With the school year ending and the World Cup kicking off on the same weekend, a Sunday newsletter was always a long shot. Instead, we've been staying up ridiculous hours watching football and catching up on the kind of adult chores that always multiply when you're not looking:

Finalized summer rental in Tacoma ✔️

Cleaned behind the stove and washer (eeew!) ✔️

Got rugs & curtains cleaned ✔️

Purged closet ✔️

Bought a new e-reader and loaded it with books for the summer ✔️

Refilled prescriptions for summer ✔️

Getting the AC cleaned & serviced - tomorrow

Getting a long overdue eye check - Friday

As far the World Cup, I gotta keep it buck. I had my reservations about this tournament. I laid many of them out here with an assist from Charlie Boehm but inarguably the football has been masterful. Messi, the greatest player of all time, had a hat trick against Senegal this morning. And as I write this Jordan’s team and supporters are belting out their anthem before their match against Austria.  

The World Cup also feels like it's part of  a larger conversation this week, a change in the tides. The US (along with Canada and Mexico) hosting a tournament that brings together players and fans from all corners of the globe is a repudiation of the ethos and general vibes of the current administration. 

Yes, Iran’s players are being treated terribly. 

Yes, fans from Haiti and other countries aren’t able to travel to attend matches because of travel bans.

Yes, ticket prices are INSANE leading notably to empty seats at matches.

Yes, if you'd like to watch the United States take on Australia in the group stage, be prepared to part with roughly a mortgage payment (see below).

But the football outshines the shabbiness. 

It reminds me of the old College Game Day bit where everyone makes their picks and Lee Corso interrupts with a finger wag and a "Not so fast, my friends." Since coming back to power last year, the administration has insisted the world works a certain way. This week, reality had some notes.

I had a similar feeling watching New York celebrate winning the NBA title this week.

New York City is the future of America that bigots dread: a multi-racial democracy with no single racial or ethnic group forming a majority. It is ethnically pluralist, with large populations of Hispanic (~30%), Black (~20%), Asian (~15%), and foreign-born residents, all led by a Muslim Democratic Socialist born in Kampala, Uganda.

Like with the World Cup, tickets for the Knicks during their playoff run were stratospheric. This led to impromptu watch parties breaking out all over the city. Bars and restaurants were packed to the gills. In many neighborhoods TVs were moved to the sidewalk and Knicks fans filled the streets. Those organic gatherings are another glimpse at the multi-racial coexistence that bigots dread and try to destroy. 

One of the defining projects of Trump’s second term is a sustained effort to reassert a white-dominant racial hierarchy. It is often framed through the language of “restoring merit” or rolling back “wokeness” and has included the rollback of DEI programs. On other fronts, we’ve seen the denial of promotions for Black and female officers in the military. Within the Justice Department, there has been a dismantling of civil rights enforcement. The DOJ is now soliciting complaints from white Americans alleging workplace discrimination, a shift that inverts the intent of civil rights law.

Beyond this, the administration pursued violent crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, the elimination of refugee admissions with the exception of White South Africans, and a tightening of legal immigration pathways, making lawful entry more difficult. 

And don’t get me started on the racialized redistricting, stripping away Black representation and political power across the US South (see video below).

Taken together, these moves are a reorientation of federal power away from the integrationist framework of the post–Civil Rights era and toward a form of state-imposed racial hierarchy.

But this week the New York Knicks broke a 53 year title drought and New York celebrated together. 

For my entire life the team was synonymous with playoff futility but this spring they went on a historically dominant run. They swept each of their series leading up to the finals. They then won the NBA Finals 4 to 1 over the San Antonio Spurs, with their lone defeat being a game that was notably attended by the President where he was booo’d mercilessly by the crowd.

When the Knicks won the city celebrated. The celebrations were a glimpse at a version of  America

To be clear, I don’t want to read too much into soccer crowds or street celebrations in Queens. But what we’ve seen over the last week, alongside the administration’s strategic defeat in its ill-conceived war with Iran, feel like a broader repudiation of the Trumpian worldview. The America we saw celebrating in the streets of the Bronx, and the one we’re seeing inside & outside these stadiums, is multiracial, multi-ethnic, and represents the best version of us.

The term “multiculturalism” doesn’t have much purchase in contemporary US politics; it feels like a vestige of 1990s liberalism or academia. But the underlying idea is essential and must be defended. Call it multiracial democracy, call it pluralism, call it whatever you want. But a society in which people of different languages, faiths, skin colors, and countries of origin share public life is simply better than the racial caste logic of the past that this administration is eager to revive.
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Shout out to my friend and reader Dave, this week’s newsletter is largely the outgrowth of a conversation we had this week.