The Friday Brief, June 12, 2025

Inside: A Week of Rubicons. The Missile Parade. Israel Strikes Iran. On the Military. Taco Strikes Again. A Trap of Their Own Making. Trump Pardons Child Porn Criminal. Marco Rubio Hits Bottom, Digs. Weird Culture Miss. Google Deepmind and Hurricanes. What I’m Reading.

The Big Picture:

A Week of Rubicons

This past week in Los Angeles wasn’t just a news cycle: it was a goddamned civics lesson written in tear gas, federal overreach, the howling mob on the right eager for the blood of resistors and Democratic leaders. It was a week where a few men and women interposed themselves in the line of political fire and said, “Not only no, but hell no” to Donald Trump.

Trump wanted the slow-and-then-all-at-once collapse of democratic norms to break the nation to his will this week.

If you want to know how a republic dies, don’t look to an invading army or a sudden coup. Look instead to one city at a time being ground under the heel of power, one executive order, one soldier, one ICE raid at a time. Los Angeles, the city of dreams, just lived through a week of Rubicons, those irreversible, catastrophic choices from which there’s no coming back.

What’s held the line? A handful of people willing to stand, to fight, to show personal and political courage.