Good morning. It is June 12th. It is already getting hot in New York City and it's supposed to get hotter. So I'm going to try to knock this one out briskly with the roar of the air conditioner turned off. Anyway, this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

A Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet operated by Air India crashed right after takeoff on a scheduled flight from Ahmedabad to Gatwick Airport, London. There were 242 people aboard, and the New York Times reports that the plane came down onto the dining facility of a medical college during lunchtime. So far, 204 bodies have been recovered, at least five of them of medical students on the ground. The Times Visuals team already has a map up of the crash showing that the plane went about a mile from the runway, losing altitude as it went before crashing. This is the first fatal crash of 787, but, the Times notes, the plane had been investigated by the FAA and had its deliveries paused for a year because of reports of manufacturing defects and irregularities. The Times writes that “among the whistleblowers who have raised concerns about the South Carolina factory where the Dreamliners assembled, was John Barnett, a former quality manager with almost three decades of experience at Boeing, who went public with his concerns in 2019. He and other people who had worked at the factory highlighted shoddy practices, including the improper routing of wires and manufacturing tools and debris left inside planes. Mr. Barnett killed himself last year after a years long legal battle with the company, which he accused of retaliating against him over his speaking out.”

Now back to the regularly scheduled bad news. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, followed up his firing of all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control's Vaccine Advisory Panel by naming eight members of his choosing to the panel. They are predictably more or less what Dick Tracy's Rogues Gallery would look like if he fought disease instead of crime. A mixture of people best known for opposing COVID control measures and people best known for opposing vaccines and people who do both. Dr. Robert Malone, for instance, NPR reports, has “gained a large following for undermining the COVID-19 vaccine. A scientist who worked on early research into the mRNA technology, he became critical of the shot and made baseless and disproven claims, including falsely stating that getting vaccinated puts people who have already had COVID-19 at higher risk. Another member, Vicki Pebsworth,” NPR writes, has served on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center, a prominent advocacy group that warns against vaccine risks.” The roundup continues, “Dr. Retsef Levi, who's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has stoked concerns about the shots. In a social media post in early 2023, Levi said that all COVID mRNA vaccination programs should stop immediately because they completely failed to fulfill any of their advertised promises regarding efficacy. And there was ‘mounting and indisputable evidence’ that they cause unprecedented levels of harm, including the death of young people and children.” 

As the basic pillars of survival continue to get yanked out from under the American project, President Donald Trump told reporters at one of his Oval Office press sessions on Tuesday, that he wants to shut down the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the end of hurricane season. CNN writes, “‘we want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,’ Trump told reporters later saying, ‘a governor should be able to handle it. And frankly, if they can't handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn't be governor.’ Trump added,” CNN writes “that the federal government will start distributing less federal aid for disaster recovery and that the funding will come directly from the president's office.” 

Trump went to the Kennedy Center last night to watch Le Misérables and was heckled and booed by the crowd. The Washington Post writes, “asked before the show whether he identified more with Jean Valjean, the humble protagonist and former convict trying to redeem himself, or Javert, the inspector who uses strict enforcement of the law to pursue Valjean. Trump responded, ‘that's a tough one. I don't know.’”

As Trump grapples with the question of who the more appealing character in a famous melodrama about persecution might be, the front of this morning's New York Times gives him a five column headline. “Trump Could Send Troops to More Cities as Protests Expand / Newsom Assails a ‘Brazen Abuse of Power.’ The departure from the Times's standard strategy of indirect headlines is so sharp that the lead is basically the same thing as the headline package. “Trump administration officials said on Wednesday,” the Times writes “that they were prepared to deploy more troops and National Guard units to counter the growing number of demonstrations against the White House's immigration crackdown, threatening to expand what California's governor, Gavin Newsom, condemned as ‘a brazen abuse of power.’” The story goes on to say “The decision to deploy Marines and National Guard troops in Los Angeles was made without the consultation of Mr. Newsom, who in a nationally televised address on Tuesday night, urged Americans to stand up to Mr. Trump, calling it a perilous moment for democracy and the country's long-held legal norms. ‘California may be first, but it clearly won't end here,’ Mr. Newsom said, speaking to cameras from a studio in Los Angeles. ‘Other states are next. Democracy is next.’ This is Gavin Newsom, recently seen cozying up to far right figures on his podcast in his never ending search for the popular middle. 

Nevertheless, next to that piece, Shane Goldmacher weighs in on behalf of the Times's politics desk. “Democrats See a Risky Terrain As Unrest Transfixes California / A Party Wrestling With Addressing Crime and Immigration.” The piece depicts a party pathologically incapable of rising to an occasion, as witnessed by a political coverage operation, even more abjectly trapped within its own inadequate ideological frameworks. “For Democrats, the scattered yet searing scenes of unrest in Southern California,” Goldmacher writes, “scattered yet searing,” being a brief little hand wave at the gap between the discourse about what's happening and the observable facts of the situation. 

“The scattered yet searing scenes of unrest in Southern California have uncomfortably thrust to the center two issues that have powered Republican gains in recent years, immigration and crime, as party leaders worry that the president is setting a dangerous political trap with provocations too outrageous to ignore.” 

The provocations are outrageous, yet somehow they are only a political problem for the Democrats. To support this, Goldmacher turns to John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania senator whose own staff is fleeing his ongoing mental and emotional breakdown as he reportedly spends his days off his meds and neglecting his job duties in favor of endlessly scrolling social media. “Fetterman,” Goldmacher writes, “a Democrat who has increasingly broken with his party, described the scenes unfolding in Los Angeles as, ‘anarchy and true chaos,’ posting a photo that Republicans have heavily circulated of a masked man waving a Mexican flag standing on a vandalized car surrounded by fire. ‘My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings and assaulting law enforcement,’ Mr. Fetterman wrote on Monday.” 

Besides John Fetterman social media diet. Goldmacher also cites public opinion. “A 54 % majority of Americans, the story says, supported Mr. Trump's program to deport those in the country illegally, according to a CBS News YouGov poll taken on the eve of the current immigration fight. Americans were in favor of Mr. Trump's goals, if not necessarily his approach.” 

That is, this piece about the politics of Trump's current actions in California is pointing to public opinion from before Trump took those actions. But also, when you read the online version of Goldmacher's story and click on the link to the poll he's talking about, when he writes that 54 % of Americans said they support Trump's position, if not necessarily his approach, what “not necessarily his approach” means is that 56 % of Americans say they dislike his approach to only 45 % like it. That is, the supposed popularity of his goals, was entirely offset by the unpopularity of what people believed he was actually doing. And again, this is before he sent in the Marines. 

The piece also describes how members of Congress speaking out against the illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement were peppered by questions Goldmacher writes, “from conservative leaning or right-wing outlets, including the Washington Times, the Epoch Times, Fox News, the Daily Caller News Foundation and the Daily Signal in a sign of how the immigration issue was resonating on the right.” 

That is certainly one way of interpreting the fact that a bunch of people being paid by right-wing outlets came together to voice their objections to Democratic officials who had spoken against Trump's actions. But it seems like if the message were truly successfully resonating, they might not need to try quite so hard. 

And, on the question of what Trump is actually doing with immigration enforcement, the big picture on the top of the page one is of an officer whose face is obscured by a reflection of leaves in a window touching or gesturing toward a handcuffed person in what looks like the back of a police vehicle. The caption is, “A group of more than 10 officers detained a total of three migrants over the course of several hours on a recent day in Miami,” and the headline is, “ICE, Pressured by White House, Is Straining to Meet Arrest Goals / A Push Is Increasing the Potential for Errors, Ex-Officials Say.”

“Demands from the White House,” the Times writes, “for a drastic increase in arrests of people who have entered the country illegally have pushed immigration officials into overdrive to fulfill President Trump's pledge of mass deportations. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is carrying out workplace raids across the country, like the one in the Garment District of Los Angeles last week that kicked off protests and a vast federal response. The agency is staggering shifts, so agents are available seven days a week to try to meet arrest goals and asking criminal investigators, who usually focus on issues like human trafficking, to help identify targets.”

“It is also asking the public to call in tips to report illegal immigration.” Piece goes on to say “Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has been deeply engaged in the effort behind the scenes, meeting with top ICE officials in recent weeks and scrutinizing the numbers, according to people familiar with his involvement.” The Times’s reporting on that meeting is considerably less spicy and more favorable to Miller than what the Wall Street Journal reported previously about it.

The Times writes, “during a meeting with agency leaders late last month at ICE's headquarters, Mr. Miller reviewed the agency's arrest rate and discussed ways to ratchet it up. At one point, he encouraged ICE leaders to target apparent gang members with noticeable tattoos, according to people familiar with his comments.” 

The story then says “another official with direct knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the discussion, said that Mr. Miller asked those in the room if they thought they could hit one million deportations this year.” 

The Journal's account of how Miller was pushing to get the numbers up, published on Monday, described more or less the opposite of what the Times presented. “Gang members and violent criminals, the Journal wrote, what Trump called the worst of the worst, weren't the sole target of deportations. Federal agents needed to ‘just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,’ Miller told top ICE officials who had come from across the U.S. according to people familiar with the meeting. Agents didn't need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C. and arrest 30 people right away. ‘Who here thinks they can do it, Miller said, asking for a show of hands.” The Journal then wrote, “ICE agents appeared to follow Miller's tip and conducted an immigration sweep Friday at the Home Depot in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Westlake in Los Angeles, helping set off a weekend of protests around Los Angeles County.” 

The question of who it is that Stephen Miller is telling the agents to go after is even more germane given what the Times story gets to later on, about how ICE is hunting people using a new mapping app, which contains information about more than 700,000 people” the Times writes, “drawn from data not just at ICE, but at agencies across the government. This includes the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Social Security Administration, according to the documents obtained by the Times. The app will ‘eventually allow for the centralized management of all interior enforcement priorities,’ the documents say.” 

“That would include data from the Housing and Urban Development Department, the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department, and the Internal Revenue Service, according to the documents.” Seems like the deployment of a total surveillance state, drawing on what's supposed to be protected personal information, could have gone a little higher in the story. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.