Good morning. It is June 5th. It is a hot morning and it's going to be a hotter day in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Supreme court put out a batch of decisions this morning, including one finding that, because the protection of lawful commerce and arms act shields gun makers from the consequences of people being killed with the products they profit from, Mexico cannot sue Smith and Wesson and six other gun manufacturers over the fact that their guns, despite being illegal to sell in Mexico have flooded the country and are used in widespread violence there. Although the companies are raking in money by selling more guns than the U.S. market is prepared to take, so that their merchandise unavoidably ends up on the Mexican black market, the law shields the manufacturers unless they are actively aiding and abetting a firearms offense, and the court unanimously found that the company's indifference to where their money was ultimately coming from did not meet that standard. 

In another decision, in a reverse discrimination suit, the unanimously agreed that a heterosexual woman could sue her employer for allegedly favoring homosexual employees over her in hiring and promotion under the same standard that a member of a minority group would use to file a discrimination lawsuit. 

New York City had a mayoral debate last night that offered the rare spectacle of Andrew Cuomo engaging with his opponents on stage rather than running his usual tightly controlled front-runner-by-default campaign. To the extent it was a contest to see who could attack Cuomo most memorably, the winner was former assemblyman Michael Blake, who among other things, used a question about public perceptions of safety on the subway, to say that the real menace to public safety was Cuomo sexually harassing women.

City Council President Adrienne Adams and Assembly member Zohran Mamdani, the runaway number two candidate in the polls, both landed some good and accurate attacks on Cuomo. Cuomo, in turn, kept attacking Mamdani as someone who was talented on social media, but underqualified to be mayor. Although unlike Cuomo, Mamdani lives here, an issue that went somewhat under-discussed in the two hours of the debate, except for a portion in which all the candidates were asked who their number one choice in the 2021 primary had been, and Cuomo was stuck saying who he would have voted for, incredibly enough, given the chance to make a purely hypothetical pick with four years of hindsight, Cuomo chose to say that he would have voted for Eric Adams. 

After the debate, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave Mamdani her long-awaited endorsement with Adrienne Adams as her second choice, Comptroller Brad Lander third, former Comptroller Scott Stringer fourth, and State Senator Zellnor Myrie, fifth. 

Yesterday, we talked about the front page story in the New York Times, about how the Smithsonian board had not yet said anything in public about Donald Trump's illegal declaration that he was going to fire the director of the National Portrait Gallery. The Washington Post reported yesterday evening that if there aren't words, there are actions. “In defiance of Trump's announcement last Friday that he was firing her,” the Post writes, “Kim Sajet, the director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, has continued to report for work, conducting meetings and handling other museum business as she did before. According to several people familiar with her activities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter.” 

This seems like stretching the word formula of asking for anonymity to “discuss a personnel matter” beyond its reasonable boundaries. It's not as if they're safeguarding, say, its privacy. And it seems like there would be several more salient reasons why someone would avoid publicly attaching their name to a story about defying the out-of-control authoritarian president, but journalistic conventions are journalistic conventions. 

That same president announced a new travel ban against people from 12 different countries and restrictions on people from seven more, reviving and expanding his first-term Muslim ban. The 12 countries whose nationals are banned are Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. 

The seven restricted countries are Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. Trump's executive order cites claims that people from those countries either overstay their visas or represent security threats to the United States, conditions which somehow do not apply to any countries in Europe. The ban contains an exemption for World Cup and Olympic athletes, to try to reconcile the Trump administration's desire to operate a xenophobic fortress nation against the president's desire to put on big TV events. 

On the front of the print edition of this morning's New York Times, the lead news spot is two stories under a two-column headline. “G.O.P.’s Bill Would Swell U.S. Debt by $2.4 Trillion.” On the right, “Budget Office’s Tally Likely to Heat Up Debate in Senate.” On the left, “Republicans Work to Discredit Experts’ Tax-Cut Warning.” Your straight news lead in the right hand column is “The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday that the broad Republican bill to cut taxes and slash some federal programs would add $2.4 trillion to the already soaring national debt over the next decade in an analysis that was all but certain to inflame concerns that President Trump's domestic agenda would lead to excessive government borrowing.” 

And the left-hand column deals with how those facts will be received politically. “Even before House Republicans learned the full price of their tax package on Wednesday,” The Times writes, one of the bill's chief authors, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, was sowing doubt about the accuracy of the estimate. ‘I’m skeptical’ Mr. Smith quipped at an event last month when asked about the coming analysis of the legislation's cost. ‘Unless I like the number, I'm against the number.’” Does it really count as a quip if it's just a literal assessment of what he's gonna say and do? 

“In the bitter war over the nation's fiscal future,” the Times continues, “President Trump and his Republican allies have united around a new foe, the economists and budget experts who have warned about the costs of the party's tax ambitions. Republican leaders have set about trying to discredit any hint of unfavorable accounting on their signature legislation as they race to enact it before the president's self-imposed July 4th deadline.” 

Next to that is a set of four pictures of a factory in Vietnam making jeans. Over the headline, “Trump Dreams of Factory Revival, but U.S. Is Short on Essentials / Lacking Tech, Training and Skilled Workers.” The setup is a little confusing. It opens by talking about a manufacturer named Sanjeev Bahl. “From his factory in Los Angeles,” the Times writes, “Mr. Bahl oversees around 250 people who sew, cut, and distress jeans for brands like Everlane, J. Crew, and Ralph Lauren. They stitch together 70,000 pairs of jeans a month. ‘America,’ he insisted, ‘can make stuff again.’ But there is a catch. The operation works only because his company, Saitex, runs a much bigger factory and fabric mill in Vietnam, where thousands of workers churn out 500,000 pairs a month.” 

The guy who says America can make stuff again is really saying that America can operate some factories embedded within a much larger global system of production, but that's not what the trade war is set up to do, which means this particular model of American production isn't built for Trump's manufacturing policy. Before you even get to the paragraph that goes by saying, “at Saitex's Los Angeles factory, most of the workers come from countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador.” 

Down at the bottom of page one, Jeremy Peters takes another whack at the subject of campus conflict with a story that he wants to be about free speech and overreaching student discipline on campus, but is in fact about a little creep at Brown who decided to make himself famous and get into the right-wing media ecosystem by programming an AI to generate disparaging accounts of what the university's employees individually do and then posting those results publicly so the right-wing outrage machine could target them. Is it free expression? Sure. Is this country infested with people who have, unfortunately for themselves and everyone else, lived lives protected from the risk of anyone ever punching them in the face for their free expressive choices? Absolutely. 

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 clicking those buttons if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, after we take our leisurely summer Friday, we will talk again on Monday.