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Dear Progressive Reader,

“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy. They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.” This comment did not come from a news reporter describing the very public breakup () that began on Tuesday afternoon between President Donald Trump and his unelected billionaire adviser Elon Musk, rather it was a recording ([link removed]) of Trump’s comments about the war in Ukraine when speaking with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office on Thursday. “You see it in hockey. You see it in sports. The referees let them go for a couple of seconds,” Trump continued. “Let them go for a little while before you pull them apart.” We will have to see in the days to come whether there are any referees that will pull apart the tussling narcissists before more damage is
done to our country and our world.

One significant concern raised last night by Jeffrey Goldberg of
The Atlantic magazine is what form or revenge Musk might take with all of the information he gathered during his 130-day career with DOGE. “I take the Trump-Musk breakup drama seriously, in part because Donald Trump gave his former best friend Elon Musk access to enormous amounts of secret government data and there’s no predicting what Musk could do with it,” said Goldberg ([link removed]) on Washington Week.

In the meantime, a series of raids by Immigration ad Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Los Angeles on Friday were met by protests and resistance ([link removed]) in what may be a precursor of escalating conflicts in other cities ([link removed]) as well. When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said ([link removed]) she was deeply angered and that her office would not stand for these type of actions, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller fired back ([link removed]) on X, “You have no say in this at all. Federal law is supreme and federal law will be enforced.” This comment follows the latest proposal to militarize ICE enforcement.

On May 9, the
Department of Homeland Security requested ([link removed]) 20,000 National Guard troops to support “expansive interior immigration enforcement operations.” All of this has frightening historical echoes. The story of a similar nationalization of police forces in 1930s Germany is described ([link removed]) in an extensive article in the online Holocaust Encyclopedia which notes, “The Nazis believed that the police would have a particularly important role to play in the new Germany. Therefore, almost immediately after Hitler’s appointment, the Nazis sought to take over and transform [the police]. But the decentralized nature of German policing in 1933 made this difficult. At that time, various state and city governments—not the German chancellor—oversaw the country’s police forces. Nazification of the police could not happen overnight. In fact, it took
several years. It was not until 1936 that the Nazis fully centralized all police forces.” This historical comparison was emphasized on Friday by Chicago alder Byron Sigcho-Lopez who described ([link removed]) the recent raids in his city as “Gestapo-style abductions happening in front of all of us.”

This week on our website, Ed Rampell interviews ([link removed]) journalist Chris Hedges about his new book on Gaza, A Genocide Foretold; Shadrack Omuka reports ([link removed]) from Kenya on how cuts to USAID funding are impacting his country’s renewable energy sector; and Terrance Sullivan writes on ([link removed]) longterm impact of Trump’s ending of consent decrees placed on local police departments in the wake of the tragic killings in 2020 of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Plus, Bill Lueders looks at ([link removed]) the strange bedfellows of nutty Republicans and animal rights activists working to end the use of animals in scientific research;
David Rosen analyzes ([link removed]) the impact of defunding digital equity programs; and Frank Smyth raises the alarm ([link removed]) about a recent decision by the Trump Administration that paves the way for a form of home-made machine gun. Plus, health advocates Donna Gaffney and Teri Mills pen an op-ed ([link removed]) of the dangers of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas about fluoride; and Taryn Morrissey opines ([link removed]) on the ways children and families would be harmed by the GOP tax bill currently being debated in Congress.

Finally, next week on June 14, we are celebrating the 170th birthday of Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette, with a special day of online fundraising to honor our founder and his vision for a true peoples’ democracy where corporate interests do not hold undue influence over our political system. Please join us this year to #FIGHTBACKPRESSFORWARD ([link removed]) and make a gift to help keep the independent voice of The Progressive alive and thriving.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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