Mashed up by me from H.R. 1295 text via Congress.gov, Creative Commons photo of White House, and vector graphic of crown
Note: My Apr. 4 blog post—#TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of 3: Crash course in Elon Musk, the DOGE coup, and resisting same—I published as part one of three. Under my own Douglasian reorganization authority, and to make my own life easier, I hereby declare this post part two of that series. Part three comes—eventually!
On June 4, Rolling Stone published my latest article: Republican bill would legalize DOGE and let Trump dismantle everything: The Reorganizing Government Act is a longshot in the Senate, but that could change—and so would the separation of powers. As usual, I drafted more text than could be squeezed in, so please find below bonus material—mostly concerning statutory presidential reorganization authority’s history and some political philosophy—for the truly autodidactic among ye.
A short history of reorganization authority power struggles
The Reorganizing Government Act of 2025’s House sponsor, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), portrayed his bill during the Mar. 25 House Oversight Committee session as a fairly routine granting of long-gone special powers. “I want to reiterate that between 1932 and 1984,” Comer said, “presidents submitted more than 100 reorganization plans, presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan, used this authority to create or dismantle federal agencies.” While President Reagan did briefly hold Congressionally granted reorganization authority, he didn’t use it to create or dismantle any federal agencies—he didn’t even submit a single reorganization plan to Congress. To give Comer’s Southern drawl the benefit of the doubt, it sounds like he just misplaced the clause “presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan” in his sentence. It should have gone after “between 1932 and 1984″—then it would have been accurate.
Comer also claimed “Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama requested renewed and expand[ed] authority” to submit reorganization plans. None of those past presidents obtained the authority, especially because, not to embarrass Comer or anything, Clinton never even asked. At the meeting, no Representative corrected Comer, but the Congressional Research Service report he received unanimous consent to enter into the record, does. (It also explains the accurate Reagan history.)
Clinton in 1993 tasked Al Gore with cutting bureaucratic costs, and in each term, the then-vice president’s National Performance Review pursued that mission. Among the Review’s thousands of pages was indeed the recommendation that the White House seek reorg. authority. But the Clinton administration never took up the idea in earnest, much less formally requested such powers from Congress. Comer’s claim, apparently an attempt to turn such minutiae into a main character to normalize an unprecedented power grab for Trump, is specious.
Back in January, Trump told Congress that DOGE “is headed by Elon Musk”; Musk claimed the austerity team is akin to the concluded National Performance Review, which was a White House-led task force—as DOGE arguably is.
Yet Gore’s crew traveled the country to listen to agency staff and compile their ideas into wonkish suggestions for Congress and Clinton to consider—and faced no serious legal challenges. In contrast, Musk and his 34-timefelon president stand accused, in the AFGE lawsuit, of top-down rogue lawbreaking to dismantle government unilaterally from under the White House cloak of an efficiency task force. In their complaint, the plaintiffs write: “In sum, OMB [Office of Management and Budget], OPM [Office of Personnel Management], and DOGE have usurped agency authority, exceeded their own authority, acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, and ignored procedural requirements by requiring federal agencies throughout the government” to “Impose cuts to functions and staffing according to ‘targets’ and ‘goals’ imposed by DOGE.”
Musk boasted of his team, “all of our actions are maximally transparent”—yet they tellrequesterssuing for records underthe Freedom of Information Act, No way, even after a federal judge found in March that DOGE is “likely covered by FOIA.”
If the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were actually a cabinet-level department created through Congress, it’d be very subject to FOIA and other obligations. But DOGE’s ‘name’ is a mere label Musk styled after a dog- (or doge-)themed cryptocurrency he’sdeniedowning in a contentous, closed court case. The operatives’ continuing refusal to disclose their names and their literal opacity—papering over windows in a basement conference room—has encouraged accusations, including from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), that the crew of hacker-y twentysomethings is a “shadow government.”
At the Oversight session, Comer ignored or dismissed concerns about DOGE’s doings, painting his bill and the Trump administration as simply cleaning the government up of unnecessary bureaucrats: “We have to have a reorganization of the government—it’s gotten out of hand over the past 4 years! Bureaucracies have grown, bureaucrats have increased in number, and the people taking it on the chin in the federal workforce are the ones who actually do the work at the bottom of the organizational chart. This is a reorganization for them!” (Yeah, sure.)
Curiously, Comer didn’t discuss the first Trump administration’s reorganization authority request. The related Reforming Government Act of 2018 died prior to floor voting. Unlike Comer’s legislation, the Trump 1-erabills expressly forbade plans to ax independent regulatory agencies or all of their statutory programs and would have constrained the presidential powers by limiting them to “consolidation authority.” Like moving a computer file from one directory to another, deleting the former location’s in the process and hoping everything works out with the file in the fresh spot, consolidation authority would have presumably preserved whichever statutory programs’ existence when shifting their position in the org charts.
Consolidation authority similarly made the Trump 1 request less extreme than failed Republican reorg. authority legislation from earlier in the 21st century. President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers now, pushing maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking the Constitution. Bush 43 would have obtained statutory reorganization authority—unexpiring—to propose ending departments, independent regulatory agencies, and some/all of either’s statutory programs, but only if his White House deemed the targets intelligence related. Obama’s request for two-year authority, by contrast, would have left independent regulators alone and stayed under consolidation authority for his plan to merge particular executive organizations: he said he’d arrange six of them into a new take on the Commerce Department, eliminating the old one in the process—so he technically needed the power to abolish departments. Republicans feared he wouldn’t stop with the Commerce Department, but that dispute seems minor compared to today’s Trumpian dismantlings: Neither Obama nor Bush 43 were boasting that they were gunning to end the Education Department altogether, as Trump is. And the expansive Reorganizing Government Act of 2025 envisions no consolidation authority constraint for Trump 2, making Comer’s comparison of his bill with Obama’s request bogus.
In hindsight, the Trump 1 effort comes off like a befogged dry run for the Heritage Foundation, much of the brainsbehind it—and behind today’s moreprepared, Project 2025-shaped Trump 2. After all, ideas for reorganization plans that emanated quietly from his relatively inexperienced, disarrayed first administration strangely amalgamized cross-partisan priorites: a smattering of low-profile, quasi-technical moves, among them merging food safety programs; centrist or liberal schemes like spinning off FAA air traffic control into a nonprofit corporation to better procure the latest, best staff and technology with less political interference; and conservative fixations such as prepping the U.S. Postal Service for privatization. That last is a jaw-dropping commonality between the 2018 and 2025 bids. In March, Musk agreed with Trump that the familiar, constitutionally authorized snailmailmen should be delivered to industry, saying, “we should privatize anything that can be[.]”
This most recent of reorg. authority’s three historical phases has seen Congress deny every presidential request for it since the statute last expired in (of all years) 1984.
Sometimes, these 21st-century bids have downplayed their expansive scopes by trading on the authority’s preceding, more widely popular mid-20th-century phase. That’s when Congress, often routinely, blessed most presidential reorg. plans, not infrequently advertised as merely improving the government’s operational mechanics. Reorganizers promised to steer clear of normative beliefs (somehow)—to remain agnostic about what Uncle Sam should do—and instead hyperfocus on tweaking how government operates.
These wonkish middle-phase plans—President Carter’s among them—have been lampooned as nothing more than “boxology”: shuffling agencies around on the org-charts without really fixing anything. Sometimes they have been rather mundane: President Kennedy’s first reorganization plan in 1963 restructured the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library with a change-up involving “ten guards, one repairman, and two janitors at a total cost of $87,000 a year.”
Other times, second-phase reorganization authority, largely freeing presidents from lawmakers’ snail-speed deliberations and entrenched dependencies on specific districts and states, facilitated surprising results quickly from a birds-eye view. For example, President Nixon’s third reorganization plan in 1970 created the Environmental Protection Agency, now targeted by DOGE.
Searches for historical evidence of major savings from this better-liked second period—or any period—of presidential reorganization authority will findlittle, aside from some of its uses in winding down World War II. The same report from 2012 that Comer entered into the record states that there have been “few instances in which reorganization plans resulted in documented cost savings.”
Reorganization authority’s earliest phase wasn’t so much about money, but about the first half of the 20th century generating widespread, amped-up hopes that significantly strengthening executive power to advance social goals could lead to sizable restructurings that would help heal the deep, long-lasting traumas of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.
The historical analogy isn’t lost entirely even on the unscholarly Donald Trump. He’s repeatedly invoked comparisons between himself and Roosevelt, who during the Great Depression and into the 1940s wielded enormous executive power mainly for very different ends: progressive New Deal social programs and fighting Axis countries instead of Trump’s You’re fired! commands for ever-smaller government and aligning with fascistleaders. Further, whereas Trump’s dismantlings this year have proceeded through a barrage of 150+ executive orders, many legally questionable—some paused by courts pending litigation—Roosevelt revamped government largely by ensuring Congress passed well-crafted, durable legislation.
Vanderbilt political science professor John A. Dearborn, who specializes in power shifts between Congress and presidents, told me that “FDR primarily viewed reorganization authority as a way to make government work more efficiently, and better, rather than simply as a tool to drastically cut back on agencies and functions.” That included a failed 1937 attempt to establish, at the same time as his proposed restructuring legislation would have granted him reorganization authority, a new Department of Public Works and a new Department of Social Welfare.
“Like Trump,” Dearborn said, “FDR was accused of seeking too much power for the presidency. He framed his ambitious reorganization proposal in 1937 as a way to ‘prove to the world that American Government is both democratic and effective’ while authoritarian systems were on the rise abroad. Congress scuttled many of the boldest elements of that plan”—among them not requiring him to seek Congressional review and its lack of an expiration date for his authority (almost always, when Congress extends the preorgative, it’s been on a temporary basis). “Nonetheless,” Dearborn continued, “while the reorganization authority lawmakers granted FDR in 1939 included some important limits on his powers, the law still relied on legislators’ assumption that a president would be uniquely focused on the good of the nation as a whole when formulating and submitting reorganization plans.”
The national culture backing FDR was an enormous facilitator of his reorg. plans and legacy. The culture back then was much more unified than today’s extreme polarization, as illustrated by the song “Why I Like Roosevelt,” originally from the 1940s. It’s embedded below as a 1990s-era recording of the elderly Willie Eason playing guitar in the Sacred Steel tradition and singing.
But another president Trump often mentions, this one trepidatiously, is much less well regarded, particularly due to his tariffs worsening the Great Depression. That’s Herbert Hoover, in 1932 the first president to receive from Congress statutory reorganization authority as presently understood, powers he’d championed as Commerce Secretary in 1924 for his then-boss, President Coolidge. During that year’s relatively mild recession, Commerce Secretary Hoover wrote that the public deserved “little right to complain about our economic situation”—foreshadowing Trump’s own Commerce Secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, lecturing this March that if Social Security checks go unsent, it’s “fraudsters” who’d complain, whereas in such dire straits, his elderly relatives would just hope for their next checks in patriotic silence.
Hoover ignored the warning a thousand-plus economists sent him and signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to dramatically hike duties on imports. The Smoot-Hawley Act was a major part of that era’s tariff policy, which Trump said, in his Apr. 2 “Liberation Day” speech, would have stopped the Great Depression had tariffs—Hoover’s among them—been even more aggressive, as his own were: per Fitch Ratings, Trump’s early April effective tariff rate was reaching levels not seen since twenty years prior to 1929’s Black Thursday. His recent tariff de-escalation with China significantly decreased the total effective rate only temporarily and still has investors anxious over yo-yo-ing uncertainties. (On June 3 Trump doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum—from 25% to 50%—which will particularly affect neighbors Canada and México.)
Trump is likewise ignoring the warning of more than 700 economists and other scholars not to “repeat the catastrophic errors of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.” Tariffs generally raise prices of imported goods, effectively disrupting manufactural supply chains and taxing consumer demand. In a bankster country that, starting in the later 20th century or so, has compensated for offshoring manufactural production by using the military, the spy-meddlers, Madison Avenue, monetized intellectual property enforcement, and more to manipulate much of the globe into keeping the U.S. dollar the default international currency, it’s particularly perilous to crater the buying power of the planet’s biggest importers at the same time as world leaders are losing faith in dealing with The Donald anyway.
Fears of international de-dollarization—and of saying goodbye to stock market gains and Treasury bonds—among money-capital factions may well undo Trump. In January, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called it “The Dumbest Trade War in History,” and even the high school economics teacher in the comedy flick Ferris Bueller’s Day Off managed to succinctly explain a 1986 version of why.
The economy’s bottom falling out would be a catastrophe Trump would presumably blame on anyone cast as his negative image—women, non-whites, poor people, those beyond U.S. borders in the supposed here be dragons lands—and leverage as pseudo-justification for further wrecking-ball powers, much of which the Reorganizing Government Act would legalize.
Akin to Hoover’s years of championing the idea until presidential reorganization authority became for the first time a real prerogative—and in his hands—Trump could claim that, to fix economic and other problems of his own making, Congress should grant him extreme powers, among them unmatched reorganization authority. It’s quite possible his allies would continue to paint it as nothing unusual, perhaps “not fit for camera” and along the lines of second-phase “boxology”—if they justify the authority to the public any more than the little they did at the Mar. 25 Oversight session.
Given such pessimisticprecedents, it’s worth reiterating that Congress has denied presidents the optional reorganization authority for the last four decades and counting.
Vanderbilt University political science professor David E. Lewis, an expert on presidents and the bureaucracy, told me that “In the late 1980s, as the Cold War was ending and the peace dividend beginning, Congress pursued military cuts on their own. They created a commission—the Commission on Base Realignment and Closure—to recommend changes and made themselves vote the recommendation up or down with no amendments allowed. Congress did not need the president to help them improve efficiency via structural changes. They did it themselves.”
Reorganizing the response: extra material about Federalist 51
Standing in the Oval Office on Feb. 11, Musk gave a muddled half-hour speech groping toward political philosophy as his five year old, X Æ A-Xii, rubbedboogers on the Resolute Desk and whispered to a scowling Trump sitting behind it: “You are not the president and you need to go away.”
Musk said that to understand the “whole point of democracy”—according to the FOIA-dodger, it’s being “responsive to the people”—we should imagine “ask[ing] the founders” as if they were alive today. Without specifying any founders or what they said, Musk then criticized the bureaucracy as an unelected fourth branch usurping democratic rule. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau he seeks to “Delete” would likely qualify as such a bureaucracy in his eyes, though that may have more to do with the consumer-protecting independent regulators’ jurisdiction over his companies Tesla and xAI, probably a conflict of interest for DOGE, than it does with anything approaching political philosophy.
Besides claiming the bureaucracy overpowers voters and Congress—a set of debatable, multifaceted questions, to which he simply asserted an axiomatic answer—Musk didn’t address the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Yet “Publius” did, in 1788.
“Publius” was the pseudonym of the founder—almost certainly James Madison, Bill of Rights champion and later, fourth president—who in Federalist 51 argued for ratifying the Constitution. He explained how the core document, if treated as more than mere magic paper, can defend “liberty” by preventing, or at least forestalling, power-grabs by any of the three branches that might aspire to tyranny. That’s a risk inherent to expansive reorganization authority given to presidents who enjoy compliant Congresses.
Each branch, Publius wrote, “should have a will of its own” with members “as little dependent as possible” on the others. Although the Constitution permits Congress to delegate powers such as reorg. authority to presidents—much as lawmakers may delegate certain other powers to various agents, say, to independent regulators, the task of ascertaining abstruse particulars of complicated regulations—if Congress hands over too much, it risks losing its own will.
In a famous line, Publius wrote that the secret to maintaining the separation of powers is this: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Congressional ambition to guard its own turf and expertly will its own authority can counteract presidential ambition to apotheosis.
While certainly imperfect, ambition counteracting ambition is a formula leaps and bounds away from Rep. Tim Burchett’s “fully support[ing] any effort that allows President Trump to make government more efficient.” But the Republican from Tennessee isn’t the only one giving himself over to The Donald.
Such toadyism to an autocrat aspirant emerges from right-wing ideologies, among their ideologues Christian Nationalists and Silicon Valley adherents of the “TESCREAL” variety pack of beliefs that often uphold sci-fi-style eugenics.
Crucially, the ideologies mostly unite against another point in Federalist 51: in “republican”—that is, kingless—”government,” Publius wrote, “the legislative authority, necessarily, predominates.”
Most predominant and consequential of the ideologies may be the neo-reactionary movement (NRx)—also called the Dark Enlightenment—which puts an outright despotic bow on the others.
Maximalist unitary executive theory from both Bush 43 and Trump
President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers now, pushing maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking the Constitution, and the failed legislation for giving Bush 43 reorganization authority should be seen in that context. Of course, advocates of maximalist unitary executive theory would say they’re simply using the Constitution’s second article to the fullest. For a contemporary statement of the viewpoint, see Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership policy agenda guidebook drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. They don’t use the concept of monarchy, but maximalist unitary executive theory certainly has the effect of facilitating the far-right project of getting the country there.
Soft coup to benefit foreign foes: National Labor Relations Board whistleblower Daniel Berulis
Berulis described DOGE arriving at the NLRB’s D.C. headquarters on Mar. 3 in a police-escorted black SUV to procure highly-privileged accounts on NLRB systems. Soon after, attempts to log in from Russia with those same credentials were geo-blocked, but followed by the DOGE accounts siphoning away reams of sensitive data to U.S.-based servers—final destinations unknown.
Per his lawyer, Berulis was threatened a week prior to filing his sworn whistleblower declaration: an unexplained note mentioning his then-forthcoming disclosure—complete with drone photos of Berulis walking his dog—was taped up on his home door.
In February, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called DOGE a “shadow government,” a “hostile takeover,” and “part of a troubling pattern of Russian and Chinese Communist sympathizers increasing their influence on American foreign policy.”
U.S. statutes and federal regulations both formally identity, among others, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation as foreign adversaries of the United States.
June 1, Mexico City: Discussing teachers’ protest with Zócalo occupiers
On Dec. 21, I described leaving the United States for México in my blog post “Memo from Mexico City.” I’ve since been living in the country’s southernmost and poorest state, Chiapas, intending to write a “Memo from San Cristóbal de las Casas.” That hasn’t materialized, because life is busy.
Now, though, I’ll dash off this quick, second post from Mexico City—also known as CDMX. By way of Viva Aerobús, I arrived back in the capital roughly a week ago to take care of crucial stuff, such as buying fresh New Balance kicks for running and picking up some PlayStationCastlevaniagames. Before I knew it, I was discussing education with teachers occupying the downtown Zócalo and watching black bloc throw rocks into government windows. As hard as I try to keep my nose in science fiction novels and my ears tuned to temperate podcasts about long-dead philosophers, such encounters seem to keep happening to me—as if I’m pursuing a slightly personalizing variant of a preternatural path that other Douglases have already snaked through, creating our mysterious, ongoingly synthesized web of time. You know how it is!
I’ll try to limit my metaphysical musings—the U.S. State Department would never have me author memo-cables—and focus on impersonally important events.
Educating everyone
June 1, CDMX Zócalo: CNTE occupying teachers raise fists
Since mid-May, teachers from around México, primarily as part of CNTE—the National Coordinator of Education Workers, a powerful, protest-heavy offshoot of the country’s largest education union—have converged on the Zócalo plaza where the presidential National Palace is, and upon surrounding streets, occupying with tents and demanding the repeal of the 2007 ISSSTE law for the sake of sustainable pensions and wages. Reportedly this protest, which shut down several terminals of CDMX’s main international airport on May 23, coincides with teacher strikes in Panama, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil.
This past weekend, some—Section 22 of CNTE among them—wanted to stop the occupation because of the authorities’ tepid offers, but the rank and file, angry at trade union leadership for murmuring of retreating, surged despite heavy rain, seizing the stage at the union leaders’ meeting-place. On June 2, CNTE temporarily shut down the San Ysidro border crossing from San Diego to Tijuana, aiming to pressure the Mexican government. Now, negotiation with the federal authorities is supposed to continue at least into the late morning of June 4, perhaps later. The former Education Secretary of Chiapas, Javier Álvarez Ramos, once a teacher himself, toldLa Jornada on June 3 that CNTE must propose various possible solutions, and that President Claudia Sheinbaum needs to realize the vast majority of Mexican teachers are more than 40 years old, so the pension issues—such as age of eligibility—must be addressed.
In my view, Sheinbaum deserves admiration as Mexico’s first woman president, first scientist president, for her firebrand way of repeatedly standing up to Trump (albeit not on every item), and for her support of Mexican migrants and refugees crossing the northern border. On the other hand, however, her government continues to discriminate against migrants and refugees crossing Mexico’s southern border—such as those homeless in Tapachula—she resists raising taxes on the rich, and she’s made some other dubious decisions.
“What the teachers’ union achieves in the struggle is going to benefit you, the worker affiliated with the ISSSTE. Support and join!” June 1 photo shows occupation covers not just the Zócalo but nearby streets.
Sheinbaum, who enjoys a remarkable 80+% approval rating, has recently spoken in support of teachers in the abstract, but says budgetary constraints prevent her government from accepting CNTE’s demands. If you want to follow how the protests play out, I recommend tracking the CNTE tag on La Jornada‘s website.
I understand the teachers’ emphasis on specific financial figures, because people have to start somewhere, but sometimes, not unlike the Duffy character in James Joyce’s 1914 short story “A Painful Case,” I worry the Marxist money-über-alles stuff just has activists chasing their own tails across the centuries as wage-increases are met with price-hikes and the insistence that nothing but money can be the root of all evil continues to cloud people from seeing the social-emotional human relationships underneath the money, underneath the way our particular civilization (not the only one humanity has had!) happens to monetize, to gamify outgrouping, and obsess over moneytokens unceasingly (when was the last time you had a conversation about shame or courage to the same length people discuss property values, interest rates, or inflation? What if depictions of defense mechanisms were on the front of the business section instead of the NASDAQ? Okay, the stock market is a defen— Or to put it crudely: do lonely guys chase skirt to improve their skill at making money, or do they make more money to better chase skirt? So what’s fundamental here, pal, which is steering: pesos and pennies—or love and hate?)
But with all that background in place, what was the vibe on the ground at the Zócalo, when I went there on June 1?
The CNTE teachers seemed possessed of an almost otherworldly cheerfulness, beyond the overall increase in happiness that Mexicans have versus USians in general regardless of time, place, or protest. It reminded me of Occupy Dallas, when I brought water there nearly a decade and a half ago, or when I checked out Zuccotti Park wi—. The bullshit of extreme endosocial zero-sum seething anger and guilt and terror that dissociated populations don’t know surrounds and interpenetrates and saps them of motivation constantly, making them blame themselves and their genes instead of their tyrants large and small, was just gone, like poof, gone. Leaving smiles and jokes and abrazos (hugs). It was the another world is possible before the riot police show up.
One woman I spoke with, an elementary schoolteacher named Guadalupe, told me the photos of her schoolkids encourage her to stay at the encampment, to keep enduring the hard parts of it, because if she’s not paid enough to survive, how can she continue to nurture them? As in the image that opens this blog post, Guadalupe showed me, on her phone, pictures of her smiling kids, who looked like a Mexicanized version of the midde-schoolers I used to substitute-teach in Fort Worth and Seattle, or perhaps you could say my students were a USian-ized version of them. It really made me miss “my” middle and high school children—I still remember many of their names, years later, and wonder how they’re doing, where they are in the big web of time tracing around different paths, pulling this, repelling that, maybe finding strength as a heroic vampire-killer in some silly video game. Did any leave the United States, and if so, under what conditions—ICE? Somehow, of everything in this post section—the pensions this, the president that, the money over here, the taxes over there—the most important moment of visiting that tent was just sharing stories with Guadalupe in my stilted Spanish about my schoolkids and hearing about hers. That’s why we were both there, ultimately. Effort for humans and the future shouldn’t feel like a chore or duty, but fun, exciting, discovery (exosocial).
I talked to the teachers under the tent as best I could about how in the United States, the politicians and school administrators lie, claiming to the major media that at the poor campuses, respiratory pandemics are no worry, just open the windows, use the pink puffy soap from the bathroom dispensers. But the windows have been stuck shut for decades and the dispensers are soapless and smashed, little plastic shards all over the sticky, scuffed linoleum (or vinyl asbestos tile) floors. They said it was the same deal in places like Chiapas and Oaxaca.
June 1, looking into the Zócalo with the Metropolitan Cathedral in the background
An elementary school teacher named Ulises told me, when I asked what teacher unions in the United States need to know about the CNTE protests, that we have the same enemy: the multinational corporations, the supranational oligarchy. I asked Guadalupe if there was ever any issue with software copy-protection preventing students from accessing educational materials, the United States intellectual property regime. She said not with the pen-and-paper resources, which are easy to photocopy ad libetum, but occasionally, computer software presents her classes with various paywall hurdles. (My Spanish wasn’t good enough to get any further details.)
There was a younger teacher there at the same tent who knew she was the most attractive, as did everyone else, at least from the impersonal eye that no one really has (if you truly love someone, they’re the most beautiful regardless). She put down her phone and asked about me, learned that I’m a substitute teacher and a freelance writer/journalist, and so on.
Half-jokingly, she said I should return that evening with alcohol, and other flirty things that I couldn’t translate—except by watching the body language of the others and sensing the blushing of my warming cheeks. When she found out that I plan to stay in México for years, she held out her hand, fingers down, in a pretend offer of marriage.
Apparently the weeks of tent-life—the grungy, earthy nature of occupying—had turned the teachers’ humor rather ribald, for she then said, spacing out both her hands as if measuring a large fish, “I like big ones, though, you have to have a big one.”
So I reached into my slacks and whipped out—
—my phone. “Por cierto (Indeed),” I said, gesturing at the huge Samsung in its hardshell case, “¡es muy grande!“
That wit, which needs no translation, won me applause. I didn’t go back that night with wine, however, although perhaps I should have. Well, in some other multiverse. In this one, I had a major article (extra material) under consideration at Rolling Stone to edit.
First things first.
Factional feminists?
May 30, near the Palacio de Bellas Artes, fire lit in an intersection seized by a faction of vendors
And now, a confusing story with, maybe, a simple solution. Or not.
Certain vendor areas in Alameda Central—a huge public park in downtown CDMX, said to be the oldest public park in the Americas—are reportedly disputed, and have been for a month or so, maybe longer.
The dispute was—probably still is—between two groups of artisans selling their merchandise. One is referred to as Mazahua indigenous women; the other, feminists. Already it’s a mess. The indigenous women can’t be feminists, and none in the feminist squad are of the Mazahua?
Meanwhile, there’s a third factor: the Mexican authorities. A May 31 La Jornadaarticle, the only news item I’ve come across about this dispute so far, says that according to the Mazahua spokesperson Elizabeth, the Mexican government is establishing a ‘green zone’ to legalize heavy marijuana-smoking in the disputed area. Heavy marijuana-smoking that’s already taking place. And already taking place, too, are worse things, according to the article: too much alcohol, urination and defecation, and so on. I’ve heard from more than one person that there’s definitely a lot of ongoing drugs & whatnot in the area, but I don’t know the extent of any associated problems or who might be causing them. Apparently the indigenous vendors have asked for a crackdown, received nothing in response, and now have to police the area themselves.
Per La Jornada, the feminist vendors were upset because the Mazahua vendors had taken over the disputed turf, preventing them from selling their merchandise—moreover, according to local onlookers and a woman apparently sympathetic to the feminist vendors with whom I briefly and unskillfully spoke in Spanish during the May 30 clash, the Mazahua artisans stole some of the feminist vendors’ stuff, and/or got rid of it, trashed it.
This video I took on May 30 briefly shows a tussle over a banner (or item of clothing?) between two women, apparently from the two separate groups. It seems another woman—I’m guessing from the ‘feminist group’ a.k.a. ‘anarchist group’—successfully de-escalated the tussle. If I’m seeing that correctly, it’s an interesting, optimistic occurence not mentioned in the La Jornada article, which quotes Elizabeth as saying the “feminists call us Indians.” (I haven’t been able to discern what the woman with the bullhorn is saying in the below video.)
Making matters worse, the feminist merchants, according to La Jornada, got no help from the authorities regarding the alleged Mazahua vigilante policing/stealing, so they decided to make their ire known dramatically. During the May 30 show of force, they threw rocks at the Post Office, breaking something like seven windows, and added graffiti to its walls: Sheinbaum is not a feminist; Femicidal state; Down with the patriarchy; Street vendor mafia!
Why target the Post Office? Because it’s there, at/near the disputed turf, and it’s part of the Mexican government. Some onlooker locals—male—expressed dissatisfaction with this to me: the post office is for all the people, they reasoned, and while femicides, they acknowledged, are a serious problem, what does the Mexican snailmail have to do with femicides? One woman onlooker local was less polite in her slur-packed description of the feminist vendor group… Another likely reason for targeting the Post Office is the intersection in front of it is quite busy, meaning taking it over helps ensure publicity.
Publicity? The messaging, unfortunately, wasn’t clear, and it wasn’t just my subpar Spanish—some onlooker locals expressed confusion as well. What does alleged theft by the Mazahua group have to do with femicides? Of course, the graffiti was presumably meant to diss the Mexican government in general, including their (as everywhere) lack of sufficient prosecution of masculinist murderers/rapists. Not so much a diss to the rival Mazahua group in particular.
This May 30 video of mine shows rocks being shipped express to the Post Office windows by the feminist group. (I still don’t know what’s being said through the bullhorn in this video, either.)
Some floated theories as to other interests that might be behind the unpopular vandalism/architectural remixing. One Mexican local I spoke with suggested that perhaps right-wing saboteurs are infiltrating feminist groups, inciting actions that will damage their credibility among the majority. Someone else suggested that could be a machination to make Sheinbaum look weak or bad: See? The homegrown anarcha-feminists don’t think Sheinbaum’s any feminist of theirs, which means the president has no real mandate to speak for women.
Personally, while I think such speculations shouldn’t be discounted, I also don’t think anyone should just automatically rule out the possibility that the dispute is exactly what it appears to be: a turf war between two rival local groups. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
That said, the drone that suddenly showed up overhead was pretty spooky—I managed to film it for a few seconds, embedded below—but is that the flying device of an evil moustache-twirler orchestrating world events from within what looks like a mere taco truck, or just an overpriced sky-gizmo piloted by some bored tourist? Maybe it’s Stratfor’s, the creepy Austin-based private spy firm (now part of RANE) that I investigated and published articles about roughly a decade or so ago, including its myriad advising of multinationals, such as the Dell computer company, on how to do biz in México. Who knows?
Speculation can be important (when labelled as such), but it’s also cheap and easy—anybody can kick their feet up, spitball a few pet theories as to who the real moustache-twirlers must be, and call it a day. If I get a chance this week to talk further with either set of vendors, both of whom are out selling pretty much daily, I’ll update this post.
What’s my simple solution? Maybe if men stopped rapes and femicides, and stopped tolerating loose support or ‘joking’ support of such from their male acquaintances, or remediated their ignorance about such crimes, we wouldn’t have to decipher what this May 30 clash in front of Belles Artes was all about.
Except, maybe the graffiti on the Post Office would then just say something else—the two groups seem to have other things to fight over, after all. And are the over-the-top drugs mucking up public spaces really necessary? I don’t mean to be a prude, and I’m mostly in favor of legalizing your whatever, but why not tone it down? What’s the harm in being healthy? I know it’s a lot of work, but your best weapon in life/resistance is a strong mind.
—Captain, shouldn’t we obey the Prime Directive? —Of course not, they have coffee.
Maybe I shouldn’t be expressing any opinions at all, and just observing. Witnessing the whole affair put me in mind of Star Trek. Those Voyager episodes with the ill-defined worldbuilding, for one thing: two stereotyped groups clashing on the planet of the week, no granular details required about their backstories. But besides that, the Prime Directive. You know, the rarely followed rule (in Star Trek or real life) that outsiders shouldn’t interfere with the internal affairs of other societies. I think witnessing—like some Ursula K. Le Guin anthropologist protagonist—is fair enough, and I don’t have any nuanced position on the Prime Directive, especially since as so many science fiction stories demonstrate that “mere” witnessing can, a la quantum mechanics, turn real quick into affecting “somebody else’s” situation. Well, I have nothing wise to say here, so moving right along.
There were a number of humorous juxtapositions that I’ll conclude this with. You know, if this were a srs bizness journadoodle article, like say about the Reorganizing Government Act of 2025, there wouldn’t be a bunch of meandering and certainly no out-of-nowhere pic of Captain Janeway from Voyager (nobody cares about Chakotay). But why can’t this just be a blog post? For me, a huge part of witnessing the May 30 scuffle was the bizarre juxtapositions, the web of life tangling up in ways that didn’t straightforwardly sell anybody’s metaphysics, except perhaps that of the surrealists.
For instance, bicyclists—some of them Rappi or DiDiFood deliverers—rode carefree around the feminist merchants’ blockades as pedestrians took quick detours and kept going, which La Jornada described with only some truth as walkers not being allowed to cross the intersection whatsoever. Some braver ones did. Anyway, it seemed surreal, as if for many passersby, the fire, the rock-throwings, the windows loudly crackling apart, the blaring bullhorns, none of that existed: it was just any other day in the capital.
To be clear, I wasn’t there the whole time, so La Jornada may have seen things I didn’t. For instance, La Jornada wrote that ambulances took some half-dozen people to the hospital, which may have been true—I didn’t see it, but I left before the scuffle ended.
Speaking of, that was another weird juxtaposition, the voyeurism: there was quite a semi-bored crowd circled around watching this whole affair like it was a baseball game or something. They’d occasionally walk a few feet over to the nearest food truck and buy some tacos, like a baseball fan grabbing a hot dog from concessions. Then they’d resume watching, perhaps commenting to their buddy next to them about how the “score” between the two groups was progressing. Rome Coliseum vibes.
Another peculiar juxtaposition. CDMX, like San Cristóbal de las Casas, has trash cans spaced perodically on sidewalks, a nice convenience indeed. While I was taking photos and videos of the feminist group’s show of force, I had an empty Electrolit—a popular drink here akin to Gatorade—in one hand. As I stood by a sidewalk covered in shattered glass, I proceeded to peer around, politely looking for a polite trash can to gently deposit the bottle into. Shards of glass everywhere, fires burning, people yelling, and still: Perdón, ¿dónde está la basura, por favor? (Excuse me, where’s the trash, please?)
Lastly, there was one particular Mexican food truck vendor dude there with a woman who seemed his wife. Asked about the scuffle, he told me this kind of thing—why not paint with a broad brush sometimes?—has been going on for years. He approached his discourse on the topic as though he were a meteorologist describing transient yet recurring weather phenomena. The feminists are mad about the Mazahua; the Mazahua are mad about the feminists; round and round; want an enchilada? Then he rolled up his newspaper and, listening to the feminist bullhorn yelling, playfully swatted his apparent wife on her culo.
Well, she didn’t seem to mind at all, or maybe I’m just an optimist. Anyway, describing protests as impersonal weather phenomena is sort of a common civic freeloader trope meant to ward off any potential engagement with the particulars of this or that incident. Strangely, being an outside-observer to this whole scuffle, made me see it a bit more like a civic freeloader, and less like the jouno-activist I am. And yet here I am writing up what particulars I managed to learn.
I wonder how many such scuffles go on, day in, day out, around the globe, minimally reported or not reported at all, the full story lost to the winds of time because no one quite crawled out on the web of ongoingly synthesized history far enough to snag the information before it was all gone, all lost…
Unique judicial elections
In the United States, all federal judges are appointed. But in several states, state-level judges are voted for. In Texas, for example, the judicial elections are even by political party. I have no opinion on whether judges should be appointed or elected or when or why; sadly, I’m under-informed on the entire issue.
But I’d be remiss not to note that on June 1, Mexicans voted for thousands of judges countrywide for the very first time. More elections for additional thousands of Mexican judges will take place in 2027, a staggered system. No other country, including Mexico previously, has ever voted for judges to such an enormous extent, so it’s quite the political experiment.
A Mexican friend who voted in the morning on June 1 told me that he and the other voters at his polling place could see information about candidates’ curricula vitae on their ballots, and that they were very enthusiastic and proud to be voting for judges. However, that’s too small a sample size to really know how it stacks up against reports that Mexicans are almost evenly split on the question of whether judges should be elected, with hundreds of judges refusing to participate in protest.
The astonishing experiment is something to keep an eye on, at the very least. Reports indicate there was low turnout—13%—and that Sheinbaum’s Morena party is winning judicial benches, including control of the Supreme Court. This would give Morena dominance over all three federal branches of government, which some are comparing to the 3/4-century of one-party rule by the right-wing PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), even though Morena’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), Sheinbaum’s predecessor, didn’t win the presidency, displacing PRI, until just seven years ago (2018).
Sheinbaum herself doesn’t see Morena’s victories as a problem. “Whoever says that there is authoritarianism in Mexico is lying,” Sheinbaum said on June 1. “Mexico is a country that is only becoming more free, just and democratic because that is the will of the people.”
Friends, FAQs, and farewell for now…
June 1, downtown CDMX: Iván from Letras Con Locuras and me
I’m staying at a hostel in CDMX a few more days before heading back to Chiapas. An elderly Christian proselytizer from the United States arrived at the hostel the day before yesterday; he says he has divine guidance and that he once prayed away a dread disease. Last night, he repeatedy warned me not only to refrain from upsetting Mexican drug cartels as a journalist, but to not upset Elon Musk or Donald Trump even just on Twitter, lest they come after me. I will not take his advice. An Eastern European woman listening to the conversation with a radiant Eastern European scowl informed the table—including him—that what he imagines Trump will do to tweeps such as myself (well, Bluesky), Putin actually does in real life to her compatriots. She also told him that some people pray hard and still die, so his God isn’t very divine. Eastern Europeans don’t fuck around.
On June 1, I hung out with Iván Maceda Mejías from Letras Con Locuras (Letters with Madness), the name of a radical mental health magazine put out by activists I discussed in my first CDMX memo. Find their second, April issue here. In the next few days, I should see Luis Gerardo Arroyo Lynn, a journalist with Mad in Mexico, an affiliate of journalist Robert Whitaker’sMad in America. He’s a fellow vegan; well, I’m mostly vegan nowadays; travel can make it difficult at times, so I cheat a little, which I should probably find ways to fix.
I might even get to see a couple I met briefly at a downtown restaurant in December, who—in a very Mexican fashion that reminded me of rural North or East Texas—were suddenly concerned for this traveler’s well being, and invited him to their table, and gave me their WhatsApp contact info and told me to stay in touch. Why not? Maybe their curling paths crossed mine because the web of time is a variable phenomena myriad wills create rather than a Newtonian box we’re stuck inside clawing at the coordinate walls cynically because lightning or whatever supposedly birthed life … I don’t mean that If you pray hard enough, divinity will rearrange the whole universe to give you a sweet parking space, and protect you from Elon Musk and Donald Trump to boot; moreso, maybe the restaurant where I met the couple has really popular churros drawing people together because the chefs and everyone else are active participant-creators of this reality thing, except not as a metaphor: rather, it’s literally true. Not that your skin cells create/alter reality when you scratch your nose so much (though that too), but more those enigmatic perspective + will components we each uniquely have and employ to realize, actualize that which is around us, as do other powers not commonly described as living, to various extents (if that seems too hippie, picture something as impersonal as Aristotle’s Prime Mover). Somehow this spangled web we weave is easier to understand outside the United States, which sometimes feels trapped in formaldehyde.
To quickly answer a few questions I often get lately:
Yes, my Spanish is rapidly improving. I began learning Spanish in Texas in elementary school; in high school, I flirted briefly with German and mostly switched to Latin, which I continued studying from that point on—as far as formal education is concerned—the only change being the addition of a few years of ancient koine Greek … except for a few days of French class in college, which I quickly aborted, finding that fancy language extremely silly and impossible for a Texan to pronounce. I had a few short-lived post-school attempts to learn Dutch and improve my fledgling Spanish.
No, I won’t be translating at the United Nations any time soon. I can definitely have simple conversations about the weather or a menu, and if I’m “on,” I can do a bit better, sort of like a not-particularly-literate USian middle schooler’s grasp of English. I can read a lot better than I can converse, even discerning the main ideas of a La Jornada or Cuarto Poder news article without a dictionary, for example. On the daily, my difficulty isn’t so much vocab or grammar, as it is my ear acclimating to hearing native Spanish speakers talking at a zillion kilometers per hour. Remember, even the speech of fluent native speakers in any language is typically riddled with unnoticed grammatical errors, stops and starts, and circuitous ramblings that can throw off any learner who’s desperately trying to decipher every last word properly. I hope a year from now, I’m at the point where I can have some kinda-subtle conversations on topics more substantial than asking for directions and how much otrojugo de naranja costs. Now, if editors want news articles from México, I may have more incentive to study and practice…
Yes, I hope to visit the United States. It’d be more feasible sometime between August and December, because reasons, but sorry, no promises yet. I think I wouldn’t bring electronics of any kind in, for fear of Trumpian border patrol confiscating journalists’ devices, now that I’m a rolling rock freelancer or stone or what have you. I’d just put my needed documents into an asymmetrically encrypted tarball, upload it to the secret X-marks-the-spot online, then buy a cheap laptop Stateside, put Lubuntu Linux on it, and download the tarball once back in anxiety-covered CONUS. Also would help with travel to win the lottery. I guess my biggest concern is that, while I’m there, Trump might decide to close the border on some pretext or because he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, making it hard to get back out, although I imagine he’d want to implement a tiered $ystem. Definitely need to visit and finish scanning some old documents and suchlike that I didn’t get around to dealing with when I left in December—and before the Golden Dome is erected to keep missiles out, USians in (whether just psychologically or by additional border strictures).
Yes, you can still snailmail my Seattle PO Box—the same address on this blog’s sidebar to the right—and I’ll get a photo or scan of whatever you send eventually, and the magnificent human who checks my PO Box on my behalf can, in time, deposit checks or whatever else might need to be done with your old-school letter. There are a lot of people I owe snailmails and emails. I’ll reply soon; I haven’t forgotten! Just, moving to another country with another language, et cetera, takes a lot, while trying to keep up with news and everything else. Patience please, and thanks!
Long-term plans? Idk, man, I have a vasectomy and no mortgage, no kids, what do I need long-term plans for? I’m gonna finish paying off my debt, slowly tapering off psychopharmaceuticals, and reading and writing. What else is there?
June 1, downtown CDMX: Iván from Letras Con Locuras and me
I'm a Texas-born, Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist currently living in Chiapas, México. Published at Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, Salon, WhoWhatWhy, the Texas Observer, the Daily Dot, others. I write about anything and everything, but usually current events meets investigative journalism and philosophy; liberatory mental health; education; science fiction and fantasy; technology; justice; more. Also a former public ed substitute teacher.
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