A political novice, James Zurlinden decided last year to run for Santa Barbara City Council, driven by frustration at feeling constantly “worked up” and “embarrassed” by the City Hall soap opera.

At 41, Zurlinden had a 15-year career as a chef before transitioning a few years ago into accounting and financial services work. In seeking the District 5 council seat, he positions himself as a fiscal moderate and a blue-collar guy who provisionally backs rent control on behalf of families economically struggling to stay in Santa Barbara, and supports reopening the upper blocks of the State Street “promenade” on behalf of local businesses.

Born and raised in Tucson, he moved back to Santa Barbara in 2013, after briefly living here in the aughts, and says he is running as a “nonpartisan person” seeking to represent neighbors “who don’t feel represented by City Council anymore.”

“I’m really trying to create a voice for the working people of Santa Barbara,” Zurlinden said in a Newsmakers interview. “I never saw myself running for any kind of office. But instead of being worked up and just kind of fed up with what’s been going on … there comes a point in time in your life where you say, ‘Okay, you got to put your money where your mouth is.’”

“Because when you feel strongly about something, there comes a point where you have to stand up,” he added.

State of play. District 5 includes Upper State Street, part of San Roque, Hitchcock, Hidden Valley and other nearby neighborhoods. It is relatively affluent, with the highest share among the six council districts of bachelor’s degree holders, according to U.S. Census data, and over half of households owning their own home.

Zurlinden is one of three candidates who have pulled papers to run, with film producer and community volunteer Cevin Cathell and Ian Baucke, a Democratic Party-endorsed Monique Limón aide, also competing for the seat.

While offering a set of prescriptive generalities for a familiar litany of problems Santa Barbara faces, the candidate promised to provide a level-headed alternative to what he described as “embarrassing” ideological and personality clashes among incumbent council members that have little to do with the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens.

“With my background growing up in a working family … I’ve seen the struggles that families take and I’ve experienced them — including having to leave Santa Barbara (in the early 2000s) because it was just not feasible to live here anymore,” Zurlinden said. “And seeing the issues that people are having — hard time paying rents, getting around town, the lack of housing, all the issues going on with State Street and all the development that’s going on … people want an actual voice in city council.”

“People are just feeling their voices are left behind, that the people in city council, they have their blinders on,” he added. “There’s been a lot of heated confrontations in City Hall, and it’s kind of embarrassing.”

On the issues. Our conversation with Zurlinden is the latest in a summer-long series Newsmakers is doing with candidates for council and mayor. In our campaign interviews, we ask the candidates for their views on four key issues. Here’s what he said about them, lightly edited for clarity:

Rent control. I support rent stabilization, but only as a piece of a larger housing strategy, not as a solution...I believe it can be used more of a bridge solution while we’re getting housing developed a little bit more (but) what actually concerns me with the city, is they don’t have any kind of a sunset for this. I see it kind of like a way to really incentivize - let's do five years while we're cleaning up the permitting, incentivizing redevelopment, doing this (while) saying, ‘let's study the actual housing population. So what units are getting taken off the market?…We need transparency on everything, the actual costs (of) this entire ordinance…It's a great program, but it needs to be used correctly.”

State Street. “I think a promenade of about three blocks would be great…I see it as a smaller promenade keeping the upper sections open, be it one-way or two-way traffic (but) I don't feel we need eight or 10 blocks closed…I would like to see is a (cars-free) promenade from De La Guerra to Haley, a three block stretch…Up from De La Guerra Plaza, I haven't seen the need to have that entire section closed. It's a huge stretch.”

“(On e-bikes) I think we need to give the police the resources to actually enforce the laws that are on the books and encourage the crackdown events that they’re doing. And so if we have on State Street, the promenade, those three blocks, we need to have an officer down there, especially right now because it’s kind of wide open, and we need to have that force down there to be able to start educating these people.”

Budget. “It’s very embarrassing…emergency reserves should not be used in normal times (and) we can't just keep breaking out the credit card to pay for everything. And so we've got to get our emergency reserves paid back. (On a vacancy tax): We need to talk to the property owners and say, ‘What’s going on? Is it a permit holdup? Is it a need for a reduced fee? What is it to help encourage you guys?’ Because...it can’t be the only thing. And so I would consider it, but I wouldn’t say it has to happen right away.”

Ranked choice voting. “I think an introduction to ranked choice voting might be good….but maybe looking at the mayoral race, for example, as a (way) to start out and see how that’s going to go.”

Check out our conversation with James Zurlinden via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include candidates Alexander Stoeber, Wendy Sims-Moten and Kristen Sneddon. Here is who we’ve spoken with to date:

District 4

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16.

• Devon Wardlow, candidate for District 4, July 21.

District 5

• Cevin Cathell, candidate for District 5, July 23.

• Ian Baucke, candidate for District 5, July 26.

• James Zurlinden, candidate for District 5, Aug. 3.

District 6

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

Mayor

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

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In a power grab corrupt and odious even by the unfathomably low standards of the Trump Administration, the House of Representatives last week approved a measure to wipe out all state, local, and other legal authority over the Sable Offshore oil company’s operations in Santa Barbara County.

A very special interest amendment to the annual military spending bill, sponsored by the Republican congressman from Sable’s home district in Houston and approved by one vote in the GOP-held House, would give the Pentagon absolute sway over the company’s actions, brushing away reams of pending regulatory and legal objections to the rogue oil outfit’s reckless behavior, and handing jurisdiction to Pete Hegseth, the boozy Fox News weekend host who Trump installed as what he insists on calling the “Secretary of War.” Nick Welsh reported:

“The amendment language would make such authorization irrevocable and irreversible, no matter how various state and federal courts, now deliberating over various legal controversies surrounding Sable’s production plans and jurisdictional supremacy, might rule.”

On this week’s episode of Newsmakers TV, Nick returns to reprise his reporting on the issue, and to handicap the chances of California’s two U.S. Senators heading off the disastrous matter when the Defense spending bill comes before them.

Callie Fausey joins the gang with a breakdown of how the Administration is simultaneously trying to dismantle the federal Endangered Species Act, by redefining what it means to “harm” a species, while Josh Molina updates the latest sturm und drang from Santa Barbara City Hall over the city’s rent control ordinance.

Plus: the heart-breaking story of the deaths of two newborn red pandas at the Zoo, a new twist in local efforts to handle the homeless, and Josh shares about his big social media breakthrough, with an account of his Joe Rogan-length podcast interview with Santa Barbara’s biggest Instagram star.

All this and more, right here, right now, on Newsmakers TV.

Check out the latest episode via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Image: Los Angeles Times.

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On Wednesday, Newsmakers’ pointed criticism of the sinister tone and imagery employed by some tenant activists during this week’s raucous rent control hearing at Santa Barbara City Hall struck a chord in the community.

The post, viewed by more than 2,000 readers, generated dozens of public and private comments and responses, the majority supporting our editorial stance — which specifically decried the display in chambers of a sign featuring a guillotine primed to be wielded against anti-rent control politicians — although a significant portion also took issue with our argument.

The most notable reply came from rent control advocate Ana Garcia, who identified herself in the comments section on our site as the author and bearer of the off-with-their-heads protest sign.

Garcia posted this comment under the post: “So the ‘violence’ of my SIGN is more important to report on as political violence than the ACTUAL violence these elected officials condone against the people every day?” she wrote. “Don’t be distracted by this. The sign has a ballot box as part of the guillotine, but that just gets ignored as well, right?”

In a follow-up exchange via Substack, seeking clarification and elaboration of her statement, Garcia criticized Newsmakers for over-emphasizing symbolic violence — as represented by the graphic of a guillotine, historically associated with the most bloodthirsty era of the French Revolution — instead of focusing on what she characterized as real violence perpetrated by elected officials who oppose rent control.

“It’s symbolism,” she said of her sign. “As for violence, I think choosing to side with people who are exploiting tenants and who make poor choices in their business endeavors, over helping to ensure constituents stay housed, is violent.”

Also noteworthy was the first statement on the matter from council member and mayor’s race front-runner Kristen Sneddon. In preparing the original story, I texted every member of the City Council a photo of Garcia’s sign and posed “a binary question”: Did council members condemn the display of the sign in City Hall, or did they find it acceptable?

Before deadline, I tried and failed repeatedly to connect with Sneddon, who later texted a 74-word comment, at 1:52 a.m. Wednesday, inserted a few hours later as an update to the original story on the Newsmakers site:

“We all support the First Amendment and welcome public comment at City Hall, from all sides, on any issue,” Sneddon wrote. “There are times when comments or images are used to provoke, and this one clearly did. I don’t think it affected any of our votes on the issue, one way or the other.

“Regardless,” she added, “I don’t think images that can be interpreted in this way should be broadcast on City TV, for all our safety.”

Here is a representative sample of other comments we received, pro and con.

• Rent control supporter Zachary Cosseboom cited the opening line of the Newsmakers piece — “Maybe I’m just overly sensitive” — and employed multiple emojis to argue that the guillotine image clearly symbolized electoral politics, not physical violence. He also took issue with comments by Mayor Randy Rowse, saying it was a bipartisan warning to politicians, not just to Republicans: “Yes, Jerry you are overly sensitive 🍼,” Cosseboom wrote. “It is cutting a piece of paper. Also I don’t think Randy saw it had a rhino & a donkey 🤦‍♂️”

• Journalist, teacher and friend of Newsmakers Cissy Ross also reacted negatively to the piece, saying that First Amendment rights of free expression far eclipsed objections to the message and content of the “rage bait” sign. “Concerning the sign at the rent control meeting — ‘rage bait’ is right,” she wrote, referencing a comment by council member Oscar Gutierrez. “Study how to make an effective argument. This ain’t it.”

Most of those who commented on the site or by email, however, agreed with Newsmakers’ condemnation of the sign.

• "Thanks for laying it out there. When our representatives are silent on stuff like this — very bad deal," wrote environmental advocate Hillary Hauser, who applauded council member and mayoral candidate Eric Friedman's disapproving comments. "Thank you, Eric, for speaking up. The violence in this country is increasing by the day, thanks to the hatefulness of our Supreme Commander — and the only way to fight such stuff is in our own back yard," Hauser added. "We're all depressed/oppressed/obsessed by the news. We need backbone close to us right now; we need a City Council with backbone. A sign with guillotine/violence is NOT permissible in any city council chamber."

• Planning Commissioner Brian Barnwell also connected the local episode to national politics. “It is what President Obama, in his statesmanlike way, referred to as ‘the coarsening of public debate,’” Barnwell wrote. “I am not supportive of silence on this coarsening, which is a form of bullying, and which is a page taken directly from the playbook of the most coarse and heinous of them all: the drumpf” — his final word a mocking reference to Donald Trump.

• Former city Fire Chief Pat McElroy was critical of council members who did not speak out publicly at the meeting. “It was a shameful day,” he wrote. “How afraid of their own supporters are some of these council members? They can’t bring themselves to condemn something akin to the signs of January 6th. I think this council, and probably the next, will have a hard time keeping really talented staff, who they continually throw under the bus.”

• Cheri Rae, biographer of Santa Barbara icon Pearl Chase, expressed regret on behalf of venerable local values, writing that “our civic discourse has drifted a long way away from the days when Pearl Chase advocated for what she referred to as the three C’s: ‘Communicate, Co-ordinate, Co-operate.’”

• (Update 1Aug26. Late Friday, council member Wendy Santamaria responded to our original question about the guillotine sign with a 169-word statement texted more than 48 hours after Newsmakers asked the binary question. Santamaria echoed the argument made by Ana Garcia, saying she does not “condone political violence in action or in rhetoric. It has no place in our discourse or in our city,” and adding that evictions and the brutality of ICE agents on the streets of Santa Barbara also are forms of violence that should be “condemned.”

You can find further public comments about the post on the Newsmakers website here.

Image above: The Amherst Current.

Image: The contentious sign (Josh Molina photo for the News-Press).

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Maybe I’m just overly sensitive.

But I’ve actually covered the assassinations of two local elected officials,1 so seeing a sign hoisted at Santa Barbara City Hall on Tuesday night that glorified the beheading of political leaders made me sick with disgust and outrage.

Is that who we are now? Is this what politics in Santa Barbara has come to — that anyone who disagrees with you on a policy issue deserves to be put to death?

Please spare me the lectures about freedom of expression. I’ve spent a lifetime manifesting and defending the First Amendment, and I’ve got the scars — physical, emotional, legal, financial — to show for it.

Count me all in for freedom of speech — but as a simple matter of plain civic virtue, in a town long distinguished by civility and mutual respect, can we not agree that graphically cheering the decapitation of political foes is, if not unconstitutional, simply wrong?

What council said. Newsmakers surveyed the seven members of City Council, all of whom saw the off-with-their-heads sign at Tuesday night’s packed meeting about rent control, and were also witness to hours of jeering, heckling and berating of members, City Administrator Kelly McAdoo and other city officials, largely by tenant advocates.

Their responses broke down into two categories — the gallant and the timid.

The Gallant

Eric Friedman, who is running for mayor, had a clear and direct response to the offensive sign and those celebrating its sentiments. “It’s not acceptable to me,” said Friedman, acknowledging the First Amendment argument. “In a time when elected officials have faced threats, violence and even been killed, everyone should take time to think about the potential ramifications of their actions.”

Mayor Randy Rowse, the target of much of the vitriol hurled at the dais, said he “100 percent” condemns the sign. “That kind of directed violent imagery tests the boundaries of free speech,” he said. “I assume the elephants on the picture indicate Republicans and perhaps it was directed at me. Too bad I’ve never been a Republican.”

Meagan Harmon responded with swift moral clarity to our question about the menacing sign. “It’s an easy ‘unacceptable,’” she texted. “I guess the First Amendment says it’s okay, but like, does anyone say it’s a good thing?”

Mike Jordan criticized himself for not speaking out in the moment with the outrage he said he felt. “I’m extremely sorry, looking back, that I didn’t just pop off about that, and the loud personal verbal attack on (McAdoo) and staff … I’m pretty much done politely dealing with immature (people) who think part of advocacy or discussion is jeering, attempting to intimidate, and generally acting like spoiled toddlers.”

Oscar Gutierrez, calling the sign “rage bait,” defended the free-speech right to wield it, but said that “for me personally it’s not acceptable,” adding that he plans to “voice my disapproval” to those behind it and “ask the city attorney if we can limit signs at the public comment podium.”

The timid.

Wendy Santamaria, to the surprise of no one, did not respond to our questions about the offending sign. Her one-note symphony of politics begins and ends with rent control, and she is more responsible than anyone for the toxic tone of public hearings on the subject.

More surprising is the silence of Kristen Sneddon, even though her support for rent control largely fuels her campaign for mayor. Over the course of an afternoon and evening, she didn’t respond to repeated texts and calls seeking response to a simple, binary question - does she condemn the sign, or does she find it acceptable?

So she either: a) doesn’t know what she thinks or; b) is trying to duck the whole thing. We’re not sure which is worse, but it is disconcerting that someone imploring voters to install her in the office that is the public face of Santa Barbara lacks the gumption to stand up for basic decency.

(Update 30July26): About seven-and-a-half hours after this piece published, council member and mayoral front-runner Sneddon responded to our simple question with this terpsichorean answer:

“We all support the First Amendment and welcome public comment at City Hall, from all side, on any issue. There are times when comments or images are used to provoke, and this one clearly did. I don’t think it affected any of our votes on the issue, one way or the other. Regardless, I don’t think image that can be interpreted in this way should be broadcast on City TV, for all our safety.”

Editor’s’ note: Donald Trump’s personal and political corruption is so unprecedented, so fast-moving and so ubiquitous that it often feels overwhelming to comprehend, let alone to keep track of it. So we admired and saluted California U.S. Senator Adam Schiff’s attempt last week to inventory and explain all the bribery, graft, extortion and other criminality which has become commonplace (and dangerously, normalized by much of the legacy media) during the second Trump Administration. Here’s the text of an extraordinary speech Schiff delivered on the Senate floor on July 23. /jr).

Mr. President,

More than a year and a half ago, when Donald Trump placed his hand on a Bible and took the oath of office for the second time, he swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

In the time since, he has failed to live up to that basic promise. Instead, he has focused laser-like on a very different priority — to preserve, protect, and expand his family’s wealth.

The payments to the president and his family have been massive. The self-dealing and profiteering have been absolutely breathtaking in their scope.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. Two weeks ago, the president filed his annual financial disclosure — signed under penalty of law. It shows more than $2.3 billion dollars in income last year alone. $2.3 billion made by the president in the last year alone. Wow.

That is three and a half times what he reported the year before. So, either he’s just become a much better businessman since he became president, or he is corruptly using his office to enrich himself. The same can be said for much of the rest of his family.

Exposing this corruption is the first necessary step to stopping it. This is important in its own right — public servants should not be enriching themselves at public expense.

But it is even more crucial to root out corruption for another reason, and that is because the cost of corruption is an economy that does not meet the basic needs of the American people, an economy that does not produce housing that average families can afford, or a college education that young people can obtain without mortgaging their future, or quality healthcare that is accessible, or groceries that don’t break the family budget.

When the president is fixated only on his family’s personal wealth, on the money he can make by abusing the power of his position, on his own vanity projects, gilding the White House, gilding statues and gilding a ballroom, he has very little time or inclination to address the problems facing ordinary Americans. They are mere afterthought, and the country suffers.

That is the true cost of corruption.

So today, I’m going to walk you through the top ten ways this president has turned the Oval Office into a personal revenue stream. The settlements he’s collected. The gifts he’s pocketed.

The money he and his family have extracted from anyone with the misfortune of needing something from this government. And the pet causes he has extorted money to fund. Bear in mind, every number I am about to give you is either taken from his own financial filing, or from public reporting.

And because the president seems to enjoy ratings and rankings, we’ll count them down – from number ten all the way to number one — of the top ten most corrupt self-enrichment schemes of the president.

And by the time we reach number one, we will have tallied billions of dollars for him, for his family, for his personal whims — and nothing for you. That is the cost of corruption.

Number 10. Let’s start small. And by small, I mean $23 million.

Since his re-election, the Trump family has made at least $23 million dollars licensing the Trump name overseas. A hotel in Oman. Towers in India. Golf courses on the outskirts of Riyadh and Doha.

These are just a few of the more than twenty overseas projects the Trump Organization is now pursuing – many of them requiring the cooperation of foreign governments. And here’s the thing about needing help from foreign governments when you happen to be the President of the United States —

Those governments are going to want something in return. They’re going to want you to treat them very, very favorably in return.

These countries all want something from the United States of America — U.S. military protection, U.S. nuclear power plants, U.S. technologies, U.S. AI chips, you name it. They want something from this country. And these countries are not investing in the Trump family projects out of the goodness of their hearts. They want payback, and much to the detriment of Americans’ national security interests, they are getting it.

Let’s look at just one example, this one from Southeast Asia. The administration agreed to lower its threatened tariffs on Vietnam — but not until after the Trump Organization broke ground on a $1.5 billion Trump golf complex outside of Hanoi. A golf complex that Vietnamese officials fast-tracked – by ignoring their own rules.

This kind of overt pay-to-play is playing out in country after country after country.

What is the cost of this corruption? Well, our national security suffers when the president sells advanced chips to a gulf nation, not because it’s in our interest to do so, not because our own AI companies don’t need the chips to compete, but because the president or his family got a payoff. Our country suffers when the president makes national security decisions for financial reasons that benefit not the country, but himself.

Did the president just approve nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia because it’s a good idea? Or because the Saudis have been phenomenally generous to the Trump family business, to the president and his sons, and to his son-in-law Jared Kushner in particular, in whom they invested a cool $2 billion.

Will American troops, our sons and daughters, be more at risk of deployment to the Middle East, with more endless wars, or because of a nuclear arms race that we helped get started in the region — not because helping the Saudis go nuclear was good for us — but because the Saudis wanted payback for their investment in Donald Trump’s family? That is the cost of corruption.

Number 9. Number nine rings us to perhaps one of the most frivolous media lawsuits to ever see the inside of a courtroom. Following a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during that presidential campaign, Trump sued CBS, alleging, believe it or not, “election interference.”

His claim?

That CBS edited the interview to make Harris sound better.

Let me remind everyone – most long-form television interviews are edited. That’s how television works. But in Trump’s reality, editing is election interference if he doesn’t like the edits.

CBS acknowledged the suit was frivolous. The president had no right to sue because he doesn’t like how an interview with someone else is edited. It’s absurd. The studio has a first amendment right to make those decisions for itself.

Nevertheless, CBS agreed to pay off the president — $16 million. Why? Not because they thought they would lose the litigation — they knew Trump’s claim would never be successful. No, CBS agreed to pay off the president because its parent, Paramount Studios, wanted to merge with Skydance in a deal worth $8 billion dollars. What was a $16 million dollar payoff compared to an $8 billion dollar deal?

And it wasn’t just the $16 million dollar payoff. Skydance also committed to paying another $20 million in advertising and public service announcements favored by the president. Final tally: $36 million, that the president was able to extort because he could leverage his power to kill the merger deal — into a personal payoff.

So, what’s the cost of that corruption to you? Well, if you’re a worker in the entertainment industry, it just might cost you your job, because a merger was approved on a corrupt basis and without considering job losses in the industry wasn’t made to benefit you.

If you’re a consumer, you’ll be paying more for your streaming service and have fewer choices, because this deal wasn’t approved with consumers in mind — it was approved to make money for the president.

This particular brand of corruption — suing media companies to extort them for payoffs — goes beyond anything the president did in first term. This president doesn’t just complain about the press – calling them “fake news” or “enemies of the people.”

No, no. That was the stuff of Trump 1.0.

In Trump 2.0, he sues them into submission. Uses the leverage he has over their business deals and mergers. And pockets the proceeds. More money for him, fewer jobs for you, and more money out of your pocket when you want to stream your favorite shows. This is the cost of corruption.

Number 8. Number eight is a three-for-one. Twitter. YouTube. Meta. Sixty million dollars, combined.

Trump got suspended from these platforms for conduct related to the attack he incited on the Capitol. He sued. And one by one, the companies paid up. To him personally, and to his pet projects, like the golden ballroom.

Twitter – now Elon Musk’s X – settled for $10 million. A case a district judge had already thrown out and that an appeals court was openly skeptical of. They paid anyway.

And the president’s response?

He went on television to complain it was not enough, it was too low – that he “was looking to get much more money than that.”

YouTube settled for $25 million. And in a flourish of creative accounting, $22 million of it was routed straight to the White House golden ballroom project.

More on that ballroom in a minute.

But Meta – parent company to Facebook and Instagram – they also settled for $25 million.

And just to sweeten the pot, they kicked in an additional million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

So, let’s recap just this item. The president sues these platforms over their refusal to amplify his false claims about the election and his incitement of insurrection. Using the leverage he now has over them as president, to help or to hurt their businesses, he extorts them to the tune of $60 million dollars.

It is a disinformation loyalty program – except the rewards go to the president, and the rest of us get more false claims, more false information, more social harms from an unregulated social media, and potentially, more incitement of violence around our elections. This is the cost of that corruption.

Number 7. For number 7, we move back to the family business.

You may have seen the trailers.

Amazon struck a $40 million deal with First Lady Melania Trump for a documentary about her life before and during her time in the White House.

Reports indicate that Melania’s team shopped the project to several studios and executives – many of whom had attended Trump’s inauguration – before Amazon closed the deal.

And Amazon, separately, contributed another $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Of the $40 million though, the First Lady personally received $28 million.

The big-time theatrical run of this film brought in only $16 million at the box office – landing it at a sweet #68 on the 2026 releases, behind “Bunny!!,” behind “Guru,” and behind “Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe.”

Bear in mind the Melania movie was so bad, that one reviewer at Variety said that if you saw the film on a plane, you would still walk out. But Amazon paid the Trump family $40 million for it. Why?

Because Amazon has huge government contracts at stake, worth billions of dollars. What is a $40 million payment for Melania, when you want a federal cloud computing contract worth a hundred times that much? Worth billions.

So – while families across this country are wrestling with the skyrocketing price of groceries, the First Lady is collecting $28 million for a documentary about….herself.

But more important, we end up paying Amazon billions in government contracts when Amazon may — or may not — be the best deal for the American taxpayer. When the amount of the contract may — or may not — be competitive with other companies, when Amazon may — or may not — be the best competitor in the bidding process.

We may never know if taxpayers are getting ripped off, and whether the true cost of the Melania film was a bad deal for the country costing taxpayers billions of dollars on cloud computing that we didn’t need to spend.

This kind of corrupt contracting — where taxpayer funds are wasted because of a backroom deal or a kickback — is common in developing countries, but it hasn’t been common here, not until now. And that is the cost of corruption.

Number 6. Just 24 hours before taking the oath of office, Donald Trump launched a meme coin called $TRUMP. A memecoin is, a kind of a “joke” digital currency. But Trump still saw the opportunity for personal profit – about $635 million worth.

And the people on the other side of that trade? More than 810,000 of them have lost a combined two billion dollars. That’s 810,000 people that bought this memecoin, this Trump memecoin, mainly the president’s own supporters, lost money so the president could make hundreds of millions of dollars.

But even that is not the end of the story. It gets worse.

Trump hosted a private dinner for the top holders of his memecoin. Investors were told they had a two-and-a-half-week window to buy enough $TRUMP to earn a seat. He created a public auction, where what was being auctioned off was access to the president – buy Trump’s memecoin and you get to dine with the president. Where? At his own private club in Virginia.

And among the guests?

A crypto billionaire who’d been charged by the SEC with fraud, in a case in which Trump’s SEC just coincidentally asked a judge to hit pause on the matter just weeks before the meme coin dinner.

And this March, the case was dropped entirely — dismissed with prejudice, never to be brought again — with the company paying a mere $10 million penalty while admitting nothing. This, for a crypto billionaire who had poured some $75 million into Trump family crypto ventures.

So, to recap this item, the president invents a by-definition worthless asset, profits while hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their savings buying it, breaks bread with the people his government is investigating for defrauding investors, even as his administration puts an end to the alleged fraudster’s potential prosecution.

The cost of corruption here: hundreds of millions of dollars go to Trump, hundreds of thousands of Americans lose the value of their purchases — about $2 billion in total — and fraudsters get a pass to commit other frauds on the American people. More money for Trump, more fraud for you. This is the cost of corruption.

Number 5. Number five is one of the most audacious schemes in presidential history: the gold-plated, gilded, and gaudy White House ballroom. The president has solicited ever-larger donations for this pet project – which now has a whopping price tag of $600 million.

A $600 million monument to his vanity, built for him by people who need something from the government. And paid for by you, the taxpayer. Because far from the president’s promise that no tax dollars would be used for his golden ballroom, he’s making you pay an estimated $300 million of your tax dollars towards this project. Promises made, promises broken, and the taxpayer left holding the bag.

Now – I have sought answers from the White House on this ballroom. Asking who are the private donors, and how much they have given, and what business do they have before the federal government. Their response?

Not surprisingly, no response. Not willing to say. Not willing to be transparent. Wanting to keep it hidden from the American people.

But we know there are at least 37 donors. Among them, Amazon and Apple and Google and Meta and Microsoft and Coinbase and Tether and Caterpillar and Lockheed Martin and T-Mobile. And more.

Of these corporate donors, two-thirds have been awarded federal contracts over the last five years – contracts worth $279 billion. And fourteen of them are either facing, or have had suspended, federal actions for violations of the law.

So let’s get this straight – companies under federal investigation, many of them, write a check for the president’s ballroom, and their legal troubles go away, or their contracts multiply. Or in some cases, both.

Trump even told these donors they’d be the first guests welcomed into the finished ballroom – “if I still like you at that time, which I’m sure I will.”

Translation? Keep paying, and I’ll keep liking you.

The cost of this corruption: Hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding that could go to building new hospitals in your community. Or building new schools, or keeping the ones near you open — go to a ballroom instead. Hundreds of daycare centers that could have received funding so you don’t have to pay so much for childcare, or so there is even childcare in your area.

But instead of building roads or bridges, hospitals or healthcare clinics or childcare, the president is building a gaudy gold tollbooth in place of the East Wing. And federal contracts are going to the biggest donors, not the best competitors, and that could cost you billions more in taxes.

Number 4. Number four is the gift that keeps on taking.

A $400 million luxury jet, “gifted” by the government of Qatar, to serve as Air Force One through the end of Trump’s term.

And then?

Transferred to Trump’s own museum foundation. His to keep! He took his maiden flight aboard it just a few weeks ago.

And while the president insists the plane is “free,” outfitting it to serve as Air Force One could cost American taxpayers up to one billion dollars in security upgrades.

A billion dollars. For this “free” jet. That he gets to keep. Paid for by you, the taxpayer, and his generous friends, the Qataris.

And let’s not pretend there’s nothing expected in return. Trump himself volunteered that the United States provides security for Qatar – and “will continue to.”

He also explained that only a “stupid person” turns down a “free very expensive airplane.” Only a stupid person would turn it down. How could he refuse?

So, a foreign government hands the president a $400 million jet. We pay a billion in taxes to make it usable. He keeps it when he leaves office. And if you think that’s corrupt, he thinks you’re the stupid one.

That is not a gift to America. It’s a gift to Donald Trump – paid for by the American taxpayer, courtesy of a foreign government that now holds a great deal of leverage over the president.

The same foreign government whose wealth fund is invested in developing the Doha Trump International Golf Club – complete with luxury villas and 18 holes of world-class golf.

The cost of this corruption: American foreign policy our national security interests in the region now skewed towards a country that gives the president exorbitant gifts or develops real estate deals with his family.

That is not putting America first, but putting it last, well behind his family and personal interests in a plane and golf courses.

Number 3. At three –– the numbers have turned even more staggering.

After a barrage of executive orders targeting the legal profession, nine wealthy law firms struck deals with the administration – pledging nearly one billion dollars in “pro bono services” to make those threats go away. Threats to disfavor their clients, threats to take their security clearances away so they couldn’t represent other clients, threats to look unfavorably on the mergers their clients want, government contracts or lucrative deals favored by their clients.

Now this money didn’t land directly in the president’s bank account. This is value he extracted – nearly a billion dollars in legal work, redirected to causes he favors, surrendered by law firms who were afraid of what he might do to them if they refused.

And who negotiated these deals? Reportedly, Boris Epshteyn – the president’s personal lawyer. Not a government official. A private citizen, allegedly shaking down America’s largest law firms on the administration’s behalf.

Nine hundred and forty million dollars, extracted under threat. And all too easily complied with by firms that were unwilling to take a stand. It is a modern protection racket.

What is the cost of this corruption: well, law firms are silenced from representing clients whose interests may be averse to the president. That might be you one day. Businesses unable to get counsel because these law firms are too scared of crossing a vindictive president. That business may be your business one day.

And the law firms that stood their ground and defied the president, they risk losing business in a corruption of the economy that only favors firms willing to capitulate to the president. It is Putin-style economics. And it doesn’t work any better here than it does in Russia.

Number 2. We are now in the top two.

World Liberty Financial. The Trump family cash cow.

A firm in which the Trump family holds an ownership interest of around 75 percent.

The sale of these governance tokens has earned the family well over a billion dollars. A single deal tied to a state-backed fund in the United Arab Emirates funneled $500 million into this venture. A single deal, made by a wealthy sheik who is also head of that country’s intelligence service. What could go wrong? And in return, they just got American made advanced AI chips, just like they wanted. Coincidence? I don’t think so. If you do, I have a ballroom I’d like to sell you.

But the scheme doesn’t stop here.

Because the Trump family is also entitled to the interest earned on the reserves backing their stablecoin – this income is ongoing, grows by the day, and is pegged to the U.S. dollar itself. Unlike the memecoin, this is real money.

More than $1.5 billion. And counting.

Over a billion and a half dollars, flowing to the president’s family, through a financial instrument his family controls, launched while he sits in the Oval Office.

Not a side business. Not a blind trust.

The President of the United States, using the power and prestige of his office to drive money into a venture he owns – and from which he profits every single day.

And consider what one of the family’s business partners got in return. The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, helped turn World Liberty’s stablecoin from a small venture into one of the largest in the world — first by settling a $2 billion investment from an Abu Dhabi state fund in the Trump coin, then by building it into the exchange’s own trading systems.

And for that Trump family earns interest on every dollar.

And the founder of Binance, what did he get out of it? He’d been convicted of money-laundering crimes and was facing the consequences. Until, last October, when the president pardoned him. A foreign-funded boost to the family business, repaid with a presidential pardon.

The cost of this corruption? Crooked deals to benefit convicted fraudsters. U.S. foreign policy for sale to the highest gulf bidder. Less time, attention and resources of the country focused on bringing down your costs, improving your quality of life, bringing back prosperity to America.

Number 1. Which takes us, ladies and gentlemen, to number one. The crown jewel.

The president his IRS settlement and the $1.7 billion slush fund. So, here’s the scheme and you have to give the president credit for its audacity. The president sues the IRS an agency run by one of his employees, one of his appointees, and represented by the Department of Justice, also run by one of his appointees. His lawyers bring the suit, and his lawyers defend the suit. He is functionally suing himself.

And he, not surprisingly, settles with himself for a staggering amount. He gets an IRS get out of jail free card, he faces no audit or investigations for any prior tax fraud or underpayment that he, his kids, his businesses, or his associates have ever made or participated in — a deal estimated to be worth up to $100 million dollars for the Trump family, personally.

It is a sham settlement, castigated by a federal judge as based on a suit brought wholly for an improper purpose and a settlement that was the product of the worst form of collusion and self-dealing. But that is just the start. The $100 million tax get out of free card only a start.

The settlement also purports to give the president control over $1.776 billion in taxpayer money which he can use as a personal slush fund to compensate his friends and allies who claimed that they were wronged. Included among the aggrieved — people who violently attacked law enforcement officers on January 6th.

Now these people who attacked police officers on January 6. They already got pardoned by the president, on his first day. But that wasn’t enough, for them or the president. They want to be paid for their acts of insurrection, and the president is willing to pay them with your tax dollars. Imagine, your tax dollars going to pay cop beaters.

And besides the morally repugnant nature of that slush fund and its beneficiaries, it comes at a huge cost. He wants nearly two billion of your money your tax dollars to fund this cop beater program. Not to serve the public. But as a pot of money, he controls – to pay out to the people loyal to him. Willing to use violence for him.

Congress and the courts have compelled Trump’s acting attorney general to back off the fund for now, but not the president. He still wants to make the payoffs to his cronies and enablers, and the administration is looking for other ways to loot the treasury for the same purpose, using other funds of the Department of Justice.

Taxpayer money, converted into a personal patronage for the preseident.

There is a word for governments that take public money and hand it to their friends.

And it is not “republic.”

The cost of this corruption: incalculable. Besides misappropriating billions of your money, it is also rewarding people seeking to overturn a free and fair election. If it succeeds in encouraging others to do so in the next election, the cost to you just may be our whole democracy.

So, let’s add it up.

• Overseas licensing: $23 million

• Media lawsuits: $36 million

• Big Tech settlements: $60 million

• Amazon and Melania: $40 million

• The memecoin: $635 million

• The White House ballroom: $600 million

• The Qatari jet: $400 million

• Big Law: $940 million

• World Liberty Financial: $1.5 billion and counting

• The IRS giveaway and slush fund: $1.7 billion and $100 million

For a grand total of 6 billion dollars. And that fellow Americans is just the top ten.

What’s not counted. That doesn’t include the Trump wine sold at the Coast Guard exchanges. It doesn’t include Don Jr.’s executive branch club. It doesn’t include the Trump resort in Qatar or the Trump hotel in Belgrade. It doesn’t include Don Jr.’s 2.6 million in a drone company that just got, coincidentally, landed an army contract. And it doesn’t even include all the stock trades of the president.

The president’s own filing shows 3,642 trades in just the first three months of the year. 58 trades every single market day. Up to three quarters of a billion dollars worth of trades. Think about that. The man who’s supposed to be running the country, instead he’s running a trading desk.

And what a trader he is. He bought Nvidia stock on January 6th of this year, and one week later, his commerce department approved Nvidia chip sales to China, a $50 billion opportunity for the company. He bought more Nvidia in February. A week later, Nvidia announced a blockbuster deal with Meta.

What are the odds, trade after trade, perfectly timed two decisions only his government knew were coming?

And these are only the deals that we know about.

No one put this historic level of corruption in perspective better than the Vice President, J.D. Vance, who recently told a crowd that if Watergate took place today, it would be a 12-hour story.

Think about that for a moment. If the president broke into the Democratic Party headquarters, bugged the place, used hush money to cover it up, used the CIA to thwart the FBI’s investigation of it. Lied to the country about it. J.D. Vance says that would be a mere blip on the screen for them today.

He is telling us, the Vice President is telling us, that the corruption of the Trump regime, his regime, is so pervasive, they have so successfully normalized it, that Nixon’s behavior would seem quaint. Congratulations, JD. You’ve made the most egregious corruption commonplace. Well done. You should be so very proud.

After Watergate, Congress passed a host of reforms to constrain a future corrupt president. They included limits on campaign finance, safeguards to wall off presidential misuse of the Justice Department, New oversight mechanisms for the intelligence community. Offices of Inspector General to root out fraud and much more.

What is to be done. It now falls on us in this generation to usher in a whole new set of reforms to address a far broader range of lawlessness and corruption.

During the first Trump administration, I introduced the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a package of reforms meant to address the many violations of law and norms by the president at that time. We have reintroduced it in the Senate, but as the list of laws and guardrails shattered multiplies, the need for corrective action must multiply with it.

Just this week, I have introduced three additional bills meant to attack conflicts of interest, keep convicted fraudsters out of the government and tighten our laws against the bribery of public officials. In the weeks and months to come, we must propose the best laws that we can, meant to constrain the worst impulses of human nature.

But we must be mindful of this truth as well. And that is, no set of laws, no matter how well conceived, no Constitution, no matter how brilliantly constructed, can protect our lives, our liberty, our prosperity if elected officials are unwilling to live up to their oaths or to accept the truth or to put their country over their party. None of it will be enough.

We must also return prosperity to America. We must make it possible when people are working hard they can earn a good living for themselves and their families. When people see the lives that their parents had as better, all too many are willing to entertain and put their fate in the hands of any demagogue who promises that they alone can fix it.

Our democracy will not be on solid ground until our economy is working again for all Americans.

When the founders gathered in Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787, they debated a great many things. But one fear united them across every divide, the fear of corruption. They had just thrown off a king. They had risked everything, their lives, their fortunes, their honor, to build something new.

A republic, a government of laws, not men. And they knew with a clarity born of hard experience that a republic would not long endure if leaders used public power for private gain. That’s why they wrote a constitution of checks and balances. One that set the ambition of one branch of government against the other. And included provisions meant to address the personal weaknesses and failings of a president, any president.

Because they understood human nature. They understood those in power would be tempted to enrich themselves. They understood that foreign governments would try to buy our leaders with gifts and payments and favors. They imagined something like what we are witnessing today.

But what they may not have imagined, what they may have exceeded even their worst fears, was a president so brazen, so shameless, so relentless, and so creative in the pursuit of personal profit. And a Congress so feckless, so loath to confront him, so lacking an ambition for its own power and institution, so willing to let him profit at the public expense, with payout after payout after payout.

The snuffbox factor. In 1785, Benjamin Franklin was serving as our ambassador to France. The King of France gave him a gift, a snuffbox encrusted with diamonds, a gesture of diplomatic friendship. In Paris, such gifts were routine, business as usual. But back home in America, it sparked a controversy. Franklin had to ask Congress for permission to keep it, and the Congress, then under the Articles of Confederation, granted it.

But the concern that a leader less scrupulous than Franklin would be tempted, would be compromised, lingered. So, when delegates gathered in Philadelphia two years later to write our Constitution, they remembered the snuffbox. The first draft said nothing about foreign gifts or emoluments. The final draft did, because they remembered the snuffbox.

Edmund Randolph, one of the Constitution’s framers, later explained it this way. This restriction was provided to prevent corruption. A box was presented to our ambassador by the king of our allies. It was thought proper in order to exclude corruption and foreign influence to prohibit anyone in office from receiving or holding any emoluments from foreign states.

They wrote it into the Constitution because of a snuff box.

Imagine. And now we have a president accepting a $400 million jet? Can you imagine what the founders would have thought of that?

We have a president earning more than a billion dollars from a cryptocurrency company, his family controls funded in large part by foreign interests. The founders understood that once you accept the first gift, the second becomes easier and the third, and soon you’re not making decisions based on what’s right for the country, you’re making them based on who’s been generous to you. As president.

Bottom line. My colleagues, the White House has become a marketplace and the presidency a crooked family business.

Every one of these transactions, the dozens we know about and the many more we surely don’t, raises profound questions about the influence of foreign governments and the buying and selling of American policy, American justice, and American democracy itself.

Every single day this continues. Our democracy is weakened. Our institutions are compromised. The office of the presidency is degraded. And the costs come out of your pocket. Out of your pocket.

But here’s the thing. The founders and their warning to us about corruption also gave us the tools to fight it. They gave us a free press to investigate and expose it. They gave us a separation of powers so that no branch could become too powerful. We have those powers in this body. In this body to stop it. If only we will use them.

And they gave us above all A government of the people. The ultimate authority. The final word. And it will take all of us demanding something better. Voting for something better. Refusing to accept that this is normal or inevitable or just the way things are. A 12-hour story.

Our story is not 12 hours long. But 250 years old. It is the story of a country that began as an improbable experiment, where people believed that we had sufficient virtue to be self-governing, that we did not need to be ruled by a despot, a country where what’s right matters, where the truth matters, and where decency, basic decency matters.

That is the story of the birth of this country. And that can be the story of its future if we are willing to fight for it.

Adam Schiff, 66, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2024, after serving 12 terms in the House of Representatives. He was a leader in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

Image: Schiff prosecutes the case in the Senate impeachment trial against Trump in Jan. 2020 (The New Yorker).

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Ian Baucke “got the political bug” early, he says.

Born and raised in Santa Barbara, he headed to Washington, D.C., after his 2017 graduation from San Marcos High School to attend George Washington University, one of the nation’s premier training grounds for political leaders.

Blocks from the White House and Capitol Hill, he earned an undergraduate degree in Political Science and a master’s in Professional Studies in Political Management, although the pandemic temporarily disrupted the latter pursuit. Back home during lockdown, he dipped into some local campaigns and causes while also landing a remote gig with a nonprofit that distributed federal relief funds to counties.

“I got involved in local politics during what I call ‘the spring break that never ended,’ as I started grad school during Covid,” Baucke said in an interview. “And those experiences really made me decide that the local level is where I would want to invest my time as someone interested in a career in public service.”

Today, the 27-year-old, self-confessed policy nerd is a leading candidate for the open City Council seat in Santa Barbara’s District 5, his campaign bolstered by an interlocking network of plugged-in personal, political and policy alliances.

A Democratic county committee member, he won a coveted spot on the party’s endorsement slate card unanimously. A district representative on state Sen. Monique Limón’s staff, he earns an annual state salary of $69,600, according to payroll records. He’s known around City Hall, as the son of city Planning Commissioner John Baucke; as the chair of the city’s advisory Transportation and Circulation Committee; and as a public advocate for Strong Towns Santa Barbara — the local chapter of a national progressive urban planning coalition best known here for its successful, absolutist crusade to keep the State Street “Promenade” closed to traffic.

“I think there’s a bit of a misconception out there that we have a Chicago-style party boss machine or something like that,” Baucke told Newsmakers, when asked about the Democratic Party endorsement.

“So yeah, I show up when I can with groups like Strong Towns or the Tenants Union or the Democratic Party, because I found them and I joined them intentionally because they aligned with my values,” he said. “And so that’s why I have the opinions I do. But I’m always happy to talk to folks who have a difference and work it out.”

State of play. District 5 includes Upper State Street, part of San Roque, Hitchcock, Hidden Valley and other nearby neighborhoods. It is relatively affluent, with the highest share among the six council districts of bachelor’s degree holders, according to U.S. Census data, and over half of households owning their own home.

Having moved back home for good in 2024, Baucke is one of three candidates who have pulled papers to run, with film producer and community volunteer Cevin Cathell and financial planner James Zurlinden also vying for the post.

In the interview, Baucke expressed confidence in the ideological correctness of his economic and political analysis of what ails Santa Barbara, but said he remains flexible in crafting policy prescriptions for dealing with it.

“I try to talk to people with a diverse set of perspectives, but I do land on positions that align with my values and what I think is the best path forward for the community,” he said. “And I think that’s a value add for voters.”

“Just growing up in this community as a local, so many of my friends and folks of my generation and beyond have been priced out and displaced — folks who would have stayed in Santa Barbara,” he added. “Our tax dollars were spent educating them and they were invested here. And then through no fault of their own, they’ve been pushed out.”

“Everybody in Santa Barbara … is making a financial sacrifice to live in this community,” Baucke said. “And I think the city council needs to recognize that and honor that and get to work on the policies that we need, especially affordable housing, to make a difference and make it easier for people to live here.

“So that’s kind of the thesis for my campaign,” he said.

Fun with faction. Asked if he’s concerned about political polarization in a small city — as indicated by recent 4-to-3 council votes on a host of long-term consequential policies, from rent control to State Street to the budget — Baucke said divisiveness would decrease if Democratic candidates win more seats.

“I think the reality is that you have an overwhelmingly liberal city,” he said. “And so you’re going to have more of a liberal majority on the council inherently, going forward now that we’ve increased voter participation by moving to even-year elections and district elections.

“And so I would like to see more consensus — I’m really excited about the other (Democratic) candidates running in Districts 4 and 6,” he added. “And if people want to see more consensus … they should vote for us, because you’re going to have a lot fewer 4-to-3 votes if that’s the case.”

With city council seats required by the state Constitution to be non-partisan, we asked him to identify anything in the local Democratic Party’s 7,800-word platform, with which he disagrees: “I struggle to think of an example,” Baucke said, acknowledging that he has not read the document closely, “and I think that just happens to be what my politics are.”

“I’m a progressive,” he said. “That’s the only label I subscribe to — other than that I’m a progressive Democrat.”

“And I believe I’m fighting for working-class Santa Barbarans who are being pushed out. And I think we need a city council that isn’t afraid to say, ‘These are the problems and these are the solutions that we believe in and that we’re going to fight for,’” he added. “People are free to disagree with any of them, but I think they’d appreciate knowing where you stand.

Baucke shrugged off questions about any appearance of a conflict of interest between his duties as a council member and his simultaneous service to Sen. Limón, one of the most powerful politicians in Sacramento, who has her own, far-flung and complex policy and political agenda.

“My day job is my day job,” he said. “I have the utmost respect for Senator Limón. It’s an absolute privilege to work for her. We’re focused day-to-day in the office on delivering results for constituents and helping them … So I don’t see it as a conflict. It is something to be mindful of and to be transparent about and navigate.”

On the issues. Our conversation with Baucke is the latest in a summer-long series Newsmakers is doing with candidates for council and mayor. In our campaign interviews, we ask the candidates for their views on four key issues. Here’s what he said about them:

Budget. Baucke said he does not see any current budget expense that should be cut, and his major fiscal concern is identifying a steady and reliable revenue stream for the city’s Local Housing Trust Fund. “I think there’s a lot of revenue possibilities that have a direct nexus to affordable housing that are the most appropriate. Vacancy tax, residential and commercial, I would support. Real estate transfer tax I think is something worth looking into … The number one expense for the city, as it is for any organization, is people — the staff and their salaries and their benefits. And my preference is to not cut any of them. The city residents deserve the full-service city that we’ve built over the years and have come to expect. And I’m committed to finding every possible way to maintain those services.”

Rent control. “I support rent stabilization … This is about preserving the population, the people who define and make up Santa Barbara, and their ability to live here. If we don’t make policy actions like this, this town is going to wither away. That’s just the demographic reality that we’ve seen over the years. And I don’t want that to happen, and I’m going to do everything in my power from a policymaking perspective if I’m elected to prevent it. And if that requires us standing up to special interests, I get it … But I’m committed to making sure there’s a process for property owners who have unexpected repairs they need to make for tenants, to find ways to amortize that. It’s not about being punitive or picking sides between one economic group or another. It’s about preventing an increase in homelessness.”

State Street. For Baucke, reopening any portion of downtown State Street to traffic is a non-starter. However, he said the proliferation of e-bikes has created problems that require further regulation. “I kind of think that we ended up going with the worst of both worlds by putting a giant bike lane down the middle with no actual separation. Because what it tells people is, ‘This is my space.’ And now we have this proliferation of both legal and illegal e-bikes. A lot of what you see there are going 30, 40 miles an hour and are not even street legal … But we need to get it under control. I believe that we should be impounding any vehicle that’s not street legal and that’s being ridden.”

Ranked-choice voting. “Ranked-choice voting is a great system. It’s definitely preferable to the one that we have now … if we’re able to do it in a way that gets other races incorporated, I think that would be preferable. But it is objectively a better system. So yes, I would be supportive of that or a runoff system.”

Check out our conversation with Ian Baucke via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include candidates Alexander Stoeber, James Zurlinden, Wendy Sims-Moten and Kristen Sneddon. Here is who we’ve spoken with to date:

District 4

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16.

• Devon Wardlow, candidate for District 4, July 21.

District 5

• Cevin Cathell, candidate for District 5, July 23.

• Ian Baucke, candidate for District 5, July 26.
  

District 6

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

Mayor

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

Topics A, B and C on Santa Barbara’s local news front this week was the heartbreaking death by drowning of a puppy named Bruce at a popular Eastside doggie day care facility.

On a new episode of Newsmakers TV, News-Press reporter Kaitlin Sweeney joins the gang to reprise her reporting on the viral story, which not only triggered a street protest outside the shuttered premises of Camp Canine but also generated sickening and detestable social media threats of violence aimed at the business operators.

Ryan P. Cruz checks in with a preview of next week’s big City Council vote on a sweeping rent control ordinance, which will cascade through the political landscape — as Josh Molina explains in breaking down how the contentious issue is shaping campaigns for mayor and three open council seats.

Plus: a big waterfront rally on behalf of free and fair elections; an important community project to equip kids with back-to-school supplies; seniors in despair over being displaced by a major construction project at the Presidio Springs Senior Housing Complex; and the genial host’s head explodes at language-police meddling.

All this and more, right here, right now, on Newsmakers TV.

Check out the latest episode via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Image: Bruce the English Bulldog, 1, who died by accidental drowning at Camp Canine (courtesy photo via Santa Barbara News-Press).

Cevin Cathell worked for decades in the production side of the film industry and says the skills she developed — administering budgets, organizing complex projects, managing personality clashes, herding cats — equip her for the duties of serving on Santa Barbara’s City Council.

A political novice, Cathell came to Santa Barbara in 2000 and has paid community dues for a quarter-century as a low-profile volunteer with the SB Women’s Club, the Music Academy and the Film Festival. Now she is seeking the District 5 council seat being vacated by the termed-out Eric Friedman, who is running for mayor.

In an interview, she said she was prompted to run for office for the first time by watching the current council, where long-range consequential decisions like rent control, the future of State Street and even the city budget are being decided on 4-to-3 votes — which she said is leading to “polarization” across the city.

“We are at a crossroads now in Santa Barbara — the polarization is not good for the city,” Cathell (her name is pronounced Keh-vin Ka-THELL) told Newsmakers.

“I’m at a point where I feel like I can give back — I have the skills, I have the organizational skills, I have the budgeting skills,” the 67-year-old Cathell added. “I feel like my strengths, in everything I’ve done, have been to help bring people together — not necessarily in a kumbaya way, but just being able to talk to people and get them to work together.

“I don’t know if that’s gonna be possible, frankly, but I’m gonna do my darndest,” she said.

State of play. District 5 includes Upper State Street, part of San Roque, Hitchcock, Hidden Valley and other nearby neighborhoods. U.S. Census data shows it is relatively affluent, with the highest share among the six council districts of bachelor’s degree holders, and over half of households owning their own home.

Cathell is one of three candidates who have pulled papers to run, with Democratic Party-endorsed Ian Baucke, an aide to Sen. Monique Limón, and financial planner James Zurlinden also vying for the post.

Cathell’s commentary on key policy questions is heavy on platitudes — “we’ve got to bring everyone to the table” — and short on specifics — “I don’t have the whole entire answer; I wish I did” — but she speaks clearly in broad strokes about the big issues facing the city: she opposes rent control and most new taxes, and favors experimenting with returning cars to several blocks of upper State Street on the downtown “promenade.”

“We need to develop more retail, and we need to support the retail that we have already,” she said. “Building affordable housing downtown will bring more businesses down there as well, and of course that will increase sales tax revenues.”

*** Cevin vs. DCC. A lifelong Democrat who was raised by liberal, politically active parents in North Carolina, Cathell said she sought the Democratic Party endorsement but was surprised and disappointed to learn that the county committee had “handpicked” Baucke as their candidate early on. In any case, she was disqualified because of her opposition to rent control, a determinative issue for the party.

She gave this account of her dealings with the party:

“From the very beginning, when I started telling people that I was thinking about running, they were so encouraging — they said, ‘We’re thrilled; however, you have to know that the DCC, the Democratic Central Committee, has chosen somebody else. They’ve handpicked somebody else.’”

“And I said, ‘Fine, I’m going to go for their endorsement anyway, even though I know that they’re going to choose this other person…And so, yes, I went up against the big machine. I did get an interview with the Democratic Central Committee. It was not the most positive interview I have ever done, but I knew going in that they were not going to choose me.

“I feel that they have chosen somebody who has gone with the party line, which is more of a socialist-democratic platform, rather than opening up to all of us …

“I’m not using this as a stepping stone. I’m doing this because I really care about what’s going on in Santa Barbara. And I’m willing to sacrifice and use all my talents to actually try to do the right thing for Santa Barbara … and not be beholden to an agenda.”

*** (Update 9:08 p.m. 7-23-26: About an hour after Newsmakers posted this piece, we received an email from DCC Chair Christian Alonso taking issue with her version of events in which he stated:

“I have great respect for Cevin and the energy she's bringing to this race, and I also understand that campaigns are hard, personal, and often exhausting. But I want to be direct: the characterization of our endorsement process in her Newsmakers interview is not accurate.

The Santa Barbara County Democratic Party's endorsement process is open to every registered Democrat who chooses to seek it. Every candidate who applies receives the same interview process before our Central Committee, made up of elected representatives from across the county. No candidate is chosen in advance, and no outcome is predetermined before candidates have had the chance to make their case.

I take seriously any suggestion that our process was unfair, and I've reached out to Cevin directly about her concerns. But I want your viewers and readers to know clearly: our committee's decisions reflect the votes of its members, made through an open process, not a "handpicked" outcome decided in advance. I wish Cevin well in her campaign and look forward to a race focused on the issues that matter to District 5 and city voters”).

On the issues. Our conversation with Cathell is the latest in a summer-long series Newsmakers is doing with candidates for council and mayor. In our campaign interviews, we ask the candidates for their views on four key issues. Here’s what she said about them.

Rent control. Cathell said she opposes the rent stabilization ordinance before council next week — specifically the 60 percent of Consumer Price Index limit on rent increases — and thinks it will discourage construction of new rental units. “We need more affordable housing, and I’m not sure that this one-pronged approach is going to get us there. It is going to work in the short term for a very small number of people, but I do believe that it will discourage more housing, and we need more affordable housing. That’s the only way we’re gonna get out of this.”

State Street. Cathell said she greatly enjoys the so-called “arts district” and the lower four blocks of State Street, which she thinks should remain closed to traffic, but that the city should be more flexible with the closed upper blocks. “There are a lot of people on the upper part of State Street that are suffering, and those businesses may not be there for much longer. We need a more vibrant downtown, and if opening it up is part of the way to do it, great … Open it up with the option of closing it.”

Budget. Cathell said she might support increasing the city’s Transient Occupancy Tax but opposes a so-called “vacancy tax” on unused downtown properties or housing units. She declined to identify any specific savings in the city’s $257 million general fund, deferring to “the experts” on City Hall staff. “But we are very heavily taxed here. Personally, part of the reason I’m running is because it’s hard to live here. It’s very expensive. And when you are being taxed heavily and your insurance is going up and inflation is going up, it’s very difficult to keep going. And so I think we need to get creative.”

Ranked-choice voting. Cathell said she has not studied the notion of changing the city’s election system but would be willing to support putting it on the ballot in a regular even-year election, but not as a special election measure.

Check out our complete conversation with Cevin Cathell via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include candidates Ian Baucke, Alexander Stoeber, James Zurlinden, Wendy Sims-Moten and Kristen Sneddon. Here is who we’ve spoken with to date:

District 4

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16.

• Devon Wardlow, candidate for District 4, July 21.

District 6

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

Mayor

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

(Editor’s note: Last week, Donald Trump laid a major egg at the White House, when he delivered an hysterical primetime rant about his long-discredited claims of fraud in the 2020 election, failing yet again to offer any Actual Facts or evidence, after promising new bombshell information. Amid Trump’s flop, however, it is crucial to understand that he has already activated the entire federal government in a campaign to interfere in the midterm elections, in order to elude accountability imposed by a Democratic Congress. In this gift subscription report published even before the debunked speech, a team of New York Times reporters deconstructs the scheme. -jr).

By Karen Yourish, Nick Corasanti and Charlie Smart /The New York Times

President Trump is trying to use the levers of the federal government, along with personal influence over state and local lawmakers, to reshape the rules governing the 2026 midterms and future elections in extraordinary ways.

Many of these efforts have been blocked by courts, stymied by the Constitution or stopped in Congress. But the relentless assault by the president on the electoral process — both administratively and rhetorically — is likely to sow doubt and lay groundwork for extensive challenges to election results.

Agencies and officials across the federal government have, at the direction of Trump, undertaken dozens of actions grounded in novel strategies and aimed at insulating Republicans from potential losses in November. Those actions fall into six major categories (and some fall into more than one).

1-Taking steps to nationalize elections

Justice Department; DHS; USPS

At least 14 actions,, including lawsuits against Utah and other states for failing to produce voter registration lists; proposed rule to control mail-in ballots;

The United States Constitution puts control over elections in the hands of the states and grants Congress the ability to pass federal election legislation. It gives no explicit authority to the executive branch.

But in early February, Trump said he wanted the Republican-led federal government to “nationalize” or “take over” the running of elections. “A state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” he said.

Trump had already, in March 2025, signed an executive order seeking broad authority over elections. The order required documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and mandated the return of mail ballots by Election Day. Those were almost universally blocked by courts, which found that the order clearly violated the separation of powers and exceeded the president’s authority.

But another provision, which instructed the U.S. attorney general to hunt for and prosecute election crimes, has been used to justify sprawling efforts by the Justice Department related to elections.

The Justice Department began demanding the complete voter files — state databases of registered voters that include sensitive personal identifying information — from every state as it worked to compile the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected.

More than half the states — many under Democratic control but some run by Republicans, too — have resisted this effort. In response, the Justice Department has sued at least 30 states and territories, seeking to force them to turn over their unredacted voter rolls. At least 16 states have provided or indicated an intention to turn over their lists, according to tracking from the Brennan Center for Justice.

In January, Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, requested that Minnesota turn over its voter rolls to “bring back law and order” amid protests against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Minnesota officials dismissed the request as “outrageous.”

Though the Justice Department has yet to win a single lawsuit — it has lost at least 10 so far, as well as one federal appeal — election officials and Democrats fear the battle over voting records may be used in a post-election effort to challenge, discredit or spread disinformation about midterm results.

Acting on the same executive order, the Department of Homeland Security has been combing voter rolls for noncitizens who have voted. It has not found evidence of widespread fraud, and a federal judge barred the administration from letting states use a federal citizenship data tool to screen their voter rolls.

In March 2026, Mr. Trump signed a second executive order regarding voting policy, this time seeking to create state-by-state lists of citizens that would be used to determine voting eligibility and restrict the use of mail ballots. It was immediately challenged by nearly half the states and multiple voting rights groups. A federal judge sided with the states’ argument, blocking key provisions of the executive order.

Before that court decision, the United States Postal Service proposed a rule that would allow the agency to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that didn’t turn over voter rolls to the federal government. The postmaster general has said the service will abide by any court order.

Separate from the executive orders, senior Justice Department officials last year began exploring whether they could bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the administration determined they had not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems.

Democrats fear that the president could weaponize federal agencies on or after Election Day. Trump told The New York Times last year that he regretted not seizing voting machines after the 2020 election.

Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, defended the president’s actions and policies regarding elections.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered noncitizen voters,” she said in a statement.

Jackson also pointed to a few specific examples of noncitizens who were charged with illegal voting and noted other ongoing investigations. She reiterated the president’s desire to pass federal voting legislation that would enshrine many of his voting objectives into law.

“Noncitizens voting is a crime,” Jackson said. “Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

2-Trying to tighten voting restrictions

Justice Department, U.S.P.S.

At least 21 actions: Dismissed Biden-era lawsuit that accused Georgia of Black voter suppression. Filed voter purge lawsuit in North Carolina.

While Trump’s attempts to use executive orders to change elections have been largely blocked by courts, the president and his allies have found other avenues to add new restrictions to voting that are designed to help them win at the ballot box.

Soon after Trump took office, the Justice Department dropped or halted all of its open voting rights lawsuits that preceded Mr. Trump’s inauguration, easing the path for partisan gerrymanders and voting laws to withstand legal scrutiny. That included dropping a lawsuit against a voting law in Georgia.

The number of lawyers working in the voting-rights arm of the Justice Department, one of the government’s critical bulwarks against civil rights abuses in voting and elections, has dwindled from about 30 at the end of the Biden administration to the single digits after resignations, cuts and reassignments.

Last year, the Trump administration joined a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee against Mississippi that said the state’s policy of accepting mail and absentee ballots that were postmarked by Election Day but arrived in a short period afterward violated federal election law. (Far more Democrats than Republicans vote by mail.)

Recently, the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi’s grace period.

The president has also sought to force Congress to pass voting legislation that would codify many parts of his executive orders into federal law. The legislation, called the SAVE America Act, would, among other things, require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote as well as photo identification to vote. It would also require states to submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans lack the votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster and pass the legislation, but the president has continued to pressure Republicans to force a vote, threatening not to sign any nonbudgetary bills until it is passed.

3-Pushing for mid-decade redistricting

Enacted at the state level, not via federal agencies

Perhaps no strategy embraced by Trump was more explicitly designed to prevent a midterm loss than the mid-decade redistricting wars of the past year.

Last summer, Trump and his allies at the White House began encouraging Texas Republicans to take the rare step of redrawing their congressional maps to try to save the party’s endangered majority.

By November, forcing Republican-led states to redraw their maps was at the center of Trump’s strategy to win the midterms and prevent Democratic control of the House of Representatives.

Texas, North Carolina and Missouri quickly redrew their congressional maps, netting seven new Republican-leaning districts. Ohio redrew its map as required by state law, adding as many as two new Republican-leaning districts.

Democrats responded by introducing aggressive gerrymanders in California and Virginia, which appeared to bring the redistricting wars to a draw — until the Supreme Court weakened a key component of the Voting Rights Act in April. After the ruling, Tennessee redrew its maps to eliminate the lone Democratic-held seat in the state, and Louisiana and Alabama quickly followed with new maps that would each eliminate another Democratic-controlled district.

At the same time, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the Democratic gerrymander in the state, effectively eliminating four new Democratic-leaning districts and handing Republicans a multi-seat structural advantage heading into the midterms.

4-Cutting election security

Justice Department, D.H.S.

Disbanded F.B.I. task force tracking foreign influence operations. Froze election cybersecurity work

The Trump administration has gutted key elements of the nation’s election security infrastructure. Experts warn that the changes could reduce visibility into nationwide cyberattacks and foreign influence campaigns while making it more difficult for state and local election officials to coordinate defensive operations.

Early in his second term, Trump signed two directives that administration officials have used to justify the dismantling of these programs.

The administration has weakened the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, terminated an F.B.I. task force aimed at combatting foreign influence in U.S. elections and ended a program responsible for sharing threat intelligence with state and local officials.

The actions are rooted in longstanding grievances from Trump and his allies, who have argued that, under the guise of fighting misinformation and disinformation, the Biden administration infringed on free speech.

In his first budget request to Congress, Trump proposed eliminating CISA’s disinformation offices, accusing them of “conspiring against the First Amendment rights of President Trump and his supporters.”

Trump’s attacks on CISA also reflect his animosity toward Christopher Krebs, the agency’s former director who oversaw efforts to secure the 2020 election and infuriated Mr. Trump by publicly debunking his lies about that election.

5-Undermining faith in the electoral system by questioning previous results

Director of National Intelligence. Justice Department

At least 19 actions: Requested access to inspect 2020 voting equipment in Missouri. Demanded election records from Wayne County, Mich.

Trump refuses to concede that he lost the 2020 election and has used the White House to both legitimize and seek evidence supporting his debunked conspiracy theories.

On his first day back in office, he granted clemency to the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Later, he introduced a page on the White House website falsely accusing Democrats of promoting a “gaslighting narrative” in their efforts to certify the “stolen election.”

Trump also ordered Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, to help manage an F.B.I. investigation of his baseless claims of voting irregularities in Fulton County, Ga. The move came after a team led by Gabbard seized voting machines from Puerto Rico to examine them for vulnerabilities.

The administration has also issued subpoenas for 2020 election records in Maricopa County, Ariz.; requested access to voting equipment used in Missouri; and, based on disproven allegations about the 2020 election, demanded 2024 election records from Wayne County, Mich. Last month, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles broke with decades of precedent in predicting election fraud charges related to California’s primary races while votes were still being counted.

In May, the Justice Department announced it was setting up a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed to be victims of government “weaponization,” which would most likely include people who stormed the Capitol in 2021. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said on June 2 that the fund would not move forward, but Trump later said he still loved the idea.

Trump has stocked his second administration with people who are sympathetic to his denial of the 2020 election results. These officials have been put into positions where they could play a role in undermining this year’s and future elections.

Trump also has installed election deniers to key positions throughout the government, including the White House (Clay Parikh); the Justice Department (Kash Patel, Harmeet Dhillon, Sigal Chattah, Jeanine Pirro, Dan Bishop, Kurt Olsen, Eric Neff, Christopher Gardner, Meagan Frederick, Joseph Voiland); the Defense Department (Patrick Weaver; Marci McCarthy); Department of Homeland Security (Markwayne Mullin, Heather Honey, Gregg Phillips, David Harvilicz).

6-Punishing those who have worked against election denialism

Justice Department. Director of National Intelligence. C.I.A.

At least 15 actions: Fired more than a dozen prosecutors hired to investigate Jan. 6. Revoked security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials. Indicted James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.

While Trump has long used grievance as a political tool, retribution against his perceived enemies has become a centerpiece of his second administration. Much of that retribution has targeted anyone who has investigated the Jan. 6 attack or pushed back on his 2020 election denial.

Within hours of retaking office, Trump signed an executive order asserting that the Biden administration had engaged “in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents” and directing federal agencies to seek evidence that it did so.

The administration has purged F.B.I. agents and government attorneys who worked on investigations of Trump or his allies, revoked security clearances from dozens of people as punishment for alleged misconduct and opened investigations into Trump’s supposed “enemies.”

It has also sought to target ordinary citizens. In April, the Justice Department issued a federal grand jury subpoena demanding the identities of every person who worked on the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga. The county’s motion to block the subpoena characterized it as intended “to target, harass and punish the president’s perceived political opponents.” The effort remains tied up in the courts.

As the only president in United States history to seek to overturn an election result, Trump has spent years using social media and campaign rallies to sow doubt about the integrity of U.S. elections. He continues to do so, but now he also wields the authority to direct his cabinet secretaries and other political appointees to implement his agenda.

All of Trump’s directives underlying the above agency actions are based on several debunked election-related conspiracy theories, including:

• His claim that undocumented immigrants vote illegally in large numbers.

“They want illegal immigrants to come in, criminals, doesn’t matter because they want to get their votes.”— Republican fundraiser, March 25, 2026

• His spreading of debunked claims of widespread fraud related to mail-in ballots …

“Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots.”— White House remarks, Aug. 18, 2025

• … and voting machines.

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”— Truth Social post, Aug. 18, 2025

• Broader unsubstantiated claims he has made of widespread voting fraud that include people voting multiple times or assuming dead people’s identities to vote.

“Every day you read in the papers about more and more fraud that’s discovered.”— White House remarks, April 9, 2025

• And finally, his belief in a “deep state” embedded in the government that has worked against him and other Republicans:

“We’re going to find the deep-state actors who have buried into government, fire them and escort them from federal buildings.” — Campaign rally, Jan. 28, 2023

Bottom line. While many of Trump’s directives have been blocked or delayed by the courts, election experts say that their potential harm remains significant, and that some of the efforts have already eroded faith in the process.

“The point of so much of this campaign is not actually to change policy because they know they don’t actually have the authority to change policy,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program.

“It’s to inject distrust and confusion into our elections, both to discourage people from participating and to lay the groundwork for calling elections into question after the fact.”

Image: Pro-Trump rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the first time in its history the United States did not have a post-election peaceful transfer of power (ABC).

Last week, Planning Commissioner Devon Wardlow entered Santa Barbara’s wide-open race for the District 4 city council seat with a campaign announcement that ran to 591 words.

None of those words was “cannabis.”

Which seemed a notable oversight, given that the 37-year-old Wardlow spent the past six years employed locally and around the state in the retail sector of the contentious pot industry.

In a Newsmakers interview, Wardlow for the first time in the campaign discussed her work as a public affairs executive and lobbyist for several retail cannabis companies, a background that has drawn grumbling among some local Democratic insiders. In 2019 and 2020, Wardlow worked as director of public affairs for Coastal Dispensary, and then spent four years as vice president for the statewide Embarc Cannabis Dispensaries — a job she left in February for a gig with a traffic safety company.

Mindful of deep community and political scars inflicted by county government’s past reckless push to make Santa Barbara California’s epicenter of cannabis cultivation, she contrasted the retail sector with cultivation, described the former as a local “success” and portrayed her work in it as a template for how she would approach an elected post on city council:

“I’ve never worked in cultivation,” she said. “My role was really focused on municipal ordinance development in dozens of municipalities throughout the state. And really the goal was — cannabis is legal from a retail perspective throughout the state — how do we implement this in a responsible and appropriate way in communities throughout the state?”

She added:

“So I would work with city council members and the community to really develop a super-regulated approach to ensuring that if cannabis is going to happen in your community, it’s done right and really tailored to your community.

“And I did that through identifying shared priorities with folks that really disagreed with the policy. And I think that’s a very appropriate and important part of crafting policy. So I worked with former chiefs of police, heads of youth-serving organizations, school boards — all through the lens that they were not supportive of cannabis, but they were supportive of addressing the illegal market and actively and meaningfully investing in youth drug prevention and education.

“I think that from a retail perspective, cannabis is viewed as a success, definitely. Santa Barbara was one of the first cities to move forward with retail cannabis implementation, and it was actually used as an example of how to do this in an appropriate manner. It was a capped market — three licenses with very appropriate zoning. So yes, I would say that retail cannabis has been a success.”

Personal experience. A UCSB graduate, Wardlow moved to Santa Barbara when she was 13 and has had a whirlwind career that includes a variety of experience, among it:

• Government (Obama’s White House intern and Department of Labor aide)

• Politics (campaign operative for Hillary Clinton and Lois Capps)

• Tech (public-facing gigs at Facebook and Lyft)

• Community planning (first appointed by city council in 2022, she remains the board’s most high-profile and ardent advocate for new housing projects)

When she discusses her desire to be elected to council, the fervent pace of Wardlow’s professional experience manifests in turbo-charged torrents of words — a verbal cascade that melds policy-speak, planning jargon, tech idioms and progressive political bromides with a spirited passion that animates her presentation and produces statements like this:

“And so I really believe that my approach of really working together, identifying those shared values and priorities, and then working to do the policy work to execute on that vision is how we ensure that any types of developments that we do are aligned and complement our broader goals around protecting what we love about Santa Barbara while also meaningfully addressing the challenges that we’re facing.”

Politics and policy. Pro-rent control and pro-housing, she enters the four-way District 4 race well-positioned from the standpoint of campaign organization, having won the influential Democratic Party endorsement and raised about $50,000 to date.

District 4 includes the Upper East, Riviera, San Roque and other nearby neighborhoods. Fifteen Tuesdays before the Nov. 3 election, Wardlow faces three rivals who have pulled papers to run: former city council member Jason Dominguez, corporate consultant Genevieve Taft-Vazquez and retired tech executive Monte Wilson (whose Newsmakers interviews are here, here and here, respectively).

In our conversation, Wardlow said her résumé reflects pragmatic skills in building consensus and forging compromise on complex and contentious policy matters — abilities she argued are well-suited for Santa Barbara’s political moment.

Via the State Street Master Plan and robust plans for new housing downtown, she contended, the city is poised for generational change, and her experience can help push it through.

“I really think it’s important that we focus, and we stop scaring people that we’re trying to put housing in high fire zones, full stop,” she said. “That is not something that I would be supportive of. I believe that we need to focus housing and do the policy work necessary to actually start to meaningfully deliver on the housing that we say we want to do by focusing in that downtown where I think that there’s both community support and political support to really make progress there.”

“From the state, we are being asked to build 8,000 units,” Wardlow added. “We are not going to hit those numbers. I think that if we can make the meaningful impact that the State Street Master Plan calls out — which is 1,000 to 2,000 units downtown — that would be substantial. And so I think we need to ground the conversation in what’s realistic.”

On the issues. In our campaign interviews, we ask all the candidates for their views on four key issues. Here’s what Wardlow said about them.

Rent control. “I do not think it will increase the supply of housing. I’m strongly supportive of it from the perspective that it is obvious and critical that we protect community members and that they can afford to stay here. The rise of rent costs is definitely not commensurate with the rise of wages … And I think that we need to use every tool in our tool chest to address housing affordability so that our community can stay the community that we all love.”

Budget. “I’m supportive of a residential vacancy tax … I think that through all the budget conversations that we’ve had, what has come out is that we’re not going to be able to cut our way out of this problem. And so I think it really has to do first with evaluation … And then I think it’s really the obvious things. Number one, consulting contracts. We need to really reevaluate those and ensure that we are not leveraging consultants for things that we as a community have a brain trust that we can probably do better … the second part is really identifying vacant positions … and holding those positions open for as long as we possibly can.”

State Street. Wardlow believes that all nine blocks of downtown State Street should remain closed to traffic and described the current scene as “vibrant.” As for future downtown development: “I’m focused on the maximum (height of new buildings) — to me that would be 60 feet. And I think that we can do this in a way where it can still really hold the architectural value and the charm and character that make Santa Barbara so unique … So I don’t think that we can’t meaningfully start to address and make good on the vision of the State Street Master Plan and retain the character and charm of Santa Barbara. I really believe we can do both of those things.”

Ranked-choice voting. “I’d be supportive of it. I think it really comes down to: are the voters supportive of it? So obviously I would turn it over to them to make that decision. And then I think it also matters what the cost of implementing it would be. So are other cities in our county supportive of this? And if so, I think that would be amazing, because then we can split the cost of implementing and getting it on the ballot. But yes, I would totally be supportive of that.”

Check out our interview with Devon Wardlow via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include candidates Ian Baucke, Cevin Cathel, Alexander Stoeber, James Zurlinden, Wendy Sims-Moten and Kristen Sneddon. Here is who we’ve spoken with to date:

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16.

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

(Editor’s note: The June 9 killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents in Houston was the 10th fatal shooting by federal immigration authorities in less than two years of the second Trump Administration. As in previous cases, the government immediately set forth a false narrative blaming the victim for his own death. As The Bulwark’s immigration reporter Adrian Carrasquillo shows, it’s becoming an all-too-familiar and cynical practice. -jr)

By Adrian Carrasquillo /The Bulwark

There is a familiar pattern to how the Trump administration responds when its immigration enforcement agents commit a high-profile killing: They move swiftly to malign the victim.

Usually, this involves dredging up menacing pictures. Often it means pointing to past, unrelated crimes. In the case of Alex Pretti, it meant surfacing video of a separate confrontation he had with ICE officers before he was fatally shot.

Now, following the killing last week of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE, we find ourselves in this cycle once again.

Reports emerged on Wednesday that the FBI, which is leading an investigation of the confrontation in which Araujo was shot to death in Houston, claimed to have found potential “controlled substances” in Araujo’s van.

According to a search-warrant application approved by a judge on Tuesday and obtained by the New York Times, an FBI special agent inspecting the van sometime after the fatal incident saw eight “plastic bags with what appeared to be a white crystal-like substance”—packaging supposedly “consistent with methamphetamine.” The news was quickly amplified by right-wing media, which posted photos from the warrant application showing the small bags of powder.

Alarm bells went off immediately.

It’s unusual for an application like this to be unsealed so swiftly, as the Times notes. And knowing the Trump administration’s history of vilifying its victims, it was hard to escape the suspicion this was orchestrated to insinuate Araujo was not an innocent working-class immigrant father but rather a . . . drug addict? A drug pusher? A bad guy somehow deserving of the bullets?

It strained credulity. And, sure enough, a day after the Times report, local officials poured water on the claim. “Based on the information we have regarding who Mr. Salgado was and just eyeballing the evidence as it was collected yesterday, we don’t believe that they are drugs,” Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told CNN. He added, “We have information that we’re not going to release yet.”

While Teare wasn’t ready to release the information, the lawyer for Lorenzo’s brother Victor felt no such compunction.

“After consulting with my client and his family, our understanding is that this was granulated salt, which is paired with lemon and water as a homemade electrolyte mix used by outdoor workers in extreme Texas heat, not methamphetamine or any other illicit substance,” that lawyer, Ruby Powers, told the Texas Tribune.

Regardless of the origin of the substance in the van, there is something deeply unsettling going on here. It’s not just that law enforcement seems more intent on winning PR campaigns than holding bad actors to account; it’s that they’re smearing people even after they’ve shipped them off to their graves. If, indeed, the substance in his car was a homemade mix, that would add another layer of insult: Lorenzo being defamed for preparing a drink to help him do his backbreaking work.

The documented evidence on Lorenzo depicts a good man. A hard-working father who put three kids through college. He was not the target of ICE operations the day he was killed. Nor, as the Times notes, were drugs “the reason for the encounter” that resulted in his shooting. In fact, the paper notes, “there has been no indication that agents pursuing the van that day suspected drugs were present.” Nor have there been indications that Araujo or his passengers were involved in criminal activities.

Given the groundswell of outrage—which was compounded by the killing of another Latino father, Johan Sebastián Guerrero, in Maine six days later—it’s hard to look at these claims as anything other than an attempt to concoct a post-hoc pretext for Araujo’s murder.

It is a hamfisted attempt to absolve ICE. And it comes as there are some really important questions about the killing that still need to be answered.

A gap in the official timeline. Lorenzo’s sons are understandably taking a reprieve from press engagement to prepare for the funeral, but a person who spoke with them told me they are concerned about an apparent gap in the official timeline—an unaccounted-for period between the shooting and when their father was taken to the hospital—which raised further concerns about why the FBI was now claiming there were drugs in the van.

“DHS published their dad’s identity before Ronaldo even knew he was dead,” the person outside the family who spoke in depth to the brothers told me. “He didn’t know his dad was dead until 3 p.m. But Lorenzo didn’t get to the hospital until noon. Where was he between 7:30 a.m. and noon?”

There are also questions about what medical attention Lorenzo received at the scene, if any. Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) told me that, according to the men present in the car with him, Lorenzo’s care was limited to “a rag or cloth on him where he was bleeding” after “they held Lorenzo on the ground with a knee to his body as he was bleeding.”

There was no first aid administered, the congresswoman said.

The person who spoke to his sons made this point as well. “What’s not getting the attention it deserves is the lack of first aid medical attention for Lorenzo. . . . There is this suspicion ICE agents were getting their story straight before they reached out to anybody else.”

Domingo Garcia, president of LULAC Adelante PAC and former head of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a significant Hispanic civil rights organization working with the Araujo family, also expressed concern about ICE’s vague timeline.

“He gets shot around 6 a.m. He’s on the floor handcuffed and crying for help in pain and he’s not getting first aid,” Garcia told me. “What we heard from his brother Victor was the ICE agents were mocking him, saying ‘You tried to escape, now look at you, what can you do?’”

Domingo Garcia also reiterated LULAC leadership’s statements from last week, based on conversations with Lorenzo’s son Ronaldo, that the delay in identifying Lorenzo was due to ICE taking his wallet from his pocket, leading him to be classified as a John Doe at the hospital.

“Why would they do that? That creates a motive of trying to hide the identity of who has been shot so the family will not know and will not be able to investigate,” Garcia said. “Ronaldo went to the site several hours after his father had been shot. That’s when he talked to an FBI agent who later texted him ‘Your father has been taken to Ben Taub [hospital].’ He goes there, but there is no one by [his father’s] name. He winds up calling Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia, and later finds out his dad has already passed away.”

A positive step. After reports that the three men in Lorenzo’s van, including his brother Victor, were refusing to self-deport and sign waivers of deportation despite being pressured to do so, there was a hopeful development this Wednesday.

Both Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare and lawyers for the three men who witnessed the shooting said all three had their requests for “U” visas certified. The U visa is designated for victims of crimes who may be “helpful to law enforcement or government officials.”

This does not mean they have received the visas; it means they have just completed the necessary first step in a two-step process: receiving certification from a law enforcement agency—in this case, Teare’s office—that the applicant could be useful in an investigation.

The second stage requires approval from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and can take years. But the certification should be enough to keep the men in the country. While waiting, the men should be eligible for work authorization, and if their visas are approved and they stay on the visa for three years, they should be able to apply for green cards. Regardless, after what they’ve been through, it is a significant protection against deportation.

Immigration journalist Adrian Carrasquillo writes the “Huddled Masses” newsletter for The Bulwark. Subscribe here.

Image: The sons of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo hold a photo of their father celebrating his 52nd birthday (Time).

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This just in: Our friends at Indivisible Santa Barbara invite community members to join a nonviolent, grassroots rally on Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., on the beach side of Cabrillo Boulevard on both sides of the Dolphin Fountain.

The protest is part of a national “Good Trouble Lives On” Weekend of Action honoring the late Rep. John Lewis, focused on the civil rights icon’s call to “Teach, Reach, Preach” in defense of voting rights and mobilizing voters.

The event comes at a time when Donald Trump — fearful of a Democratic takeover of Congress in the midterms that would hold him accountable for the corruption, cruelty and chaos of his administration — has escalated his long-running attack on free and fair elections.

On Thursday, Trump delivered an Oval Office address aimed at ginning up distrust about the Nov. 3 elections and seeking last-minute congressional support for his failed efforts to clamp federal restrictions on the constitutionally ensured rights of states to conduct elections. Prominent pro-democracy writer Robert Hubbell, succinctly describing it as “a nothingburger speech,” put it this way:

The speech consisted of old lies delivered in a low-testosterone manner that showed even Trump doesn’t believe the B.S. he is peddling. You shouldn’t believe it, either.

That said, Trump has been peddling election lies since his 2020 defeat, and there’s no reason to think he plans to stop his efforts to interfere with and undermine public trust anytime soon, as Robert Reich explained in a recent analysis deconstructing MAGA’s six-part strategy.

In the 108 days before the midterms, it is crucial for those who oppose Trump’s authoritarian project to push back on multiple fronts, including Saturday’s rally.

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Santa Barbara native Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, a dark horse in the crowded District 4 City Council race, blends corporate-world experience with born-and-raised social values as he promises to “bring a different lens” to City Hall.

A political rookie in a wide-open, four-candidate field that includes several city government veterans, the 49-year-old business consultant considers her outsider status an asset, campaigning to bring “balance” to a City Council dominated by Democratic Party-endorsed partisans.

Genevieve’s parents came to Santa Barbara in the 1970s, her teacher father in pursuit of an Olympic dream via decathlon training with a famed UCSB coach. After local school at Laguna, Santa Barbara Middle School and SB High School, she graduated from Yale and received graduate degrees from Penn and Johns Hopkins, then pursued a career with non-government organizations and multinationals, including Coca-Cola and Gap, focused on corporate social responsibility and environmental, social and governance (ESG) programs. She moved back home with her husband and three kids, now teenagers, six years ago.

“I think spending so much time in the private sector is a real value-add,” Taft-Vazquez said of her candidacy. “It brings a different perspective, a different lens. There will be other council members who have a strictly city administrative background, and that’s great. I think it’s also important to have balance on the City Council.”

“I realize I’m not part of the establishment,” she told Newsmakers. “But I think that, as an involved community member, that’s also an asset.”

Politics and policy. District 4 includes the Riviera and the Upper East Side, among other neighborhoods. Just over 100 days before the Nov. 3 election, Taft-Vazquez currently faces three rivals who have filed paperwork to run: former city council member Jason Dominguez and retired tech executive Monte Wilson (whose Newsmakers interviews are here and here respectively) and city Planning Commissioner Devon Wardlow (whom we’ll be speaking with in the next few days).

Along with longtime friends and kids’ schools connections, Taft-Vazquez also brings to the campaign a network of supporters arising from her volunteer work as an at-large member of the Neighborhood Advisory Council.

In our conversation, she pitched a two-track campaign message: a set of district-specific issues like wildfire abatement, emergency evacuation routes and local traffic safety improvements, along with a broader, less defined push on citywide matters — “building a thriving local economy and the supply of housing so that my kids and other kids, that next generation, have good jobs and can afford to live here.”

Taft-Vazquez portrays herself as a middle-of-the-road pragmatist who is less attached to ideological positions and more focused on compromise and consensus on the city’s most contentious issues.

“We need to have more action and less talk,” she said. “What I don’t think is happening is action. And whether that’s decision paralysis, or just not really being willing to take steps or actions, I think now is the time. There is a lot of momentum building. I think Santa Barbara’s poised to have some really exciting new investment.”

Here is Taft-Vazquez’s take on some key issues, about which we’re questioning all the candidates in our ongoing series.

Rent control. Taft-Vazquez said she assumes rent control is a done deal. Stipulating that a stabilization ordinance will have been adopted by the time she joins the council, if she wins, she said the ordinance should include a five-year sunset. “The reality is this ordinance is going to get approved before the next city council anyway, so how do we make it actually work for people? … The supply of housing is probably the most important piece we could address on this issue, so I don’t look at rent control or rent stabilization as some sort of silver bullet. That said, I do believe in protecting the people who are here and building for the people who want to be here, or the next generation…. I’d want that ordinance to be something that is clear and somewhat simple to administer, and I’d also want to make sure that this is something that can be reviewed on a regular basis, to make sure that it’s actually doing what it’s set out to do.”

Budget. Taft-Vazquez said she opposes any new taxes and would seek financial savings by “reconfiguring” jobs when vacancies occur, in an effort to hold down City Hall head count. “If you’re asking for more taxes — no, I don’t think there should be more taxes… Having dealt with budgets from small nonprofits to multi-billion-dollar companies, I would bring that same perspective around balancing the budget and making sure that we’re replenishing those reserves… The general fund is largely around city staff, and I don’t think anybody wants to be cutting jobs… I think there probably are opportunities to reconfigure jobs when vacancies open up or people retire, so that it’s not a one-for-one — think about different ways to use technology, or whatever it may be, to reconfigure some of those.”

State Street. Taft-Vazquez said she is frequently on and around State Street for multiple reasons and thinks the nine-block promenade should remain car-free. “I will say that I am a heavy user of State Street. What I also think is that we’ve studied this to death, and we definitely need to move forward. So generally I’d say we need to adopt the master plan, get that going… But yes, closed to cars… And the real thing here, I think, is stop with this stop-start, whatever. Let’s actually invest in making it happen and making it a place where people want to come back to, and they feel safe, and it’s clean.”

Ranked choice voting. Taft-Vazquez acknowledged that she has not studied the issue of whether the city should adopt ranked choice voting. In such a system, voters rank candidates in order of preference, and if no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to those voters’ next choice, repeating until one candidate has a majority. However, she said she would be willing to vote on council to put a ballot measure before voters: “It would be up to the people to decide.”

Check out our full conversation with Genevieve Taft-Vazquez via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include candidates Devon Wardlow, Ian Baucke, Cevin Cathel, Alexander Stoeber, James Zurlinden and Kristen Sneddon, with more in the works. Here is who we’ve talked with to date:

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat. June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6.

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

By Jonathan V. Last /The Bulwark

Over the last week, agents of the federal government have killed two people on the streets of America.

We should say their names: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo; Johan Sebastián Guerrero.

These men were not armed. Araujo was in the country illegally, but was not the target of the operation that ended in his public execution. Guerrero was in the country legally when he was executed by agents of the state.

In America, we have become inured to incidents in which law enforcement kills civilians. The idea that law enforcement officials can use deadly force at the drop of a hat is accepted by the general public.

But what the federal government has been doing to people assumed to be immigrants is different from normal police brutality. It is a targeted campaign.

We are witnessing, for the first time since Jim Crow, American death squads.

I understand if that sounds like an exaggeration. But that’s only because we are inside the story and have become acclimated to the horror.

When crimes against humanity start happening, the people on the inside are often the last to understand how horrific the situation is.

So let me tell you a story to help you understand how our situation looks to outsiders.

Story corner. Once upon a time there was a democracy. It was a young country, but a reasonably sophisticated one. It was a constitutional republic, with separation of powers, the rule of law, the whole nine yards.

They were upwardly mobile and making economic strides. But they had problems, like every country. One of their problems was the drug trade.

A politician rose to power arguing that drugs were ruining the country. That drug dealers and drug users were destroying everything the people—the silent majority—held dear.

This politician came from a wealthy family but presented himself as a populist hero of the working class. He was unapologetic about his hatred of drug users. “I would be happy to slaughter them,” he told voters.

The New York Times, in a profile years later, would describe him this way:

[H]is draconian justice and coarse manner have earned him widespread condemnation. . . .

He has alienated many with outrageous comments and irrational behavior, yet remains wildly popular.

This politician ran for president and campaigned almost exclusively on the scourge of drugs. He had a policy prescription to deal with the problem: He would unshackle the police and turn them loose on the streets to deal with the drug problem while also encouraging civilian militias to do the same.

“Forget the laws on human rights,” he said during his campaign. “If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because I’d kill you.” He promised to use the pardon power of the presidency to immunize police who killed on his behalf from future prosecution. He called the pardon power one of his “weapons.”

He had a message for the news media, too, after a disturbing act of violence against a reporter: “Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch.”

The politician won and became president. Soon after his election he went to a rundown neighborhood and addressed the country: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself,” he said.

Another passage from that New York Times profile:

A psychological assessment of [President X], prepared in 1998 for the annulment of his marriage, concluded that he had “narcissistic personality disorder” and a “pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate others and violate their rights.”

Once the politician was sworn in as president, the killings started.

Killing people in the streets. The police killed people on the streets. Civilian militias killed people on the streets. Everyone who was shot was labeled either a drug dealer or a drug user.

There was no proof offered, though. The police would find someone they claimed to be a drug user, kill them, and move on. No investigation. No accountability.¹

This happened every day, because drug users were seen as vermin who were poisoning the blood of the country. Many of the people who were killed were not, in fact, either drug dealers or drug users.

The people of this little democracy didn’t mind terribly. They were mostly amused by the antics of their president—he was so outrageous! And, like I said up top, these things can be hard to see clearly from the inside.

People outside the country, however, recognized exactly what was going on.

These were death squads.

Some of the death squads were agents of the state specifically instructed by the president. Some of the death squads were freelance civilians. The rule of law was gone, but not in a random way—it was a targeted campaign against a particular population that treated minor legal infractions as capital offenses.

People inside the country thought that maybe their president had gotten carried away, or been a little too bombastic. People outside the country understood that they were witnessing something worse.

The view from abroad. International media outlets put together documentaries about what was happening.

The European Union urged the country to pay attention to the human rights abuses that were taking place on its streets.²

The International Criminal Court indicted the president for crimes against humanity.³

The entire world was aghast that this once normal, peaceful constitutional republic became a place where agents of the state routinely murdered unarmed civilians on the street. A home to death squads.

By now you recognize that we’ve been talking about Rodrigo Duterte and the Philippines. And no, the parallels aren’t exact. But the similarities are uncanny?

This is not normal. The point of this story, however, isn’t to argue that Trump=Duterte, same-same. The point is that during Duterte’s reign, people inside the Philippines thought they were experiencing quasi-normal political life.

But the rest of the world was able to see the situation more clearly.

I wonder if it’s the same way with our ICE death squads.

Maybe, even though we’re treating these killings as normal, the rest of the world has a clearer sense of what’s going on. Maybe the rest of the world reads about what is happening in America with the same sense of horror that you and I had when we read what Duterte was doing in the Philippines.

I’m not sure if societies ever truly understand, contemporaneously, when they are living through periods of extraordinary terror.

If you want to be hopeful—not something I usually endorse—consider this fact:

On March 11, 2025, Rodrigo Duterte was arrested. He is currently in jail, awaiting trial at the Hague.

If that’s too hopeful for you, we can close with this: Duterte remains popular enough that his hometown of Davao, where he served multiple terms as mayor going back to the 1980s, elected him mayor again last year, two months after he was extradited to the Hague.

1. As of last year, only eight police officers had been convicted for illegal killings during Duterte’s reign—despite some six thousand people killed by police during those years.

2. In response, the president literally gave them the middle finger.

3. The politician’s defense against these charges was that his words were not instructions for police to murder civilians, but merely examples of this trademark “hyperbole.”

Bulwark Editor Jonathan V. Last writes “The Triad” newsletter for the Never Trump news platform. Subscribe here.

Image: Ingrid Bostrom photo for the Santa Barbara Independent shows the scene at a vigil for Lorenzo Arauio and Johan Guerrero on Monday 13July2026.

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Gabe Escobedo, a 37-year-old rising star in local politics, is seeking the District 6 seat on Santa Barbara’s City Council, courting voters who are “ready for a change” — with a campaign bolstered by formidable establishment support.

An elected member of the Santa Barbara Unified School District’s board of education, Escobedo not only won the coveted early endorsement of the local Democratic Party, earning a spot on its influential slate card, but also the enthusiastic aid of Meagan Harmon, the termed-out incumbent in the district, who anointed him as her “ready to serve on Day One” successor.

“When I say the candidate for ‘change,’ part of that is a campaign slogan that lives on a website, but part of it is truth,” Escobedo said, when asked to reconcile his dual standing as a change agent and the chosen one of the status quo.

“If you look at Meagan’s time, she’s pushed for so much change and has gotten us to the point where there is real opportunity,” he told Newsmakers, in the latest in our series of conversations with candidates for Santa Barbara City Council.

“We have been in decision paralysis, it feels like, and that decision paralysis has led to a lack of action,” Escobedo added. “And I feel like right now we have a little bit of momentum and I want to contribute to pushing us forward and actually making some decisions.”

Bio back story. The son of a single mother who grew up poor in Ontario, Escobedo seized on education as the way out of a dead-end future, and credits academic mentors with encouraging and guiding him — to a B.A. from Cal State San Marcos, in San Diego County, and a master’s in kinesiology from St. Mary’s College, in Contra Costa County.

For the past 10 years, he has worked at UCSB, where he is associate director of programs for the Department of Recreation, while raising his profile and building a network in politics and policy circles. He served a term on the city Planning Commission, led the controversial Community Formation Commission effort aimed at police reform, and lost a bid for the Assembly seat won by Gregg Hart, before being elected to the school board in 2022.

“I am looking for ways to be involved. I’m ambitious and I want to be in the rooms where decisions are made. That is the truth,” he said. “And the one thing that I can also say is true is that I love Santa Barbara.

“And so when I think about ways that I want to contribute, I seek out these roles. And right now I think the way that best serves the community and best leverages my experience and my skills is on city council,” Escobedo added. “I think right now is the right time for me to run.”

The district. District 6, which he is running to represent, includes downtown and Oak Park, among other neighborhoods. It has the highest percentage of renters — about 84 percent, according to U.S. Census data — of any district, and the lowest percentage of homeownership. Besides Escobedo, real estate agent Alexander Stoeber also has pulled papers to run in the district.

“Most people that live here in Santa Barbara are making sacrifices to live here,” Escobedo said. “In my time in the policy conversations, there’s a lot of talk about preserving the character of Santa Barbara — usually through the lens of architecture and mountain views and coastal access and preserving open space.

“And I absolutely agree — all of those things contribute to making Santa Barbara special,” he added. “But for me, the thing that contributes most to the character of Santa Barbara is the people. And so it’s the people that live and work here that contribute to our community. And one of the primary goals for me is: how do we keep those people here, and how do we provide value to them?”

E-bike oopsie. Sporting a full-length white splint on his right arm, Escobedo in our conversation described a recent e-bike accident on State Street — “user error,” he explained — and also discussed his term on the school board, acknowledging frustration with the ongoing poor performance of SBUSD students on standardized tests while highlighting the district’s pivot to a new “science of reading” curriculum aimed at increasing literacy.

He described himself as an energetic advocate for more housing, setting an aspirational goal of “100 percent affordable housing” for new projects by developing publicly owned land and seeking new revenue streams for the city’s Affordable Housing Fund.

“There’s a lot of stuff that we could be doing to generate affordable housing that actually is affordable for the people that live and work here,” he said.

With 16 weeks to go before the election, Escobedo also outlined his policy stances on other key issues about which we’re questioning all the candidates:

Rent control. Escobedo identified himself as a strong supporter of the current council majority’s aggressive push for rent control: “I support it because … if we want to protect what makes Santa Barbara so special, it’s about keeping the people who contribute to our community here. And rent stabilization is not the silver bullet. It doesn’t solve the housing affordability crisis, but it’s one tool in our toolbox and one component of that ecosystem of policies that we need.”

State Street. Escobedo waved off pleas by downtown retail business owners to reopen State Street to cars, but acknowledged that the increasing surge of e-bike traffic is a problem requiring imaginative policy solutions. “I think it should stay closed permanently … now that we’ve made this decision, where we really need to act is by making the investment (in the master plan) … Some of the e-bikes are way too fast — some of them are motorcycles for all intents and purposes … Kristen Sneddon brought up an interesting idea, which I love … We should confiscate their e-bikes (from riders who break the law) and give them a regular bike … a more serious policy prescription is we really need some help at the state level to limit what class of bike a parent can purchase for their kids.”

Budget. Escobedo said he backs rebuilding depleted emergency reserve funds, would seek cost savings by not filling some vacant positions and by offering a “retirement incentive package” to older public employees — but also favors both a commercial vacancy tax and an increase in the Transient Occupancy Tax: “It would be irresponsible to just be flippant and say we’re going to cut all these programs, because really what you’re saying is you’re cutting people. I think one prudent thing to do is that anytime a position becomes vacant, ask yourself: is this a position that we need to fill? … The commercial vacancy tax would be for properties that have been long-term vacancies, and so for those folks there needs to be some sort of incentive — not a punishment, but an incentive — for them to rent those spaces to actual local businesses.”

Ranked choice. Escobedo said he leans toward changing the current district election system to a ranked-choice method, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference; if no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to those voters’ next choice, repeating until one candidate has a majority: “I think ranked-choice voting is, in my opinion, probably the gold standard. I’d support that, but there are some outstanding questions (about cost) to answer.”

Check out our interview with Gabe Escobedo, the latest in our series with candidates for City Council and Mayor in the Nov. 3 election, via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include candidates Genevieve Taft-Vasquez, Devon Wardlow, Ian Baucke, and Cevin Cathel, with more in the works. Here is who we’ve talked with to date:

Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat. June 23.

Jason Dominguez, candidate for District, July 6.

This week, a team of New York Times reporters produced a comprehensive, 2,673-word examination of how Donald Trump has unleashed an “all of government” campaign using a host of federal agencies to subvert the midterm elections. They reported:

President Trump is trying to use the levers of the federal government, along with personal influence over state and local lawmakers, to reshape the rules governing the 2026 midterms and future elections in extraordinary ways …

“While many of Mr. Trump’s directives have been blocked or delayed by the courts, election experts say that their potential harm remains significant, and that some of the efforts have already eroded faith in the process.” (Gift link.)

On a new episode of Newsmakers TV, Mark Z. Barabak, the veteran roving political columnist for the Los Angeles Times, discusses the effort Trump has mounted to block Democrats from winning either or both houses of Congress — and what it will take to ensure that the undermining strategy fails.

What Democrats need, he said, “is, to use the George W. Bush term, a ‘thumping’ … what Barack Obama described as a ‘shellacking,’” he said, citing the overwhelming midterm defeats two previous presidents endured.

“A very definitive, incontrovertible, even-Donald-Trump-cannot-subvert election result on November 3rd,” Barabak termed it.

Surveying the political landscape four months before the election, the LAT ace said that while Republicans have greatly benefited from a wave of midterm gerrymandering, as well as a U.S. Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act, Democrats are still well-positioned to capture the net three seats needed to win back the House, and maintain an outside chance of flipping the four U.S. Senate seats they need to control that body.

In our conversation, Barabak also offered his perspective on the administration’s investigation of Gov. Newsom’s personal finances, the latest on the potential presidential candidacies of Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris, and an update on the governor’s race between Democrat Xavier Becerra, the odds-on favorite, and MAGA Republican Steve Hilton.

He also broke down the political hazard that California’s slow ballot-counting presents to Democrats, handing Trump and his allies a cudgel to falsely claim our elections are “rigged” — including recent steps Newsom and his party have taken to respond to the challenge.

“Are there ways the state can speed it up?” Barabak said. “Yeah, the governor and the legislature passed a budget that includes $40 million that is going to pay for more staff. It’s going to pay for better technology, software, whatever it’s going to take … there are technical steps that can be taken and that presumably will be taken.”

Plus: the Northern California representative — one of only four admitted atheists in Congress — who founded the “Free Thought Caucus” and just published a book warning of the clear and present danger of a Christian nationalist takeover of the federal government.

All this and more, right here, right now, on Newsmakers TV. Check out our conversation with Mark Barabak via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

(Editor's note: Sheila Lodge, Santa Barbara's first woman mayor and one of the most praiseworthy community heroes in its history, died on Wednesday at the age of 97. Nick Welsh, appropriately, broke the news with a splendid tribute to her remarkable life and work. Sheila was a great supporter and loyal viewer of Newsmakers TV — among other things, after berating us for years for using as our Zoom background a photo she said made the town look like it was on fire, she finally sent us an image from the courthouse tower she had taken herself, now our regular backdrop — and made multiple appearances on the show to discuss a myriad of civic controversies and soap operas. In 2020, she spoke to us at length when her long-awaited history of local land use planning — "An Uncommonplace American Town: Urban Planning History in Santa Barbara — A Personal View" — was published. We repost the interview today in honor of her friendship and her consequential life, well lived. RIP.—jr).

(Image: In February 2025, the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors honored Sheila Lodge for her lifetime achievements (Josh Molina photo for Noozhawk).

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In 2019, City Council member Jason Dominguez lost an excruciatingly close race for re-election in Santa Barbara’s Eastside District 1, the target of a successful effort by the local Democratic Party to boot him out of office.

Now, Dominguez has mounted a comeback bid. Still a registered Democrat, he has moved to District 4, where he believes his independent streak will find support from its more moderate and higher-income voters, at a time when lefties dominate council politics.

“It’s a much different city council in 2026 than it was when I ran for re-election — I think people had a lot more confidence in the council six years ago,” Dominguez told Newsmakers. “When you look at polling (that asks) ‘Is the city going in the right direction?’ — it’s at an all-time low.

“And that’s part of the reason I want to run,” he added. “We’re going to lose four council members and the mayor. There’s going to be a very big transition.”

In a one-on-one interview, the latest in our series of conversations with candidates for SB City Council and Mayor, the 57-year-old Dominguez reflected on his eight-vote, 2019 re-election loss to Alejandra Gutierrez — the endorsed candidate of the Democrats, who dropped her four years later in favor of current District 1 incumbent Wendy Santamaria — and discussed changes in the local political landscape since 2015, when he won election as a member of the first council fully seated under the district elections system.

“There are the sharp elbows of a political party and its bosses, who want to have only their candidates on council,” Dominguez said. “So I understand it, but I think the way voters can push back … on that is to vote for people like me who didn’t get an endorsement from a political party — someone who’s independent-minded, independent-thinking,” he added.

“And people should … if they want a government that’s independent and not involved in culture wars or political battles, they should vote for people like me. If you want someone who’s going to dogmatically follow a party line, then don’t vote for me.”

District 4 includes the Riviera and the Upper East Side, among other neighborhoods. With 17 weeks to go before the Nov. 3 election, Dominguez currently faces three rivals who have filed paperwork to run: retired tech executive Monte Wilson; Democratic Party-endorsed Planning Commissioner Devon Wardlow; and Neighborhood Advisory Council member Genevieve Taft-Vasquez. (The latter two are scheduled for upcoming interviews; we spoke with Monte Wilson previously.)

Among other topics in our conversation, Dominguez offered a prescription to address concerns that the current local electoral system produces council members more focused on the narrow interests of district constituencies than on the overall interests of the entire city: ranked-choice voting.

Under a ranked-choice system, such as that used in San Francisco and other Bay Area communities, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to those voters’ next choice, repeating until one candidate has a majority.

“Ranked-choice voting is basically just an instant runoff,” Dominguez said. “Ranked-choice voting would definitely be a priority” if he is elected, he added.

Dominguez on three other key issues:

Rent control. “I don’t think it’s worked in many places, and if you talk to (prominent UCSB economist) Peter Rupert and some of the local economists, they say that it doesn’t work, that it’s counterproductive. At this point I’d be pretty against rent stabilization … you also have to add in the fact that we’re a small city and we’re going to spend a couple million dollars administering the program. We don’t have the economy of scale … We’d be better off putting that money into direct subsidies or giving people vouchers.”

Budget. “It’s the old cliché: ‘Hey, there’s still checks in my checkbook — how could there be no money there?’ … I think we need to go to a position where departments really reexamine their budgets and come up with 10 percent savings, whether it’s eliminating a program that’s no longer working or reallocating staff … No more consultants … No more severance contracts when we sign department heads.”

State Street. "If I'm on council, I don't want to spend 80 percent of our time and thousands of hours and millions of dollars fighting over (vehicles allowed on State Street). But could you just have one week a month where it's open to cars? … Riding an e-bike in a crowded area doing a wheelie is a nuisance. It's a crime. It's reckless driving. Where there's a will, there's a way. If the council wants to enforce that law, they can. So I can lead that charge when I'm on council."

Check out our full interview with Jason Dominguez via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for Mayor and four City Council seats in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Here is who else we’ve talked with to date:

Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat. June 23.

Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

(Editor’s note: On the morning of July 6, 2006, your correspondent was perp-walked by HR from the newsroom of the Santa Barbara News-Press, setting in motion two years of community protests and two decades of turmoil that culminated in the newspaper’s decline and eventual bankruptcy. A few months later, in the American Journalism Review, Chapman University journalism professor Susan Paterno reported and wrote the definitive account of the events that sparked the crisis; she later successfully defended her work against a retaliatory lawsuit filed by the paper’s then-owner. Paterno’s article, together with the documentary Citizen McCaw, remains the single best account of the events and the stakes in what came to be known as the “News-Press Meltdown.”On the 20th anniversary of that pivotal moment in Santa Barbara’s local history, we are reprinting her distinguished piece, from the online archive of the AJR, which ceased publication in 2015. )—jr).

By Susan Paterno

The day before the Santa Barbara News-Press imploded last July, the paper’s top editors gathered at Editor Jerry Roberts’ rambling hacienda to discuss the future under owner Wendy McCaw. The last few weeks had been brutal. With McCaw and her boyfriend – the paper’s restaurant critic – now copublishers, Roberts was ordered to kill a story about the editorial page editor’s drunk-driving sentence. Two weeks later, the paper published the address of an empty lot where actor Rob Lowe intended to build a mega-mansion exceeding his neighborhood’s zoning limits, prompting McCaw to issue harsh reprimands to several editors and a reporter. When she put the editorial page editor in charge of the newsroom, then left with the restaurant critic on a monthlong Mediterranean cruise aboard her multimillion-dollar yacht, the editors figured it couldn’t get much worse.

But it did, and here they were, wondering how they came to be having lunch amid blooming fruit trees, lush foliage and waving palms, grimly discussing their bleak futures. They talked about how “there was no benefit to doing what we were about to do,” says then-Managing Editor George Foulsham, about how families would suffer, about the emotional stress, the uncertain job market. They debated staying, says former Metro Editor Jane Hulse, “but there was a feeling of hopelessness that we couldn’t fight. I think all of us were pretty certain we were leaving. But there was no vote or plan.” Instead, there were “hugs all around,” Hulse says, and they left to face their inexorable fate.

More than half of the 50-member News-Press newsroom has resigned or been dismissed since then. Those remaining, including replacements, have affiliated with the Teamsters union, working in a climate of fear and paranoia ripped from the pages of Kafka’s “The Trial,” “like you’ve passed into another dimension,” says one. The last few months have been “a period of extreme disorientation for me,” Roberts said recently, echoing the feelings expressed by many left fighting, due in part to McCaw’s attempt to silence everyone from former and current employees and competitors to community members, the Teamsters, the Santa Barbara Independent, even Vanity Fair and AJR, by threatening or filing lawsuits against them.

McCaw has consistently refused to comment on the upheaval at her newspaper, says Communications Manager Agnes Huff. “Mrs. McCaw doesn’t do any interviews.” In response to my initial efforts to speak with News-Press executives, Huff told me in an e-mail, “News-Press management and staff are unable to grant any interview requests at this time.” I continued leaving messages for managers, prompting Huff to e-mail me again: “I advised you that no one from the News-Press will be available to provide you with any interviews. It would really be appreciated it [sic] if you could..not continue to call and e-mail News-Press employees when you have been clearly advised of the paper’s position.”

In her few public pronouncements, McCaw has blamed the turmoil on “disgruntled ex-employees” who tried to use the newspaper “as a personal arena to air petty infighting” and to advance their own agendas. She has denied breaching the wall, that inviolable barrier separating news from opinion and journalists from moneymakers at America’s newspapers. But after buying the paper from the New York Times Co. in 2000 and promising to have no role in newsgathering, McCaw began whacking away, her lieutenants firing one editor after another, presiding over the dismissal or resignation of five publishers in five years, destroying friendships, families and livelihoods, until it was Jerry Roberts’ turn to bend to her will.

Roberts spent his final years at the News-Press fiercely protecting the wall against McCaw, who flattened it last summer, prompting him, Hulse, Foulsham and six others to quit within days of one another. They were “brothers in arms,” an editor says, cast as workaday heroes fighting against a onetime billionaire in a timely allegory about what it means to control the news, a stark reminder that independent owners are hardly a panacea for the media’s multifaceted problems.

“Mrs. McCaw never fully understood that she didn’t just buy a mouthpiece for her own views,” says Linda Strean, News-Press managing editor from 2003 to 2005, now managing editor for Great Schools.net. “It really comes down to a tragic misunderstanding of what the mission of a newspaper should be.” Those remaining at the News-Press realize the battle is far from over. “We’re going to stay here for as long as it takes,” says one veteran. The issues “are so much larger than us,” she adds, a point reiterated by former Washington Post reporter and Ronald Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, who lives in Santa Barbara. “This is an extraordinary display of courage,” Cannon says. “If they win, it would be a hell of a victory for American journalism.” And if they lose? “If they lose, it means the only thing that matters is who owns the paper. And the owner doesn’t have to answer to anybody.”

Ownership, ironically, was a big reason Jerry Roberts left the San Francisco Chronicle after 25 years, the last five as managing editor. In 2000, the family-owned Chronicle was sold to Hearst, now the nation’s ninth-largest newspaper company. Life under the new owners was “exhausting and difficult,” says Strean, Roberts’ deputy managing editor for news in San Francisco. It “just wasn’t fun anymore.” Roberts left in 2002 to teach at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. But before a single class, he was in Santa Barbara entertaining a job offer.

Strean was taken aback. Urbane and “big city,” says Strean, Roberts “didn’t strike me as a Santa Barbara sort of guy.” Nestled between wide, white sand beaches and gently rolling ranchlands, Santa Barbara is trademarked “the American Riviera,” with 300 days of sunshine a year, $1.2 million average home prices, subsidized housing for families with annual incomes of $160,000, a University of California campus and a host of Hollywood celebrities among its 90,000 residents. Not only had the city captivated Roberts, but McCaw also had assured him she wanted the best local paper in America and would allow him to “run the newsroom the way he wanted,” Strean says.

McCaw moved to Santa Barbara in the mid-’90s, one of America’s richest women, the result of a bitter divorce from cellular phone magnate Craig McCaw. Nearing 50, she bought the News-Press, an odd purchase for someone whose public persona was so reclusive Santa Barbarans joked she wanted the paper to keep herself out of it. Though her previous newspaper experience consisted of reading one, her company, Ampersand Publishing, paid a reported $100 million (some put the figure at $150 million) for a 48,000-circulation paper with about $30 million in revenues and 11 percent profit margins.

The newsroom staff was euphoric, and the paper’s popular publisher, Allen Parsons, told AJR at the time that he was excited to embrace the future with McCaw (see The Beat, September 2000). In the next two years, though, her largely unexplained directives led to confusion, turmoil and turnover, with benefits and overtime pay slashed, newsroom decisions challenged and executives fired or forced to resign after refusing to do her bidding, say former reporters, editors and executives.

At the party to celebrate the paper’s sale, Publisher Parsons told a couple of editors shocking news: McCaw was replacing him with her 44-year-old attorney, Joe Cole. Though Parsons says the decision was mutual, most in the newsroom had a different impression. “Twenty minutes after her big welcoming party, she fired the very popular publisher “an absolutely wonderful man,” says a veteran reporter. “That’s when we realized, uh-oh, what is she all about?”

In short order, McCaw went from recluse to renown, details of her personal life splashed across the front pages of the News-Press and the Los Angeles Times. Her 1995 separation “devastated” her, the Times reported, but her pain translated into a billion-dollar settlement. Her $2.65 billion net worth in 2000 helped her acquire a $30 million Gulfstream jet, estates in Pebble Beach and Santa Barbara, a cobalt blue Porsche 911 and a 193-foot yacht with a crew of 14 and a helicopter on deck. She bought a BMW for the fiancé she later sued, the same one who filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on her behalf against the California Coastal Commission to try to block legally mandated public access to the beach below her 24-acre cliff-top estate.

Under McCaw, a Libertarian, News-Press editorials evolved from respectful, cautious, reasonably argued pieces to raucous assaults, sometimes on the paper’s own reporters, with attacks on the coastal commission, affordable housing and the local rodeo, an affront to McCaw’s animal rights sensibilities. Through her executives, McCaw worked her will: “It was always about news content and news reporters,” says an insider no longer at the paper. “If one story wasn’t the way she wanted it, it was off with their heads,” with Cole “just doing her bidding.”

(Cole declined to be interviewed, saying he has “confidentiality obligations beyond those binding other past News-Press employees.” He added, “My family’s financial future would be adversely affected by any breach of those obligations.”)

Pretty soon, Business Editor Dave Bemis recognized a pattern. “The person at the top tries to keep a separation between the newsroom and the ownership, and eventually he’s fired. We finally realized: Anything that isn’t an immediate yes, she sees as a no. And you can only say no for so long until you get fired.” Bemis resigned in May 2002, a few days before 17 reporters and editors signed a letter to Cole questioning “the newspaper’s commitment to journalistic integrity.” But they never sent it. The next day, as improbable as a snowstorm in Santa Barbara, a deus ex machina arrived.

On his first day, Jerry Roberts met a bewildered staff. The previous editor, Jesse Chavarria, was there one day, gone the next, recalls then-News Editor Don Murphy, so no one had any idea what to expect. Roberts’ credentials “stunned” the staff, says former senior writer Scott Hadly. His pedigree � the Harvard-educated son of a factory worker and a drug store clerk � gave Roberts the right combination of street and polish. As soon as he arrived, “everything turned around,” says then-City Hall reporter Joshua Molina, now working at the San Jose Mercury News. “We were all optimistic.”

McCaw appointed as publisher Will Fleet, a prominent member of the California Newspaper Publishers Association and longtime First Amendment advocate. While Fleet busied himself producing strong financial results, Roberts remade the paper, emphasizing local content, visual storytelling, graphic design and “kick-ass breaking news,” a former editor recalls. Supportive and protective, Fleet rarely visited the newsroom and never interfered with newsgathering, say former News-Press editors who worked with him at the time, allowing Roberts to publish stories about McCaw’s $460,000 coastal commission fine and her $14.8 million legal loss � still on appeal � to former fianc�, attorney and business partner Greg Parker. But trouble was looming.

The News-Press story about Parker omitted the arbitrator’s description of McCaw’s conduct as “oppressive,” “despicable” and “evasive,” a witness who denied “events even in the face of written evidence to the contrary.” McCaw hired a publicist “to place articles in her newspaper complimentary to herself and derogatory of Parker,” the ruling said, prompting the Los Angeles Times to question whether McCaw “had crossed the line from covering the news to slanting it.” Forced to defend his new boss against events that occurred before he arrived, Roberts told the Times he had covered McCaw as he would “any other powerful person.”

Soon, though, he realized he needed an ally, someone who shared his passion and vision, who believed as strongly as he in principles and ethics. He called Linda Strean.

In June 2003, Strean arrived at the News-Press as managing editor, adding an even bigger jolt to an already energized newsroom. She and Roberts entertained the troops with humorous banter, “as if Linda completed Jerry’s thoughts,” says Hadly. The next two years were “the most fun I’ve ever had in journalism,” says former Metro Editor Hulse. Given to wisecracks and hail-fellow-well-met backslapping, the 50-something Roberts, a “bearded, bespectacled Bugs Bunny,” the city’s alternative weekly wrote, endeared himself to the staff with precision editing � “he could make stories sing,” says Murphy � and an ability to ask tough questions. “He brought the News-Press to a whole new level,” says Molina.

As metro editor, Hulse “worked the longest hours I ever worked in my life,” she says. She was hardly alone. “We did it because we wanted to please these people who had really high standards.” Roberts added local columnists, including Arthur “Nipper” von Wiesenberger as restaurant critic. A well-known restaurateur, food writer and consultant to the bottled water industry, von Wiesenberger was also McCaw’s boyfriend. Though the appointment seemed “a little weird,” Strean says, von Wiesenberger “was the best in town, so it made sense.”

As the newsroom strengthened, the paper’s opinion section grew more virulent under the direction of Travis K. Armstrong, a 38-year-old openly gay American Indian, former San Jose Mercury News editorial writer and registered Democrat. Armstrong attacked “local politicos,” from “lefty wankers to main-street corporate types,” who quickly learned, wrote Santa Barbara Independent Executive Editor Nick Welsh, “the best they could expect was a stiff-arm to the head.” Strean and Roberts mostly ignored him, Strean says, but Armstrong’s columns “created lots of problems for our reporters. Whenever we went into the community, we had to listen to complaints.”

Profit margins reached record levels of 25 percent in 2003, say those familiar with the paper’s finances, and the News-Press consistently won local, state and regional journalism awards for its coverage. But its success was not enough to save Fleet: The day he returned from his honeymoon in August was his last at the News-Press. “He was just gone,” Strean says. “There was no reason given.” (Fleet declined to comment for this article.)

Roberts added publisher to his editor title, recusing himself from daily newsroom decision making. The arrangement worked well, Strean says, until spring 2004, when McCaw insisted on previewing stories mentioning Brian Cearnal, a prominent Santa Barbara architect she was suing for malpractice. An ugly scene ensued in June when McCaw ordered Roberts to publish a piece touting her alleged legal victory over Cearnal, Strean says, a story that had no comment from the architect and whose facts were disputed by his partner. After a while, McCaw wanted Roberts to publish four pages of her boyfriend’s restaurant reviews. Though McCaw “continually pursued it,” Roberts “kept arguing against it,” Strean says, and refused to implement her directive. Finally, McCaw stopped meeting with Roberts and then “quit speaking to him.”

By January 2005, the musical chairs began again: Cole replaced Roberts as publisher; Roberts returned to the newsroom; Strean quit in March, and George Foulsham, a former Los Angeles Times editor, took over as managing editor. For reasons no one can adequately explain, Joe Cole went from being McCaw’s enforcer to “the fence,” says an editor no longer at the paper, “the person who protected us.”

In late April 2006, Cole announced he was retiring “at the ripe old age of 50,” says a former editor, with McCaw and von Wiesenberger becoming copublishers. A week later, von Wiesenberger challenged a story about Travis Armstrong’s drunk-driving arrest, an objection that not only betrayed his inexperience, say Don Murphy and other editors, but also exacerbated the mistrust between the newsroom and the publisher’s suite.

With von Wiesenberger in charge, the editors “seemed anguished,” Hadly says; there were “feelings of impending doom.” The angst spilled onto the pages of the Santa Barbara Independent, which provided a comprehensive picture of the paper’s internal squabbling, prompting McCaw loyalists to try to smoke out moles with inquisitions and threats, Hadly says. The sight of McCaw and her executives playing whack-a-mole, slamming down one rumor as another popped up, proved exceedingly amusing to the hundreds of bloggers weighing in on the spectacle and the characters they dubbed Spendy McFlaw, Travisty, Nipper, Baron von Weaselburger and Agnes Huff and Puff.

While bloggers reported what McCaw wanted squelched, another newsroom drama was unfolding. Michael Todd, the business editor widely admired for his intelligence and acerbic wit, made a joke to part-time photographer Ana Fuentes that she construed as a death threat. Though much of what transpired between them is disputed, neither argues the basic facts: Todd saw Fuentes in front of a downtown store in late May; when he next saw her, he made what he considered a joke about hitting her with his car. Everyone agrees Fuentes laughed, though she says she thought it was “weird,” and the rest of the story is unclear. Fuentes remains convinced Todd wants to hurt her, though she has no idea why. Todd was doing nothing more than joking around with a colleague, he says. “It certainly wasn’t serious or threatening.” (The News-Press pursued a restraining order against Todd in connection with the Fuentes episode in July, costing him close to $7,000 in attorney’s fees, he says, before dropping the case in late October.)

The paths carrying Todd, Fuentes, McCaw and Armstrong converged on a Friday morning in June, when reporter Dawn Hobbs returned from the courthouse with a report on Travis Armstrong’s drunk-driving sentence. After Hobbs tried to interview him, Armstrong came “unglued,” says a reporter, accusing the newsroom of “targeting him.” Orders “from on high” forced Roberts to kill Hobbs’ story, says then Deputy Managing Editor Murphy, who went home and tearfully confessed to his wife: “I can’t work there anymore,” a prospect that frightened them both. Murphy, days shy of his 60th birthday, faced an uncertain job market and few local prospects. After nearly two decades in Santa Barbara, leaving meant uprooting Murphy’s ill, 93-year-old mother-in-law from her friends, church and doctors.

While Murphy launched a job search, Roberts left for a planned vacation in Greece, and McCaw went “balls out at the newsroom,” a former editor says. Armstrong read “every story on the front page,” says then-reporter Camilla Cohee, including her account of the Rob Lowe zoning dispute. Speaking at a televised meeting, Lowe asked the city to grant him a variance so he could build a 14,260-square-foot mansion. Armstrong sent an e-mail to two editors saying Lowe had called him and both he and Lowe were concerned about Lowe’s address being published in the story. But the editors had left for the day, and Cohee’s editor, Michael Todd, says no one forwarded the message to him. The next day, the News-Press published Cohee’s story, address included, and von Wiesenberger called Cohee from Paris inquiring, “Would Rob Lowe be happy with the article? If I were Rob Lowe, would I think it’s fair?”

After seeing the story, McCaw was livid, says a former editor, and issued reprimands to Cohee, Todd and two other editors, including one who had read it for the first time in the paper.

Todd and McCaw exchanged a series of blistering memos, with Todd censuring McCaw for granting a celebrity privacy rights exceeding “those given to average citizens.” McCaw suspended him without pay pending an investigation into the Fuentes incident, blasting him for “careless news judgment,” for prompting the Lowes to cancel their subscription and for potentially damaging “relations with other high profile readers.”

“It was not good,” says Hadly. “Josh [Molina] and I had a running joke: that we were going to walk in one day and Travis would be our boss.” It didn’t take long for McCaw to prove them right. She appointed Armstrong interim publisher, then left for a Mediterranean cruise aboard her yacht with von Wiesenberger. While they were gone, Armstrong ordered Cohee to rewrite a routine story about a local city council member’s resignation “to reflect the editorial position of the paper,” Murphy says. Reporters and editors stood by stunned as Armstrong directed news coverage, “violating every journalistic principle I could think of,” says then-Metro Editor Hulse. Executives threatened to terminate anyone “sharing or leaking..information involving the News-Press to any other news organization,” according to a News-Press memo. Murphy was sure he’d “be asked to do something I just couldn’t do,” that he’d be marched through the newsroom and out the building. “I would have found that very difficult,” he says, choking back tears.

He resigned, handing his key, parking pass and badge to Director of Human Resources Yolanda Apodaca, who asked why he was leaving. He politely recited the litany of ethical breaches he’d witnessed, apologized for not giving two weeks’ notice and left. He accepted another job, and a substantial pay cut, at the San Luis Obispo Tribune, arranging to share an apartment two hours away so his wife and mother-in-law could remain in Santa Barbara. Shortly thereafter, Managing Editor Foulsham also resigned, citing the same reasons Murphy had articulated.

Roberts returned to work July 6, McCaw’s 55th birthday, reporting to the editorial page editor, unable to protect the newsroom. “He believed a lot in the newspaper,” says Strean. “He’d worked so hard, he’d overcome meddling attempts before,” but finally, he “realized he couldn’t do it anymore.” He had breakfast with Apodaca, submitted his resignation letter and offered to help with the transition. Returning to the newsroom, he found Hulse, who handed him her two weeks’ notice.

What happened next was a scene out of “The Battle of Algiers,” a former editor says, with Armstrong “roaring” into Roberts’ office, “face all red,” yelling, “I want you out of here right now!” Someone shouted: “Jerry’s getting kicked out!” prompting reporters and editors to rush forward and form a tight ring around Roberts, while Armstrong, tugging on Roberts’ sleeve, repeated, “C’mon, you’ve got to get out now!” The chaos intensified: Reporters and editors were yelling, hugging, crying. Above the din, completely out of character, came Jane Hulse’s pitched voice: “Fuck you, Travis, haven’t you done enough already?”

“Fuck you, Travis! Fuck you, Travis!” staffers chanted, applauding as Roberts made the perp walk to the street. Turning to Hulse, Armstrong demanded: “I want you out of the building.” Michael Todd quit, as did star columnist Barney Brantingham, followed by Sports Editor Gerry Spratt the next day. The newsroom burst with emotion, hardened journalists weeping as Hulse threw her belongings into a box, quickly said good-bye and walked to her car.

Gathering around Hulse, they realized McCaw had won. Armstrong had brought down Roberts, and the wall. Hadly wrote a story about the resignations, gave it to the copy desk and left for a meeting with his colleagues and a union representative. Around 10 p.m., Armstrong killed it, replacing it with a note to readers. The resignations, he wrote, reflected “differences of opinion.”

In near real time, news of the upheaval � with some of the most unflattering photographs of McCaw imaginable � appeared on the wires, the Independent’s Web site, the well-read LA Observed blog, followed by pieces in the Los Angeles Times and 150 other publications. McCaw’s publicist attributed the resignations to people who disagreed with the owner’s request for more local news, a position that contradicted the paper’s numerous awards for local coverage and confused readers, who demanded to know what really happened.

“Boycott the News-Press” bumper stickers appeared on cars around town, and hundreds of readers cancelled subscriptions. The Independent, “inundated with letters, phone calls and e-mails,” was happy to publish what the News-Press rejected, says Executive Editor Welsh. Relaxing aboard her yacht in the Adriatic with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, McCaw seemingly failed to grasp the tragedy unfolding back home. She told New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman the fault was not hers, attributing the unrest to “personality differences,” admitting that, amid the turmoil, she was reading the News-Press only “occasionally.”

In Santa Barbara, though, the battle was escalating. When more than a dozen reporters appeared at Armstrong’s office with a petition demanding an end to the “intolerable conditions,” the restoration of newsroom ethics and support for a nascent union, he ordered them back to work. The next day, in the aptly named De La Guerra Plaza adjacent to the News-Press building, hundreds of supporters gathered to watch staff members, dressed in black, their mouths sealed with duct tape, greet a roaring crowd that chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and waved signs, “Free the News,” “No More News Suppress,” “Stop the Travesty!” while Armstrong watched from his office window.

Within minutes, images of gagged News-Press reporters and editors shot around the world on the Internet. Rather than give interviews � Armstrong refused to return calls even to his own reporters � he and McCaw communicated through commentaries. In her first front-page column, McCaw accused “disgruntled ex-employees” of manipulating “facts to divert attention from the truth” and infusing the news with inaccurate, biased reporting. Editors had used the paper “as a personal arena to air petty infighting” and to further “their own agendas.” She praised the newsroom’s new leaders, including former reporter Scott Steepleton, who became the newsroom’s highest-ranking editor, for having a “dedicated commitment to quality and higher standards.”

Meanwhile, reporter Scott Hadly struggled to deal with the quagmire his life had become. “I don’t have any money, I have a mortgage payment, I have two little kids, but I was physically sick over this moral dilemma every day.” After reading McCaw’s column, he wrote his resignation letter. “She put something on the front page that was patently untrue. It was so offensive to me,” Hadly said in an interview. “It was like she was undermining my own work there for eight years.”

Presentation Editor Colin Powers resigned next, disgusted at what he calls McCaw’s “vicious and unfounded” column, at seeing positions filled with “opportunists who possess the requisite loyalty.” Those who resigned left “because the hands of the executive suite and op-ed department had extended their reach so far into the newsroom that their fingertips were on the reporters’ keyboards,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

Human resources manager Apodaca forbade Roberts from retrieving his belongings, hiring a delivery service to return enough boxes to fill a storage room, along with an envelope one of the workers handed his 16-year-old daughter, a cease-and-desist letter from McCaw’s attorney that basically said: “Shut your pie hole or we’ll sue you to kingdom come,” says the Independent’s Nick Welsh, who along with several others received similar letters.

Sidelined by McCaw’s cease-and-desist letter and her ongoing litigation threats, Roberts decided he nonetheless had to speak out, had to make clear to the community that ethics were behind the stand he and the others had taken. When the organizers of a community forum invited him to speak in late July, he agreed, arriving at the downtown Victoria Hall Theater to hundreds of cheering supporters.

In his first public address since resigning, Roberts enumerated the many ways McCaw and her loyalists had failed to “distinguish between advocacy and reporting, obliterating the metaphorical wall that stands to separate them.” Several prominent journalists spoke that night, supporting those who had sacrificed so much for principle. Recounting a moment from his own career when San Jose Mercury News Publisher Joe Ridder killed a political expos�, Lou Cannon said: “I had four kids and I wasn’t willing to give up a very good job on a matter of principle. These nine people did.” He added: “It’s going to be a long fight. Do enough people in Santa Barbara care about honest news to mount a long-term campaign? I hope so, because their fight is our fight.”

It didn’t take long for McCaw and her supporters to unleash their fury, attacking what they called a “cabal” trying to silence the paper, chastising the Los Angeles Times for soliciting subscriptions in Santa Barbara, assailing Times editor John Arthur for sending a one-line e-mail to his old friend Roberts telling him to “hang in there.” McCaw and von Wiesenberger prowled the parking lot taking photos of a car with union stickers and placards as “evidence for possible cease-and-desist letters,” according to a letter the Teamsters sent to the National Labor Relations Board protesting the paper’s labor practices.

Reporters drove to work in tears, arriving feeling “like puking every day,” says one. Fed up, they scheduled an appointment with McCaw, but she never showed. Associate Editor Scott Steepleton ordered them back to work, then wrote in a memo that they had knocked so loudly on McCaw’s door she might have “come out of her office and [been] surprised.” Their actions, he wrote, were a “clear and outrageous attempt to physically intimidate Mrs. McCaw”; he threatened to fire them if they tried it again.

Throughout summer and fall, McCaw pledged to rebuild her team, hiring self-help author Laura Schlessinger as the paper’s new local columnist; a security agency with expertise in combating corporate espionage; and a slew of recent college graduates to replace the fleeing veterans. Despite the paper’s anti-Teamster crusade, union supporters kept fighting for representation, while McCaw and her executives refused to meet with prominent community members and rejected an advertisement from religious leaders urging the News-Press to adopt “a public and clear commitment to..professional ethics.” In his response to the clergy, von Wiesenberger compared them to “tyrants, charlatans and religious intolerants,” scolding: “It is dismaying..to see religious leadership so willingly embrace a cause that they have no facts about and do not choose to understand,” an opinion McCaw and Armstrong repeated in a series of columns and editorials that included antiunion diatribes, attacks on competitors and accusations against those who would “silence News-Press editorials.”

McCaw’s attorney sent a threatening letter to prominent lawyers providing legal assistance to News-Press journalists; then Steepleton fired the features editor for allowing health columnist Michael Seabaugh to make a passing reference to Laura Schlessinger’s preaching “against tolerating diversity” as “a waste of time.” The News-Press publicly apologized to her without consulting Seabaugh. (Schlessinger declined to comment. See “The Sound of Silence,” page 45.) Calling the features editor’s dismissal “unconscionable,” Seabaugh, too, resigned; he now writes for the Santa Barbara Independent.

McCaw was so determined to discredit Roberts and his allies that she assigned publicist Agnes Huff to dissuade the Society of Professional Journalists from honoring them with an ethics award. The e-mail Huff sent to the organization contained factual errors, referring to the “Santa Monica” News-Press, and was “not at all germane,” says Gary Hill, chair of the SPJ ethics committee.

A week before SPJ’s Chicago convention, a News-Press reporter called Jerry Roberts at home asking about a confidential $500,000 breach of contract action McCaw had filed against him. When Roberts inquired how he knew about the secret arbitration filing, the reporter replied that McCaw’s attorney had delivered a copy to him at the News-Press, says Roberts’ lawyer, Andrine Smith. A few days later, Huff publicly blamed Roberts for revealing the existence of the confidential legal action to the Los Angeles Times, a charge both Smith and Times reporter James Rainey dispute. “There were plenty of folks both inside and outside the newsroom,” says Rainey, “who knew about it.”

If McCaw wanted to scare Roberts into silence, she failed miserably. At the SPJ convention, nothing about his appearance made him seem anything but ordinary: the brown tweed jacket, the navy tie, the gray hair and beard, the steady, dependable cadence of his remarks. But as he recounted the events that brought him to the podium, his words betrayed the extraordinary courage and bravery of the more than two dozen who have quit or been fired in the last four months. Passing the sword to those “who stayed behind to fight,” Roberts beseeched the audience to struggle every day “to ensure the values, principles and ethics that define public interest journalism.”

The crowd leapt to its feet, stomping, applauding, whooping, as Hill heralded Roberts and the others as heroes. Everyone in the hall “realized the kind of sacrifices these guys made,” Hill says. “Any journalist can picture themselves in that situation, and wonder, ‘Do I have the courage and principles to do what they did?’”

Fall descends gently on Santa Barbara, the mist lingering longer, the yellow and orange of the sycamore and maples mingling in the palette of palms and evergreens. In the newsroom, fall brought union representation and a renewed commitment to securing a contract “with guarantees that the wall will not be breeched,” says a reporter, even though McCaw officially contested the 33-6 vote with the National Labor Relations Board. Fall also found McCaw on her yacht again with boyfriend von Wiesenberger, now using the title “Baron,” the Dallas Morning News reported, with “more pressing business than putting down [a] staff insurrection.”

While McCaw and her jet-set friends sported beach chic and Bohemian casual while sipping glasses of Veuve Clicquot on the sands of St. Tropez, more and more News-Press employees, trapped by financial obligations and a lack of jobs, pondered ways to survive. Some considered joining a lawsuit claiming the paper willfully violated overtime laws. Others plotted union strategies, determined, as one says, “to stay and fight for the paper’s integrity.” Still more resigned. Starshine Roshell, an 11-year veteran who lost her column in August after publicly declaring her support for the newsroom and the union, gave Scott Steepleton her resignation letter, said, “Fuck you” and walked out. Huff issued a press release scolding Roshell for her “use of profanity,” prompting a 45-year Santa Barbara resident to e-mail Steepleton: “I don’t know Starshine Roshell but I do know that she is one of the best writers at the News-Press... I don’t know what she said, but I’m sure you deserve it. You stink!”

The battle for the newsroom’s soul will likely continue far into the future, with neither side backing down. In the midst of a union-sponsored subscription boycott, the paper’s seven-day circulation has declined 5 percent since March to 39,725, according to figures the News-Press released publicly in October. As the struggle escalated, Associate Editor Steepleton required reporters to sign affidavits denying leaking information to the press, intensifying a campaign of intimidation that has union leaders and newsroom veterans worried that News-Press executives will fire them just as they did Melinda Burns, an award-winning, 21-year News-Press reporter and union leader, in late October.

As difficult as their lives have become, the newsroom staff has encountered overwhelming community support, with frequent acts of kindness bestowed by random citizens: free meals at restaurants, free services at an office supplies store, free cups of coffee “and more free drinks than I can count,” says Michael Todd. “A million little things from nameless people.”

Nearly all those who left have new jobs and new lives, including Jerry Roberts, who has no plans to return to daily journalism, preferring to teach, write and help his former reporters and editors find work, he tells me on a glowing October day as we stroll past the bubbling fountains of an impeccably appointed beachfront restaurant. Tan and fit, he sits down at a table facing white sailboats cutting a path through the sparkling ocean, clearly exhilarated at the good fortune that has brought him to Santa Barbara. Despite the hours spent battling McCaw’s legal challenge, the heartbreak he suffers for the disrupted lives of his colleagues and the disappointment he feels at seeing what his beloved News-Press has become, Roberts has moved on. “I don’t have any bitterness.

I had a great ride. You don’t get that a lot in this business,” he says, pausing, his mood turning somber as he recalls the trials of the last four months. “Everybody’s lost that now.”

The realization brings him back to a tearful farewell party two weeks earlier at editor Don Murphy’s house, the last hurrah for the Roberts newsroom. As the night wore on, it became clear to them that “what we had for a couple of years was really special. We built something together, a really good paper. You don’t see that when you’re in it, but you have to appreciate it. You have to look back and remember: There was a time, and there were these people, and it was all working really, really well. That’s how you heal.”

He pauses again, his gaze lingering on the sailboats, then wryly delivers the kicker: “I myself went home, took a sleeping pill and went to bed.”

Editorial assistant Hallie C. Falquet contributed research to this report.

Clarifications:

• It may have appeared to some readers of this article that Agnes Huff is an employee of the News-Press. In fact, Huff is retained by the News-Press to handle media inquiries in her capacity as President & CEO of Agnes Huff Communications Group, LLC.

• The article refers to Arthur von Wiesenberger as both restaurant critic and copublisher of the News-Press. After von Wiesenberger was named copublisher in late April 2006, he no longer served as restaurant critic.

Image: In July 2006, hundreds of community members rallied in De La Guerra Plaza on behalf of the News-Press editorial staff (Santa Maria Times).

On Saturday, the United States marks its semiquincentennial, awash in the vile corruption, vicious cruelty and tyrannical incompetence of Donald Trump — disunited by an elected leader who foments division, preaches hatred, and steals like he breathes.

At a time of disillusion and pessimism about the nation’s future, Newsmakers sought solace and affirmation of the historic ideals, principles and values on which the U.S. was founded in the words of perhaps the most famous speech ever delivered in observation of America’s birthday.

On July 5, 1852, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, himself a formerly enslaved man, delivered a searing address in Rochester, N.Y., that made manifest the vast gap between the soaring rhetoric of the Founders and the brutality of the institutional bondage they had legalized.

Here’s an excerpt from the speech, courtesy of Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, as delivered by the late James Earl Jones — one that speaks to the obligation of Americans to respond when the nation’s founding principles are betrayed. The full text of Douglass’s speech is here.

Happy 250th, America.

Image: Frederick Douglass (Amsterdam News).

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