventually took him the same way he lived his life, with courage, optimism and the “no retreat, no surrender” credo of a true warrior.

Earl was born to Harrison William Crites and Mildred Irma (Curtis) Crites on April 2, 1951 in Scotia, California. His birth completed the family that included his older siblings: brother Lee Godsey and sister Jean (Godsey) Swartz.

Earl was raised with his family on a 20-acre homestead in Laytonville. The family worked hard and maintained a self-sufficient life-style allowing them to eat from their own vegetable garden, as well as their home-raised poultry and beef. Earl often joked that he got his strong grip strength from years of pulling up acres of Manzanita shrubs by hand, one of the many jobs that his father assigned to him.

While attending Laytonville High School, Earl was an avid athlete. He especially loved playing basketball and football where his strength, speed and competitiveness helped to give Laytonville High its reputation for being one of the hardest-hitting schools in the league.

Soon after graduating from high school in 1969, Earl joined the Army and was thrilled to be able to serve his time in Alaska. Earl was a proud veteran who loved his country.

Earl met his first wife Martina (Finnegan) Peterson in high school and they were married in December of 1969. They had two beautiful daughters Karen Marie Crites (Sweaney) and Tammy Marlene Crites (Rivano). After leaving the service, his family moved back to the “lower 48” where he worked multiple jobs before he eventually began his career in Corrections, working at the Vacaville State Prison as a correctional officer. Following his divorce, he moved to Southern Humboldt in 1980 where he continued his career in Corrections at the Eel River Conservation Camp #31 in Redway where he remained until he retired.

He met Judy Turney at the dentist office where she worked in Garberville in 1980. At that time the state allowed inmates to be taken to local dentists for dental treatment. While the inmate was with the dentist having treatment, there was enough time for a bit of conversation and flirtation between Earl and Judy. The attraction was mutual and they were soon dating. They remained a devoted couple until the end of Earl’s life.

Earl’s dream since he was a teenager was to have his own small homestead where he would build a home and be as self-sufficient as possible. His focus never changed and when he moved to Southern Humboldt, he soon bought property above Phillipsville. Starting with undeveloped property, he created a house site, and built a beautiful home. He and Judy created their beloved homestead together. Over the years they added gardens, orchards, and landscaped yards. Their love of animals led them to raise many cats, dogs, goats and chickens as well as attracting many wild birds to their yard to watch and enjoy.

A life-long passion for sports, travel, and adventure balanced out Earl’s drive to work hard building and developing his home.

He was well known in the Shelter Cove fishing community and had the reputation that his boat most often came in with its full limit of fish. Some people recognized the unique shape of Earl’s boat and enjoyed watching him come in with his Blue Heeler, Bandit, standing proudly on the bow of the boat, waiting to be close enough to shore to dive off and swim to shore. He did this every time they came in!

Earl also loved skiing, all water sports, abalone diving, hiking and traveling. He loved sharing these passions with family and friends. Whether he was hunting abalone with his nephew John Turney, skiing with his friend Tommy (and others), fishing, hiking or rafting with his friend Paul (and others) or traveling with Judy, and often Paul & Tina. The bragging rights and hours of storying-telling after each adventure was just as important as the adventures themselves.

He loved to share adventures with Judy, constantly pushing her to challenge herself and learn new skills. He taught her to ski, kayak, snorkel, fish and push for more challenging hikes than she thought she could accomplish.

All of these adventures will remain cherished memories.

Earl leaves behind a large and loving family, including his Turney family and many friends who will miss him deeply. He is survived by his life-partner Judy Turney, daughters Karen (Sean) Sweaney, Tammy (Gary) Rivano, granddaughters Vanessa Rivano, Amanda Rivano, Hannah Rivano, and great-grandson Joshua Mann.

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STEPHANIE MARCUM:

U.S. Cellular Problems

With permission, this is from Erin Piper over on the coast.

Please if you're a US Cellular/T-Mobile customer and experiencing less than stellar cell reception since T-Mobile bought USC, please call the number at the bottom and let them know you're not satisfied.

Hello fellow neighbors! If you have U.S. Cellular or are experiencing problems with your cell service in the Manchester area, (or surrounding areas) I would like to ask you to take a few minutes to call into U.S. Cellular or your cell service carrier to submit a tech support ticket complaint.

Several of us on Mt. View Road are experiencing poor service or all out outages. I am hearing from my neighbors several times a week about this problem.

I have even heard of poor service being experienced on Eureka Hill Road, such as not being able to call emergency services when they are needed. Most of us no longer have land lines and rely on cell service as a lifeline. This is a real problem. Please help is inundate the engineering department with complaints so they will fix this problem.

Part of the issue stems from T-Mobile buying out U.S. Cellular. They are either updating contracts with tower owners or updating hardware on the towers in preparation for the T-Mobile network. I have heard rumors that it could be months for this to be cleared up. We don't have months, we need services restored now.

My husband was standing on top of a hill the other day looking at three cell towers and had absolutely no service.

This is a public safety issue.

I just got off the phone with tech support and she said that the more complaint tickets they have will help. They will only take one ticket per customer, so we need your help.

Call U.S. Cellular at 1-888-944-9400 or 611 from your phone.

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JAMES MICHAEL ANDERSEN

James “Jim” Andersen, beloved husband, father, brother, and friend, passed away unexpectedly and peacefully on March 22, 2026.

Jim was born on December 30, 1959, to Peggy and Harold Andersen and grew up in Ukiah with his sister, Pam, and brother, Chuck. He often spoke of his childhood as idyllic, full of sports, community, and lifelong friendships. A 1978 graduate of Ukiah High School, Jim attended Humboldt State before transferring to San Diego State University, where he met the love of his life, Robbin. They graduated from SDSU and married on June 25, 1983, later returning to Ukiah to raise their three children.

Jim devoted his career to public service, working for the County of Mendocino beginning in 1987 as Assistant CAO and later CAO. In 2004, he joined Sonoma County as Assistant CAO, retiring in 2008. He returned to work for MCERA and fully retired in 2012.

Jim will be remembered for his warmth, humor, kindness, deep faith, and gift for making everyone feel welcome. He is survived by his wife, Robbin, his children Melissa, Christopher, and Nathaniel, his sister Pam, and many beloved extended family members.

A Celebration of Life will be held at First Baptist Church in Ukiah on April 6, 2026 at 10:00am

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ELISE COX (Mendolocal.news):

We tried something different this week in terms of covering the Board of Supervisors.

We broke out the different actions into separate stories to make them more consumable. Let us know what you think of this approach, please.

We sent the story we thought would be of most general interest to subscribers, with links at the bottom of the story to the rest of the coverage. We want to avoid overwhelming folks with coverage while still letting you know there is more to follow. If you are not yet a paid subscriber and would like to support this kind of county coverage, Substack's lowest paid tier for MendoLocal is $30/year. And you can pledge any amount on Monkey Pod. Some of our supporters are living on very small monthly budgets — $1 from them is equal to $100 from someone else. We appreciate all the support.

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LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)

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LOCAL ANDERSON VALLEY HONEY FOR SALE. $45 per quart. Contact Misha at [email protected] to arrange a Boonville pickup.

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FRANCESCA SUAREZ/REDWOOD DRIVE-IN, BOONVILLE:

The Redwood Drive-In is open and ready to serve you. We’re currently experiencing issues with our landline, so we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Our hours are Monday through Sunday, 7 AM to 7 PM. We look forward to seeing you soon!

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JOHN VALERY REITZELL

John Reitzell passed away after a long illness on March 19, 2026. As a young man he travelled to California from Louisiana to begin work at a lifelong career in the lumber industry starting out in Rockport. He met and married Myrna Snook in Willits, and they moved to Ukiah where they had two children, Deborah Perkins and Jerry Reitzell Oglesby. John married Delores Smith (Dodie) after his first marriage dissolved and embraced her daughter Melody Smith as his own. John continued his lumber industry career until retirement and also enjoyed playing and performing music in Ukiah at various venues. John and Dodie enjoyed their community, their travels and made many memories with family and friends. Their interests led to owning an antique and collectables store in Ukiah after retirement. After Delores passed away, John enjoyed his music, family and friends for many years, passing at the age of 97.

He is survived by his daughter Deborah Perkins (Chris), son Jerry Oglesby (Isabel), stepdaughter Melody Daquilante (Albert), grandchildren Colby Standley (Maria), Jeremy Standley (Kellie), Savanna Oglesby, Johnathan Larson (Kayla), Jamie Larson, Michael Larson (Kelly), great-grandchidren Kailani Skye Standley, Carson Standley, Ivy Standley, Breanna Larson, Katelynn Larson, Aubree Larson, Nathan Larson, Sophia Larson, Amelia Larson, and great-great grandchildren Harmony, Sapphira, Johnathan, Rowan, Wrenlee, Magnolia and Landon.

A private memorial will be held at Russian River Cemetery.

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LUPITA GUTIERREZ:

For the people who have been asking me when I'm going to sell IN Boonville and Philo. I inform you that tomorrow on Friday I'll go there first. For whoever likes it. Orders are going out. To be delivering in the afternoon. The empanadas will be made of coconut, camote, pumpkin and chilacayote. Call me. I will be taking orders. 707,472,9344. Thank you very much.

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SARAH SONGBIRD:

It’s Release Day!

Jesus Isn’t Comin’ in is now LIVE on @bandcamp and you can go to the link in the comments to listen and download. This is the first song that I wrote, produced and engineered and I am excited to share it with you.

This is not an uplifting song, but one that is haunting and full of truth. It speaks of fear and pain, and asks us to face the reality of current life. In every era, folk musicians have an opportunity to tell the stories of the human experience. This is my chance to tell our story.

I invite you to check it out on Bandcamp. This is the best platform to actually support the work of artists. Nearly 100% of the proceeds go directly to the Artists, and it’s a great way to show appreciation for what creators are offering. You can give the minimum or anything above that you choose to.

Most importantly, I hope that you will share this song far and wide. With friends and family, and loved ones and radio DJs and colleagues. If this song touches you, perhaps it will touch someone else. I appreciate you putting your confidence in my work and your help in having it be heard around the world.

Thanks so much for all your support of my musical life, and I hope that you resonate with this song I’ve created.

Thanks also to the great musicians who came up to the studio at Mendocino College to play on this track and my teacher and classmates who provided support in recording and mixing this song.

Fiddle - Candy Girard

Guitar - Colton Dean Prince

Bass - Pierre Archain

Engineering support and mentoring - Rodney Grisanti and my Recording Engineering & Technology classmates.

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UKIAH BRANCH LIBRARY EVENTS

-Art Walk Featuring Charles Montgomery and harpist Suni Robin on 4/3

-The Ukiah Valley Friends of the Library Book Sale on 4/3 and 4/3

-The Annual Haiku Walk on 4/4

-Beekeeping Basics at Urban Homesteading 101 on 4/11

-Makerspace: Felted Landscapes on 4/17 (new date)

-Fairy Tale STEM Series starting 4/24

Details at: https://www.mendolibrary.org/events/ukiah-events.

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THE NOYO BIDA TRUTH PROJECT APRIL TEACH-IN will be Sunday, April 12 at 2 p.m. in the Community Room of the Fort Bragg Library at 499 E. Laurel Street, Noyo Bida, CA.

Envisioned as a program to educate attendees about the issues involved in returning native names to local sites, including our City, and to hear neighbors' ideas, the teach-in will last about one hour and will feature the speaker and a question and answer/discussion period.

Our speaker this month will be Kyle Whiterock a Yokayo and Big Valley Pomo artist, actor and director. He serves as a Student Retention Specialist at Mendocino College.

Whiterock has worked in Indigenous Communities for over 5 years, and continues to work to uplift and motivate community youth. He is currently pursing his Bachelor's in Social Work at Cal Poly Humboldt. He serves on the Board of The Noyo Bida Truth Project

His topic will be: "Working in Education - Native American Student Success"

This program is neither sponsored by nor endorsed by the Mendocino County Library.

More information at https://thenoyobidatruthproject.org/

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VINEYARD WIND MACHINES SOUND LIKE ‘VIETNAM-ERA CHOPPERS.’

Should San Luis Obispo County muzzle them?

by Stephanie Finucane (May 12, 2024)

You can’t miss Claire Mamakos’ farm stand on picturesque Vineyard Drive in rural San Luis Obispo County. It’s the whimsical one with the flowers, the wind chimes and the hand-painted signs. It’s where Mamakos sells fruit, honey, eggs, walnuts and CBD salve. The farm is located in the heart of Paso Robles wine country, directly across the road from Jada Vineyard, an upscale winery and tasting room.

Therein lies the problem.

For the past couple of years, Mamakos has been tilting — not at a windmill — but at a wind machine used to protect the grapes from frost damage. Wind machines — also known as frost fans — aren’t used often in San Luis Obispo County, but when they are, they make an awful racket. “It sounds like the old Vietnam-era choppers. … You’d expect to see them coming over the hill at any second,” is how one resident described the noise to a county advisory group. Yet there’s little that neighbors can do about it. Since the machines are used to protect crops, they are exempt from the local noise ordinance.

This isn’t the first time noisy frost fans have created a ruckus in California wine country. Mark Scaramella, managing editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, sued Mendocino County and over the fans in 2015. “Basically, I want the county to treat these things like boomboxes,” Scaramella said at the time. He eventually wound up reaching a settlement with neighboring wineries and dropped the county from the case: “Realizing that the County didn’t give a rat’s ass about the problem, and bleeding money for lawyer hours, I removed the County from my lawsuit,” he wrote in the Advertiser.

The owner of a small farm on Vineyard Drive in Paso Robles is pressuring the county to set limits on noisy wind machines used to protect crops from frost.

The right to farm

Agriculture — a billion-dollar industry in San Luis Obispo County — is protected by a right-to-farm ordinance, just as it is in other rural and semi-rural counties in California. The ordinances aim to shield farmers and ranchers from nuisance lawsuits filed by neighbors who move into an ag area, only to belatedly discover that they don’t like the noise or the smells or the tractor traffic associated with farming. It’s a way to deliver an important message that can save everyone a lot of grief: If you aren’t prepared to put up with the sights, sounds and smells of rural living, don’t come here.

Yet longtime residents — including some who are farmers or ranchers themselves — say they deserve protection as well, especially since they were here before the wind machines. Wind machines like the one installed at Jada Vineyard in Paso Robles have led to conflicts between growers and neighboring residents in San Luis Obispo County’s rural areas.

Vineyard owner: ‘I don’t wish anyone ill will’

Mamakos said she had no problem with Jada Vineyard until a new owner took over and installed a portable wind machine in late 2022. She estimates it’s just 150 feet from her property. Jada owner Anthony Riboli — a fourth-generation winemaker — puts it at 300 feet. Noise isn’t the only problem, Mamakos said. “The gale force winds they generate are extraordinary. In November, when the Jada fan was first brought in to protect late-planted vines, the air blew down walnuts and leaves in our orchard, branches hit our home and our windows rattled,” she wrote to the county.

Riboli said there aren’t many other options for frost control. Overhead sprinklers are effective, but are impractical in an area where water is scarce. The wind machine doesn’t go on very often, Riboli said, only 30 hours total since he bought the vineyard in 2022. So far this year, it’s only been needed four days. The fan kicks on automatically when the temperature dips below 34 degrees, then turns off as soon as the air temperature rises. Should something go wrong, General Manager Josh Messina lives onsite and is available to respond. “We have not broken any laws,” Riboli said. “If the law changes, then we will change. … I don’t wish anyone ill will.”

‘Why does this one single piece of equipment merit an exemption?’

Last year, the county Agricultural Liaison Advisory Board heard complaints about wind machines not only on Vineyard Drive, but also at two other locations. Residents of Rolling Hills Estates in San Luis Obispo pleaded with the county to do something when a grower switched from grapes to citrus and installed two wind machines. “Bird cannons, car washes, even dogs are regulated for noise. Why does this one single piece of equipment merit an exemption from all noise outputs, and at all hours?” San Luis Obispo resident Patty Smith asked the advisory board.

Over on the coast, near the small community of Cayucos, ranchers Ingrid and Richard Warren became so fed up that they filed a lawsuit over machines that were installed to a protect a nearby avocado crop. The noise not only keeps the couple awake at night, it also spooks their horses. Two horses housed in a barn were so frenzied that they injured themselves, they said. Ingrid Warren now goes down to the barn to soothe the horses whenever the fans kick on. The Warrens got a restraining order that imposed limits on when the machines can operate. They also went through mediation — the avocado farm switched to a type of device that’s supposed to make less noise, and the Warrens installed more insulation in their home — but Ingrid said that hasn’t cured the problem. She refuses to give up the fight, not just for her sake, but also for her children. “I can’t pass this property on to my children in good faith,” she said.

No interest in setting standards

In response to complaints, the agricultural advisory board did develop a set of “accepted standards” for wind machines, similar to standards already adopted for “bird-frightening devices” that emit loud sounds. The recommended standards called for a minimum 300-foot buffer zone between the fans and neighboring residences and, if necessary, advised considering other methods — such as overhead sprinklers — that aren’t so noisy. The advisory board approved the standards by a unanimous vote, but then nothing happened. The proposal was never moved up the chain. ”Our original understanding was that planning and the Board of Supervisors would take it from there, Assistant Agricultural Commissioner Marc Lea said. “But there doesn’t seem to be any interest in doing that.”

A lawsuit should not be the only recourse

Neighbors weren’t thrilled with the standards developed by the advisory board. They believed a buffer zone should be based on decibels, rather than distance. Still, they were disappointed when the proposal died on the vine. The county’s lack of follow-through is especially frustrating since SLO County is experiencing more extremes in weather, with higher highs and lower lows. There will almost certainly be a need for more frost protection for crops. The county — especially the Board of Supervisors — needs to wake up and stop ignoring its constituents. Otherwise, neighbors have only one recourse: Take their case to civil court. That’s a burden for parties on both sides.

Rural living can be noisy, but expecting residents to put up with the sound of “Vietnam-era choppers” in the middle of the night is too much. The Board of Supervisors should find a way to balance the right to farm with the right to be protected from ear-splitting noise.

(TribuneNews/San Luis Obispo. Originally published May 10, 2024.)

(ED NOTE: Anderson Valley’s wind fans have been coming on after midnight almost every night for the last two weeks, even though the recorded temperature hasn’t gone much below 40 degrees.)

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NANNIE FLOOD ESCOLA’S EARLY LIFE

edited by Averee McNear

Nancy Mary Flood was born October 26th, 1885 in a woods camp at Fred Halmke’s sawmill site two miles up Greenwood Creek from the ocean. The town of Greenwood was nonexistent at the time. Cuffey’s Cove, a few miles north on the coast, was where ships came to load lumber.

Nancy Mary was named for her grandmother Flood but the name soon softened to Nannie May and later to Nannie. Her father, William Henry Flood, came from Surry, Maine in 1872 and had been working in the logging camps along the coast as a bull-puncher, driving the bull teams hauling logs to the creeks to float them to the sawmill. When and where William Henry Flood and Rosa Mary Watkins, Nannie’s mother, met is not known. Rosa’s parents came from England to Canada. Rosa was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1858. Rosa and William’s marriage is recorded in the Mendocino Presbyterian Church Register on January 28th, 1885. Reverend James L. Drum conducted the ceremony with Mrs. Drum as one of the witnesses and Rosa’s good friend Euphemia Thompson as the other.

Around 1891 the family moved to Glen Blair, where William was employed as Woods Boss for the Pudding Creek Lumber Company (later named Glen Blair Lumber Company). Although Nannie started school at Glen Blair, she was there only a few months when her folks decided to move to Mendocino, where there would be better schooling for their children. A Mendocino Beacon item published on June 4th, 1892 states “W.H. Flood has moved his family down and is occupying one of Mose Greenwood’s cottages.” The house was on Pine Street. Soon they moved further east on Pine Street to a roomier two-story house owned by the Baskerville brothers, John, Peter and James. When the last Baskerville died, he willed the house to Rosa Flood.

Nannie’s school days were spent in Mendocino, until 1906 when she enrolled in the San Jose Normal School. She graduated in 1908 and came back to teach in Mendocino county for the next six years. Her first school was at Counts, a tiny one room school in Anderson Valley. Ellison District School was her second teaching assignment. Her last teaching role was at the Little River School. This assignment lasted for two years until her marriage.

The Beacon provides another bit of news about Nannie on November 9th, 1912. “Miss Nannie Flood was the first woman in Mendocino to cast a vote for President of the United States. Miss Flood cast her ballot a few minutes after 6 o’clock and before going to Little River to open her school.” California voted for women’s suffrage nine years before it became federal law.

All was not joyous on the day of Nannie’s wedding to John Escola in 1914. John’s father had died shortly before, and Nannie’s parents did not approve of her marrying a woodsman and a Finn. The couple had waited six years to be married and felt that was long enough. They had met while Nannie was teaching at Ellison District and boarding at John’s brother’s home.

Nannie and John lived first at the tie camp near Little River, later in the Albion woods, once near Comptche, and wherever else jobs opened up. Like all woodsmen’s families, they moved to town for the winter. On January 4th, 1919, the Beacon reported “John Escola and family, who have been at Keene Summit for the past several months, have moved into the Flanagan cottage on Pine Street.” This became their favorite town house, and in 1924 they bought it from Flossie Flanagan Anderson, daughter of John Flanagan who built it in 1889.

When her daughter Hazel was still a toddler in 1926, Nannie went back to her Ellison District school after an absence of 12 years from a schoolroom. John was working in the area. The mandatory number of children to keep a school open was five, and John and Nannie had four of school age. During the week while Hazel (Tillie) stayed with her grandmother Flood, the rest of the family lived in the Ellison District schoolhouse in the living quarters provided. The children were taught by their mother. Attendance varied, some years there were as many as 35 students, depending on how much logging activity there might be. Most weekends the Escolas came back to their home in Mendocino. This arrangement lasted around 10 years. As the Escola children finished their elementary education they attended Mendocino High School.

(Kelley House Museum, www.kelleyhousemuseum.org)

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, March 26, 2026

MARCOS ESCARENO, 35, Redwood Valley. Battery.

LUNA MAGADALENO, 35, Willits. petty theft, probation revocation, unspecified offense.

JEREMIAH MCOSKER, 47, Ukiah. Under influence, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

JESSICA NORTON, 34, Willits. County parole violation.

JACINTO TUPPER, 21, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

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LIES BREAK TIES

Editor,

If you were wondering how Trump bankrupted four businesses, stay tuned; he is currently working on the United States. Some failures are due to market changes, but Trump's failures stem from a character flaw. Most successful business leaders admit responsibility for their company's failures and change their behavior to prevent future debacles. Trump avoids blame and demonstrates a lack of personal integrity. In other words, when he is the culprit, he points a finger and projects unsubstantiated blame onto others.

Case in point, Trump proposed a trade deal that put Canada in a subservient role. In response, Premier Mark Carney took steps to protect Canada's sovereignty, prompting Trump to escalate his insults and triggering an international crisis. As Trump is saving face with fabricated accusations, the American economy will lose approximately 10,000 jobs a month until the end of the year, according to Goldman Sachs.

And as the rest of the world transitions away from fossil fuels, Trump wants to base our nation's economy on it. Question? How are we going to increase sales when the rest of the world is reducing its consumption?

Tom Fantulin

Fort Bragg

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WHERE ARE THE PHILANTHROPISTS?

Editor,

Regarding “S.F. has a stunning shuttered museum for sale. Turning it into something new won’t be simple,” (San Francisco, SFChronicle.com, March 25):

With the immense amount of new money now concentrated in San Francisco, you would think that it would be a new Renaissance Florence, but as Laura Waxman and J.K. Dineen explain in their article on the closure and sale of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, much of its cultural sector is floundering and even dying.

I would suggest it is doing so not so much because of a post-COVID hangover but because its very mobile billionaire class does not share the same philanthropic commitment to place that old money families once did, since to do so would cut into their members’ net worth and Forbes 400 ranking.

Gray Brechin

Inverness

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FIGHT OFFSHORE DRILLING

Editor,

Regarding “Trump orders restart of oil drilling off California coast as Iran war pushes gas prices up,” (California, SFChronicle.com, March 14): President Donald Trump’s illegal order has put the Central Coast in danger of another horrendous spill now that oil is flowing off Santa Barbara again, but it also sets an alarming precedent for the rest of our state.

This administration has proposed expanding offshore drilling off our coast, including to parts of Northern California. Despite a robust state history of rejecting offshore drilling and strong opposition from those of us who live here, it’s now glaringly obvious that neither Trump nor the oil industry care what we want, or what state law says.

Thankfully, Gov. Gavin Newsom sees this outrageous move for the power grab that it is, and is fighting back. The state has already filed a lawsuit over the order and the administration’s misuse of the Defense Production Act.

I’ll be cheering them on loudly, and I hope you’ll join me. It’s an important moment to stand up for the ocean and our iconic California coastline, before it’s changed forever.

Miyoko Sakashita

Oakland

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MITCH CLOGG:

Fourscore and seven years ago, my mother and father brought forth upon this continent: me, conceived on New Year's Eve 1937, scheduled for a September '38 delivery and dedicated to the proposition that children should be seen and not heard. Pediatrician Benjamin Spock had not yet published his life-changing "Baby and Child Care." The conviction that children are unspeakably precious, a conviction to which we give more lip service than service, was not yet prevalent. We were engaged in a great global war, testing whether representative democracy, installed a century and a half prior, would long endure.

I endure. My mother and father did not. Along with my brother and sister, two family friends - husband and wife - and our family dog, drowned on a wildly windy day at Maryland's coast. Everybody was buried in Baltimore on April 1, 1955, April Fool's Day, by bleak coincidence, my father's birthday. It rained that day. Many stood in the rain as the coffins were lowered into the graves.

They had been crossing from Maryland's Eastern Shore (called that because it is east of the Chesapeake Bay, which bisects eastern Maryland) - from the sandspit where Atlantic-coast resorts are, back to the mainland and the return to Baltimore. Saturday's weather was mild and pleasant. Sunday turned very cold and very windy. The Clogg family (minus my two older sisters and me; we weren't along) had spent the night at the High Winds Ducking Club, an isolated place south of Ocean City, Maryland.

On the return trip, the boat overturned. The combination of cold and storm waves killed them all before they could make it to a nearby island. (They were all swimmers, and the water was shallow.) My parents were 45, Judsan and Chanel were 11 and 7. Their dying struggles play out in my head. My nephew, himself an experienced waterman, told me that the "gasp response," to a plunge into icy water, an involuntary gasp and intake of water, probably made it a quick death. It was not quick enough.

This event and its effect on my life, interior and exterior, took up less and less of my mind for many years. Now in old age, it has returned front and center, the screams, the futile efforts, the terror and agony. They play out in my head, no two times identical, over and over.

However quickly my father died, it was in full knowledge of the disaster he caused, killing himself, wife, children and friends. My father was regarded as successful man. He was, in the modern vernacular, "an alpha," a natural leader, a man admired and respected--until his final act. His dying was a complex thing--the torment of freezing and drowning; knowing he had inflicted that on the whole party, that he, owner and driver of that little boat, had made the fatal, to me incomprehensible, decision to try an open-water crossing in an overloaded outboard motor boat in that weather. He murdered his wife and kids. He murdered his friends. He murdered himself. He knew it. I was then sixteen years old.

Tomorrow is the seventy-first anniversary of that tragedy. I feel a compulsion to make notice of it every year at this time, and I apologize to you Facebook friends. It was witnessed by no one, yet it immediately became widely noticed and reported. It became a public event. I need to make public acknowledgment of it, year after year.

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EVA CHRYSANTHE:

"Bear with me for a personal story that sheds light on this 'antisemitic hate crime' issue.

Last year I was invited to deliver a lecture on state violence to a conference. I used Gaza as the main example. A Jewish woman confonted me in the refreshments queue. She accused me of selecting an inappropriate example. I replied that I'm against Netanyahu's regime and I hope you are too. She said nothing and returned to her seat. That was it. Nothing more.

The following morning, the conference organiser rang to inform me that I had been reported to the regional police service as the perpetrator of an antisemitic hate crime. NFA, of course, but the incident has still been registered and the university informed. So it's on the statistics. How often is this happening? Genuine question, because I really don't know."

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NO KINGS PROTEST KEEPS GROWING AS ANGER TOWARD TRUMP ESCALATES

by Raheem Hosseini

When No Kings Day returns to the Bay Area for a third time on Saturday, it could set a record for the biggest one-day protest in U.S. history.

It’s also likely to extend an unenviable trend for an American president usually fond of boasting about crowd sizes: If protester numbers are any indication, Donald Trump is one of the least popular presidents in modern history.

No Kings organizers said Thursday more than 3,000 events are planned across the U.S. for Saturday’s threequel — including some 320 in California — and expected that figure to keep climbing amid widening frustration with the Trump administration’s handling of the economy and penchant for self-induced crises.

“To put that in perspective, there are only about 3,001 counties in the whole country. It is enormous,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, the Ralph Nader-created consumer advocacy nonprofit that is one of the groups behind No Kings. “It’ll be the single-largest day of protest in American history.”

The last No Kings Day, on Oct. 18, 2025, drew several million people across 2,700 events in what was either the largest or second-largest one-day demonstration in six decades. The other — the Women’s March on Washington — also happened under Trump’s watch.

Organizers note that the last No Kings event occurred before federal immigration agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, before the government shutdown that has filled airports with stranded travelers and reassigned ICE agents, and before the president’s surprise attack on Iran, which has widened into a regional conflict and risked a global energy crisis.

Gilbert said all those things are likely to drive turnout to an event whose name is a rebuke to a view shared by many democracy scholars that Trump has sought to obliterate checks on his power from Congress and the courts.

“The backbone for why they’re there is not wanting a king in America, which is one of most patriotic, nonpartisan ideals we have,” Gilbert said. As for people’s specific reasons for attending, she said they “can have a million different reasons because, unfortunately, this administration is doing so much that people find horrifying.”

While estimating crowd size remains an evolving and inexact data science, Trump has presided over some of the largest displays of public opposition ever measured in the U.S.

The 2017 Women’s March, held a day after Trump’s first inauguration, drew 3.2 million to 5.3 million people to more than 650 marches, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a Harvard Kennedy School and University of Connecticut collaboration that produces granular data about U.S. protests and demonstrations in the Trump era.

The Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 may represent the largest sustained protest in American history, with an estimated 15 million to 26 million people participating in demonstrations that lasted into August, according to a New York Times analysis.

The consortium also showed that the 2018 March for Our Lives and #Enough walkouts that occurred in response to the Parkland school shooting hold the record for the most protest locations on a single day, occurring in more than 4,400 distinct locations. The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, holds the record for most participants, around 10 million to 20 million people, though social scientists disqualify it because the actual demonstrations were limited and much of it encompassed educational workshops at schools.

A growth industry

Harvard Kennedy School professor Erica Chenoweth, director of the school’s Nonviolent Action Lab, and their research team at the consortium have been early to counter what they’ve described as a prevailing misconception that grassroots resistance to the second Trump administration was muted compared with Trump’s first go-round in office.

Though the Women’s March may still hold the one-day record, a steady, diverse proliferation of events — including the Peoples’ March two days before Trump’s second inauguration, the DOGE-focused Hands Off protests in April 2025 (919,000-1.5 million participants) and the first No Kings protests last June (2 million-4.8 million participants) have drawn increasingly large audiences across a broader geography of locations.

The findings about the level of grassroots resistance over the past 14 months has been an overlooked phenomenon that runs counter to the narrative that drove the first year of Trump 2.0: that the administration faced little opposition, particularly from Congress, corporations and powerful institutions such as elite universities, law firms and media conglomerates.

“While media attention is often focused on actors acquiescing to Trump’s demands, in the streets the popular protest movement continues to push back against the administration with notable persistence over time,” Chenoweth and their coauthors wrote in August 2025.

The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, matching consortium data with county-level data from the 2024 presidential election and U.S. Census data on county populations, concluded that the first year of Trump 2.0 has brought out the most geographically widespread protests in American history.

The Ash Center, Harvard’s research hub on democracy, previously reported that the protest movement under Trump 2.0 has operated at a faster, larger clip than under Trump 1.0 and “is overwhelmingly (and even historically) nonviolent.”

Data journalist G. Elliott Morris, author of the Substack newsletter Strength in Numbers, and Atlanta news outlet the Xylom crowdsourced their estimate of between 5 million to 6.5 million participants at the second No Kings in October, which was below organizers’ claim of 7 million participants at more than 2,700 events, a figure Morris noted “may be a bit optimistic (but is not impossible).”

Organizers say 150,000 people attended San Francisco’s No Kings march in October.

According to a Chronicle analysis of consortium data, a project to document the size of U.S. demonstrations by the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, October’s No Kings drew roughly 3.1 million to 4.1 million participants. Some 300 protests did not have a recorded estimated crowd size so they were excluded from the analysis.

San Francisco’s march will start at noon at Sue Bierman Park and include a community organizing fair at Fulton Plaza.

Oakland’s march will begin an hour later at 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza and end at the Lake Merritt amphitheater with a rally headlined by Live Free Rev. Mike McBride, a local community organizer, and Valarie Bachelor, Oakland director of the ACCE Institute, which is focused on racial and economic justice.

‘Who’s ready to throw down?’

Joseph Raff, a volunteer with Indivisible East Bay, a lead organizer of the Oakland No Kings, said the planning for Saturday’s event started as soon as the national coalition announced a date around the end of January. He said he received a group text from the East Bay leadership team asking, “Who’s ready to throw down?”

Raff said each event requires a lot of logistical planning, with a coalition of groups coordinating with one another and local government on setting march routes, closing streets and establishing safety plans.

“These have been massive events,” said Raff, and Saturday’s is shaping up to be bigger than the one in October, which drew about 20,000 people.

One example of the heightened interest: Participation in the Mighty Marching Chorus, a volunteer choral group, grew from nine participants at the first No Kings to 18 at the second and is on track to number around 300 singers at the third.
Berkeley resident Jennifer, who declined to provide her last name, dons an Uncle Sam costume as she marches during the No Kings Day protest in Oakland on Oct. 18, 2025.

“A lot of these things are happening independently,” Raff said. “We’ve reached a point where these things are self-organizing.”

Raff got involved with Indivisible East Bay about a year ago and was quickly put to work on planning the Hands Off rally. A former engineer and fine-dining cook, the 30-year-old said he moved to California from the East Coast in August 2024. When Trump won reelection, Raff said he found himself thinking about what was coming and “ways to stand up against that.” He knew his adopted home of Oakland had its challenges, but what was happening on the federal level felt more urgent.

“We’re all doing this as volunteers, part time, in between our day jobs and families and everything else that’s going on,” said Raff, who works at a consumer goods company. “Most of us have not been involved in anything of this scale before.”

On the other side of the spectrum is the red, rural speck of Alturas (Modoc County), population 2,700 and mostly Republican, said Sarah Merrick, who is planning the local No Kings rally as co-leader of Modoc Indivisible, which she founded in February 2025.

“We don’t even have a Democratic Party up here,” she said, chuckling.

The 73-year-old Merrick said she hadn’t been political since the Vietnam War, when she was in college. But “all of the antics Trump was up to” compelled her to go online, learn about Indivisible and plan a meeting, at which 17 people, mostly senior citizens, showed up.
Rep. Jared Huffman gets a tour of Modoc Indivisible's truck signage from Sarah Merrick of the group as he meets with future constituents in Alturas, Calif., on Jan. 28, 2026.

Rep. Jared Huffman gets a tour of Modoc Indivisible's truck signage from Sarah Merrick of the group as he meets with future constituents in Alturas, Calif., on Jan. 28, 2026.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle

The group’s first event, its Hand Off rally, attracted maybe 50 people to the lawn in front of the Veterans Hall on Main Street. She said 70 people showed up to their No Kings event at the same location, but that she “bailed out of” hosting No Kings 2 because of all the threats she was receiving, including in-person.

“I chickened out, I did,” she said. “For some reason, I’m not afraid this time.”

On Saturday, they’ll be congregating in an empty lot that locals refer to as “the four corners” near the intersection of North Main Street and Highway 299. There’ll be a band, balloons, snacks and water, and they’ll raffle off an air fryer and bicycle.

“We hope it’s a fun gathering time,” Merrick said. “We don’t really have any big speakers. I’m usually the emcee for it.”

Merrick said the police department told her to phone in a reminder about the event so it can dispatch extra patrols on Saturday. She said their security detail amounts to three volunteers, two on the younger side, who will be wearing security vests and body cameras. So will Merrick.

“If anything happens, we want it on video,” she said. “So I’m expecting some opposition, but I’m also expecting more excitement.”

(sfchronicle.com)

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B TRAVEN

On this day, 26 March 1969, the famous reclusive anarchist and working class novelist B Traven died. He is best known for writing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which later became an Oscar-winning film starring Humphrey Bogart.

As a young sailor, known as Ret Marut, he took part in the German revolution in 1919, before being sentenced to death and escaping to London. There, he was arrested and interrogated, gave several false names, and tried to seek refuge in the US, claiming to be a US citizen whose documents were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

This was unsuccessful, and he eventually moved to Mexico. There he wrote texts including The Cotton Pickers, about Mexican migrant labourers, and The Death Ship, about a sailor stranded in Europe after World War I, when all of a sudden strict national borders began to be erected. Meanwhile, back in Germany, his books were burned by the Nazis after their takeover, and they declared him a "disgrace to Germany".

When the film adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre began shooting, executives asked Traven to be a paid advisor on set. He declined and instead sent his literary agent, Hal Croves, in his stead. It much later transpired that Croves was in fact Traven himself.

Some journalists managed to track him down but he always denied everything, and it was only after his death that researchers managed to piece together who he was. While it is firmly established that he was the same person as Marut, another pseudonym, his true identity is still disputed. The most likely possibility is that he was born Otto Feige in Swiebodzin, now Poland, in 1882.

He is remembered as a great author of working-class literature, but he acknowledged the shortcomings of merely writing. While masquerading as Croves, Traven once said: "Life is worth more than any book one can write".

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OF ROBERT FROST

There is a little lightning in his eyes.
Iron at the mouth.
His brows ride neither too far up nor down.

He is splendid. With a place to stand.

Some glowing in the common blood.
Some specialness within.

— Gwendolyn Brooks (1963)

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FINALLY, GOOD NEWS: FREE SPEECH WINS BIG IN COURT

Four years after the Twitter Files, the Missouri v. Biden case ends in a consent decree barring government from threatening protected speech - a belated but important victory

by Matt Taibbi

In the first week of December, 2022, a group of reporters now scattered and divided over the Iran War and other issues searched through a pile of raw correspondence at the San Francisco office of Twitter. One file we found was 67 pages of complaints about content, mostly from state officials, sent to an address marked misinformation@cissecurity. In one case, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office complained about a Fox5 Atlanta report titled, “Computer Problems Bring Down Voting Machines in Spaulding County.”

The story about technical difficulties in Spaulding County turned out to be accurate, as a “county-wide technical issue” delayed voting. Superior Court Judge Fletcher Sams ordered that ballots be kept open an extra two hours in 18 locations. In those same 67 pages we found a form letter informing the Georgia official that his complaint about the Fox story had already been forwarded to “our partners,” who included “The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security” and “The Election Integrity Partnership” at Stanford University.

Early Twitter evidence of CISA fiddling with speech

This was the first time an outsider had seen the plumbing of a wide-scale effort by federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to regulate mis-, dis-, and malinformation in the social media landscape. It took considerable effort to untangle the mechanism by which complaints of “misinformation” were processed — the process was deliberately confusing — but the documents in the Twitter Files ended up playing a role in helping a landmark First Amendment case already been launched in the courts, called Missouri v. Biden.

The general public, if it knows about this case at all, heard about the alleged “embarrassing defeat” plaintiffs like Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, future NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, and Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff suffered in the Supreme Court in early 2024. This was often misreported, as the Supreme Court really punted on procedural issues and sent the case back down to be decided. It was forgotten until a consent decree was finally issued Tuesday, ending in victory for the plaintiffs. As Kheriaty wrote, the decree prohibits:

The U.S. Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from threatening social media companies into removing or suppressing constitutionally protected speech on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and YouTube.

“It was a victory, even if we did not get everything we wanted in the settlement,” said Kheriaty, the former professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine, and chairman of the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals.

Kheriaty, Bhattacharya, Hines, and others filed their first amended complaint on August 2, 2022 on the grounds that their social media posts about issues like Covid had been suppressed by a smorgasbord of government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security.

In that first complaint filed by the Missouri defendants, CISA was singled out based on evidence maladroitly conceded by Joe Biden’s own cabinet, as part of the argument for a controversial Disinformation Governance Board, which was to be headed by viral singing sensation Nina Jankowicz.

In a memo on September 13, 2021, DHS officials told then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that “leading up to the 2020 election, CISA relayed reports of election disinformation from election officials to social media platform operators.” The Missouri plaintiffs didn’t know exactly what form this “relaying” took, but they correctly identified a serious problem: the government can’t pressure private carriers or publishers by labeling things “disinformation.”

This reflected a basic misunderstanding of the First Amendment, which was designed specifically to keep the state out of the Truth-Squadding business, particularly at moments like the Covid pandemic when the state might be seeking effective veto power over critical national issues.

Unprompted, CISA admitted to having “relayed” reports of disinformation to Internet platforms

The Consent Decree handed down this week put into the books concepts that should provide a little comfort to those of us who fought to surface this issue. One principle agreed upon is that “modern technology does not alter the government’s obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment.” It also enjoined government agencies from threatening social media companies with “some sort of punishment” if they don’t “remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social media content containing protected speech.”

Kheriaty talked about how he understood the accomplishments of Missouri v. Biden. His thoughts are similar to how I feel about the Twitter Files. The court case and the Twitter documents took a matter that was not only a non-issue in media (the existence of censorship programs were routinely denied before late 2022) and rapidly propelled it to the center of the American political discussion.

It reached the Supreme Court and, as Aaron pointed out, ended up being an issue that helped decide the 2024 election. In the Vice Presidential debate in 2022, when J.D. Vance was asked if his running mate was a threat to democracy, he responded that the widespread assault on the First Amendment was the threat he worried about:

In the intervening years, I’ve had to think about this a lot. I had to think about it last week. I had to think about it yesterday, and again today. Friends and colleagues regularly challenge the utility of a court case and scandal that allowed Trump and his own more-than-questionable approach to speech issues a chance to prevail in 2024, by capitalizing on Joe Biden’s idiotic government-wide jawboning program.

To this I ask, what was the alternative? Letting it go? A ruling permitting the behaviors detailed in Missouri v. Biden would have been far more devastating. If you’re concerned about a hyper-empowered chief executive intent on deamplifying, say, derogatory content about the war in Iran, you need it enshrined in law that threats and pressure to social media companies are strictly forbidden. In that regard, everyone irrespective of party should be happy about this result.

As for the 2024 election, Democrats had plenty of time to get on the right side of these issues. I know this because I privately pleaded with plenty of them behind the scenes to see how badly this was going to play in an election year. They not only refused to listen, but insisted on nominating two hardcore speech ignoramuses in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, while smearing people like Kheriaty for bringing this case.

After the many controversies of the last few years, Democrats can probably be counted on to support the First Amendment for as long as Trump is in office, and you know what? That’s okay! That’s good. As long as both parties see the political benefit in appearing to be on the side of one of America’s core beliefs, it’s a win. It’s a testament to who really deserves the credit for decisions like this Decree: the public. Enough people expressed enough disgust about these behaviors that the First Amendment has been updated in the books, boasting a fresh coat of paint for the social media age. It’s good for everyone. When was the last time we could say that?

Congrats to Aaron and his co-plaintiffs, who went through a lot on the road to this result. Historians won’t know what a disgusting process it was to get here, but I’ll remember, and I hope Racket readers will as well. The plaintiffs who hung in deserve a hearty pat on the back. As John Vecchione, counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance put it, “Freedom of speech has been powerfully preserved by our clients.” It’s true, and a happy thing that a few people cared enough to see it through.

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

It's no surprise when people frequently complain about the state of the healthcare industry in this country, but when anyone brings up single-payer healthcare, all of a sudden, it's, "But I don't want to pay for somebody else's healthcare!" It's always about me, me, me in this country. Extreme individualism brought us here. You see it in schools: parents complaining that their children are never wrong. You see it in the lackadaisical attitude towards antisocial behavior on the subway or streets. And you see it anytime you try to push back on another harmful, neoliberal policy that continues to exacerbate the divide between the 1% and the rest of the country.

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LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT

Trump Says He Will Sign an Order to Pay T.S.A. Agents

D.H.S. Funding Lapse Leads to Longest Partial Shutdown in History

Trump’s Signature Is Going on U.S. Paper Currency. No President Has Done That.

Trump Administration Begins Investigations Into 3 Medical Schools

House Ethics Panel Holds Rare Public Hearing on Democrat’s Conduct

Trump Assembles His Cabinet to Discuss Iran, Inflation and ... Sharpies

Standoff With Iran Raises Fresh Doubts About Trump’s Freestyle Diplomacy

Trump Extends Deadline Again for Iran to Open Strait or Face Power Grid Strikes

Iran Acts as Gatekeeper of Hormuz as War Drags On

G.O.P. Senator Weighs Forcing Congress to Vote to Authorize the War

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SHIELD OF THE AMERICAS

by Forrest Hylton

The precise outlines of the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, announced last September, have become clearer. The region has witnessed fishy elections in Honduras; the bombing and murder of more than 150 fishermen in the Pacific and Caribbean; the kidnapping and extradition of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela; the killing of the drug kingpin El Mencho in Mexico; the capture, in Bolivia, by US forces, of Sebastián Marset, who ran the Uruguayan arm of Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital; and joint US-Ecuador military operations that led to the bombing of an alleged FARC guerrilla camp on the Colombian frontier, leaving at least 25 dead.

The inaugural Shield of the Americas Summit was held at one of Donald Trump’s golf resorts in Florida on 7 March. The US president told the dozen allied heads of state gathered at Trump National Doral Miami that he didn’t have time to learn ‘your damn language’. He scolded them for the reach of organised crime in their countries, as if US drug policies had nothing to do with it. Trump said he’d be happy to use missiles to target traffickers should his partners request it, and that Cuba was ‘at the end of the line’. Pete Hegseth announced that he only spoke ‘American’.

As in the Bush years, US policy in the Western hemisphere is once again focused on ‘anti-terrorism’ operations like the ones in Ecuador, except the military rather than the State Department is now in charge: who needs the façade of the Organisation of American States, or the Summit of the Americas, which Bill Clinton kicked off in Miami in 1994?

Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, enjoyed a moment in the spotlight at the Doral for expelling Cuban diplomatic personnel and violating his country’s constitution (voters rejected his referendum to allow US bases or military forces on Ecuadorian soil). Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador and Trump’s offshore jailer, was there, along with Nasry Asfura, who wouldn’t be president of Honduras if not for Trump. Argentina’s Javier Milei has embraced the prospect of military co-operation with US special forces, the FBI and the DEA. It is difficult to imagine Chile under José Antonio Kast objecting.

Under the Doral Charter, participating states can buy US military equipment with interest-free loans. The charter also establishes a fund for ports and infrastructure, since one ostensible aim of the military offensive against ‘cartels’ is to recover economic ground lost to China. It remains to be seen how much of any of the promised money materialises, or how one goal relates to the other.

On 10 March, Paraguay’s Congress approved a bill that extends diplomatic immunity to all US military and civilian defence personnel. It allows them to wear US military uniforms and carry US weapons, and travel the country’s roads with US drivers’ licences. US citizens will be subject to US, not Paraguayan law. The US had a similar deal in Iraq, as did the British in 19th-century China. It will be a first in South America.

Paraguayan authorities have the right to be notified when the US military is moving planes, boats and overland vehicles in Paraguay, but not to inspect them. The US Navy and Coast Guard plan to increase their presence on the rivers along which much of the cocaine produced in Peru and Bolivia travels to Atlantic ports such as Montevideo, Santos, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahía before crossing to West Africa and Europe.

Like Milei, the Paraguayan president, Santiago Peña, has declared the ‘Cártel de los Soles’ a terrorist organisation, even though the US Justice Department has explained to Trump, who wanted to charge Maduro as its leader, that there is no such organisation. Peña refrained from commenting on US and Israeli attacks on Iran, but condemned the latter’s strikes on the Gulf monarchies. Peña has also asked the FBI to run an anti-terrorist training centre to share intelligence and fight against Hizbullah and Iran in the triple frontier region.

In a recent meeting with Lula, Trump tried to insist that Brazil designate the PCC and the Comando Vermelho (CV) as ‘terrorist organisations’. The Brazilian president refused to go along (Bolivia’s president, Rodrigo Paz, was more compliant). Lula was one of only five heads of state to attend the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States in Bogotá on 21 March, warning of the dangers of the ‘new colonialism’, but Itamaraty continues to imagine Brazil’s future more as a member of the BRICS group than as part of Latin America: it remains incapable of addressing, much less confronting, regional problems. This has deep historical roots. But if ever there was a time to shift focus from the global stage to the region, in order to exercise much-needed leadership, it is now.

Polls show Brazil’s presidential race nearly tied between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro. Should Flávio get elected in October – with help from Trump – he would almost certainly follow Trump’s example and amnesty his father, Jair, along with the top military brass currently imprisoned for their roles in the riots in Brasília on 8 January 2023. Paraguayan levels of military and police ‘co-operation’ with US agencies to fight ‘terrorist organisations’ would likely follow, though without prison reform the currently incarcerated leadership of the PCC and CV would remain untouched.

With the collapse of Banco Master and the arrest of its boss, Daniel Vorcaro, a corruption scandal is unfolding in which Supreme Court justices, politicians from all parties, leading businessmen and government officials are all implicated. Lula is not among them, but Flávio Bolsonaro may yet find a way to twist the scandal to his political advantage, regardless of how many of his allies may be involved, and even though his father’s administration was the most corrupt – the bar is high – since Brazil’s return to democracy in the 1980s. Lula’s disapproval rating stands at 61 per cent. Victory in October will not come easily.

(London Review of Books)

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TRUMP HAS NO SOUL

Trump is dangerous not simply because of his imbecility and unbridled narcissism, but because he lacks the core attributes of empathy and understanding that define the human soul.

by Chris Hedges

The most profound realities of human existence are often the ones that can never be measured or quantified. Wisdom. Beauty. Truth. Compassion. Courage. Love. Loneliness. Grief. The struggle to face our own mortality. A life of meaning.

But perhaps the greatest conundrum is the concept of a soul. Do we have a soul? Do societies have souls? And, most basically, what is a soul?

Philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Arthur Schopenhauer, have all grappled with the concept of a soul, with Schopenhauer preferring to define the mystical force within us as will. Sigmund Freud used the Greek word psyche. But most have accepted, whatever the definition, some version of a soul’s existence.

While the concept of the soul is opaque, soullessness is not. Soullessness means something inside of us is dead. Basic human feelings and connections are shut down. Those without souls lack empathy. I saw the soulless in war. Those so calcified inside they kill without any demonstrable feeling or remorse.

The soulless exist in a state of insatiable self-worship. The idol they have erected to themselves must be constantly fed. It demands a never-ending stream of victims. It demands abject obedience and subservience, publicly on display at Trump cabinet meetings.

Psychologists, I expect, would define the soulless as psychopathic.

I write this not to get into an esoteric debate about the soul, but to warn what happens when those without souls seize power. I want to write about what is lost and the consequences of that loss. I want to caution you that death, our death — as individuals and as a collective — mean nothing to those without souls.

This makes the soulless very, very dangerous.

Those who lack souls have no concept of their own limitations. They feed off a bottomless and self-delusional optimism, giving to their cruelest deeds and bitterest defeats, the patina of goodness, success and morality.

Those without souls — as Paul Woodruff writes in his small masterpiece “Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue” — do not have the capacity for reverence, awe, respect and shame. They believe they are gods.

The soulless cannot respond rationally to reality. They live in self-constructed echo chambers. They hear only their own voice. Civic, familial, legal and religious rituals and ceremonies that transport those with souls into the realm of the sacred, into a space where we acknowledge our shared humanity, forcing us, at least for a moment, to humble ourselves, are meaningless to those without souls. Those without souls cannot see because they cannot feel.

The soulless, enslaved by narcissism, greed, a lust for power and hedonism, cannot make moral choices. Moral choices for them do not exist. Truth and falsehoods are identical. Life is transactional. Is it good for me? Does it make me feel omnipotent? Does it give me pleasure? This stunted existence banishes them from the moral universe.

Human beings, including children, are commodities to the soulless, objects to exploit for pleasure or profit or both. We saw this soullessness displayed in the Epstein Files. And it was not only Epstein. Huge sections of our ruling class including billionaires, Wall Street financiers, university presidents, philanthropists, celebrities, Republicans, Democrats and media personalities, consider us worthless.

Thucydides understood. Reverence is not a religious virtue but a moral virtue. Woodruff went so far as to define it as a political virtue. Reverence for shared ideals, Woodruff writes, is the only thing that can bind us together. It is the only attribute that ensures mutual trust. Reverence allows us to remember what it means to be human. It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honor and protect — including the natural world — and forces that allow us moments of transcendence, or what in religious terms, we call grace.

“If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs,” Woodruff writes. “Pray instead that all may be reverent.”

Trump’s celebration of himself is made manifest in his stunted vocabulary of superlatives and his rebranding of national monuments. He tears down the East Wing to construct his gaudy and oversized $400 million ballroom. He proposes a 250-foot-tall memorial arch, adorned with gilded statues and eagles, in honor of himself, an arch that will be bigger than the Arch of Triumph erected by North Korean dictator Kim II Sung in Pyongyang. He is planning a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will include life-size statues of celebrities, sports figures, political and artistic figures deemed by Trump to be politically correct, along with, of course, himself. His face adorns the sides of federal buildings on huge, well-lit banners. He changed the name of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. He added his name to the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has announced a new fleet of U.S. naval vessels called Trump-class battleships.

These are monuments not only to Trump, but to a perverted ethic, to the insatiable self-worship that defines the inner void of the soulless. Monuments, houses of worship and national shrines dedicated to justice, self-sacrifice and equality, which demand from us humility and introspection, which require the capacity for reverence, mystify the soulless.

The soulless have no sense of aesthetics. They have no sense of balance, symmetry and proportion. The bigger, the gaudier, the more encrusted in gold leaf, the better. They seek to shut out everything and everyone else, to herd us with offerings to the feet of Moloch.

When the soulless wage war it is part of this perverted drive to build a monument to themselves. When war goes badly, as it is going in Iran, the soulless, unable to read reality, demand greater levels of violence and destruction. The more they fail, the more they are convinced everyone has betrayed them, the more they descend into a tyrannical rage.

Trump, potentially facing a humiliating debacle in Iran, will lash out like a wounded beast. It does not matter how many suffer and die. It does not matter what weapons, including nuclear weapons, must be employed. He must triumph, or at least appear to triumph.

“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’” Father Zossima asks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

This is the plight of the soulless. They seek, in their misery, to make their hell our own.

(chrishedges.substack.com)

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