MADISON, Wis. — Out in Wisconsin’s state capital, where the orange leaves are falling and every other person seems to wear the red and white of the University of Wisconsin Badgers, the pride and pain of rooting for the Dodgers in 2025 played out in the household of Carolina Sarmiento and Revel Sims.
They’re urban planning professors, Southern California natives — he’s from Eagle Rock, she’s from Santa Ana; they met at UCLA — and longtime friends of mine who have lived in Madison for a decade but are still involved in immigrant and anti-gentrification activism back home. I visited them recently as part of a speaking tour of Midwestern colleges and found myself in the middle of a debate that passed through the lives of too many people we know back home.
It’s one that’s unlikely to completely fade away no matter how many rings and parades the Boys in Blue rack up:
Is it OK to, well, revel, in this year’s World Series champs?
On one hand the Dodgers won back-to-back titles for their first time ever and became the first team to do so in a generation. The squad looked like Los Angeles at its best: people from across the world who set aside their egos to win and bring joy to millions of Angelenos in a most difficult year for the City of Angels.
L.A., a city long synonymous with winning — the weather, the teams, the people, the food — has suffered a terrible losing streak that started with the deadly and catastrophic Eaton and Palisades fires and continues with mass deportations that the Trump administration vows to escalate.
That’s where the rub came for Sarmiento and other Dodgers fans. For them, the actions and inactions of the team this year have been indefensible.
“For me, it started when the Dodgers went to the White House,” said the 45-year-old as we drove to their blue-and-white house. She especially took issue with shortstop Mookie Betts, who skipped a White House visit in 2019 when he was with the World Series-winning Boston Red Sox but shook Trump’s hand this time around, describing his previous snub as “very selfish.”
“Who got in his ear?” she exclaimed, bringing out dried mangoes for us to snack on as we waited for Sims to come home. “Since when has standing up for injustice been about you?”
Sarmiento didn’t grow up a Dodgers fan but bought into the team once she and Sims became a couple. They and their two young sons usually attended Dodgers games on trips back home and regularly caught the Dodgers in Milwaukee whenever they played the Brewers. One time, manager Dave Roberts “happily” signed a jersey for them when the family ran into him at a hotel, Sarmiento said.
In Madison, she long wore a Dodgers sweatshirt emblazoned with the Mexican flag that Sims bought for her because “it was a way to represent home. But not anymore. I tell Revel, ‘Babe, I’m not asking you to boycott the Dodgers forever, but they gotta give us something back.’”
Sure, the Dodgers blocked federal agents from entering the Dodger Stadium parking lot in June just after la migra raided a Home Depot facility. Shortly after, the team donated $1 million to the California Community Foundation to disburse to nonprofits assisting families affected by Trump’s deportation Leviathan.
But as the summer went along, Sarmiento grew frustrated that only Dodgers outfielder Kiké Hernández spoke out against immigration raids and Trump’s deployment of the Marines and National Guard. She also wondered why Dodgers chairman Mark Walter wouldn’t address charges that companies he has investments in do business with Trump’s deportation machine. One has a stake in a private prison company that contracts with the federal government to run immigrant detention centers; another has a joint venture with Palantir, which ICE has contracted to create data surveillance systems that would make the Eye of Sauron from “The Lord of the Rings” series seem as innocuous as a teddy bear.
“After a while, it’s like a woman who knows her partner is a cheater but keeps saying, ‘He’s not a cheater, he’s not a cheater’ and then gets upset when he cheats on her again. At that point, all you can say is, ‘Girl…‘”
I brought up how many Dodgers fans I know saw the team’s World Series win as a giant middle finger to Trump.
The heroes of Games 6 and 7, outfielders Kiké Hernández and second baseman Miguel Rojas, come respectively from Puerto Rico and Venezuela, a commonwealth Trump has neglected and a country he’s salivating to invade. The team’s most popular player, Shohei Ohtani, still proudly speaks in his native Japanese despite being in the U.S. for eight years and knowing some English. Tens of thousands of fans came out for the Dodgers victory parade and celebration at Dodger Stadium, many of them undoubtedly immigrants.
Isn’t it OK to let folks be happy?
“It’s like community benefit agreements,” Sarmiento responded, referring to a tactic by neighborhood groups that sees them win commitments from developers on issues like open space, union contracts and affordable housing with the threat of protests and lawsuits. “You know what’s coming, so you try to get something out of it. This year was a political moment that fans could’ve taken and they didn’t, so the Dodgers gave nothing.”
We greeted Sims as he walked in. The two of us walked down to the basement, where he watched the World Series in exile on a big-screen TV.
“It’s a little lonely being a Dodgers fan out here,” joked the 48-year-old, although he was heartened to have seen a fellow University of Wisconsin professor decked out in a Freddie Freeman jersey earlier in the day. Sims grew up going to Dodger Stadium with his father and remembered going to games on his own in the mid-2000s “when it wasn’t a pretty time.”
He brought up the Dodgers’ owner from that era: Frank McCourt, who raised ticket and concession prices seemingly every year and who still partially owns the parking lots surrounding Dodger Stadium. Fans responded to his disastrous regime by protesting before and during games. “It was disheartening to not see that in the stadium this year, when there was an even bigger problem going on.”
Sims felt “conflicted” rooting for the Dodgers this year. He watched every game he could but admitted he found the team celebrating ethnic pride nights “hollow” as raids increased across Los Angeles and the Trump administration attacked the rights of groups that the Dodgers were honoring.
“It would’ve been easy [for the Dodgers] to make a bland statement — ‘We’re a team full of immigrants in a city of immigrants and we’re proud of us all’ — and you wouldn’t have to go any further. They have a historical obligation to do that because of their history.”
But not rooting for the Dodgers was never an option.
Pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto stands onstage at the World Series celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I want to see L.A. people happy. The parade! It’s a free holiday. People just ditch work and don’t get in trouble for it. We’re the only city — not New York, not Boston, not San Francisco — with a chant against us. We’re despised and misunderstood. So if the Dodgers win, L.A. wins.”
Sarmiento joined us. “She’s my better political half,” Sims cracked. “Caro said to pick another sport.”
“No I didn’t!” she kindly replied. “I just said to take a pause, just for now. A political pause.”
Sims admitted that that a vintage jacket that he used to bring out every October as the Dodgers made another playoff run and Wisconsin turns cold was still in the closet. “I haven’t worn any gear all year.”
“When you went to the game!” Sarmiento shot back, referring to a visit to Milwaukee earlier this year with his local softball team.
“I went with a Valenzuela jersey to represent L.A.,” Sims responded as Sarmiento shook her head.
He laughed.
“I love the team. I just don’t like this team for not saying anything. But it’s what I signed up for.”
Like a teenager armed with their first smartphone, President Trump’s masked immigration enforcers love nothing more than to mug for friendly cameras.
They gladly invite pseudo-filmmakers — some federal government workers, others conservative influencers or pro-Trump reporters — to embed during raids so they can capture every tamale lady agents slam onto the sidewalk, every protester they pelt with pepper balls, every tear gas canister used to clear away pesky activists. From that mayhem comes slickly produced videos that buttress the Trump administration’s claim that everyone involved in the push to boot illegal immigrants from the U.S. is a hero worthy of cinematic love.
But not everything that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and its sister agencies do shows up in their approved rivers of reels.
Their propagandists aren’t highlighting the story of Jaime Alanís García, a Mexican farmworker who fell 30 feet to his death in Camarillo this summer while trying to escape one of the largest immigration raids in Southern California in decades.
They’re not making videos about 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe, an Orange County resident who moved to this country from Mexico as a 4-year-old and died in a Victorville hospital in September after spending weeks in ICE custody complaining about his health.
They’re not addressing how ICE raids led to the deaths of Josué Castro Rivera and Carlos Roberto Montoya, Central American nationals run over and killed by highway traffic in Virginia and Monrovia while fleeing in terror. Or what happened to Silverio Villegas González, shot dead in his car as he tried to speed away from two ICE agents in suburban Chicago.
Those men are just some of the 20-plus people who have died in 2025 while caught up in ICE’s machine — the deadliest year for the agency in two decades, per NPR.
Publicly, the Department of Homeland Security has described those incidents as “tragic” while assigning blame to everything but itself. For instance, a Homeland Security official told the Associated Press that Castro Rivera’s death was “a direct result of every politician, activist and reporter who continue to spread propaganda and misinformation about ICE’s mission and ways to avoid detention” — whatever the hell that means.
An ICE spokesperson asked for more time to respond to my request for comment, said “Thank you Sir” when I extended my deadline, then never got back to me. Whatever the response would’ve been, Trump’s deportation Leviathan looks like it’s about to get deadlier.
As reported by my colleagues Andrea Castillo and Rachel Uranga, his administration plans to get rid of more than half of ICE’s field office directors due to grumblings from the White House that the deportations that have swamped large swaths of the United States all year haven’t happened faster and in larger numbers.
Asked for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs, described The Times’ questions as “sensationalism” and added “only the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a ‘massive shakeup.’”
Agents are becoming more brazen as more of them get hired thanks to billions of dollars in new funds. In Oakland, one fired a chemical round into the face of a Christian pastor from just feet away. In Santa Ana, another pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at activists who had been trailing him from a distance in their car. In the Chicago area, a woman claimed a group of them fired pepper balls at her car even though her two young children were inside.
La migra knows they can act with impunity because they have the full-throated backing of the White House. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller crowed on Fox News recently, “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”
That’s not actually true, but when have facts mattered to this presidency if it gets in the way of its apocalyptic goals?
Greg Bovino, El Centro Border Patrol sector chief, center, walks with federal agents near an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Ill.
(Erin Hooley / Associated Press)
Tasked with turning up the terror dial to 11 is Gregory Bovino, a longtime Border Patrol sector chief based out of El Centro, Calif., who started the year with a raid in Kern County so egregious that a federal judge slammed it as agents “walk[ing] up to people with brown skin and say[ing], ‘Give me your papers.’” A federal judge ordered him to check in with her every day for the foreseeable future after the Border Patrol tear-gassed a neighborhood in a Chicago suburb that was about to host its annual Halloween children’s parade (an appeals court has temporarily blocked the move).
Bovino now reports directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and is expected to pick most of the ICE field office directors from Customs and Border Protection, the arm of the federal government that the Border Patrol belongs to. It logged 180 immigrant deaths under its purview for the 2023 fiscal year, the last year for which stats are publicly available and the third straight year that the number had increased.
To put someone like Bovino in charge of executing Trump’s deportation plans is like gifting a gas refinery to an arsonist.
He’s constantly trying to channel the conquering ethos of Wild West, complete with a strutting posse of agents — some with cowboy hats — following him everywhere, white horses trailed by American flags for photo ops and constant shout-outs to “Ma and Pa America” when speaking to the media. When asked by a CBS News reporter recently when his self-titled “Mean Green Machine” would end its Chicago campaign — one that has seen armed troops march through downtown and man boats on the Chicago River like they were patrolling Baghdad — Bovino replied, “When all the illegal aliens [self-deport] and/or we arrest ‘em all.”
Such scorched-earth jibber-jabber underlines a deportation policy under which the possibility of death for those it pursues is baked into its foundation. ICE plans to hire dozens of healthcare workers — doctors, nurses, psychiatrists — in anticipation of Trump’s plans to build more detention camps, many slated for inhospitable locations like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz camp in the Florida Everglades. That was announced to the world on social media with an AI-generated image of grinning alligators wearing MAGA caps — as if the White House was salivating at the prospect of desperate people trying to escape only to find certain carnage.
In his CBS News interview, Bovino described the force his team has used in Chicago — where someone was shot and killed, a pastors got hit with pepper balls from high above and the sound of windshields broken by immigration agents looking to snatch someone from their cars is now part of the Windy City’s soundtrack — as “exemplary.” The Border Patrol’s peewee Patton added he felt his guys used “the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission. If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them.”
One shudders to think what Bovino thinks is excessive for la migra. With his powers now radically expanded, we’re about to find out.
Tuesday evening former Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to her second sold-out crowd in Los Angeles at the Wiltern Theater as part of a book tour promoting her memoir, “107 Days.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to decide if she’ll run for president in 2028. She’s also not going to dish on her former boss, Joe Biden. And her advice for a Brown-skinned person just getting into politics? There will be many situations when you walk into a meeting room and no one looks like you. Keep your chin up, your shoulders back and remember — all of us have your back.
“All of us” referred to the cheering, sold-out crowd at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening who’d come to see the former Democratic presidential candidate speak about her new book, the election-campaign memoir “107 Days.” The chanted “Kamala!” “Kamala!” as she walked on stage. The outbursts of adoration continued for the next hour in eruptions of applause and supportive shout-outs (“We love you!”) as she spoke about everything from the need to pass Proposition 50 to how she coped with the devastating loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
Moderated by actor Kerry Washington, “A Conversation With Kamala Harris” was one of nearly 20 stops on a tour that’s already seen Harris speak in New York, London and at the Wiltern last month. Zealous attendees paid anywhere from $55 to $190 on tickets to see Harris again following “one of the wildest and most consequential campaigns in American history” (the latter is an official descriptor for her book). The memoir details her historically short run for president, the whirlwind 107 days between the time Biden withdrew from the race and Harris become the Democratic nominee to her devastating loss on Nov. 5.
Harris fans flock to the Wiltern to see Kamala speak about her book, “107 Days.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Were there any great revelations or gotcha moments on stage Tuesday evening? Not really, but that’s not what this tour is about — at least for those who chose Harris over watching Game 4 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. The former attorney general of California shared her thoughts about the current Department of Justice — a “thin-skinned president” is using it as his own personal tool of “vengeance.” She explained how her loyalties to Biden may have cost her votes, and called out the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, whose “billionaire owners pre-capitulated” to Trump when they pulled their respective editorial boards’ endorsements for Harris. She drew a big laugh when discussing the importance of parsing fact from fiction in today’s mediaverse, and made up her own example of misinformation: “Circumcisions are causing autism!” And on a more serious note, she detailed the emotional fallout she experienced after losing the election: “For months [she and her husband, Doug Emhoff] never even mentioned it.”
Criticisms of Harris’ book have centered around a frankly tired refrain that she should accept more personal accountability for the election loss as opposed to blaming the influence of outside forces. On Tuesday she appeared willing to explore those themes when she said she constantly interrogated herself on the campaign trail: Are you doing everything you can to win this election? But before she could go much deeper, Washington told her that she needed to know that we, the audience, understood she did everything she could. The crowd erupted in affirming shouts and applause.
Clearly, a book tour attended by The Converted is not going to produce headline-worthy grist, especially with an interviewer who is an admitted Harris friend and supporter. That’s what debates and media interviews are for, and this was a fan event.
And her base was thirsty. Since Harris has largely stayed out of the spotlight since last November, the audience appeared ready to relive some of the joy they felt in the brief time she was running for office, and perhaps find a glimmer of hope in dark times for those who see the current administration’s actions as anti-democratic, at best.
Before “The Conversation With Kamala Harris” kicked off at 7 p.m., attendees who spotted Harris’ husband, Emhoff, in the first few rows of the venue lined up to shake his hand and take selfies with the former second gentleman of the United States. The close access to SGOTUS was surprising, given the heightened security around political figures after violent events such as the home-invasion assassinations of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, and the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a speaking event last month. Yet the atmosphere was casual and relaxed.
Despite heightened threats of politically-motivated violence, President Trump pulled Harris’ Secret Service detail, as he has done to many of those he sees as his enemies. But as a former state office holder, Harris’ security detail Tuesday was provided by the California Highway Patrol.
The conversation lasted a little over an hour, with a few prescreened questions at the end from audience members, such as the query from an attendee who identified himself as Ramon Chavoya, a proud Latino. He asked for Harris’ advice on getting into local politics. She was the first Black and first South Asian female candidate to be chosen by either party to run for the Oval Office. Her very presence was a reminder that the face of the nation is changing, despite a rise in xenophobic movements and legislation. She advised the aspiring young politician that he would likely stand out, but that he wasn’t alone. “We’re all in the room with you,” she said, a sentiment Harris’ supporters surely understood.
Scholes initially kept his son’s diagnosis secret during his playing career and revealed he was dropped by United manager Sir Alex Ferguson while attempting to handle the situation privately.
“I never got a break from it, even when playing – it was very hard in those days,” Scholes, one of United’s key players in the 1999 Treble season, added.
“I don’t think they diagnosed it until he was two-and-a-half years old. But you knew early something was wrong, but then you get the diagnosis, and I’d never heard of it.
“I remember the first time after it, we were playing Derby away and I just didn’t want to be there.
“I remember the manager dropped me the week after, and I hadn’t told anyone. I ended up telling them a few weeks later, as it was quite hard.
“Even now, I don’t want sympathy or anything. I just thought, even if I did speak to someone about it, it’s not going to help Aiden.
“The big concern now is, because you’re getting a bit older, what happens when you’re not here? That’s the thing that’s now on my mind all the time.”
Autism spectrum disorder – its medical name – is the name for a range of conditions that affect how a person communicates and interacts with the world around them, as well as their interests and behaviour.
It is not a disease or an illness, but a condition that somebody is born with, and it is estimated that one in every 100 people in the UK is autistic.
A year ago tomorrow , the Zacatecas native suffered a heart attack and mild stroke in the moments after seeing his Dodgers win Game 2 of the World Series against the New York Yankees. He spent three days in a medically induced coma at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood and regained consciousness to news from jubilant nurses that the Dodgers had won the championship.
The lifelong baseball fan had no idea what they were talking about. His passion for the sport was lost along with his memory.
When family members put on highlights from the 2024 championship during his rehabilitation at a clinic in Gardena throughout the end of the year, the former carpenter would shrug and change the channel. When someone told him that legendary Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela had died, Contreras swore that he had just seen his fellow Mexican pitch at the stadium.
It wasn’t until the 2025 baseball season came along that Contreras’ mind began to truly rebound. He watched games from his longtime home in the unincorporated Florence-Graham neighborhood and learned to love the Dodgers anew. But he didn’t cheer like before. Contreras followed doctor’s orders to stay calm when the Dodgers were losing instead of cursing like the past and quietly applaud when the team was winning when he would’ve previously roared.
He’s the father-in-law of my sister Alejandrina. And I wanted to hang out with Don Conrado for Game 1 of this year’s World Series to experience fandom in all its mortality.
Wearing a flat-brimmed fedora and a blue Dodgers 2024 World Series champion, I caught Contreras just as he was entering my sister’s Norwalk home holding on to his walker with the help of Alejandrina’s husband, Conrad. His father talks slower than he used to and can’t drive anymore, but Contreras is once again the same man his family knows: witty, observant and baseball-crazy.
A schoolyard pitcher in his hometown of Monte Escobedo, Contreras fell in with the Dodgers almost as soon as he migrated to the United States in 1970 to join a brother in Highland Park. He used to attend games every week “when $10 got two people into the stadium and you could also eat a hot dog,” Contreras told me in Spanish before Game 1 began.
His stories from those years were immaculate. Don Sutton throwing a shutout. The Cincinnati Reds always “ready to play to the death.” Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Willie Stargell hitting a home run out of Dodger Stadium in 1973 “and all of us just staring above our heads in awe.”
Contreras was such a fan that he took his pregnant wife Mary to watch Valenzuela pitch on the day in 1983 that Conrad was due because they were giving out “I (Heart) Fernando” T-shirts, an anecdote that left their son flabbergasted.
“What happened to the shirt?” Conrad asked his mom in Spanish.
“I threw it away,” replied the 61-year-old Mary.
“They’d cost a lot of money now!” he groaned.
“They were cheap! The color really faded fast.”
Los Angeles Dodgers two-way player Shohei Ohtani hits a two-run home run during the seventh inning of Game 1 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays at Roger Centre on Friday in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Blue Jays won, 11-4.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The family continued to attend games through Conrad’s teenage years but stopped “when even the birds couldn’t afford to attend,” Mary said. Conrad, 42, thinks the last time he went to a game with his dad was “at least” 20 years ago. But they regularly watched games on television. It was he who administered the CPR a year ago that saved his dad’s life.
“He was walking around the house angry all that game,” Conrad said.
“No, well, Roberto was making me mad,” Conrado replied, his nickname for Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “But I can’t get mad anymore.”
I asked how he thought this year’s series would go. He mentioned Shohei Ohtani, whom he kept calling el japonés in a respectful tone because, well, his memory can be fuzzy.
“He strikes out too much, but when he hits it, he hits it. If he plays like that, they win the series. But if Toronto hits, forget it.”
One more question before game time, the one too many liberal Latino Dodgers fans are belly-aching over right now: is it ethical to root for the team considering they haven’t been too vocal in opposing Donald Trump’s deportation campaign and owner Mark Walter has investments in companies that are profiting from it?
“Sports shouldn’t get into politics, but all sports owners are with Trompas,” he said, using a nickname I’ve heard more than a few rancho libertarians use for Trump. He shrugged.
“So what’s one to do? They kept la migra out of the stadium,” referring to an unsuccessful June attempt by federal agents to enter the stadium parking lot. “If the team had allowed that, then there’d be a huge problem.”
Mary wasn’t as sympathetic. “Latinos shouldn’t let the Dodgers off so easy. But when Latinos surrender, they surrender.”
It was game time.
Conrad slipped into a gray Dodgers away jersey to match his black team cap. My sister, an Angels follower for some reason, wore a Kiké Hernández T-shirt “because he stands with immigrants.”
“The only good thing about the Dodgers is that they aren’t winning with a gringo,” said Mary, who actually doesn’t care much about baseball because she finds it boring. “It’s someone [Ohtani] who doesn’t want to speak English who’s winning it for them.”
Her husband smiled.
“Let’s see if Mary gets into baseball.”
“That’ll be the real miracle,” she snapped back.
Contreras rubbed his hands in glee as the Dodgers went up 2-0 in the top of the third and merely frowned when the Blue Jays tied it in the bottom of the fourth while we were enjoying takeout from Taco Nazo. “His anger comes in waves, it’s a trip,” Conrad said. “He’s calmer but se enoja.”
“Who?” Conrado deadpanned.
When Dodger starting pitcher Blake Snell left the game with the bases loaded and no one out in the bottom of the sixth, Contreras shook his head in disgust but kept his voice calm.
“This is what gets me mad. They should’ve taken him out long ago, but Roberto didn’t. This is what I was afraid of. When Toronto get on, they get on. They won’t stop until they destroy.”
Earlier in the game, Alejandrina had told Conrado that Kirk was a Tijuana native. The pride in shared roots, albeit generations apart, took a little bit of sting off his home run, which made the score a humiliating 11-2.
“Thank goodness he’s Mexican,” Conrado told his son, patting his knee. “That’s what’s left for us” to be happy about the game.
An inning later, Contreras began to feel woozy. His sugar level was elevated. Mary took off his jacket to fix his insulin device. My sister’s corgi, Penny, jumped onto the couch and lay on his lap.
“They do know when someone someone’s ill, right?” he said to no one before scratching Penny’s tummy and cooing, “You know I’m ill, right? I’m ill!”
When the “massacre” finally ended, Contreras remained philosophical.
“It’s incredible that I’m able to see this. But I’m still malo. My feet hurt, my memory isn’t what it used to be, my sense of balance isn’t there. But there’s the Dodgers. But they need to win.”
Conrad went to the bedroom to grab his father’s walker.
“Do you want a Toronto shirt now?” he joked.
His dad stared silently. “No, that would give me another heart attack.”
Consumer confidence is dropping. The national debt is $38 trillion and climbing like the yodeling mountain climber in that “The Price is Right” game. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are falling and the U.S. is getting more and more restless as 2025 comes to a close.
What’s a wannabe strongman to do to prop up his regime?
Attack Latin America, of course!
U.S. war planes have bombed small ships in international waters off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia since September with extrajudicial zeal. The Trump administration has claimed those vessels were packed with drugs manned by “narco-terrorists” and have released videos for each of the 10 boats-and-counting it has incinerated to make the actions seem as normal as a mission in “Call of Duty.”
“Narco-terrorists intending to bring poison to our shores, will find no safe harbor anywhere in our hemisphere,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media and who just ordered an aircraft carrier currently stationed in the Mediterranean to set up shop in the Caribbean. It’ll meet up with 10,000 troops stationed there as part of one of the area’s biggest U.S. deployments in decades, all in the name of stopping a drug epidemic that has ravaged red America for the past quarter century.
This week, Trump authorized covert CIA actions in Venezuela and revealed he wants to launch strikes against land targets where his people say Latin American cartels operate. Who cares whether the host countries will give permission? Who cares about American laws that state only Congress — not the president — can declare war against our enemies?
It’s Latin America, after all.
The military buildup, bombing and threat of more in the name of liberty is one of the oldest moves in the American foreign policy playbook. For more than two centuries, the United States has treated Latin America as its personal piñata, bashing it silly for goods and not caring about the ugly aftermath.
“It is known to all that we derive [our blessings] from the excellence of our institutions,” James Monroe concluded in the 1823 speech that set forth what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially told the rest of the world to leave the Western Hemisphere to us. “Ought we not, then, to adopt every measure which may be necessary to perpetuate them?”
Our 19th century wars of expansion, official and not, won us territories where Latin Americans lived — Panamanians, Puerto Ricans, but especially Mexicans — that we ended up treating as little better than serfs. We have occupied nations for years and imposed sanctions on others. We have propped up puppets and despots and taken down democratically elected governments with the regularity of the seasons.
The culmination of all these actions were the mass migrations from Latin America that forever altered the demographics of the United States. And when those people — like my parents — came here, they were immediately subjected to a racism hard-wired into the American psyche, which then justified a Latin American foreign policy bent on domination, not friendship.
Nothing rallies this country historically like sticking it to Latinos, whether in their ancestral countries or here. We’re this country’s perpetual scapegoats and eternal invaders, with harming gringos — whether by stealing their jobs, moving into their neighborhoods, marrying their daughters or smuggling drugs — supposedly the only thing on our mind.
That’s why when Trump ran on an isolationist platform last year, he never meant the region — of course not. The border between the U.S. and Latin America has never been the fence that divides the U.S. from Mexico or our shores. It’s wherever the hell we say it is.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro Urrego addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23 at U.N. headquarters.
(Pamela Smith / Associated Press)
That’s why the Trump administration is banking on the idea that it can get away with its boat bombings and is salivating to escalate. To them, the 43 people American missile strikes have slaughtered on the open sea so far aren’t humans — and anyone who might have an iota of sympathy or doubt deserves aggression as well.
That’s why when Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the U.S. of murder because one of the strikes killed a Colombian fisherman with no ties to cartels, Trump went on social media to lambaste Petro’s “fresh mouth,” accuse him of being a “drug leader” and warn the head of a longtime American ally he “better close up these killing fields [cartel bases] immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”
The only person who can turn down the proverbial temperature on this issue is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who should know all the bad that American imperialism has wrought on Latin America. The U.S. treated his parents’ homeland of Cuba like a playground for decades, propping up one dictator after another until Cubans revolted and Fidel Castro took power. A decades-long embargo that Trump tightened upon assuming office the second time has done nothing to free the Cuban people and instead made things worse.
Instead, Rubio is the instigator. He’s pushing for regime change in Venezuela, chumming it up with self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and cheering on Trump’s missile attacks.
“Bottom line, these are drug boats,” Rubio told reporters recently with Trump by his side. “If people want to stop seeing drug boats blow up, stop sending drugs to the United States.”
You might ask: Who cares? Cartels are bad, drugs are bad, aren’t they? Of course. But every American should oppose every time a suspected drug boat launching from Latin America is destroyed with no questions asked and no proof offered. Because every time Trump violates yet another law or norm in the name of defending the U.S. and no one stops him, democracy erodes just a little bit more.
This is a president, after all, who seems to dream of treating his enemies, including American cities, like drug boats.
Few will care, alas. It’s Latin America, after all.
A new expanded edition of Maia Kobabe’s award-winning graphic memoir “Gender Queer” will be released next year.
Oni Press has announced that “Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition” will be available in May. The special hardcover edition of the seminal LGBTQ+ coming of age memoir includes commentary by Kobabe as well as other comic creators and scholars.
“For fans, educators, and anyone else who wants to know more, I am so excited to share ‘Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition,’” Kobabe said in the news release. “Queer and trans cartoonists, comics scholars, and multiple people who appear in the book as characters contributed their thoughts, reactions, and notes to this new edition.”
The new 280-page hardcover will feature “comments on the color design process, on comics craft, on family, on friendship, on the touchstone queer media that inspired me and countless other people searching for meaningful representation, and on the complicated process of self-discovery,” the author added.
Released in 2019, “Gender Queer” follows Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, from childhood into eir young adult years as e navigates gender and sexuality and eir understanding of who e is. The books is a candid look into the nonbinary author’s exploration of identity, chronicling the frustrations and joys and epiphanies of eir journey and self discovery.
A page from “Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition” by Maia Kobabe.
(Oni Press)
“It’s really hard to imagine yourself as something you’ve never seen,” Kobabe told The Times in 2022. “I know this firsthand because I didn’t meet someone who was out as trans or nonbinary until I was in grad school. It’s weird to grow up and be 25 before you meet someone who is like the same gender as you.”
In addition to commentary by Kobabe, “Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition” will feature comments from fellow artists and comics creatives Jadzia Axelrod, Ashley R. Guillory, Justin Hall, Kori Michele Handwerker, Phoebe Kobabe, Hal Schrieve, Rani Som, Shannon Watters and Andrea Colvin. Sandra Cox, Ajuan Mance and Matthew Noe are among the academic figures who contributed to the new edition.
“It’s been almost seven years since I wrote the final words of this memoir; revisiting these pages today, in a radically different and less accepting political climate, sparked a lot of new thoughts for me as well,” Kobabe said in the news release. “I hope readers enjoy this even richer text full of community voices.”
A page from “Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition” by Maia Kobabe.
Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.
From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portlandand New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.
That includes 13 police officers tear-gassed in Chicago earlier this month. And, now, a U.S. marshal.
Federal agents boxed in the Toyota Camry of local TikToker Carlitos Ricardo Parias — better known to his hundreds of thousands of followers as Richard LA. As Parias allegedly tried to rev his way out of the trap, an ICE agent opened fire. One bullet hit the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant — and another ricocheted into the hand of a deputy U.S. marshal.
Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, but it’s easy to imagine that things could have easily turned out worse. Such is the chaos that Trump has caused by unleashing shock troops into U.S. cities.
Rather than take responsibility and apologize for an incident that could’ve easily been lethal, Team Trump went into their default spin mode of blaming everyone but themselves.
Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the shooting was “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest.”
Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli chimed in on social media soon after: “I urge California public officials to moderate their rhetoric toward federal law enforcement. Encouraging resistance to federal agents can lead to deadly consequences.” Hours later, he called Times reporter James Queally “an absolute joke, not a journalist” because my colleague noted it’s standard practice by most American law enforcement agencies to not shoot at moving vehicles. One reason is that it increases the chance of so-called friendly fire.
Federal authorities accuse Parias of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in. He is being charged with assault on a federal officer.
Time, and hopefully, evidence, will show what happened — and very important, what led to what happened.
The Trump administration keeps claiming that the public anger against its immigration actions is making the job more dangerous for la migra and their sister agencies. McLaughlin and her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, keep saying there’s been a 1,000% increase in assaults on immigration agents this year like an incantation. Instead of offering concrete figures, they use the supposed stat as a shield against allegations ICE tactics are going too far and as a weapon to excuse the very brutality ICE claims it doesn’t practice.
Well, even if what they say is true, there’s only one side that’s making the job more dangerous for la migra and others during raids:
La migra.
It turns out that if you send in phalanxes of largely masked federal agents to bully and intimidate people in American cities, Americans tend not to take kindly to it.
Who knew?
Gregory Bovino, center, of U.S. Border Patrol, marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
We’re about to enter the sixth month of Trump’s plan to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. Sycophants are bragging that he’s doing the job, but they’re not caring to look at the mess left in its wake that’s becoming more and more perilous for everyone involved. They insist that those who are executing and planning raids are professionals, but professionals don’t make constant pendejos out of themselves.
Professionals don’t bring squadrons to chase after tamale ladies or day laborers, or stage flashy raids of apartments and parks that accomplish little else than footage for propaganda videos. They don’t go into neighborhoods with intimidation on their mind and ready to rough up anyone who gets in their way.
A ProPublica investigation showed that ICE has detained at least 170 U.S. citizens this year, many whom offered proof that they were in this country legally as la migra cuffed them and hauled them off to detention centers.
Professionals don’t lie like there’s a bonus attached to it — but that’s what Trump’s deportation Leviathan keeps doing. In September, McLaughlin put out a news release arguing that the shooting death of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago by an ICE agent was justified because he was dragged a “significant distance” and suffered serious injuries. Yet body cam footage of local police who showed up to the scene captured the two ICE agents involved in the incident describing their injuries as “nothing major.”
Closer to home, a federal jury in Los Angeles last month acquitted an activist of striking a Border Patrol agent after federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega screened footage that contradicted the government’s case and poked holes in the testimony of Border Patrol staff and supervisors. Last week, ICE agents detained Oxnard activist Leonardo Martinez after a collision between their Jeep and his truck. McLaughlin initially blamed the incident on an “agitator group … engaged in recording and verbal harassment,” but footage first published by L.A. Taco showed that la migra trailed Martinez and then crashed into him twice — not the other way around.
Professionals don’t host social media accounts that regularly spew memes that paint the picture of an American homeland where white makes right and everyone else must be eliminated, like the Department of Homeland Security does. A recent post featured medieval knights wearing chain mail and helmets and wielding longswords as they encircle the slogan “The Enemies are at the Gates” above ICE’s job listing website.
The Trump administration has normalized racism and has turned cruelty into a virtue — then its mouthpieces gasp in mock horror when people resist its officially sanctioned jackbootery.
This evil buffoonery comes straight from a president who reacted to the millions of Americans who protested this weekend at No Kings rallies by posting on social media an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown and dropping feces on his critics from a jet fighter. And yet McLaughlin, Noem and other Trump bobbleheads have the gall to question why politicians decry la migra while regular people follow and film them during raids when not shouting obscenities and taunts at them?
Meanwhile, ICE is currently on a hiring spree thanks to Trump’s Bloated Beastly Bill and and has cut its training program from six months to 48 days, according to The Atlantic. It’s a desperate and potentially reckless recruitment drive.
And if you think rapidly piling more people into a clown car is going to produce less clown-like behavior by ICE on the streets of American cities, boy do I have news for you.
A few months ago, my younger daughter, Darby, and I were settling into our seats at the local AMC. As the previews rolled, she gasped. “I know that voice,” she said. “That’s Aidan. Mom, that’s Aidan.”
I looked up just in time to see a familiar shock of brown curls. It was indeed Aidan Delbis, former member of the Falcon Players at Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, a kid I had seen perform alongside my daughter in countless student plays.
Only now he was seated at a kitchen table with Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone as the words “Bugonia” and then “directed by Yorgos Lanthimos” flashed across the screen.
“Did you not know?” I asked my daughter. CV is a fine public school with a good theater program, but it isn’t exactly an incubator for nepo babies and aspiring stars. That one of their own had stepped off last year’s graduation stage and into a major film production should have been very big news long before a trailer hit theaters.
“No,” she said, furiously messaging various friends. “But now they will.”
Now they will indeed. When he joined the cast of “Bugonia,” Delbis didn’t just become a part of Lanthimos’ highly anticipated remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 black comedy “Save the Green Planet!” He also entered the mythology of which Hollywood dreams are made: A 17-year old sends in his first-ever open-call submission and lands a major role in a very big movie.
With a script by Will Tracy and obvious Oscar potential, “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August at this year’s Venice Film Festival before launching onto the festival circuit, including screenings in Toronto and New York, in preparation for its release this Friday. A slightly absurdist, darkly funny thriller with political undertones, it revolves around the kidnapping of a pharmaceutical company’s CEO, Michelle (Stone), by wild-eyed conspiracy theorist Teddy (Plemons) and his loyal cousin Don (Delbis).
From left, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons in the movie “Bugonia.”
(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)
Teddy believes Michelle is an alien sent to destroy Earth. Don believes in Teddy. Though he falls in with Teddy’s plans, he often questions them, serving as a continual reminder that even within Teddy’s paranoid view of the universe, there is such a thing as going too far. Don is, in many ways, the heart of the film.
He is also, like the actor who plays him, autistic.
Delbis — who chooses to self-describe as autistic rather than neurodivergent — is not someone who has long nursed dreams of stardom. He took drama classes all through high school, but it wasn’t until his junior year, Delbis says, “that I started to get more into the process. I found the general process of acting, of understanding and investing in different personalities, to be fun and sometimes scary.”
Still, he says, “I wasn’t really sure that I wanted it to be my main career. But it so happened that this happened while I was in high school, and here we are.”
Here is the Four Seasons on a very rainy October afternoon where Delbis, now 19, has just finished his first solo photo shoot and is sitting, fortified by Goldfish crackers (his go-to-snack), for his first long one-on-one interview. He went to some of the film festivals and just returned from “Bugonia’s” London premiere, where he signed autographs on the red carpet and enjoyed flying first class. His parents, Katy and David Delbis, are seated nearby, as is his access and creative coach, Elaine Hall.
Delbis is a tall, good-natured young man who speaks with a distinctive cadence and in an unwaveringly calm tone. Aside from a habit of repeating himself as he searches for what he wants to say next, he seems more comfortable discussing his experience with filmmaking than many of the dozens of more experienced actors I have interviewed in this very hotel over the years.
“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” Delbis says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It all started,” he says, “when my mom was friends with this agent, April, and one day she sent Mom an audition that seemed pretty promising, so I submitted for that. And they really liked it and called me back.”
It actually started a bit further back than that. With Plemons and Stone already cast, Lanthimos had decided that he wanted a nonprofessional actor to play Don.
“We went really wide in trying to find someone really special,” the Greek-born director of “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” says in a phone interview. “With these two experienced actors, I wanted to bring in a different dynamic. As we looked at people, I felt that the character would be more interesting if he was neurodivergent.”
Casting director Jennifer Venditti put out an open call, which April Smallwood of Spotlight Development saw and sent to Delbis’ mother, Katy.
“A happy-go-lucky young man, neurodivergent — it practically described Aidan,” Katy says in a later interview. La Crescenta may not be an industry hub, but, like many in L.A., the Delbis family has a Hollywood connection. Aidan’s older brother, Tristan (who is also neurodivergent), works at a movie theater; father David is about to retire after years at the Writers Guild Health Fund; and Katy, a self-described “creative,” has done some acting herself. But no one saw film-acting as a potential career for Aidan, who was set to take a gap year after high school. And, Katy says, she had no idea what sort of movie it was for. “It said for a ‘big film,’ but they always say that.”
She thought of it a bit like the time Delbis, a member of the high school track team, decided he also wanted to try out for basketball. “As I drove him to the school,” Katy said, “I told him that he might not get on since there were a lot of kids who had been playing basketball for years, which he had not. He said, ‘Mom, I just want to see what it’s like.’”
Now Delbis wanted to see what it would be like to audition for a “big film.”
Aidan Delbis in the movie “Bugonia.”
(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)
He had recently performed the Vincent Price monologue from “Thriller” for the school talent show, which Katy filmed on her phone, so Smallwood submitted that. Venditti called Smallwood the next day and met with Delbis over Zoom. Thus began a monthslong process of meetings, rehearsals and auditions.
“We focused on him right away,” Venditti says. “He seemed to have it all. And he was very committed.”
“I was really unaware of how big a project it was,” Delbis said. “I had never seen a film by Yorgos.”
In March, Lanthimos, Stone and Plemons were in L.A. for the Oscars, so they all met with Delbis and came away impressed.
Lanthimos thought of casting a neurodivergent actor in a part because it would bring a natural clarity and unfiltered unpredictability to the role. He didn’t consider it any more challenging than working with any other actor. And when he met Delbis, Lanthimos says, “I just thought: That’s him.”
“Just from watching that first tape, you could see there was something so magnetic about him,” said Stone during a recent phone interview. (She is also a producer on the film.) “Don is the audience’s window, the one who can see through the charade.”
Still, there were many more steps to take.
“It’s a big leap for any nonprofessional,” Stone says. “It’s a big part in what is essentially a three-hander.”
From left, director Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons at the Venice Film Festival, where “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August.
(Alessandra Tarantino / Invision / AP)
For an autistic actor, it’s an even bigger leap. As talented as Delbis might be, he also had to be able to handle the pressures, boredom and chaos of a film set. Venditti reached out to Hall. The founder of the Miracle Project and mother to a now-adult neurodivergent son, Hall is an acting coach who has worked for more than 20 years to increase the presence and understanding of neurodivergent and disabled people. She is often asked to gauge the ability of actors to take on a certain role — their ease with the material, their physical stamina, their level of independence and their emotional accessibility.
Delbis, she says, ticked all the boxes. He loves horror films, he was on the track team and he was, at the time, about to travel without his parents on a school trip to Sweden.
He is, as he says himself, “a low-key guy,” so Hall gave him some exercises to help him portray more extreme emotions and prepare him for when other cast members might do the same. (One subsequent rehearsal involved a scene in which one of the actors screamed repeatedly.)
Often, Hall says, perfecting these exercises can take weeks; Delbis, working with his mother, did it in a weekend. She also helped him prepare for his meeting with and then chemistry read with Plemons.
Delbis says he was “a bit nervous, though I don’t know why.” He did not recognize Plemons’ name or his face. “I had watched ‘Breaking Bad,’ but I didn’t realize Jesse played Todd. Halfway through [the read], I told him he looked like Todd and he said, ‘That’s because I played him.’ I’ve seen him in other things since then,” Delbis adds. “He’s a very solid actor.”
More important, he says, “Jesse seemed to me to be a very cool guy.”
That feeling is mutual. “When we brought Aidan in, I was excited and a little nervous,” Plemons says during a phone call from London. They started with one of the more extreme scenes from the film. “I was finding my feet too. When it became apparent that he was going to be fine with the darker scenes, I said, ‘This is him; this is Don.’”
While all this was happening, Delbis was finishing his senior year, which included a starring role in a production of “Almost Maine.” “It was not overly hard,” he says, but sometimes it was a lot. “I did one read and then I had to go to rehearsal for the play.”
Venditti remembers that day very well. “Here we were being so careful, treating him like he was fragile and not wanting to overload him,” she says laughing, “and he’s just calmly multitasking.”
When Delbis got the role in May, he and his family signed a nondisclosure agreement, which is why none of his friends knew his news after graduation, and Delbis and his family flew to the U.K. to begin filming. It was a tough secret for his parents to keep. But “any time it looked like I might slip,” Katy says, “Aidan shut me down.” He celebrated his 18th birthday near the set outside of Windsor, where production ran for three months before moving for two weeks in Atlanta.
Hall was hired to be Delbis’ on-set access and creative coach, a job she believes she has invented, meant to make the experience for neurodivergent and disabled actors easier. She suggested that Lanthimos and Tracy simplify Delbis’ script pages, stripping down the description of action “so he wouldn’t get stuck thinking he had to do exactly what was on the page,” she says, which they were happy to do.
“We didn’t want to put any limits on him,” Lanthimos says.
Delbis chose most of his costumes (except a beekeeping suit, motivated by the plot, which he says “was very hot”), which mirrored his own wardrobe preferences down to the horror film t-shirts and mismatched socks. Even the food Teddy and Don eat during the film reflects Delbis’ taste: mac ’n’ cheese, taquitos, spaghetti.
Hall ensured Delbis had extra time before filming, during which she could help him prepare with rehearsal and centering exercises. She visited the set before he arrived so she could tell him exactly what to expect and worked with the production team to ensure that he had his own space between takes. “They built us a little house, with horror posters on the wall and stuffed animals that looked like his cats,” she says. As there were no Goldfish available in the U.K., the production had them flown in.
“Having Elaine there was amazing,” Venditti says. “The idea of having someone to act as eyes and ears of what people are actually experiencing on set, I think it’s groundbreaking. I don’t know why we haven’t done it before.”
Delbis spent a fair amount of time with Plemons, who Hall said occasionally stepped in to help if she had to be away from set.
“We did a decent amount of goofing around,” Delbis says. “The bond that developed between us occurred quite naturally. I consider Jesse a friend.”
For his part, Plemons enjoyed being around someone who spoke his mind.
“I so appreciated Aidan’s inability to tell a lie,” Plemons says. “On a set, you spend so much time waiting around, and he would say, ‘What are we doing? What is taking so long?’ Which was exactly what I was thinking. He’s a very smart, sensitive, self-assured guy, and if you’re unclear in what you’re saying, he will let you know.”
“Aidan is just so funny,” says his “Bugonia” co-star Emma Stone. “We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Stone says that while she and Delbis had a friendly rapport, she hung back a little when they weren’t shooting. “I didn’t want to form the same kind of bond Aidan had with Jesse because [in the film] it’s them against me and I didn’t want to do too much to mess with that.”
But, the two-time Oscar winner says, “Aidan is just so funny. He was on a jag during the kidnapping scene. We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”
“I went through all of ‘Bugonia’ thinking I had never seen Emma in anything,” Delbis says. “Then I realized my parents had shown me a clip of a woman getting very involved in a birthday card — ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ — and that was from ‘Easy A.’”
When he was filming, Delbis was all business. Several of the takes which he ad-libbed made it into the film and Delbis is proud of that.
“Despite being in more extreme situations than I’ve been in, there’s something of Don’s emotion and struggles that did feel very familiar to me,” he says. “Feelings of great distress and helplessness and conflictedness and confusion. I have felt that in classes in high school.”
“Aidan has great instincts,” Lanthimos says. “In a scene toward the end [of the film], he was so moving, it was the first time I have ever teared up on set.
There were difficult days — one moment with Plemons, Delbis says, took many takes. “It was hot AF and involved me getting more worked up that I am used to getting,” he remembers. But he appreciated Lanthimos’ willingness to let him try things. “In one scene, Jesse throws a chair and I thought that seemed pretty cool. So at the end of the day, they let me throw a chair. I hope that makes it into the outtakes reel.”
He was also very pleased when the crew threw him a s’mores party at the end of filming. “There was a fire pit on set that looked perfect for s’mores,” he says. “And I told them that, so it was my idea to have a s’mores party.”
Delbis is happy with how the film turned out, including his performance. “I think I looked pretty baller in that suit,” he says of one scene. Though he doesn’t have an opinion on the authenticity debate — whether autistic actors should always be the ones to play autistic characters — he thinks it’s “cool that writers and directors are starting to be more conscientious and give more realistic and respectful depictions of neurodivergent people and characters.”
He is more concerned that audiences understand what he thinks is the most important message of the movie.
“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” he says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme. God knows, people aren’t always willing to be tolerant.”
It’s almost a year into Trump 2.0 and MAGA has gone full “snowflake.”
You know the word, the one that for the past decade the right has wielded against liberals as the ultimate epithet — you know, because libs are supposedly feelings-obsessed, physically weak, morally delicate and whiny as all get out.
Because if you think, among other things, that Portland is “War ravaged” like Trump claims it is and the U.S. of A. has to send in the military, you truly are a snowflake.
It sure wasn’t the left that called for the firing of people who criticized one of their heroes in the wake of their tragic death. Or that revoked visas over it. Or cheered when a late-night talk show host was temporarily suspended after the FCC chairman threatened to punish his network, as Brendan Carr did to ABC when he told a podcaster Disney could mete out punishment to Jimmy Kimmel “the easy way or hard way.”
Which president complains any time someone doesn’t think they’re the greatest leader in human history? Threatens retribution against foes real and imagined every waking second? Whines like he’s a bottle of Chardonnay?
Trump even complained this week about a Time magazine cover photo that he proclaimed “may be the Worst of All Time.”
“They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!” the king of MAGA-dom wrote on Truth Social.
Here’s guessing he’d have complained a little less if the “something” floating on the top of his head looked like a really, super-big crown.
President Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One prior to departure from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Sunday.
(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
Watch out, Time magazine, Trump might send the Texas National Guard to your newsroom!
This is an administration that is forcing airports to run videos blaming the government shutdown on their opponents? What branch of the government just asked journalists to only publish preapproved information?
And always with the reacting to Democrat-led cities like Portland, Chicago and L.A. as if they’re Stalingrad during the siege.
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary in August: “L.A. wouldn’t be standing today if President Trump hadn’t taken action then. That city would have burned down if left to the devices of the mayor and the governor of that state.”
Trump about Washington, D.C., over the summer as he issued an executive order to take over its police department in the wake of what he characterized as out-of-control crime: “It is a point of national disgrace that Washington, D.C., has a violent crime rate that is higher than some of the most dangerous places in the world.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to military brass he called in from across the world last month to declare the following: “No more beardos. The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done.”
Welcome to our Snowflake Government. The way these people’s tough talk turns into waterworks at the slightest provocation, you’d think they were the ski slopes of Mt. Baldy come summertime.
Trump and his lackeys possess scary power and don’t hesitate to use it in the name of punishing enemies. But what betrays their inherent snowflake-ness is how much they cry about what they still don’t dominate and their continued use of brute force to try and subdue the slightest, well, slight.
The veritable pity party gnashes its teeth more and more as the months pass. Trump was so angry at the sight of people causing chaos over a relatively small area of downtown L.A. after mass raids swept Southern California in June — chaos that barely registered to what happens after a Dodgers World Series win — that he sent in the Marines.
His spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, keeps describing any nasty look or bad word thrown at migra agents as proof of them suffering a supposedly unprecedented level of assault despite never offering any concrete proof.
The Southland’s acting U.S. attorney, Bill Essayli, accused an LAPD spokesperson last week of leaking information to The Times after one of my colleagues asked him about … wait for it … an upcoming press conference.
No part of the government melts faster, however, than the agency with the apropos acronym of ICE.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their fellow travelers across Homeland Security are Trump’s own Praetorian Guard, tasked with carrying out his deportation deluge. They’ve relished their months in the national spotlight cast by the federal government simultaneously as an unstoppable force and an immovable object. La migra continues to crash into neighborhoods and communities like a masked avalanche of tear gas and handcuffs, justice be damned.
Illinois State Police clash with demonstrators by the ICE facility in Broadview, Ill., as tensions rise over prolonged protests targeting federal ICE operations in Chicago on Oct. 10.
(Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu via Getty Images)
They’re firing pepper balls at the heads of Presbyterian priests outside detention facilities and tackling middle-aged reporters.
Border Patrol sector chief Gregory Bovino, who thinks he’s Napoleon with a crew cut and an Appalachian drawl, has accused protester Cole Sheridan of causing an unspecified groin injury even though the government couldn’t provide any video evidence during a preliminary court hearing earlier this month.
Agents have set off tear gas canisters without giving a heads-up to Chicago police. They’re detaining people without giving them a chance to prove their citizenship until hours later.
All this because — wah, wah! — Windy City residents haven’t welcomed la migra as liberators.
Bovino and his ICE buddies keep whimpering to Trump that they need the National Guard to back them up because they supposedly can’t do their job despite being the ones armed and masked up and backed by billions of dollars in new funds.
That’s why the government is now pushing tech giants to crack down on how activists are organizing. In the past two weeks, Apple has taken down apps that tracked actions by ICE agents and a Chicago Facebook group that was a clearinghouse for migra sightings at the request of the Department of Justice.
On X, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi bragged that she “will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement” despite offering no evidence whatsoever — because who needs facts in the face of Trump’s blizzard of lies?
Since the start of all this madness, I’ve seen the left offer a rejoinder to the snowflake charge: the slogan “ICE Melts,” usually accompanied by a drawing of the action at hand. It’s meant to inspire activists by reminding them that la migra is not nearly as mighty as the right makes them out to be.
That’s clever. But the danger of all these conservative snowflakes turning into a sopping mess the way they do over their perceived victimhood is that the resulting flood threatens to drown out a little thing we’d come to love over many, many, many years.
Five-plus years ago, during the early days of COVID-19, we sent the first edition of Boiling Point. I wrote then that there would “always be people who say it’s the wrong time to talk about carbon emissions, or water pollution, or the extinction crisis.” But even amid a deadly pandemic and stay-at-home orders, I argued, it was more important than ever to keep the climate crisis front and center.
The same is true now — yes, even amid the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on democracy and dissent and immigrants. Which is why, even though I’m leaving the L.A. Times, Boiling Point will continue.
Yes, you read that correctly. I’ve made the difficult decision to leave the L.A. Times. Tuesday was my last day.
But I’m not done telling stories about climate. And neither are my wonderful friends and colleagues.
You’re reading Boiling Point
Sammy Roth gets you up to speed on climate change, energy and the environment. Sign up to get it in your inbox twice a week.
I’m not quite ready to share my own plans yet. If you want to keep following my work, please send me an email at [email protected], and I promise to keep you updated. I’m excited for what comes next.
It’s a bittersweet moment, though. Working at The Times has been one of the great privileges of my life; thank you for inviting me into your inboxes, and making time to read my stories when you could have been scrolling or streaming. I’m grateful for our dialogue, our debates, our disagreements. I hope we’ll have many more.
Starting next week, several of my colleagues will take turns writing Boiling Point. It’ll look a little different than it does now, with a combination of analysis and news roundup. Each edition will have a unique focus, based on the reporter’s expertise: Ian James will cover water, for instance, while Lila Seidman will tackle wildlife and Tony Briscoe will handle air quality. You’ll get a wide range of thoughtful perspectives.
The newsletter will still arrive in your inbox every Thursday. It’ll still be worth opening.
Just like climate, journalism is more important now than ever. Local journalism especially.
Thank you for everything. Onward.
ONE MORE THING
On the southern end of Del Mar, train tracks run precariously close to the edge of rapidly crumbling cliffs.
(John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune)
For nostalgia’s sake, here are some of my favorite environmental stories and series the L.A. Times has produced during my seven years here — including, no shame, one of my own:
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
If I didn’t know better, I might have thought Intermountain Power Plant was already dead.
When I visited last month, most of the desks had been torn from the administrative building, leaving behind scattered piles of boxes and office supplies. A whiteboard featured photos of dozens of newly retired employees. Perhaps most tellingly, the coal pile in the yard out back was tiny compared with my previous visit in 2022.
“Our target is to have no coal left on the floor,” said Kevin Peng, manager of external generation for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Peng was my tour guide at this hulking coal-fired power plant in central Utah, over 500 miles from the city it has powered for the last 40 years. And no, it wasn’t dead yet. One of two massive steam turbines, a General Electric unit installed in 1986, was still sending small amounts of electricity to L.A. and several other Southern California cities following a required air quality test. Soon Unit 1 would shut off, probably for the final time.
You’re reading Boiling Point
Sammy Roth gets you up to speed on climate change, energy and the environment. Sign up to get it in your inbox twice a week.
Unit 2 would carry Intermountain through its final act. At the moment it was slowly preparing to generate power, releasing puffy white steam through a small vertical pipe near the main smokestack. I stood on the roof for a few minutes near the pipe, letting water droplets fall gently on my face and reporter’s notebook.
“We create our own rain,” Peng with a smile.
Come November, the rain will cease. Same goes for the planet-warming carbon emissions. Los Angeles is closing Intermountain, a watershed moment that will mark the end of coal power in California.
The 710-foot smokestack towers over the rest of Intermountain Power Plant.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
To hear President Trump tell it, coal is needed for economic prosperity. Just this week, his administration said it would open 13 million acres of public land to coal mining and offer $625 million in handouts to coal plant owners.
Trump & Co. — including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fossil fuel executive, who insisted the handouts “will be vital to keeping electricity prices low and the lights on without interruption” — are battling the free market. Coal plants generated 16.2% of U.S. electricity in 2023, down from 48.5% in 2007. The main culprit? Competition from cheaper solar, wind and natural gas.
In California, just 2.2% of electricity came from coal in 2024 — nearly all of it from Intermountain. Over 60% was generated by solar panels, wind turbines and other climate-friendly sources that don’t fuel deadly wildfires, heat waves and floods. Thanks to a surge in lithium-ion batteries, there have been no power shortages since 2020.
The L.A. Department of Water and Power, meanwhile, has been making big investments in low-cost renewables, including a record-cheap solar-plus-storage plant that opened this summer. DWP has fired up Intermountain less and less, relying on the plant for 21% of the city’s power in 2019 and just 10% in 2023.
Jason Rondou, the utility’s assistant general manager for power planning and operations, said the coal plant has supplied affordable, reliable electricity for decades. But now there are better options.
“It’s come at a pretty significant external cost — the cost of the carbon emissions,” he said. “For us to move beyond that and move to a cleaner, innovative technology, I think is very exciting.”
The new turbines are designed to burn a mix of 70% natural gas and 30% hydrogen. Although gas is a fossil fuel that exacerbates global warming, hydrogen isn’t. That mix alone is unique for a plant of this scale. But over time, as technology improves, DWP plans to transition to 100% hydrogen — an unprecedented undertaking.
The newly built gas/hydrogen power plant known as IPP Renewed, seen from the roof of the Intermountain coal plant.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
Even better, the hydrogen will be “green,” meaning it’s made from renewable electricity rather than fossil fuels.
At times of day when DWP has extra renewable power — such as mild spring afternoons, when the sun is shining and Angelenos aren’t blasting their air conditioners — the utility can use that energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. DWP and its partners have hired a private company to store the hydrogen in giant underground salt caverns just down the road from Intermountain.
Then, when DWP needs extra power — during a heat wave months later, for instance — it can pull hydrogen from the caverns and fire up the turbines. Basically, the hydrogen will function like a long-term battery.
“It’s very different from lithium-ion [batteries],” Rondou said. “For that seasonal storage, that’s where hydrogen can really provide significant benefit.”
Among environmentalists, hydrogen is controversial. Some share DWP’s view that it’s a necessary piece of the clean energy puzzle. Others consider it a distraction from cheaper, more proven technologies, and a threat to air quality, especially in low-income communities of color. They’ve slammed DWP’s goal of eventually converting four L.A.-area gas plants to hydrogen, citing nitrogen oxide pollution and potential methane leaks.
In Utah’s Millard County, conservative local officials have embraced the newfangled technology, along with solar and wind. Unlike Trump, who has slashed hydrogen funding, they have little aversion to clean energy.
“Energy development is really important in our portfolio. And we will talk to everybody. We’re open for business,” said County Commissioner Bill Wright.
Sitting in his living room, as dogs and grandkids wandered past, Wright reflected on his rural county’s long relationship with Los Angeles. The massive tax revenues, the hundreds of jobs. The lack of local control. The fact that nearly all the power goes to California.
Wright would have liked to see DWP keep the coal plant running. But the closure has been in the works for years, so he and his neighbors have had time to adjust. He’s glad L.A. isn’t leaving town entirely — even though the new plant will be smaller, with fewer jobs and a smaller tax base.
“Absolutely, this is a better solution,” he said.
Millard County Commissioner Bill Wright poses for a portrait near Intermountain Power Plant outside Delta, Utah, on Sept. 16.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
Wright is hopeful that the Utah Legislature will find a buyer for the coal plant, possibly a data center. One of his colleagues on the county commission, Vicki Lyman, is less optimistic. She’s worked at Intermountain for a dozen years and sees major technical and economic hurdles to restarting a mothballed power plant.
“I’m kind of excited just to see how all this technology’s going to work out,” Lyman said.
It’s still not entirely clear when DWP will start combusting hydrogen. The new plant will burn 100% gas when the coal turbines power off in November, utility officials say, because there won’t be enough hydrogen banked in the salt caverns yet. DWP is targeting the second quarter of 2026 to mix in 30% hydrogen.
For employees, DWP has tried to make the transition as painless as possible. It’s limited layoffs by not replacing retiring staffers, and by offering tuition reimbursement to anyone who chooses to go back to school.
Still, change can be bittersweet. While touring Intermountain, I bumped into plant manager Jon Finlinson, who’s worked there since 1983 and would have retired already if the gas/hydrogen units weren’t running a few months behind schedule. He professed excitement for the new facility. But when I asked him how he’d commemorate the final day of coal combustion, he offered the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t have a plan for that yet.”
Really? After 40 years, nothing?
“It’ll be a sad day for all the people that have worked here for their whole life,” he acknowledged.
Intermountain staff member Carl Watson offers a peek into the coal furnace.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
Technically, even after Intermountain stops sending coal power to L.A. — as well as Anaheim, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and Riverside — there will still be tiny amounts of coal in California’s energy mix. A Riverside County electric cooperative imports coal from out of state, as does Berkshire Hathaway-owned Pacific Power in Northern California. In San Bernardino County, two small coal plants fuel a mining operation.
Together, those coal generators supplied less than 0.2% of the state’s electricity in 2024. (If you want to get really technical, an additional 1.5% came from “unspecified” out-of-state sources, most likely gas and coal.)
But why quibble when there’s cause for celebration? Change is never easy; no solution is perfect; there will always be caveats.
Next month, California is quitting coal. Raise a glass.
The coal pile at Intermountain Power Plant, seen on Sept. 17.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
Correction: Last week’s edition of this newsletter referred to Revolution Wind as a floating offshore wind farm. The project’s turbines are attached directly to the sea floor.
When my father was crossing the U.S.-Mexico border like an undocumented Road Runner back in the 1970s, la migra caught him more than a few times.
They chased him and his friends through factories in Los Angeles and across the hills that separate Tijuana and San Diego. He was tackled and handcuffed and hauled off in cars, trucks and vans. Sometimes, Papi and his pals were dropped off at the border checkpoint in San Ysidro and ordered to walk back into Mexico. Other times, he was packed into grimy cells with other men.
But there was no anger or terror in his voice when I asked him recently how la migra treated him whenever they’d catch him.
“Like humans,” he said. “They had a job to do, and they knew why we mojados were coming here, so they knew they would see us again. So why make it difficult for both of us?”
His most vivid memory was the time a guard in El Centro gave him extra food because he thought my dad was a bit too skinny.
There’s never a pretty way to deport someone. But there’s always a less indecent, a less callous, a less ugly way.
The Trump presidency has amply proven he has no interest in skirting meanness and cruelty.
“The way they treat immigrants now is a disgrace,” Papi said. “Like animals. It’s sad. It’s ugly. It needs to stop.”
I talked to him a few days after a gunman fired on a Dallas ICE facility, killing a detainee and striking two others before killing himself. One of the other wounded detainees, an immigrant from Mexico, died days later. Instead of expressing sympathy for the deceased, the Trump administration initially offered one giant shrug. What passed for empathy was Vice President JD Vance telling reporters, “Look, just because we don’t support illegal aliens, we don’t want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political violence” while blaming the attack on Democrats.
It was up to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem to try and show that the federal government has a heart. Her statement on the Dallas attack offered “prayers” to the victims and their families but quickly pivoted to what she felt was the real tragedy.
How ungrateful critics are of la migra.
“For months, we’ve been warning politicians and the media to tone down their rhetoric about ICE law enforcement before someone was killed,” Noem said. “This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences…The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop.”
You might have been forgiven for not realizing from such a statement that the three people punctured by a gunman’s bullets were immigrants.
This administration is never going to roll out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants. But the least they can do it deal with them as if … well, as if they are human.
Under Noem’s leadership, DHS’ social media campaign has instead produced videos that call undocumented immigrants “the worst of the worst” and depict immigration agents as heroes called by God to confront invading hordes. A recent one even used the theme song to the cartoon version of the Pokémon trading card game — tagline “Gotta catch them all” — to imply going after the mango guy and tamale lady is no different than capturing fictional monsters.
That’s one step away from “The Eternal Jew,” the infamous Nazi propaganda movie that compared Jews to rats and argued they needed to be eradicated.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) as prisoners stand, looking out from a cell, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, in March.
(Alex Brandon/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Noem is correct when she said that words have consequences — but the “violence and dehumanization” she decries against ICE workers is nothing compared to the cascade of hate spewing from Trump and his goons against immigrants. That rot in the top has infested all parts of American government, leading to officials trying to outdo themselves over who can show the most fealty to Trump by being nastiest to people.
If there were a Cruelty Olympics, Trump’s sycophants would all be elbowing each other for the gold.
Politicians in red states propose repulsive names for their immigration detention facility — “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, for instance, or “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana. U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, Trump’s top prosecutor in Southern California, has trumpeted the arrests of activists he claimed attacked federal agents even as video uploaded by civilians offers a different story. In a recent case, a federal jury acquitted Brayan Ramos-Brito of misdemeanor assault charges after evidence shown in court contradicted what Border Patrol agents had reported to justify his prosecution.
Our nation’s deportation Leviathan is so imperious that an ICE agent, face contorted with anger, outside a New York immigration court recently shoved an Ecuadorian woman pleading for her husband down to the ground, stood over her and wagged his finger in front of her bawling children even as cameras recorded the terrible scene. The move was so egregious that Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughin quickly put out a statement claiming the incident was “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE.”
The act was so outrageous and it was all caught on camera, so what choice did she have? Nevertheless, CBS News reported that the agent is back on duty.
Noem and her crew are so high on their holy war that they don’t realize they’re their own worst enemy. La migra didn’t face the same public acrimony during Barack Obama’s first term, when deportation rates were so high immigration activists dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.” They didn’t need local law enforcement to fend off angry crowds every time they conducted a raid in Trump’s first term.
The difference now is that cruelty seems like an absolute mandate, so forgive those of us who aren’t throwing roses at ICE when they march into our neighborhoods and haul off our loved ones. And it seems more folks are souring on Trump’s deportation plans. A June Gallup poll found that 79% of Americans said immigration was “a good thing” — a 15% increase since last year and the highest mark recorded by Gallup since it started asking the question in 2001. Meanwhile, a Washington Post/Ipsos September poll showed 44% of adults surveyed approved of Trump’s performance on immigration — a six-point drop since February.
I asked my dad how he thought the government should treat deportees. Our family has personally known Border Patrol agents.
“Well, most of them shouldn’t be deported in the first place,” he said. “If they want to work or already have families here, let them stay but say they need to behave well or they have to leave.”
That’s probably not going to happen, so what should the government do?
“Don’t yell at people,” my dad said. “Talk with patience. Feed immigrants well, give them clean clothes and give them privacy when they have to use the bathroom. Say, ‘sorry we have to do all this, but it’s what Trump wants.’
“And then they should apologize,” Papi concluded. “ They should tell everyone, ’We’re sorry we’ve been so mean. We can do better.’”
The NFL announced the musical headliner for Super Bowl LX’s halftime show, and — much to MAGA’s chagrin — it’s not Kid Rock.
Music’s most lucrative spot went to a relevant artist who actually sells albums: Bad Bunny. Letting the Puerto Rican rapper and singer turned global megastar perform 2026’s halftime show gifts right-wing influencers with a fresh conduit for the old grievance that woke culture has permeated every crevice of American culture, especially the Super Bowl.
Their proof: The NFL chose a predominantly Spanish-language artist who is known to wear women’s dresses, who endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, and who has decried this year’s immigration sweeps. Clearly, this decision was designed to irk them rather than serve Bad Bunny’s millions and millions of fans.
“The NFL is self-destructing year after year,” conservative commentator Benny Johnson wrote on X. He said of Bad Bunny: “Massive Trump hater. Anti-ICE activist. No songs in English.”
Other critics accused the reggaeton artist of flip-flopping, particularly following Bad Bunny’s statements earlier this month that he would not include any mainland U.S. dates on his Debí Tirar Más Fotos world tour out of concern that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents might target and detain his fans.
“There were many reasons why I didn’t show up in the U.S., and none of them were out of hate — I’ve performed there many times,” he said to I-D magazine. “But there was the issue of — like, f—ing ICE could be outside [my concert]. And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.”
The artist, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, explained his decision to join the long list of Super Bowl halftime notables in a short statement following the NFL’s announcement Sunday.
“What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” he said. “It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown … this is for my people, my culture and our history. Ve y dile a tu abuela, que seremos el HALFTIME SHOW DEL SUPER BOWL.”
Bad Bunny in glasses, not a dress.
(Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP)
The year-after-year decision to cast top-ranking pop artists and music legends in the featured Super Bowl halftime spot is hardly a mystery. They are stars that sell or performers that appeal to millions. But that dull reality hasn’t stopped the characterizations that the Bad Bunny decision is a deep state conspiracy, designed to rot American households from the inside out.
“Barack Obama’s best friend Jay-Z runs the Super Bowl selection process through his company Roc Nation which has an exclusive contract with the NFL. This is who chooses the halftime show, the most-watched musical performance in America,” wrote alt-right figure Jack Posobiec.
The NFL in 2019 partnered with rapper Jay Z’s entertainment and sports company, Roc Nation, to produce its Super Bowl halftime shows. The first show under the new partnership featured 2020’s Latin music in performances by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. Since then the institution’s halftime performances have largely featured hip-hop artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna and the OG trio of Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Eminem.
Lamar’s 2025 politically charged performance was the source of condemnation from the right. Clad in red, white and blue, his predominantly Black dance crew assembled in an American flag formation. And guest star Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as Uncle Sam, called out the nation’s systemic racism. Lamar had already rankled the right with 2017’s “The Heart Part 4,” where he referred to Trump as a “chump.”
Kendrick Lamar performs during halftime of the NFL Super Bowl 59.
(Frank Franklin II / AP)
It’s one of many moments over the last decade that have galvanized conservative factions around calls to boycott the Super Bowl, or at least publicly bash the event. Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime show was once such flash point, where she performed “Formation” featuring dancers in Black Panther-inspired outfits and paid tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement.
At least those complaints were rooted in a performance that actually happened, as opposed to claims that the NFL was manipulating games for the Kansas City Chiefs to enable tight end Travis Kelce and his then-girlfriend (now fiancée) Taylor Swift to endorse Joe Biden. Sure, totally feasible.
Yet there should be no secret around why the Super Bowl hasn’t featured wildly popular, globally celebrated MAGA-promoting performers: There aren’t any. It’s no wonder Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood always seem to be the entertainment of choice for Trump rallies.
Bad Bunny is the most-streamed male artist on Spotify, running just behind the platform’s most-streamed artist of all time, Swift. As of Sunday, his release “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” became the first album of 2025 to surpass 7 billion streams on Spotify. And the 31-year-old artist just finished a sold-out, month-long residency at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Though the Super Bowl is still five months away, those who aren’t among the haters can enjoy an early kick off: Bad Bunny is scheduled to host the new season opener of “SNL” this weekend.
So Jimmy Kimmel is coming back, fast enough that there are still folks out there who didn’t know he was gone.
Hallelujah? Praise be to ABC? Free speech triumphs?
It all depends on Tuesday night, when we see if Kimmel returns undaunted, or if he has been subdued. Of all the consequential, crazy, frightening events that have taken place in recent days, Kimmel’s return should be a moment we all watch — a real-time, late-night look at how successful our president is at forcing us to censor ourselves through fear.
Please, Jimmy, don’t back down.
If Kimmel tempers his comedy now, pulls his punches on making fun of power, he sends the message that we should all be afraid, that we should all bend. Maybe he didn’t sign up for this, but here he is — a person in a position of influence being forced to make a risky choice between safety and country.
That sounds terribly dramatic, I know, but self-censorship is the heart of authoritarianism. When people of power are too scared to even crack a joke, what does that mean for the average person?
If Kimmel, with his celebrity, clout and wealth, cannot stand up to this president, what chance do the rest of us have?
Patriotism used to be a simple thing. A bit of apple pie, a flag on the Fourth of July, maybe even a twinge of pride when the national anthem plays and all the words pop into your mind even though you can’t find your car keys or remember what day it is.
It’s just something there, running in the background — an unspoken acknowledgment that being American is a pretty terrific thing to be.
Now, of course, patriotism is the most loaded of words. It’s been masticated and barfed out by the MAGA movement into a specific gruel — a white, Western-centric dogma that demands a narrow and angry Christianity dominate civic life.
The one that put a knot in my stomach was the speech by Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar, speaking, without humor, at the memorial for Charlie Kirk.
That’s disturbing, but actually mild compared with what he said next, a now-familiar Christian nationalist rant.
“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Miller said. “Our ancestors built the cities they produced, the art and architecture they built. The industry.”
Who’s going to tell him about Sally Hemings? But he continued with an attack on the “yous” who don’t agree with this worldview, the “yous,” like Kimmel, one presumes (though Kimmel’s name did not come up) who oppose this cruel version of America.
“You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred, you are nothing,” Miller said. “You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.”
Humor, of course, ain’t nothing, which is why this administration can’t stand it.
Humor builds camaraderie. It produces dopamine and serotonin, the glue of human bonding. It drains away fear, and creates hope.
Which is why autocrats always go after comedians pretty early on. It’s not thin skin, though Trump seems to have that. It’s effective management of dissent.
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels knew it. In 1939, after his party had set up a Chamber of Culture that required all performers to adhere to certain rules, he banned five German comedians — Werner Finck, Peter Sachse, Helmuth Buth, Wilhelm Meissner and Manfred Dlugi — for making political jokes that didn’t support the regime. He basically ended their careers for daring satire against Nazi leaders, claiming people didn’t find it funny.
“(I)n their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades,” the New York Times reported the German government claiming at the time.
Sounds familiar.
Kimmel, of course, is not the only comedian speaking out. Jon Stewart has hit back on “The Daily Show,” pretending to be scared into submission, perhaps a hat tip to Finck, who famously joked, “I am not saying anything. And even that I am not saying.”
And there are plenty of others pushing back. Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken to all-caps rebuttals. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, whom Trump called “nothing,” is also vocal in his opposition, especially of National Guard troops in Chicago.
The collective power of the powerful is no joke. It means something.
But all the sober talk in the world can’t rival one spot-on dig when it comes to kicking the clay feet of would-be dictators. Mark Twain said it best: Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. Which is what makes Kimmel so relevant in this moment.
Can he come back with a laugh — proving we have nothing to fear but fear itself — or are we seriously in trouble?
The Hollywood sign has been blown up in movies, altered by pranksters to read “Hollyweed,” “Jollygood” and “Hollyboob” and saw Tom Cruise staple some Olympic rings on it to promote the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. Politicians have used it as a prop for commercials and mailers the way they do kissing a baby or eating a taco. Out-of-town goobers and locals alike hike up to various vantage points around it for a selfie or group shot.
But the crown for the worst stunt involving the monument to everything dreamy and wonderful about L.A. now lies with the Border Patrol.
Earlier this week, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief in charge of Trump’s long, hot deportation summer in L.A., posted on social media a photo of him and dozens of his officers posing on a patch of dirt in what looks like Lake Hollywood Park. Behind them is the Hollywood sign.
Arms are crossed. Hands are on belts. A few National Guard troops, one with a K9 unit, join in. None of the faces are masked for once. That’s because they didn’t have to be: Almost every one of them is blurred out.
“This is the team. They’re the ones on the ground, making it happen,” wrote Bovino, one of only two in the photo without a blurry face. “The mean green team is not going anywhere. We are here to stay.” And just in case readers didn’t get that la migra is hard, Bovino concluded his post with a fire emoji.
Jeff Zarrinnam, chairman of the nonprofit in charge of maintaining the Hollywood sign, said “we have to stay neutral on these types of things,” so he didn’t offer his opinion on why a man who spent his summer terrorizing large swaths of the Southland would want to pose there. He did say the Border Patrol didn’t request special access to get closer to it as other politicians have in the past.
“It was probably a team-building effort for them, or a lot of them probably hadn’t seen it before,” he said. “It’s a symbol of America. Maybe that’s why they were standing up there. Who knows?”
L.A. Councilmember Nithya Raman, whose district is where the Hollywood sign stands, was not as charitable.
“To see an icon of this city used for an image designed to instill fear in Angelenos is chilling — particularly on the heels of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling which dealt a devastating blow to a city that has already faced so much hardship this year,” she said in a statement.
Bovino is expected to show up soon in Chicago to oversee the Border Patrol’s invasion of the Windy Cindy. His press team didn’t return my request for an interview or my questions about whether the photo was digitally altered — other than the face blurring and the ultra-sharp focusing on Bovino — and what he hoped to accomplish with it. The sign itself looks shrouded in fog, but who knows? The whole photo has a weirdness about it.
Nevertheless, Bovino’s smirk in the group portrait says it all.
This is the team. They’re the ones on the ground, making it happen. The ones not afraid to put in the work. Every person in this photo is part of our commitment to the mission. We don’t stop. We don’t slow down. We keep pressing forward.💪
— Commander Op At Large CA Gregory K. Bovino (@CMDROpAtLargeCA) September 9, 2025
This is a guy who came into town like so many newcomers before him wanting to make it big and willing to do whatever it took. Short, with a high fade haircut and nasal drawl, Bovino quickly became a constant on local news, selling himself as a mix of Andy Griffith (a fellow North Carolina native) and Lt. Col. Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now.”
He starred in slickly produced government-created videos portraying the Border Patrol as warriors on a divine mission to make the City of Angeles safe from immigrant infidels. He claimed local politicians were endangering residents with their sanctuary policies and gleefully thumbed his nose at a temporary restraining order barring indiscriminate raids like those, which the Supreme Court just ruled can start happening again. He was there, a cameraman filming his every strut, when National Guard troops in armed Humvees parked along Whittier Boulevard in July all so Border Patrol agents on horseback could trot through an empty MacArthur Park.
Bovino cheered on via social media when his “mean green team” rented a Penske truck to lure in day laborers at a Westlake Home Depot in August only to detain them. Even worse was Bovino showing up in front of the Japanese American National Museum with a phalanx of migra while California’s political class was inside decrying the gerrymandering push by President Trump. He pleaded ignorance on that last action when Gov. Gavin Newsom and others accused the sector chief of trying to intimidate them even as friendly media just happened to be there, just like they so happened to be embedded with immigration agents all summer as they chased after tamale ladies and day laborers.
Supporters played up his moves as if they were a master class in psyops, with grandiose codenames such as Operation Trojan Horse for the Penske truck raid and Operation Excalibur for the invasion of MacArthur Park. So Bovino and his janissaries posing in front of the Hollywood sign comes off like a hunter posing in front of his killed prey or a taunting postcard to L.A.: Thinking about you. See you soon.
But all of Bovino’s actions grabbed far more non-criminals than actual bad hombres and did nothing to make Southern California safer. Locals have countered his attempt at a shock-and-awe campaign with lawsuits, protests, mutual aid and neighborhood watches that won’t end. That resistance forced la migra to cry to their daddy Trump for National Guard and Marine backup, with an occasional call to the LAPD and L.A. Sheriff’s Department to keep away the boo birds who now track their every move.
Greg: hope you enjoyed your stay in L.A. Congrats — you made it! You’re the star of your own D-level Tinseltown production that no one except pendejos wants to see. You left L.A. as one of the most loathed outsiders since former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt. Stay gone. Wish you weren’t here.
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The author condemns the Border Patrol’s group photo at the Hollywood sign as the “worst stunt” involving Los Angeles’ iconic monument, viewing it as an inappropriate use of a symbol representing “everything dreamy and wonderful about L.A.”
The author characterizes Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino’s enforcement operations throughout the summer as “terrorizing large swaths of the Southland” rather than legitimate law enforcement, arguing these actions were designed primarily to “instill fear in Angelenos”
The author criticizes Bovino’s tactics as ineffective at improving public safety, asserting that his operations “grabbed far more non-criminals than actual bad hombres and did nothing to make Southern California safer”
The author portrays Bovino as a publicity-seeking outsider who came to Los Angeles “wanting to make it big and willing to do whatever it took,” comparing the chief’s media presence to starring in “slickly produced government-created videos”
The author condemns specific enforcement operations, including using a rental truck to “lure in day laborers” and targeting vulnerable populations like “tamale ladies,” characterizing these as deceptive and cruel tactics
The author views the recent Supreme Court ruling lifting restrictions on immigration enforcement as enabling “state-sponsored racism” and creating conditions where Latino citizens become “second-class citizens” subject to racial profiling[3]
Different views on the topic
Jeff Zarrinnam, chairman of the nonprofit maintaining the Hollywood sign, offers a more charitable interpretation, suggesting the photo “was probably a team-building effort” and noting that the Hollywood sign serves as “a symbol of America,” potentially explaining why Border Patrol agents would want to pose there
Supporters of Bovino’s operations viewed his enforcement tactics as sophisticated strategic operations, describing them as “a master class in psyops” with organized codenames like “Operation Trojan Horse” and “Operation Excalibur”
The Trump administration has argued to the Supreme Court that racial profiling capabilities are necessary for effective immigration enforcement, contending that without these tools, “the prospect of contempt” would hang “over every investigative stop”[3]
Federal authorities and supporters frame these enforcement operations as necessary public safety measures targeting individuals who pose risks to communities, rather than random harassment of immigrant populations[1][2]
The Supreme Court majority, led by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, characterized immigration enforcement encounters as “brief investigative stops” where citizens and legal residents “will be free to go after the brief encounter,” minimizing concerns about prolonged detention or abuse[3]
My dad’s passport is among his most valuable possessions, a document that not only establishes that he’s a U.S. citizen but holds the story of his life.
It states that he was born in Mexico in 1951 and is decorated with stamps from the regular trips he takes to his home state of Zacatecas. Its cover is worn but still strong, like its owner, a 74-year-old retired truck driver. It gives Lorenzo Arellano the ability to move across borders, a privilege he didn’t have when he entered the United States for the first time in the trunk of a Chevy as an 18-year-old.
The photo is classic Papi. Stern like old school Mexicans always look in portraits but with joyful eyes that reveal his happy-go-lucky attitude to life. He used to keep the passport in his underwear drawer to make sure he never misplaced it in the clutter of our home.
At the beginning of Trump’s second term, I told Papi to keep the passport on him at all times. Just because you’re a citizen doesn’t mean you’re safe, I told my dad, who favors places — car washes, hardware stores, street vendors, parks, parties — where immigrants congregate and no one cares who has legal status and who doesn’t.
“Exagera,” my dad replied — Trump exaggerates. As a citizen, my dad reasoned he now had rights. He didn’t have to worry like in the old days, when one shout of “¡La migra!” would send him running for the nearest exit of the carpet factory in Santa Ana where he worked back in the 1970s.
Masked migra swept across Southern California under the pretense of rounding up criminals. In reality, they grabbed anyone they thought looked suspicious, which in Southern California meant brown-skinned Latinos like my father. The feds even nabbed U.S. citizens or detained them for hours before releasing them with no apology. People who had the right to remain in this country were sent to out-of-state detention camps, where government officials made it as difficult as possible for frantic loved ones to find out where they were, let alone retrieve them.
This campaign of terror is why the ACLU and others filed a lawsuit in July arguing that la migra was practicing racial profiling in violation of the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches. A federal judge agreed, issuing a temporary restraining order. The Trump administration appealed, arguing to the Supreme Court that it needed to racially profile to find people to kick out of the country, otherwise “the prospect of contempt” would hang “over every investigative stop.”
In a 6-3 vote, the justices lifted the temporary restraining order as the ACLU lawsuit proceeds. L.A.’s long, hot deportation summer will spill over to the fall and probably last as long as Trump wants it to. The decision effectively states that those of us with undocumented family and friends — a huge swath of Southern California and beyond — should watch over our shoulders, even if we’re in this country legally.
And even if you don’t know anyone without papers, watch out if you’re dark-skinned, speak English with an accent or wear guayaberas or huaraches. Might as well walk around in a T-shirt that says, “DEPORT ME, POR FAVOR.”
The ruling didn’t surprise me — the Supreme Court nowadays is a Trump-crafted rubber stamp for his authoritarian project. But what was especially galling was how out of touch Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion was with reality.
Kavanaugh describes what la migra has wrought on Southern California as “brief investigative stops,” which is like describing a totaled car as a “scratched-up vehicle.” A citizen or permanent resident stopped on suspicion of being in this country illegally “will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he wrote.
The justice uses the words “brief” or “briefly” eight times to describe what la migra does. Not once does he mention plaintiff Brian Gavidia, the U.S. citizen who on June 9 was at a Montebello tow yard when masked immigration agents shoved him against the fence and twisted his arm.
Gavidia’s offense? He stated he was an American three times but couldn’t remember the name of the East L.A. hospital where he was born. A friend recorded the encounter and posted it to social media. It quickly went viral and showed the world that citizenship won’t save you from Trump’s migra hammer.
Would Kavanaugh describe this as a “brief encounter” if it happened to him? To a non-Latino? After more cases like this inevitably happen, and more people are gobbled up by Trump’s anti-immigrant Leviathan?
Brian Gavidia stands in a parking lot next to East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park. A video of him having his arm twisted and held by an immigration officer against a wall despite being a U.S. citizen went viral. He’s currently a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit alleging the Trump administration is violating the 4th Amendment with indiscriminate immigration raids.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Anyone who applauds this decision is sanctioning state-sponsored racism out of apartheid-era South Africa. They’re all right with Latinos who “look” a certain way or live in communities with large undocumented populations becoming second-class citizens, whether they just migrated here or can trace their heritage to before the Pilgrims.
I worry for U.S.-born family members who work construction and will undoubtedly face citizenship check-ins. For friends in the restaurant industry who might also become targets. For children in barrios who can now expect ICE and Border Patrol trucks to cruise past their schools searching for adults and even teens to detain — it’s already happened.
Life will irrevocably change for millions of Latinos in Southern California and beyond because of what the Supreme Court just ruled. Shame on Kavanaugh and the five other justices who sided with him for uncorking a deportation demon that will be hard to stop.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor recounts Gavidia’s travails in her dissent, adding that the Real ID he was able to show the agents after they roughed him that established his citizenship “was never returned” and mocking Kavanaugh’s repeated use of “brief.”
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” she wrote. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
I will also dissent, but now I’m going to be more careful than ever. I’m going to carry my passport at all times, just in case I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even that is no guarantee la migra will leave me alone. It’s not a matter of if but when: I live in a majority Latino city, near a Latino supermarket on a street where the lingua franca is Spanish.
And I’m one of the lucky ones. I will be able to remain, no matter what may happen, because I’m a citizen. Imagine having to live in fear like this for the foreseeable future for those who aren’t?
“The Paper,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, is a belated spinoff of “The Office,” much as Peacock is a sort of spinoff of NBC, where the former show aired on Thursdays from 2005 to 2013. In the new series, Dunder Mifflin, the office in “The Office,” has been absorbed into a company called Enervate, which deals in office supplies, janitorial paper and local newspapers, “in order of quality.” The newspaper at hand is the Toledo Truth Teller, sharing space with the toilet paper division.
Created by “Office” developer Greg Daniels with Michael Koman, “The Paper” is shot in the same documentary style, ostensibly by the same fictional crew, and imports “Office” player Oscar Núñez as head accountant Oscar Martinez, not at all happy to be back on camera.
In the first episode, Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), a starry-eyed journalism school graduate turned cardboard salesman turned toilet paper salesman, arrives as the new editor in chief of the Truth Teller, not exactly taking charge of a staff that consists entirely of narcissistic interim managing editor Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore), whose sole prior media experience is as a contestant on a dating reality show called “Married at First Sight”; ad salesman Detrick Moore (Melvin Gregg); subscriptions person Nicole Lee (Ramona Young); compositor Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), who wrote for “Stars and Stripes”; accountants Adam Cooper (Alex Edelman) and Adelola Olofin (Gbemisola Ikumelo); and Duane Shepard Sr. as Barry Stokes, the only official reporter, whose beat consists of high school sports and falling asleep. In the sitcom logic of the show, they will all be drafted as volunteer journalists, joined by Travis Bienlien (Eric Rahill), from the toilet paper division.
Times television critic Robert Lloyd and news and culture (and former television) critic Lorraine Ali have worked in many newspaper and magazine offices between them, and come together here to discuss how “The Paper” compares to “The Office,” its journalistic veracity and whether or not it’s funny.
The journalist recruits in “The Paper,” from left: Chelsea Frei as Mare, Ramona Young as Nicole, Melvin Gregg as Detrick, Gbemisola Ikumelo as Adelola, Alex Edelman as Adam, Eric Rahill as Travis and Oscar Núñez as Oscar.
(John P. Fleenor / Peacock)
Ali: I’ll start with my favorite quote about journalism from “The Paper”: “The industry is collapsing like an old smoker’s lung.” Hack, hack, cough, I say from inside the beast. This half-hour comedy offered so many great moments of spot-on commentary about the state of legacy journalism that I wasn’t sure if I should weep or laugh. I chose the latter, most of the time. The first couple episodes are clever, funny and charmingly clumsy — if not too close to the bone for folks like us. I’ll get to the rest of the series in a minute, but how did the satire about a contracting newsroom strike you, Robert?
Lloyd: There are a couple of moments in the pilot episode where it flashes back to an old black-and-white documentary on the Truth Teller in an earlier age when 1,000 people worked for the paper, before the internet destroyed print journalism and the newspaper, which once occupied a whole building, and was eventually reduced to sharing a corner of a floor with the toilet paper division. It gave me a little shock. I feel like I caught the end of that analog era, at the L.A. Weekly, when it was a thin, then a fat alternative paper, and the Herald Examiner, where there were typewriters that must have been sitting there since the ’30s, a sort of piratical “Front Page” energy and tons of talent. (Much of which migrated to The Times when the Herald folded.)
Ali: I felt a tinge of sadness and loss watching those flashback scenes. Then they cut to present day, and the marbled halls of the once-great Truth Teller newspaper are empty. What struck me is how much the fictional paper’s lobby looked like the old Globe Lobby of the L.A. Times’ building downtown. I also got a lump in my throat when they went down into the basement where the old giant presses sat frozen. We had those relics in the old Times building too. For readers who don’t know, the L.A. Times hasn’t been in that landmark building since 2018. We’re now in El Segundo. Sounds like a great setup for a sitcom joke, right?
Lloyd: Most — all? — newspapers have felt the stress of shrinking staffs and resources, of doing more with less. But the Truth Teller starts with almost nothing — that it comes out at all, apparently daily, is something of a joke in itself; at least Ted Baxter was the only knucklehead working at WJM on “Mary Tyler Moore,” but there are more than a few of them here. “The Office” wasn’t about the work, but about surviving the environment. It didn’t really matter what did or didn’t get done. But this is a show about a business — a noble institution, however ignobly served — with deadlines, some of which one would rightly regard as impossible, having met hundreds, if not thousands, in one’s life — even without a skeleton crew that has no idea what it’s doing. But it just sort of wishes them away. Then again, it is a sitcom.
The jokes are well-timed and reliably funny, but like “The Office,” it’s all down to the characters, which are wonderful company. Oscar, of course, we already know and love. But I especially liked Gregg as the soft-edged Detrick, with an awkward crush on the wry Nicole. Ned, whom the Irish Gleeson plays like someone out of a Frank Capra pastiche, can be a little competitive, but he’s no Michael Scott; neither is he exactly Jim to Mare’s Pam, though obviously they occupy a similar position, being relatively normal and attractive. But as the One Who Needs to Be Noticed, Impacciatore’s Esmeralda does have more than a little Michael Scott in her, though turned up to 11, insanely glamorized and in an Italian accent. It’s a hilarious performance. Her delighted scrolling through a thicket of ads on a clickbait article on a tip Brad Pitt left someone is a little comic gem. It’s not unlike the way Janelle James pops out as Ava on “Abbott Elementary.”
Sabrina Impacciatore, left, plays managing editor Esmeralda, who has more than a little Michael Scott in her.
(John P. Fleenor / Peacock)
Ali: It’s impossible not to compare “The Paper” to “The Office.” It’s unfair yet inevitable, and “The Office” wins, though my favorite version of that show was the British version with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. But I do like what Gleeson does in “The Paper” with Ned Sampson, portraying him as an enthusiastic editor in chief born about 50 years too late to experience the Woodward and Bernstein glory days of print journalism. The deflated expression on his face is priceless when he advises his lost “reporters” to rely on the Five Ws of reporting, and one asks, “Is that a gang?” Gleeson has an impressive range. He was haunting as the conflicted foodie/serial killer in psychological thriller “The Patient,” where he co-starred, ironically, with Steve Carell. I also really like Young as Nicole, who I admittedly had an affinity for as a drama club nerd in “Never Have I Ever.”
My issue with “The Paper” isn’t the cast, but the pacing. It starts off strong. The first two episodes are filled with sharp writing and build a strong foundation for what we expect to see: the hilarity of an inexperienced, underdog staff turning a local rag into a real source of news. But the momentum doesn’t quite sustain. I felt myself losing interest in the story as the series progressed because their ensuing assignments, setbacks and interpersonal trajectories weren’t all that compelling.
I do, however, appreciate that “The Paper,” like “Abbott Elementary,” mines the tragic humor of a crumbling American institution while also pointing out that this thing is happening under our noses, and shouldn’t we do something — anything — to save it? Turning that tragedy into a sitcom is one answer.
NPR’s “All Things Considered” is getting a new weekday voice.
Scott Detrow will become a full-time weekday host of NPR’s afternoon radio show starting Sept. 29, while maintaining his role at “Consider This,” the outlet’s daily news podcast, the public radio firm said.
“I can’t wait to bring listeners the news five days a week now. And at this moment where we are all focusing on strengthening the entire public media network and working together more closely than ever before,” Detrow said in a statement.
This news comes a week after journalist Ari Shapiro announced his departure from the news magazine show. Shapiro had been hosting the show for nearly a decade.
For the last two years, Detrow could be heard on weekend episodes of “All Things Considered.” He steered coverage of breaking news events, including the attempted assassination of President Trump in Pennsylvania, earning him the Edward R. Murrow Award for breaking news.
He initially joined NPR in 2015. From getting his start as a Fordham student at WFUV in New York to working as a statehouse reporter at WITF in Pennsylvania and at KQED in the Bay Area, he has spent his entire career in public radio.
Since becoming a part of the national nonprofit, he has helped launch segments such as “Reporter’s Notebook,” in which listeners get a behind-the-scenes look at how journalism is produced, and most recently, he anchored live coverage surrounding Pope Leo’s election. He has also co-hosted the “NPR Politics Podcast” for seven years, focusing on the White House, Congress and two presidential campaigns.
“All Things Considered” is one of NPR’s longest-running shows, first airing in 1971. The flagship program presents a mix of news, commentary, interviews and analysis on a daily basis.
In a full-circle moment, Detrow’s first job out of college was working on the local version of “All Things Considered” in central Pennsylvania.
“I’m proud that I started out as an ATC host at a NPR Member station, and now will be doing that job nationally,” he said.
But enough people remember Cain in blue tights and a red cape so that he’s a regular on the fan convention circuit.
It’s his calling card, so when the Trump administration put out the call to recruit more ICE agents, guess who answered the call?
Big hint: Up, up and a güey!
On Aug. 6, the up until then not exactly buzzworthy Cain revealed on Instagram that he joined la migra — and everyone else should too!
The 59-year old actor made his announcement as an orchestral version of John Williams’ stirring “Superman” theme played lightly below his speech.
Superman used to go after Nazis, Klansmen and intergalactic monsters; now, Superman — er, Cain — wants to go after Tamale Lady. His archenemy used to be Lex Luthor; now real-life Bizarro Superman wants to go to work for the Trump administration’s equally bald-pated version of Lex Luthor: Stephen Miller.
“You can defend your homeland and get great benefits,” Cain said, flashing his bright white smile and brown biceps. Behind him was an American flag in a triangle case and a small statue depicting Cain in his days as a Princeton Tigers football player. “If you want to save America, ICE is arresting the worst of the worst and removing them from America’s streets.”
Later that day, Cain appeared on Fox News to claim he was going to “be sworn in as an ICE agent ASAP.” a role Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin later on clarified to the New York Times would be only honorary. His exaggeration didn’t stop the agency’s social media account to take a break from its usual stream of white supremacist dog whistles to gush over Cain’s announcement.
“Superman is encouraging Americans to become real-life superheroes,” it posted “by answering their country’s call to join the brave men and women of ICE to help protect our communities to arrest the worst of the worst.”
American heroes used to storm Omaha Beach. Now the Trump administration wants their version of them to storm the garden section of Home Depot.
Dean Cain speaks during a ceremony honoring Mehmet Oz, the former host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Feb. 11, 2022.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
Its appeal to Superman is part of their campaign to cast la migra as good guys while casting all undocumented people as shadowy villains who deserve deportation — the faster and nastier the better. But as with almost anything involving American history, Team Trump has already perverted Superman’s mythos. In early June, they put Trump, who couldn’t leap over a bingo card in a single bound let alone a tall building, on the White House’s social media accounts in a Superman costume. This was accompanied with the slogan: “Truth. Justice. The American Way.” That was the day before Warner Bros. released its latest Man of Steel film.
Even non-comic book fans know that the hero born Kal-El on Krypton was always a goody-goody who stood up to bullies and protected the downtrodden. He came from a foreign land — a doomed planet, no less — as a baby. His alter ego, Clark Kent, is humble and kind, traits that carry over when he turns into Superman.
The character’s caretakers always leaned on that fictional background to comment on real-world events. In a 1950 poster, as McCarthyism was ramping up, DC Comics issued a poster in which Superman tells a group of kids that anyone who makes fun of people for their “religion, race or national origin … is un-American.”
A decade later, Superman starred in a comic book public service announcement in which he chided a teen who said “Those refugee kids can’t talk English or play ball or anything” by taking him to a shabby camp to show the boy the hardships refugees had to endure.
The Trumpworld version of Superman would fly that boy to “Alligator Alcatraz” to show him how cool it is to imprison immigrants in a swamp infested with crocodilians.
It might surprise you to know that in even more recent times, in a 2017 comic book, Superman saves a group of undocumented immigrants from a man in an American flag do-rag who opened fire on them. When the attempted murderer claimed his intended targets stole his job, Superman snarled “The only person responsible for the blackness smothering your soul … is you.”
Superman used to tell Americans that immigrants deserved our empathy; Super Dean wants to round them up and ship them out.
Rapists? Murderers? Terrorists? That’s who Superman né Cain says ICE is pursuing — the oft repeated “worst of the worst” — but Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that 71% of people currently held in ICE detention have no criminal records as of July 27 .
I don’t think the real Superman — by whom I mean the fictional one whom Cain seems to think he’s the official spokesperson for just because he played him in a middling dramedy 30-some years ago — would waste his strength and X-ray vision to nab people like that.
Dean “Discount Superman” Cain should grab some popcorn and launch on a Superman movie marathon to refresh himself on what the Man of Steel actually stood for. He can begin with the latest.
Its plot hinges on Lex Luthor trying to convince the U.S. government that Superman is an “alien” who came to the U.S. to destroy it.
“He’s not a man — he’s an It. A thing,” the bad guy sneers at one point, later on claiming Superman’s choirboy persona is “lulling us into complacency so he can dominate [the U.S.] without resistance.”
Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor and David Corenswet as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Superman.”
(Jessica Miglio / Warner Bros. Pictures)
Luthor’s scheme, which involves manipulating social media and television networks to turn public opinion against his rival, eventually works. Superman turns himself in and is whisked away to a cell far away from the U.S. along with other political prisoners. Luthor boasts that “[constitutional] rights don’t apply to extraterrestrial organisms.”
Tweak that line a little and it could have come from the mouth of Stephen Miller.
Director James Gunn told a British newspaper that his film’s message is “about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.”
He also called Superman an “immigrant,” which set Cain off. He called Gunn “woke” on TMZ and urged Gunn to create original characters and keep Superman away from politics.
Well, Super Dean can do his thing for ICE and Trump. He can flash his white teeth for promotional Trump administration videos as he does who knows what for the deportation machine.
Commentary: From far away, an L.A. couple grapples with all-too-familiar debate after Dodgers win
MADISON, Wis. — Out in Wisconsin’s state capital, where the orange leaves are falling and every other person seems to wear the red and white of the University of Wisconsin Badgers, the pride and pain of rooting for the Dodgers in 2025 played out in the household of Carolina Sarmiento and Revel Sims.
They’re urban planning professors, Southern California natives — he’s from Eagle Rock, she’s from Santa Ana; they met at UCLA — and longtime friends of mine who have lived in Madison for a decade but are still involved in immigrant and anti-gentrification activism back home. I visited them recently as part of a speaking tour of Midwestern colleges and found myself in the middle of a debate that passed through the lives of too many people we know back home.
It’s one that’s unlikely to completely fade away no matter how many rings and parades the Boys in Blue rack up:
Is it OK to, well, revel, in this year’s World Series champs?
On one hand the Dodgers won back-to-back titles for their first time ever and became the first team to do so in a generation. The squad looked like Los Angeles at its best: people from across the world who set aside their egos to win and bring joy to millions of Angelenos in a most difficult year for the City of Angels.
L.A., a city long synonymous with winning — the weather, the teams, the people, the food — has suffered a terrible losing streak that started with the deadly and catastrophic Eaton and Palisades fires and continues with mass deportations that the Trump administration vows to escalate.
That’s where the rub came for Sarmiento and other Dodgers fans. For them, the actions and inactions of the team this year have been indefensible.
“For me, it started when the Dodgers went to the White House,” said the 45-year-old as we drove to their blue-and-white house. She especially took issue with shortstop Mookie Betts, who skipped a White House visit in 2019 when he was with the World Series-winning Boston Red Sox but shook Trump’s hand this time around, describing his previous snub as “very selfish.”
“Who got in his ear?” she exclaimed, bringing out dried mangoes for us to snack on as we waited for Sims to come home. “Since when has standing up for injustice been about you?”
Sarmiento didn’t grow up a Dodgers fan but bought into the team once she and Sims became a couple. They and their two young sons usually attended Dodgers games on trips back home and regularly caught the Dodgers in Milwaukee whenever they played the Brewers. One time, manager Dave Roberts “happily” signed a jersey for them when the family ran into him at a hotel, Sarmiento said.
In Madison, she long wore a Dodgers sweatshirt emblazoned with the Mexican flag that Sims bought for her because “it was a way to represent home. But not anymore. I tell Revel, ‘Babe, I’m not asking you to boycott the Dodgers forever, but they gotta give us something back.’”
Sure, the Dodgers blocked federal agents from entering the Dodger Stadium parking lot in June just after la migra raided a Home Depot facility. Shortly after, the team donated $1 million to the California Community Foundation to disburse to nonprofits assisting families affected by Trump’s deportation Leviathan.
But as the summer went along, Sarmiento grew frustrated that only Dodgers outfielder Kiké Hernández spoke out against immigration raids and Trump’s deployment of the Marines and National Guard. She also wondered why Dodgers chairman Mark Walter wouldn’t address charges that companies he has investments in do business with Trump’s deportation machine. One has a stake in a private prison company that contracts with the federal government to run immigrant detention centers; another has a joint venture with Palantir, which ICE has contracted to create data surveillance systems that would make the Eye of Sauron from “The Lord of the Rings” series seem as innocuous as a teddy bear.
“After a while, it’s like a woman who knows her partner is a cheater but keeps saying, ‘He’s not a cheater, he’s not a cheater’ and then gets upset when he cheats on her again. At that point, all you can say is, ‘Girl…‘”
I brought up how many Dodgers fans I know saw the team’s World Series win as a giant middle finger to Trump.
The heroes of Games 6 and 7, outfielders Kiké Hernández and second baseman Miguel Rojas, come respectively from Puerto Rico and Venezuela, a commonwealth Trump has neglected and a country he’s salivating to invade. The team’s most popular player, Shohei Ohtani, still proudly speaks in his native Japanese despite being in the U.S. for eight years and knowing some English. Tens of thousands of fans came out for the Dodgers victory parade and celebration at Dodger Stadium, many of them undoubtedly immigrants.
Isn’t it OK to let folks be happy?
“It’s like community benefit agreements,” Sarmiento responded, referring to a tactic by neighborhood groups that sees them win commitments from developers on issues like open space, union contracts and affordable housing with the threat of protests and lawsuits. “You know what’s coming, so you try to get something out of it. This year was a political moment that fans could’ve taken and they didn’t, so the Dodgers gave nothing.”
We greeted Sims as he walked in. The two of us walked down to the basement, where he watched the World Series in exile on a big-screen TV.
“It’s a little lonely being a Dodgers fan out here,” joked the 48-year-old, although he was heartened to have seen a fellow University of Wisconsin professor decked out in a Freddie Freeman jersey earlier in the day. Sims grew up going to Dodger Stadium with his father and remembered going to games on his own in the mid-2000s “when it wasn’t a pretty time.”
He brought up the Dodgers’ owner from that era: Frank McCourt, who raised ticket and concession prices seemingly every year and who still partially owns the parking lots surrounding Dodger Stadium. Fans responded to his disastrous regime by protesting before and during games. “It was disheartening to not see that in the stadium this year, when there was an even bigger problem going on.”
Sims felt “conflicted” rooting for the Dodgers this year. He watched every game he could but admitted he found the team celebrating ethnic pride nights “hollow” as raids increased across Los Angeles and the Trump administration attacked the rights of groups that the Dodgers were honoring.
“It would’ve been easy [for the Dodgers] to make a bland statement — ‘We’re a team full of immigrants in a city of immigrants and we’re proud of us all’ — and you wouldn’t have to go any further. They have a historical obligation to do that because of their history.”
But not rooting for the Dodgers was never an option.
Pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto stands onstage at the World Series celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I want to see L.A. people happy. The parade! It’s a free holiday. People just ditch work and don’t get in trouble for it. We’re the only city — not New York, not Boston, not San Francisco — with a chant against us. We’re despised and misunderstood. So if the Dodgers win, L.A. wins.”
Sarmiento joined us. “She’s my better political half,” Sims cracked. “Caro said to pick another sport.”
“No I didn’t!” she kindly replied. “I just said to take a pause, just for now. A political pause.”
Sims admitted that that a vintage jacket that he used to bring out every October as the Dodgers made another playoff run and Wisconsin turns cold was still in the closet. “I haven’t worn any gear all year.”
“When you went to the game!” Sarmiento shot back, referring to a visit to Milwaukee earlier this year with his local softball team.
“I went with a Valenzuela jersey to represent L.A.,” Sims responded as Sarmiento shook her head.
He laughed.
“I love the team. I just don’t like this team for not saying anything. But it’s what I signed up for.”
Source link
Commentary: Bodies are stacking up in Trump’s deportation deluge. It’s going to get worse
Like a teenager armed with their first smartphone, President Trump’s masked immigration enforcers love nothing more than to mug for friendly cameras.
They gladly invite pseudo-filmmakers — some federal government workers, others conservative influencers or pro-Trump reporters — to embed during raids so they can capture every tamale lady agents slam onto the sidewalk, every protester they pelt with pepper balls, every tear gas canister used to clear away pesky activists. From that mayhem comes slickly produced videos that buttress the Trump administration’s claim that everyone involved in the push to boot illegal immigrants from the U.S. is a hero worthy of cinematic love.
But not everything that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and its sister agencies do shows up in their approved rivers of reels.
Their propagandists aren’t highlighting the story of Jaime Alanís García, a Mexican farmworker who fell 30 feet to his death in Camarillo this summer while trying to escape one of the largest immigration raids in Southern California in decades.
They’re not making videos about 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe, an Orange County resident who moved to this country from Mexico as a 4-year-old and died in a Victorville hospital in September after spending weeks in ICE custody complaining about his health.
They’re not addressing how ICE raids led to the deaths of Josué Castro Rivera and Carlos Roberto Montoya, Central American nationals run over and killed by highway traffic in Virginia and Monrovia while fleeing in terror. Or what happened to Silverio Villegas González, shot dead in his car as he tried to speed away from two ICE agents in suburban Chicago.
Those men are just some of the 20-plus people who have died in 2025 while caught up in ICE’s machine — the deadliest year for the agency in two decades, per NPR.
Publicly, the Department of Homeland Security has described those incidents as “tragic” while assigning blame to everything but itself. For instance, a Homeland Security official told the Associated Press that Castro Rivera’s death was “a direct result of every politician, activist and reporter who continue to spread propaganda and misinformation about ICE’s mission and ways to avoid detention” — whatever the hell that means.
An ICE spokesperson asked for more time to respond to my request for comment, said “Thank you Sir” when I extended my deadline, then never got back to me. Whatever the response would’ve been, Trump’s deportation Leviathan looks like it’s about to get deadlier.
As reported by my colleagues Andrea Castillo and Rachel Uranga, his administration plans to get rid of more than half of ICE’s field office directors due to grumblings from the White House that the deportations that have swamped large swaths of the United States all year haven’t happened faster and in larger numbers.
Asked for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs, described The Times’ questions as “sensationalism” and added “only the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a ‘massive shakeup.’”
Agents are becoming more brazen as more of them get hired thanks to billions of dollars in new funds. In Oakland, one fired a chemical round into the face of a Christian pastor from just feet away. In Santa Ana, another pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at activists who had been trailing him from a distance in their car. In the Chicago area, a woman claimed a group of them fired pepper balls at her car even though her two young children were inside.
La migra knows they can act with impunity because they have the full-throated backing of the White House. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller crowed on Fox News recently, “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”
That’s not actually true, but when have facts mattered to this presidency if it gets in the way of its apocalyptic goals?
Greg Bovino, El Centro Border Patrol sector chief, center, walks with federal agents near an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Ill.
(Erin Hooley / Associated Press)
Tasked with turning up the terror dial to 11 is Gregory Bovino, a longtime Border Patrol sector chief based out of El Centro, Calif., who started the year with a raid in Kern County so egregious that a federal judge slammed it as agents “walk[ing] up to people with brown skin and say[ing], ‘Give me your papers.’” A federal judge ordered him to check in with her every day for the foreseeable future after the Border Patrol tear-gassed a neighborhood in a Chicago suburb that was about to host its annual Halloween children’s parade (an appeals court has temporarily blocked the move).
Bovino now reports directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and is expected to pick most of the ICE field office directors from Customs and Border Protection, the arm of the federal government that the Border Patrol belongs to. It logged 180 immigrant deaths under its purview for the 2023 fiscal year, the last year for which stats are publicly available and the third straight year that the number had increased.
To put someone like Bovino in charge of executing Trump’s deportation plans is like gifting a gas refinery to an arsonist.
He’s constantly trying to channel the conquering ethos of Wild West, complete with a strutting posse of agents — some with cowboy hats — following him everywhere, white horses trailed by American flags for photo ops and constant shout-outs to “Ma and Pa America” when speaking to the media. When asked by a CBS News reporter recently when his self-titled “Mean Green Machine” would end its Chicago campaign — one that has seen armed troops march through downtown and man boats on the Chicago River like they were patrolling Baghdad — Bovino replied, “When all the illegal aliens [self-deport] and/or we arrest ‘em all.”
Such scorched-earth jibber-jabber underlines a deportation policy under which the possibility of death for those it pursues is baked into its foundation. ICE plans to hire dozens of healthcare workers — doctors, nurses, psychiatrists — in anticipation of Trump’s plans to build more detention camps, many slated for inhospitable locations like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz camp in the Florida Everglades. That was announced to the world on social media with an AI-generated image of grinning alligators wearing MAGA caps — as if the White House was salivating at the prospect of desperate people trying to escape only to find certain carnage.
In his CBS News interview, Bovino described the force his team has used in Chicago — where someone was shot and killed, a pastors got hit with pepper balls from high above and the sound of windshields broken by immigration agents looking to snatch someone from their cars is now part of the Windy City’s soundtrack — as “exemplary.” The Border Patrol’s peewee Patton added he felt his guys used “the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission. If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them.”
One shudders to think what Bovino thinks is excessive for la migra. With his powers now radically expanded, we’re about to find out.
Source link
Commentary: These are thirsty times. No wonder Kamala Harris’ book tour is a fan fest
Tuesday evening former Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to her second sold-out crowd in Los Angeles at the Wiltern Theater as part of a book tour promoting her memoir, “107 Days.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to decide if she’ll run for president in 2028. She’s also not going to dish on her former boss, Joe Biden. And her advice for a Brown-skinned person just getting into politics? There will be many situations when you walk into a meeting room and no one looks like you. Keep your chin up, your shoulders back and remember — all of us have your back.
“All of us” referred to the cheering, sold-out crowd at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening who’d come to see the former Democratic presidential candidate speak about her new book, the election-campaign memoir “107 Days.” The chanted “Kamala!” “Kamala!” as she walked on stage. The outbursts of adoration continued for the next hour in eruptions of applause and supportive shout-outs (“We love you!”) as she spoke about everything from the need to pass Proposition 50 to how she coped with the devastating loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
Moderated by actor Kerry Washington, “A Conversation With Kamala Harris” was one of nearly 20 stops on a tour that’s already seen Harris speak in New York, London and at the Wiltern last month. Zealous attendees paid anywhere from $55 to $190 on tickets to see Harris again following “one of the wildest and most consequential campaigns in American history” (the latter is an official descriptor for her book). The memoir details her historically short run for president, the whirlwind 107 days between the time Biden withdrew from the race and Harris become the Democratic nominee to her devastating loss on Nov. 5.
Harris fans flock to the Wiltern to see Kamala speak about her book, “107 Days.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Were there any great revelations or gotcha moments on stage Tuesday evening? Not really, but that’s not what this tour is about — at least for those who chose Harris over watching Game 4 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. The former attorney general of California shared her thoughts about the current Department of Justice — a “thin-skinned president” is using it as his own personal tool of “vengeance.” She explained how her loyalties to Biden may have cost her votes, and called out the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, whose “billionaire owners pre-capitulated” to Trump when they pulled their respective editorial boards’ endorsements for Harris. She drew a big laugh when discussing the importance of parsing fact from fiction in today’s mediaverse, and made up her own example of misinformation: “Circumcisions are causing autism!” And on a more serious note, she detailed the emotional fallout she experienced after losing the election: “For months [she and her husband, Doug Emhoff] never even mentioned it.”
Criticisms of Harris’ book have centered around a frankly tired refrain that she should accept more personal accountability for the election loss as opposed to blaming the influence of outside forces. On Tuesday she appeared willing to explore those themes when she said she constantly interrogated herself on the campaign trail: Are you doing everything you can to win this election? But before she could go much deeper, Washington told her that she needed to know that we, the audience, understood she did everything she could. The crowd erupted in affirming shouts and applause.
Clearly, a book tour attended by The Converted is not going to produce headline-worthy grist, especially with an interviewer who is an admitted Harris friend and supporter. That’s what debates and media interviews are for, and this was a fan event.
And her base was thirsty. Since Harris has largely stayed out of the spotlight since last November, the audience appeared ready to relive some of the joy they felt in the brief time she was running for office, and perhaps find a glimmer of hope in dark times for those who see the current administration’s actions as anti-democratic, at best.
Before “The Conversation With Kamala Harris” kicked off at 7 p.m., attendees who spotted Harris’ husband, Emhoff, in the first few rows of the venue lined up to shake his hand and take selfies with the former second gentleman of the United States. The close access to SGOTUS was surprising, given the heightened security around political figures after violent events such as the home-invasion assassinations of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, and the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a speaking event last month. Yet the atmosphere was casual and relaxed.
Despite heightened threats of politically-motivated violence, President Trump pulled Harris’ Secret Service detail, as he has done to many of those he sees as his enemies. But as a former state office holder, Harris’ security detail Tuesday was provided by the California Highway Patrol.
The conversation lasted a little over an hour, with a few prescreened questions at the end from audience members, such as the query from an attendee who identified himself as Ramon Chavoya, a proud Latino. He asked for Harris’ advice on getting into local politics. She was the first Black and first South Asian female candidate to be chosen by either party to run for the Oval Office. Her very presence was a reminder that the face of the nation is changing, despite a rise in xenophobic movements and legislation. She advised the aspiring young politician that he would likely stand out, but that he wasn’t alone. “We’re all in the room with you,” she said, a sentiment Harris’ supporters surely understood.
Source link
Man United: Paul Scholes stopped commentary work to care for son
Scholes initially kept his son’s diagnosis secret during his playing career and revealed he was dropped by United manager Sir Alex Ferguson while attempting to handle the situation privately.
“I never got a break from it, even when playing – it was very hard in those days,” Scholes, one of United’s key players in the 1999 Treble season, added.
“I don’t think they diagnosed it until he was two-and-a-half years old. But you knew early something was wrong, but then you get the diagnosis, and I’d never heard of it.
“I remember the first time after it, we were playing Derby away and I just didn’t want to be there.
“I remember the manager dropped me the week after, and I hadn’t told anyone. I ended up telling them a few weeks later, as it was quite hard.
“Even now, I don’t want sympathy or anything. I just thought, even if I did speak to someone about it, it’s not going to help Aiden.
“The big concern now is, because you’re getting a bit older, what happens when you’re not here? That’s the thing that’s now on my mind all the time.”
Autism spectrum disorder – its medical name – is the name for a range of conditions that affect how a person communicates and interacts with the world around them, as well as their interests and behaviour.
It is not a disease or an illness, but a condition that somebody is born with, and it is estimated that one in every 100 people in the UK is autistic.
Source link
Commentary: He’s just happy to root for the Dodgers again after almost dying during the last World Series
There was probably no Dodgers fan more grateful to see the Blue Crew lose badly in the opening game of the World Series than Conrado Contreras. See, the 75-year-old was happy to enjoy any Fall Classic at all.
A year ago tomorrow , the Zacatecas native suffered a heart attack and mild stroke in the moments after seeing his Dodgers win Game 2 of the World Series against the New York Yankees. He spent three days in a medically induced coma at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood and regained consciousness to news from jubilant nurses that the Dodgers had won the championship.
The lifelong baseball fan had no idea what they were talking about. His passion for the sport was lost along with his memory.
When family members put on highlights from the 2024 championship during his rehabilitation at a clinic in Gardena throughout the end of the year, the former carpenter would shrug and change the channel. When someone told him that legendary Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela had died, Contreras swore that he had just seen his fellow Mexican pitch at the stadium.
It wasn’t until the 2025 baseball season came along that Contreras’ mind began to truly rebound. He watched games from his longtime home in the unincorporated Florence-Graham neighborhood and learned to love the Dodgers anew. But he didn’t cheer like before. Contreras followed doctor’s orders to stay calm when the Dodgers were losing instead of cursing like the past and quietly applaud when the team was winning when he would’ve previously roared.
He’s the father-in-law of my sister Alejandrina. And I wanted to hang out with Don Conrado for Game 1 of this year’s World Series to experience fandom in all its mortality.
Wearing a flat-brimmed fedora and a blue Dodgers 2024 World Series champion, I caught Contreras just as he was entering my sister’s Norwalk home holding on to his walker with the help of Alejandrina’s husband, Conrad. His father talks slower than he used to and can’t drive anymore, but Contreras is once again the same man his family knows: witty, observant and baseball-crazy.
A schoolyard pitcher in his hometown of Monte Escobedo, Contreras fell in with the Dodgers almost as soon as he migrated to the United States in 1970 to join a brother in Highland Park. He used to attend games every week “when $10 got two people into the stadium and you could also eat a hot dog,” Contreras told me in Spanish before Game 1 began.
His stories from those years were immaculate. Don Sutton throwing a shutout. The Cincinnati Reds always “ready to play to the death.” Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Willie Stargell hitting a home run out of Dodger Stadium in 1973 “and all of us just staring above our heads in awe.”
Contreras was such a fan that he took his pregnant wife Mary to watch Valenzuela pitch on the day in 1983 that Conrad was due because they were giving out “I (Heart) Fernando” T-shirts, an anecdote that left their son flabbergasted.
“What happened to the shirt?” Conrad asked his mom in Spanish.
“I threw it away,” replied the 61-year-old Mary.
“They’d cost a lot of money now!” he groaned.
“They were cheap! The color really faded fast.”
Los Angeles Dodgers two-way player Shohei Ohtani hits a two-run home run during the seventh inning of Game 1 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays at Roger Centre on Friday in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Blue Jays won, 11-4.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The family continued to attend games through Conrad’s teenage years but stopped “when even the birds couldn’t afford to attend,” Mary said. Conrad, 42, thinks the last time he went to a game with his dad was “at least” 20 years ago. But they regularly watched games on television. It was he who administered the CPR a year ago that saved his dad’s life.
“He was walking around the house angry all that game,” Conrad said.
“No, well, Roberto was making me mad,” Conrado replied, his nickname for Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “But I can’t get mad anymore.”
I asked how he thought this year’s series would go. He mentioned Shohei Ohtani, whom he kept calling el japonés in a respectful tone because, well, his memory can be fuzzy.
“He strikes out too much, but when he hits it, he hits it. If he plays like that, they win the series. But if Toronto hits, forget it.”
One more question before game time, the one too many liberal Latino Dodgers fans are belly-aching over right now: is it ethical to root for the team considering they haven’t been too vocal in opposing Donald Trump’s deportation campaign and owner Mark Walter has investments in companies that are profiting from it?
“Sports shouldn’t get into politics, but all sports owners are with Trompas,” he said, using a nickname I’ve heard more than a few rancho libertarians use for Trump. He shrugged.
“So what’s one to do? They kept la migra out of the stadium,” referring to an unsuccessful June attempt by federal agents to enter the stadium parking lot. “If the team had allowed that, then there’d be a huge problem.”
Mary wasn’t as sympathetic. “Latinos shouldn’t let the Dodgers off so easy. But when Latinos surrender, they surrender.”
It was game time.
Conrad slipped into a gray Dodgers away jersey to match his black team cap. My sister, an Angels follower for some reason, wore a Kiké Hernández T-shirt “because he stands with immigrants.”
“The only good thing about the Dodgers is that they aren’t winning with a gringo,” said Mary, who actually doesn’t care much about baseball because she finds it boring. “It’s someone [Ohtani] who doesn’t want to speak English who’s winning it for them.”
Her husband smiled.
“Let’s see if Mary gets into baseball.”
“That’ll be the real miracle,” she snapped back.
Contreras rubbed his hands in glee as the Dodgers went up 2-0 in the top of the third and merely frowned when the Blue Jays tied it in the bottom of the fourth while we were enjoying takeout from Taco Nazo. “His anger comes in waves, it’s a trip,” Conrad said. “He’s calmer but se enoja.”
“Who?” Conrado deadpanned.
When Dodger starting pitcher Blake Snell left the game with the bases loaded and no one out in the bottom of the sixth, Contreras shook his head in disgust but kept his voice calm.
“This is what gets me mad. They should’ve taken him out long ago, but Roberto didn’t. This is what I was afraid of. When Toronto get on, they get on. They won’t stop until they destroy.”
Sure enough, the Blue Jays erupted for nine runs that inning, including a two-run blast by catcher Alejandro Kirk, who had sparked the Jays’ initial rally a few innings earlier.
Earlier in the game, Alejandrina had told Conrado that Kirk was a Tijuana native. The pride in shared roots, albeit generations apart, took a little bit of sting off his home run, which made the score a humiliating 11-2.
“Thank goodness he’s Mexican,” Conrado told his son, patting his knee. “That’s what’s left for us” to be happy about the game.
An inning later, Contreras began to feel woozy. His sugar level was elevated. Mary took off his jacket to fix his insulin device. My sister’s corgi, Penny, jumped onto the couch and lay on his lap.
“They do know when someone someone’s ill, right?” he said to no one before scratching Penny’s tummy and cooing, “You know I’m ill, right? I’m ill!”
When the “massacre” finally ended, Contreras remained philosophical.
“It’s incredible that I’m able to see this. But I’m still malo. My feet hurt, my memory isn’t what it used to be, my sense of balance isn’t there. But there’s the Dodgers. But they need to win.”
Conrad went to the bedroom to grab his father’s walker.
“Do you want a Toronto shirt now?” he joked.
His dad stared silently. “No, that would give me another heart attack.”
Source link
Commentary: As Trump blows up supposed narco boats, he uses an old, corrupt playbook on Latin America
Consumer confidence is dropping. The national debt is $38 trillion and climbing like the yodeling mountain climber in that “The Price is Right” game. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are falling and the U.S. is getting more and more restless as 2025 comes to a close.
What’s a wannabe strongman to do to prop up his regime?
Attack Latin America, of course!
U.S. war planes have bombed small ships in international waters off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia since September with extrajudicial zeal. The Trump administration has claimed those vessels were packed with drugs manned by “narco-terrorists” and have released videos for each of the 10 boats-and-counting it has incinerated to make the actions seem as normal as a mission in “Call of Duty.”
“Narco-terrorists intending to bring poison to our shores, will find no safe harbor anywhere in our hemisphere,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media and who just ordered an aircraft carrier currently stationed in the Mediterranean to set up shop in the Caribbean. It’ll meet up with 10,000 troops stationed there as part of one of the area’s biggest U.S. deployments in decades, all in the name of stopping a drug epidemic that has ravaged red America for the past quarter century.
This week, Trump authorized covert CIA actions in Venezuela and revealed he wants to launch strikes against land targets where his people say Latin American cartels operate. Who cares whether the host countries will give permission? Who cares about American laws that state only Congress — not the president — can declare war against our enemies?
It’s Latin America, after all.
The military buildup, bombing and threat of more in the name of liberty is one of the oldest moves in the American foreign policy playbook. For more than two centuries, the United States has treated Latin America as its personal piñata, bashing it silly for goods and not caring about the ugly aftermath.
“It is known to all that we derive [our blessings] from the excellence of our institutions,” James Monroe concluded in the 1823 speech that set forth what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially told the rest of the world to leave the Western Hemisphere to us. “Ought we not, then, to adopt every measure which may be necessary to perpetuate them?”
Our 19th century wars of expansion, official and not, won us territories where Latin Americans lived — Panamanians, Puerto Ricans, but especially Mexicans — that we ended up treating as little better than serfs. We have occupied nations for years and imposed sanctions on others. We have propped up puppets and despots and taken down democratically elected governments with the regularity of the seasons.
The culmination of all these actions were the mass migrations from Latin America that forever altered the demographics of the United States. And when those people — like my parents — came here, they were immediately subjected to a racism hard-wired into the American psyche, which then justified a Latin American foreign policy bent on domination, not friendship.
Nothing rallies this country historically like sticking it to Latinos, whether in their ancestral countries or here. We’re this country’s perpetual scapegoats and eternal invaders, with harming gringos — whether by stealing their jobs, moving into their neighborhoods, marrying their daughters or smuggling drugs — supposedly the only thing on our mind.
That’s why when Trump ran on an isolationist platform last year, he never meant the region — of course not. The border between the U.S. and Latin America has never been the fence that divides the U.S. from Mexico or our shores. It’s wherever the hell we say it is.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro Urrego addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23 at U.N. headquarters.
(Pamela Smith / Associated Press)
That’s why the Trump administration is banking on the idea that it can get away with its boat bombings and is salivating to escalate. To them, the 43 people American missile strikes have slaughtered on the open sea so far aren’t humans — and anyone who might have an iota of sympathy or doubt deserves aggression as well.
That’s why when Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the U.S. of murder because one of the strikes killed a Colombian fisherman with no ties to cartels, Trump went on social media to lambaste Petro’s “fresh mouth,” accuse him of being a “drug leader” and warn the head of a longtime American ally he “better close up these killing fields [cartel bases] immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”
The only person who can turn down the proverbial temperature on this issue is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who should know all the bad that American imperialism has wrought on Latin America. The U.S. treated his parents’ homeland of Cuba like a playground for decades, propping up one dictator after another until Cubans revolted and Fidel Castro took power. A decades-long embargo that Trump tightened upon assuming office the second time has done nothing to free the Cuban people and instead made things worse.
Instead, Rubio is the instigator. He’s pushing for regime change in Venezuela, chumming it up with self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and cheering on Trump’s missile attacks.
“Bottom line, these are drug boats,” Rubio told reporters recently with Trump by his side. “If people want to stop seeing drug boats blow up, stop sending drugs to the United States.”
You might ask: Who cares? Cartels are bad, drugs are bad, aren’t they? Of course. But every American should oppose every time a suspected drug boat launching from Latin America is destroyed with no questions asked and no proof offered. Because every time Trump violates yet another law or norm in the name of defending the U.S. and no one stops him, democracy erodes just a little bit more.
This is a president, after all, who seems to dream of treating his enemies, including American cities, like drug boats.
Few will care, alas. It’s Latin America, after all.
Source link
What bans? ‘Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition’ due in 2026
A new expanded edition of Maia Kobabe’s award-winning graphic memoir “Gender Queer” will be released next year.
Oni Press has announced that “Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition” will be available in May. The special hardcover edition of the seminal LGBTQ+ coming of age memoir includes commentary by Kobabe as well as other comic creators and scholars.
“For fans, educators, and anyone else who wants to know more, I am so excited to share ‘Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition,’” Kobabe said in the news release. “Queer and trans cartoonists, comics scholars, and multiple people who appear in the book as characters contributed their thoughts, reactions, and notes to this new edition.”
The new 280-page hardcover will feature “comments on the color design process, on comics craft, on family, on friendship, on the touchstone queer media that inspired me and countless other people searching for meaningful representation, and on the complicated process of self-discovery,” the author added.
Released in 2019, “Gender Queer” follows Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, from childhood into eir young adult years as e navigates gender and sexuality and eir understanding of who e is. The books is a candid look into the nonbinary author’s exploration of identity, chronicling the frustrations and joys and epiphanies of eir journey and self discovery.
A page from “Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition” by Maia Kobabe.
(Oni Press)
“It’s really hard to imagine yourself as something you’ve never seen,” Kobabe told The Times in 2022. “I know this firsthand because I didn’t meet someone who was out as trans or nonbinary until I was in grad school. It’s weird to grow up and be 25 before you meet someone who is like the same gender as you.”
Since the publication of “Gender Queer,” the political climate has been increasingly hostile to the LGBTQ+ community. Right-wing activists and politicians have pushed for legislation to restrict queer and trans rights, including how sexual orientation and gender identity can be addressed in classrooms. Caught in the crossfire of this conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ culture war, “Gender Queer” has become one of the most challenged and banned books in the United States.
In addition to commentary by Kobabe, “Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition” will feature comments from fellow artists and comics creatives Jadzia Axelrod, Ashley R. Guillory, Justin Hall, Kori Michele Handwerker, Phoebe Kobabe, Hal Schrieve, Rani Som, Shannon Watters and Andrea Colvin. Sandra Cox, Ajuan Mance and Matthew Noe are among the academic figures who contributed to the new edition.
“It’s been almost seven years since I wrote the final words of this memoir; revisiting these pages today, in a radically different and less accepting political climate, sparked a lot of new thoughts for me as well,” Kobabe said in the news release. “I hope readers enjoy this even richer text full of community voices.”
A page from “Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition” by Maia Kobabe.
(Oni Press)
Source link
Commentary: Sanctuary policies and activists aren’t endangering lives during ICE raids — ICE is
Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.
From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portlandand New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.
That includes 13 police officers tear-gassed in Chicago earlier this month. And, now, a U.S. marshal.
Which brings us to what happened in South L.A. on Tuesday.
Federal agents boxed in the Toyota Camry of local TikToker Carlitos Ricardo Parias — better known to his hundreds of thousands of followers as Richard LA. As Parias allegedly tried to rev his way out of the trap, an ICE agent opened fire. One bullet hit the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant — and another ricocheted into the hand of a deputy U.S. marshal.
Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, but it’s easy to imagine that things could have easily turned out worse. Such is the chaos that Trump has caused by unleashing shock troops into U.S. cities.
Rather than take responsibility and apologize for an incident that could’ve easily been lethal, Team Trump went into their default spin mode of blaming everyone but themselves.
Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the shooting was “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest.”
Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli chimed in on social media soon after: “I urge California public officials to moderate their rhetoric toward federal law enforcement. Encouraging resistance to federal agents can lead to deadly consequences.” Hours later, he called Times reporter James Queally “an absolute joke, not a journalist” because my colleague noted it’s standard practice by most American law enforcement agencies to not shoot at moving vehicles. One reason is that it increases the chance of so-called friendly fire.
Federal authorities accuse Parias of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in. He is being charged with assault on a federal officer.
Time, and hopefully, evidence, will show what happened — and very important, what led to what happened.
The Trump administration keeps claiming that the public anger against its immigration actions is making the job more dangerous for la migra and their sister agencies. McLaughlin and her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, keep saying there’s been a 1,000% increase in assaults on immigration agents this year like an incantation. Instead of offering concrete figures, they use the supposed stat as a shield against allegations ICE tactics are going too far and as a weapon to excuse the very brutality ICE claims it doesn’t practice.
Well, even if what they say is true, there’s only one side that’s making the job more dangerous for la migra and others during raids:
La migra.
It turns out that if you send in phalanxes of largely masked federal agents to bully and intimidate people in American cities, Americans tend not to take kindly to it.
Who knew?
Gregory Bovino, center, of U.S. Border Patrol, marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
We’re about to enter the sixth month of Trump’s plan to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. Sycophants are bragging that he’s doing the job, but they’re not caring to look at the mess left in its wake that’s becoming more and more perilous for everyone involved. They insist that those who are executing and planning raids are professionals, but professionals don’t make constant pendejos out of themselves.
Professionals don’t bring squadrons to chase after tamale ladies or day laborers, or stage flashy raids of apartments and parks that accomplish little else than footage for propaganda videos. They don’t go into neighborhoods with intimidation on their mind and ready to rough up anyone who gets in their way.
A ProPublica investigation showed that ICE has detained at least 170 U.S. citizens this year, many whom offered proof that they were in this country legally as la migra cuffed them and hauled them off to detention centers.
Professionals don’t lie like there’s a bonus attached to it — but that’s what Trump’s deportation Leviathan keeps doing. In September, McLaughlin put out a news release arguing that the shooting death of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago by an ICE agent was justified because he was dragged a “significant distance” and suffered serious injuries. Yet body cam footage of local police who showed up to the scene captured the two ICE agents involved in the incident describing their injuries as “nothing major.”
Closer to home, a federal jury in Los Angeles last month acquitted an activist of striking a Border Patrol agent after federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega screened footage that contradicted the government’s case and poked holes in the testimony of Border Patrol staff and supervisors. Last week, ICE agents detained Oxnard activist Leonardo Martinez after a collision between their Jeep and his truck. McLaughlin initially blamed the incident on an “agitator group … engaged in recording and verbal harassment,” but footage first published by L.A. Taco showed that la migra trailed Martinez and then crashed into him twice — not the other way around.
Professionals don’t host social media accounts that regularly spew memes that paint the picture of an American homeland where white makes right and everyone else must be eliminated, like the Department of Homeland Security does. A recent post featured medieval knights wearing chain mail and helmets and wielding longswords as they encircle the slogan “The Enemies are at the Gates” above ICE’s job listing website.
The Trump administration has normalized racism and has turned cruelty into a virtue — then its mouthpieces gasp in mock horror when people resist its officially sanctioned jackbootery.
This evil buffoonery comes straight from a president who reacted to the millions of Americans who protested this weekend at No Kings rallies by posting on social media an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown and dropping feces on his critics from a jet fighter. And yet McLaughlin, Noem and other Trump bobbleheads have the gall to question why politicians decry la migra while regular people follow and film them during raids when not shouting obscenities and taunts at them?
As I’ve written before, there’s never a nice way to conduct an immigration raid but there’s always a better way. Or at least a way that’s not dripping with malevolence.
Meanwhile, ICE is currently on a hiring spree thanks to Trump’s Bloated Beastly Bill and and has cut its training program from six months to 48 days, according to The Atlantic. It’s a desperate and potentially reckless recruitment drive.
And if you think rapidly piling more people into a clown car is going to produce less clown-like behavior by ICE on the streets of American cities, boy do I have news for you.
Source link
Commentary: Friends of this L.A. teen will soon find out his big secret: He’s co-starring in ‘Bugonia’
A few months ago, my younger daughter, Darby, and I were settling into our seats at the local AMC. As the previews rolled, she gasped. “I know that voice,” she said. “That’s Aidan. Mom, that’s Aidan.”
I looked up just in time to see a familiar shock of brown curls. It was indeed Aidan Delbis, former member of the Falcon Players at Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, a kid I had seen perform alongside my daughter in countless student plays.
Only now he was seated at a kitchen table with Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone as the words “Bugonia” and then “directed by Yorgos Lanthimos” flashed across the screen.
“Did you not know?” I asked my daughter. CV is a fine public school with a good theater program, but it isn’t exactly an incubator for nepo babies and aspiring stars. That one of their own had stepped off last year’s graduation stage and into a major film production should have been very big news long before a trailer hit theaters.
“No,” she said, furiously messaging various friends. “But now they will.”
Now they will indeed. When he joined the cast of “Bugonia,” Delbis didn’t just become a part of Lanthimos’ highly anticipated remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 black comedy “Save the Green Planet!” He also entered the mythology of which Hollywood dreams are made: A 17-year old sends in his first-ever open-call submission and lands a major role in a very big movie.
With a script by Will Tracy and obvious Oscar potential, “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August at this year’s Venice Film Festival before launching onto the festival circuit, including screenings in Toronto and New York, in preparation for its release this Friday. A slightly absurdist, darkly funny thriller with political undertones, it revolves around the kidnapping of a pharmaceutical company’s CEO, Michelle (Stone), by wild-eyed conspiracy theorist Teddy (Plemons) and his loyal cousin Don (Delbis).
From left, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons in the movie “Bugonia.”
(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)
Teddy believes Michelle is an alien sent to destroy Earth. Don believes in Teddy. Though he falls in with Teddy’s plans, he often questions them, serving as a continual reminder that even within Teddy’s paranoid view of the universe, there is such a thing as going too far. Don is, in many ways, the heart of the film.
He is also, like the actor who plays him, autistic.
Delbis — who chooses to self-describe as autistic rather than neurodivergent — is not someone who has long nursed dreams of stardom. He took drama classes all through high school, but it wasn’t until his junior year, Delbis says, “that I started to get more into the process. I found the general process of acting, of understanding and investing in different personalities, to be fun and sometimes scary.”
Still, he says, “I wasn’t really sure that I wanted it to be my main career. But it so happened that this happened while I was in high school, and here we are.”
Here is the Four Seasons on a very rainy October afternoon where Delbis, now 19, has just finished his first solo photo shoot and is sitting, fortified by Goldfish crackers (his go-to-snack), for his first long one-on-one interview. He went to some of the film festivals and just returned from “Bugonia’s” London premiere, where he signed autographs on the red carpet and enjoyed flying first class. His parents, Katy and David Delbis, are seated nearby, as is his access and creative coach, Elaine Hall.
Delbis is a tall, good-natured young man who speaks with a distinctive cadence and in an unwaveringly calm tone. Aside from a habit of repeating himself as he searches for what he wants to say next, he seems more comfortable discussing his experience with filmmaking than many of the dozens of more experienced actors I have interviewed in this very hotel over the years.
“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” Delbis says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It all started,” he says, “when my mom was friends with this agent, April, and one day she sent Mom an audition that seemed pretty promising, so I submitted for that. And they really liked it and called me back.”
It actually started a bit further back than that. With Plemons and Stone already cast, Lanthimos had decided that he wanted a nonprofessional actor to play Don.
“We went really wide in trying to find someone really special,” the Greek-born director of “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” says in a phone interview. “With these two experienced actors, I wanted to bring in a different dynamic. As we looked at people, I felt that the character would be more interesting if he was neurodivergent.”
Casting director Jennifer Venditti put out an open call, which April Smallwood of Spotlight Development saw and sent to Delbis’ mother, Katy.
“A happy-go-lucky young man, neurodivergent — it practically described Aidan,” Katy says in a later interview. La Crescenta may not be an industry hub, but, like many in L.A., the Delbis family has a Hollywood connection. Aidan’s older brother, Tristan (who is also neurodivergent), works at a movie theater; father David is about to retire after years at the Writers Guild Health Fund; and Katy, a self-described “creative,” has done some acting herself. But no one saw film-acting as a potential career for Aidan, who was set to take a gap year after high school. And, Katy says, she had no idea what sort of movie it was for. “It said for a ‘big film,’ but they always say that.”
She thought of it a bit like the time Delbis, a member of the high school track team, decided he also wanted to try out for basketball. “As I drove him to the school,” Katy said, “I told him that he might not get on since there were a lot of kids who had been playing basketball for years, which he had not. He said, ‘Mom, I just want to see what it’s like.’”
Now Delbis wanted to see what it would be like to audition for a “big film.”
Aidan Delbis in the movie “Bugonia.”
(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)
He had recently performed the Vincent Price monologue from “Thriller” for the school talent show, which Katy filmed on her phone, so Smallwood submitted that. Venditti called Smallwood the next day and met with Delbis over Zoom. Thus began a monthslong process of meetings, rehearsals and auditions.
“We focused on him right away,” Venditti says. “He seemed to have it all. And he was very committed.”
“I was really unaware of how big a project it was,” Delbis said. “I had never seen a film by Yorgos.”
In March, Lanthimos, Stone and Plemons were in L.A. for the Oscars, so they all met with Delbis and came away impressed.
Lanthimos thought of casting a neurodivergent actor in a part because it would bring a natural clarity and unfiltered unpredictability to the role. He didn’t consider it any more challenging than working with any other actor. And when he met Delbis, Lanthimos says, “I just thought: That’s him.”
“Just from watching that first tape, you could see there was something so magnetic about him,” said Stone during a recent phone interview. (She is also a producer on the film.) “Don is the audience’s window, the one who can see through the charade.”
Still, there were many more steps to take.
“It’s a big leap for any nonprofessional,” Stone says. “It’s a big part in what is essentially a three-hander.”
From left, director Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons at the Venice Film Festival, where “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August.
(Alessandra Tarantino / Invision / AP)
For an autistic actor, it’s an even bigger leap. As talented as Delbis might be, he also had to be able to handle the pressures, boredom and chaos of a film set. Venditti reached out to Hall. The founder of the Miracle Project and mother to a now-adult neurodivergent son, Hall is an acting coach who has worked for more than 20 years to increase the presence and understanding of neurodivergent and disabled people. She is often asked to gauge the ability of actors to take on a certain role — their ease with the material, their physical stamina, their level of independence and their emotional accessibility.
Delbis, she says, ticked all the boxes. He loves horror films, he was on the track team and he was, at the time, about to travel without his parents on a school trip to Sweden.
He is, as he says himself, “a low-key guy,” so Hall gave him some exercises to help him portray more extreme emotions and prepare him for when other cast members might do the same. (One subsequent rehearsal involved a scene in which one of the actors screamed repeatedly.)
Often, Hall says, perfecting these exercises can take weeks; Delbis, working with his mother, did it in a weekend. She also helped him prepare for his meeting with and then chemistry read with Plemons.
Delbis says he was “a bit nervous, though I don’t know why.” He did not recognize Plemons’ name or his face. “I had watched ‘Breaking Bad,’ but I didn’t realize Jesse played Todd. Halfway through [the read], I told him he looked like Todd and he said, ‘That’s because I played him.’ I’ve seen him in other things since then,” Delbis adds. “He’s a very solid actor.”
More important, he says, “Jesse seemed to me to be a very cool guy.”
That feeling is mutual. “When we brought Aidan in, I was excited and a little nervous,” Plemons says during a phone call from London. They started with one of the more extreme scenes from the film. “I was finding my feet too. When it became apparent that he was going to be fine with the darker scenes, I said, ‘This is him; this is Don.’”
While all this was happening, Delbis was finishing his senior year, which included a starring role in a production of “Almost Maine.” “It was not overly hard,” he says, but sometimes it was a lot. “I did one read and then I had to go to rehearsal for the play.”
Venditti remembers that day very well. “Here we were being so careful, treating him like he was fragile and not wanting to overload him,” she says laughing, “and he’s just calmly multitasking.”
When Delbis got the role in May, he and his family signed a nondisclosure agreement, which is why none of his friends knew his news after graduation, and Delbis and his family flew to the U.K. to begin filming. It was a tough secret for his parents to keep. But “any time it looked like I might slip,” Katy says, “Aidan shut me down.” He celebrated his 18th birthday near the set outside of Windsor, where production ran for three months before moving for two weeks in Atlanta.
Hall was hired to be Delbis’ on-set access and creative coach, a job she believes she has invented, meant to make the experience for neurodivergent and disabled actors easier. She suggested that Lanthimos and Tracy simplify Delbis’ script pages, stripping down the description of action “so he wouldn’t get stuck thinking he had to do exactly what was on the page,” she says, which they were happy to do.
“We didn’t want to put any limits on him,” Lanthimos says.
Delbis chose most of his costumes (except a beekeeping suit, motivated by the plot, which he says “was very hot”), which mirrored his own wardrobe preferences down to the horror film t-shirts and mismatched socks. Even the food Teddy and Don eat during the film reflects Delbis’ taste: mac ’n’ cheese, taquitos, spaghetti.
Hall ensured Delbis had extra time before filming, during which she could help him prepare with rehearsal and centering exercises. She visited the set before he arrived so she could tell him exactly what to expect and worked with the production team to ensure that he had his own space between takes. “They built us a little house, with horror posters on the wall and stuffed animals that looked like his cats,” she says. As there were no Goldfish available in the U.K., the production had them flown in.
“Having Elaine there was amazing,” Venditti says. “The idea of having someone to act as eyes and ears of what people are actually experiencing on set, I think it’s groundbreaking. I don’t know why we haven’t done it before.”
Delbis spent a fair amount of time with Plemons, who Hall said occasionally stepped in to help if she had to be away from set.
“We did a decent amount of goofing around,” Delbis says. “The bond that developed between us occurred quite naturally. I consider Jesse a friend.”
For his part, Plemons enjoyed being around someone who spoke his mind.
“I so appreciated Aidan’s inability to tell a lie,” Plemons says. “On a set, you spend so much time waiting around, and he would say, ‘What are we doing? What is taking so long?’ Which was exactly what I was thinking. He’s a very smart, sensitive, self-assured guy, and if you’re unclear in what you’re saying, he will let you know.”
“Aidan is just so funny,” says his “Bugonia” co-star Emma Stone. “We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Stone says that while she and Delbis had a friendly rapport, she hung back a little when they weren’t shooting. “I didn’t want to form the same kind of bond Aidan had with Jesse because [in the film] it’s them against me and I didn’t want to do too much to mess with that.”
But, the two-time Oscar winner says, “Aidan is just so funny. He was on a jag during the kidnapping scene. We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”
“I went through all of ‘Bugonia’ thinking I had never seen Emma in anything,” Delbis says. “Then I realized my parents had shown me a clip of a woman getting very involved in a birthday card — ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ — and that was from ‘Easy A.’”
When he was filming, Delbis was all business. Several of the takes which he ad-libbed made it into the film and Delbis is proud of that.
“Despite being in more extreme situations than I’ve been in, there’s something of Don’s emotion and struggles that did feel very familiar to me,” he says. “Feelings of great distress and helplessness and conflictedness and confusion. I have felt that in classes in high school.”
“Aidan has great instincts,” Lanthimos says. “In a scene toward the end [of the film], he was so moving, it was the first time I have ever teared up on set.
There were difficult days — one moment with Plemons, Delbis says, took many takes. “It was hot AF and involved me getting more worked up that I am used to getting,” he remembers. But he appreciated Lanthimos’ willingness to let him try things. “In one scene, Jesse throws a chair and I thought that seemed pretty cool. So at the end of the day, they let me throw a chair. I hope that makes it into the outtakes reel.”
He was also very pleased when the crew threw him a s’mores party at the end of filming. “There was a fire pit on set that looked perfect for s’mores,” he says. “And I told them that, so it was my idea to have a s’mores party.”
Delbis is happy with how the film turned out, including his performance. “I think I looked pretty baller in that suit,” he says of one scene. Though he doesn’t have an opinion on the authenticity debate — whether autistic actors should always be the ones to play autistic characters — he thinks it’s “cool that writers and directors are starting to be more conscientious and give more realistic and respectful depictions of neurodivergent people and characters.”
He is more concerned that audiences understand what he thinks is the most important message of the movie.
“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” he says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme. God knows, people aren’t always willing to be tolerant.”
Source link
Commentary: Trump has turned the White House into a government of ‘snowflakes’
It’s almost a year into Trump 2.0 and MAGA has gone full “snowflake.”
You know the word, the one that for the past decade the right has wielded against liberals as the ultimate epithet — you know, because libs are supposedly feelings-obsessed, physically weak, morally delicate and whiny as all get out.
Well, if you’re MAGA in 2025, you should probably embrace the term like Trump hugging an American flag with a Cheshire Cat grin.
Because if you think, among other things, that Portland is “War ravaged” like Trump claims it is and the U.S. of A. has to send in the military, you truly are a snowflake.
It sure wasn’t the left that called for the firing of people who criticized one of their heroes in the wake of their tragic death. Or that revoked visas over it. Or cheered when a late-night talk show host was temporarily suspended after the FCC chairman threatened to punish his network, as Brendan Carr did to ABC when he told a podcaster Disney could mete out punishment to Jimmy Kimmel “the easy way or hard way.”
Which president complains any time someone doesn’t think they’re the greatest leader in human history? Threatens retribution against foes real and imagined every waking second? Whines like he’s a bottle of Chardonnay?
Trump even complained this week about a Time magazine cover photo that he proclaimed “may be the Worst of All Time.”
“They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!” the king of MAGA-dom wrote on Truth Social.
Here’s guessing he’d have complained a little less if the “something” floating on the top of his head looked like a really, super-big crown.
President Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One prior to departure from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Sunday.
(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
Watch out, Time magazine, Trump might send the Texas National Guard to your newsroom!
This is an administration that is forcing airports to run videos blaming the government shutdown on their opponents? What branch of the government just asked journalists to only publish preapproved information?
And always with the reacting to Democrat-led cities like Portland, Chicago and L.A. as if they’re Stalingrad during the siege.
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary in August: “L.A. wouldn’t be standing today if President Trump hadn’t taken action then. That city would have burned down if left to the devices of the mayor and the governor of that state.”
Trump about Washington, D.C., over the summer as he issued an executive order to take over its police department in the wake of what he characterized as out-of-control crime: “It is a point of national disgrace that Washington, D.C., has a violent crime rate that is higher than some of the most dangerous places in the world.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to military brass he called in from across the world last month to declare the following: “No more beardos. The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done.”
Welcome to our Snowflake Government. The way these people’s tough talk turns into waterworks at the slightest provocation, you’d think they were the ski slopes of Mt. Baldy come summertime.
Trump and his lackeys possess scary power and don’t hesitate to use it in the name of punishing enemies. But what betrays their inherent snowflake-ness is how much they cry about what they still don’t dominate and their continued use of brute force to try and subdue the slightest, well, slight.
The veritable pity party gnashes its teeth more and more as the months pass. Trump was so angry at the sight of people causing chaos over a relatively small area of downtown L.A. after mass raids swept Southern California in June — chaos that barely registered to what happens after a Dodgers World Series win — that he sent in the Marines.
His spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, keeps describing any nasty look or bad word thrown at migra agents as proof of them suffering a supposedly unprecedented level of assault despite never offering any concrete proof.
The Southland’s acting U.S. attorney, Bill Essayli, accused an LAPD spokesperson last week of leaking information to The Times after one of my colleagues asked him about … wait for it … an upcoming press conference.
No part of the government melts faster, however, than the agency with the apropos acronym of ICE.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their fellow travelers across Homeland Security are Trump’s own Praetorian Guard, tasked with carrying out his deportation deluge. They’ve relished their months in the national spotlight cast by the federal government simultaneously as an unstoppable force and an immovable object. La migra continues to crash into neighborhoods and communities like a masked avalanche of tear gas and handcuffs, justice be damned.
But have you seen how they’re flailing in Chicago?
Illinois State Police clash with demonstrators by the ICE facility in Broadview, Ill., as tensions rise over prolonged protests targeting federal ICE operations in Chicago on Oct. 10.
(Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu via Getty Images)
They’re firing pepper balls at the heads of Presbyterian priests outside detention facilities and tackling middle-aged reporters.
Border Patrol sector chief Gregory Bovino, who thinks he’s Napoleon with a crew cut and an Appalachian drawl, has accused protester Cole Sheridan of causing an unspecified groin injury even though the government couldn’t provide any video evidence during a preliminary court hearing earlier this month.
Agents have set off tear gas canisters without giving a heads-up to Chicago police. They’re detaining people without giving them a chance to prove their citizenship until hours later.
All this because — wah, wah! — Windy City residents haven’t welcomed la migra as liberators.
Bovino and his ICE buddies keep whimpering to Trump that they need the National Guard to back them up because they supposedly can’t do their job despite being the ones armed and masked up and backed by billions of dollars in new funds.
That’s why the government is now pushing tech giants to crack down on how activists are organizing. In the past two weeks, Apple has taken down apps that tracked actions by ICE agents and a Chicago Facebook group that was a clearinghouse for migra sightings at the request of the Department of Justice.
On X, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi bragged that she “will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement” despite offering no evidence whatsoever — because who needs facts in the face of Trump’s blizzard of lies?
Since the start of all this madness, I’ve seen the left offer a rejoinder to the snowflake charge: the slogan “ICE Melts,” usually accompanied by a drawing of the action at hand. It’s meant to inspire activists by reminding them that la migra is not nearly as mighty as the right makes them out to be.
That’s clever. But the danger of all these conservative snowflakes turning into a sopping mess the way they do over their perceived victimhood is that the resulting flood threatens to drown out a little thing we’d come to love over many, many, many years.
Democracy.
Source link
Commentary: Leaving the L.A. Times, and a new direction for Boiling Point
Five-plus years ago, during the early days of COVID-19, we sent the first edition of Boiling Point. I wrote then that there would “always be people who say it’s the wrong time to talk about carbon emissions, or water pollution, or the extinction crisis.” But even amid a deadly pandemic and stay-at-home orders, I argued, it was more important than ever to keep the climate crisis front and center.
The same is true now — yes, even amid the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on democracy and dissent and immigrants. Which is why, even though I’m leaving the L.A. Times, Boiling Point will continue.
Yes, you read that correctly. I’ve made the difficult decision to leave the L.A. Times. Tuesday was my last day.
But I’m not done telling stories about climate. And neither are my wonderful friends and colleagues.
You’re reading Boiling Point
Sammy Roth gets you up to speed on climate change, energy and the environment. Sign up to get it in your inbox twice a week.
By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy.
I’m not quite ready to share my own plans yet. If you want to keep following my work, please send me an email at [email protected], and I promise to keep you updated. I’m excited for what comes next.
It’s a bittersweet moment, though. Working at The Times has been one of the great privileges of my life; thank you for inviting me into your inboxes, and making time to read my stories when you could have been scrolling or streaming. I’m grateful for our dialogue, our debates, our disagreements. I hope we’ll have many more.
Just as importantly, I hope you’ll continue to follow and support the L.A. Times, especially our environment team.
With no disrespect to any other news outlet, we have the best climate reporters in the business: Tyrone Beason. Tony Briscoe. Noah Haggerty. Ian James. Sandra McDonald. Melody Petersen. Corinne Purtill. Susanne Rust. Lila Seidman. Hayley Smith. Rosanna Xia. If you’re not reading them, you’re doing it wrong.
Starting next week, several of my colleagues will take turns writing Boiling Point. It’ll look a little different than it does now, with a combination of analysis and news roundup. Each edition will have a unique focus, based on the reporter’s expertise: Ian James will cover water, for instance, while Lila Seidman will tackle wildlife and Tony Briscoe will handle air quality. You’ll get a wide range of thoughtful perspectives.
The newsletter will still arrive in your inbox every Thursday. It’ll still be worth opening.
Just like climate, journalism is more important now than ever. Local journalism especially.
Thank you for everything. Onward.
ONE MORE THING
On the southern end of Del Mar, train tracks run precariously close to the edge of rapidly crumbling cliffs.
(John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune)
For nostalgia’s sake, here are some of my favorite environmental stories and series the L.A. Times has produced during my seven years here — including, no shame, one of my own:
A reporter kept a diary of her plastic use. It was soul-crushing
Colorado River in Crisis: A Times series on the Southwest’s shrinking water lifeline
Fishing the L.A. River is more than a quarantine hobby. For some, it’s therapy
Is it ethical to have children in the face of climate change?
Repowering the West: Energy-hungry cities are reshaping the landscape, again
The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim
The L.A. Times investigation into extreme heat’s deadly toll
Uncovering the toxic soil lurking in L.A.’s burn zones
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.
Source link
Commentary: California is finally quitting coal. Here’s what comes next
If I didn’t know better, I might have thought Intermountain Power Plant was already dead.
When I visited last month, most of the desks had been torn from the administrative building, leaving behind scattered piles of boxes and office supplies. A whiteboard featured photos of dozens of newly retired employees. Perhaps most tellingly, the coal pile in the yard out back was tiny compared with my previous visit in 2022.
“Our target is to have no coal left on the floor,” said Kevin Peng, manager of external generation for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Peng was my tour guide at this hulking coal-fired power plant in central Utah, over 500 miles from the city it has powered for the last 40 years. And no, it wasn’t dead yet. One of two massive steam turbines, a General Electric unit installed in 1986, was still sending small amounts of electricity to L.A. and several other Southern California cities following a required air quality test. Soon Unit 1 would shut off, probably for the final time.
You’re reading Boiling Point
Sammy Roth gets you up to speed on climate change, energy and the environment. Sign up to get it in your inbox twice a week.
By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy.
Unit 2 would carry Intermountain through its final act. At the moment it was slowly preparing to generate power, releasing puffy white steam through a small vertical pipe near the main smokestack. I stood on the roof for a few minutes near the pipe, letting water droplets fall gently on my face and reporter’s notebook.
“We create our own rain,” Peng with a smile.
Come November, the rain will cease. Same goes for the planet-warming carbon emissions. Los Angeles is closing Intermountain, a watershed moment that will mark the end of coal power in California.
The 710-foot smokestack towers over the rest of Intermountain Power Plant.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
To hear President Trump tell it, coal is needed for economic prosperity. Just this week, his administration said it would open 13 million acres of public land to coal mining and offer $625 million in handouts to coal plant owners.
Trump & Co. — including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fossil fuel executive, who insisted the handouts “will be vital to keeping electricity prices low and the lights on without interruption” — are battling the free market. Coal plants generated 16.2% of U.S. electricity in 2023, down from 48.5% in 2007. The main culprit? Competition from cheaper solar, wind and natural gas.
In California, just 2.2% of electricity came from coal in 2024 — nearly all of it from Intermountain. Over 60% was generated by solar panels, wind turbines and other climate-friendly sources that don’t fuel deadly wildfires, heat waves and floods. Thanks to a surge in lithium-ion batteries, there have been no power shortages since 2020.
The L.A. Department of Water and Power, meanwhile, has been making big investments in low-cost renewables, including a record-cheap solar-plus-storage plant that opened this summer. DWP has fired up Intermountain less and less, relying on the plant for 21% of the city’s power in 2019 and just 10% in 2023.
Jason Rondou, the utility’s assistant general manager for power planning and operations, said the coal plant has supplied affordable, reliable electricity for decades. But now there are better options.
“It’s come at a pretty significant external cost — the cost of the carbon emissions,” he said. “For us to move beyond that and move to a cleaner, innovative technology, I think is very exciting.”
Indeed, Los Angeles isn’t just closing Intermountain. It’s built a first-of-its-kind power plant across the street.
The new turbines are designed to burn a mix of 70% natural gas and 30% hydrogen. Although gas is a fossil fuel that exacerbates global warming, hydrogen isn’t. That mix alone is unique for a plant of this scale. But over time, as technology improves, DWP plans to transition to 100% hydrogen — an unprecedented undertaking.
The newly built gas/hydrogen power plant known as IPP Renewed, seen from the roof of the Intermountain coal plant.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
Even better, the hydrogen will be “green,” meaning it’s made from renewable electricity rather than fossil fuels.
At times of day when DWP has extra renewable power — such as mild spring afternoons, when the sun is shining and Angelenos aren’t blasting their air conditioners — the utility can use that energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. DWP and its partners have hired a private company to store the hydrogen in giant underground salt caverns just down the road from Intermountain.
Then, when DWP needs extra power — during a heat wave months later, for instance — it can pull hydrogen from the caverns and fire up the turbines. Basically, the hydrogen will function like a long-term battery.
“It’s very different from lithium-ion [batteries],” Rondou said. “For that seasonal storage, that’s where hydrogen can really provide significant benefit.”
Among environmentalists, hydrogen is controversial. Some share DWP’s view that it’s a necessary piece of the clean energy puzzle. Others consider it a distraction from cheaper, more proven technologies, and a threat to air quality, especially in low-income communities of color. They’ve slammed DWP’s goal of eventually converting four L.A.-area gas plants to hydrogen, citing nitrogen oxide pollution and potential methane leaks.
In Utah’s Millard County, conservative local officials have embraced the newfangled technology, along with solar and wind. Unlike Trump, who has slashed hydrogen funding, they have little aversion to clean energy.
“Energy development is really important in our portfolio. And we will talk to everybody. We’re open for business,” said County Commissioner Bill Wright.
Sitting in his living room, as dogs and grandkids wandered past, Wright reflected on his rural county’s long relationship with Los Angeles. The massive tax revenues, the hundreds of jobs. The lack of local control. The fact that nearly all the power goes to California.
Wright would have liked to see DWP keep the coal plant running. But the closure has been in the works for years, so he and his neighbors have had time to adjust. He’s glad L.A. isn’t leaving town entirely — even though the new plant will be smaller, with fewer jobs and a smaller tax base.
“Absolutely, this is a better solution,” he said.
Millard County Commissioner Bill Wright poses for a portrait near Intermountain Power Plant outside Delta, Utah, on Sept. 16.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
Wright is hopeful that the Utah Legislature will find a buyer for the coal plant, possibly a data center. One of his colleagues on the county commission, Vicki Lyman, is less optimistic. She’s worked at Intermountain for a dozen years and sees major technical and economic hurdles to restarting a mothballed power plant.
“I’m kind of excited just to see how all this technology’s going to work out,” Lyman said.
It’s still not entirely clear when DWP will start combusting hydrogen. The new plant will burn 100% gas when the coal turbines power off in November, utility officials say, because there won’t be enough hydrogen banked in the salt caverns yet. DWP is targeting the second quarter of 2026 to mix in 30% hydrogen.
For employees, DWP has tried to make the transition as painless as possible. It’s limited layoffs by not replacing retiring staffers, and by offering tuition reimbursement to anyone who chooses to go back to school.
Still, change can be bittersweet. While touring Intermountain, I bumped into plant manager Jon Finlinson, who’s worked there since 1983 and would have retired already if the gas/hydrogen units weren’t running a few months behind schedule. He professed excitement for the new facility. But when I asked him how he’d commemorate the final day of coal combustion, he offered the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t have a plan for that yet.”
Really? After 40 years, nothing?
“It’ll be a sad day for all the people that have worked here for their whole life,” he acknowledged.
Intermountain staff member Carl Watson offers a peek into the coal furnace.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
Technically, even after Intermountain stops sending coal power to L.A. — as well as Anaheim, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and Riverside — there will still be tiny amounts of coal in California’s energy mix. A Riverside County electric cooperative imports coal from out of state, as does Berkshire Hathaway-owned Pacific Power in Northern California. In San Bernardino County, two small coal plants fuel a mining operation.
Together, those coal generators supplied less than 0.2% of the state’s electricity in 2024. (If you want to get really technical, an additional 1.5% came from “unspecified” out-of-state sources, most likely gas and coal.)
But why quibble when there’s cause for celebration? Change is never easy; no solution is perfect; there will always be caveats.
Next month, California is quitting coal. Raise a glass.
The coal pile at Intermountain Power Plant, seen on Sept. 17.
(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.
Correction: Last week’s edition of this newsletter referred to Revolution Wind as a floating offshore wind farm. The project’s turbines are attached directly to the sea floor.
Source link
Commentary: There’s no nice way to deport someone. But Trump’s ICE is hosting a cruelty Olympics
When my father was crossing the U.S.-Mexico border like an undocumented Road Runner back in the 1970s, la migra caught him more than a few times.
They chased him and his friends through factories in Los Angeles and across the hills that separate Tijuana and San Diego. He was tackled and handcuffed and hauled off in cars, trucks and vans. Sometimes, Papi and his pals were dropped off at the border checkpoint in San Ysidro and ordered to walk back into Mexico. Other times, he was packed into grimy cells with other men.
But there was no anger or terror in his voice when I asked him recently how la migra treated him whenever they’d catch him.
“Like humans,” he said. “They had a job to do, and they knew why we mojados were coming here, so they knew they would see us again. So why make it difficult for both of us?”
His most vivid memory was the time a guard in El Centro gave him extra food because he thought my dad was a bit too skinny.
There’s never a pretty way to deport someone. But there’s always a less indecent, a less callous, a less ugly way.
The Trump presidency has amply proven he has no interest in skirting meanness and cruelty.
“The way they treat immigrants now is a disgrace,” Papi said. “Like animals. It’s sad. It’s ugly. It needs to stop.”
I talked to him a few days after a gunman fired on a Dallas ICE facility, killing a detainee and striking two others before killing himself. One of the other wounded detainees, an immigrant from Mexico, died days later. Instead of expressing sympathy for the deceased, the Trump administration initially offered one giant shrug. What passed for empathy was Vice President JD Vance telling reporters, “Look, just because we don’t support illegal aliens, we don’t want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political violence” while blaming the attack on Democrats.
It was up to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem to try and show that the federal government has a heart. Her statement on the Dallas attack offered “prayers” to the victims and their families but quickly pivoted to what she felt was the real tragedy.
How ungrateful critics are of la migra.
“For months, we’ve been warning politicians and the media to tone down their rhetoric about ICE law enforcement before someone was killed,” Noem said. “This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences…The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop.”
You might have been forgiven for not realizing from such a statement that the three people punctured by a gunman’s bullets were immigrants.
This administration is never going to roll out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants. But the least they can do it deal with them as if … well, as if they are human.
Under Noem’s leadership, DHS’ social media campaign has instead produced videos that call undocumented immigrants “the worst of the worst” and depict immigration agents as heroes called by God to confront invading hordes. A recent one even used the theme song to the cartoon version of the Pokémon trading card game — tagline “Gotta catch them all” — to imply going after the mango guy and tamale lady is no different than capturing fictional monsters.
That’s one step away from “The Eternal Jew,” the infamous Nazi propaganda movie that compared Jews to rats and argued they needed to be eradicated.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) as prisoners stand, looking out from a cell, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, in March.
(Alex Brandon/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Noem is correct when she said that words have consequences — but the “violence and dehumanization” she decries against ICE workers is nothing compared to the cascade of hate spewing from Trump and his goons against immigrants. That rot in the top has infested all parts of American government, leading to officials trying to outdo themselves over who can show the most fealty to Trump by being nastiest to people.
If there were a Cruelty Olympics, Trump’s sycophants would all be elbowing each other for the gold.
Politicians in red states propose repulsive names for their immigration detention facility — “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, for instance, or “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana. U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, Trump’s top prosecutor in Southern California, has trumpeted the arrests of activists he claimed attacked federal agents even as video uploaded by civilians offers a different story. In a recent case, a federal jury acquitted Brayan Ramos-Brito of misdemeanor assault charges after evidence shown in court contradicted what Border Patrol agents had reported to justify his prosecution.
La migra regularly harass U.S. citizens even after they’ve offered proof of residency and have ignored court-ordered restraining orders banning them from targeting people because of their ethnicity. Border Patrol sector chief Gregory Bovino continually squanders taxpayer dollars on photo ops, like the Border Patrol’s July occupation of a nearly empty MacArthur Park or a recent deployment of boats on the Chicago River complete with agents bearing rifles as if they were safari hunters cruising the Congo.
Our nation’s deportation Leviathan is so imperious that an ICE agent, face contorted with anger, outside a New York immigration court recently shoved an Ecuadorian woman pleading for her husband down to the ground, stood over her and wagged his finger in front of her bawling children even as cameras recorded the terrible scene. The move was so egregious that Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughin quickly put out a statement claiming the incident was “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE.”
The act was so outrageous and it was all caught on camera, so what choice did she have? Nevertheless, CBS News reported that the agent is back on duty.
Noem and her crew are so high on their holy war that they don’t realize they’re their own worst enemy. La migra didn’t face the same public acrimony during Barack Obama’s first term, when deportation rates were so high immigration activists dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.” They didn’t need local law enforcement to fend off angry crowds every time they conducted a raid in Trump’s first term.
The difference now is that cruelty seems like an absolute mandate, so forgive those of us who aren’t throwing roses at ICE when they march into our neighborhoods and haul off our loved ones. And it seems more folks are souring on Trump’s deportation plans. A June Gallup poll found that 79% of Americans said immigration was “a good thing” — a 15% increase since last year and the highest mark recorded by Gallup since it started asking the question in 2001. Meanwhile, a Washington Post/Ipsos September poll showed 44% of adults surveyed approved of Trump’s performance on immigration — a six-point drop since February.
I asked my dad how he thought the government should treat deportees. Our family has personally known Border Patrol agents.
“Well, most of them shouldn’t be deported in the first place,” he said. “If they want to work or already have families here, let them stay but say they need to behave well or they have to leave.”
That’s probably not going to happen, so what should the government do?
“Don’t yell at people,” my dad said. “Talk with patience. Feed immigrants well, give them clean clothes and give them privacy when they have to use the bathroom. Say, ‘sorry we have to do all this, but it’s what Trump wants.’
“And then they should apologize,” Papi concluded. “ They should tell everyone, ’We’re sorry we’ve been so mean. We can do better.’”
Well, that ain’t happening, dad.
Source link
Commentary: Bad Bunny will perform Super Bowl LX’s halftime show, likely in Spanish. Cue the meltdown
The NFL announced the musical headliner for Super Bowl LX’s halftime show, and — much to MAGA’s chagrin — it’s not Kid Rock.
Music’s most lucrative spot went to a relevant artist who actually sells albums: Bad Bunny. Letting the Puerto Rican rapper and singer turned global megastar perform 2026’s halftime show gifts right-wing influencers with a fresh conduit for the old grievance that woke culture has permeated every crevice of American culture, especially the Super Bowl.
Their proof: The NFL chose a predominantly Spanish-language artist who is known to wear women’s dresses, who endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, and who has decried this year’s immigration sweeps. Clearly, this decision was designed to irk them rather than serve Bad Bunny’s millions and millions of fans.
“The NFL is self-destructing year after year,” conservative commentator Benny Johnson wrote on X. He said of Bad Bunny: “Massive Trump hater. Anti-ICE activist. No songs in English.”
Other critics accused the reggaeton artist of flip-flopping, particularly following Bad Bunny’s statements earlier this month that he would not include any mainland U.S. dates on his Debí Tirar Más Fotos world tour out of concern that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents might target and detain his fans.
“There were many reasons why I didn’t show up in the U.S., and none of them were out of hate — I’ve performed there many times,” he said to I-D magazine. “But there was the issue of — like, f—ing ICE could be outside [my concert]. And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.”
The artist, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, explained his decision to join the long list of Super Bowl halftime notables in a short statement following the NFL’s announcement Sunday.
“What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” he said. “It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown … this is for my people, my culture and our history. Ve y dile a tu abuela, que seremos el HALFTIME SHOW DEL SUPER BOWL.”
Bad Bunny in glasses, not a dress.
(Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP)
The year-after-year decision to cast top-ranking pop artists and music legends in the featured Super Bowl halftime spot is hardly a mystery. They are stars that sell or performers that appeal to millions. But that dull reality hasn’t stopped the characterizations that the Bad Bunny decision is a deep state conspiracy, designed to rot American households from the inside out.
“Barack Obama’s best friend Jay-Z runs the Super Bowl selection process through his company Roc Nation which has an exclusive contract with the NFL. This is who chooses the halftime show, the most-watched musical performance in America,” wrote alt-right figure Jack Posobiec.
The NFL in 2019 partnered with rapper Jay Z’s entertainment and sports company, Roc Nation, to produce its Super Bowl halftime shows. The first show under the new partnership featured 2020’s Latin music in performances by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. Since then the institution’s halftime performances have largely featured hip-hop artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna and the OG trio of Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Eminem.
Lamar’s 2025 politically charged performance was the source of condemnation from the right. Clad in red, white and blue, his predominantly Black dance crew assembled in an American flag formation. And guest star Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as Uncle Sam, called out the nation’s systemic racism. Lamar had already rankled the right with 2017’s “The Heart Part 4,” where he referred to Trump as a “chump.”
Kendrick Lamar performs during halftime of the NFL Super Bowl 59.
(Frank Franklin II / AP)
It’s one of many moments over the last decade that have galvanized conservative factions around calls to boycott the Super Bowl, or at least publicly bash the event. Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime show was once such flash point, where she performed “Formation” featuring dancers in Black Panther-inspired outfits and paid tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement.
At least those complaints were rooted in a performance that actually happened, as opposed to claims that the NFL was manipulating games for the Kansas City Chiefs to enable tight end Travis Kelce and his then-girlfriend (now fiancée) Taylor Swift to endorse Joe Biden. Sure, totally feasible.
Yet there should be no secret around why the Super Bowl hasn’t featured wildly popular, globally celebrated MAGA-promoting performers: There aren’t any. It’s no wonder Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood always seem to be the entertainment of choice for Trump rallies.
Bad Bunny is the most-streamed male artist on Spotify, running just behind the platform’s most-streamed artist of all time, Swift. As of Sunday, his release “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” became the first album of 2025 to surpass 7 billion streams on Spotify. And the 31-year-old artist just finished a sold-out, month-long residency at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Though the Super Bowl is still five months away, those who aren’t among the haters can enjoy an early kick off: Bad Bunny is scheduled to host the new season opener of “SNL” this weekend.
Source link
Commentary: Please, Jimmy, don’t back down. Making fun of Trump is your patriotic duty
So Jimmy Kimmel is coming back, fast enough that there are still folks out there who didn’t know he was gone.
Hallelujah? Praise be to ABC? Free speech triumphs?
It all depends on Tuesday night, when we see if Kimmel returns undaunted, or if he has been subdued. Of all the consequential, crazy, frightening events that have taken place in recent days, Kimmel’s return should be a moment we all watch — a real-time, late-night look at how successful our president is at forcing us to censor ourselves through fear.
Please, Jimmy, don’t back down.
If Kimmel tempers his comedy now, pulls his punches on making fun of power, he sends the message that we should all be afraid, that we should all bend. Maybe he didn’t sign up for this, but here he is — a person in a position of influence being forced to make a risky choice between safety and country.
That sounds terribly dramatic, I know, but self-censorship is the heart of authoritarianism. When people of power are too scared to even crack a joke, what does that mean for the average person?
If Kimmel, with his celebrity, clout and wealth, cannot stand up to this president, what chance do the rest of us have?
Patriotism used to be a simple thing. A bit of apple pie, a flag on the Fourth of July, maybe even a twinge of pride when the national anthem plays and all the words pop into your mind even though you can’t find your car keys or remember what day it is.
It’s just something there, running in the background — an unspoken acknowledgment that being American is a pretty terrific thing to be.
Now, of course, patriotism is the most loaded of words. It’s been masticated and barfed out by the MAGA movement into a specific gruel — a white, Western-centric dogma that demands a narrow and angry Christianity dominate civic life.
There have been a deluge of examples of this subversion in recent days. The Pentagon is threatening to punish journalists who report information it doesn’t explicitly provide. The president used social media to demand U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi go after his perceived enemies.
The one that put a knot in my stomach was the speech by Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar, speaking, without humor, at the memorial for Charlie Kirk.
“We are the storm,” Miller said, hinting back at a QAnon conspiracy theory about a violent reordering of society.
That’s disturbing, but actually mild compared with what he said next, a now-familiar Christian nationalist rant.
“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Miller said. “Our ancestors built the cities they produced, the art and architecture they built. The industry.”
Who’s going to tell him about Sally Hemings? But he continued with an attack on the “yous” who don’t agree with this worldview, the “yous,” like Kimmel, one presumes (though Kimmel’s name did not come up) who oppose this cruel version of America.
“You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred, you are nothing,” Miller said. “You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.”
Humor, of course, ain’t nothing, which is why this administration can’t stand it.
Humor builds camaraderie. It produces dopamine and serotonin, the glue of human bonding. It drains away fear, and creates hope.
Which is why autocrats always go after comedians pretty early on. It’s not thin skin, though Trump seems to have that. It’s effective management of dissent.
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels knew it. In 1939, after his party had set up a Chamber of Culture that required all performers to adhere to certain rules, he banned five German comedians — Werner Finck, Peter Sachse, Helmuth Buth, Wilhelm Meissner and Manfred Dlugi — for making political jokes that didn’t support the regime. He basically ended their careers for daring satire against Nazi leaders, claiming people didn’t find it funny.
“(I)n their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades,” the New York Times reported the German government claiming at the time.
Sounds familiar.
Kimmel, of course, is not the only comedian speaking out. Jon Stewart has hit back on “The Daily Show,” pretending to be scared into submission, perhaps a hat tip to Finck, who famously joked, “I am not saying anything. And even that I am not saying.”
Stephen Colbert roasted Disney with a very funny parody video. Political cartoonists are having a field day.
And there are plenty of others pushing back. Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken to all-caps rebuttals. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, whom Trump called “nothing,” is also vocal in his opposition, especially of National Guard troops in Chicago.
The collective power of the powerful is no joke. It means something.
But all the sober talk in the world can’t rival one spot-on dig when it comes to kicking the clay feet of would-be dictators. Mark Twain said it best: Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. Which is what makes Kimmel so relevant in this moment.
Can he come back with a laugh — proving we have nothing to fear but fear itself — or are we seriously in trouble?
Source link
Commentary: Against the backdrop of the Hollywood sign, the Border Patrol takes a hellaweird group photo
The Hollywood sign has been blown up in movies, altered by pranksters to read “Hollyweed,” “Jollygood” and “Hollyboob” and saw Tom Cruise staple some Olympic rings on it to promote the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. Politicians have used it as a prop for commercials and mailers the way they do kissing a baby or eating a taco. Out-of-town goobers and locals alike hike up to various vantage points around it for a selfie or group shot.
But the crown for the worst stunt involving the monument to everything dreamy and wonderful about L.A. now lies with the Border Patrol.
Earlier this week, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief in charge of Trump’s long, hot deportation summer in L.A., posted on social media a photo of him and dozens of his officers posing on a patch of dirt in what looks like Lake Hollywood Park. Behind them is the Hollywood sign.
Arms are crossed. Hands are on belts. A few National Guard troops, one with a K9 unit, join in. None of the faces are masked for once. That’s because they didn’t have to be: Almost every one of them is blurred out.
“This is the team. They’re the ones on the ground, making it happen,” wrote Bovino, one of only two in the photo without a blurry face. “The mean green team is not going anywhere. We are here to stay.” And just in case readers didn’t get that la migra is hard, Bovino concluded his post with a fire emoji.
The faces of these supposedly brave men are more fuzzed out than Bigfoot in that famous footage from 1967.
Jeff Zarrinnam, chairman of the nonprofit in charge of maintaining the Hollywood sign, said “we have to stay neutral on these types of things,” so he didn’t offer his opinion on why a man who spent his summer terrorizing large swaths of the Southland would want to pose there. He did say the Border Patrol didn’t request special access to get closer to it as other politicians have in the past.
“It was probably a team-building effort for them, or a lot of them probably hadn’t seen it before,” he said. “It’s a symbol of America. Maybe that’s why they were standing up there. Who knows?”
L.A. Councilmember Nithya Raman, whose district is where the Hollywood sign stands, was not as charitable.
“To see an icon of this city used for an image designed to instill fear in Angelenos is chilling — particularly on the heels of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling which dealt a devastating blow to a city that has already faced so much hardship this year,” she said in a statement.
Bovino is expected to show up soon in Chicago to oversee the Border Patrol’s invasion of the Windy Cindy. His press team didn’t return my request for an interview or my questions about whether the photo was digitally altered — other than the face blurring and the ultra-sharp focusing on Bovino — and what he hoped to accomplish with it. The sign itself looks shrouded in fog, but who knows? The whole photo has a weirdness about it.
Nevertheless, Bovino’s smirk in the group portrait says it all.
This is a guy who came into town like so many newcomers before him wanting to make it big and willing to do whatever it took. Short, with a high fade haircut and nasal drawl, Bovino quickly became a constant on local news, selling himself as a mix of Andy Griffith (a fellow North Carolina native) and Lt. Col. Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now.”
He starred in slickly produced government-created videos portraying the Border Patrol as warriors on a divine mission to make the City of Angeles safe from immigrant infidels. He claimed local politicians were endangering residents with their sanctuary policies and gleefully thumbed his nose at a temporary restraining order barring indiscriminate raids like those, which the Supreme Court just ruled can start happening again. He was there, a cameraman filming his every strut, when National Guard troops in armed Humvees parked along Whittier Boulevard in July all so Border Patrol agents on horseback could trot through an empty MacArthur Park.
Bovino cheered on via social media when his “mean green team” rented a Penske truck to lure in day laborers at a Westlake Home Depot in August only to detain them. Even worse was Bovino showing up in front of the Japanese American National Museum with a phalanx of migra while California’s political class was inside decrying the gerrymandering push by President Trump. He pleaded ignorance on that last action when Gov. Gavin Newsom and others accused the sector chief of trying to intimidate them even as friendly media just happened to be there, just like they so happened to be embedded with immigration agents all summer as they chased after tamale ladies and day laborers.
Supporters played up his moves as if they were a master class in psyops, with grandiose codenames such as Operation Trojan Horse for the Penske truck raid and Operation Excalibur for the invasion of MacArthur Park. So Bovino and his janissaries posing in front of the Hollywood sign comes off like a hunter posing in front of his killed prey or a taunting postcard to L.A.: Thinking about you. See you soon.
But all of Bovino’s actions grabbed far more non-criminals than actual bad hombres and did nothing to make Southern California safer. Locals have countered his attempt at a shock-and-awe campaign with lawsuits, protests, mutual aid and neighborhood watches that won’t end. That resistance forced la migra to cry to their daddy Trump for National Guard and Marine backup, with an occasional call to the LAPD and L.A. Sheriff’s Department to keep away the boo birds who now track their every move.
Greg: hope you enjoyed your stay in L.A. Congrats — you made it! You’re the star of your own D-level Tinseltown production that no one except pendejos wants to see. You left L.A. as one of the most loathed outsiders since former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt. Stay gone. Wish you weren’t here.
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The author condemns the Border Patrol’s group photo at the Hollywood sign as the “worst stunt” involving Los Angeles’ iconic monument, viewing it as an inappropriate use of a symbol representing “everything dreamy and wonderful about L.A.”
The author characterizes Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino’s enforcement operations throughout the summer as “terrorizing large swaths of the Southland” rather than legitimate law enforcement, arguing these actions were designed primarily to “instill fear in Angelenos”
The author criticizes Bovino’s tactics as ineffective at improving public safety, asserting that his operations “grabbed far more non-criminals than actual bad hombres and did nothing to make Southern California safer”
The author portrays Bovino as a publicity-seeking outsider who came to Los Angeles “wanting to make it big and willing to do whatever it took,” comparing the chief’s media presence to starring in “slickly produced government-created videos”
The author condemns specific enforcement operations, including using a rental truck to “lure in day laborers” and targeting vulnerable populations like “tamale ladies,” characterizing these as deceptive and cruel tactics
The author views the recent Supreme Court ruling lifting restrictions on immigration enforcement as enabling “state-sponsored racism” and creating conditions where Latino citizens become “second-class citizens” subject to racial profiling[3]
Different views on the topic
Jeff Zarrinnam, chairman of the nonprofit maintaining the Hollywood sign, offers a more charitable interpretation, suggesting the photo “was probably a team-building effort” and noting that the Hollywood sign serves as “a symbol of America,” potentially explaining why Border Patrol agents would want to pose there
Supporters of Bovino’s operations viewed his enforcement tactics as sophisticated strategic operations, describing them as “a master class in psyops” with organized codenames like “Operation Trojan Horse” and “Operation Excalibur”
The Trump administration has argued to the Supreme Court that racial profiling capabilities are necessary for effective immigration enforcement, contending that without these tools, “the prospect of contempt” would hang “over every investigative stop”[3]
Federal authorities and supporters frame these enforcement operations as necessary public safety measures targeting individuals who pose risks to communities, rather than random harassment of immigrant populations[1][2]
The Supreme Court majority, led by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, characterized immigration enforcement encounters as “brief investigative stops” where citizens and legal residents “will be free to go after the brief encounter,” minimizing concerns about prolonged detention or abuse[3]
Source link
Commentary: I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m always going to carry my passport now. Thanks, Supreme Court
My dad’s passport is among his most valuable possessions, a document that not only establishes that he’s a U.S. citizen but holds the story of his life.
It states that he was born in Mexico in 1951 and is decorated with stamps from the regular trips he takes to his home state of Zacatecas. Its cover is worn but still strong, like its owner, a 74-year-old retired truck driver. It gives Lorenzo Arellano the ability to move across borders, a privilege he didn’t have when he entered the United States for the first time in the trunk of a Chevy as an 18-year-old.
The photo is classic Papi. Stern like old school Mexicans always look in portraits but with joyful eyes that reveal his happy-go-lucky attitude to life. He used to keep the passport in his underwear drawer to make sure he never misplaced it in the clutter of our home.
At the beginning of Trump’s second term, I told Papi to keep the passport on him at all times. Just because you’re a citizen doesn’t mean you’re safe, I told my dad, who favors places — car washes, hardware stores, street vendors, parks, parties — where immigrants congregate and no one cares who has legal status and who doesn’t.
“Exagera,” my dad replied — Trump exaggerates. As a citizen, my dad reasoned he now had rights. He didn’t have to worry like in the old days, when one shout of “¡La migra!” would send him running for the nearest exit of the carpet factory in Santa Ana where he worked back in the 1970s.
Then came Trump’s summer of deportation.
Masked migra swept across Southern California under the pretense of rounding up criminals. In reality, they grabbed anyone they thought looked suspicious, which in Southern California meant brown-skinned Latinos like my father. The feds even nabbed U.S. citizens or detained them for hours before releasing them with no apology. People who had the right to remain in this country were sent to out-of-state detention camps, where government officials made it as difficult as possible for frantic loved ones to find out where they were, let alone retrieve them.
This campaign of terror is why the ACLU and others filed a lawsuit in July arguing that la migra was practicing racial profiling in violation of the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches. A federal judge agreed, issuing a temporary restraining order. The Trump administration appealed, arguing to the Supreme Court that it needed to racially profile to find people to kick out of the country, otherwise “the prospect of contempt” would hang “over every investigative stop.”
On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed.
In a 6-3 vote, the justices lifted the temporary restraining order as the ACLU lawsuit proceeds. L.A.’s long, hot deportation summer will spill over to the fall and probably last as long as Trump wants it to. The decision effectively states that those of us with undocumented family and friends — a huge swath of Southern California and beyond — should watch over our shoulders, even if we’re in this country legally.
And even if you don’t know anyone without papers, watch out if you’re dark-skinned, speak English with an accent or wear guayaberas or huaraches. Might as well walk around in a T-shirt that says, “DEPORT ME, POR FAVOR.”
The ruling didn’t surprise me — the Supreme Court nowadays is a Trump-crafted rubber stamp for his authoritarian project. But what was especially galling was how out of touch Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion was with reality.
Kavanaugh describes what la migra has wrought on Southern California as “brief investigative stops,” which is like describing a totaled car as a “scratched-up vehicle.” A citizen or permanent resident stopped on suspicion of being in this country illegally “will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he wrote.
The justice uses the words “brief” or “briefly” eight times to describe what la migra does. Not once does he mention plaintiff Brian Gavidia, the U.S. citizen who on June 9 was at a Montebello tow yard when masked immigration agents shoved him against the fence and twisted his arm.
Gavidia’s offense? He stated he was an American three times but couldn’t remember the name of the East L.A. hospital where he was born. A friend recorded the encounter and posted it to social media. It quickly went viral and showed the world that citizenship won’t save you from Trump’s migra hammer.
Would Kavanaugh describe this as a “brief encounter” if it happened to him? To a non-Latino? After more cases like this inevitably happen, and more people are gobbled up by Trump’s anti-immigrant Leviathan?
Brian Gavidia stands in a parking lot next to East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park. A video of him having his arm twisted and held by an immigration officer against a wall despite being a U.S. citizen went viral. He’s currently a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit alleging the Trump administration is violating the 4th Amendment with indiscriminate immigration raids.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Anyone who applauds this decision is sanctioning state-sponsored racism out of apartheid-era South Africa. They’re all right with Latinos who “look” a certain way or live in communities with large undocumented populations becoming second-class citizens, whether they just migrated here or can trace their heritage to before the Pilgrims.
I worry for U.S.-born family members who work construction and will undoubtedly face citizenship check-ins. For friends in the restaurant industry who might also become targets. For children in barrios who can now expect ICE and Border Patrol trucks to cruise past their schools searching for adults and even teens to detain — it’s already happened.
Life will irrevocably change for millions of Latinos in Southern California and beyond because of what the Supreme Court just ruled. Shame on Kavanaugh and the five other justices who sided with him for uncorking a deportation demon that will be hard to stop.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor recounts Gavidia’s travails in her dissent, adding that the Real ID he was able to show the agents after they roughed him that established his citizenship “was never returned” and mocking Kavanaugh’s repeated use of “brief.”
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” she wrote. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
I will also dissent, but now I’m going to be more careful than ever. I’m going to carry my passport at all times, just in case I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even that is no guarantee la migra will leave me alone. It’s not a matter of if but when: I live in a majority Latino city, near a Latino supermarket on a street where the lingua franca is Spanish.
And I’m one of the lucky ones. I will be able to remain, no matter what may happen, because I’m a citizen. Imagine having to live in fear like this for the foreseeable future for those who aren’t?
There’s nothing “brief” about that.
Source link
‘The Paper’ review: A spot-on commentary about the state of journalism
“The Paper,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, is a belated spinoff of “The Office,” much as Peacock is a sort of spinoff of NBC, where the former show aired on Thursdays from 2005 to 2013. In the new series, Dunder Mifflin, the office in “The Office,” has been absorbed into a company called Enervate, which deals in office supplies, janitorial paper and local newspapers, “in order of quality.” The newspaper at hand is the Toledo Truth Teller, sharing space with the toilet paper division.
Created by “Office” developer Greg Daniels with Michael Koman, “The Paper” is shot in the same documentary style, ostensibly by the same fictional crew, and imports “Office” player Oscar Núñez as head accountant Oscar Martinez, not at all happy to be back on camera.
In the first episode, Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), a starry-eyed journalism school graduate turned cardboard salesman turned toilet paper salesman, arrives as the new editor in chief of the Truth Teller, not exactly taking charge of a staff that consists entirely of narcissistic interim managing editor Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore), whose sole prior media experience is as a contestant on a dating reality show called “Married at First Sight”; ad salesman Detrick Moore (Melvin Gregg); subscriptions person Nicole Lee (Ramona Young); compositor Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), who wrote for “Stars and Stripes”; accountants Adam Cooper (Alex Edelman) and Adelola Olofin (Gbemisola Ikumelo); and Duane Shepard Sr. as Barry Stokes, the only official reporter, whose beat consists of high school sports and falling asleep. In the sitcom logic of the show, they will all be drafted as volunteer journalists, joined by Travis Bienlien (Eric Rahill), from the toilet paper division.
Times television critic Robert Lloyd and news and culture (and former television) critic Lorraine Ali have worked in many newspaper and magazine offices between them, and come together here to discuss how “The Paper” compares to “The Office,” its journalistic veracity and whether or not it’s funny.
The journalist recruits in “The Paper,” from left: Chelsea Frei as Mare, Ramona Young as Nicole, Melvin Gregg as Detrick, Gbemisola Ikumelo as Adelola, Alex Edelman as Adam, Eric Rahill as Travis and Oscar Núñez as Oscar.
(John P. Fleenor / Peacock)
Ali: I’ll start with my favorite quote about journalism from “The Paper”: “The industry is collapsing like an old smoker’s lung.” Hack, hack, cough, I say from inside the beast. This half-hour comedy offered so many great moments of spot-on commentary about the state of legacy journalism that I wasn’t sure if I should weep or laugh. I chose the latter, most of the time. The first couple episodes are clever, funny and charmingly clumsy — if not too close to the bone for folks like us. I’ll get to the rest of the series in a minute, but how did the satire about a contracting newsroom strike you, Robert?
Lloyd: There are a couple of moments in the pilot episode where it flashes back to an old black-and-white documentary on the Truth Teller in an earlier age when 1,000 people worked for the paper, before the internet destroyed print journalism and the newspaper, which once occupied a whole building, and was eventually reduced to sharing a corner of a floor with the toilet paper division. It gave me a little shock. I feel like I caught the end of that analog era, at the L.A. Weekly, when it was a thin, then a fat alternative paper, and the Herald Examiner, where there were typewriters that must have been sitting there since the ’30s, a sort of piratical “Front Page” energy and tons of talent. (Much of which migrated to The Times when the Herald folded.)
Ali: I felt a tinge of sadness and loss watching those flashback scenes. Then they cut to present day, and the marbled halls of the once-great Truth Teller newspaper are empty. What struck me is how much the fictional paper’s lobby looked like the old Globe Lobby of the L.A. Times’ building downtown. I also got a lump in my throat when they went down into the basement where the old giant presses sat frozen. We had those relics in the old Times building too. For readers who don’t know, the L.A. Times hasn’t been in that landmark building since 2018. We’re now in El Segundo. Sounds like a great setup for a sitcom joke, right?
Lloyd: Most — all? — newspapers have felt the stress of shrinking staffs and resources, of doing more with less. But the Truth Teller starts with almost nothing — that it comes out at all, apparently daily, is something of a joke in itself; at least Ted Baxter was the only knucklehead working at WJM on “Mary Tyler Moore,” but there are more than a few of them here. “The Office” wasn’t about the work, but about surviving the environment. It didn’t really matter what did or didn’t get done. But this is a show about a business — a noble institution, however ignobly served — with deadlines, some of which one would rightly regard as impossible, having met hundreds, if not thousands, in one’s life — even without a skeleton crew that has no idea what it’s doing. But it just sort of wishes them away. Then again, it is a sitcom.
The jokes are well-timed and reliably funny, but like “The Office,” it’s all down to the characters, which are wonderful company. Oscar, of course, we already know and love. But I especially liked Gregg as the soft-edged Detrick, with an awkward crush on the wry Nicole. Ned, whom the Irish Gleeson plays like someone out of a Frank Capra pastiche, can be a little competitive, but he’s no Michael Scott; neither is he exactly Jim to Mare’s Pam, though obviously they occupy a similar position, being relatively normal and attractive. But as the One Who Needs to Be Noticed, Impacciatore’s Esmeralda does have more than a little Michael Scott in her, though turned up to 11, insanely glamorized and in an Italian accent. It’s a hilarious performance. Her delighted scrolling through a thicket of ads on a clickbait article on a tip Brad Pitt left someone is a little comic gem. It’s not unlike the way Janelle James pops out as Ava on “Abbott Elementary.”
Sabrina Impacciatore, left, plays managing editor Esmeralda, who has more than a little Michael Scott in her.
(John P. Fleenor / Peacock)
Ali: It’s impossible not to compare “The Paper” to “The Office.” It’s unfair yet inevitable, and “The Office” wins, though my favorite version of that show was the British version with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. But I do like what Gleeson does in “The Paper” with Ned Sampson, portraying him as an enthusiastic editor in chief born about 50 years too late to experience the Woodward and Bernstein glory days of print journalism. The deflated expression on his face is priceless when he advises his lost “reporters” to rely on the Five Ws of reporting, and one asks, “Is that a gang?” Gleeson has an impressive range. He was haunting as the conflicted foodie/serial killer in psychological thriller “The Patient,” where he co-starred, ironically, with Steve Carell. I also really like Young as Nicole, who I admittedly had an affinity for as a drama club nerd in “Never Have I Ever.”
My issue with “The Paper” isn’t the cast, but the pacing. It starts off strong. The first two episodes are filled with sharp writing and build a strong foundation for what we expect to see: the hilarity of an inexperienced, underdog staff turning a local rag into a real source of news. But the momentum doesn’t quite sustain. I felt myself losing interest in the story as the series progressed because their ensuing assignments, setbacks and interpersonal trajectories weren’t all that compelling.
I do, however, appreciate that “The Paper,” like “Abbott Elementary,” mines the tragic humor of a crumbling American institution while also pointing out that this thing is happening under our noses, and shouldn’t we do something — anything — to save it? Turning that tragedy into a sitcom is one answer.
Source link
NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ names Scott Detrow as new full-time host
NPR’s “All Things Considered” is getting a new weekday voice.
Scott Detrow will become a full-time weekday host of NPR’s afternoon radio show starting Sept. 29, while maintaining his role at “Consider This,” the outlet’s daily news podcast, the public radio firm said.
“I can’t wait to bring listeners the news five days a week now. And at this moment where we are all focusing on strengthening the entire public media network and working together more closely than ever before,” Detrow said in a statement.
This news comes a week after journalist Ari Shapiro announced his departure from the news magazine show. Shapiro had been hosting the show for nearly a decade.
For the last two years, Detrow could be heard on weekend episodes of “All Things Considered.” He steered coverage of breaking news events, including the attempted assassination of President Trump in Pennsylvania, earning him the Edward R. Murrow Award for breaking news.
He initially joined NPR in 2015. From getting his start as a Fordham student at WFUV in New York to working as a statehouse reporter at WITF in Pennsylvania and at KQED in the Bay Area, he has spent his entire career in public radio.
Since becoming a part of the national nonprofit, he has helped launch segments such as “Reporter’s Notebook,” in which listeners get a behind-the-scenes look at how journalism is produced, and most recently, he anchored live coverage surrounding Pope Leo’s election. He has also co-hosted the “NPR Politics Podcast” for seven years, focusing on the White House, Congress and two presidential campaigns.
“All Things Considered” is one of NPR’s longest-running shows, first airing in 1971. The flagship program presents a mix of news, commentary, interviews and analysis on a daily basis.
In a full-circle moment, Detrow’s first job out of college was working on the local version of “All Things Considered” in central Pennsylvania.
“I’m proud that I started out as an ATC host at a NPR Member station, and now will be doing that job nationally,” he said.
Source link
Commentary: Dean Cain wants to join ICE. Forget Lex Luthor, this Superman is after Tamale Lady
There are people who keep reliving their glory days, and then there’s Dean Cain.
The film and TV actor is best known for his work in the 1990s series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.”
He was no Christopher Reeve or Henry Cavill.
But enough people remember Cain in blue tights and a red cape so that he’s a regular on the fan convention circuit.
It’s his calling card, so when the Trump administration put out the call to recruit more ICE agents, guess who answered the call?
Big hint: Up, up and a güey!
On Aug. 6, the up until then not exactly buzzworthy Cain revealed on Instagram that he joined la migra — and everyone else should too!
The 59-year old actor made his announcement as an orchestral version of John Williams’ stirring “Superman” theme played lightly below his speech.
Superman used to go after Nazis, Klansmen and intergalactic monsters; now, Superman — er, Cain — wants to go after Tamale Lady. His archenemy used to be Lex Luthor; now real-life Bizarro Superman wants to go to work for the Trump administration’s equally bald-pated version of Lex Luthor: Stephen Miller.
“You can defend your homeland and get great benefits,” Cain said, flashing his bright white smile and brown biceps. Behind him was an American flag in a triangle case and a small statue depicting Cain in his days as a Princeton Tigers football player. “If you want to save America, ICE is arresting the worst of the worst and removing them from America’s streets.”
Later that day, Cain appeared on Fox News to claim he was going to “be sworn in as an ICE agent ASAP.” a role Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin later on clarified to the New York Times would be only honorary. His exaggeration didn’t stop the agency’s social media account to take a break from its usual stream of white supremacist dog whistles to gush over Cain’s announcement.
“Superman is encouraging Americans to become real-life superheroes,” it posted “by answering their country’s call to join the brave men and women of ICE to help protect our communities to arrest the worst of the worst.”
American heroes used to storm Omaha Beach. Now the Trump administration wants their version of them to storm the garden section of Home Depot.
Dean Cain speaks during a ceremony honoring Mehmet Oz, the former host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Feb. 11, 2022.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
Its appeal to Superman is part of their campaign to cast la migra as good guys while casting all undocumented people as shadowy villains who deserve deportation — the faster and nastier the better. But as with almost anything involving American history, Team Trump has already perverted Superman’s mythos. In early June, they put Trump, who couldn’t leap over a bingo card in a single bound let alone a tall building, on the White House’s social media accounts in a Superman costume. This was accompanied with the slogan: “Truth. Justice. The American Way.” That was the day before Warner Bros. released its latest Man of Steel film.
Even non-comic book fans know that the hero born Kal-El on Krypton was always a goody-goody who stood up to bullies and protected the downtrodden. He came from a foreign land — a doomed planet, no less — as a baby. His alter ego, Clark Kent, is humble and kind, traits that carry over when he turns into Superman.
The character’s caretakers always leaned on that fictional background to comment on real-world events. In a 1950 poster, as McCarthyism was ramping up, DC Comics issued a poster in which Superman tells a group of kids that anyone who makes fun of people for their “religion, race or national origin … is un-American.”
A decade later, Superman starred in a comic book public service announcement in which he chided a teen who said “Those refugee kids can’t talk English or play ball or anything” by taking him to a shabby camp to show the boy the hardships refugees had to endure.
The Trumpworld version of Superman would fly that boy to “Alligator Alcatraz” to show him how cool it is to imprison immigrants in a swamp infested with crocodilians.
It might surprise you to know that in even more recent times, in a 2017 comic book, Superman saves a group of undocumented immigrants from a man in an American flag do-rag who opened fire on them. When the attempted murderer claimed his intended targets stole his job, Superman snarled “The only person responsible for the blackness smothering your soul … is you.”
Superman used to tell Americans that immigrants deserved our empathy; Super Dean wants to round them up and ship them out.
Rapists? Murderers? Terrorists? That’s who Superman né Cain says ICE is pursuing — the oft repeated “worst of the worst” — but Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that 71% of people currently held in ICE detention have no criminal records as of July 27 .
I don’t think the real Superman — by whom I mean the fictional one whom Cain seems to think he’s the official spokesperson for just because he played him in a middling dramedy 30-some years ago — would waste his strength and X-ray vision to nab people like that.
Dean “Discount Superman” Cain should grab some popcorn and launch on a Superman movie marathon to refresh himself on what the Man of Steel actually stood for. He can begin with the latest.
Its plot hinges on Lex Luthor trying to convince the U.S. government that Superman is an “alien” who came to the U.S. to destroy it.
“He’s not a man — he’s an It. A thing,” the bad guy sneers at one point, later on claiming Superman’s choirboy persona is “lulling us into complacency so he can dominate [the U.S.] without resistance.”
Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor and David Corenswet as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Superman.”
(Jessica Miglio / Warner Bros. Pictures)
Luthor’s scheme, which involves manipulating social media and television networks to turn public opinion against his rival, eventually works. Superman turns himself in and is whisked away to a cell far away from the U.S. along with other political prisoners. Luthor boasts that “[constitutional] rights don’t apply to extraterrestrial organisms.”
Tweak that line a little and it could have come from the mouth of Stephen Miller.
Director James Gunn told a British newspaper that his film’s message is “about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.”
He also called Superman an “immigrant,” which set Cain off. He called Gunn “woke” on TMZ and urged Gunn to create original characters and keep Superman away from politics.
Well, Super Dean can do his thing for ICE and Trump. He can flash his white teeth for promotional Trump administration videos as he does who knows what for the deportation machine.
Just leave Superman out of it.
Source link