The Politics of Empty Schools

Usually, when a school district decides to close a school, the conversation immediately stops being about education.

First, it is always the memories. Someone learned how to read there. Someone was there when the school won a championship and still remembers the court. There is always a parent with a kindergarten drop off memory, and there is a grandparent recalling a graduation. There are Friday night football games remembered, school plays revisited, and friendships that somehow survived decades. The hallways themselves somehow look the same even after all the years that have passed.

None of those memories are unimportant. Schools have a way of preserving a community’s history. They are among the few public institutions that remain constant across generations. Children become parents. Parents become grandparents. Through it all, the school remains.

Even if school consolidation is unpopular and brings a great deal of anger, memories do not bring students to a school.

The buildings are getting older while the student population keeps getting smaller. The population is aging. Housing costs continue to rise. Families that once filled neighborhoods with children are getting older, while younger families increasingly struggle to remain in the communities where they grew up. Across California, school enrollment continues to decline. Schools built for one generation are now serving far fewer students from the next.

No matter the reason for consolidation, the decision is often treated as a betrayal.

Someone is always accused of having an agenda. Consultants inevitably become part of the story. Public meetings fill with frustration. The discussion gradually moves further away from enrollment numbers and closer to questions of trust. Because every aspect of the consolidation discussion is personal, everyone seems to forget one simple, basic idea.

A school district exists to educate students, not preserve buildings.

The impact of that distinction is significant because maintaining school buildings is expensive. Roofs need to be replaced. Air conditioning systems break. Utility bills need to be paid. Parking lots need to be repaved. Equipment and technology eventually need to be upgraded or replaced. Whether classrooms are full or half empty, those costs continue to arrive.

At the same time, communities expect more from their schools. Parents want more counselors. Teachers want better facilities and stronger academic programs. Students need updated technology. School districts want to retain quality staff. None of these expectations are unreasonable. The challenge is that every one of those priorities competes for the same limited resources.

Most people are unwilling to discuss declining enrollment because it feels impersonal. It lacks the emotional force of a school closure protest or a packed community meeting. Demographics do not inspire rallies. Unfortunately, demographics are also stubborn.

You cannot vote away declining birth rates. You cannot organize a petition against population shifts. You cannot shame enrollment numbers into changing direction.

Many of the school closure debates taking place across California are really conversations about change. Communities are trying to reconcile what they have with what they remember. That tension is natural. Schools often become symbols of a community’s past, and people understandably fight to preserve what they value.

Most of us would rather talk about growth than decline. We celebrate new schools, new housing developments, and expanding communities. We are far less comfortable discussing what happens when those trends begin moving in the opposite direction.

Yet adaptation is not the same thing as failure.

A district that closes a school has not necessarily abandoned public education. In some cases, it may be attempting to preserve it. Consolidating resources, reducing operating costs, and aligning facilities with actual enrollment may strengthen the educational system that remains rather than weaken it.

Reasonable people can disagree about which schools should remain open and which should close. They can disagree about timelines, public engagement, and implementation. Those debates are worth having.

What should not be controversial is acknowledging reality. California’s enrollment challenges are not unique to any one district. They are part of a broader demographic shift unfolding throughout the state. More communities will face these difficult decisions in the years ahead.

The temptation will be to treat every school closure proposal as a controversy driven by individual personalities. Doing so may create headlines, but it often obscures the larger story. California spent decades building schools for a period of growth. The question many communities are now confronting is what happens after that growth slows.

It is not an easy conversation. It is not a popular conversation. It is certainly not one that wins many votes. It is, however, a necessary one.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And he will charge you $ 2.5 million for event photography.

The Election Scandal That Has Everything Except Proof

Trump promised another bombshell about the election he lost. For the MAGA faithful, the explosion happened years ago.

Every presidency has its theater. Franklin Roosevelt had the fireside chat. John F. Kennedy understood the television camera. Ronald Reagan practically made love to it. Donald Trump has given us something more appropriate for an age of reality television, social media, and men selling miracle testosterone supplements between cable news segments: the presidential infomercial. Thursday night, Trump commandeered primetime television to reveal what had been advertised as another extraordinary development involving American elections, China, voter data, intelligence agencies, and, because apparently no evening in America can ever truly be complete without it, the 2020 presidential election.

Nearly six years have passed since Donald Trump lost that election, which is apparently about five and a half years longer than Donald Trump has been emotionally prepared to accept it. Most Americans have changed jobs, moved homes, watched children grow up, buried relatives, survived inflation, endured presidential elections, and generally continued participating in the exhausting business of being alive. Trump, meanwhile, remains spiritually trapped somewhere around 11:43 p.m. on November 3, 2020, wandering through the political attic with a flashlight, opening boxes marked China, Venezuela, Voting Machines, Intelligence Agencies, and Suspicious Things That Happened in Michigan, convinced that somewhere inside one of them is the missing evidence that will finally return him to the winner's circle of an election whose winner was certified years ago.

Thursday night's address was the latest expedition into the attic.

At the center of Trump's presentation was a serious allegation involving China and American voter information. Trump claimed that Chinese actors obtained an enormous amount of voter registration data connected to the 2020 election and presented the matter as part of a broader story about election integrity and information supposedly concealed from the American public. If a foreign government obtained American voter information, that deserves investigation. Americans should know what happened, what information was obtained, when intelligence officials learned about it, and whether government officials withheld information that should have been disclosed. Congress should investigate it. Journalists should investigate it. Independent cybersecurity experts should examine it. Release whatever documents can legally be released and let the evidence endure the unpleasant experience of being examined by people who do not already know what conclusion they are supposed to reach.

But here is where Trump's magnificent political soufflé begins to fall a part.

A voter registration database is not a ballot box. Obtaining voter information is not the same as changing a vote. A cybersecurity breach is not evidence that voting machines were manipulated. Foreign interference is not synonymous with election theft. And discovering that China may have wanted information about American voters does not magically transform Donald Trump into the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

The distinctions are admittedly less exciting than a primetime presidential address. Nobody is selling commemorative hats emblazoned with the words NUANCED DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN VOTER REGISTRATION DATABASES AND VOTE TABULATION SYSTEMS. There are no rallies where thousands of people chant SHOW US THE METHODOLOGY. But these distinctions happen to be rather important when a president is once again asking Americans to question the legitimacy of an election.

Trump's genius, if we are willing to call it that, is understanding that he does not actually need to demonstrate the connection. He merely needs to place enough suspicious sounding things beside one another until the audience begins assembling the conspiracy themselves. China. Voter data. Venezuela. Voting machines. Intelligence agencies. Michigan. Noncitizens. California. Election fraud. Throw everything onto the kitchen counter, turn on the blender, and eventually you have something that looks enough like a scandal to serve on tv.

This is politics by word association.

China obtained voter information. Venezuela knows something about voting machines. Suspicious registration applications appeared in Michigan. California takes forever to count ballots. Therefore, somehow, Donald Trump may have won the 2020 election.

One could perform the same intellectual exercise with almost anything. My neighbor owns a Toyota. Toyota is a Japanese company. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Therefore, my neighbor is responsible for World War II. The individual statements may contain facts. The conclusion remains ridiculous because the connections have not been demonstrated.

But Trump has spent years perfecting the political art of making proximity feel like proof.

The 2020 election has consequently become the perfect Trumpian crime. A crime perpetually waiting for evidence. Every irregularity becomes suspicious. Every bureaucratic mistake becomes intentional. Every cybersecurity vulnerability becomes confirmation. Every government official who disagrees becomes part of the conspiracy. Every court that rejects a claim becomes compromised. Every investigation that fails to uncover the necessary evidence becomes evidence that investigators are hiding something. Even the absence of evidence can be repackaged as proof that the conspiracy is extraordinarily sophisticated.

It is a wonderfully convenient arrangement. Evidence proves Trump is right. Contradictory evidence proves Trump's enemies are lying. No evidence proves Trump's enemies destroyed the evidence. Sherlock Holmes would have been unemployed within a week.

This is not how evidence works, although it is an excellent way to maintain a political movement indefinitely. A mystery that can never be solved can also never be closed, and Trump has turned the 2020 election into America's longest-running dinner theater production. The cast changes. The villains rotate. New documents appear. New witnesses emerge. China replaces Venezuela until Venezuela returns for a guest appearance. Voting machines leave the stage and voter databases enter from stage right. But the ending remains stubbornly unchanged: Donald Trump was wronged, Donald Trump was cheated, and somewhere, somehow, someone is about to produce the evidence. Any day now.

None of this means Americans should blindly trust the government. Intelligence agencies deserve scrutiny. Election officials deserve scrutiny. Cybersecurity systems deserve scrutiny. The FBI, CIA, DHS, Congress, state governments, and presidents should all be subjected to aggressive journalism and public accountability. If intelligence officials concealed important information for political reasons, expose them. If election infrastructure is vulnerable, fix it. If foreign governments obtained American voter information, determine how and why.

But skepticism is not a coupon that can only be redeemed against institutions Donald Trump dislikes. If we are skeptical of intelligence agencies, we should also be skeptical when a president describes intelligence that conveniently supports his political grievances. If we demand evidence from election officials, we should demand evidence from the man accusing them. If Trump possesses information that fundamentally changes the historical understanding of the 2020 election, then he has an extraordinarily simple path available to him. Show us.

Release the documents that can be released. Let independent experts examine them. Let journalists who do not attend dinner at Mar-a-Lago read them. Let congressional committees investigate. Let election security experts explain precisely what systems were compromised and whether those compromises affected ballots, vote tabulation, or certified election results.

If the evidence demonstrates something extraordinary, then report something extraordinary. Until then, we are watching the flatscreen. And the flatscreen is where Trump has always been most comfortable.

The media, naturally, participates enthusiastically in this arrangement while occasionally pretending to be horrified by it. Trump announces that he will make an important announcement and immediately the countdown clocks appear. Cable networks assemble panels of eight people to speculate about what a ninth person might say several hours later. Social media fills with predictions. Journalists write previews of an event that has not happened. Commentators analyze the possible implications of information they have not seen.

The spectacle becomes news before the information does.

Trump understands this arrangement better than perhaps any American politician alive because he helped perfect it. He knows that millions of people will remember the accusation long after they forget the correction. He knows that "China compromised election data" travels faster than a paragraph explaining the technical differences between publicly available voter information, registration databases, ballots, and vote tabulation systems. He knows the bombshell will receive a push notification and the qualification will appear three days later somewhere around paragraph seventeen. By then, the circus has already left town.

Trump understands something advertisers have known for decades: people remember the commercial long after they’ve forgotten what the commercial was selling. By the time journalists begin separating evidence from insinuation, the product has already been purchased.

The fact-checkers arrive afterward carrying brooms. This may be Trump's greatest political innovation. He does not need to prove that the 2020 election was stolen. He merely needs to ensure that Americans never completely stop wondering whether it might have been. Suspicion is politically renewable energy. It requires no resolution and produces an apparently endless supply of outrage. It can be carried from election to election, rally to rally, lawsuit to lawsuit, and now primetime address to primetime address.

Thursday night, Trump returned once again to the scene of the crime he insists occurred but has never convincingly demonstrated. He brought China. He brought voter data. He brought voting machines. He brought intelligence agencies. He brought all the familiar characters back together for another reunion special.

The only thing still missing was the evidence connecting them all. Perhaps that evidence exists. If it does, Americans deserve to see it, and journalists should report it without hesitation. If the documents fundamentally change what we know about the 2020 election, then history should change accordingly. Truth does not become less true because Donald Trump says it, just as an allegation does not become true because he repeats it. That is why evidence matters.

Eventually the primetime special ends. The news panels go home. The social media clips disappear beneath tomorrow's outrage. The flags are folded away, the presidential podium is rolled out of the room, and the television cameras point toward the next spectacle.

Then we are left with the record. Donald Trump promised America a bombshell Thursday night. What he delivered was another trailer for a movie he has been promising to release for nearly six years.

At some point, even the most loyal audience is entitled to see the damn film.

The Pomonan is an independent publication covering politics, culture, art, and the contradictions shaping contemporary American life.

Legislator Watch: Representative Norma Torres Votes Against Curtailing U.S. Involvement in Israel’s War on Lebanon

On June 30, Representative Norma Torres (D) broke rank with her fellow Democrats to side with the vast majority of Republicans in voting against Representative Rashida Tlaib's Lebanon War Powers Resolution which, if passed, would have ordered the president to withdraw all U.S. service members from hostilities in Lebanon.

The measure failed by a vote of 189 to 235.

In what amounts to a sea-change of sentiment, the majority of Democrats (187) voted in favor of the resolution, joined by two Republicans, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. However, a small minority of Democrats, 22 in total, including Congresswoman Norma Torres, voted against it.

Just Foreign Policy, an anti-war group, lambasted the 22 Democrats who voted against the resolution.

“These 22 fringe House Democratic hawks revealed today that they don’t actually want the Iran War to end,” the group wrote in a post to social media. “By failing to end U.S. participation in the Israeli war in Lebanon, they are undermining a peace deal.”

Statements made by the resolution's author, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib:

“The United States is not a bystander to these war crimes. It’s an active participant.”

And:

“The Trump administration is assisting the Israeli government as it bombs children in Lebanon. In just 25 days, nearly 1000 more people have died while Congress lacks the courage to end U.S. participation in this invasion. We must pass the Lebanon War Powers Resolution today [June 30].”

And:

“More than 1.3 million people have already been forced to leave their homes or be killed, with the Israeli military telling them they will not be allowed to return. Eighty-one Lebanese neighborhoods have been violently depopulated and demolished—erased from the map entirely.”

Congresswoman Norma Torres represents California's 35th Congressional District, which, after the passage of Proposition 50, includes the cities of Bloomington, Chino, Chino Hills, Claremont, Corona, Eastvale, Fontana, Montclair, Norco, Ontario, Pomona, Rancho Cucamonga, and Upland.

According to Track AIPAC, Congresswoman Norma Torres has received $427,988 in lifetime contributions from the pro-Israel lobbies.

Note from the editor:

As a Democrat, I often hear Democrats complain about our current Congress, asking why it is not doing more to curtail the current presidential administration's use of executive power, particularly in matters of war. Let this vote serve as part of the explanation. Even members of the president's opposition party are, at times, voting in ways that align with the administration's foreign policy and military objectives.

The 4 other Democratic Congress members from California who voted against the resolution are Representative Adam Gray (Central Valley); Rep. Jimmy Panetta (Central Coast); Representative Brad Sherman (North LA County and Ventura); and Representative Juan Vargas (Southern San Diego County).

Legislator Watch is an accountability series by The Pomonan that combines public records, legislative votes, campaign finance data, and editorial analysis to examine the actions of elected officials. While grounded in verifiable public information, the opinions and conclusions expressed are those of The Pomonan Editorial Board.

Most Americans Use Political Labels They Cannot Define

How Americans Stopped Arguing About Ideas and Started Joining Political Gangs

Photography Julian Lucas ©2017

A few weeks ago I made what I thought was a fairly harmless observation on a well known biased platform. The kind of platform that debating just leaves many circling the drain and losing brain cells.

Most Americans do not know the difference between a liberal, a progressive, a leftist, a moderate, a neoliberal, a socialist, or a communist. The reaction was immediate.

Some people informed me there was no difference between any of those categories. Others argued the distinctions existed but were meaningless. A few insisted that all of them represented the same thing anyway. One commenter declared moderate Democrats extinct. Another wanted to know why anyone would care. Someone else asked what my end goal was, as though distinguishing between political ideologies required an ulterior motive.

The more responses appeared, the more interesting the discussion became. Not because people disagreed. People disagree about politics every day. What caught my attention was how quickly the conversation moved away from the ideas themselves. Very few people wanted to discuss what separated one political tradition from another. Instead, the discussion became a debate about belonging. The labels appeared and of course the assumptions arrived shortly after. Before long, entire political traditions were being put into a handful of emotional categories. 

The liberal became the communist. The progressive became the socialist. Democrats became the leftist and the distinctions disappeared almost immediately.

One comment stayed with me. A man wrote that we are not living in a political science class and therefore nobody cares about labels. Judging by the reactions, many people agreed with him. Honestly, I understood the point.

Most people are not spending their evenings reading political philosophy. They are working jobs, paying their rent, worrying about healthcare, raising children, commuting to work, paying mortgages, and trying to survive an economy that seems determined to charge more for everything than it did yesterday. Politics enters most people’s lives through experience before it enters through theory.

Yet there remains something strange about holding strong opinions regarding categories that nobody wants to define.

Mention communism and someone points to China. Mention China and someone points to the Soviet Union. Mention socialism and someone points to California. The conversation always moves swiftly from label to conclusion without spending much time on definition. Whether modern China resembles classical Marxist theory, state capitalism, authoritarian nationalism, or some combination of all three rarely enters the discussion. The label does most of the work.

The same thing happens elsewhere across the political spectrum. A person can spend years attacking socialism without understanding how it differs from liberalism. Another can spend years criticizing conservatism without distinguishing between a libertarian, a constitutional conservative, a nationalist, a populist, or a neoconservative. The labels remain familiar while the meanings become increasingly vague.

After the first discussion, I made a similar observation about conservatives. Most Americans probably could not distinguish between libertarians, fiscal conservatives, constitutional conservatives, MAGA populists, evangelicals, nationalist Republicans, moderates, and neoconservatives either. However, the reaction was different.

Many of the strongest responses to the first observation came from self-identified conservatives who immediately added liberals, progressives, leftists, neoliberals, Democrats, socialists, and communists into a single category. Yet when distinctions appeared within conservative politics, those distinctions suddenly became easier to recognize. People who had argued that labels were meaningless now had opinions about the differences.

The contradiction appeared over and over and over again. Several people insisted labels did not matter while defending the labels they identified with. Others argued distinctions were meaningless while demanding that distinctions important to them be recognized. A few dismissed the entire conversation before spending considerable time participating in it.

An additional kink emerged when the original discussion concerning liberals, progressives, leftists, neoliberals, socialists, and communists eventually disappeared from the platform. A nearly identical discussion involving conservatives remained active. I have no idea why one stayed and the other vanished. Perhaps it was reported, well it was definitely reported and some moderators out voted against the post. What interested me more than the removal itself was the intensity of the reaction surrounding the first conversation. The experience left me thinking less about political labels and more about how people arrive at politics in the first place.

Most people do not arrive there through books. They arrive through family. Through church . Through neighborhoods. Through work. Through television. Through social media. Through economic frustrations. Through experiences that shape how they see the world long before they encounter political theory. By the time ideological labels enter the conversation, many loyalties have already been formed.

That reality does not make people irrational. It makes them human. But it does help explain why discussions about political ideology often become discussions about identity. The argument may begin with labels, but it rarely stays there for long. Before long, people are talking about who belongs, who does not belong, who can be trusted, who cannot be trusted, and which side represents people like them.

Reading through the responses felt less like reading a discussion about political philosophy and more like watching sports fans explain why their team matters and the other team does not. The details changed from person to person, but the pattern remained remarkably consistent.

What struck me most was not the confusion. It was the indifference. Many people were not arguing that the distinctions were wrong. They were arguing that the distinctions did not matter. That may be the more interesting observation. A society can survive disagreement. A society can survive competing political traditions. What becomes more difficult is maintaining meaningful public discussion when understanding itself begins to feel optional.

The original observation was never really about liberals, conservatives, socialists, communists, progressives, or populists. It was about whether ideas still deserve to be understood before they are embraced or rejected.

Judging from the responses, that question may be more important than the labels themselves. 

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And he will charge you 2.5 Million dollars for event photography.

Chad Bianco Talks Like He’s Never Worked a Housing Unit

You can’t write about someone like Chad Bianco from the outside.

Bianco has a way of talking that sounds convincing if you don’t spend much time thinking about what’s underneath it.”Direct, confident, like everything is simple if people would just fall in line. I get why that works. In corrections, command presence matters. You don’t survive a module or tier based on theory. You survive on awareness, timing, reading a room before it turns. But that same experience also teaches you something else. The cleaner someone makes it sound, the more you start wondering what they’re not dealing with.

I worked inside the joint. Not Riverside, but it doesn’t matter as much as people think. Same rhythm. Same pressure. You learn real quick that control is fragile. You can’t fake it. You can’t posture your way through a dorm full of dudes who already know who’s present and who’s putting on a performance. The job is repetitive, tense, sometimes quiet in a way that isn’t actually quiet at all. Doors, counts, movement, paperwork, watching everything without looking like you are.

So when Bianco talks like the system is clean, like society breaks down into right and wrong if people would just act right, it sounds familiar. It’s that black-and-white framing that leaves no room for what’s actually happening in front of you. But race doesn’t disappear because you decide not to account for it.

And inside, race isn’t theoretical. It’s not something you debate, it’s something you manage. Prison politics is embedded in everything. Who sits where, who moves with who, who doesn’t cross certain lines. Staff read it whether they admit it or not. Both prisoners and guards live it every day. You don’t get to flatten that into “just follow the rules.” That’s not how it works.

And this idea that race doesn’t really factor in, it doesn’t hold up even before you step inside. Riverside County itself tells a different story. The population is roughly 47 percent Latino, around 38 percent white, and about 6 percent Black. But when you look at who ends up incarcerated across California, which Riverside tracks pretty closely, the proportions shift. Latinos still make up the largest group, but Black residents, while a small share of the overall population, are incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates. In Riverside County specifically, Black residents are arrested at more than twice the rate of white residents. That gap is already there before anyone even enters a housing unit.

So by the time you’re inside a module, you’re not starting from neutral. You’re walking into something that’s already shaped a certain way. And inside, prison politics are already there whether anybody wants to talk about it or not.

From inside a housing unit, prison politics don’t disappear just because you ignore race. Doesn’t matter what Chad Bianco said at that debate.

And honestly, the tough guy image starts feeling manufactured after a while. Bianco leans heavily into this black and white sheriff identity, the adult in the room surrounded by activists and chaos. But real life inside institutions doesn’t work like a campaign ad. Real rural people, the kind politicians love using as symbols, usually don’t spend this much time performing toughness. They’re working. Fixing engines, dealing with weather, growing food, hunting, handling whatever is in front of them. A lot of them would probably laugh at how theatrical modern political toughness has become.

Bianco comes from a semi-rural background and clearly identifies with that culture. Fine. But there’s still a difference between understanding rural life and talking like complicated systems are simple.

And then there’s the way he talks about activists, like they’re somehow separate from “adults” making real decisions. He talks about California being run by activists, says the ACLU runs Sacramento, frames public safety as if it exists completely apart from healthcare, education, housing, or poverty. 

But anybody who has actually worked inside long enough knows those systems bleed into each other constantly.

You see mental illness untreated for years. Addiction. People cycling in and out because nothing outside changed before they came back in. You see enough people come through who can barely read and eventually all that “public safety has nothing to do with education” talk stops sounding serious.

At one point during the debate, after a reporter mentioned that California law directs roughly 40 percent of the state budget toward public education, Bianco said that was too much. He said he would change the law. He also blamed AB 109 for the downfall of public safety and said it should be completely reversed.

And this is where his worldview becomes really clear. Everything gets reduced into enforcement first, everything else second. Education becomes separate from public safety. Healthcare becomes separate from public safety. Poverty becomes separate from public safety.

But inside a jail, those lines don’t stay separate very long.

You see what happens when schools fail people early. You see untreated mental illness. Addiction. People who learned violence before they learned stability. You see the same names come back through the system because whatever happened outside the walls never changed before they came back in.

Bianco said California should have built more prisons. Maybe from his perspective that sounds practical. More beds, more control, more separation from the people he sees as dangerous.

But if you’ve worked around incarceration long enough, eventually you start asking a different question. At what point do we stop building larger systems around failure and start asking why the same pipeline keeps filling up in the first place?

Because prisons don’t exist separate from society. They absorb everything society ignored earlier. Poverty. Untreated mental illness. Addiction. Violence. Underfunded schools. Neighborhoods abandoned long before somebody ends up in handcuffs.

Listening to Bianco talk, you’d think California’s problems began the moment prisons started closing. But California has been moving vulnerable people between broken systems for decades.

Ronald Reagan helped oversee the dismantling of state mental institutions long before Gavin Newsom was governor. The promised treatment infrastructure never fully replaced them. So people ended up somewhere else instead. On the street. In county jails. In emergency rooms. Back on the street again.

Anybody who has worked around incarceration long enough has seen that cycle up close.

But in Bianco’s version of California, the story almost always begins at the point where enforcement weakened. Everything before that disappears.

And once you’ve watched enough people cycle through those systems, the idea that public safety exists completely separate from education or healthcare starts sounding less serious.

Listening to Bianco talk, you’d think California is in some permanent free fall where crime is endlessly rising and society is unraveling in real time. But even crime data has been more complicated than that. Some categories rose after the pandemic, others dropped, and in many places violent crime has leveled off or declined again.

But complexity and nuance never really seem to enter the conversation. Everything gets flattened into categories. Activists. Conservatives. Good people. Bad people. But people aren’t monoliths. Everything becomes crisis. Everything becomes collapse. Everything becomes another reason for more enforcement, more control, more certainty.

At another point in the debate, Bianco was asked how he would lower the cost of living in California. He said it would be “so easy” and pointed toward removing regulations.

Maybe some regulations should be revisited. California absolutely overcomplicates parts of its own economy. But anybody seriously looking at housing, energy, insurance, or infrastructure knows there is nothing easy about any of this.

And that’s the pattern that keeps repeating. Complex systems get reduced into simple answers. Crime becomes weak enforcement. Homelessness becomes prison closures. Economic pressure becomes regulations. Activists become the enemy. Everything gets flattened down until it fits inside a debate answer.

But reality doesn’t stay flattened for very long once you’re actually inside the systems themselves.

And that’s where it starts to feel off. Not because he’s confident, but because the confidence doesn’t leave much room for complexity. You start to wonder what that’s based on. What he’s reading, who he’s listening to, what kind of education, formal or otherwise, is shaping that worldview. Because if your position is that race isn’t a factor, then you’re either not seeing it, or choosing not to.

Riverside County has dealt with lawsuits, in-custody deaths, the same questions about conditions coming back again and again. It’s all still there. However it gets framed, it’s still there.

And the numbers don’t help him. During his time in office, his department has been described as having one of the worst crime-solving rates among California sheriff departments, clearing only around 9 percent of major crimes, well below the state average.

Bianco says the job is about integrity, honesty, and leadership. Then people have every right to ask why the same problems keep following the department around.

At the same time, Riverside County jails have seen some of the highest death figures in California. In one recent year alone, 18 people died in custody, the highest number the county had seen in over a decade. Riverside County also accounted for roughly 17 percent of jail homicides in California while holding only about 6 percent of the state jail population.

And this isn’t happening in some underfunded department. Chad Bianco was the highest-paid sheriff in California, pulling in over $593,000 in total compensation in a single year.

Bianco gives Gavin Newsom an “F,” talks like California is some completely failed state run by activists and chaos. Meanwhile, Riverside Sheriff operates with a massive budget, thousands of employees, state funding streams tied to policies like AB 109, and one of the largest economies in the world backing the entire system.

That doesn’t mean California doesn’t have serious problems. It obviously does. But the picture Bianco paints is always total collapse, total failure, total disorder. And eventually it starts sounding less like analysis and more like campaign rhetoric. So when the message is control, order, certainty, you start looking at what’s actually being controlled.

And then there’s the Oath Keepers history, something Bianco has repeatedly tried to brush off or ridicule reporters for even bringing up. But people keep asking because it matters. The Oath Keepers were not some random social club. The group became nationally associated with the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and several members were later convicted in connection to it.

Bianco says he distanced himself from the organization long before that. Fine. But the question doesn’t disappear just because he acts annoyed by it. People are still left wondering why a sheriff, someone responsible for public trust and constitutional authority, aligned himself with that kind of movement in the first place.

Then there’s the rest of it. The political attention, the broader fights, the time spent outside the day-to-day. Maybe that builds a following. But the work doesn’t pause. The modules still run. The tension is still there whether anyone is talking about it or not.

This isn’t about making him into something easy to dismiss. It’s about the gap. The distance between how authority presents itself and how it actually holds up when things aren’t being narrated. Inside, there’s no audience. There’s no applause. There’s just whether the place holds or it doesn’t.

And if you’ve been in that environment, even for a short time, you know exactly what that means.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million dollars for event photography.

Jennifer Stark, Off the Record

Julian Lucas ©2026

Local politics often flattens people into positions, voting records, and rehearsed public language. Over two separate days spent walking through Claremont with Mayor Jennifer Stark, the conversation drifted somewhere less controlled. We spoke for hours about governance, private doubt, economic inequality, emotional pressure, and the quiet demands that come with representing a city that increasingly projects its anxieties onto public office. Shot entirely on black-and-white film, the piece intentionally steps outside the aesthetics of campaign imagery and civic branding.

Julian: How does your day usually begin when you’re not in “city council mode?

Jennifer:
When I have free time in the morning, I love to play the New York Times games, starting with my favorite, Spelling Bee. Then I walk my dog in the Wilderness Park before it gets too hot.

Julian: What’s something about you that has nothing to do with politics but says a lot about who you are?

Jennifer:
My identity comes from being part of a large family and friend group, and being a member of a community that I love and feel responsible for.

Julian: Do you feel different walking into City Hall now compared to your first year?

Jennifer:
Yes, absolutely. Time and experience change the way you feel about everything.

Julian: Do you ever feel like you’re stepping into a version of yourself when you sit on the dais?

Jennifer:
Yes. Being Mayor and serving on City Council are positions that are bigger and more expansive than my sense of self.

For me, it’s crucial that I prioritize respectful and courteous behavior that reflects the dignity of the position. I’m committed to deliberating logically and articulating my thought process as clearly as possible. I strive to craft arguments my colleagues can support while also understanding the logic behind their arguments.

Being a decision maker in this capacity requires thinking about everyone I represent and comporting myself accordingly. I don’t take those responsibilities lightly. Representing the City of Claremont is an honor and a privilege, and the duty requires seriousness, self-control, and constant awareness of bias and personal preference.

Julian: What part of your personality is least compatible with political life?

Jennifer:
I’m getting more and more private as I age. I’m also awkward and uncomfortable with titles and the deference that titles carry.

Julian: What do you think residents misunderstand most about how decisions actually get made?

Jennifer:
I think that depends on the specifics of the issue. In my opinion, decisions should be made based on details, not generalities.

Some residents are deeply invested in understanding those details, while others defer to the opinions of friends or groups they trust. Most people understand the power of lobbying and advocacy, and most people understand it takes a majority of Council to approve or deny something.

I also think people understand that City Council decisions are shaped by laws and legal frameworks, not just personal opinion.

Julian: Where does idealism and reality collide?

Jennifer:
In the details and the nuance.

Idealism can be broad and aspirational. It absolutely informs principles and values, but reality, the legal, financial, and political framework we operate within, is built from details, and not all of those details are ideal.

Julian: Have you ever supported public policy you personally struggled with? Why?

Jennifer:
Yeah, I have. In an ideal world, there are policies I wouldn’t have supported. There’s nothing wrong with taking a principled vote and saying, “I’m voting against this.” We absolutely have the right to do that.

At the same time, outside agencies are watching us, and how council votes come out reflects on how functional the city is. A principled vote might make me feel good, but my responsibility is to act in the city’s best interest.

One example is electric bikes. I support access to them, but I don’t think policies should unnecessarily limit access to wilderness parks. Those are fire roads, they’re built for trucks, and bikes aren’t going to deteriorate them. An electric bike doesn’t move faster downhill than a regular bike, it just helps people get up the hill. That said, I don’t support throttles or dirt-style electric motors in those areas.

Another example is tenant protections after COVID. At the time, we were dealing with state legislation allowing rent increases of CPI plus 5%, capped at 10%. The policy hadn’t really been tested because of COVID interruptions.

At the time, I supported not adding additional restrictions because we didn’t want to inhibit the housing market or make it difficult for property owners to maintain their properties. But now, I’ve brought the issue back for discussion because rent increases of 8% to 10% annually simply are not sustainable for tenants.

We’re seeing corporations purchase buildings with below-market rents, make cosmetic changes, and then raise rents significantly to push longtime tenants out. I think we can craft policies that support tenants without being unfair to landlords, potentially through softer caps or stronger relocation support.

That’s an issue I want to continue working on.

Julian Lucas ©2026

Julian: What kind of conflict drains you the most?

Jennifer:
I get drained by the expectation that leadership should be transactional.

It’s natural for people to center their own interests when expressing their position, but my responsibility is to consider everyone’s interests, especially the needs of the most vulnerable people, not just individuals advocating for themselves.

Julian: When do you feel most connected to the community?

Jennifer:
This community is my family, my friends, and my home. When I feel most connected to them, I feel most connected to the community.

Julian: What do you miss about life before office?

Jennifer:
I used to have more energy for gardening and home projects. Now, when I have downtime, I mostly want to rest — maybe read, hike, or take a nap — rather than start another project or chore.

Julian: What truth about Claremont would make people uncomfortable if said plainly?

Jennifer:
I think the uncomfortable truth is similar to many suburbs in California and across the United States: there’s deep economic disparity baked into the landscape.

Claremont was a redlined city. The 10 freeway was intentionally placed through South Claremont, dividing neighborhoods. These are historical realities we can’t ignore.

It’s our responsibility in government not to shy away from those facts and to begin addressing them honestly. Many of these issues have compounded over time into massive structural problems.

The Council has been actively trying to grapple with inequities, especially in South Claremont, but these are not easy fixes. Issues around race, economic disparity, and equity require long-term commitment and honesty.

Whenever someone claims there’s an easy solution, people should be cautious. These are ongoing issues that require continuous work.

Julian: How do you personally measure whether you’re doing a good job?

Jennifer:
One of the most enriching parts of serving in elected office is the constant opportunity for personal growth.

Like anyone, I have a petty side, but this role requires me to recognize that and set it aside. The job demands a broader perspective that can’t be personality-driven.

Taking the high road, being courteous, not centering yourself — those are all ongoing practices. You’re also constantly receiving feedback, both directly and indirectly.

Praise feels good, of course, but I’m more motivated by the internal voice pushing me to do better. Every meeting has something to teach me, and I try to learn from each one.

Julian: If you left politics tomorrow, what would you feel relieved about?

Jennifer:
There’s definitely a level of pressure that comes with the role.

I feel responsible for showing up to community events, nonprofit functions, and gatherings. Even missing something like the farmers market can make me feel guilty.

I hold myself to a high standard, and I care deeply about meeting expectations — both my own and others’. I think I’d feel relief in stepping back from some of that pressure and having more freedom over how I spend my time.

Julian: Change is inevitable, and it feels like there’s been a cultural shift in the Village, from a thriving creative art hub to something more franchise-driven. We’ve seen independent shops and restaurants give way to chains. Do you see that trend continuing?

Jennifer:
Businesses in Claremont are subject to the same economic pressures as businesses anywhere else.

Retail is changing, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for brick-and-mortar businesses to survive, not because of the City of Claremont, but because of larger economic trends.

That said, Claremont has intentionally preserved its scale and charm, and that’s part of what makes the Village special.

Businesses will continue to come and go based on the market. We do have an economic development consultant who works to fill vacancies, and compared to many cities, our vacancy rate is actually relatively low. But because the Village is so walkable, empty storefronts become more noticeable.

The city and the Chamber work closely together to support local businesses, and if there are ways we can help small businesses succeed, we want to do that.

Julian Lucas ©2026

Julian: Do you still consider Claremont the “City of Trees and PhDs”?

Jennifer:
I still consider Claremont the City of Trees, but I’m less attached to the “PhDs” portion. It can come across as arrogant.

If we want to maintain that identity, we need to make sure people who work here can actually afford to live here. That means supporting affordable housing, but also addressing the “missing middle” and diversifying our housing stock.

Claremont used to be a place where people lived and worked locally. Now many workers commute from far outside the city. We need to find ways to restore that balance.

Julian: There are empty storefronts that have remained vacant for quite some time. What can the city do to encourage property owners to lease spaces and support small businesses?

Jennifer:
This really ties back to the broader economic environment. Running a brick-and-mortar business is incredibly difficult right now.

A good example is Barbara Cheatle’s. It was a deeply personal store built around one person’s vision. When the owner was ready to retire and there wasn’t someone to continue it, that chapter naturally came to an end.

Stores like that are difficult to replace because they’re tied so closely to the person behind them.

That said, we do have successful examples. The Cheese Cave and Crème are businesses people will drive long distances to visit. But success requires enormous creativity, resilience, adaptability, and commitment from the owner.

Small business owners are the backbone of places like the Village, and the city and Chamber remain committed to supporting them however we can.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million dollars for event photography.

The Limits of Vision

Concept and image by Julian Lucas

Every city has them. Plans, meetings, a steady language about what things could become. The vocabulary hardly changes. Revitalization and investment. Words that suggest motion, though most of the time nothing actually moves fast the way we would like to see. Nothing moves in the direction many of us would love to be a part of. It circulates instead, passing from one room to another, intact.

Stay with it long enough and a pattern settles in. Projects arrive in fragments, a development here, a proposal there. Each one presented as progress, but rarely in relation to anything else. Nothing accumulates, nothing quite follows through. It begins to feel less like a vision than an arrangement. With respect to housing, cities are now told to build housing. 

Hodge podge. Not in a generous sense, in the sense of no cohesion, no vision. Industrial lots sitting next to tired storefronts, laundromats pressed up against tire shops, motels that look like they’ve been holding the same stories for decades, a few doors down gas stations neighboring new apartments that are trying to signal something forward. And buildings that never move at all. It’s all there, just not together. 

After a while, that lack of cohesion stops reading as temporary. It starts to feel intentional, even when it isn’t, like this is simply how the place is meant to be. People learn it without being told. They understand where attention gathers and where it thins out, which spaces are treated as open and which are approached like the outcome has already been decided. It doesn’t need to be written down. You can see it in what gets built, and repurposed, what lingers in delay, what never even gets close.

The expectation takes over from there. It decides what feels possible before anything begins and narrows things just enough that the results start to look inevitable. Stagnation doesn’t announce itself. It holds, not because there aren’t ideas, but because those ideas aren’t allowed to land everywhere. 

Because renters can’t possibly have ideas that matter.

When something new shows up in a place that’s been stuck in a pattern, people notice it right away. Not because it blends in, but because it doesn’t. It looks intentional. It looks like it belongs somewhere else, or at least somewhere that’s been treated differently.

That’s where the tension is. It raises a question people usually move past too quickly. If this can exist here, even for a moment, then what has been stopping everything else? There are answers ready, policy, funding, process. They matter, but they don’t explain the consistency of the outcome. Something else is doing the work, where seriousness gets placed, where it doesn’t, what gets taken on and what gets dismissed before it has time to become anything.

That kind of sorting builds over time, decision by decision, approval by approval, a way of working that favors what can be managed over what might actually change something. Nothing gathers enough force, so the story holds. Until something interrupts it, not by fixing anything, but by refusing the proportions that were already in place. The contrast doesn’t argue. It stays, and once it does, it becomes harder to go back to believing things are the way they are because they have to be.

This is usually where “innovation” gets mentioned. Slides, language, a version of change that stays contained. Something that can be approved without disrupting anything around it.

But that’s not what this is.

This doesn’t come out of a meeting. It doesn’t wait to be placed where it feels appropriate. It shows up where it isn’t expected, fully formed, not asking to be explained.

That’s closer to what innovation actually looks like.

Not a concept that moves through rooms, but something that takes up space. Something that risks being out of place because it’s trying to change the place.

It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t pretend to. It just sits there and makes the difference obvious.

And once you see that difference, it’s harder to go back to believing things are the way they are because they have to be.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.

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How the Power Elite Handles Allegations of Sexual 'Misconduct,' Rape, Sexual Assault

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CASE STUDY
California Governor Debate, April 22, 2026, Gubernatorial Candidate and former chair of the Congress’ Democratic Caucus (2013-17; VC; 2009-13), Xavier Becerra answers a question about what he knew about Congressman Eric Swalwell’s sexual misconduct.

BACKGROUND INFO

In April 2026, former U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, was accused of multiple instances of sexual misconduct, including rape and sexual assault. Swalwell, who has served as Congressman since 2012, recently stepped down amid these allegations from both his elected position as a California Congressman and as a candidate for California Governor.

FACT
California Gubernatorial Candidate Xavier Becerra admitted in a CNN interview with Pam Brown on April 16, a week prior to the April 22 California Governor debate, that he had heard 'rumors' about Congressman Swalwell's misconduct, but took no action. Pressed at the debate, Becerra said 'rumors are not facts' and deflected to law enforcement.

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT #1: CNN Interview with Candidate Becerra, April 16, 2026
Brown: “What have you heard, Secretary?”

Becerra: “I think many of us had heard the rumors as well. Never seen any corroboration. But certainly, I think that the word had gone out.”

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT #2: First California Governor Debate, hosted by Nexstar Media Group, April 22, 2026
NewsNation host Nikki Laurenzo: "Mr. Becerra, you were chair of the Democratic Caucus when Eric Swalwell was elected to Congress. You said in a recent interview that, quote, 'Many of us heard the rumors.' What rumors did you hear? And should you have pursued the rumors as a member of Democratic leadership?" NewsNation host Nikki Laurenzo asked.

Becerra: "Yeah, you hear rumors all the time about all sorts of things. Rumors are not facts, And the, the caucus, the Democratic caucus is not a place that adjudicates those things. It's law enforcement that does. If someone had come forward, we could then have investigations. I say that as the former Attorney General for the state of California.

When I was Attorney General, we did go after sex trafficking. We did go to those who abuse of young women and take advantage of them. We did prosecute people.There was an individual who was a religious leader who was taking advantage of young women, we prosecuted that individual. Today he is in jail for his crimes. We have gone after people, but we go after them based on evidence and based on facts.
Unfortunately, we have a president today who would go after someone based on rumors. That’s not the way we do it in America. We have to have the facts. Rumors are one thing, but getting the facts really gets you to move. And let me just applaud those courageous survivors who stood up and told America what the truth was. And today Eric Swalwell is facing accountability.”

COMMENTARY
Here, Gubernatorial Candidate Becerra absolves himself and the Democratic Caucus of any responsibility, placing the onus on victims to file charges with their local police department.

Which sounds nice except that, for the most part, victims of sexual crimes, don't.

We don’t live in a society that supports sexual abuse victims. Already humiliated and traumatized by their sexual assault, victims often choose to not to participate in systems that will only perpetuate their humiliation and traumatization.

In rape cases, there is often a power dynamic involved - a sexual abuser is a boss, a powerful person or a father figure. Victims fear retribution. The loss of their job or  respect from their community. The loss of community.

Alcohol and drugs are often involved, and victims oftenn do not always want to admit to alcohol or drug use - and they aren’t sure how to proceed in cases where they think they may have been drugged.

Statistics support this. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey, and the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System: nearly every minute, someone in the US is sexually assaulted, AND approximately 63% to over 80% of sexual assaults and rapes in the US go unreported to law enforcement, AND the vast majority of perpetrators—nearly 98%—are never held fully accountable by the criminal justice system.

Twenty years after the MeToo movement, and the same year as the release of (some - not all!) of the Epstein files, gubernatorial candidate Becerra shows us that it is still acceptable for elected officials to skirt their responsibilities for vetting their fellow elected officials. I’m not thinking that Becerra is an isolated example, but representative of an entire network of people in power who are willing to shirk their responsibilities in this regard.

It is well past time for the Democratic Party to own up to its responsibilities to their constituents.

Pamela Nagler Pamela Nagler is finishing her book, Unceded Land, Indigenous California and the Foreign Invasions: Spanish, Mexican, Russian, US.

What’s in a Name? President Trump Chooses Punishing, Testosterone-Driven Names for his Ever-Expanding Military Objectives

"Maybe not a good thing to say WAR . . . I won’t use the word ‘war’ because they say if you use the word ‘war,’ that’s maybe not a good thing to do. They don’t like the word ‘war’ because you’re supposed to get approval. So, I’ll use the word ‘military operation,’ which is really what it is. It’s a military decimation.”

President Donald Trump, March 26, 2026 at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s (NRCC) annual fundraising dinner.

On March 17, 2026, with little fanfare and scant press coverage, the Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and America’s Security Affairs, Joseph M. Humire, launched our new military offensive in Ecuador, Operation Total Extermination. Calling it a series of “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border,” he indicated it was an effort by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.A.

Of course, the big concern with this announcement is the escalating violence across the globe and how President Trump is finding it easy to circumvent Congress in this escalation. But that’s not what this article is about. This article is about President Trump choosing increasingly bellicose and combative names to promote his ever-expanding war efforts.

Reminder - this is only the beginning of year two of his four year term.

Since elected for the second time, President Trump has been choosing increasingly aggressive names to accompany his expanded use of military force and extension of a “strike first” doctrine. Prior to his announcement of Operation Total Extermination (with a name like that - what could possibly go wrong?), he has called his military aggressions, Operation Epic Fury, Operation Midnight Hammer, Operation Southern Spear, Operation Rough Rider and Operation Hawkeye Strike.

And Trump is waging his jingoistic name war domestically, as well. In the naming of his vicious attacks on immigrants, President Trump is riffing off of the same formula - with a twist. Showing off his virulent racism and his penchant for sick humor, he has named his operations to round up immigrants with cruel, taunting, schoolyard bully names like Operation Dirtbag, Operation Catch of the Day and Operation Charlotte’s Web - combining a bit of what he might call ‘whimsy’ with some very, very dark messaging.

All of these names for operations both international and domestic contrast the names that past presidents have coined to define their wars and military aggressions. A non-comprehensive review of names of past military actions includes: Operation Desert Storm in Iraq and Operation Just Cause in Panama (George H.W. Bush), Operation Allied Force in Yugoslavia (Clinton), Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (George W. Bush), and Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya (Obama). In naming the recent war in Iran and Lebanon, Operation Epic Fury President Trump borrowed terminology from former President Ronald Reagan and amped it up some. Former President Reagan called his war on Grenada Operation Urgent Fury.

Of course, there is an inherent problem in past U.S. Presidents glorifying (and at the same time downgrading) the horrors of war with such lofty names. For instance, former President Truman labeled the Korean War a “police action” in 1950. Even so, President Trump’s names are starting a new trend of announcing to the world the nation’s new emphasis on military thuggery.

It has always been problematic that Presidents have felt free to exercise their executive authority to deploy military force without a formal congressional declaration of war, but with Trump’s new military actions, we’ve entered a new age of very, very few checks and balances from our legislative branch of government. Based on data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) covering the period from January 20, 2025, to early 2026, President Donald Trump's second term saw a rapid surge in military activity that surpassed the total number of airstrikes conducted during Joe Biden's entire four-year term from 2021-2025.

President Trump’s Second Term International Operations:

Operation Total Extermination (March 2026)
Operation Epic Fury (February 2026)  airstrikes against Iran
Operation Hawkeye Strike (December 2025) large-scale strikes against ISIS targets in Syria
Operation Southern Spear (September 2025) anti-narcotic/maritime campaign in the Caribbean
Operation Midnight Hammer (June 2025)  B-2 stealth bombers and missile strikes targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure
Operation Rough Rider (March 2025) air and naval campaign against Houthi targets in Yemen, which included U.S.-led coalition

President Trump’s Second Term Domestic Operations Against Immigrants:

Operation Catch of the Day (January 2026)  Operations conducted in Maine
Operation Salvo (January 2026) An ICE raid in New York City targeting gang members.
Operation Catahoula Crunch (Swamp Sweep) (December 2025) Enforcement operations in Louisiana
Operation Metro Surge (December 2025) Immigration enforcement in the Minneapolis region
Operation Charlotte's Web (November 2025) a Department of Homeland Security action against undocumented immigrants in North Carolina
Operation Dirtbag (November 2025)  Enforcement operations in Florida

Operation Midway Blitz (January 2025) An operation in the Chicago metropolitan area where approximately 3,000 detained individuals reportedly disappeared from ICE records

In President Trump’s first presidency, his former Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor, Steve Bannon, in a 2019 PBS Frontline interview, outlined the strategy to overwhelm the media and opposition. by "flooding the zone" with rapid-fire initiatives, a concept he termed "muzzle velocity.” It’s a strategy President Trump has continued into his second term and it appears to be working.

Pamela Nagler Pamela Nagler is finishing her book, Unceded Land, Indigenous California and the Foreign Invasions: Spanish, Mexican, Russian, US.

Human Trafficking in Pomona: A Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight

Julian Lucas ©2023

When people hear “human trafficking,” they imagine something distant, another country, another city, another community. That narrative allows us to feel safe. It is also dangerously wrong! Human trafficking is happening in Pomona. It is not rare. It is not accidental. And it is not simply a criminal issue, it is the predictable result of housing instability, economic inequality, labor exploitation, and gaps in community-based services. In California, trafficking remains a persistent emergency. According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, more than 1,700 trafficking cases were identified statewide in 2023, involving over 3,600 victims.  If we are serious about public safety and community well-being, we must stop treating trafficking as an isolated crime and recognize it as a structural crisis rooted in vulnerability.

As a Pomona resident, graduate social work student, and survivor of trafficking, I know exploitation does not begin with abduction. It begins with instability when rent consumes most of a paycheck, when youth age out of foster care without support, or when someone flees domestic violence with nowhere to go. Traffickers rarely present as strangers; they present as solutions! They offer housing, protection, employment, and stability. Over time, those promises become tools of control.

This crisis is visible in our community. Along corridors like Holt Avenue, prostitution unfolds in plain sight. Many residents see it daily. I do too. What some dismiss as “choice” is often survival shaped by trauma, poverty, and coercion! When exploitation becomes normalized on our streets, it signals deeper systemic failures in housing policy, mental health access, economic opportunity, and prevention.

Experts agree these figures likely represent only a fraction of actual cases due to underreporting, fear, immigration concerns, and distrust of institutions. Los Angeles County continues to rank among the largest hubs for labor and sex trafficking nationwide, according to the Polaris Project.

Pomona’s proximity to major transportation corridors, hotels, warehouses, and informal labor sectors increases vulnerability, especially in hospitality, domestic work, day labor, and logistics. Exploitation thrives where labor is hidden, unregulated, or dependent on silence. But statistics alone do not explain why trafficking persists. Structural conditions do.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identifies housing instability, poverty, and prior trauma as major risk factors. Research from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago found that nearly one in five youth experiencing homelessness report being trafficked in some form. That is not a coincidence; it is cause and effect. When stability disappears, leverage appears. When people lack options, traffickers gain power.

Pomona is already grappling with rising housing costs, visible homelessness, and economic insecurity. These challenges are not separate from trafficking; they are interconnected. When affordable housing is scarce, and wages stagnate, vulnerability grows. When trauma-informed mental health services are inaccessible, recovery becomes harder and re-exploitation more likely! When labor protections are weak, exploitation becomes normalized. Yet our response remains fragmented.

Survivors often encounter limited shelter beds, short-term services, and inconsistent case management. Legal processes can stretch for years. Funding is frequently reactive rather than preventative. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine emphasizes that effective anti-trafficking responses require coordinated, long-term, survivor-centered systems, not isolated efforts. We cannot arrest our way out of this crisis.

Law enforcement accountability is necessary, but prevention requires structural investment. Research consistently shows that access to stable housing, livable wages, healthcare, and coordinated social services reduces vulnerability to exploitation. When people have genuine stability, traffickers lose leverage.

If Pomona is serious about confronting human trafficking, city and county leaders must move beyond awareness campaigns and commit to concrete, sustained action. This means investing in long-term, trauma-informed housing so survivors have a safe place to rebuild their lives, while also implementing school-based prevention programs that educate young people about grooming and online recruitment. Educators, healthcare providers, and other frontline professionals should receive mandatory training to recognize the warning signs of trafficking and respond appropriately. At the same time, stronger labor protections and enforcement are needed to address exploitation in workplaces where trafficking often remains hidden. Finally, Pomona must support coordinated, survivor-centered service networks bringing together social services, legal aid, healthcare, and community organizations to ensure survivors receive the comprehensive support they need for long-term recovery.

These are not radical demands. They are evidence-based solutions! This is not only a moral issue. It is a public safety issue, an economic justice issue, and a community responsibility.
As someone who survived trafficking in a community where exploitation was normalized, I refuse to accept silence as the default response. Survival should not depend on luck. Prevention should not depend on chance. Pomona deserves a coordinated strategy grounded in evidence, compassion, and accountability. The time for passive concern has passed. The time for coordinated, community-wide action is now.

Sarai Martinez is a graduate student at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and a Pomona resident.

Is the Billionaire Tax Fair?

A recent article in Forbes magazine breaks it down. Here’s a summary: 

According to Economist Dean Baker (Center for Economic and Policy Research), the California billionaire tax can look punishing on paper, but it actually partially mitigates the tax breaks that our tax system grants the very wealthy. Even though it can seem like California has one of the highest income tax rates in the country, these rates only apply to ordinary income such as wages and salaries — and billionaires rarely live on wages and salaries. Most of their income comes from capital gains and business equity. Long-term capital gains face a top federal tax rate of 20%, which is well below the top federal wage tax rate. States also don’t tax unrealized gains, and as a result, large increases in wealth can go untaxed for years - or decades.

UC Berkeley economists Akcan S. Balkir, Emmanuel Saez, Danny Yagan, and Gabriel Zucman have found that the richest Americans pay an effective tax rate of about 24%, compared with about 30% for the average U.S. household. Actually, high-wage earners can pay closer to 45% because earners get most of their income from working. By contrast, the wealthy get most of their income from owning. It is a sobering truth is that labor is taxed more than capital.

California currently has no state estate or inheritance tax, relying solely on the federal estate tax, which in 2025 exempted the first $13.99 million per individual —$27.98 million for couples - meaning that only the wealthiest estates face taxation. The elimination of California’s state-level estate tax in 1982 substantially reduced tax burdens on California’s wealthy by allowing the transfer of intergenerational wealth.

In addition, high-priced property is treated well in California. California’s Proposition 13 of 1978 caps the general property tax rate and limits increases in a property’s assessed value. Long-tenure owners can end up with assessed values far below market values, which disproportionately advantages high-income/high-wealth households who are more likely to own property, own higher-value property, and are able to hold onto their property. California has historically allowed these tax breaks to be passed on to their heirs.

Over the last decade or so, California’s high priced homes in LA and San Francisco increased in value over 85% and 77% respectively. In contrast, average hourly earnings for California’s total private workforce rose only 49%.

In such a system, workers are falling behind. Interestingly, political agreement is emerging across ideological lines that the wealth gap is too large and it is destabilizing. Federal Reserve data shows that in 2025 the top 1% of U.S. households held over 31% of all wealth — the highest share since tracking began in 1989 — while the bottom 50% held just 2.5%.

Editor’s Note:

Recent coverage of California’s proposed billionaire tax has appeared in major outlets, including the Los Angeles Times. It is also worth noting that many large news organizations operate within ownership structures shaped by immense private wealth. The Los Angeles Times, for example, is owned by biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. This does not determine the conclusions of any individual article, but it is part of the landscape in which debates about taxing extreme wealth are reported and discussed. Readers should keep that context in mind as the conversation around the billionaire tax continues.

Pamela Nagler Pamela Nagler is finishing her book, Unceded Land, Indigenous California and the Foreign Invasions: Spanish, Mexican, Russian, US.

Who are the Billionaires Opposing California’s Proposed “Billionaire Tax”?

Right now, people in California are circulating petitions to place a “Billionaire Tax” on California’s November ballot. If passed, it would impose a one-time tax of 5% on California’s tax residents whose net worth is $1 billion or more. The initiative, sponsored by the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), would only target a small number of Californians - just slightly more than 200 - but would benefit approximately 3.4 million Californians who are presently at risk of losing their Medi-Cal due to recent massive funding cuts at the federal level. The California billionaire's tax initiative requires at least 874,641 valid signatures for it to appear on the ballot - a threshold the petitioners are likely to easily meet. Read

California has the most billionaires of any U.S. state and many - though certainly not all -  oppose this tax initiative. Some are funding the opposition movement - others are actively voicing their opposition - and a handful have moved out of state to avoid paying. Many who oppose - again not all - are Silicon Valley billionaires. The New York Times reported on a recent conference that convened in Orange County advising billionaires on how to avoid paying. Half-jokingly, advisors told billionaires to get divorced. They also advised “moving their Picassos” out of state or spending down their banking accounts by buying up properties elsewhere. Read  

Here’s a short list of the California billionaires who are funding the opposition:

Google co-founder Sergey Brin (net worth $242 billion) has contributed $20 million to establish the political action committee, "Building a Better California"  in January of 2026, aimed at defeating the tax initiative. Read


Cryto-currency executive, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen (net worth $10 billion) has contributed $5 million to the opposition movement. Read

PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel (net worth $26 billion) made a $3 million donation in late December 2025 to the California Business Roundtable, a major lobbying group opposing the measure. Read

SV Angel founder Ron Conway (net worth $1.5 billion) has contributed $100,000 to the “Stop the Squeeze" committee to oppose the measure.

According to a New York Times’ January 28, 2026 article, other seven-figure contributors to "Building a Better California" include prominent investors John Doerr (net worth $11.9 billion) and Michael Moritz (net worth ($5.6 billion); Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison (net worth $11.5 billion), a longtime advocate on housing issues; Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (net worth $54.5 billion), and Stewart Resnick (net worth combined with his wife, $11 billion), who owns a farming empire that produces oranges, pistachios and POM Wonderful juice. Read

Two of the top funders of the anti-Billionaire Tax campaign, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel, are also Trump supporters. They have something else in common - according to the Epstein Files, both associated with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Sergey Brin, one of the world’s richest men, began supporting Trump in 2025. In December 2024, he attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and was seated in a prime spot at the 2025 inauguration. In September 2025, Brin publicly praised the Trump administration for supporting AI companies, stating he was "very grateful" for the administration's backing. His company Google contributed $1 million to the inauguration fund for Trump in 2025.

During the first decade of the 2000s, Sergey Brin visited Mr. Epstein’s private island near St. Thomas, made plans to dine at Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side home, and corresponded with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion, convicted as Epstein’s co-conspirator in 2021. Read


In the Epstein files, Sergey Brin appears in an undated photograph on a patio looking out to a tropical destination with women whose faces are redacted. Another document shows that one of Epstein’s accusers told the Epstein Victims Claims Administrator that she met Sergey Brin and his then-wife when they spent a day on Epstein’s island in January 2007 with Jean-Luc Brunel, a modeling agent who died in 2022 in prison while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Read

Sergey Brin associated with Jeffrey Epstein prior to Epstein’s 2028 conviction for sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, which has given him the opportunity of denying knowing about Epstein’s heinous crimes - at least to some people, in some circles.

Peter Thiel,  a key early supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, provided crucial donor, industry, and strategic support to his campaign. In 2016, Thiel delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention highlighting his support for Trump as a "political outsider.” He later served on the Trump administration’s transition team.

While Sergey Brin is mentioned in the Epstein files 4 times, Peter Thiel is mentioned some 2,200 times. Their relationship began after Epstein’s initial arrest and conviction in 2008. So fart, the interactions between Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein appear to be all business-related. According to the documents, Peter Thiel had a continuous, long-term business relationship with the sex offender  that involved investments, private meetings, and advice from 2014-2019, the year Epstein was convicted for the second time.

In an August 2024 podcast, Peter Thiel revealed that he met Epstein starting in 2014. He was first introduced to Epstein by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, another California billionaire who has voiced his opposition to the Billionaires/ Tax. According to the Wall Street Journal, Hoffman actually visited Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, in 2014. Read

Both the U.S. and the Israeli government are relying on Peter Thiel’s company, Palantir Technologies - the U.S. for its anti-immigration efforts and now its war with Israel on Iran. Israel has previously relied on Palantir, for among other things, its war on Gaza against Palestinians, but also its war on Lebanon.

Palantir has contracts with both the U.S. and Israeli governments. Founded in 2003 with seed funding from the CIA, the company specializes in artificial intelligence (AI) and software that aggregates, cleans, and analyzes massive, disparate datasets to find hidden patterns. Critics of Palantir consider it a dangerous corporation because its technology enables advanced mass surveillance, aids immigration enforcement (ICE), and powers military targeting systems with minimal public oversight or accountability. In February of 2026, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security negotiated a $1 billion purchasing agreement with Palantir, reinforced its already-existing  contracts that aid in arresting and detaining immigrants. Read

Reid Hoffman has stated that he included Peter Thiel, along with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk (net worth $900 billion)  and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (net worth 227 billion), at an August 2015 dinner party in Silicon Valley that also included Epstein. No surprises here - all four of these men oppose the Billionaire’s Tax.

Elon Musk, a former advisor to Trump,  recently called a national effort to impose any tax on billionaires “stupid." He contends that taxing billionaires would eventually lead to tax hikes for the middle class. Musk recently moved his residence and Tesla's headquarters from California to Texas. PBS, Yahoo Business

Various news outlets have reported that Mark Zuckerberg has moved to Florida to escape California’s billionaire tax.

Here’s a short list of other California billionaires who have moved to avoid the billionaire tax:

Sergey Brin and his fellow Google co-founder, Larry Page (net worth $262 billion) are in the process of setting up new residences and businesses in Florida and Nevada. Brin just moved to a $42 million mansion on the Nevada side of Lake Taboe, and Page has reportedly moved out of the state, with associated LLCs filing in Florida. Read

PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel has expanded his Florida footprint and is moving his operations away from Los Angeles.

David Sacks (net worth $2 billion) left California for Texas in late 2025/early 2026. David Sacks, a prominent technology entrepreneur, investor, and former San Francisco resident often described as a billionaire and a member of the "PayPal Mafia,”  is currently serving in the Trump administration as Trump’s crypto/AI advisor. The New York Times recently ran an article on Sacks, titled, Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends: David Sacks, the Trump administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, has helped formulate policies that aid his Silicon Valley friends and many of his own tech investments. Read

David Sacks’ business partner, Bill Lee, co-founder of Craft Ventures, recently relocated to Austin with Sacks to work out of the new Texas headquarters.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison (net worth $225 billion) sold his California home and moved to Hawaii.

Trump supporter Don Hankey (net worth $7.4 billion),  known for his high-interest auto loans and facilitating a $175 million bond for Trump's New York civil fraud case, has moved to Nevada in anticipation of the tax. Read

And, what about the politicians?  Current Governor Gavin Newsom (wealthy, but not a billionaire) is denouncing the measure as ruinous and has vowed to stop it. His allies are running the "Stop the Squeeze" campaign.

However,current California gubernatorial candidate and billionaire Tom Steyer (net worth $2 billion) supports the tax. In his recent substack, he said, “If there’s an opportunity to tax wealthy people to fund health care and education, I’d vote for it all day long.”  Read


Author’s Note: The billionaires’ net worths cited in this article were mostly sourced from a Business Insider article published June 10, 2926. As billionaire assets are always in flux, these figures are merel approximations. Read
Further reading:

On the split between Democrats who support the Billionaire Tax and those who don’t: Read

List of who supports and who opposes

Editors Note

When some of the wealthiest Californians frame this as “taxation without representation,” it’s worth remembering that the phrase originally described colonists taxed by a distant monarchy. Those affected by California’s 2026 Billionaire Tax Act are not disenfranchised subjects of an empire. They are among the most politically connected actors in the country.

If anyone is underrepresented in our tax structure, it may be the millions of wage earners whose labor is taxed more heavily than capital.

Pamela Nagler Pamela Nagler is finishing her book, Unceded Land, Indigenous California and the Foreign Invasions: Spanish, Mexican, Russian, US.

Everything Starts Underground, Until the Underground Becomes a Scene

Timothy Miller’s The Hippies and American Values does something many books about the 1960s don’t. It doesn’t romanticize hippies. It doesn’t mock them either. It treats them seriously. Not as clichés. Not as an aesthetic. But as people trying to build a different way to live.

Miller looks at hippies as a moral and cultural movement. His focus isn’t elections or legislation. It’s everyday life, sex, drugs, music, community, and the rejection of mainstream expectations.

Reading the book now, more than thirty years later, it feels less like history and more like a mirror.


The Promise of Free Love

Free love was one of the most visible ideas of hippie culture. No sexual shame. No rigid monogamy. No moral policing tied to marriage.

In theory, it meant intimacy without ownership. Sex without the heavy rules that defined earlier generations.

It also carried a quieter radicalism: interracial relationships, queer visibility, nontraditional partnerships,  all pushing against a society that still treated many of these as taboo or deviant.

In the late 1960s, interracial marriage itself was still illegal in parts of the United States. So crossing racial lines wasn’t just personal. It was socially defiant.

But ideals don’t erase reality.

Photography John Wehrheim ©1970

The Reality Inside Hippie Spaces

For a movement that spoke constantly about freedom and community, hippie culture was often overwhelmingly white.

Appropriation vs. Inclusion

Hippies embraced Black music, Eastern spirituality, Indigenous imagery, and non-Western philosophy. But the presence of actual Black and Brown participants was far less consistent.

Borrowing culture did not always mean sharing space.

Interracial Sex

Interracial intimacy existed. Sometimes it was celebrated. Sometimes it was fetishized. Desire moved across racial lines, but it wasn’t free from stereotype, assumption, and power. No one entered these encounters untouched by the myths America had already written onto race and sex.

Much of hippie mythology centers whiteness, even though Latino, Indigenous, and Black cultural influences shaped the music, aesthetics, and spiritual language of the era. The counterculture imagined itself universal. In practice, participation did not always equal visibility, and the same boundaries it claimed to reject often persisted.

What looked like openness could still carry the same old inequalities.

Gender and Power

Free love didn’t automatically level the field. Women, especially women of color, often navigated a mix of liberation and pressure. Being “evolved” sometimes meant suppressing discomfort. Boundaries could be framed as repression rather than preference.

Freedom, even here, had uneven edges.

Free Love Didn’t Age Gracefully

Free love sounded simple. No rules. No jealousy. No shame. Just honesty and desire. And to be fair, it did crack something open. It challenged sexual conservatism and loosened norms that had long constrained women’s autonomy. But removing rules doesn’t automatically create fairness. Power didn’t disappear. It just changed clothes.

Then Came #MeToo

#MeToo didn’t end the idea of sexual freedom. It challenged the mythology surrounding it.

For many people, it genuinely felt like harmless liberation. But that experience didn’t cancel out the blurred lines, uneven power, and pressures others were navigating at the same time.

Jealousy wasn’t just discouraged, it could be treated as moral failure. Boundaries weren’t always respected, they were sometimes framed as repression.

Freedom became something people were expected to perform.

#MeToo forced a harder question:

Who actually benefited from this version of freedom?

Accountability vs. Nostalgia

What shifted culturally wasn’t sexuality.  It was tolerance for imbalance. Behaviors once minimized or excused suddenly had names, such as coercion, manipulation, and abuse of power. Free love didn’t collapse under puritanism. It collided with accountability.

The Hippie That Never Fully Disappeared

One of the book’s unexpected resonances is how often hippie culture keeps resurfacing.

Photography Julian Lucas ©1997

The 1990s saw its own revival: thrift store aesthetics, neo-psychedelia, rave culture’s utopian language, the soft return of anti-corporate identity. Tie-dye came back. So did talk of dropping out, tuning in, living differently.

And today, since history repeats itself. The younger generations borrow the visual grammar again such as , crystals, vintage clothing, although now overpriced. Good vibes, spiritual curiosity, and anti-work rhetoric. Only now the flower child carries a smartphone and posts themselves engaging in curated liberation.  

The commune has now become a group text. The rebellion becomes content. The identity becomes a brand.

Even body liberation shifted in form. What once challenged sexual repression now appears online as hashtags like #FreeTheNipple, part protest, part aesthetic, part performance.

Miller’s Most Durable Insight

Miller’s strongest argument still holds. Hippies didn’t reject American values outright. They radicalized them. Freedom, individuality, authenticity, and pleasure.

These weren’t radical ideas. They were already embedded in American mythology. Hippies simply pushed them further, sometimes toward liberation, sometimes toward contradiction. 

The counterculture began underground. Hippie identity did not stay there. What started as resistance slowly became style, then a scene, then a marketable persona. The counterculture wasn’t separate from America. It became one of America’s most successful products.

Why This Book Still Matters

The values Miller documents didn’t disappear. They were absorbed, repackaged, and monetized. Sexual openness bled into a culture where people expose their intimate lives to dating app corporations. Psychedelic exploration resurfaced as a profitable therapy market. Spiritual curiosity became the wellness industry. Even authenticity hardened into marketing strategy. What began as resistance became lifestyle. What began as critique became commodity.

Final Thought

The Hippies and American Values remains valuable because it captures the counterculture before its afterlife fully unfolded.  Before rebellion became branding.  Before free love met accountability. Before “authenticity” became a sales pitch. Miller doesn’t romanticize hippies, and he doesn’t mock them either. He treats them as human. Which, decades later, feels like the most honest thing a book about the Sixties can do.

Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (University of Tennessee Press, 1991)

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.

Malcolm X and the Question of Christianity in America

The Christian church in this country is the most segregated institution in America.

You go to church on Sunday and you worship a white God. You listen to a white preacher tell you to be patient, to love your enemy, to wait for justice in the next life, while injustice is practiced against you in this one.

I’m not against Christianity.
I’m against the way Christianity is practiced in America.

If Christianity were being practiced the way it was taught, Black people would not be in the condition they’re in today. You wouldn’t need civil rights legislation. You wouldn’t need demonstrations. You wouldn’t need to beg for rights that are supposed to already belong to you.

The same people who preach love and brotherhood on Sunday are the same ones who deny you housing, deny you education, deny you employment, and send you to fight wars for a country that won’t protect you at home.

Religion in America has been used to make people suffer peacefully.

It has been used to teach you to turn the other cheek while someone keeps their knee on your neck. It has been used to tell you that obedience is morality, and silence is virtue.

The government, the press, and the church work together. They don’t operate separately. They operate together to maintain the same system — and that system is not designed for your freedom.

If Christianity were truly a religion of justice in this country, it would not be standing on the sidelines while Black people are brutalized. It would not be silent while violence is committed in the name of law and order. It would not bless wars abroad while denying humanity at home.

I don’t judge a religion by what it says.
I judge it by what it does.

And when you look at what Christianity has done for Black people in America, you have to ask yourself a serious question:

If Christianity is right, why is America so wrong?

Sources

  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

  • “Message to the Grassroots” (Detroit, 1963)

  • “The Ballot or the Bullet” (Cleveland & Detroit, 1964)

  • “God’s Judgment of White America” (New York, 1963)

  • Interviews with Louis Lomax (1963)

  • University lectures and public Q&A sessions, 1962–1965

Malcolm X (1925–1965) was a human rights activist, internationalist, and one of the most incisive critics of American racism, imperialism, and religious hypocrisy. His speeches and writings challenged the moral contradictions of a nation that professed democracy and Christian values while practicing segregation, state violence, and global domination.

Why Suburbia Misunderstands Everything: Geography, Insulation, Nuance, and the Politics of Distance

Photography Julian Lucas ©2021

The title is most definitely a blanket statement. However in my interactions with many who live in the suburbs, I’ve found the misunderstanding isn’t random or accidental. It’s almost consistent and patterned. It presents itself in the same places, around the same issues, with the same confidence. What reads as ignorance is usually something more structural. It’s a way of thinking shaped by distance, insulation, and a daily life that rarely demands engagement with complexity.

There is a long American tradition of believing that proximity produces danger and distance produces clarity. The suburb was built on that belief, engineered as both a physical and psychological buffer from the complexities of big city life. And over decades, that distance hardened into a worldview. Not an accidental one, but a worldview shaped by planning decisions, racial covenants, policing practices, school funding structures, and a moral geography that equates separation with superiority.

In theory, the digital age should have neutralized this.

If information is everywhere, ignorance shouldn’t have a zip code.

But suburbia proves that information access and information literacy are not the same thing.

What follows isn’t a satire of the suburbs, that’s too easy.

It’s an examination of why so many suburban communities remain misinformed about the social issues they speak most confidently about. And yes, I’ll let a few subtle jabs leak through. I’m only human.

Urban scholars like William Julius Wilson and Loïc Wacquant have long argued that proximity to social institutions, courts, shelters, jails, social services, hospitals, produces a different form of political understanding. Not better or worse, just grounded.

Suburbia, by contrast, was designed through very deliberate public policy to avoid these institutions altogether.

Mortgage subsidies rewarded flight.

Zoning laws kept multi-family housing out.

Highways pushed poverty elsewhere. Redlining concentrated racialized disadvantage into the city.

Federally backed mortgage subsidies rewarded flight, a process that came to be known as white flight, insulating white, middle class suburbia from exposure to inequality while concentrating risk and enforcement elsewhere. That pattern didn’t stop at the city line. As Black families later gained access to suburban housing, the same logic repeated itself within suburbia, producing new lines of departure, new pockets of insulation, and the same avoidance of proximity.

This is why race continues to surface in debates where some insist it doesn’t belong. For many white suburban residents, policy feels abstract, detached from identity, history, or exposure. But for communities shaped by racialized enforcement and exclusion, race isn’t a lens applied after the fact; it’s the context the policy operates within. The refusal to engage that context isn’t neutrality. It’s the privilege of never having to.

These systems didn’t just shape neighborhoods, they shaped how people view the world.

Sociologist Douglas Massey calls this the “architecture of inequality.”

It isn’t just about where people live, it’s about what they do not have to see.

Distance became a lifestyle.

And eventually, a belief system.

When your lived environment is stable and predictable, your worldview tends to simplify.

Robert Sampson’s research on collective efficacy shows that stable, homogeneous neighborhoods often develop a kind of social confidence, a belief that people like us behave properly and systems behave properly toward us.

This becomes the foundation for slogans that feel like moral law:

  • “If you follow the rules, you’ll be fine.”

  • “Just do things the right way.”

  • “Crime is a result of bad choices.”

  • “People who struggle must have caused it themselves.”

These aren’t malicious statements; they’re statements made by people who have never experienced the alternative. Safety creates linear thinking.

Where nothing bends, nothing is questioned.

Most suburbs remain socially and racially homogeneous,  not by accident, but by the legacy of decades of exclusionary zoning and economic sorting.

Political scientist Lilliana Mason describes this as “stacked identities”: when racial, cultural, and political sameness overlap so tightly that disagreement becomes an anomaly rather than the norm.

In those environments, misinformation doesn’t just survive, it enjoys the comfort of repetition.

When a community hears the same narrative from neighbors, schools, churches, and local media, the narrative becomes common sense, regardless of its accuracy.

Consensus replaces evidence.

Repetition replaces inquiry.

The familiar becomes the truth.

It is hard to learn something new when everyone around you is rewarded for knowing the same old thing.

Sociologist Matthew Desmond, writing about eviction and poverty, notes that those who never interact with state power directly often imagine it incorrectly. This applies equally to immigration, policing, social services, and crime.

If you have:

  • never been profiled

  • never been detained

  • never needed a public defender

  • never struggled with rent

  • never lost a job and then a home

  • never relied on public transit, public aid, or public housing

…then your understanding of those systems will naturally be theoretical. And when something is theoretical, it’s easily moralized.

Distance makes judgment feel like insight.

This isn’t insight so much as interpretation filling in for lived experience.

This is where a familiar vocabulary enters the conversation, usually delivered with confidence and rarely interrogated.

Law abiding citizens.
Good neighborhoods.
Family values.
Doing things the right way.

These phrases are not descriptions; they are credentials. They function less as moral principles than as proof of belonging, signals that one lives in the class of people for whom the law feels neutral, the neighborhood feels protected, and mistakes are treated as anomalies rather than indictments. The language sounds ethical, but it is fundamentally positional. It tells you where someone stands in relation to enforcement, not how enforcement actually works.

When these phrases are repeated enough, they stop describing behavior and start justifying outcomes. They explain who deserves patience and who deserves punishment. They soften structural inequality into personal failure. And because they are spoken from a distance, from lives rarely tested by the systems being discussed, they feel like common sense rather than ideology.

We live in a time when any statute, ruling, or data point can be found in seconds.

Yet as media scholars have pointed out for years, information abundance doesn’t create informed citizens, it amplifies the gap between those who are curious enough to seek knowledge and those who seek a consensus of affirmation.

Suburban communities, because they are insulated from direct contact with state power, often seek information that reinforces their sense of order.

It’s not ignorance so much as adaptation to a life where complexity and nuance rarely interferes.

Why interrogate systems you never encounter? 

Why learn nuance when your life teaches you simplicity?

Why question the law when the law has always worked for you?

The result is what I call “high bandwidth, low comprehension.”

The Wi-Fi is strong.

The conclusions are weak.

Suburbia also claims to believe in capitalism, but mostly as long as it remains abstract. The market is celebrated until it sends a bill. Rising trash fees, higher electricity rates, utility surcharges, suddenly the free market feels like mismanagement. What rarely gets examined is how decades of privatization, guaranteed profits, and corporate consolidation produce exactly these outcomes. Capitalism is embraced as an identity, not understood as a system. The result is a politics where people demand market freedom but expect price stability, oppose regulation but rely on regulated infrastructure, and treat the costs of the system as someone else’s problem.

This is the part that scholars don’t say directly, so I will say it. 

Ignorance is survivable in the suburbs.

If you misunderstand immigration law, it will not be used against you, but it will make for a good heated debate on the Nextdoor app.

If you misinterpret crime data, which most are allergic too, your neighborhood will still feel safe. 

If you misjudge homelessness, you will not be priced out of your home.

If you believe policing is neutral, which most do, your body will never test that theory. 

When being wrong has no consequences, being wrong becomes easy.

It’s not so much a moral failure, so much as the result of a life curated from the outcomes of the policies being discussed. 

But that insulation creates political danger. People who live outside of metropolitan cities are often the farthest from issues, often wield the most influence over it. 

Suburbia is not the villain. But it is where the power of voting exists. It is those areas whose worldview is shaped more by distance than experience. This produces political priorities that often punish the very communities whose realities suburban voters misunderstand. When distance becomes the dominant perspective, the policies reflect the fantasy, not the lived world. And the lived world pays for it.

Suburbia is not ignorant because its residents are unintelligent.

Suburbia is misinformed because it was built to live in a comfortable bubble, and within that bubble comfortability rarely produces curiosity.

Comfort produces certainty.

And certainty, untested by experience, eventually becomes doctrine.

If suburbs want to understand the issues they debate, housing, immigration, crime, homelessness, policing, and inequality, the first step is accepting that distance is not clarity.

It’s just distance.

And sometimes the people who live closest to the problem aren’t “emotional” or “angry.”

They’re simply the ones who know.

References

Massey, Douglas S. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Harvard University Press, 1993. On suburbanization, segregation, and the structural production of inequality.

Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged. University of Chicago Press, 1987. On spatial distance from institutions and how geography shapes political understanding.

Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke University Press, 2009. On moralization, punishment, and governance from a distance.

Sampson, Robert J. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. University of Chicago Press, 2012. On collective efficacy, neighborhood stability, and confidence produced by homogeneity.

Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. University of Chicago Press, 2018. On “stacked identities” and consensus environments that discourage dissent and inquiry.

Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Crown, 2016. On how those insulated from state power often misunderstand how it functions.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961. On urban complexity versus suburban simplification.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. Verso, 1990.
On suburban fear, policing, and political power disconnected from lived consequence.

Baldwin, James. The Price of the Ticket. St. Martin’s Press, 1985. On moral distance, innocence, and the cost of refusing proximity to reality.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and PPABF. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.

You Like to Paint with a Broad Brush

Illustration Julian Lucas ©2025

We were sitting at the furthest table at The Quiet Oyster, oysters on ice between us, the room doing that quiet, self-possessed thing it does when it’s full. A martini crowned with olives individually hand-stuffed with blue cheese and anchovy. A Negroni stirred deliberately with gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, finished with an orange peel expressed just enough to wake up the bitterness. 

Then the bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Sharp, clean, and praised for its green, flinty notes and depth. Textured and uncomplicated. I poured without asking. That mattered.

We ordered a dozen oysters. Bub’s &  Grandma’s bread, butter. She reached for the lemon. I didn’t. This has
become a known difference.

It was the second restaurant I’d opened, housed in a fire station that had been vacant since the 1990s. Decades of quiet had settled into the walls, and the room carried that patience easily.

She lifted an oyster, looked at it for a second, then said it plainly, without warming up the sentence. 

“You like to paint with a broad brush. You can’t make a blanket statement like suburban art is different from art in metropolitan areas.” A continued conversation from the car. 

There it was. I smiled, mostly because she was right and we both knew it. “I do,” I said. “I just shouldn’t.” She smiled softly with slight funny irritating smirk and took a sip of her wine. “That’s lazy,” she said. “You like to put people in categories.”  I swallowed an oyster, brinier than hers.  “I’m talking about risk,” I said. “About what’s allowed to happen.” She shook her head, not dismissively, just patiently. “Art is art,” she said. “And half the stuff you’re talking about isn’t even that different.” We let that sit while the bread disappeared. But I ordered more bread. Because Bub’s and Grandma’s bread is the answer. 

I brought up a gallery we frequent sometimes. It always comes up. She didn’t hesitate. “Ehh,” she said. “It reminds me of art in Pomona.” My eyes opened wide, like deer in headlights, totally in disbelief.  “And all the nude women in the photos is “snore bore.”  That one landed because I agreed. “It does become redundant. Although very different, the idea, pretending it’s  transgressive.”  “And honestly,” she said, “a lot of the work looks the same at that gallery.” 

But lets remember, the body is one of the oldest tools in art. The question isn’t whether it’s there, it’s why it’s there. The same body once filled churches without apology, long before galleries learned to flinch. I mentioned the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s frescoes are filled with nude figures, prophets, angels, bodies.

But she wasn’t wrong. Most of it blurred together, point and shoot cameras, Kodak Gold, irony worn thin from overuse. Different artists, same visual sentence. Over and over again. But every generation of photographers has its thing. 

There are exceptions,” I said. “Some photographers make photos that’s distinct. There’s history. Weight. Intention.” And to be fair, that particular gallery exhibits work that pushes beyond boundaries.

She gravitates toward the masters. Chuck Close especially—the discipline, the patience, the way the work earns its gravity over time. I love that too. I just tend to lean further forward, toward contemporary work, sometimes lowbrow, where things are still unsettled.

She agreed, but carefully, like she didn’t want that to become a loophole.

We ordered scallop tostadas next. Crisp, delicate, just enough heat to keep the conversation awake. Another bottle of white followed, colder than the first. The Trout collar followed by the Cod Sandwich. 

“And yet,” I said, “I still appreciate what that gallery does. 

She looked at me, waiting.

“They don’t hold back,” I said. “They let the work exist without apologizing for it. They don’t pre edit for comfort. That’s where I always get stuck.

It’s not that every gallery needs to shock. It’s not that everything needs to be out there. It’s that so many spaces, especially the smaller cities east of LA spaces start negotiating with the audience before the art even arrives. Anything that pushes the envelope gets hidden, even when it’s thoughtful. Risk gets diluted. Work that might breathe gets quietly smothered in advance. And for what it’s worth it’s not for shock value. It’s the reality of the artist and its culture. Out here in the burbs, galleries perpetuate the culture war by playing it safe, mistaking restraint for responsibility.

“I’m not saying all art should be the same,” I said. “I’m saying let it live. Let it irritate someone. Let it make someone uncomfortable. Let someone love it and someone else get angry. Art is supposed to make you feel something. It doesn’t all have to behave like a Hallmark card. 

She took a sip of her wine.

“That’s art doing its job,” I added. “Not being agreed upon.”

She didn’t argue with that. 

I brought up other galleries we spend time at on the west side. Imagine if they hid the work in a back office, tucked away where no one could see it. They’d be out of business within a year. So how do these art spaces expect to survive? Is it all just for show, or are they actually invested in the artists they claim to support?

I said what I’m usually not supposed to say out loud. A lot of these places aren’t really galleries at all. They’re frame shops with gallery space attached. That changes everything. When your business is selling frames, the art becomes an accessory, not the point. Photography “doesn’t sell” because it isn’t being treated like work that deserves to be sold. It’s being filtered through caution, through wall color, through what won’t upset the regulars. If photography truly didn’t sell, there wouldn’t be entire galleries on the west side of Los Angeles devoted to it. They wouldn’t survive. The difference isn’t the medium. It’s the willingness to stand behind it.

I asked her what artists had really emerged from the burbs lately. Not Instagram famous for a weekend, but artists with legs. There’s a massive opportunity out here to stop slapping a parental advisory label on everything, to stop sanding down the edges, and instead actually produce artists. Not safe work. Not polite work. Real work.

We ordered a half dozen more oysters because at some point the debate mattered less than staying. The conversation softened, looped back, drifted again. Artists we loved. Work we didn’t trust. Art that felt alive. Art that felt polite.

She glanced around the room, then back at me.

“This place,” she said. “You built it quiet on purpose.”

I nodded.

“See?” she said. “Not every restaurant has to be a club with music so loud you can’t have a conversation with the person in front of you. The 1990s was 35 years ago. 

I smiled because she was right again.

“I paint with a broad brush when I get lazy,” I said. “When I slow down, I can see the difference too.”

She reached for her glass. We didn’t settle anything. We never do. And thats what’s beautiful. 

Some conversations don’t need conclusions.

They just need oysters, good bread, a perfect bottle of wine, and enough trust to keep disagreeing without trying to win. 

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and PPABF. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.

Mary, Joseph, Jesus — and the Corporation That Finally Let Them In

Interestingly enough there are certain cultural rituals that don’t need a marketing department. Las Posadas is one of them. It’s a tradition held together by abuelas, borrowed guitars, paper lanterns, and the collective memory of people who have survived more displacement than most cities are willing to admit. You don’t corporatize a Posada; you just show up, eat a tamal, and try not to sing off-key.

Which is why the sponsorship banner hits with the force of accidental comedy.

Of all things to attach a polished logo to, Athens Services chose this, a reenactment of a couple turned away at every door, a story about refuge and scarcity and community stepping up when institutions don’t. And suddenly, the city’s waste contractor is the presenting sponsor, smiling in the program like a benevolent uncle who never paid rent but always wants credit for the lights staying on.

It’s not offensive.

It’s just… funny.

Funny in that quietly familiar Pomona way, where civic life is so intertwined with contractors, nonprofits, and political nostalgia that contradictions start looking normal. Everyone pretends not to see the seams, but there they are, bright as a corporate neon sign glowing above “Dios te salve María.”

Athens showing up as the presenting sponsor of a Posada feels less like community support and more like a vintage How to Privatize for Dummies book from the 20th century political era, an antiquated, outdated neoliberal austere approach that has consternated anyone paying attention to how power launders itself through culture. It’s the old playbook dusted off for a new audience, hoping no one notices the seams. And if Mary and Joseph tried to make this same journey today, they’d probably have to get past ICE before they ever reached an inn, which somehow makes a corporate sponsor feel less strange than it should.

That’s the thing, the irony isn’t subtle; it’s structural. A tradition born from displacement ends up efficiently underwritten by a company that built its reputation navigating municipal contracts, gatekeeping essential services, and increasing everyone’s trash bill. I’m sure they’d increase Jesus’s bill as well. If they lived in the community. 

And maybe that’s the part worth sitting with, not the sponsorship, but what it reveals. Corporate goodwill once relied on these gestures: sponsor a youth program, donate to a school play, host a toy drive, stamp your name on a Posada. It was the public relations equivalent of placing a warm tortilla over a cold truth. But that era is thinning out. People read more carefully now. They ask who benefits. They ask who controls the story.

None of this makes Athens villainous. It just makes the sponsorship oddly nostalgic, like watching someone reenact a political strategy from the 1990s and assume everyone still falls for it. That’s the humor buried in the moment. The city changes, sort of, the community evolves, and the corporate playbook stays stuck in a time capsule.

And because of that, the result is a kind of civic uncanny valley. A cultural tradition rooted in scarcity and hospitality ends up looking like a polished corporate goodwill. A story about seeking shelter gets repurposed as a branding opportunity. A ritual that has survived colonization, migration, displacement, and assimilation somehow ends up as a line item on a quarterly outreach report. Why? Hasn’t Athens already monopolized the trash game in the city? 

Meanwhile, the community keeps moving. Families show up. Kids step into their papel wings. Elders hum along to songs older than the city’s zoning map. In the actual celebration, none of this corporate choreography matters. And that’s why it stands out, it isn’t about the Posada at all. It’s about the environment the Posada is asked to exist in.

In a city like Pomona, power doesn’t always show up in ordinances or budgets. Sometimes it eases its way quietly into the footer of a flyer. Many times it shakes hands at the door of a cultural events it has nothing to do with, kind of like a book fair at a local urban farm (I really dislike the word “urban”, it’s so passé) hoping repetition will turn visibility into belonging. Or forgetting about the dramatic increase of the trash bill. 

Maybe that’s the real story. Not the trash company. Not the Posada. But the long shadow of a political era that taught corporations to treat culture as an entry point, as long as they brought a check and a tagline. 

A Posada doesn’t need a presenting sponsor.

But Pomona has learned to live with juxtapositions, old traditions and new optics, sacred stories and contractor logos, community memory and municipal economics. We laugh at it, analyze it, roll our eyes, and then keep showing up for the parts that matter.

Because we understand culture started underground and culture will always outlast the sponsors.

It always does.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and PPABF. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.

Yogurt for Dinner

Ristorante Panorama
By Julian Lucas

The first thing that should be known is that I wasn’t supposed to be in the dining room that night. Executive chefs don’t get to glide through their own openings like guests who wandered in off the street, we’re supposed to be in the back, sweating, barking at the station chefs about ticket times, and pretending we don’t hear every whispered opinion drifting in from the front of house. But the room was glowing, and I wanted to see it breathe on its own.

It was opening night at Ristorante Panorama, a round room built for light, for watching, for being watched.

The lighting was too good, superb.
That warm, amber wash that makes everyone look like they had taken a bath in photoshop, pretty much they looked more interesting than they actually were. I wanted to see the space breathing on its own.

Panorama Ristorante lived inside what used to be the old Tate Cadillac building on Holt Ave, a dreamy mid-century curve of glass and concrete structure that caught light the way some people catch attention, effortlessly.

And that’s when she walked in.

Not alone, she arrived with our mutual friend I hadn’t seen in 6 years, the one I’ve known for twenty-five years but who somehow managed to keep entire universes of his people away from me. He never mixed his circles. He’d hide his friends like precious artifacts. She was apparently one of the hidden ones.

I’d heard about her and her boyfriend 25 years ago.
She’d heard about me for the same time frame.
But timing is a petty tyrant, and it never lined us up until that night.

She stood just inside the doorway, catching the glow. Glasses that made her look like the well read one in every room. Hair falling in that effortless way that’s probably not effortless at all. A plaid scarf soft enough to suggest she actually cares about comfort but has taste. And that expression, interested, intelligent, like she was auditing the room before deciding whether to participate.

We were introduced and exchanged polite smiles. Civilized. Respectful. I was also introduced to her boyfriend from twenty-five years ago, and honestly, I didn’t think anything of it. I made some comments about my interpretation of the food menu and the wine list. When he drifted off, she stayed and we kept talking, easy, natural. But then he came back, cutting the moment short, and she turned to walk away. Halfway through the turn, she glanced back. A subtle double take. Barely a pause, but enough to register in that part of the brain that notices things it has no business noticing.

It wasn’t dramatic, but it was just enough. And “just enough” is usually where real stories begin.

A week later, we ran into each other at a favorite restaurant of mine. She walked up and talked to me like we weren’t two people who had dodged each other’s existence for two and a half decades. The conversation was short, but the energy was different. More open. More intentional. The kind of moment that makes you suspicious of coincidence. 

Weeks passed. Real life did its boring real-life thing, work, deadlines, other people’s noise, until one day Instagram decided it was tired of watching and stepped in. A comment. A reply. 

We just started enjoying each other’s company, quietly, and very consistently. We went to art exhibitions, lingering longer than necessary because neither of us seemed in a rush to go home. We tried new restaurants, the kind you don’t tell people about because you want to keep them yours for a little while. It wasn’t romance, not officially. It was just two people doing what they naturally gravitated toward, art, food, and the kind of conversation that stretches out without permission.

And then we traveled.

Not by car, she hates road trips. The idea of being trapped in a vehicle for five hours makes her want to file a complaint. So our relationship formed in airports instead, which is honestly much more cinematic. There’s something about watching a person navigate TSA with grace that tells you they’re built for partnership.

We flew to places that didn’t care who we were. Ate in restaurants where chefs plated food like religious offerings. We didn't stay out later than college kids at a 10 kegger frat house party with no responsibilities, we were mature enough to go home and watch a movie until I fell asleep from the single glass of suav blanc I sipped. 

Then there was the trip where everything went sideways, delays, lost reservations, rain that came out of nowhere like a prank. We ended up in a tiny bistro, laughing so hard the waiters were probably relieved when we left. That’s when I learned, compatibility isn’t measured in perfect evenings. It’s measured in the disasters you can talk through. You can learn from. Its beautiful.

Traveling with someone is one thing. Coming home with them is another. That’s where the quirks start revealing themselves.

Like socks.

She’d walk in from work, drop her bag, and then fling her socks across the room with the casual accuracy of someone who was once an Olympian in a past life. Wherever they landed, they landed. Near the fireplace, under the chair. It wasn’t performance art, it was tired from a days work.

Then there was the yogurt for dinner thing. A cup of yogurt, sometimes with granola, sometimes not. She’d eat it cross-legged like she was participating in a minimalist cooking show where the whole point was not cooking anything at all. Strangely, these were the nights I felt most close to her. Or sometimes it was steamed broccoli with rice. It was always something healthy for dinner. 

You think you know what love is when it starts, the chemistry, timing, sparks, all the feelings. But you don’t really understand it until the dust settles, until you watch a person move through your space like they belong there.

It wasn’t a grand confession that told me what we were becoming. It was the morning half asleep. The late night conversations that wandered. The quiet car rides where silence felt like companionship instead of distance. Her leaning her head against my shoulder during a rerun. The first, second, and third disagreements. 

And yes, it was that first night too. The opening. The double take. The moment she looked back and didn’t realize I’d caught it. That’s where the whole thing began.

People ask how we met, and I could give the long version, the flights, the art, Mohawk Bend, the socks, the yogurt, but the truth is simple. 

She looked back.
I saw her.
And nothing was the same after that.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and PPABF. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.