California built its tradition of open government — including for citizen boards that set the rules for such functions as automotive repair and security guard licensing — precisely to keep well-funded corporate interests in check. Lobbyists and special interests are constantly scheming to defeat the will of the majority. Now they are able to do more damage using artificial intelligence to simulate fake grassroots opposition to clean air measures, and they are surreptitiously using the identities of real people to deceive regulators.
Last June, the South Coast Air Quality Management District received more than 20,000 comments opposing a pair of clean air rules that would have prevented 2,500 premature deaths and 10,000 new cases of asthma. A February investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed that those comments were submitted through CiviClick, a Washington-based AI-powered comment generation platform, orchestrated by a local political consultant with ties to the natural gas industry. When the district’s cybersecurity team reached out to a small sample of commenters to verify their identities, a majority of respondents said that they had not submitted the comments in their names.
Even so, the flood of fake comments seemingly worked. These rules, vehemently opposed by the natural gas industry, already watered down by the district to near-toothlessness, were ultimately rejected by the board — apparently overwhelmed by the flood of fake opposition to even the mildest effort to limit pollution from gas-burning appliances.
This Southern California campaign was not an isolated incident. A recent investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle also revealed that an industry front group used Speak4, a platform that advertises its use of AI, to submit dozens of comments regurgitating talking points from the fossil fuel industry in an attempt to weaken and delay clean air rules in the Bay Area. The scheme was exposed when 10 residents whose identities were used on these emails said they absolutely did not send them, calling the messages “forged.”
In both cases, organizations submitted emails and comments to regulators using real people’s identities without their knowledge or consent. This playbook has been employed in other states: CiviClick was used by fossil fuel companies to support a gas-pipeline-expansion project in North Carolina last year. When elected officials reached out to a few respondents to verify the messages, some constituents stated they had no knowledge of the emails sent under their names.
The opposition campaign to South Coast’s clean air rules was run by one of the state’s most powerful lobbying firms. Its client list includes Sempra, the parent company of SoCalGas, which opposed the clean air standards, which would have encouraged the sale of pollution-free heat pumps and threatened the utility’s business.
The industry front group using AI to undermine clean air rules in the Bay Area, Common Sense Coalition, also has ties to fossil fuel companies. Common Sense Coalition is a project of the Bay Area Council, a local business group that features members such as the Western States Petroleum Assn., Chevron, Martinez Refining Co. and Phillips 66.
The question of whether fossil fuel interests financed astroturf AI campaigns to defeat clean air rules should be answered through full investigations, which also ought to address whether the campaigns committed fraud and identity theft.
Californians deserve to know what is going on — how AI was used, where the lobbyists got the names and addresses they attached to the robo-messages and who paid for the deceptive campaigns. What’s most concerning is the use of actual residents’ identities — without their knowledge or consent — to oppose life-saving clean air standards.
Top law enforcement officials should be investigating — including Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman and San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins. If the law on using a person’s name in a scheme to thwart action by a public agency is not clear enough to support prosecutions, then the law needs to be tightened up — and there is legislation, Senate Bill 1159, aiming to do that.
If this seems like a niche issue, I can assure you it is not. I spent 17 years at the helm of the California Air Resources Board, and I am deeply disturbed by the potential co-opting of public input processes using forgery through automated tools. Gathering public input is fundamental to the legitimacy of regulatory agencies.
We frequently heard from individuals or business associations concerned about the cost or burden of proposed regulation, and we worked hard to understand and tailor our rules to make them as streamlined and cost-effective as we could, while still making progress toward reducing the air and climate harms of a wide array of equipment and activities.
The destruction of meaningful public input through deceit isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a democracy issue — and it demands urgent attention and accountability. California should draw the line to protect our democratic institutions.
Mary Nichols was chair of the California Air Resources Board, where she occupied the attorney seat. She is distinguished counsel to the Emmett Institute on Climate and Sustainability at UCLA Law School.
There will be no Charlie Kirk highway in his home state of Arizona. The reason: politics.
Exactly whose politics is to blame has become a point of debate.
Kirk, the conservative activist known for his campus debates, was assassinated last year during an event at Utah Valley University. Republicans in Arizona, where Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization is based, passed legislation attempting to add Kirk’s name to Loop 202, a highway circling through the sprawling Phoenix area.
Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed it on Friday.
In a veto message to state lawmakers, Hobbs denounced political violence but suggested that Republicans had inappropriately injected politics into a decision rightly left to a state board that names historic highways.
“I will continue working toward solutions that bring people together, but this bill falls short of that standard by inserting politics into a function of government that should remain nonpartisan,” Hobbs wrote.
Republican state Senate President Warren Petersen, who sponsored the legislation, said it was Hobbs who practiced politics by breaking with “a long-standing Arizona tradition” of recognizing people who made an impact on society.
The veto “tells people that recognition now depends on political alignment, not contribution,” Petersen said in a statement. “That’s not how Arizona has ever approached these decisions, and it’s a disappointing shift for our state.”
Lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced over five dozen bills seeking to honor Kirk, according to an Associated Press analysis using the bill-tracking software Plural. Many propose naming things after Kirk or creating an official day of remembrance. Others invoke Kirk’s name for measures that would protect free speech rights on college campuses or encourage schools to teach about the role of Judeo-Christian values in American history.
Arizona and Florida were among the first states to give final approval to Kirk-inspired legislation.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has yet to act on a bill that would designate a road in Miami-Dade County as “Charlie Kirk Memorial Avenue” while also designating a road in Broward County as “President Donald J. Trump Boulevard.”
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury Department is working on plans to put President Trump’s signature on all new U.S. paper currency, the agency announced Thursday.
The move would be a first for a sitting president. The news was first reported by Vanity Fair.
It’s the latest instance of Trump putting his name and likeness on American cultural institutions, following his renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Kennedy Center performing arts venue and a new class of battleships, among other tributes.
The plans come in tandem with an effort to get Trump’s face on a coin.
This month, a federal arts commission approved the final design for a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing Trump’s image to help celebrate America’s 250th birthday on July 4.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s signature would also appear on the currency, according to a Treasury news release.
Bessent said in a statement that “there is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country” than with U.S. dollar bills bearing Trump’s name.
U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said in a statement that printing Trump’s signature on the American currency “is not only appropriate, but also well deserved.”
The Mint, which is part of the Treasury Department, manufactures and distributes the currency.
It was Dodger Stadium on Wednesday, when the grass outside the baseline and the bright red sign high above center field read “UNIQLO FIELD.” It will be Dodger Stadium on Thursday, when the defending World Series champions open their new season, and forevermore.
The official name of our summer home is now Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium. The team announcers will say that, and so will some of the signs. The fans won’t, and the founder of the company that just spent nine figures on the name you won’t use said he completely understands.
“That’s a very natural reaction,” Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai told me through an interpreter. “We respect that.”
Yanai said his company’s deal with the Dodgers covers five years. He would say only that the total value was “more” than $125 million. That provides the Dodgers with an annual naming rights payment in line with the ones at Crypto.com Arena, Intuit Dome and Sofi Stadium, without the Dodgers having to sell naming rights to the actual venue.
Are the Dodgers baseball’s version of a gold mine? Yes. Do they spend big and win big? Also yes. Do you mind if Uniqlo essentially covers Freddie Freeman’s salary this season?
“We need a lot of revenue to put out the product that we do,” Dodgers president Stan Kasten said. “That’s not a secret. And we’re proud of everyone who helps us do it: all of our fans, all of our media partners, and all of our sponsor partners. They are all important. It is how this all comes together.”
While Uniqlo would be delighted if you used its name, whatever local fans choose to call the stadium is not critical to the success of the partnership.
Ohtani made an estimated $125 million in endorsements and sponsorships last year, Sportico reported, a larger annual haul “than any other athlete in the history of sports.”
“The Dodgers are such a popular team,” Yanai said. “I usually ask my wife, after I come back from the office, whether Shohei hit a home run. I think all the Japanese people do that.”
Uniqlo Field signs were unveiled Wednesday at Dodger Stadium in the wake of the team’s naming rights deal.
(Beth Harris / Associated Press)
According to Forbes, Yanai is the richest man in Japan, where baseball teams carry corporate names. Why not buy a team and call it, say, the Uniqlo Bears?
“I always keep saying that could be very interesting,” he said, “but my wife turned it down. She keeps telling me, ‘Tadashi, you are not cut out to manage sports teams.’”
Instead, he is managing Uniqlo, an apparel company that pitches itself as blending comfort with quality. “We do not make disposable clothing,” Yanai said in the company’s last annual report.
Uniqlo has 794 stores in Japan but only 77 in the United States, including 14 in the Southland. Koji Yanai, a senior executive officer and Tadashi’s son, said the company aspires to grow annual U.S. revenues from $6 billion to $30 billion.
He shared what might be a more challenging aspiration.
“The Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium name may be very new for everyone,” he said, “but I hope in the near future the fans will like it and will love it.”
Jeff Marks, the chief executive of Los Angeles-based Innovative Partnerships Group, once brokered a naming rights deal in which the Cal football team would play on Kabam Field at California Memorial Stadium. He tried to find a receptive audience for the name.
“We educated a lot of freshmen, sophomores, and newcomers,” Marks said. “Are you going to go after alumni who have been calling it Memorial Stadium? No. So you didn’t focus on that. You focused on people that could be more impressionable, and it worked.”
With Dodger Stadium, we’ll see. For the 2026 season, it is now time for Dodgers baseball, but not before one reporter at a press conference Wednesday asked company officials whether Uniqlo would provide the Dodgers players with free clothing.
Kasten could not pass up the chance to interject.
“We pay them enough,” he said with a grin, “to shop at Uniqlo stores.”
Riz Ahmed has created and stars in a marvelous new series, “Bait,” premiering Wednesday on Prime Video. There are no worms in it, though viral video plays a part, and fame — the pursuit of which is a subject — is a lure.
But what’s in a name? A comedy by any other name would be as funny — if it was funny, and this one very much is, in a way that’s crazy and serious and human, built around a character in crisis who refuses to believe his life is out of control and is so invested in putting up a front that he’s begun to believe his own lies. Almost. It’s a series in which hallucinations, dreams, magical realism and memories, which punctuate and interfere with the “normal” business of the story, all amount the same thing, and in which the style of the filming shifts with the action.
Ahmad plays Shah Latif, a British Pakistani actor, who, owing to the exertions of his faithful, often frustrated agent, Felicia (Weruche Opia), is improbably auditioning to be the next James Bond. But he repeatedly forgets his line when his scene partner, a girl with a gun, asks, “Tell me, when it’s just you all alone, how do you live with yourself? Do you even know who you are?” establishing a theme. (The line he can’t recall: “I don’t live with myself, I live with whoever you need me to be.” Spies and actors!)
Leaving the audition, he contrives to be photographed by one of the paparazzi lurking outside, sniffing for a Bond scoop; his picture is published, which creates a stir and some racist blowback, culminating in a package thrown through the front window of his parents’ home. (It is not a window that opens.) What’s inside the package I’ll leave for you to discover, but it will play a part through the rest of the show.
The recurring question of who will be the next James Bond generates a lot of pop cultural heat in our world; just type “next James Bond” into your search engine of choice. At one point, you may recall, Idris Elba was regularly bruited as a potential 007, which occasioned enough anti-Black reaction that he officially took himself out of the unofficial running. It may have been on Ahmed’s mind here — Shah claims high purpose for his Bondean aspirations, that he wants “to show them that this too is what British looks like.”
On the one hand, Shah has had enough of a career to have been made into a “limited edition collectible action figure,” starred in a well-regarded but underseen small film, played “the translator in ‘Homeland’ series seven” and earned a rising star award from some French festival; on the other, he is, professionally speaking, no Idris Elba — not a nobody, but not too many rungs above it. (He’s not Dev Patel, either, with whom he’s repeatedly confused.)
At the top of the second episode, Shah is seemingly being interviewed on a podcast, “Sir Chatwick Stewart, with me, Sir Patrick Stewart” — played by the man himself, whom we hear but never see — about his ambitions, though it’s soon clear that Stewart is a mental projection, an inner critic and inquisitor. He’ll stick around through the series, offering barbed commentary and something like support: “If I humiliate you, it’s to save you from the bigger humiliation of remaining as you are.”
As a protagonist continually getting in his own way, Shah is a classic sort of comic character. He creates opportunities only to squander them; finds himself voiceless after forcing himself onstage at a black-tie gala or in an underground club (he was once a politically provocative MC). After a newsworthy mishap, his agent advises him to lie low, which is impossible for him to do; there is no itch he won’t scratch, and no good advice he’ll actually follow. Apart from a rival actor (Himesh Patel) he’s a protagonist without antagonists, excepting himself. He’s insufficiently grateful to the people he owes, and insufficiently apologetic to those he’s wronged.
Shah’s self-involvement will be challenged by ex-girlfriend Yasmin (Ritu Arya), encountered first by accident, then sought out — a writer, she has published an op-ed headlined, “No, Shah Latif, We Don’t Need a Brown Bond” — in which she accuses him of “exchanging his political art for vanilla distraction.” His family, whom he neglects to visit for months, includes warm-hearted cousin Zulfi (Guz Khan), who has started a Muslim ride share company; a no-nonsense sister (Aasiya Shah) — the name of her character is rendered as “Q” on IMDb and elsewhere, but in the series itself she’s called Ainy — doting mother Tahira (Sheeba Chaddha); and his skeptical father, Parvez (Sajid Hasan), who has not been keeping his doctor appointments and asks Shah, “What do you even do? I watch TV all day — you’re never on it.”
Appropriate to a character who lives for being onscreen, “Bait” plays with the language of film — gritty procedural, a burst of Bollywood, romantic comedy — though not necessarily to the usual ends. Frame-filling titles identify the London neighborhoods where the action takes place — Wembley, Kentish Town, Brick Lane, Ladbroke Grove — as Paris, Moscow and Mexico City might appear in an international thriller. The series is at once satirical and celebratory; “Bait” feels abundant, both in its presentation of a culture, which has the ring of documentary truth, and as a beautifully realized work of art.
The framed photo of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta sits in my personal office on a bookshelf crammed with volumes about California and the American West.
The two are at a 1973 United Farm Workers convention, presiding over the union they co-founded. After years of victories in the name of campesinos, the group and its charismatic leaders seem ready for what’s next.
A UFW banner emblazoned with the group’s famous black Aztec eagle logo hangs in the center of the picture, making Chávez and Huerta look like equals.
But they’re not.
He’s speaking from a podium, looking down and appearing cast in darkness due to Chávez blue vest melding into his black hair and brown skin. She’s by his side clasping her hands, wearing a colorful blouse that pales in radiance to Huerta’s hopeful face as she looks at the crowd before them.
It’s the only picture of historical figures that I display at home, and it’s in a place where I’m guaranteed to look at it. It has long served as my secular version of a prayer card, a daily reminder to fight for the good in the world and a reminder that giants before me faced challenges far more daunting than mine. It was also a testament to teamwork — when I acquired the photo a few years ago, it called to me in a way a solo Chávez never would have because I always knew el movimento was more than just one man.
Their portrait can never mean just those things ever again after the New York Times reported last week Chávez sexually assaulted two teenage girls in the 1970s and Huerta in the 1960s.
Places left and right — colleges, cities, classrooms, even states that mark Chávez’s birthday as a holiday — are now deleting his name and image from the public sphere. It’s not going to be a quick, easy task even if the cancellation is starting to take place with startling speed: Chávez’s presence is as ubiquitous in Mexican American life as the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Just this weekend, a friend acknowledged that he and his wife had just started reading a book about him to their 5-year-old daughter, a book they now plan to trash.
I thought of doing the same to my photo of Chávez and Huerta. But I’ve decided not to.
I don’t fault folks for wanting to scrub any hint of Chávez from their daily lives and neither does the Cesar Chavez Foundation, the nonprofit headed by his descendants that recently announced in a statement, “We support and respect whatever decision[s]” may come in the weeks and months to come. Communities are entitled to decide whom they should and shouldn’t publicly honor.
But to eradicate Chávez’s civic presence so fast — to tear down his statues, relabel streets and parks named in his honor, paint over his image on old and new murals, to throw away artwork that has adorned homes and offices for decades — doesn’t remove the fact that millions largely saw him as a champion of the downtrodden until last week. It can’t rescind the positive influence Chávez had on generations of Latinos and non-Latinos who saw in him the hopes of a people and now must reconcile their memories with his horrible deeds.
Historians, educators, activists and politicians for far too long elevated Chávez above Huerta in the name of a simplistic narrative that should’ve never been constructed. The public at large bought into those efforts with little skepticism in the understandable desire to have Latinos star in the American story. It’s a culpability we should all interrogate, not immediately purge.
That’s why not only am I keeping up my photo of Chávez and Huerta, I’m going to put it in a more prominent place from where I can’t look away.
Workers for the city of San Fernando cover the statue at Cesar E. Chavez Memorial Park on Thursday.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
It will serve as a memory of a tragic, tremendous moment in the history of Latinos in the United States, where we should be focusing our attention on a presidential administration that wants most of us gone but instead must deal with the fallout from the downfall of one of our own. It will challenge me anew to look past the big names of the past and highlight those whose stories aren’t nearly as known by the mainstream.
Seeing Huerta next to her abuser will forever remind me about how the now-95-year-old sacrificed her own mental health and safety in the name of something bigger than the two of them — a choice no one should ever have to make but one that she nevertheless did.
The photo will stand as the manifestation of the old newspaper adage that if your mom tells you she loves you, go check it out. No one should ever be above skepticism no matter how sanctified and righteous they may seem — that’s why the New York Times investigation crashed into the Chicano collective sense of self like a meteor. No one could’ve imagined that Chávez could’ve possibly done things so monstrous, but maybe we shouldn’t have built him up so much while he was alive and after his death in the first place.
My framed Chávez-Huerta memento will make me think of how the stories of sexual abuse survivors are still not heard enough or even believed. Even now, some Chávez defenders are casting doubt on the claims of Huerta and the three other women named in the New York Times story, questioning their motivations to come forward after decades of silence and decrying how their decision to do so has permanently tarnished the reputation of one the few nationally known Chicano heroes. In Huerta’s case, critics just don’t buy how someone who carried Chávez’s torch decades after his death could all of a sudden supposedly turn on him.
But as a Catholic who has long covered the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, I know that every sexual assault survivor has their own journey of recovery. I also know that we must always seek the truth instead of living a lie.
And turning Chávez into a historical footnote is a lie. He long served as a moral exemplar; he should now serve as a cautionary tale known to all.
Erasing historic figures from the public sphere is an exercise in power going back to the pharaohs, a way rulers ensured future generations couldn’t learn about their enemies. The push to nix Chávez comes from the trend in recent years by progressive activists to remove monuments that hail problematic figures under the pretense that someone’s sins trump any good they might have done no matter how influential they were.
Again, all communities have that right to reexamine the past. But we can’t and shouldn’t disappear the full story of Chávez, as painful as it is. It’s the easy way out — and remedying wrongs is never easy.
If the photo in my book shelf was only of Chávez, I’d still keep it up. The good he did was really good — the bad he committed was as terrible as it gets.
PHOENIX — Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas addressed an erroneous report from earlier in the week with understanding while also making his feelings clear.
On Monday, a senior baseball writer at the Athletic misidentified Rojas as the recipient of an 80-game suspension for the use of a banned substance on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. It was in fact Phillies outfielder Johan Rojas who had tested positive for Boldenone. The writer, Evan Drellich, quickly deleted the post and corrected it.
“I’m not frustrated because of the report, because we are all humans and we make mistakes,” Rojas said Wednesday morning in front of his locker at Camelback Ranch. “I was expecting a little bit more of an apology, not just to me, but the organization. Because it wasn’t just my name, it was pretty clear that it says, ‘Miguel Rojas from the Los Angeles Dodgers.’ And I don’t think anybody in this organization should be kind of freaking out and jumping out of their seats for the six or seven minutes that it happened.”
Rojas saw the correction post as an opportunity to issue that apology.
“It wasn’t just my name, it was the organization that I represent too, and that’s really important to me,” he said. “So that’s the only thing that I’m kind of bothered [by].”
Later on Wednesday, Drellich followed up with another post: “To Miguel Rojas and the Dodgers, I sincerely and publicly apologize. I’ve reached out to Miguel, the Dodgers and Miguel’s agent to say the same. Once again, I’m sorry.”
In the midst of the fallout from the report, Rojas watched Team Venezuela, who he would have represented in the World Baseball Classic if it weren’t for insurance issues, win the tournament with a victory against the United States in Tuesday’s final.
“It was really special to see my kids kind finding joy in that moment that the third strike was called,” he said, noting that his children were born in the United States. “And they felt Venezuelan the same as I did, and every other family in Venezuela.”
Rojas said he’d moved on after the insurance snag.
“When I made my last post, when I came to spring training, I made a decision of being another fan and supporting from any anywhere that I was going to be,” he said. “Because I knew I wasn’t going to be there anymore. So I had to kind of remove myself from the possibility of playing, and now I’m just becoming another Venezuelan pulling for a team that are getting ready and preparing for something like that.”
As word evidently reached activists in the last few weeks that disturbing allegations of sexual abuse against Chicano civil rights icon Cesar Chavez were forthcoming, things started to happen without much explanation.
Groups began to cancel long-planned parades, dinners, lectures and fundraisers scheduled for Chavez’s birthday on March 31. People who I’ve known for years suddenly weren’t returning calls or texts about what was going on. Longtime defenders of Chavez — who stood by their hero even as revelations in this paper and in biographies over the past generation showed there was a dark side to the man — suddenly became hard to reach.
When the United Farm Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation put out statements Tuesday morning that “troubling allegations” against their patriarch were considered credible enough for them to offer help to his victims, the silence transformed into dread. There was a discomfort similar to waiting for a tsunami — that whatever was coming would change lives, shake institutions and make people question values and principles that they had long held dear.
And like a natural disaster, what emerged about Chavez was far worse than anyone could’ve expected.
Wednesday morning, the New York Times published a story where two women whose families marched alongside Chavez in the fields of California during the 1960s and 1970s disclosed that he sexually abused them for years when they were girls. Just as shocking was the revelation by Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s longtime compatriot and a civil rights legend, that he had once raped her at a time when their leadership in the fight to bring dignity to grape pickers earned national acclaim and amounted to a modern-day Via Dolorosa.
The silence has transformed into screams. Politicians and organizations that long commemorated Chavez and urged others to follow his ways are releasing statements by the minute. My social media feed is now a torrent of friends and strangers expressing empathy for Chavez’s victims and outrage, disgust and — above all — disappointment that someone considered a secular saint by many for decades turned out to be a human more terrible than anyone could’ve imagined.
There will be questions and soul-searching about these horrifying disclosures in the weeks, months and years to come. We will see a push for the renaming of the dozens of schools, parks and streets that bear Chavez’s name across the country and even the rebranding of Cesar Chavez Day, a California state holiday since 2000 devoted to urging people to give back to their communities and the least among us.
The reckoning is only right. Much of the Latino civil rights, political and educational ecosystem will have to grapple with why they held up Chavez as a paragon of virtue for too long above others just as deserving and, as it turns out, nowhere near as compromised.
In any event, the myth has been punctured.
A portrait of Cesar Chavez on a mural on Farmacia Ramirez, 2403 Cesar E Chavez Ave. in East Los Angeles.
(James Carbone / Los Angeles Times)
Chavez’s biography always reads like an entry in the “Lives of the Saints” genre of books that Catholics used to read about the holy men of their faith. The son of farmworkers who became a Mexican American Moses trying to lead his people to the promised land of equity and political power. An internationally famous leader who lived a mendicant’s life. Who devoted decades to some of the most exploited people in the American economy. Honored with awards, plays, posters. Murals, movies and monuments. President Biden even kept a bust of Chavez at his Oval Office desk.
It was a beatific reputation that largely persisted even as the union he helped to create lost its influence in the fields of California and a new generation of activists looked down on Chavez for his long-standing opposition to immigrants who came to this country to work without legal status. Admirers kept him on a pedestal even as former UFW members alleged over the last two decades that the boss they once idolized purged too many good people in the name of absolute control. The hagiography continued even as a new generation of Latinos came of age not knowing anything about him other than an occasional school lesson or television segment.
I was one of those neophytes. I first heard his name at Anaheim High School in the mid-1990s and thought my teacher was talking about Julio Cesar Chavez, the famous Mexican boxer. I was thrilled to discover that someone had bravely fought for the rights of campesinos like my mom and her sisters, who toiled in the garlic fields of Gilroy and strawberry patches of Orange County as teenage girls in the 1960s, the same time that Chavez and the UFW were enjoying their historic wins.
“Who’s Cesar Chavez?” my Mami responded when I asked if his efforts ever made her work easier.
My admiration for Chavez continued even as I learned about some of his faults. I was able to separate Chavez the man from the movement for which he was a figurehead. Long-maligned communities seek heroes to emulate, to draw hope from, to hang on their walls and share their quotes on social media. We create them even as we ignore that they’re flesh and blood just like us.
Chavez seemed like the right man at the right moment as Mexican Americans rose up like never before to battle discrimination and segregation. Now, Latinos and others who admired Chavez have to grapple with his moral failings of the worst possible magnitude at the worst possible time: when there’s an administration doing everything possible to crush Latinos and we’re looking for people to look up to like never before.
He remains one of the few Latino civil rights leaders known nationwide — and Chavez is nowhere near as known as acolytes make him out to be. Some people will argue that it’s unfair he will likely get wiped away from the public sphere while other predatory men from the past and present largely maintain their riches and reputations.
But that’s looking at the abuse revelations the wrong way. For now, I will follow what those most directly affected by Chavez’s actions are telling us to do.
The UFW and Cesar Chavez Foundation were wise to not try to defend the indefensible in their statements and instead consider any victims first before deciding how to decide what’s next for them.
The Chavez family put out a news release that states “we honor the voices of those who feel unheard and who report sexual abuse.”
Huerta wrote in an online essay: “Cesar’s actions do not reflect the values of our community and our movement. The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual.”
Another of his victims told the New York Times of Chavez’s legacy: “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes. The movement — that’s the hero.”
The fountain in the Memorial Garden surrounds the gravesite of Cesar Chavez and his wife Helen Chavez at Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Keene, Calif.
(Francine Orr)
The face of that movimiento brought inspiration to millions and improved the lives of hundreds of thousands. That’s why we shouldn’t cancel the good that Chavez fought for alongside so many; we should direct the adulation he once attracted and the anger he’ll now rightfully receive toward the work that still needs to be done.
To quote an old UFW slogan that Chavez transformed into a mantra, la lucha sigue — the fight continues. It’s a statement that’s more pertinent than ever, damn its imperfect messenger.
The Dodgers agreed to a deal granting Uniqlo naming rights to the field at Dodger Stadium, according to the Athletic — marking the first time in the 64-year history of the stadium that a corporate sponsorship has been attached to it.
Dodger Stadium’s name remains unchanged. The organization made it a priority to keep the name of the ballpark, which has been in place since its opening in 1962.
“[The stadium’s name] will never be for sale,” Dodgers president Stan Kasten told The Times in 2017.
Though not officially announced by the Dodgers, the name likely will be Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium.
With more than 1,000 stores worldwide, the Japanese-based clothing brand will hold exclusive marketing and promotional opportunities as the Dodgers’ main sponsor. The new deal will also include a new sign in center field.
Since signing Japanese two-way star Shohei Ohtani, the team has partnered with several different Japanese companies, earning $70 million in sponsorship revenue in 2024 alone, according to Forbes.
Bob Lynch, chief executive of research firm SponsorUnited, estimated that teams hosting the Dodgers generated roughly $15 million in cumulative revenue from the brands that have attached themselves to the team.
“ … A slew of brands essentially following him around across the country that are paying dollars either directly to the team or to Van Wagner, who’s selling the backstop signage,” Lynch told Forbes in 2025.
In 2022, the Dodgers partnered with global sports marketing agency Sportfive to secure premier sponsorships. Two years later, the organization announced a self-sponsorship with its ownership group, Guggenheim Baseball Management, which placed a patch on the team’s jerseys.
A video circulating online appears to show signature collectors paying people to sign initiative petitions under other people’s names, according to officials, and now the state has opened an investigation.
The video, filmed by videographer JJ Smith, shows a long queue leading to a table set up at 6th and Mission streets in San Francisco. A man in line says they are being offered $5 to sign petitions. At the table, where there are lists with the information of apparent registered voters, a woman confirms the payment and — using a highlighter — instructs a person on the name and address that she is supposed to use.
“I get $5 too?” the videographer asks.
“Yeah,” says the woman.
“And what is it?”
“Just sign it,” she says.
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Petitions connected to at least three ballot campaigns — including the billionaire-backed effort to thwart California’s proposed billionaire tax — appear in the video.
“I approached some people and asked them what they were there for,” Smith told The Times. “They told me they didn’t know what they were signing for, that they just wanted the $5.”
Smith said he watched the scene for hours and estimated that a few hundred people cycled through the line over roughly two hours.
Those running the table did not ask for anyone’s identification and gave no explanation of what was actually being signed, he said.
The video showed voter data from San Luis Obispo County that was both visible and, as details were spoken aloud, audible in the footage.
The county acted immediately after becoming aware of the video and initiated an investigation through the fraud unit of the California secretary of state’s office, said Erin Clausen, public information officer for the San Luis Obispo county clerk’s office.
Clausen noted that, although voter registration data can be legally requested from county election offices, the data in this case may have been used inappropriately. The county is also planning on reaching out directly to voters who were specifically mentioned or identified in the video, according to Clausen.
“The activity shown in the video, if verified, would violate California election law,” County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano said in a formal statement released Wednesday morning.
The secretary of state’s office confirmed it had opened a formal investigation.
“Under California law, it is illegal to give money or other valuable consideration to another in exchange for their signature on an initiative petition,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “ Those who abuse our system will be held accountable.”
The office is working with local officials and encouraged anyone with information to file a complaint.
One political committee, Californians for a More Transparent and Effective Government, confirmed its petitions were among those whose signature gatherers were allegedly paying people to sign and moved quickly to distance itself from the activity.
“Under no circumstance do we tolerate this type of activity in the signature gathering process,” said spokesperson Molly Weedn. “We’ve taken immediate action and have demanded that the signature gathering firm identify these circulators and reject their petitions.” Weedn said the collectors were subcontractors, not campaign employees, and that attorneys were contacting authorities.
That committee is funded by another group, Building a Better California, which was also among campaigns that appeared in the video. The other was for a proposed initiative called the Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act of 2026. Representatives for the latter two have not responded to requests for comment.
Smith said this was not the first time he had witnessed this type of activity in the area.
“I saw something similar with ballots three days ago,” he said.
The investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information can submit a complaint to the Office of the California Secretary of State or contact their local county elections office.
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
Fears of a broad flight of artists and agents prompted Wasserman to announce that he was selling his talent representation and sports marketing firm. Talks with prospective buyers have been ongoing, according to a person close to the agency but not authorized to speak publicly.
For now, the agency is still owned by Wasserman and private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.
Wasserman continues to lead LA28, the nonprofit group that will be staging the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in two years. The LA28 board’s executive committee unanimously voted to keep Wasserman as chairman, after reviewing known details surrounding his more than 20-year-old flirtations with Maxwell and his “strong leadership” of the Games.
Visitors to the Wasserman agency website were greeted with a message saying the firm, as of Monday, was rebranding as the Team.
“For 24 years, this company has been shaped by our work, our people and our unifying belief in the power of Sports, Music and Entertainment,” the message read. “That philosophy remains the foundation of who we are — and where we are going.”
Wasserman was not mentioned in the website messaging. Nor was he pictured in its photos depicting smiling agents. Old press releases have been changed to refer to the company as the Team, not Wasserman.
In a Feb. 13 memo to his staff, Wasserman acknowledged his appearance in a recent batch of documents released by the Department of Justice related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell had “become a distraction.”
Wasserman said he was “heartbroken that my brief contact with them 23 years ago” had brought hardship to the agency he created in 2002.
“I’m deeply sorry that my past personal mistakes have caused you so much discomfort,” Wasserman wrote to his staff. “It’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to the clients and partners we represent so vigorously and care so deeply about.”
Wasserman, a prolific Clinton fundraiser whose famous grandfather helped the Democrat win the 1992 presidential election, was joined on Epstein’s jet by his then-wife, Laura, actor Kevin Spacey, Epstein and his longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell and others, including security agents.
It’s not clear when Wasserman and Maxwell began corresponding via email. The messages contained in the Justice Department files are from March and April of 2003. In them, Wasserman writes about wanting to see Maxwell in a tight leather outfit and she offered to give him a massage that can “drive a man wild.”
Wasserman has worked nearly a decade to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles.
Former Mayor Eric Garcetti recruited him to help L.A. win its host bid and the International Olympic Committee reportedly were impressed with Wasserman’s “network of contacts.”
Behind the scenes, there have been tensions with Los Angeles political leaders. Mayor Karen Bass has said that Wasserman should step down from the high-profile role overseeing the Games. Bass said that “we need to look at the leadership” of LA28 and that her job is to make sure that the city is “completely prepared” for the Games.
Contributor: Investigate the AI campaigns flooding public agencies with fake comments
California built its tradition of open government — including for citizen boards that set the rules for such functions as automotive repair and security guard licensing — precisely to keep well-funded corporate interests in check. Lobbyists and special interests are constantly scheming to defeat the will of the majority. Now they are able to do more damage using artificial intelligence to simulate fake grassroots opposition to clean air measures, and they are surreptitiously using the identities of real people to deceive regulators.
Last June, the South Coast Air Quality Management District received more than 20,000 comments opposing a pair of clean air rules that would have prevented 2,500 premature deaths and 10,000 new cases of asthma. A February investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed that those comments were submitted through CiviClick, a Washington-based AI-powered comment generation platform, orchestrated by a local political consultant with ties to the natural gas industry. When the district’s cybersecurity team reached out to a small sample of commenters to verify their identities, a majority of respondents said that they had not submitted the comments in their names.
Even so, the flood of fake comments seemingly worked. These rules, vehemently opposed by the natural gas industry, already watered down by the district to near-toothlessness, were ultimately rejected by the board — apparently overwhelmed by the flood of fake opposition to even the mildest effort to limit pollution from gas-burning appliances.
This Southern California campaign was not an isolated incident. A recent investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle also revealed that an industry front group used Speak4, a platform that advertises its use of AI, to submit dozens of comments regurgitating talking points from the fossil fuel industry in an attempt to weaken and delay clean air rules in the Bay Area. The scheme was exposed when 10 residents whose identities were used on these emails said they absolutely did not send them, calling the messages “forged.”
In both cases, organizations submitted emails and comments to regulators using real people’s identities without their knowledge or consent. This playbook has been employed in other states: CiviClick was used by fossil fuel companies to support a gas-pipeline-expansion project in North Carolina last year. When elected officials reached out to a few respondents to verify the messages, some constituents stated they had no knowledge of the emails sent under their names.
The opposition campaign to South Coast’s clean air rules was run by one of the state’s most powerful lobbying firms. Its client list includes Sempra, the parent company of SoCalGas, which opposed the clean air standards, which would have encouraged the sale of pollution-free heat pumps and threatened the utility’s business.
The industry front group using AI to undermine clean air rules in the Bay Area, Common Sense Coalition, also has ties to fossil fuel companies. Common Sense Coalition is a project of the Bay Area Council, a local business group that features members such as the Western States Petroleum Assn., Chevron, Martinez Refining Co. and Phillips 66.
The question of whether fossil fuel interests financed astroturf AI campaigns to defeat clean air rules should be answered through full investigations, which also ought to address whether the campaigns committed fraud and identity theft.
Californians deserve to know what is going on — how AI was used, where the lobbyists got the names and addresses they attached to the robo-messages and who paid for the deceptive campaigns. What’s most concerning is the use of actual residents’ identities — without their knowledge or consent — to oppose life-saving clean air standards.
Top law enforcement officials should be investigating — including Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman and San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins. If the law on using a person’s name in a scheme to thwart action by a public agency is not clear enough to support prosecutions, then the law needs to be tightened up — and there is legislation, Senate Bill 1159, aiming to do that.
If this seems like a niche issue, I can assure you it is not. I spent 17 years at the helm of the California Air Resources Board, and I am deeply disturbed by the potential co-opting of public input processes using forgery through automated tools. Gathering public input is fundamental to the legitimacy of regulatory agencies.
We frequently heard from individuals or business associations concerned about the cost or burden of proposed regulation, and we worked hard to understand and tailor our rules to make them as streamlined and cost-effective as we could, while still making progress toward reducing the air and climate harms of a wide array of equipment and activities.
The destruction of meaningful public input through deceit isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a democracy issue — and it demands urgent attention and accountability. California should draw the line to protect our democratic institutions.
Mary Nichols was chair of the California Air Resources Board, where she occupied the attorney seat. She is distinguished counsel to the Emmett Institute on Climate and Sustainability at UCLA Law School.
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Charlie Kirk highway got vetoed in Arizona. Elected officials are citing politics
There will be no Charlie Kirk highway in his home state of Arizona. The reason: politics.
Exactly whose politics is to blame has become a point of debate.
Kirk, the conservative activist known for his campus debates, was assassinated last year during an event at Utah Valley University. Republicans in Arizona, where Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization is based, passed legislation attempting to add Kirk’s name to Loop 202, a highway circling through the sprawling Phoenix area.
Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed it on Friday.
In a veto message to state lawmakers, Hobbs denounced political violence but suggested that Republicans had inappropriately injected politics into a decision rightly left to a state board that names historic highways.
“I will continue working toward solutions that bring people together, but this bill falls short of that standard by inserting politics into a function of government that should remain nonpartisan,” Hobbs wrote.
Republican state Senate President Warren Petersen, who sponsored the legislation, said it was Hobbs who practiced politics by breaking with “a long-standing Arizona tradition” of recognizing people who made an impact on society.
The veto “tells people that recognition now depends on political alignment, not contribution,” Petersen said in a statement. “That’s not how Arizona has ever approached these decisions, and it’s a disappointing shift for our state.”
Lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced over five dozen bills seeking to honor Kirk, according to an Associated Press analysis using the bill-tracking software Plural. Many propose naming things after Kirk or creating an official day of remembrance. Others invoke Kirk’s name for measures that would protect free speech rights on college campuses or encourage schools to teach about the role of Judeo-Christian values in American history.
Arizona and Florida were among the first states to give final approval to Kirk-inspired legislation.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has yet to act on a bill that would designate a road in Miami-Dade County as “Charlie Kirk Memorial Avenue” while also designating a road in Broward County as “President Donald J. Trump Boulevard.”
Lieb writes for the Associated Press.
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Treasury plans to put Trump’s signature on U.S. bills in first for sitting president
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury Department is working on plans to put President Trump’s signature on all new U.S. paper currency, the agency announced Thursday.
The move would be a first for a sitting president. The news was first reported by Vanity Fair.
It’s the latest instance of Trump putting his name and likeness on American cultural institutions, following his renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Kennedy Center performing arts venue and a new class of battleships, among other tributes.
The plans come in tandem with an effort to get Trump’s face on a coin.
This month, a federal arts commission approved the final design for a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing Trump’s image to help celebrate America’s 250th birthday on July 4.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s signature would also appear on the currency, according to a Treasury news release.
Bessent said in a statement that “there is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country” than with U.S. dollar bills bearing Trump’s name.
U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said in a statement that printing Trump’s signature on the American currency “is not only appropriate, but also well deserved.”
The Mint, which is part of the Treasury Department, manufactures and distributes the currency.
Hussein writes for the Associated Press.
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The signs say Uniqlo Field. You will continue to say Dodger Stadium
It was Dodger Stadium on Wednesday, when the grass outside the baseline and the bright red sign high above center field read “UNIQLO FIELD.” It will be Dodger Stadium on Thursday, when the defending World Series champions open their new season, and forevermore.
The official name of our summer home is now Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium. The team announcers will say that, and so will some of the signs. The fans won’t, and the founder of the company that just spent nine figures on the name you won’t use said he completely understands.
“That’s a very natural reaction,” Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai told me through an interpreter. “We respect that.”
Yanai said his company’s deal with the Dodgers covers five years. He would say only that the total value was “more” than $125 million. That provides the Dodgers with an annual naming rights payment in line with the ones at Crypto.com Arena, Intuit Dome and Sofi Stadium, without the Dodgers having to sell naming rights to the actual venue.
Are the Dodgers baseball’s version of a gold mine? Yes. Do they spend big and win big? Also yes. Do you mind if Uniqlo essentially covers Freddie Freeman’s salary this season?
“We need a lot of revenue to put out the product that we do,” Dodgers president Stan Kasten said. “That’s not a secret. And we’re proud of everyone who helps us do it: all of our fans, all of our media partners, and all of our sponsor partners. They are all important. It is how this all comes together.”
While Uniqlo would be delighted if you used its name, whatever local fans choose to call the stadium is not critical to the success of the partnership.
For a Japanese company in pursuit of brand awareness and expansion in the United States and elsewhere, there might be nothing better than getting your name in front of millions of fans around the world watching Shohei Ohtani play on television.
Ohtani made an estimated $125 million in endorsements and sponsorships last year, Sportico reported, a larger annual haul “than any other athlete in the history of sports.”
“The Dodgers are such a popular team,” Yanai said. “I usually ask my wife, after I come back from the office, whether Shohei hit a home run. I think all the Japanese people do that.”
Uniqlo Field signs were unveiled Wednesday at Dodger Stadium in the wake of the team’s naming rights deal.
(Beth Harris / Associated Press)
According to Forbes, Yanai is the richest man in Japan, where baseball teams carry corporate names. Why not buy a team and call it, say, the Uniqlo Bears?
“I always keep saying that could be very interesting,” he said, “but my wife turned it down. She keeps telling me, ‘Tadashi, you are not cut out to manage sports teams.’”
Instead, he is managing Uniqlo, an apparel company that pitches itself as blending comfort with quality. “We do not make disposable clothing,” Yanai said in the company’s last annual report.
Uniqlo has 794 stores in Japan but only 77 in the United States, including 14 in the Southland. Koji Yanai, a senior executive officer and Tadashi’s son, said the company aspires to grow annual U.S. revenues from $6 billion to $30 billion.
He shared what might be a more challenging aspiration.
“The Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium name may be very new for everyone,” he said, “but I hope in the near future the fans will like it and will love it.”
United Airlines Field at the Coliseum? Yeah, no.
Jeff Marks, the chief executive of Los Angeles-based Innovative Partnerships Group, once brokered a naming rights deal in which the Cal football team would play on Kabam Field at California Memorial Stadium. He tried to find a receptive audience for the name.
“We educated a lot of freshmen, sophomores, and newcomers,” Marks said. “Are you going to go after alumni who have been calling it Memorial Stadium? No. So you didn’t focus on that. You focused on people that could be more impressionable, and it worked.”
With Dodger Stadium, we’ll see. For the 2026 season, it is now time for Dodgers baseball, but not before one reporter at a press conference Wednesday asked company officials whether Uniqlo would provide the Dodgers players with free clothing.
Kasten could not pass up the chance to interject.
“We pay them enough,” he said with a grin, “to shop at Uniqlo stores.”
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‘Bait’ review: Riz Ahmed’s marvelous comedy centered around James Bond
Riz Ahmed has created and stars in a marvelous new series, “Bait,” premiering Wednesday on Prime Video. There are no worms in it, though viral video plays a part, and fame — the pursuit of which is a subject — is a lure.
But what’s in a name? A comedy by any other name would be as funny — if it was funny, and this one very much is, in a way that’s crazy and serious and human, built around a character in crisis who refuses to believe his life is out of control and is so invested in putting up a front that he’s begun to believe his own lies. Almost. It’s a series in which hallucinations, dreams, magical realism and memories, which punctuate and interfere with the “normal” business of the story, all amount the same thing, and in which the style of the filming shifts with the action.
Ahmad plays Shah Latif, a British Pakistani actor, who, owing to the exertions of his faithful, often frustrated agent, Felicia (Weruche Opia), is improbably auditioning to be the next James Bond. But he repeatedly forgets his line when his scene partner, a girl with a gun, asks, “Tell me, when it’s just you all alone, how do you live with yourself? Do you even know who you are?” establishing a theme. (The line he can’t recall: “I don’t live with myself, I live with whoever you need me to be.” Spies and actors!)
Leaving the audition, he contrives to be photographed by one of the paparazzi lurking outside, sniffing for a Bond scoop; his picture is published, which creates a stir and some racist blowback, culminating in a package thrown through the front window of his parents’ home. (It is not a window that opens.) What’s inside the package I’ll leave for you to discover, but it will play a part through the rest of the show.
The recurring question of who will be the next James Bond generates a lot of pop cultural heat in our world; just type “next James Bond” into your search engine of choice. At one point, you may recall, Idris Elba was regularly bruited as a potential 007, which occasioned enough anti-Black reaction that he officially took himself out of the unofficial running. It may have been on Ahmed’s mind here — Shah claims high purpose for his Bondean aspirations, that he wants “to show them that this too is what British looks like.”
On the one hand, Shah has had enough of a career to have been made into a “limited edition collectible action figure,” starred in a well-regarded but underseen small film, played “the translator in ‘Homeland’ series seven” and earned a rising star award from some French festival; on the other, he is, professionally speaking, no Idris Elba — not a nobody, but not too many rungs above it. (He’s not Dev Patel, either, with whom he’s repeatedly confused.)
At the top of the second episode, Shah is seemingly being interviewed on a podcast, “Sir Chatwick Stewart, with me, Sir Patrick Stewart” — played by the man himself, whom we hear but never see — about his ambitions, though it’s soon clear that Stewart is a mental projection, an inner critic and inquisitor. He’ll stick around through the series, offering barbed commentary and something like support: “If I humiliate you, it’s to save you from the bigger humiliation of remaining as you are.”
As a protagonist continually getting in his own way, Shah is a classic sort of comic character. He creates opportunities only to squander them; finds himself voiceless after forcing himself onstage at a black-tie gala or in an underground club (he was once a politically provocative MC). After a newsworthy mishap, his agent advises him to lie low, which is impossible for him to do; there is no itch he won’t scratch, and no good advice he’ll actually follow. Apart from a rival actor (Himesh Patel) he’s a protagonist without antagonists, excepting himself. He’s insufficiently grateful to the people he owes, and insufficiently apologetic to those he’s wronged.
Shah’s self-involvement will be challenged by ex-girlfriend Yasmin (Ritu Arya), encountered first by accident, then sought out — a writer, she has published an op-ed headlined, “No, Shah Latif, We Don’t Need a Brown Bond” — in which she accuses him of “exchanging his political art for vanilla distraction.” His family, whom he neglects to visit for months, includes warm-hearted cousin Zulfi (Guz Khan), who has started a Muslim ride share company; a no-nonsense sister (Aasiya Shah) — the name of her character is rendered as “Q” on IMDb and elsewhere, but in the series itself she’s called Ainy — doting mother Tahira (Sheeba Chaddha); and his skeptical father, Parvez (Sajid Hasan), who has not been keeping his doctor appointments and asks Shah, “What do you even do? I watch TV all day — you’re never on it.”
Appropriate to a character who lives for being onscreen, “Bait” plays with the language of film — gritty procedural, a burst of Bollywood, romantic comedy — though not necessarily to the usual ends. Frame-filling titles identify the London neighborhoods where the action takes place — Wembley, Kentish Town, Brick Lane, Ladbroke Grove — as Paris, Moscow and Mexico City might appear in an international thriller. The series is at once satirical and celebratory; “Bait” feels abundant, both in its presentation of a culture, which has the ring of documentary truth, and as a beautifully realized work of art.
Bond can wait.
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Why I’m not taking down my César Chávez photo
The framed photo of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta sits in my personal office on a bookshelf crammed with volumes about California and the American West.
The two are at a 1973 United Farm Workers convention, presiding over the union they co-founded. After years of victories in the name of campesinos, the group and its charismatic leaders seem ready for what’s next.
A UFW banner emblazoned with the group’s famous black Aztec eagle logo hangs in the center of the picture, making Chávez and Huerta look like equals.
But they’re not.
He’s speaking from a podium, looking down and appearing cast in darkness due to Chávez blue vest melding into his black hair and brown skin. She’s by his side clasping her hands, wearing a colorful blouse that pales in radiance to Huerta’s hopeful face as she looks at the crowd before them.
It’s the only picture of historical figures that I display at home, and it’s in a place where I’m guaranteed to look at it. It has long served as my secular version of a prayer card, a daily reminder to fight for the good in the world and a reminder that giants before me faced challenges far more daunting than mine. It was also a testament to teamwork — when I acquired the photo a few years ago, it called to me in a way a solo Chávez never would have because I always knew el movimento was more than just one man.
Their portrait can never mean just those things ever again after the New York Times reported last week Chávez sexually assaulted two teenage girls in the 1970s and Huerta in the 1960s.
Places left and right — colleges, cities, classrooms, even states that mark Chávez’s birthday as a holiday — are now deleting his name and image from the public sphere. It’s not going to be a quick, easy task even if the cancellation is starting to take place with startling speed: Chávez’s presence is as ubiquitous in Mexican American life as the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Just this weekend, a friend acknowledged that he and his wife had just started reading a book about him to their 5-year-old daughter, a book they now plan to trash.
I thought of doing the same to my photo of Chávez and Huerta. But I’ve decided not to.
I don’t fault folks for wanting to scrub any hint of Chávez from their daily lives and neither does the Cesar Chavez Foundation, the nonprofit headed by his descendants that recently announced in a statement, “We support and respect whatever decision[s]” may come in the weeks and months to come. Communities are entitled to decide whom they should and shouldn’t publicly honor.
But to eradicate Chávez’s civic presence so fast — to tear down his statues, relabel streets and parks named in his honor, paint over his image on old and new murals, to throw away artwork that has adorned homes and offices for decades — doesn’t remove the fact that millions largely saw him as a champion of the downtrodden until last week. It can’t rescind the positive influence Chávez had on generations of Latinos and non-Latinos who saw in him the hopes of a people and now must reconcile their memories with his horrible deeds.
Historians, educators, activists and politicians for far too long elevated Chávez above Huerta in the name of a simplistic narrative that should’ve never been constructed. The public at large bought into those efforts with little skepticism in the understandable desire to have Latinos star in the American story. It’s a culpability we should all interrogate, not immediately purge.
That’s why not only am I keeping up my photo of Chávez and Huerta, I’m going to put it in a more prominent place from where I can’t look away.
Workers for the city of San Fernando cover the statue at Cesar E. Chavez Memorial Park on Thursday.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
It will serve as a memory of a tragic, tremendous moment in the history of Latinos in the United States, where we should be focusing our attention on a presidential administration that wants most of us gone but instead must deal with the fallout from the downfall of one of our own. It will challenge me anew to look past the big names of the past and highlight those whose stories aren’t nearly as known by the mainstream.
Seeing Huerta next to her abuser will forever remind me about how the now-95-year-old sacrificed her own mental health and safety in the name of something bigger than the two of them — a choice no one should ever have to make but one that she nevertheless did.
The photo will stand as the manifestation of the old newspaper adage that if your mom tells you she loves you, go check it out. No one should ever be above skepticism no matter how sanctified and righteous they may seem — that’s why the New York Times investigation crashed into the Chicano collective sense of self like a meteor. No one could’ve imagined that Chávez could’ve possibly done things so monstrous, but maybe we shouldn’t have built him up so much while he was alive and after his death in the first place.
My framed Chávez-Huerta memento will make me think of how the stories of sexual abuse survivors are still not heard enough or even believed. Even now, some Chávez defenders are casting doubt on the claims of Huerta and the three other women named in the New York Times story, questioning their motivations to come forward after decades of silence and decrying how their decision to do so has permanently tarnished the reputation of one the few nationally known Chicano heroes. In Huerta’s case, critics just don’t buy how someone who carried Chávez’s torch decades after his death could all of a sudden supposedly turn on him.
But as a Catholic who has long covered the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, I know that every sexual assault survivor has their own journey of recovery. I also know that we must always seek the truth instead of living a lie.
And turning Chávez into a historical footnote is a lie. He long served as a moral exemplar; he should now serve as a cautionary tale known to all.
Erasing historic figures from the public sphere is an exercise in power going back to the pharaohs, a way rulers ensured future generations couldn’t learn about their enemies. The push to nix Chávez comes from the trend in recent years by progressive activists to remove monuments that hail problematic figures under the pretense that someone’s sins trump any good they might have done no matter how influential they were.
Again, all communities have that right to reexamine the past. But we can’t and shouldn’t disappear the full story of Chávez, as painful as it is. It’s the easy way out — and remedying wrongs is never easy.
If the photo in my book shelf was only of Chávez, I’d still keep it up. The good he did was really good — the bad he committed was as terrible as it gets.
Somewhere in between stands the story of us.
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Why Miguel Rojas was bothered by erroneous suspension report
PHOENIX — Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas addressed an erroneous report from earlier in the week with understanding while also making his feelings clear.
On Monday, a senior baseball writer at the Athletic misidentified Rojas as the recipient of an 80-game suspension for the use of a banned substance on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. It was in fact Phillies outfielder Johan Rojas who had tested positive for Boldenone. The writer, Evan Drellich, quickly deleted the post and corrected it.
“I’m not frustrated because of the report, because we are all humans and we make mistakes,” Rojas said Wednesday morning in front of his locker at Camelback Ranch. “I was expecting a little bit more of an apology, not just to me, but the organization. Because it wasn’t just my name, it was pretty clear that it says, ‘Miguel Rojas from the Los Angeles Dodgers.’ And I don’t think anybody in this organization should be kind of freaking out and jumping out of their seats for the six or seven minutes that it happened.”
Rojas saw the correction post as an opportunity to issue that apology.
“It wasn’t just my name, it was the organization that I represent too, and that’s really important to me,” he said. “So that’s the only thing that I’m kind of bothered [by].”
Later on Wednesday, Drellich followed up with another post: “To Miguel Rojas and the Dodgers, I sincerely and publicly apologize. I’ve reached out to Miguel, the Dodgers and Miguel’s agent to say the same. Once again, I’m sorry.”
In the midst of the fallout from the report, Rojas watched Team Venezuela, who he would have represented in the World Baseball Classic if it weren’t for insurance issues, win the tournament with a victory against the United States in Tuesday’s final.
“It was really special to see my kids kind finding joy in that moment that the third strike was called,” he said, noting that his children were born in the United States. “And they felt Venezuelan the same as I did, and every other family in Venezuela.”
Rojas said he’d moved on after the insurance snag.
“When I made my last post, when I came to spring training, I made a decision of being another fan and supporting from any anywhere that I was going to be,” he said. “Because I knew I wasn’t going to be there anymore. So I had to kind of remove myself from the possibility of playing, and now I’m just becoming another Venezuelan pulling for a team that are getting ready and preparing for something like that.”
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Commentary: And just like that, the Cesar Chavez myth is punctured. What’s next?
An eerie silence had settled.
As word evidently reached activists in the last few weeks that disturbing allegations of sexual abuse against Chicano civil rights icon Cesar Chavez were forthcoming, things started to happen without much explanation.
Groups began to cancel long-planned parades, dinners, lectures and fundraisers scheduled for Chavez’s birthday on March 31. People who I’ve known for years suddenly weren’t returning calls or texts about what was going on. Longtime defenders of Chavez — who stood by their hero even as revelations in this paper and in biographies over the past generation showed there was a dark side to the man — suddenly became hard to reach.
When the United Farm Workers and the Cesar Chavez Foundation put out statements Tuesday morning that “troubling allegations” against their patriarch were considered credible enough for them to offer help to his victims, the silence transformed into dread. There was a discomfort similar to waiting for a tsunami — that whatever was coming would change lives, shake institutions and make people question values and principles that they had long held dear.
And like a natural disaster, what emerged about Chavez was far worse than anyone could’ve expected.
Wednesday morning, the New York Times published a story where two women whose families marched alongside Chavez in the fields of California during the 1960s and 1970s disclosed that he sexually abused them for years when they were girls. Just as shocking was the revelation by Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s longtime compatriot and a civil rights legend, that he had once raped her at a time when their leadership in the fight to bring dignity to grape pickers earned national acclaim and amounted to a modern-day Via Dolorosa.
The silence has transformed into screams. Politicians and organizations that long commemorated Chavez and urged others to follow his ways are releasing statements by the minute. My social media feed is now a torrent of friends and strangers expressing empathy for Chavez’s victims and outrage, disgust and — above all — disappointment that someone considered a secular saint by many for decades turned out to be a human more terrible than anyone could’ve imagined.
There will be questions and soul-searching about these horrifying disclosures in the weeks, months and years to come. We will see a push for the renaming of the dozens of schools, parks and streets that bear Chavez’s name across the country and even the rebranding of Cesar Chavez Day, a California state holiday since 2000 devoted to urging people to give back to their communities and the least among us.
The reckoning is only right. Much of the Latino civil rights, political and educational ecosystem will have to grapple with why they held up Chavez as a paragon of virtue for too long above others just as deserving and, as it turns out, nowhere near as compromised.
In any event, the myth has been punctured.
A portrait of Cesar Chavez on a mural on Farmacia Ramirez, 2403 Cesar E Chavez Ave. in East Los Angeles.
(James Carbone / Los Angeles Times)
Chavez’s biography always reads like an entry in the “Lives of the Saints” genre of books that Catholics used to read about the holy men of their faith. The son of farmworkers who became a Mexican American Moses trying to lead his people to the promised land of equity and political power. An internationally famous leader who lived a mendicant’s life. Who devoted decades to some of the most exploited people in the American economy. Honored with awards, plays, posters. Murals, movies and monuments. President Biden even kept a bust of Chavez at his Oval Office desk.
It was a beatific reputation that largely persisted even as the union he helped to create lost its influence in the fields of California and a new generation of activists looked down on Chavez for his long-standing opposition to immigrants who came to this country to work without legal status. Admirers kept him on a pedestal even as former UFW members alleged over the last two decades that the boss they once idolized purged too many good people in the name of absolute control. The hagiography continued even as a new generation of Latinos came of age not knowing anything about him other than an occasional school lesson or television segment.
I was one of those neophytes. I first heard his name at Anaheim High School in the mid-1990s and thought my teacher was talking about Julio Cesar Chavez, the famous Mexican boxer. I was thrilled to discover that someone had bravely fought for the rights of campesinos like my mom and her sisters, who toiled in the garlic fields of Gilroy and strawberry patches of Orange County as teenage girls in the 1960s, the same time that Chavez and the UFW were enjoying their historic wins.
“Who’s Cesar Chavez?” my Mami responded when I asked if his efforts ever made her work easier.
My admiration for Chavez continued even as I learned about some of his faults. I was able to separate Chavez the man from the movement for which he was a figurehead. Long-maligned communities seek heroes to emulate, to draw hope from, to hang on their walls and share their quotes on social media. We create them even as we ignore that they’re flesh and blood just like us.
Chavez seemed like the right man at the right moment as Mexican Americans rose up like never before to battle discrimination and segregation. Now, Latinos and others who admired Chavez have to grapple with his moral failings of the worst possible magnitude at the worst possible time: when there’s an administration doing everything possible to crush Latinos and we’re looking for people to look up to like never before.
He remains one of the few Latino civil rights leaders known nationwide — and Chavez is nowhere near as known as acolytes make him out to be. Some people will argue that it’s unfair he will likely get wiped away from the public sphere while other predatory men from the past and present largely maintain their riches and reputations.
But that’s looking at the abuse revelations the wrong way. For now, I will follow what those most directly affected by Chavez’s actions are telling us to do.
The UFW and Cesar Chavez Foundation were wise to not try to defend the indefensible in their statements and instead consider any victims first before deciding how to decide what’s next for them.
The Chavez family put out a news release that states “we honor the voices of those who feel unheard and who report sexual abuse.”
Huerta wrote in an online essay: “Cesar’s actions do not reflect the values of our community and our movement. The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual.”
Another of his victims told the New York Times of Chavez’s legacy: “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes. The movement — that’s the hero.”
The fountain in the Memorial Garden surrounds the gravesite of Cesar Chavez and his wife Helen Chavez at Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Keene, Calif.
(Francine Orr)
The face of that movimiento brought inspiration to millions and improved the lives of hundreds of thousands. That’s why we shouldn’t cancel the good that Chavez fought for alongside so many; we should direct the adulation he once attracted and the anger he’ll now rightfully receive toward the work that still needs to be done.
To quote an old UFW slogan that Chavez transformed into a mantra, la lucha sigue — the fight continues. It’s a statement that’s more pertinent than ever, damn its imperfect messenger.
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Dodgers reportedly agree to deal with Uniqlo for field naming rights
The Dodgers agreed to a deal granting Uniqlo naming rights to the field at Dodger Stadium, according to the Athletic — marking the first time in the 64-year history of the stadium that a corporate sponsorship has been attached to it.
Dodger Stadium’s name remains unchanged. The organization made it a priority to keep the name of the ballpark, which has been in place since its opening in 1962.
“[The stadium’s name] will never be for sale,” Dodgers president Stan Kasten told The Times in 2017.
Though not officially announced by the Dodgers, the name likely will be Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium.
With more than 1,000 stores worldwide, the Japanese-based clothing brand will hold exclusive marketing and promotional opportunities as the Dodgers’ main sponsor. The new deal will also include a new sign in center field.
Since signing Japanese two-way star Shohei Ohtani, the team has partnered with several different Japanese companies, earning $70 million in sponsorship revenue in 2024 alone, according to Forbes.
Bob Lynch, chief executive of research firm SponsorUnited, estimated that teams hosting the Dodgers generated roughly $15 million in cumulative revenue from the brands that have attached themselves to the team.
“ … A slew of brands essentially following him around across the country that are paying dollars either directly to the team or to Van Wagner, who’s selling the backstop signage,” Lynch told Forbes in 2025.
In 2022, the Dodgers partnered with global sports marketing agency Sportfive to secure premier sponsorships. Two years later, the organization announced a self-sponsorship with its ownership group, Guggenheim Baseball Management, which placed a patch on the team’s jerseys.
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Video: $5 to sign a ballot petition with someone else’s name? California launches probe
A video circulating online appears to show signature collectors paying people to sign initiative petitions under other people’s names, according to officials, and now the state has opened an investigation.
The video, filmed by videographer JJ Smith, shows a long queue leading to a table set up at 6th and Mission streets in San Francisco. A man in line says they are being offered $5 to sign petitions. At the table, where there are lists with the information of apparent registered voters, a woman confirms the payment and — using a highlighter — instructs a person on the name and address that she is supposed to use.
“I get $5 too?” the videographer asks.
“Yeah,” says the woman.
“And what is it?”
“Just sign it,” she says.
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Petitions connected to at least three ballot campaigns — including the billionaire-backed effort to thwart California’s proposed billionaire tax — appear in the video.
“I approached some people and asked them what they were there for,” Smith told The Times. “They told me they didn’t know what they were signing for, that they just wanted the $5.”
Smith said he watched the scene for hours and estimated that a few hundred people cycled through the line over roughly two hours.
Those running the table did not ask for anyone’s identification and gave no explanation of what was actually being signed, he said.
The video showed voter data from San Luis Obispo County that was both visible and, as details were spoken aloud, audible in the footage.
The county acted immediately after becoming aware of the video and initiated an investigation through the fraud unit of the California secretary of state’s office, said Erin Clausen, public information officer for the San Luis Obispo county clerk’s office.
Clausen noted that, although voter registration data can be legally requested from county election offices, the data in this case may have been used inappropriately. The county is also planning on reaching out directly to voters who were specifically mentioned or identified in the video, according to Clausen.
“The activity shown in the video, if verified, would violate California election law,” County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano said in a formal statement released Wednesday morning.
The secretary of state’s office confirmed it had opened a formal investigation.
“Under California law, it is illegal to give money or other valuable consideration to another in exchange for their signature on an initiative petition,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “ Those who abuse our system will be held accountable.”
The office is working with local officials and encouraged anyone with information to file a complaint.
One political committee, Californians for a More Transparent and Effective Government, confirmed its petitions were among those whose signature gatherers were allegedly paying people to sign and moved quickly to distance itself from the activity.
“Under no circumstance do we tolerate this type of activity in the signature gathering process,” said spokesperson Molly Weedn. “We’ve taken immediate action and have demanded that the signature gathering firm identify these circulators and reject their petitions.” Weedn said the collectors were subcontractors, not campaign employees, and that attorneys were contacting authorities.
That committee is funded by another group, Building a Better California, which was also among campaigns that appeared in the video. The other was for a proposed initiative called the Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act of 2026. Representatives for the latter two have not responded to requests for comment.
Smith said this was not the first time he had witnessed this type of activity in the area.
“I saw something similar with ballots three days ago,” he said.
The investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information can submit a complaint to the Office of the California Secretary of State or contact their local county elections office.
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
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Casey Wasserman’s name dropped from agency following Ghislaine Maxwell scandal
Casey Wasserman’s name has been scrubbed from the agency he founded decades ago, replaced with an amorphous moniker: “The Team.”
Monday’s move comes amid the lingering controversy over the sports mogul’s decades-old association with Ghislaine Maxwell, accomplice of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Following revelations of Wasserman’s salacious 2003 emails with Maxwell, several musicians and athletes — led by pop artist Chappell Roan and soccer star Abby Wambach — said that, to stay true to their values, they would leave the agency then known as Wasserman.
Fears of a broad flight of artists and agents prompted Wasserman to announce that he was selling his talent representation and sports marketing firm. Talks with prospective buyers have been ongoing, according to a person close to the agency but not authorized to speak publicly.
For now, the agency is still owned by Wasserman and private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.
Wasserman continues to lead LA28, the nonprofit group that will be staging the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in two years. The LA28 board’s executive committee unanimously voted to keep Wasserman as chairman, after reviewing known details surrounding his more than 20-year-old flirtations with Maxwell and his “strong leadership” of the Games.
Visitors to the Wasserman agency website were greeted with a message saying the firm, as of Monday, was rebranding as the Team.
“For 24 years, this company has been shaped by our work, our people and our unifying belief in the power of Sports, Music and Entertainment,” the message read. “That philosophy remains the foundation of who we are — and where we are going.”
Wasserman was not mentioned in the website messaging. Nor was he pictured in its photos depicting smiling agents. Old press releases have been changed to refer to the company as the Team, not Wasserman.
The website’s background is now adorned with a grid of T’s.
In a Feb. 13 memo to his staff, Wasserman acknowledged his appearance in a recent batch of documents released by the Department of Justice related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell had “become a distraction.”
Wasserman said he was “heartbroken that my brief contact with them 23 years ago” had brought hardship to the agency he created in 2002.
“I’m deeply sorry that my past personal mistakes have caused you so much discomfort,” Wasserman wrote to his staff. “It’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to the clients and partners we represent so vigorously and care so deeply about.”
Wasserman appears to have met Maxwell on a September 2002 humanitarian trip through Africa, sponsored by former President Clinton.
Wasserman, a prolific Clinton fundraiser whose famous grandfather helped the Democrat win the 1992 presidential election, was joined on Epstein’s jet by his then-wife, Laura, actor Kevin Spacey, Epstein and his longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell and others, including security agents.
It’s not clear when Wasserman and Maxwell began corresponding via email. The messages contained in the Justice Department files are from March and April of 2003. In them, Wasserman writes about wanting to see Maxwell in a tight leather outfit and she offered to give him a massage that can “drive a man wild.”
Maxwell was convicted of sexual abuse in 2021.
Wasserman has worked nearly a decade to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles.
Former Mayor Eric Garcetti recruited him to help L.A. win its host bid and the International Olympic Committee reportedly were impressed with Wasserman’s “network of contacts.”
Behind the scenes, there have been tensions with Los Angeles political leaders. Mayor Karen Bass has said that Wasserman should step down from the high-profile role overseeing the Games. Bass said that “we need to look at the leadership” of LA28 and that her job is to make sure that the city is “completely prepared” for the Games.
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