The New ‘California Post’ Offers Both Wit and Meanness; San Diego-Area Immigration Arrests Are Up 1,500%–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Jan. 29, 2026

Indy Digest: Jan. 29, 2026

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about the then-impending launch of the California Post, the West Coast version of the infamous New York Post.

I summed up my feelings thusly: “While it’s downright laughable to say the new publication is bringing ‘a new era of common sense and accountability’ to the state, I am rooting for the California Post to succeed, because the more real news outlets we have, the better—and despite being owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and despite its sensationalist and right-leaning tendencies, the New York Post does indeed publish real news.”

Well, the California Post is here, and my feelings, while somewhat conflicted, have changed.

But before I get to my opinions and explanations, I’d like to refer you to an excellent piece The New York Times published today (here’s a gift link, so you can peruse without a pesky paywall), headlined “MAGA Tab in LA-LA Land! The California Post Launches.” It covers a lot of ground.

Now, about my conflicted/changed feelings …

I am, at my professional core, a newspaper guy. I love them. I love the wide variety of creativities that go into a good “newspaper: (be it online or printed on a dead tree)—the writing, editing, photography, illustrations, design, headline writing, etc. And regarding some these creativities … well, the New York Post is amazing.

Here’s a snippet from the NYT piece:

“There’s plenty of people who would never agree with The Post’s worldview who still read it for entertainment value,” said former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was a regular target of the newspaper during his mayoralty.

There were Mr. de Blasio’s midmorning Brooklyn gym trips (the tabloid pointed out that he had a full 30 minutes blocked out for changing his clothes); the sad fate of a groundhog he’d dropped (“Staten Island Zoo officials went to great lengths to hide the death from the public — and keep secret the fact that ‘Chuck’ was actually ‘Charlotte,’ a female impostor”); and the revelation that the mayor’s regular coffee order was a double espresso with four sugars (“I cringe every time I have to get,” an aide wrote). More seriously, the paper relentlessly covered the federal investigations into Mr. de Blasio’s fund-raising.

Despite all that, “The Post is fun to read,” said the former mayor, who more recently has been in the tabloid’s pages regularly for his chaotic love life. “They’re witty as all hell.”

De Blasio’s right.

But, alas, the Post’s politics are a problem—one I was a bit to eager to dismiss two weeks ago.

I don’t have an issue with differing political viewpoints. Really, I don’t. The problem comes from the fact that so much of what passes as conservatism in these days of Peak Trumpism has an element of nastiness, of meanness, to it.

Another snippet from the NYT piece:

While its newspaper peers have been shrinking or closing, The Post’s obsession with local news has helped turn it into a wider phenomenon: No story is too small to turn into a national culture war. And on that front, California offers rich new material.

(Editor in chief) Keith Poole, who calls “common sense” the publication’s guiding light, says the paper’s worldview has so far been welcomed in the Golden State.

“They are hankering for a brand like The Post to be able to say publicly what perhaps they’re frightened of saying themselves,” he said.

Others say that the tabloid’s crusades are corrosive. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said The Post acted as a “propaganda machine” for the Trump administration to “promulgate bias and fear about immigrants contrary to all the data that we know.”

Lieberman’s right.

Here, for another example of this meanness, is the cover of today’s California Post.

Clever. Provocative. Mean and hurtful.

There are legitimate questions and concerns regarding transgender athletes playing at the higher levels of women’s sports. There are nuanced, thoughtful and honest ways to cover the topic journalistically. For an excellent and funny example, here’s a piece Last Week Tonight With John Oliver produced last year, that is well worth 42 minutes of your time.

This California Post cover is neither nuanced, thoughtful or honest. It’s bullshit. If you were to list the Top 500 issues facing Californians—things that truly affect our lives—the small number of transgender athletes playing sports in the state wouldn’t make the list, or even come close. Yet it was placed on the fourth-ever California Post cover.

This cover and its accompanying stories won’t add anything meaningful to the discussion. They will, however, rile up a lot of people—and they will further demonize and hurt the transgender community.

I am a newspaper guy, but I am also a caring human, so I take back what I said two weeks ago about rooting for the California Post to succeed. California needs more journalism—but it most certainly doesn’t need more hatred and meanness.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• There will not be another government shutdown this weekend. NBC News reports on the deal reached earlier today: “The deal reflects what senators in both parties had floated just a day earlier: passing a short-term funding bill for DHS, while the two parties negotiate changes to the department and ICE, which it oversees, along with bills to fund the rest of the government through Sept. 30. The final outstanding issue in the negotiations was how long the stopgap bill, known as a continuing resolution or CR, would fund DHS. The two sides agreed to a two-week CR that would keep DHS running through Feb. 13, just before both chambers depart for a weeklong recess, the sources told NBC News.”

• CBS News’ new boss told her staff earlier this week that she wants to revamp CBS News for the current times by … hiring commentators and asking employees who disagree with her approach to leave. Sigh. NPR says: “CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss said she will make the news division ‘fit for purpose in the 21st century’ at an all-staff meeting Tuesday, in which she outlined her strategy. Weiss announced the hiring of 18 paid commentators—on subjects ranging from national security to health and wellness—as part of an effort to ‘widen the aperture of the stories we tell and the voices we listen to.’ They include HR McMaster, who served as national security advisor during the first Trump administration; Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative Manhattan Institute; and the historian Niall Ferguson. She also cited several new hires who are going to produce original reports from Kyiv, London and New York City with a social media-first approach. And she said she only wants top-flight performers committed to her approach to stick around. Weiss is expected to make significant cuts to the newsroom, though she did not address them in her remarks.”

• The headline in The Conversation, on a piece by a professor of government, says: “ICE not only looks and acts like a paramilitary force—it is one, and that makes it harder to curb.” Eek. Details: “The United States is nearly alone among established democracies in creating a new paramilitary police force in recent decades. Indeed, the creation of ICE in the U.S. following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of just four instances I’ve found since 1960 where a democratic country created a new paramilitary police force, the others being Honduras, Brazil and Nigeria. ICE and CBP also have some, though not all, of the characteristics of a paramilitary in (a) second sense of the term, referring to forces as repressive political agents. These forces are not informal; they are official agents of the state. However, their officers are less professional, receive less oversight and are operating in more overtly political ways than is typical of both regular military forces and local police in the United States. … This problem has only been exacerbated by the rapid expansion undertaken by the Trump administration. ICE has added approximately 12,000 new recruits—more than doubling its size in less than a year—while substantially cutting the length of the training they receive.”

• Related: Our partners at Calmatters report that immigration arrests in San Diego and areas nearby are up by 1,500 percent. Yes, 1,500 percent: “The arrests occurred in San Diego and Imperial counties, a region the federal government refers to as its San Diego area of responsibility. By September, the number of arrests recorded in the two counties surpassed immigration arrests in the Los Angeles territory, a much larger region that the Trump administration targeted for a headline-grabbing crackdown that summer. In September and October, federal immigration officers arrested more than twice as many people in the San Diego region than they did in all of 2024, according to government data. ‘I feel the temperature rising,’ said Patrick Corrigan, a volunteer who monitors U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity at the federal courthouse in San Diego. As in other blue cities across the nation, activists are worried San Diego could be next on President Donald Trump’s list for a major military-style immigration operation.”

• Here’s an attention-grabbing headline, compliments of NPR: “The Trump administration has secretly rewritten nuclear safety rules.” Go on? “The Trump administration has overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public, according to documents obtained exclusively by NPR. The sweeping changes were made to accelerate development of a new generation of nuclear reactor designs. They occurred over the fall and winter at the Department of Energy, which is currently overseeing a program to build at least three new experimental commercial nuclear reactors by July 4 of this year. … The orders slash hundreds of pages of requirements for security at the reactors. They also loosen protections for groundwater and the environment and eliminate at least one key safety role. The new orders cut back on requirements for keeping records, and they raise the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to before an official accident investigation is triggered.”

• And finally … today’s recall news involves … coffee pods! This one has to do with a labeling issue, as Today.com reports: “If you have McCafe Premium Roast Decaf Coffee K-Cup Pods at home, you may want to think twice before popping one into your Keurig machine. In a recall notice, Keurig DR Pepper, Inc. noted that the product is ‘labeled as decaf, but might contain caffeine.’ … Keurig has recalled 960 cartons of 29-ounce McCafe Premium Roast Decaf Coffee K-Cup Pods. Each carton contains 84 pods. … The recalled K-Cup pods were distributed in California, Indiana and Nevada.”

Support the Independent!

Thanks for reading! Please consider clicking the button below and becoming a Supporter of the Independent if 1) you value what we do, and 2) you can afford to do so!