Rock 'n Roll and Repression

More ICE violence, a cartoon banned, Kimmel & Colbert, Wings flies again, Krugman finds the bright side in Minneapolis.

Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films, including the current “The Atomic Bowl.” Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE—so if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of those books, thanks. Or recommend this Substack to a friend!Again it’s still FREE.

Stephen and Jimmy monologues last night:

Troubling censorship, via Steve Brodner:

Ward Sutton, a celebrated cartoonist and illustrator, is a regular contributor to The Boston Globe, who rejected this powerful art, on a day when the Trump SA is persecuting the people of Minnesota.

Minneapolis is his hometown.

NY Times this morning:

President Threatens to Invoke Insurrection Act After Minneapolis Protests

Paul Krugman this morning with a kind of optimistic take:

The US has not replicated Hungary’s measured slide into authoritarianism. For Trump and his minions aren’t patient. They want retribution and subjugation. Threats and dominance displays are how they operate. They burn with racism, misogyny, and performative cruelty.

So now we have Minneapolis, America’s laboratory of democratic destruction, where ICE agents have gone full Sturmabteilung, terrorizing and even killing not only people with brown skin, but anyone who protests or gets in their way. And the irony is that this may be for the better.

For a gradual destruction of democracy would have been hard to resist. After all, who wants to rock the boat when there’s money to be made, jobs to keep, perks to be had, convenient bothsideism to be upheld, if you will just be silent and keep your head down?

Instead, however, the assault on freedom and civil liberties is open, lurid, and impossible to deny. While our institutions and our elites have failed us, ordinary Americans are rising to the occasion. If Minneapolis is a laboratory of democratic destruction, it has also become a laboratory of civil resistance — organized civil resistance, of a kind we haven’t seen since the civil rights movement. When ICE is on the rampage, crowds of brave Americans, summoned by texts and whistles, quickly gather to stand against the masked men with guns. As the outrage grows, people of common decency — like the federal prosecutors in Minnesota who chose to resign rather than pervert justice by going after Renee Nicole Good’s wife — are taking a stand.

So what’s happening now is both horrifying and inspiring. How will it all end? I don’t know, but maybe, just maybe, our democracy isn’t being destroyed — it’s being forged anew in the hands of the American people.

Another ICE shooting in Minneapolis last night but earlier a young man blinded:

New trailer for the Prime doc on Paul McCartey, the Wings era:

I guess rock ‘n roll lives. Or so claims Langhorne Slim, on The Daily Show last night.

From Tunes to Toons

Luckovich:

Horsey:

Anderson:

Bramhall:

Anderson again:

Ohman:

Photo Finish

“Early morning, Provincetown”