Rabid Badgers:
(Or, How Do We Save Democracy?)
I’ve been thinking about who I want to vote for in November. And here’s the thing. It’s not so much about their ideology. I think institutions are important. I like progressives, but I’m okay with a fairly mild center-left Democrat (or a RINO who understands the stakes we’re playing for.)
What I really want now is this: I want to vote for anybody who will fight for democracy like a rabid badger, and will do whatever it takes to preserve it.
Not symbolic resistance. Not strongly worded letters of concern. Not waiting for focus groups to tell them it’s safe to act. I want people who see the pressure gauges spiking into the red and who are starting to do something about it instead of writing another memo about how concerning the readings are.
And you know what? After a year of watching, I’m beginning to see them. The rabid badgers are emerging, and they’re not all who I expected.
The Rabid Badgers
Letitia James is getting prosecuted by Trump’s handpicked US Attorneys on charges that two separate grand juries refused to indict. Her response? Launch a Legal Observation Project deploying trained state personnel in purple vests to physically witness ICE operations and create real-time evidence trails. Set up public portals for New Yorkers to submit videos directly to her office. Lead a 22-state AG coalition telling Bondi and Noem their Minnesota coercion violates state sovereignty. And keep doing her actual job—like suing slumlords over freezing apartments and sewage floods—while Trump tries to jail her.
That’s not symbolic. That’s building accountability infrastructure that survives individual actors.
JB Pritzker created the Illinois Accountability Commission to document federal misconduct and examine Stephen Miller and the entire Trump hierarchy for their roles in Operation Midway Blitz. When Trump posted that Pritzker “should be in jail,” the governor went on MSNBC and said “Come and get me.” He won the fight to block National Guard deployment to Illinois. He’s calling for ICE abolition—not as a slogan, but as “stop the funding, stop the occupations, stop the killings.”
Tim Walz told Minnesota residents to carry their phones and film ICE agents, promising “accountability is coming at the voting booth and in court.” He mobilized the Minnesota National Guard to protect residents from federal agents. He’s refusing ICE detainer cooperation while DOJ investigates him for “obstruction.” His message to Minnesotans: “Help us create a database of the atrocities, not just to establish a record for posterity but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
Michelle Wu banned ICE from all Boston city property, directed police to investigate federal agents for crimes under state law, and coordinated six Greater Boston cities on identical executive orders. She’s leading amicus brief coalitions. Her message is clear: if ICE shows up, we’re filing in court.
Gavin Newsom looked at Texas’s mid-decade gerrymander and said “we’re doing the same thing.” He worked around California’s own independent redistricting commission—a progressive reform he otherwise supports—put it to voters as Prop 50 explicitly framed as countering Trump’s Texas power grab, and got 64% approval. When Republicans sued claiming California’s map was illegal, his lawyers had the perfect response: “You’re asking the Court to treat California’s map differently from Texas’s, thereby allowing a Republican-led State to engage in partisan gerrymandering while forbidding a Democratic-led State from responding in kind.” Even Alito couldn’t rule against that without completely unmasking the game.
Congressional Democrats have stopped writing letters and started using actual power. Schumer and Jeffries put out a 10-point list of ICE reforms and triggered a DHS shutdown. Key moderates like Mark Warner and Catherine Cortez Masto—who voted for funding in November—flipped after Alex Pretti’s killing and said they won’t vote for DHS appropriations without strict accountability measures.
The pattern: 22-23 state attorneys general meeting daily over Zoom, filing 71 lawsuits in the first year, winning 40 of 51 resolved cases. They’re not asking permission. They’re creating legal barriers, documenting everything, coordinating resistance, accepting consequences.
That’s what rabid badger looks like. Not the ideology, the action. Not the rhetoric, the infrastructure. Not the outrage, the follow-through.
The Mongoose Reads the Gauges
Now let me put on my mongoose hat and tell you why this matters strategically. Because here’s what the pressure gauges are showing:
Trump’s approval crashed through 38%—the supposed MAGA bedrock—and he’s at 34-35% now, still dropping. His GOP approval fell from 94% to 86%. Even Fox News is running stories about how expensive restaurants are. Immigration as a top concern dropped from 28% in 2024 to 19% by December 2025. Six in ten Americans say ICE has gone “too far.”
The Republican system wasn’t designed for these readings. They built infrastructure assuming stable conditions, then deliberately destabilized everything.
Specifically: Texas Republicans drew congressional districts in summer 2025 that require Latino Republican crossover votes to hold the five seats they’d just gerrymandered. They looked at Trump’s 2024 gains with Latino voters and said “this is permanent, let’s lock it into the map.”
Then Trump immediately launched the most visible anti-Latino enforcement campaign in modern American history.
That’s not strategy. That’s reading the pressure gauge wrong, building your whole system around the misreading, then deliberately spiking the pressure in the opposite direction.
The Dummy-Mander
Here’s the failure sequence:
Summer 2025: Texas redraws congressional maps based on Trump’s 2024 Latino voter gains. They crack districts that now require Latino Republican votes. Trump personally called Texas legislators to push this through. The Supreme Court allowed it in December.
January 2026: Operation Metro Surge begins. Masked federal agents raid schools. A five-year-old named Liam Ramos gets detained and used as “bait.” Two American citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—get murdered in the streets by federal agents in Minneapolis. Churches raided. Tear gas in residential neighborhoods. Every voter named Rodriguez or Trujillo or Cortez is watching their neighbors getting kettled by federal agents.
November 2026: Those same Latino voters are expected to show up and deliver republican votes for Texas’s gerrymandered seats.
The 2024 shift wasn’t ideological realignment. It was economic frustration plus inflation plus Biden fatigue. That’s reversible. Texas GOP treated it as permanent demographic change and locked it into their maps just as Trump gave those voters the clearest possible reminder of what Republican immigration policy actually looks like in practice.
Newsom’s Prop 50 countered Texas’s five-seat gain with California’s five-seat gain. The maps theoretically cancel out—except Texas built theirs assuming Latino voters won’t notice ICE, while Trump made ICE impossible to ignore.
Even Republicans Are Nervous
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt: “What is the endgame? We believe in federalism and state rights. Nobody likes feds coming into their state.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott: Time to “recalibrate.”
Susan Collins negotiated ICE withdrawal from Maine because she’s facing a tough race in a state Harris won.
Bill Cassidy—facing a Trump-backed primary challenger—called the Minneapolis shootings “incredibly disturbing” and said “the credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake.”
Ted Cruz: “Escalating the rhetoric doesn’t help and actually loses credibility.”
Thomas Massie: “Carrying a firearm is not a death sentence. It’s a Constitutionally protected God-given right.”
Chris Madel dropped out of the Minnesota gubernatorial race entirely, saying he “cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state.”
When you’ve got Texas Republicans telling Trump to dial it back and Oklahoma’s governor invoking federalism against a Republican president, the gauges aren’t just reading wrong—the whole system’s destabilizing.
Nine Months of Irreversibility
We’re nine months out from the midterms. Here’s what they can’t fix in nine months:
They can’t un-kill Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Can’t un-raid the schools. Can’t un-kettle the neighborhoods. Can’t un-traumatize Liam Ramos or the thousands who watched their communities occupied by masked federal agents. Can’t restore trust in the communities they terrorized.
They can’t fix the economy they’re actively breaking—frozen childcare funds, federal worker layoffs, inflation spiking while Trump tears down the White House and plans to shutter the Kennedy Center. Supposedly for ‘renovations.’
They can’t win back Latino voters in Texas districts that now require those voters to deliver gerrymandered seats. Every ICE raid compounds the damage to maps that only work if people forget what Republican immigration policy looks like in practice.
Not to mention Latino and Cuban and Somalian voters in the rest of the country.
And they can’t station ICE at polling places in California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, or Minnesota without running into governors who’ve spent nine months building legal infrastructure specifically to prevent it. Purple vest observers. Police documentation protocols. State prosecution of federal agents. Multi-state litigation networks. Court precedents. Public support from defending residents all year.
It’s already there, operational, normalized.
The beauty of the rabid badger strategy: by November, if Trump tries to deploy ICE to blue-state polling places, Democrats aren’t scrambling to respond—they’re executing plans they’ve been building since January.
The Stakes
The Texas dummy-mander assumes those Latino voters stay home scared or vote Republican anyway. But if they’re angry enough to show up, and the big blue states have made polling places demonstrably safe from ICE, then Trump just handed Democrats the exact mobilization tool they needed, targeted precisely at the demographic whose swing Texas depends on keeping.
The mongoose watches: they read the gauges wrong, built infrastructure based on the misreading, then deliberately sabotaged their own assumptions. Classic system failure. Nine months for it all to compound while the pressure keeps spiking in the wrong direction.
This is why I want to vote for rabid badgers. Not because they’re more left or more right. Because they’re actually fighting. Because they’re building infrastructure instead of writing letters. Because they understand that democracy doesn’t preserve itself through norms and good intentions—it survives through people willing to use every legal tool available, accept the consequences, and keep governing even while being prosecuted for it.
I want to vote for people who see Letitia James in her purple vest, standing between federal agents and New York residents, and think “yes, that’s the model.”
I want to vote for people who hear Tim Walz say “bank evidence for future prosecution” and think “yes, that’s accountability.”
I want to vote for people who watch Pritzker say “come and get me” to Trump and think “yes, that’s how you defend state sovereignty.”
That’s the standard now. Not ideology. Action. Not rhetoric. Results. Not symbolic resistance. Actual infrastructure that survives the current crisis and protects democracy for whoever comes after.
🦝 The mongoose sees the pattern. 🐸 The frog watches with tactical frivolity.
🦄 The unicorn exists defiantly. And the badgers? 🦡 We’re starting to find our badgers.
Consider sharing this with someone who needs to see rabid badgers fighting for democracy today.
It's almost as if they weren't all that competent to begin with.
That orange guy heats badgers.brung on more badger 🦡 🦡 🦡 🦡 🦡