Who Needs the “New York Times” Editorial Board?

When Eric Adams, a corrupt, dirtbag centrist cop, won the New York mayoral primary four years ago, mainstream media forces hailed him as the new face of the Democratic Party. Nate Silver said he could be the next Democratic presidential nominee. People were falling over themselves to praise his Trump-like “straight talk,” and his platform of being “tough” on crime and immigration while not quite as openly racist as Republicans usually are about the matter. His brand of Black MAGA was promoted as the way forward for the Democratic Party.

Adams was never as popular as this year’s New York mayoral primary winner (and Nation mayoral pick), Zohran Mamdani. Not for a day. His victory over Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia was “wafer-thin.” By comparison, Mamdani cruised to victory on Tuesday night over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

But Mamdani, only 33, is not being hailed by mainstream media types as “the future” of the Democratic Party, because his future leads the party to places they don’t want it to go. Instead of running a campaign based on shunning our neighbors and bewailing our problems (as Adams and Cuomo did), Mamdani’s campaign embraced our differences while offering new solutions to old problems. Instead of suckling at the teat of Wall Street titans (as Adams and Cuomo did), Mamdani ran on addressing the unaffordability of New York.

The mainstream media doesn’t want anything to change, ever. They want to keep people in fear and in thrall to corporate interests.

The Democratic Party that can unlock the vast potential of this country and defeat the forces of racism and MAGA is not the Democratic Party that can win the endorsement of The New York Times editorial board.

Zohran Mamdani just proved future Democrats don’t have to.

The Bad and The Ugly

• The e-cigarette and vape industry won a crucial case before the Supreme Court that allows them to challenge FDA regulations of their products. I think FDA regulations of vapes are wrong. I think those regulations are informed by the tobacco industry, which has a clear lobbying interest in slowing the growth of these healthier (after a fashion) competitors. But this decision is yet another blow to the regulatory state delivered by a Republican Supreme Court. Even though I am in a rare moment where I agree with the policy preferences of this decision, I can still say that the court got it wrong on the law. You see, unlike the Republicans on the court, I have intellectual consistency.

• A federal judge ruled that holding Kilmar Ábrego García in prison on the new, bullshit charges the Trump government has cooked up against him “defied common sense” and ordered him released from prison pending trial.

• House Democrats will not vote to impeach Trump over his wag-the-dog war with Iran. House Democrats remain useless. 

• On June 22, Texas passed a law requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms.

• The Supreme Court overruled the Environmental Protection Agency and decided to allow cities to dump more human poop into the oceans and waterways than experts think is safe. The literal enshittification of America continues apace.

Worst (10) Arguments of the Week

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the 10 Commandments are the first “laws.” They weren’t, of course, “the first.” Hammurabi was out there making laws when Charlton Heston was still fighting with the apes. But still, Christian conservatives like to pretend these fortune-cookie commandments are a solid and legal foundation for a just and moral society.

They’re not. They couldn’t survive as actual statutes or legal codes of conduct. Some of them form the basis for authoritarianism. Almost all of them would be legally unenforceable. 
Since it’s summer and I have time, let’s analyze them like a lawyer. From the Christian version of Exodus I found online because I do not own a Bible:

1. You shall have no other gods before me. This position is incongruous with a free society. It’s an attack not only on the freedom of speech but also on the freedom of thought (to say nothing of its obvious repudiation of the freedom of religion). Moreover, it’s a not-so-subtle attempt to place God, or the people who claim to speak for God, over and above the actual laws of the polity you happen to live in. Even Jesus understood the unworkability of this rule. That’s why he told people to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s” and pay their freaking taxes.

2. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them. Needy much? Again, the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression render this commandment inoperable in a free society. The state should not be able to take away your freedom to doodle. This order is also legally unenforceable: There is no good way to tell if a person is “worshiping” a graven idol, or simply admiring it, or perhaps refusing to burn it because they respect other people’s art. This commandment is so vague that the Abrahamic religions regularly disagree on how it should be interpreted. This dumb rule leads to actual freaking wars.

3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Seriously, enough with the cloying neediness! Get an emotional support planet and leave us to our freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

4. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. Finally, we have a progressive commandment. Paid time off has been a critical success of the labor movement, and while a six-day workweek is not exactly “labor friendly,” this commandment was a win compared to the alternatives available in biblical times (and all too often today). Of course, conservatives have responded with “right to work” laws that effectively condemn laborers to the constitutional right to work themselves to the bone if they so choose, because of course conservatives never let the commandments get in the way of making money.

The legal problem with this rule is that it doesn’t define what “keeping it holy” means. Is it like “keeping it real”? If I spend the Sabbath day at a strip club, am I in violation of this commandment, or am I in keeping with it as long as I give thanks and praise to the God or Goddess on the pole? The more legally justifiable version of this commandment would be… paid family leave.

5. Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. Aside from flatly ignoring cases of child abuse or parental neglect, the legal problem with this one is that it has no time or age cut-off. At some point, people are expected to be fully independent from their parents or guardians, and most societies expect that point to happen before their parents or guardians die. The state could not pass a “Call your mother” law, much less one that requires you to honor them, without impinging on the rights of fully adult citizens.

6. You shall not murder. Cool. Now, define “murder.” Oh, are you running out of space on your little tablets?

I could argue that the entire point of every ancient legal code is to define exactly when a person or a state can commit murder—and whom it can murder. Murder is a pregnant word, full of possibilities and meanings. No society anywhere has ever adhered to a flat prohibition on killing. Instead, every society has tried to figure out a way to get around this rule, either by defining a class of people it’s allegedly OK to kill, or using killing as a punishment for some offense. At every point in history, people who have claimed to be devout followers of this rule have killed wantonly. This commandment does not survive its first contact with reality.

7. You shall not commit adultery. Of all the possible sex crimes out there, this is the one they prohibited in stone? Not “Thou shall not rape” or “Thou shall not have sex with children” but… adultery? Diamonds exist because the God of these commandments is such a tight ass.

In any event, this only works as a law if the legal structure of “marriage” is already in place; otherwise, it’s impossible to define what “adultery” is. But marriage is not listed as a commandment. So this is like having a rule governing liability for breaches of contract without having rules for governing the formation of a valid contract. From a legal perspective, God is just being sloppy here.

8. You shall not steal. As with murder, I can argue that every modern legal code is just a set of rules justifying the massive hoarding and accumulation of private wealth as something other than “stealing.” The crime of stealing presupposes the existence of “ownership.” But what a person can and cannot own changes with the times, society, and number of Republicans running the government. One man’s stealing is another man’s “redistribution of wealth.” Stealing sounds like one of those black-letter legal issues that should be both knowable and objective. But really, stealing is one of the most subjective and political issues societies must wrestle with. There is no objectively right or wrong answer here.

9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. This one can be a law! It is sufficiently clear, and impinges on no other basic human rights. Perjury is a thing that hurts the very structure of a society that uses a judicial system. Please post this commandment in classrooms and, you know, the White House.

10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. This one is my go-to when I need to dunk on conservatives who say “the 10 Commandments should be law,” because “coveting” is so unconstitutionally vague that it could mean almost anything. Which means it means nothing. One cannot even control the impulse to covet, which happens without any rational input. It’s like saying, “Thou shall not get excited.” Basically, the only way to follow this commandment is to spend your life meditating in a cave, and even then, eventually you’d covet your neighbor’s lunch. If you tried to prohibit, say, “outward expressions of coveting,” the rule becomes even more unworkable. This law would ban… Zillow. It would ban putting things into your Amazon cart for purchase later. It would ban hiring a painter or landscaper on your neighbor’s recommendation because they did such a good job fixing up your neighbor’s home.

I could make an argument that “coveting” is literally “how societies progress.” Copying people who are already doing something well isn’t a sin; it’s smart.

In conclusion, the first five commandments are not laws; they’re demands for attention. The sixth, seventh, eighth, and tenth are nice ideas, more or less, but are far too vague to be put into a legal code without much more work spent on defining terms and allowing for exceptions. Only the ninth commandment works as a legal statute that could be posted in a classroom for children.

Inspired Takes

• In a case where the Republican majority on the Supreme Court upheld discrimination against people with disabilities, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. In that dissent, she added a footnote, Note 12, which absolutely blasted Justice Neil Gorsuch and his entire approach to textualism. I put her footnote to song. Mark Joseph Stern wrote about it.

• Before Cuomo lost, The Nation’s Dave Zirin explained how important it was for Cuomo to lose. I didn’t read it at the time, because I thought Cuomo was going to win and I didn’t want to feel even more sad about it. But… he lost. So now this is awesome.

• Zirin had a great week. Here, for The Nation, he explains why the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team stood up to ICE. It’s a story about how public pressure can remind billionaires where their money actually comes from.

What I Wrote

• The Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue sending immigrants to countries they’re not from and where they might be tortured. The decision is every bit as bad as it sounds. I explained why.

In News Completely Unrelated to the Ongoing Chaos

I’ve been holding off on watching the new season of Andor because everybody I know says it’s great and perfectly on point with the reality of our times. I didn’t really feel like watching a show about fighting fascism, because I like my entertainment to be an escape, and fighting fascism is too close to my real life.

But I finally sat down to watch the first episode. And then I started crying during the very first scene. And then I started laughing in the second scene. And by the final scene, I was screaming at my television. And then I turned it off, and my wife and I had a long conversation about the banality of evil that this show perfectly captures.

It’ll probably be another month or two before I’m ready for episode two.

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