Emotional Support Snakes on A Plane

Plus: Josh Hawley goes Samuel Gompers, why the U.S. is deporting people to South Sudan & why strict voting laws aren’t working for the GOP.

Jun 02, 2025

Over the weekend, a man used a makeshift flamethrower to attack a "Run for Their Lives" group that was drawing attention to Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Eight people, including a Holocaust survivor, were hospitalized.

The details are stark: The attacker, a 45-year-old Egyptian national who had overstayed a tourist visa, shouted "Free Palestine!" before attacking the walkers with flames. He has since been charged with attempted murder (I think the widely reported murder charge was a mistake either by media or the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office website). Jean Unger, one of the walkers, told the Wall Street Journal that while encountering protesters wasn't unusual, this quickly turned horrific. "Next thing I saw was big flames, from behind me," she said. "There was a woman on fire, and people rushing to try and help her, and other people had flames on their legs."

As of press time, his actions did not free Palestine.

The Gist List

Indian Man Arrested With 47 Venomous Vipers in Bag at Mumbai Airport (BBC)

Maybe you’re the kind of flier who overpacks or brings food from home, or “rawdogs” your flight, and take off your shoes. We all have our little peccadillos when we fly, but this guy might just take the cake—or the SNAKE! (Wait… I just gave it away).

A flyer tried to smuggle in 44 Indonesian pit vipers, three spider-tailed horned vipers and five Asian leaf turtles—all presumably his emotional support reptiles—into India. Although he’s probably no worse than the seatmate who brought fish in a Tupperware from home to eat on the plane. Samuel L. Jackson could not be reached for comment, but if he could, he would certainly opine that he’s had it with these Monday to Friday snakes on this Monkey Fighting Plane—and add, Capital One, what’s in your wallet? Let's hope it’s not a pit viper.

The White House Is Deporting People to Countries They're Not From. Why? (NPR)

Because they’re dicks?

I hope they won’t mind me saying so. In fact, it's sort of the plan, isn’t it? Adam Serwer said Cruelty Is The Point, I do think the administration would be find having the reputation as dicks when it comes to migration. If word got out in the migrant community, that the U.S. is kind of a dickish country when it comes to migration, it might tamp down migration, many (dickish) figures in the administration no doubt believe.

This particular headline was one of those stories where you click expecting to get an in-depth explainer about federal incompetence or heart-wrenching clerical errors, leaving families in the lurch, but in this case, the explanation is pretty simple. In the flurry of deportations by the Trump administration (with its accompanying gaffes), people have been deported to “third countries,” i.e., places the deportees are not from. There are a few reasons:

Their home countries are refusing to take them back because they have dangerous criminal backgrounds.
The U.S. doesn't want to release people that they can’t safely repatriate (for example, one of the people profiled in the piece was a lawful permanent U.S. resident who was serving 25 years for murder and was shipped off to South Sudan, not Vietnam, where he was from).
The administration is using deportations to pressure or negotiate with countries that have historically resisted repatriation.

Migrants are sometimes given less than 24 hours' notice, no translator, and no meaningful chance to contest removal to unstable countries, and it spans a lot of legal gray area. Dick Gray, specifically, in the Farrow And Ball pallet.

Why Stricter Voting Laws No Longer Help Republicans (The Economist)🔒

Voter ID laws used to be the GOP's not-so-secret weapon. But now? Oh, how the electoral tables have turned. Trump’s people are more Walmart than Wall Street classic notions of who is not voting. Poor and working-class white voters now back the GOP, while college-educated and younger voters lean Democratic. This means when push comes to shove at the polls, stricter voting laws might have Trump’s newfound working-class voters struggling to show up for him.

Of course, on its surface this would Democrats up in arms—as we saw with the bill that would have affected married women who took their husband’s name—but in practice, the GOP might just be shooting themselves in the foot.

Ukraine And Russia Met For Second Round Of Talks As Attacks Escalate (NYT, Institute For The Study Of War)

Russia and Ukraine might have to update their definition of peace talks because that doesn’t seem to be what is happening. They met in Istanbul on Monday for their second round of peace talks, but expectations were low, and the meeting lasted less than two hours. Meanwhile, the Russian army has bombarded Ukraine with drones, and Ukraine paid the favor right back on Sunday with a coordinated drone attack. Even more unsettling, hardliners from within Russia are now demanding a nuclear response. You have to ask, absent the Trump-initiated, “solved within one day” peace talks (that no one seems to be taking seriously), would there be this much escalation? The spring thaw has always meant an uptick in hostilities, but this round of exchanges does seem to have been specifically inspired by the desire to bring territorial gains to the negotiating table of Trump’s construction.

Josh Hawley And The Republican Effort To Love Labor (The New Yorker)🔒

Senator Josh Hawley is test-driving a new working-class persona. No word yet on whether he’s stocked the fridge with PBR or is merely workshopping a convincing flannel rotation. But politically, he has the classic country club Republican clutching pearls and intoning “You'll get nothing and like it!” after backing pro-union policies typically championed by Democrats. But Hawley and figures like J.D. Vance find themselves backing pro-union measures typically found in a Bernie starter pack: faster union elections, penalties for union-busting, even prescription drug price caps. Basically, we have gone full horseshoe theory.

Yesterday on the Show: The Strange Immunity of Bad Ideas in Politics

Oxford political scientist Ben Ansell discusses the meme-worthy but deeply explanatory concept of FAFO—fuck around and find out—and its subtler cousin FADFO, where reckless policy choices oddly fail to produce blowback. Why bad ideas often go unpunished, from Brexit to tariffs to defund-the-police slogans and MMT. Ansell argues that liberal democracies build buffers that delay "finding out," which populists and ideologues exploit. Plus, thoughts on the limits of idealism in higher ed diplomacy, especially when it comes to the assumed cultural benefits of hosting thousands of Chinese nationals at U.S. universities.

There’s more where that came from. Listen to The Gist, and upgrade to Pesca Plus for the ad-free version.

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