Good morning. It is June 4th. The heat is supposed to be backing off in New York City, but I sure can't tell that here in the Indignity Morning Podcast Studio. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The early returns are in from India's election, and Narenda Modi appears to have glaringly failed to get the sweeping affirmation of his Hindu fascist government that his campaign was aiming for. The Washington Post writes, most analysts expected him to easily brush aside India's enervated and poorly funded opposition parties, some of which had their bank accounts frozen and their leaders jailed by the government in the run up to the election. Instead, it's not clear yet whether his party, the BJP, will scrape together a majority at all. In a rare move, the Post writes, television networks typically aligned with the BJP changed the photo accompanying the party logo from Modi to the party president, JP Nata. Generally not what you do when your personality cult is winning. Indian stocks dropped 6%, the Post writes, on fears that the pro -business BJP might fall short, and companies led by Gautam Adani, a billionaire seen as a Modi ally, saw as much as a fifth of their value wiped out within hours. The publication formerly known as the Huffington Post, which is now going by HuffPost, no definite article, I think reports that the federal judge who struck down the Biden administration's mask mandate in April of 2022, Catherine Kimball Mazzell, who had based her decision on citations of how the word sanitation was used in the past, had just before the ruling gone on a lavishly funded five day retreat paid for by a right wing group that encourages judges to use that method of historical linguistic analysis which Mizzell had never used before. After five days of legal education at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, with luxury accommodations fully paid for by her sponsors, she wrote the opinion that they apparently wanted. The chief financial officer of the Epoch Times, the secretive right -wing propaganda newspaper run by Falun Gong, Weidong Guan, was indicted yesterday on charges of $67 million worth of money laundering the Southern District of New York, Bloomberg reports, accused Kwan of managing Epoch Times' Make Money Online team, which used cryptocurrency to knowingly purchase tens of millions of dollars of fraudulent unemployment insurance benefits from 2020 until this May. The Department of Justice said, next season's Shen Yun pageant is going to be amazing. On the front of the paper, New York Times Today, the lead story is,

Biden preparing order to let him seal off border. Mirrors a failed bill. Now that Donald Trump got Republicans in Congress to block the bipartisan attempt to pass Trump's preferred immigration policies under Joe Biden. Biden is just going to go ahead and do it by executive order, including blatant violations of asylum law. When you take the jump on that story, next to it is the story voters seem to embrace Trump's hardline plan on migrants. Polls show.

Trump's desire to revive the Eisenhower era program that back then they went ahead and called Operation Wetback, featuring mass deportations, is supposedly in line with public opinion. About half of Americans, the Times writes, have said they would support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a CNN poll conducted by the research firm SSRS in January. What do you know? Joe Biden's decision to move to the Stephen Miller position on immigration circa 2016 failed to neutralize Donald Trump's use of anti -immigrant sentiment as a political force. It's almost as if doing politics on the other side's terms makes the political terrain more favorable to the other side. In recent years, the Times writes, a majority of Americans have come to see the situation at the border as a problem. I wonder if that has anything to do with the New York Times' decision to cover the situation at the border as a crisis with full -blown crisis packaging and full page after full page about what a huge problem it was. Elsewhere on page one, the second column is news analysis. Mexico gives a leftist party tighter grip. Sort of an odd way to talk about a landslide popular victory in a democratic election. But whenever the needle moves left of center in Latin America, the New York Times can be counted on to put some pretty nakedly reactionary dismay in the news columns. Elsewhere on the page, regular Americans can't afford to become home buyers.

Regular Americans can't afford to buy electric vehicles. Buyers are no longer just elites, the headline says. And on page A7, in international yet provincial news, the headline is, Trump ally enters race in setback for Sunak. Trump ally here is Nigel Farage. Not sure whether to blame the Times or Farage himself for the reduction of his long squalid, extremely British career to a faint star in the Trump constellation but that does seem to be where he is. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please do subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.