Newsletter: Adam Schiff for U.S. Senate, and other L.A. Times endorsements so far

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Jan. 20, 2024. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion.

All week the election coverage has been Iowa, Iowa, Iowa. And for good reason: The former president cemented his status as the clear favorite to win the Republican Party nomination, despite being under indictment for 91 felony charges across four criminal cases. (I just wrote that sentence without giving it a second thought, which kind of frightens me.)

This swarming of the Hawkeye State (and of New Hampshire next week) might distract Californians from the fact that we have our own primary election March 5, about six weeks from now, featuring several important contests and more choices than most people can keep track of.

That’s where my colleagues on The Times’ editorial board can help. Every election cycle, they spend weeks interviewing candidates and researching ballot initiatives, all to assist readers by making deeply reported recommendations. Each endorsement is the product of many hours of work by journalists with years-long careers covering the issues on the ballot. I encourage everyone to read the endorsements, even if you disagree with the recommendation.

One such endorsement is for Adam B. Schiff for U.S. Senate. The Burbank Democrat, says the board, “stands out for his extraordinary leadership over the last several years in helping to protect the nation’s institutions, the rule of law and American democracy itself from former President Trump.”

The board has also made endorsements for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the L.A. City Council and U.S. House of Representatives, and in the coming weeks it will publish its picks for L.A. County Superior Court judges. Check latimes.com/endorsements for updates.

He believes in tenants’ rights, but L.A. is pushing out small landlords like him. Joshua Kamali owns 12 units (nothing compared with corporate landlords) and doesn’t make a living from renting to his tenants, but he says local political leaders treat him as if he were a robber baron. In the name of preventing homelessness, he says, the L.A. City Council and L.A. County Board of Supervisors have passed measures that make operating as a small landlord untenable here.

Thirty years after the Northridge earthquake, he still thinks about a hero he met that day. “Californians all have our earthquake stories,” writes Tod Goldberg. “Mine is of a man I’ve looked for since I missed the Northridge quake three decades ago, on Jan. 17, 1994, a bus driver we think was named Reggie. Reggie was a model of altruism that day. I wonder if he’s told this story, if he knows that my friends and I think about him every year around this time.”

Trump’s “lost cause,” a kind of gangster cult, won’t go away. History is riddled with examples of “lost cause” mythologies that yielded devastating consequences — for example, the Nazis’ racist grievances from losing World War I that resulted in World War II, and the Confederate nostalgia that fueled decades of violence and white supremacism in the South. Yale historian David W. Blight worries that we may be witnessing the formative years of a Trumpian “lost cause” stemming from Jan. 6, 2021.

Why are men so lonely? Columnist Jean Guerrero zeros in on the epidemic of men going it alone: “A 2023 State of American Men report from Equimundo found that two-thirds of surveyed men between ages 18 and 23 say ‘no one really knows me.’ Since 1990, the share of men who lack a single close friend quintupled to 15%, according to a 2021 study by the Survey Center on American Life. It’s worse for unmarried men: One in five of them report that they have no close friends. And 1 in every 4 of those younger than 30 say they have no close friends.”

My grandmother’s account of the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940 haunts me today. Thirty years ago, I interviewed my mor mor (Norwegian for “mother’s mother”) for a sixth-grade project on World War II. When I asked her to describe the day in April 1940 when Norway was lost to the Nazis, the tale she told me was surprising: It wasn’t about bombs and guns and death, but confusion and disbelief. Her family’s reluctance to believe what was clearly unfolding right in front of them haunts me as the United States flirts with authoritarianism in 2024.

More from this week in opinion

From our columnists

• Robin Abcarian: I nominate Hunter Biden for most perfect troll of the year
• Jonah Goldberg: Biden is late but right to strike against Yemen’s Houthis
• LZ Granderson: What have we done to deserve Marjorie Taylor Greene?

From the op-ed desk

• I bought a flip phone and tried to get by without my smartphone. Here’s how that went
• The gig economy sucked in millennials like me. Will we ever get out?
• Can the Sierra Nevada bighorn dodge extinction? It may mean reining in another wild animal

From the editorial board

• It’s outrageous that a Spanish museum refuses to return Nazi-looted art to the rightful heirs
• Meet the candidates for California’s next U.S. senator
• Buffalo mass killer should not be executed. What happened to Biden’s promise?

Letters to the editor

• If kids must learn cursive, old folks should learn to use smartphones
• “They won’t sell to Jews” — readers share stories of antisemitism in L.A.
• Is Israel an apartheid state? Readers discuss the treatment of Palestinians