Weekly Member Update - July 6, 2026
Happy Birthday, ‘Merica
Meet Folarin Balogun. Folarin is the young star of the United States Men’s National Team (USMNT), a diverse assemblage of talented footballers which team captain Tim Ream has called the “true representation of what America is” that is playing for all of us in the 2026 World Cup, the global soccer tournament which has captivated the entire world’s attention this June and July. This is Folarin’s first World Cup and, in the USMNT’s first tournament game, a victory against Paraguay, Folarin was named Player of the Match after scoring half of the home team’s four goals and becoming the first American in 96 years to score multiple goals in a World Cup match. After also taking home Player of the Match honors in the USMNT’s second game, a 2-0 victory over Australia, Folarin scored the decisive goal in the USMNT’s next win, a 2-0 knock-out of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In tonight’s match against the Red Devils of Belgium, the young striker could become the greatest single-Tournament goal scorer in American World Cup history. In sum, Falorin is an absolute star, and American children will be wearing the #20 Stars and Stripes jersey of this bona fide American sports hero for years to come.
Folarin Balogun is also what Fox News and Supreme Court Justice Samual Alito would call an “anchor baby.” Folarin’s parents are Yoruba Nigerians who resided in London when Folarin was conceived. His parents visited America when Folarin’s mother was seven months pregnant and, when airline officials refused to allow his mother to board her return flight to London due to the advanced state of her pregnancy, Folarin Balogun was born in Brooklyn on the day before the Fourth of July in 2001. Folarin and his parents returned to London only days before 9/11 and Folarin was thereafter raised in Great Britain. So, Folarin Balogun may be an accidental American — and one that, like many of this Country’s founding fathers, speaks with a British accent at that — but, make no mistake, he is an American through-and-through thanks to the genius of this Nation’s Second Founding and the Birthright Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.
Thanks to the infinite and collective wisdom of the five Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States who know how to read and fully grasp the import of this Nation’s history, we are fortunate to still have birthright citizenship in this Country as we celebrate our semiquincentennial, and not just because it gives us a transcendent soccer star. In her concurring opinion in last week’s birthright citizenship case — Trump v Barbara — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recounted the development of the 14th Amendment in the prelude and the aftermath of the Civil War and explained that the principles of our Country’s Second Founding were infinitely more ambitious than to merely guarantee the rights of citizenship to newly freed slaves. As Justice Jackson explained, it was already commonly understood at the time that “freed Blacks already had a rightful claim to citizenship because they had been born on American soil. After all, the Nation, from its founding, had boldly proclaimed that all men are born free and equal, and that consequently life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are inherent in every individual, vested inalienably by natural birthright.” Thus, instead of specifically imparting a “new status” upon the newly-emancipated slaves, the 14th Amendment alternatively sought to extend the core principles of our Nation’s founding universally. Referencing Lincoln, Justice Jackson explains that the Amendment is consciously anti-caste and anti-subordination, and sought to guarantee that “the promise of liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence [would be] ‘held sacred by all, and . . . include all.’” To that end, during the ratification debates, efforts to exclude Chinese immigrants and Romani “gypsy” peoples from the provenance of birthright citizenship were explicitly rejected. Now-familiar refrains that Chinese immigrants would “overrun” California, or that the Roma were “undeserving of birthright citizenship because they ‘wandered in gangs,’ ‘infest[ed] society,’ and ‘impos[ed] upon the simple and weak everywhere’” were specifically cast aside, as was the view that there exists a “superior, dominant ruling class of citizens” who could Constitutionally subjugate “others.” “Instead, the Amendment recognized [all Americans’] rightful claim to birthright citizenship simply and solely by virtue of their having been born on American soil . . . The rights of citizenship are universal because they are the ‘sacred rights of personhood.’”
A Washington DC commuter rides the Metro on July 4, 2026 while surrounded by masked members of the white-supremacist group Patriot Front. Photo Credit Cheney Orr/Reuters.
Some of us may remember the glory of this Nation’s bicentennial celebrations from a half century ago, and we all mourn the absence of that communal and patriotic spirit as the quarter-millennial anniversary of our Nation’s founding was ineptly coopted by Trump for his tacky and corrupt personalist agenda. Fortunately, however, we can find solace in those who continue to articulate a universal and aspirational vision of the American ideal. So, while ghouls like Stephen Miller contemplate excluding pregnant women from our shores or sterilizing foreign visitors in reaction to reaffirmation of our founding principles by the Barbara Court, we can reassure ourselves with examples of the American Dream that we all have in our in lives and lineage, and by the simple fact that the vast majority of us share a common and unbreakable bond because some ancestor from the past came to these shores, willingly or not, and thereby afforded us the opportunity to be citizens of this Nation by mere birthright. Naturally, the clearest articulation of “the ideals our Nation still strives to fulfill” were articulated this past week by an immigrant New Yorker. We encourage you share his words far and wide;
“America is exceptional because, here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, and it belongs to us all . . . You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means. The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, only belongs to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.
How small they are. How weak. How unoriginal.
At every moment of our past, those that led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. As Thomas Paine once wrote, ‘This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty. Hither have they fled.’ And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this Nation as an asylum for the persecuted, but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum. As we mark 250 years, what do we see? We see a City of contradictions within a Nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest Country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs that buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands — those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone — and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few. Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is not all I see when we look for America. We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on an ailing neighbor. Yes, we see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work and still believes his country can do better by his family. Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder. Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the People. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors — without asking how long they have lived here, or what papers they have — as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots. We see America each time working people demand more — not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans. There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: “Love it or leave it,” they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?”
The People of the Capital Region Say “Hell No”
If the soaring rhetoric of the Mayor of New York City doesn’t do it for you, the past week’s spontaneous and remarkable show of solidarity and community by the People of the Capital Region in the face of those aforementioned forces of division should give you another opportunity to show American pride. In case you have been living under a rock the past week, the entire 518 was captivated, first, by the tragic disappearance and death of seven-year-old Harbe Nagi and, thereafter, by the repugnant and disgusting response to Nagi’s death in the social media account belonging to the Taste of Italy restaurant in Latham. We won’t reproduce in full the repulsive words apparently posted to Facebook by Taste of Italy proprietor Alyssa DiBiase Cappello in response to a post by WNYT News Anchor Kumi Tucker, but suffice it to say that the post suggested that Nagi’s family would have themselves put the autistic boy to death had they lived in a “Muslim country” and impugned Islam as a “terrorist organization” and “a horrific fake religion.” The response by the People of the Mighty 518 was inspirational, and frankly unlike anything we have ever seen. A veritable fire hose of social media criticism on every platform immediately flowed in the direction of Cappello, her husband Frank Cappello and every single one of their businesses, from Taste of Italy to She’s Yar Lash Bar and NY Lash Supply. The devastating Yelp and Google reviews alone would take hours to summarize. Digital warriors all across the region soon elevated the Cappellos’ past social media posts, quickly making clear that the comments about the Nagi family were no mere one-offs. Before long, there were reminders that the Cappellos have been sued for defaming the online restaurant reviewers 518 Foodies, and that the Cappellos and their businesses owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid sales taxes, leading some to wonder how it is that Alyssa Cappello recently obtained liquor license No. 0340-26-246927 from the State Liquor Authority. Moreover, within hours of the Taste of Italy Facebook post, protestors congregated outside the Shoppes at Latham establishment and sustained protests on Wednesday and Thursday forced the business to close. Daily protests have continued and, by Sunday, footage was circulating on social media appearing to show Alyssa Cappello crashing out and pepper spraying protestors from her vehicle. Pop up protests have also occurred outside of the Cappellos’ other businesses, and public officials soon joined the fray, with State Senator Patricia Fahy condemning the “depraved, Islamophobic and stunningly insensitive” Taste of Italy comments. Additional protests are in the works, including one to coincide with the planned July 15 grand opening of the Cappellos’ latest venture, Grazie Italian Kitchen in Loudon Plaza. The Islamic Center of the Capital District is also holding a “Lighting the Way – A Love Over Hate Event” at Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Company — just doors away from Taste of Italy — in honor of Harbe Nagi this coming Saturday evening. As the United Muslim Alliance of Albany has noted, the collective response of individuals and entities “from diverse faiths, backgrounds and communities [has] sent a powerful message that hate, discrimination, and bigotry have no place in the Capital Region.” The People of the 518 really showed up this week, and we couldn’t be prouder of our community.
Odds & Ends:
We talked last week about the June 23 data center presentation given by Kenwood property developers to the South End Community Collaborative, but a link to the Zoom recording of that presentation didn’t make it into our email blast. If you’re interested, you can view the whole presentation here.
On the same day that it is issued Trump v Barbara, the birthright citizenship case discussed above, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court — you already know which six — held that states are free to preclude transgender girls and women from participating in all-female sports. Just in case you haven’t contemplated the obvious repercussions of this decision — that being that even cisgender girls and women subjectively deemed “not feminine enough” could be subjected to intrusive examinations to “prove” their femininity — the State of Washington has an initiative on the ballot for this fall that would likely subject student athletes to a genital examinations as a precondition to their participation in girls’ sports.
ICE apprehended at least 10,000 people in a five-day span as June came to a close. Among the “criminal illegal aliens” that ICE has recently abducted was Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a Catholic nun and registered nurse who was snatched off the street, while in full habit, while walking to attend religious services.
Socialist Summer Continues. Last Tuesday, 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros easily defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary for a Denver-area Congressional seat. Kiros is a veritable lock to win the deep-blue seat in November and further expand the DSA Congressional Caucus come January. On the horizon, Cori Bush looks to reclaim her St. Louis Congressional seat on August 4; that same day, Donavan McKinney will be looking to represent Detroit in Congress and Abdul El-Sayed seeks to become the Democratic nominee for Senate from Michigan. On August 11, Francesca Hong hopes to become the Democratic nominee for Governor of Wisconsin.
Our friends with RCV Albany formally presented their petition with 3200+ signatures to the Albany City Clerk, seeking to get a referendum on the ballot that would bring ranked-choice voting and a single unified election to the City of Albany. As we’ve discussed ad nauseam in past installments of this newsletter, the Albany County Democratic Party Machine opposes the measure, and that alone should give you reason to support it. As we previously noted, it is the unified-election piece of the ballot proposal which has the Machine’s knickers in a bunch, as the Machine fears a system where the voters themselves choose who will represent them, not the party bosses. We’ll say it again; the current primary-based system in the City of Albany — where the general election constitutes a coronation of the winner of the closed Democratic primary — completely disenfranchises thousands of Albanians who have no party affiliation in the name of insuring that a Machine loyalist always wins. The current system is not democracy, and we have a chance to replace it with a system that makes the voices of all the People heard. If that new system helps break the Machine, so be it.
And every week, it seems, the Machine gives us another reason why it needs to be dismantled, and soon. This week it was Patrick Tine’s stunning reporting in the Sunday Times Union detailing how the Albany County Ethics Commission — the body charged with insuring that Albany County officials and employees are “independent, impartial and free from conflicts of interest in fulfilling their public responsibilities” — has completely dropped the ball. The TU reporting discusses a recent audit report by County Comptroller Susan Rizzo and Chief Auditor Stephanie Slominski “which concludes there is an ‘overarching ineffectiveness’ in the county’s rules related to conflicts of interest and ethics in general, including systemic gaps in the yearly financial disclosure forms that some 200 county officials are required to submit.” The Ethics Commission, which initially resisted the oversight audit, has not apparently not convened in more than a year and also appears to be down to a single member from its required five. Unsurprisingly, then, the audit found that the Commission routinely fails to review the financial disclosure forms required of County officials and employees, and habitually ignores the failure of these officials to file their annual disclosures. Inevitably, the audit found at least two or three “instances of ethically questionable behavior” by employees of the County Attorney Office who claimed to be working for the County while engaged in their own private work. Two of these employees apparently no longer work for the Office of the County Attorney — which is currently helmed by Dan McCoy appointee Jeff Jamison — but at least one of those involved “has been turned over to law enforcement and appropriate external agencies for further review.” Yet, somewhat remarkably, an attorney in the County Attorney’s Office still serves as Counsel to the Ethics Commission itself. We’re looking forward to additional reporting on this subject from the TU, but this initial reporting merely confirms what we’ve always suspected, that the County government of Dan McCoy is a veritable cesspool of ineptitude and questionable ethical practices.
Upcoming Events:
Tonight, the City of Albany Common Council will convene at 6:30 and among the items on the agenda is a resolution sponsored by 14th Ward Council Member Deborah Zamer voicing the Council’s support for the Responsible Data Center Development Act, the data center moratorium still awaiting Governor Hochul’s signature. The Common Council agenda also includes a public comment period, so if you want to vent your spleen about the Kenwood data center proposal, here is your chance. We also anticipate that our friends from RCV Albany will take to the floor to lobby the Council to move their ballot proposal forward, notwithstanding opposition from the Machine. If you can’t join the fun in person, the Common Council meetings are broadcast on YouTube.
Our Monthly Member Meeting is next Monday, July 13, at the The Love Albany Center, as usual. We’ll be talking Flock in the City of Albany, data center madness, all things RCV, and a whole bunch of other things on the horizon.
The day before our Member Meeting, on Sunday, July 12, we’ll be tabling at A Big Gay Market on Knox Mall in Washington Park.
As discussed above, the day before that, on the evening of Saturday, July 11, The Islamic Center of the Capital District will be holding a “Lighting the Way – A Love Over Hate Event” at Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Company in memory of Harbe Nagi.
On July 17, we’ll be tabling and bringing “Ice Cream Socialism” to Lincoln Park in advance of the Movies Under the Stars free summer series presented by our friends at Love Albany, the RED Bookshelf and other sponsors. We’ll have more information on this event as the date approaches, but if you want to volunteer to help staff our table, drop us a line.
Last but not least, on Saturday, July 18, the next installment of De-ICE Citizens Bank is taking place. Join activists from across the region at the Guilderland branch to demand that Citizens Bank stop financing private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic.
