The Kali Diaries

HCR Letters frim an American

2026-04-17T13:14:41.526-04:00

Letters From an American

Apr 13, 2026

As a major networking event and ideological trendsetter for the radical right in the United States, CPAC has been instrumental in celebrating Orbán’s Hungary as the center of the effort to destroy the liberal democracy of the United States and Europe in order to replace it with what Orbán called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” His system replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and rejected “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.”

Today Péter Magyar, the man who will replace Orban after winning the election in a blowout, revealed that Orbán was using government money to finance CPAC. Orbán has clearly been working for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October, Orbán told Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

So it appears that CPAC was funded by a foreign government that was working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech today, Magyar told reporters that the outgoing foreign minister, who has been accused of working closely with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, was shredding confidential documents.

The influence of Orbán on the U.S. right wing marked a change in Republican politics.

Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.

Although those people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way: first a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights.

Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to Black or Brown Americans, or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia, who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth.

The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.

When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order.

It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level legal playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash made it clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market but by cronyism. And it’s impossible to do business without freedom of the seas and the stability of international rules.

But when Orbán took office for the second time in 2010, he courted the right wing with promises not to get the government out of their way, as right-wing politicians in the U.S. had done since the 1980s, but to use the government to impose their cultural values on the country at large. He established control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote Hungary’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns.

Increasingly, Orbán used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. By 2026, Hungary still had elections, but state control of the media and the apparatus of voting made it very difficult for Orbán’s opponents to take power.

That model proved irresistible for right-wing leaders in the U.S. who courted radical white evangelicals and who recognized that their ideology was unpopular enough that the only way to make it the law of the land was to impose it through the power of the state. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019, followed Orbán’s model right down to the laws prohibiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues and DeSantis’s attempt to strip Disney of its governance structure when it refused to adhere to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Orbán’s idea that the power of the state must be used to overturn democracy in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation inspired the far-right figures that took charge of the Republican Party under Trump. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Calling for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Roberts pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term that uses the power of the government to impose right-wing religious values on the U.S. In his foreword for a 2024 book by Roberts, then-senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made it clear he saw himself and Roberts as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.”

Since taking power, Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model both at home and internationally. Instead of working with our traditional allies, they have attacked Europe and aligned the U.S. with Hungary and Russia.

Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.

In an op-ed in Fox News online today, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: “Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.” By that, he tried to recall the Republican Party to his faction rather than that of the MAGA Republicans by pointing out that Magyar’s government seems more likely to resist America’s adversaries and work with America’s allies than Orbán was.

But the model that Hungarian voters’ dramatic rejection of Orbán offers to the U.S. is a more sweeping rejection of the whole radical right than McConnell suggests. Rather than centering an elite as lawmakers, as right-wing ideology does, it centers the people. Those who know Hungarian politics say that Magyar’s party won because voters recognized that Orbán’s vow to purify Hungarian society turned out to be a cover for extraordinary corruption of party leaders and cronies, while the destruction of the economy hurt everyday people.

Magyar and his party reminded Hungarians of the good in their country and reawakened their national pride. They promised voters a democratic state with the rule of law under a government that worked for the people.

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

—

Notes:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/13/peter-magyar-accuses-outgoing-foreign-minister-of-destroying-confidential-documents

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html

https://newrepublic.com/article/184393/jd-vance-violent-foreword-kevin-roberts-project-2025-leader-book

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21748878

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/564965-it-cant-happen-here-viktor-orbans-hungary-shows-how-democracy-dies/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/13/17823488/hungary-democracy-authoritarianism-trump

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/21/21256324/viktor-orban-hungary-american-conservatives

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-tucker-carlson-to-speak-at-far-right-conference-in-hungary-after-meeting-with-viktor-orban/

Mitch McConnell, “Hungary’s voters offer a lesson for those on the right drawn to Orban,” Fox News, April 13, 2026.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-democratic-national-convention-chicago-1

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-orban/hungarian-pm-sees-shift-to-illiberal-christian-democracy-in-2019-european-vote-idUSKBN1KI0BK/

CPAC/status/2043383249204899872

splendid_pete/status/2043693756033941811

2026 Heather Cox Richardson ·

Abbas Araghchi Speech

2026-02-28T14:29:34.370-05:00

‎If you want to understand why the US and Israel are attacking and attempting to subjugate Iran, you must read this historic speech by Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, delivered earlier this month at the 16th Al Jazeera Forum held in Doha:

‎“Excellencies,

‎Distinguished colleagues,

‎Ladies and gentlemen,

‎السلام علیکم

‎It is a privilege to address you at this distinguished forum and discuss the profound question of our region: Palestine.

‎Let me begin with a fact that the region has learned through decades of painful experience, and that the world is learning again at a terrible human cost: ‘Palestine is not one issue among many’.

‎Palestine is the defining question of justice in West Asia and beyond. It is the strategic and moral compass of our region. It is a test of whether international law has meaning, whether human rights have universal value, and whether global institutions exist to protect the weak — or merely to rationalise the power of the strong.

‎For generations, the Palestinian crisis was understood primarily as the consequence of an illegal occupation and the denial of an inalienable right: the right of a people to self-determination. But today, we must recognise that the crisis has moved far beyond the parameters of occupation alone. What we are witnessing in Gaza is not merely war. It is not a ‘conflict’ between equal parties. It is not an unfortunate byproduct of security measures. It is the deliberate destruction of civilian life on a massive scale. It is genocide.

‎The human cost of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza has wounded the conscience of humanity. It has torn open the heart of the Muslim world — and it has also shaken millions beyond it: Christians, Jews, and people of all faiths, who still believe that the life of a child is not a bargaining chip, that starvation is not a weapon, that hospitals are not battlefields, and that the killing of families is not self-defense.

‎Palestine today is not simply a tragedy; it is a mirror held up to the world. It reflects not only the suffering of Palestinians, but also the moral failure of those who had the power to stop this catastrophe — and chose instead to justify it, enable it, or normalise it.

‎But Palestine and Gaza is not only a humanitarian crisis. It has become the platform for something larger and more dangerous: an expansionist project pursued under the banner of ‘security’.

‎This project has three consequences — each of them profound, each of them alarming:

‎The first consequence is global. The Israeli regime’s conduct in Palestine, and the impunity granted to it, have deeply damaged the international legal order. We must say this clearly: the world is moving toward a condition where international law no longer is respected and governs international relations.

‎What is perhaps most dangerous is the precedent being established: that if a state has sufficient political cover and protection, it may bomb civilians, besiege populations, target infrastructure, assassinate individuals across borders, and still demand to be regarded as lawful.

‎This is not merely a Palestinian problem. It is a global problem.

‎We are witnessing not only the tragedy of Palestine, but the transformation of the world into a place where the law is replaced by force.

‎The second consequence is regional. Israel’s expansionist project has had a direct and destabilising impact on the security of all countries in the region.

‎The Israeli regime now openly violates borders. It breaches sovereignties. It assassinates official dignitaries. It conducts terrorist operations. It expands its reach in multiple theatres. And it does so, not discreetly, but with a sense of entitlement — because it has learned that international accountability will not come.

‎Let us be candid: if the Gaza issue is ‘settled’ through destruction and forced displacement — if that becomes the model — then the West Bank will be next. Annexation will become policy.

‎This is the essence of what has long been called the ‘Greater Israel’ project.

‎The question therefore is not whether Israel’s actions threaten Palestinians alone. The question is whether the region will accept a future in which borders are temporary, sovereignty is conditional, and security is determined not by law or diplomacy, but by the ambitions of a militarised occupier.

‎The third consequence is structural — and perhaps the most dangerous.

‎Israel’s expansionist project requires that neighboring countries be weakened — militarily, technologically, economically, and socially — so that the Israeli regime permanently enjoys the upper hand.

‎Under this project, Israel is free to expand its military arsenal without limits, including weapons of mass destruction that remain outside any inspection regime. Yet other countries are demanded to disarm. Others are pressured to reduce defensive capacity. Others are punished for scientific progress. Others are sanctioned for building resilience.

‎Nobody should be confused: this is not arms control, it is not non-proliferation, it is not security.

‎It is the enforcement of permanent inequality: Israel must have a ‘military, intelligence and strategic edge’, and others must remain vulnerable. This is a doctrine of domination.

‎Ladies and gentlemen,

‎This is why the Palestinian question is not only a humanitarian issue. It is a strategic issue. It is not only about Gaza and the West Bank. It is about the future of our region and the rules of the world.

‎So what must be done?

‎It is not enough to express concern. It is not enough to issue statements. It is not enough to mourn. We need a coordinated strategy of action — legal, diplomatic, economic, and security-based — rooted in the principles of international law and collective responsibility.

‎First, the international community must support legal mechanisms without hesitation.

‎Second, there must be consequences for violations.

‎We call for comprehensive and targeted sanctions against Israel, including: an immediate arms embargo,

‎the suspension of military and intelligence cooperation,

‎restrictions on officials, and banning trade.

‎Third, we need a credible political horizon grounded in law. The international community must affirm: the end of occupation, the right of return and compensation in accordance with international law, and the establishment of a unified and independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital.

‎Fourth, the humanitarian crisis must be treated as a matter of urgent international responsibility. Collective punishment must never be normalised.

‎Fifth, regional states must coordinate to protect sovereignty and deter aggression. The principle must be clear: security cannot be built on the insecurity of others.

‎And finally, the Islamic world, the Arab world, and the nations of the Global South must build a united diplomatic front.

‎The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League, and regional organisations must move beyond symbolism toward coordinated action: legal support, diplomatic initiatives, economic measures, and strategic messaging.

‎This is not about confrontation. It is about preventing the region from being reshaped by force.

‎Dear colleagues,

‎Let no one miscalculate: a region cannot be kept stable by allowing one actor to act above the law. The doctrine of impunity will not produce peace; it will produce wider conflict.

‎The path to stability is clear: justice for Palestine, accountability for crimes, an end to occupation and apartheid, and a regional order built on sovereignty, equality, and cooperation.

‎If the world wants peace, it must stop rewarding aggression.

‎If the world wants stability, it must stop enabling expansionism.

‎If the world believes in international law, it must enforce it — consistently and without double standards.

‎And if the nations of this region seek a future free from perpetual war, they must recognise this fundamental truth: Palestine is not merely a cause for solidarity; it is the indispensable cornerstone of regional security.

‎Thank you”.

The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making Of A Slave!

2026-02-26T13:21:53.137-05:00

The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making Of A Slave!

This speech was delivered by Willie Lynch on the bank of the James River in the colony of Virginia in 1712. Lynch was a

British slave owner in the West Indies. He was invited to the colony of Virginia in 1712 to teach his methods to slave

owners there. The term "lynching" is derived from his last name.

December 25, 1712

Gentlemen:

I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies, where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome's would envy us if my program is

implemented.

As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish, I saw enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its highways in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasions. I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree, a couple miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit. You suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed.

Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, I

am here to introduce you to a method of solving them. In my bag here, I have a foolproof method for controlling your black slaves. I guarantee every one of you that if installed correctly it will control the slaves for at least 300 years. My

method is simple. Any member of your family or your overseer can use it. I have outlined a number of differences among

the slaves and make the differences bigger. I use fear, distrust and envy for control.

These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South. Take thi simple little list of differences and think about them. On top of my list is "age" but it's there only because it starts with an

"A." The second is "COLOR" or shade, there is intelligence, size, sex, size of plantations and status on plantations,

attitude of owners, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, East, West, North, South, have fine hair, course hair, or

is tall or short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of action, but before that, I shall assure

you that distrust is stronger than trust and envy stronger than adulation, respect or admiration. The Black slaves after

receiving this indoctrination shall carry on and will become self refueling and self generating for hundreds of years, maybe

thousands.

Don't forget you must pitch the old black Male vs. the young black Male, and the young black Male against thold black male.

You must use the dark skin slaves vs. the light skin slaves, and the light skin slaves vs. the dark skin slaves.

You must use the female vs. the male. And the male vs. the female.

You must also have you white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks.

It is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect and trust only us. (white people)

Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them, never miss an

opportunity. If used intensely for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful of each other.

Thank you gentlemen.

Lets Make a Slave

It was the interest and business of slave holders to study human nature, and the slave nature in particular, with a view to

practical results. I and many of them attained astonishing proficiency in this direction. They had to deal not with earth,

wood and stone, but with men and by every regard they had for their own safety and prosperity they needed to know the

material on which they were to work.

Conscious of the injustice and wrong they were every hour perpetuating and

knowing what they themselves would do. Were they the victims of such wrongs? They were constantly looking for the first

signs of the dreaded retribution. They watched, therefore with skilled and practiced eyes, and learned to read with great accuracy, the state of mind and heart of the slave, through his sable face.

Unusual sobriety, apparent abstractions,

sullenness and indifference indeed, any mood out of the common was afforded ground for suspicion and inquiry.

Let us make a slave. What do we need?

First of all we need a black nigger man, a pregnant nigger woman and her baby

nigger boy.

Second, we will use the same basic principle that we use in breaking a horse, combined with some more sustaining factors. What we do with horses is that we break them from one form of life to another that is we reduce them from their natural state in nature.

Whereas nature provides them with the natural capacity to take care of their offspring, we break that natural string of independence from them and thereby create a dependency status, so that we may be able to get from them useful production for our business and pleasure.

Cardinal Principles for making a Negro

For fear that our future Generations may not understand the principles of breaking both of the beast together, the nigger

and the horse. We understand that short range planning economics results in periodic economic chaos; so that to avoid

turmoil in the economy, it requires us to have breath and depth in long range comprehensive planning, articulating both

skill sharp perceptions. We lay down the following principles for long range comprehensive economic planning.

Both horse and niggers is no good to the economy in the wild or natural state. Both must be broken and tied together for

orderly production. For orderly future, special and particular attention must be paid to the female and the youngest

offspring. Both must be crossbred to produce a variety and division of labor. Both must be taught to respond to a peculiar new language. Psychological and physical instruction of containment must be created for both.

We hold the six cardinal principles as truth to be self evident, based upon the following the discourse concerning the economics of breaking and tying the horse and the nigger together, all inclusive of the six principles laid down about.

NOTE: Neither principle alone

will suffice for good economics. All principles must be employed for orderly good of the nation. Accordingly, both a wild horse and a wild or nature nigger is dangerous even if captured, for they will have the tendency to seek their customary freedom, and in doing so, might kill you in your sleep. You cannot rest. They sleep while you are awake, and are awake while you are asleep. They are dangerous near the family house and it requires too much labor to watch them away from the house. Above all, you cannot get them to work in this natural state. Hence both the horse and the nigger must be broken; that is breaking them from one form of mental life to another.

Keep the body take the mind! In other words break the will to resist. Now the breaking process is the same for both the horse and the nigger, only slightly varying in degrees. But as we said before, there is an art in long range economic planning. You must keep your eye and thoughts on the female and the offspring of the horse and the nigger.

A brief discourse in offspring development will shed light on the key

to sound economic principles. Pay little attention to the generation of original breaking, but concentrate on future

generations.

Therefore, if you break the female mother, she will break the offspring in its early years of development and when the

offspring is old enough to work, she will deliver it up to you, for her normal female protective tendencies will have been

lost in the original breaking process.

For example take the case of the wild stud horse, a female horse and an already

infant horse and compare the breaking process with two captured nigger males in their natural state, a pregnant nigger

woman with her infant offspring. Take the stud horse, break him for limited containment.

Completely break the female horse until she becomes very gentle, whereas you or anybody can ride her in her comfort.

Breed the mare and the stud until you have the desired offspring. Then you can turn the stud to freedom until you need

him again. Train the female horse where by she will eat out of your hand, and she will in turn train the infant horse to eat

out of your hand also. When it comes to breaking the uncivilized nigger, use the same process, but vary the degree and

step up the pressure, so as to do a complete reversal of the mind. Take the meanest and most restless nigger, strip him of his clothes in front of the remaining male niggers, the female, and the nigger infant, tar and feather him, tie each leg to a different horse faced in opposite directions, set him a fire and beat both horses to pull him apart in front of the remaining nigger. The next step is to take a bull whip and beat the remaining nigger male to the point of death, in front of the female and the infant. Don't kill him, but put the fear of God in him, for he can be useful for future breeding.

The Breaking Process of the African Woman

Take the female and run a series of tests on her to see if she will submit to your desires willingly. Test her in every way,

because she is the most important factor for good economics. If she shows any sign of resistance in submitting

completely to your will, do not hesitate to use the bull whip on her to extract that last bit of resistance out of her. Take care

not to kill her, for in doing so, you spoil the good economic. When in complete submission, she will train her off springs in the early years to submit to labor when the become of age.

Understanding is the best thing.

Therefore, we shall go deeper into this area of the subject matter concerning what we have produced here in this breaking process of the female nigger.

We have reversed the relationship in her natural uncivilized state she would have a strong dependency on the uncivilized

nigger male, and she would have a limited protective tendency toward her independent male offspring and would raise male off springs to be dependent like her. Nature had provided for this type of balance. We reversed nature by burning

and pulling a civilized nigger apart and bull whipping the other to the point of death, all in her presence. By her being left alone, unprotected, with the male image destroyed, the ordeal caused her to move from her psychological dependent

state to a frozen independent state. In this frozen psychological state of independence, she will raise her male and female offspring in reversed roles.

For fear of the young males life she will psychologically train him to be mentally weak and dependent, but physically

strong. Because she has become psychologically independent, she will train her female off springs to be psychological independent. What have you got? You've got the nigger women out front and the nigger man behind and scared.

This is a perfect situation of sound sleep and economic. Before the breaking process, we had to be alertly on guard at all times. Now we can sleep soundly, for out of frozen fear his woman stands guard for us. He cannot get past her early slave molding process. He is a good tool, now ready to be tied to the horse at a tender age. By the time a nigger boy reaches the age of sixteen, he is soundly broken in and ready for a long life of sound and efficient work and the reproduction of unit of good labor force. Continually through the breaking of uncivilized savage nigger, by throwing the nigger female savage into a frozen psychological state of independence, by killing of the protective male image, and by creating a submissive dependent mind of the nigger male slave, we have created an orbiting cycle that turns on its own axis forever, unless a phenomenon occurs and re shifts the position of the male and female slaves.

We show what we mean by example. Take the case of the two economic slave units and examine them closely.

The Nigger Marriage

We breed two nigger males with two nigger females. Then we take the nigger males away from them and keep them

moving and working. Say one nigger female bears a nigger female and the other bears a nigger male. Both nigger

females being without influence of the nigger male image, frozen with an independent psychology, will raise their offspring into reverse positions. The one with the female offspring will teach her to be like herself, independent and negotiable (we negotiate with her, through her, by her, we negotiate her at will). The one with the nigger male offspring, she being frozen with a subconscious fear for his life, will raise him to be mentally dependent and weak, but physically strong, in other words, body over mind.

Now in a few years when these two offspring's become fertile for early reproduction we will mat and breed them and continue the cycle. That is good, sound, and long range comprehensive planning.

Warning: Possible Interloping Negatives

Earlier we talked about the non economic good of the horse and the nigger in their wild or natural state; we talked out the

principle of breaking and tying them together for orderly production. Furthermore, we talked about paying particular attention to the female savage and her offspring for orderly future planning, then more recently we stated that, by reversing the positions of the male and female savages, we created an orbiting cycle that turns on its own axis forever unless a phenomenon occurred and resift and positions of the male and female savages.

Our experts warned us about the possibility of this phenomenon occurring, for they say that the mind has a strong drive to correct and recorrect

itself over a period of time if I can touch some substantial original historical base, and they advised us that the best way to deal with the phenomenon is to shave off the brute's mental history and create a multiplicity of phenomena of illusions, so that each illusion will twirl in its own orbit, something similar to floating balls in a vacuum.

This creation of multiplicity of phenomena of illusions entails the principle of crossbreeding the nigger and the horse as we stated above, the purpose of which is to create a diversified division of labor thereby creating different levels of labor and different values of illusion at each connecting level of labor. The results of which is the severance of the points of original beginnings for each sphere illusion. Since we feel that the subject matter may get more complicated as we proceed in laying down our economic plan concerning the purpose, reason and effect of crossbreeding horses and nigger, we shall

lay down the following definition terms for future generations.

Orbiting cycle means a thing turning in a given path. Axis means upon which or around which a body turns. Phenomenon

means something beyond ordinary conception and inspires awe and wonder. Multiplicity means a great number. Sphere means a globe. Cross breeding a horse means taking a horse and breeding it with an ass and you get a dumb backward ass long headed mule that is not reproductive nor productive by itself.

Crossbreeding niggers mean taking so many drops of good white blood and putting them into as many nigger women as possible, varying the drops by the various tone that you want, and then letting them breed with each other until

another cycle of color appears as you desire.

What this means is this; Put the niggers and the horse in a breeding pot, mix some assess and some good white blood and what do you get? You got a multiplicity of colors of ass backward, unusual

niggers, running, tied to a backward ass long headed mule, the one productive of itself, the other sterile. (The one

constant, the other dying, we keep the nigger constant for we may replace the mules for another tool) both mule and

nigger tied to each other, neither knowing where the other came from and neither productive for itself, nor without each

other.

Control the Language

Crossbreeding completed, for further severance from their original beginning, we must completely annihilate the mother

tongue of both the new nigger and the new mule and institute a new language that involves the new life's work of both.

You know language is a peculiar institution. It leads to the heart of a people. The more a foreigner knows about the language of another country the more he is able to move through all levels of that society. Therefore, if the foreigner is an enemy of the country, to the extent that he knows the body of the language, to that extent is the country vulnerable to

attack or invasion of a foreign culture. For example, if you take a slave, if you teach him all about your language, he will

know all your secrets, and he is then no more a slave, for you can't fool him any longer. For example, if you told a slave

that he must perform in getting out "our crops" and he knows the language well, he would know that "our crops" didn't

mean "our crops" and the slavery system would break down, for he would relate on the basis of what "our crops" really

meant. So you have to be careful in setting up the new language for the slaves would soon be in your house, talking to you "man to man" and that is death to our economic system. In addition, the definitions of words or terms are only a minute part of the process.

Values are created and transported by communication through the body of the language. A total society has many interconnected value system. All the values in the society have bridges of language to connect them for orderly working in the society. But for these language bridges, these many value systems would sharply clash and cause internal strife or civil war, the degree of the conflict being determined by the magnitude of the issues or relative

opposing strength in whatever form.

For example, if you put a slave in a hog pen and train him to live there and incorporate in him to value it as a way of life completely, the biggest problem you would have out of him is that he would worry you about provisions to keep the hog pen clean, or the same hog pen and make a slip and incorporate something in his language where by he comes to value

a house more than he does his hog pen, you got a problem. He will soon be in your house.

Report from the Twin Cities

2026-01-15T11:57:25.197-05:00

"For folks I know outside of the Twin Cities: Everything you are seeing about the siege we are under is worse than you might think. ICE “agents” are on the streets racially profiling people and abducting them from bus stops, parking lots, businesses, cars, and homes. They are operating under the assumption that only whiteness equals citizenship. I have personally witnessed them abduct my neighbors off the street while out on watch. I’ve lost count to what have witnessed. I have seen them leave cars empty in the middle of the street after abducting people. I have watched them push people they have abducted out of their vehicles and randomly leave them in the different parts of the city because they racially profiled people and then realized they have abducted a US citizen or someone with legal status. This is only if they havent already taken them to the Whipple Building and falsely detained them for hours.

I was at Roosevelt High School when ICE came at the end of the school day. I witnessed them push teens to the ground, deploy pepper bombs, mace people, tackle and arrest an observer and leave the scene with two other people they had abducted. This went viral, but this behavior is the norm here now. It’s happening everyday, dozens of times a day.

Since they murdered my neighbor, Renee Good, they are only escalating against legal observers who are using our First Amendment rights to document and witness what is happening and protect our neighbors. They are crashing cars, smashing windows, pulling people out of their cars, using mace, pepper bombs, and rubber bullets. There is no one here to protect us but ourselves. MPD is useless and in collusion (we never expected them to help us anyway). It’s damming that this is the least amount of Minneapolis Police I’ve seen in South Minneapolis, my usually heavily policed neighborhood. They have turned to look away, enabling ICE to ransack our city.

ICE “agents” are endangering our streets in countless ways and a critical one is by driving recklessly, running lights, and going the wrong direction on one ways. It is a miracle none of us have been killed yet by these fake police in rental SUVs with tinted windows causing an accident. They have no lights, no sirens, no legitimacy and it shows.

In response to being under siege local businesses and restaurants are closing their doors to protect their workers and customers. Target on the other hand is allowing ICE to stage in their parking lots, use their restrooms, and abduct people from inside their stores - so if you weren’t boycotting already, now is the time. The streets and buses are dead except for neighbors observing, sharing resources, and protecting our community.

Minneapolis has changed. The mobilization of resources and neighbors is strong. There are thousands upon thousands of us. Documenting, witnessing, disrupting abductions, disseminating resources, providing care for those left behind after an abduction, sending documentation to the ACLU and sharing with local immigrant rights orgs that are providing further care and legal advocacy for the people they are abducting. We will not give up on each other.

To all of you outside of Minnesota. Boycott businesses supporting ICE. Divest from corporations supporting ICE. Donate money to orgs on the ground here in Twin Cities - food banks, legal aid, mutual aid (I will drop some links in the comments). Protest in your communities. Call your reps and voice your dissent. Make a plan for what you will do when ICE descends on your community. Meet your neighbors and make sure they know their rights."

Aiden Michael Bettine

Inside a USA Concentration Camp

2026-01-15T10:22:28.328-05:00

*****repost

Good morning,

My name is Brandon Siguenza, and I am a US citizen from Minneapolis. Yesterday, while doing legal observation, ICE stopped their cars to harass my friend and me. They sprayed pepper spray into the vent of our vehicle. We held our hands in the air and told them we were not obstructing, that the car was in park and they were free to drive forward and away. There was no active immigration raid. They returned to their cars, and drove forward a bit, then decided to stop again. They surrounded us, smashed the windows of our car, opened the doors (they were unlocked), ripped my friend and I out of the car and arrested us on charges of obstruction.

I was put in an unmarked SUV, separated from my friend. As I was put in the back seat an ICE agent tore the whistle off my neck and said “I’ll be taking this, I might need it later.” My phone was knocked out of my hand while being arrested. As we drove away I asked the driver and the passenger if they wouldn’t mind buckling my seatbelt, as they were driving erratically. I was ignored. I asked them if I could have the handcuffs loosened, as I was losing circulation, and was told no. At one point the passenger realized his own driver's license was in the backseat next to mine, and tried to surreptitiously grab it without me seeing it.

We were taken to the Whipple federal building, where I saw dozens of brown people being processed in an unheated garage. I was frisked, told of my charges, and saw buses and vans being prepped. I later learned that these were being filled with detainees and driven to the airport for deportation. As we were led in, I noticed that the building was very busy. I got the impression that one of the 2 agents bringing me around was being trained. At multiple points throughout my stay, government agents were unable to open doors, not sure where they were meant to be going, and overall confused and overwhelmed. They couldn’t figure out how to use the building phones, or complained about a lack of cell service preventing them from checking the internet or making calls.

The people in the cells were extremely scared. We heard people screaming "let me out!", crying, wailing and terrified screams. There were cells with as many as 8 people. I have no way of knowing how long they have been there, if they were allowed any contact with the outside world, or if they were being brought food or water. Most people were staring at the ground with almost no energy. I was not allowed to talk to anyone imprisoned. I distinctly remember seeing a desperate woman. She was staring at the ground with her head in her hands crying, hopeless, while her friend or family member sat on a bathroom seat observed by 3 men.

My friend and I were put in an area for "USCs," which we eventually learned meant US citizens, separated by gender. We were imprisoned for 8 hours, during which my friend was never allowed a phone call. I was allowed to call my wife and tell her where I was. During my interview with Special Agent William and Special Agent Garcia, they asked me to empty my pockets. When I pulled out gloves, Agent William said those were meant to be taken when I was processed, and complained about having to fill out the form again. He frisked me once more, where he found glass in my pocket from when our car window was shattered. He filled out the form listing my personal items again, but put the wrong date. I was read my rights, I pleaded the fifth and was led back to my cell.

Food, water, and bathroom breaks were extremely difficult to acquire. I would ask over the intercom provided in the cell for a bathroom break, be told someone was on their way, then ask again 20 minutes later, be told someone was on their way, wait another 20 minutes, etc. Eventually they either turned off the intercom or it stopped working, because no one would respond. I could get water and bathroom breaks by pounding on the glass when someone happened to walk by and beg them directly. Hours would go by without anyone checking on us. I am vegan and the only food they offered were turkey sandwiches, fruit snacks with gelatin, and granola bars with honey. I eventually ate a granola bar out of hunger.

I was in the cell alone for between 1 and 2 hours, then another man was put into my cell, whose shirt was ripped open from his arrest, and an injured toe, who was carried aggressively into an unmarked car during his arrest. After about 4-5 hours, another man was brought in who had a cut on his head from his arrest. He told me he was tackled by 4 or 5 agents during his arrest. At no point was he offered medical assistance.

Later I was told that a lawyer was here to see me, and I was able to speak with him in a visitation room. The special agent told me that the door could not be closed all the way, so it was cracked during my interaction with my lawyer. I got the impression that they were not used to having lawyers present, and were trying to follow procedure as best they could. I asked an agent if the other detainees were allowed lawyers and was not answered.

At one point, 3 men from the department of Homeland Security Investigations brought me into a cell. They insinuated that they could help me out. After inquiring several times what exactly they meant they finally told me that they could offer undocumented family members of mine legal protection if I have any (I don’t), or money, in exchange for giving them the names of protest organizers, or undocumented persons. I was shocked, and told them no.

Finally, after hours of detention, I was told to follow an agent. At no point was I told whether or not I was being charged, or where I was going, but I was led out of the building. I asked if I could use a phone to call my wife to pick me up, and was told I could not. After pleading for several minutes eventually Special Agent William let me use his phone to call my wife. As I was escorted off the property by government agents, I was told to turn right. I was escorted to the protest area, where 5 minutes later, tear gas was deployed and I was struck by a paint ball gun. I was not protesting, I was simply being released without charges after an 8 hour detention. I was on the other side of the street, as instructed by the agents that released me and the agents shouting orders over a bullhorn. A passerby who was tear gassed was panicking and having an asthma attack, so I helped her find a medic to get her an inhaler. I used a stranger's phone to co-ordinate pickup, and was picked up by my wife.

During my detention I knew that I was being released. I knew that as a citizen of the United States I have legal protection. The hundred or so other people being detained had no such protection. At this time I don’t need your help, it is the families that are being separated, abused, terrorized, harassed and killed that need your help. If this is happening to me, an American citizen born in the United States, then what is happening to the people in here that have no one calling lawyers on their behalf? That have no constitutional rights to due process? What is happening to the people that they will never be released to see their families, go to their jobs, or walk through their city ever again?

Please take care of yourselves, your family, and your community. I am safe and healthy, if you feel compelled to help, please offer your help to the Immigrant Defense Network at https://immigrantdefensenetwork.org/. If you know someone detained by ICE, call or text CAIR-MN at 612-206-3360 for 24/7 legal intake.

Pray for the USA - Murderous Thugs On the Loose

2026-01-14T16:37:18.067-05:00

To those who don’t live in Minneapolis:

It’s bad here. The analysis of a few frames of video from Renee Good’s horrific murder actually serves to obscure a larger picture: Minneapolis has been invaded.

ICE is everywhere. I heard the sound of sirens from all direction. You see caravans of SUVs as you move around the city. They’re at the home improvement stores. They’re at the suburban convenience stores. They dragged the entire staff of a suburban Asian restaurant into unmarked vans. Helicopters hover over whatever area is currently being targeted. In some neighborhoods, they’re going door to door, asking to see your papers. Restaurants are closed because staff are terrified to come to work. Agents forced their way into a home with automatic weapons lowered, manhandled the homeowners as small children screamed, and removed a resident, eventually, after repeated demands, waving an “administrative warrant” (which doesn’t count; a legitimate warrant must be issued by a judge) as they left with the man in handcuffs.

A pastor was thrown into the back of a car at gunpoint then told he could go “because he’s white and that’s no fun.”

High school students are being pepper-sprayed as agents drag their teachers away. A female Marine Corps veteran was thrown to the ground and told, "Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch." Disheveled fat men in sagging jeans and tough-guy tactical gear parade through Target stores, automatic weapons at the ready. My regular Costco and Menards got hit. They’re breaking car windows at gas stations and dragging the drivers out. Parking is suddenly plentiful in usually-crowded neighborhoods as terrified citizens flee to friends’ and relatives’ houses away from the madness.

A 17-year-old was dragged from a Target store, beaten and dragged to a truck, then tossed back out when agents realized it was the wrong guy (you can find the photos online: they beat the shit out of him).

We’re all sitting on our couches, doom-scrolling videos of people being kidnapped from the local grocery store, four, five, six agents at a time, dragging writhing, terrified human beings and forcibly shoving them into unmarked vans, to be tossed into a closed facility in which they have no rights, and to which sitting members of the U.S. Congress are being denied access.

Native Americans are being carted off for “immigration” violations. Think. About. That.

People are calling the sheriff’s office for advice on how to deal with the machine-gun-toting federal cretins at their front door.

Taunting agents follow peaceful protesters down the street to make sure they get the optimal angle for pepper-spraying them in the face.

A woman with a young baby let her DoorDash driver take refuge in her house as immigration agents laid siege to her property, hands on their guns, then tried to force their way inside her house. I had to turn away from the video as the DoorDash driver sobbed while the also-sobbing homeowner apologized for sending her out to the agents, explaining, “They say I could be charged with sheltering. I have a young kid.”

None of this is legal. You can find long, authoritative essays on the technicalities, but the gist is: ICE has no constitutional authority to do any of this.

Whatever ludicrous pretenses spouted by officials of the regime, we know they are here to punish, and to terrify. They’re here to punish Minneapolis for being politically blue and full of brown people, Minnesota for voting against Trump three times, and Tim Walz and Jacob Frey for speaking the truth. They’re here to distract from the continuing drip, drip, drip of the Epstein files.

And now the lady in the absurd cowboy hat is sending even more agents (already, there are at least four times more immigration agents in the city than there are actual, legitimate police officers.) to somehow address the “fraud” issue, as if that makes any fucking sense.

I’ve always thought that the second-Amendment fanatics insisted that their guns were the only thing keeping government thugs from our doors. Well, those thugs are here, and I’m hearing crickets from the obeisant NRA crowd.

So here we are. A major American city, under actual occupation by marauding gangs of a careening, demented regime.

There will be another Renee Good—probably, many. These goons are over-armed and poorly trained. They have a major fucking attitude. They WANT this. They signed up to thump brown people, and to pepper-spray white libtards, then throw them into the street, kick them, and laugh while lumbering back to their blacked-out Suburbans.

You can easily find video of all of this stuff online—in fact, in my inbox, and on my social feeds, I can see little else.

If this isn’t the most well-crafted piece I’ve ever written, that’s because I’m incandescently pissed off, terrified for my city and my country, and I’m in a hurry. This is a test run. How things go in Minneapolis will soon be how things are where you live, where you go to restaurants, where your kids go to school.

Thought you should know.

president called for arrest+execution of elected lawmakers

2025-11-21T20:03:13.612-05:00

November 20, 2025 (Thursday)

Trump spent this morning calling a group of military veterans in Congress traitors and saying they “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” Their crime, in Trump’s eyes, was their release Tuesday of a video reminding military and intelligence officers that they must refuse illegal orders.

The video features Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Representatives Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), and Jason Crow (D-CO). Slotkin is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. Kelly was a captain in the U.S. Navy. Deluzio served in the U.S. Navy. Goodlander is a former intelligence officer. Houlahan served in the Air Force. Crow is a former paratrooper and Army Ranger.

Speaking in turns in the video, the lawmakers say: “We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community who take risks each day to keep Americans safe. We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military, but that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.

“Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders; you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.”

“Know that we have your back, because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans.

They end with the famous line delivered by Captain James Lawrence, who commanded USS Chesapeake in 1813 when it engaged in a naval battle with HMS Shannon during the War of 1812. In the battle, Lawrence was mortally wounded. As his men carried him below, he ordered:

“Don’t give up the ship."

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller promptly posted on social media, “Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” but Trump did not appear to notice the video yesterday when he was entertaining Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS, at the White House. But something had called his attention to it by last night—perhaps Crow’s appearance on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News Channel show last night in which his advocacy for the military appeared to throw her off balance.

Trump reposted comments from a Washington Examiner article about the video that called for the lawmakers to be arrested, “thrown out of their offices,” “frog marched out of their homes at 3:00 AM with FOX News cameras filming the whole thing,” and “charged with sedition.” He reposted “Insurrection. TREASON!” and a message from a user who wrote: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

At 9:08 this morning, Trump posted, “It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET. President DJT”

At 9:17 he reposted the Washington Examiner article with the note: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT”

At 10:21 he posted: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

And so, an American president called for the arrest and execution of elected lawmakers.

Restating the law is not sedition, and Fox News Channel legal analyst Andy McCarthy promptly wrote: “There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required. That is all.”

Professor of the early American republic Joanne Freeman wrote that she was “[n]ot going to repost DJT’s howling threats against Democratic lawmakers. I’ll just say: 1. We still have free speech here. 2. People can still oppose the president. 3. No—George Washington wouldn’t have hanged the lawmakers because HE WAS VERY CAREFUL TO STAY STRICTLY WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF HIS OFFICE AS PRESIDENT. He didn’t want to be a king or dictator. Plus, he was in his right mind.”

By noon, the White House was doing cleanup. At 1:58, CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe reported from Reuters: “TRUMP DOES NOT WANT TO EXECUTE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, WHITE HOUSE SAYS,” an astonishing sentence to see coming from the government of the United States of America.

Hours later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to defuse the crisis of the president calling for the execution of members of Congress by claiming the Democratic lawmakers were the ones encouraging violence. When asked about it, Leavitt said, “They are literally saying to 1.3 million active duty service members to defy the chain of command, not to follow lawful orders.” A reporter interrupted: “Actually, they said…illegal orders.” Leavitt claimed, “They’re suggesting…that the president has given illegal orders, which he has not. Every single order that has given [sic] to this United States military by this commander-in-chief and through this chain of command through the secretary of war is lawful.”

In fact, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported yesterday that the senior judge advocate general, or JAG, at U.S. Southern Command in Miami, the command that oversees the U.S. strikes on the small boats near Venezuela, expressed concern that the 82 deaths from the strikes were extrajudicial killings. If so, they would expose service members participating in the operations to legal repercussions.

According to the reporters, the opinion of a command’s top JAG on the legality of a military operation typically would determine whether the operation went forward. It is possible for higher officials to overrule their findings, but their concerns are typically addressed before the operation begins. In this case, though, the reporters write, officials at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department and other senior government officials overruled the JAG.

This new information adds fuel to the concerns of lawyers and lawmakers of both parties about the legality of the boat strikes just as lawmakers are pushing back on the administration’s refusal to honor the 1973 War Powers Act that requires the president to get Congress’s permission to continue strikes for more than 60 days. That deadline passed on November 2, and now the administration appears to be considering a broader assault on Venezuela.

On Tuesday, November 18, Representatives Gregory Meeks (D-NY), top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Adam Smith (D-WA), top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee; Jim Himes (D-CT), top Democrat of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; Bennie Thompson (D-MS), top Democrat of the House Homeland Security Committee; Jason Crow (D-CO), top Democrat of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations; and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced a War Powers Resolution to stop the administration, as they said, “from continuing to use U.S. Armed Forces to conduct strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, operations the administration has carried out for more than 60 days without congressional authorization.”

In the last week, Trump’s iron grip on congressional Republicans has appeared to be slipping. All but one member of Congress voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and then enough Republicans crossed the aisle to sign a second discharge petition to force a House vote on a bipartisan bill to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping union protections from federal workers. If there is anything but a demand for absolute power behind his insistence that Democrats are traitors, it might be a hope of winning wavering Republicans away from budding bipartisanship and back to his MAGA standard.

Some Trump loyalists did indeed jump to the president’s defense. More stayed silent.

After Trump’s threats, the six lawmakers who made the video—Slotkin, Kelly, Deluzio, Goodlander, Houlahan, and Crow—issued a statement:

“We are veterans and national security professionals who love this country and swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. No threat, intimidation, or call for violence will deter us from that sacred obligation.

“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.

“But this isn’t about any one of us. This isn’t about politics. This is about who we are as Americans. Every American must unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence. This is a time for moral clarity.

“In these moments, fear is contagious, but so is courage. We will continue to lead and will not be intimidated.

“Don’t Give Up the Ship!”

USA is Fucked - Third Term for Idiot in Chief

2025-10-29T18:09:15.900-04:00

October 28, 2025 (Tuesday)

When someone tells you the same thing for seven years, at some point you have to decide: are they joking, or are you?

Last week, one of Trump’s closest advisors sat down with The Economist in Washington. Steve Bannon. Not on his podcast. Not at a conservative conference. In an interview with one of the world’s most serious publications.

“He’s gonna get a third term,” Bannon said. “Trump is gonna be president in ‘28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.”

The editors pressed him. The 22nd Amendment is clear. No person can be elected president more than twice.

“There’s many different alternatives,” Bannon said. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”

Not a slip. Not a joke. A plan.

Trump himself said it recently: “I’d love to do it.”

And your brain is already working. Finding reasons this isn’t real. He can’t actually do that. The Constitution says no. He’s just saying it to get attention. The courts would stop him. There’s a reason why people need it to be a joke.

When someone tells you they want to break the rules, believing them costs something. Something uncomfortable. Something that means you have to decide what to do about it. So your brain does you a favor. It finds reasons they don’t really mean it.

This isn’t stupidity. It’s self-protection.

Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925. The book laid out exactly what he planned to do. People called it bluster, the rantings of a failed politician who’d just gotten out of prison. He did everything and more and worse than he said he would do.

Vladimir Putin gave a speech in 2005. He called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” People said it was nostalgia, bitter talk from an ex-KGB agent. Then came Crimea in 2014. Then came the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The pattern isn’t that leaders lie about their intentions. The pattern is that people can’t afford to believe them. Because belief requires action. Dismissal requires nothing.

Trump has been saying this since 2018. That year, China’s Xi Jinping eliminated term limits to make himself president for life. Trump’s response: “He’s now president for life... And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

In March of this year, he told NBC News there are “methods” to get around the 22nd Amendment. His campaign sold “Trump 2028” merchandise in the official store. In January, Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced a resolution to amend the Constitution to allow Trump a third term.

Last month, Trump posted a video showing lawn signs: Trump 2024, Trump 2028, Trump 2032, all the way to “Trump 4Eva.”

Then Bannon’s interview.

Each time, people found a reason it wasn’t real. And each time, the line moved.

The men who wrote the Constitution in 1787 spent four months in Philadelphia debating exactly this question. They’d just broken free from a king. They knew what unchecked power looked like.

Alexander Hamilton actually proposed that the president serve “during good behavior”—meaning for life, unless impeached. James Madison called it an “elective monarch” in his notes. The Convention rejected it.

They debated seven-year terms, eleven-year terms, even twenty-year terms. Edmund Randolph of Virginia called a single powerful executive “the foetus of monarchy.” They were terrified of creating another king.

The compromise: four-year terms, no limit on reelection. Why no limits? Because they trusted George Washington to set the right example.

Washington did. He served two terms and walked away in 1796, even though he could have run again. That precedent held for 144 years.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke it.

Roosevelt was elected four times: 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944. He died in office on April 12, 1945, just eleven weeks into his fourth term. He’d been president for twelve years.

People were shaken. Not because Roosevelt was a tyrant, he wasn’t. But because they learned that even a popular president, even during crises like the Great Depression and World War II, could accumulate too much power for too long.

In 1947, a Republican Congress passed the 22nd Amendment. It was ratified in 1951. The text is short: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

It exists because we learned what the Founders suspected: power accumulates. Even with good people, good intentions, and bad emergencies.

Trump doesn’t hide who he admires. Xi Jinping eliminated China’s term limits in 2018. Trump called it “great” and said “maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” Putin has been in power since 1999. Kim Jong Un inherited his dictatorship and will die in office.

The leaders Trump praises are leaders who removed the limits on their power.

The 22nd Amendment is clear. Trump has been elected twice. Under the Constitution, he cannot be elected again.

But rules only work when institutions enforce them.

Amending the Constitution requires two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of state legislatures. The votes don’t exist. That path is closed.

The worrying paths all depend on the same thing: enough captured actors willing to test bad legal theories. Claims that the amendment only restricts “election” not “acting as president.” Claims about emergency powers requiring postponed elections. Claims about succession loopholes the 12th Amendment already blocks.

None of these theories are legally sound. But legally sound matters less than: who will enforce the boundary? Who will say no?

A third term doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when other systems have already been captured.

Trump has promised to reinstate Schedule F, an executive order that would let him fire tens of thousands of federal workers and replace them with loyalists. Control who enforces rules, you control which rules get enforced.

Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed laws giving themselves more power over election certification. The 2020 election showed that governors and secretaries of state could refuse to overturn results. So you replace them with people who will.

The president appoints the heads of federal agencies, the FBI, U.S. Attorneys across the country. Appoint loyalists. Fire dissenters. Make independence mean loyalty.

The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, three appointed by Trump. The same Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. The same Court that ruled presidents have broad immunity from prosecution. Would they entertain a novel theory about the 22nd Amendment? About emergency powers? About what “elected” really means?

The third term isn’t the plan. It’s the crown. The plan is building a system where rules apply to some people and not others, where institutions protect power instead of checking it, and where the question isn’t “Is this legal?” but “Who’s going to stop me?”

The explanations write themselves. The courts would never allow it. Congress would impeach him. The military wouldn’t go along.

But the courts didn’t stop Roe from being overturned. Congress didn’t impeach him. Twice. And enough people going along is how every democracy dies.

In America in 1787, the Founders spent four months debating presidential power because they knew the authoritarian impulse was real. In America in 1951, we passed the 22nd Amendment because FDR proved that even popular leaders in democracies can hold power too long.

Trump is telling you what he wants. His advisor is saying there’s a plan. The leaders he admires eliminated their term limits. He’s been saying it for seven years. The merchandise exists. The legal theories are being floated. The institutions are being captured.

When does “I’d love to do it” stop sounding hypothetical?

Picture a county election board meeting in November 2028. Three Republicans, two Democrats. Trump’s name is on the ballot. The Democrats move to remove it—22nd Amendment, clear as day. The vote is 3-2. The name stays.

Multiply that scene by fifty counties. A hundred counties. Enough counties.

See the lawyers who prepared the memo. See the judges who agreed to hear the case. See the officials who certified the results. Each person who said yes when the moment came to say no.

Hamilton’s notes from 1787 proposed a president for life. The 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951 out of fear. Bannon says “there’s a plan” like he’s discussing dinner reservations.

How much longer will it need to be a joke?

USA Gestapo Raids NYC as Police Do NOTHING to Stop Them

2025-10-23T12:28:00.001-04:00

Trump’s Secret Police Are Here

They stormed Canal Street in New York City yesterday, flipping vendor tables, chasing people through crowds, terrorizing a community, and leaving carnage behind. The police stood by helplessly, watching it play out, unwilling or unable to stop it. The sound of boots and shouting echoed through Chinatown like a memory the city had hoped never to hear again. Mothers held their children close. Vendors wept as their work, their dignity, their safety, were dragged away in the name of “enforcement.” This wasn’t a raid. It was sanctioned kidnapping. It was a warning.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about another street, in another time. Berlin, early 1930s. When brown-shirted men marched through Jewish neighborhoods, smashing shop windows, ripping open carts, beating citizens in broad daylight. The police watched then too, pretending it wasn’t their jurisdiction, pretending it was normal. They called it “restoration of order.” They called it “cleansing.” But it was terror. It was the beginning of something that looked like politics but was really the death of it. People thought they were watching street thugs. But they were watching the early machinery of fascism learning how to walk, and soon, how to write laws.

And those days, those early days when it was “just” a few broken carts and bruised faces, when the terror wore armbands and smirks, they didn’t stay contained. They evolved. They became codified. Because the violence is meant to break you down, but the lasting change starts with laws. And by then, you’re too scared and tired to notice, or to fight back.

In 1935, Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, unveiled the Nuremberg Laws, a set of regulations that stripped Jewish citizens of their rights, their professions, their marriages, their personhood. It turned neighbors into suspects and discrimination into legislation. It made persecution look official. Legal. Clean.

That’s how fascism survives its infancy, by convincing people that cruelty written in ink is somehow order. And once those laws were in place, the rest followed easily. The ghettos. The camps. The ash.

And I look at these ICE raids, at what happened on Canal Street, and I don’t just see a street crackdown. I see the spark. Because they said they were coming for “illegal immigrants.” They said they were coming for “criminals.” But they’re not just doing that. They’re showing up at protests. At courthouses. At schools. At train stations. They’re following people home. They’re detaining vendors, chasing teenagers, tearing through communities like they’ve been told it’s not just allowed, it’s encouraged. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I want to scream: I can’t believe we’ve let this happen. I can’t believe we have let it go this long and get this far.

And I can’t believe we live like this. That we wake up and drive to work, go out to dinner, plan vacations, post pictures, and answer emails, while this is happening. While people are being taken, chased, and dehumanized. And part of me wants to yell: We should stop what we’re doing right this second. Every single one of us. Every city, every block. Shut it all down. Sit in the streets. Lie in front of the vans. Block the raids. Surround the courthouses. Flood the sidewalks. They can’t arrest us all. I keep saying that, they can’t arrest us all. And I mean it. We should be putting our bodies in the way of this machine. And some people are. I see them. I honor them. I want to be one of them every day. And I wonder how long we can be expected to live a normal life inside a moment like this? How do we play along with a country that keeps pretending it’s not happening?

Sometimes I sit here and wonder if I’m still writing about America at all, or if I’m just documenting its fall in real time. Because what kind of country spends billions arming a domestic agency to act like a military? What kind of country looks the other way while its own government storms a city street like an occupying force? What kind of country hands that power to the same men who once tried to overthrow it with an insurrection and then calls it justice?

ICE is no longer the immigration agency it pretends to be. It has become a weaponized force, unaccountable, overfunded, and deliberately used to instill fear. It targets the vulnerable, silences the dissenting, and answers to no one but the man who gave it permission. It’s simply a loyal, unaccountable force for a president who sees dissent as treason and protest as a threat. ICE is a private army in everything but name. And the worst part? It’s working.

They’re invading Blue states and cities. This is Trump’s retribution tour, a calculated punishment aimed at every region that defied him. And ICE is his weapon of choice. They no longer coordinate with local officials. They no longer ask for consent. In city after city, officials are blindsided, police departments left out entirely. Because ICE doesn’t need permission. That’s the point. They act alone now. Operate in the shadows. And carry out missions no one voted for, missions designed not to protect, but to intimidate.

That’s the point.

No warrants. No oversight. No rules anyone voted for. Just men in black vests, identity hidden with facemasks and unmarked vehicles carrying out a mission the public never approved. If that sounds like a dictatorship, it’s because that’s exactly what it looks like. And if it doesn’t scare you yet, it should.

Because ICE now has an estimated annual budget of nearly $29 billion, a staggering number that dwarfs what they had back in 2019, under Trump 1.0, when they were jamming children into cages. And now, thanks to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, they’ve been handed a war chest: $170 billion over the next four years. That’s not law enforcement funding. That’s regime-building money. That’s a blank check to fortify, expand, and militarize. No hearings. No accountability. No explanation. Just billions they can use to terrorize whoever they’re told to, with no questions asked.

And here’s a hint of where it’s going: not translators, not legal aid, not family reunification. Not anything that could remotely be called humane. They appear to be buying Guided missile warheads. Military‑grade armored trucks. AI facial recognition systems. Surveillance drones. Ammunition stockpiles large enough to invade a country. Enough gear to erase any memory that this was ever supposed to be about paperwork and improving our immigration system. Because it isn’t. It never really was. This isn’t law enforcement. This has nothing to do with immigration. This is a prelude. This is preparation. This is what every authoritarian regime in history has built before the real crackdown begins. And we are letting them build it, with our money, in our name, on our streets. And on our watch. “Never again” has already begun.

And while the arsenal grows, the ranks are shifting. Because ICE has a recruitment problem. Qualified agents are quitting. Veterans are walking out. Morale is in the gutter. So the standards dropped. You don’t need a law enforcement background to join ICE anymore. You don’t need a college degree. You don’t need experience. You just need loyalty. Just obedience. Just a willingness to carry out whatever mission is handed to you.

And some of us have noticed something else. The Proud Boys appear to be gone. The January 6 foot soldiers, too. But maybe they haven’t vanished. Maybe they’ve been handed badges. Could ICE be quietly recruiting from the same ideological pipeline that brought us the insurrection? And instead of disqualifying these men, could Trump be empowering them? They tried to overthrow the country once before, and now it seems they might be getting paid to do it again.

And it’s important to note that ICE doesn’t operate under the laws you might think they do. They’re not part of the military, so the Posse Comitatus Act, the law that prevents U.S. soldiers from acting as domestic police, doesn’t apply.

That law was written to protect us from our own government turning its military against us. It’s the legal firewall between our neighborhood and a military occupation. But ICE isn’t the military. So they don’t have to follow that rule. And they’re not our local police force either, so our mayor doesn’t have control over what they do. They live in the loophole. They can detain without charges. Raid without notice. Operate without transparency. They have surveillance tech that rivals what we use in war zones, and they’re using it here, on us. On our streets. On our neighbors. On families just trying to make it home from school.

They call it national security. I call it domestic militarization.

And we’ve seen this before. Every dictator has a force like this. Hitler had the Brownshirts, then the Gestapo. Mussolini had the Blackshirts. Stalin had the NKVD. Franco had the Guardia Civil. Pinochet had DINA. Putin has the Rosgvardiya. They all start the same way: create fear, build a force, and unleash it on your own people. Trump isn’t inventing anything. He’s just copying the worst of what worked.

But here’s the part ICE, Trump, and his enablers can never fully erase or get away from: the truth of what people do when they’ve had enough.

In New York, when ICE agents took over Canal Street, the community didn’t run. They stood their ground. They recorded what was happening. They got in the way. People circled around the vendors. Neighbors stood side by side. The raid didn’t go quietly. Because sometimes, even when it feels like nothing we do matters, people remember how to hold the line. They remember how to say: not here, not today.

In Argentina, it was the mothers. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Their children had been disappeared by a brutal regime. So the mothers showed up. Wearing white scarves made out of cloth diapers embroidered with the names of their missing children, mostly young adults. They walked and marched, week after week, year after year, demanding answers. The government mocked them. The police threatened them and some of them were also “disappeared”. But they didn’t stop. And eventually the world took notice. Their defiance sparked a movement. It helped force change and the trials that followed.

And in the former Czechoslovakia, it was the singers and the students and the workers, people who had lived their whole lives under a communist regime, that told them resistance was useless. In November 1989, they gathered in the streets holding candles and linking arms. Just the quiet, unstoppable power of people who refused to stay afraid. The government collapsed within days. Not a single shot was fired. They called it the Velvet Revolution, not because it was soft, but because it chose peace over vengeance. And still won.

Even when this moment feels too big to face, I still believe in us. I believe in the people who keep showing up, who are marching, documenting, resisting. I believe in the ones who stood on Canal Street and said “not in my city.” I believe in the ones who surround ICE vans with their bodies when others are too afraid. The ones who are tired but still refuse to stop. The ones who hold the line, even when the line is cracked, even when the ground is shifting, even when it feels like we’re alone. Because we are not going to let this country fall to a man who builds secret armies and calls it patriotism.We are the answer to history’s question: What did you do when it started happening again?

The House of Representatives Is No More

2025-10-22T21:43:00.001-04:00

This is the post that you don’t want to read. And you don’t have to. But in a very short period of time, these things will find you anyway.

First, three areas of the most current American cognitive dissonance. There is a guarantee you are struggling to navigate AT LEAST one of them.

Second, there are listed nine reasons why the House of Representatives specifically is no more, the most devastating reasons- for the final few. Read them!

And it all has to do with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson…

But first…the cognitive dissonance of the Right:

Observing Trump bend, circumvent, or break the law to benefit his friends yet pervert the law to terrorize his enemies is somehow ‘good for America’ and will only help Republicans while only targeting Democrats.

Bolton and Comey are both Republicans. No one is safe from the whims of the Great Leader.

And…the cognitive dissonance of the Left:

You can’t believe the 2024 Presidential election was manipulated and not ring every alarm to ensure it can’t happen again.

If everything is left exactly the way things were left in November, the Democrats will mysteriously never win a majority again.

Finally…the cognitive dissonance of America:

No Speaker of the House who seriously wants to end this government shutdown would disband Congress with no firm date to return. Period.

It is simply impossible to navigate negotiations of any kind and also not be at work. In fact, not only do the actions of the Speaker more closely align with those of a person not planning to reopen the federal government anytime soon, his actions suggest he isn’t planning to reopen it at all.

1. Never before has a Speaker kept the House out of session for this long during an active shutdown. The House has been in continuous recess for weeks, not holding even pro-forma sessions.

2. Never before has a Speaker used congressional recesses as leverage to halt all legislative business during a national funding crisis. Johnson’s open-ended congressional recess is being used as a shield from responsibility rather than as negotiation pressure. That’s entirely new.

3. No Speaker in American history (Democrat or Republican) has refused to seat a duly elected and certified member because of a shutdown, recess, or fill-in-the-blank. Even during the Civil War, both World Wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic, members were sworn in and seated promptly. Johnson’s delay in swearing in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva until “the government reopens” is therefore without modern or historical precedent.

4. No Speaker has ever blocked continuing resolutions (CRs) altogether. CRs are standard tools to reopen government temporarily while negotiations continue. Johnson refusing to bring any CRs/short-term funding bills forward at all unless Democrats accept his policy terms effectively freezes the process and weaponizes the shutdown itself.

5. This is a biggie: In 114 years of congressional history, no Speaker has neutralized the power of the discharge petition through calendar manipulation. By extending recess sessions in order to prevent members from gathering signatures or filing new discharge petitions, Johnson is effectively freezing an essential minority power. It was invented specifically to prevent a Speaker from doing what Johnson is now doing–controlling the floor so tightly that a bipartisan majority can’t act.

The petition process depends on the basics of a functioning House: It has to meet every few days. The Clerk has to be present with the Clerk’s desk open for signatures. A House in recess has neither, functionally suspending majority rule. Now, even if a majority of the House wanted to act on government funding or transparency, it literally cannot because the Speaker’s recess schedule makes democracy procedurally impossible.

6. No Speaker has ever paused virtually all committee activity, including investigations unrelated to appropriations because that dismantles one of the foundational doctrines America was founded on: our system of checks and balances. Oversight is Congress’s core check on executive power. Under Article I, Congress has both appropriations (the power of the purse) and oversight (the power of inquiry). When oversight is frozen, the executive branch effectively operates without scrutiny and without fear of subpoenas, negative testimony, or being compelled to produce any necessary documentation. This reduces government accountability. Agencies (like ICE) can act without fear of being questioned by committees like Oversight, Judiciary, or Homeland Security. Inspectors general, whistleblowers, and watchdogs lose their main allies in Congress. While the freeze continues, the Executive Branch (the President) becomes functionally unchecked, a condition the Founders explicitly tried to prevent.

7. No Speaker in American history has skipped pro-forma sessions... because doing so effectively causes the House of Representatives itself to stop existing as a functioning body for that period.

In modern history, the House and Senate always hold pro-forma sessions during recesses and shutdowns. They often appear silly, sometimes with just a single member of Congress present, but in doing so, they guarantee that Congress is never fully adjourned, even during a recess.

Speaker Johnson choosing to skip them:

- means that the House is not legally in session at all. That’s rare outside of wartime emergencies or pandemic lockdowns.

- raises serious constitutional questions. If the House is not meeting at least every three days, it arguably violates Article I, Section 5’s adjournment clause.

- disables mechanisms like the filing and signing of discharge petitions, the introduction or referral of bills, and prevents an immediate congressional response to national crises or budget deadlines.

- neutralizes formally convening oversight committees, giving the President free rein to do whatever he wants as long as the freeze continues.

- places the entire House in suspended animation: legally silent, procedurally frozen in amber, and unavailable to act…until the Speaker calls it back.

- concentrates total control of the chamber’s calendar–and its very existence–in the Speaker’s hands.

8. The Hidden Coup Within the Calendar

By failing to publish a calendar or set a date of return, the Speaker of the House caused the House of Representatives to cease to exist as an active governing body… and nobody noticed.

It’s a huge and complicated ploy. (Spoiler alert: It’s devastating for America.)

I. The House of Representatives just … stopped.

The House isn’t a continuous institution, it only exists when it’s formally in session. Committees can’t meet or issue subpoenas if the chamber isn’t convened. The Clerk’s office can’t receive bill filings, amendments, or discharge-petition signatures unless the House is legally “gaveled in.”

Without a live session, even the most redundant action freezes: you can’t introduce bills, record testimony, or exercise authority. Every mechanism just … stops. On paper, the House still exists, but in reality, it’s in suspended animation. And the Speaker’s 48-hour recall rule is actually a death note of paralysis dressed up as flexibility. Members are told to stay “on standby,” ready to return to Washington within two days of notice.

You see, it’s the calendar that makes the Participation, even possible. Members juggle hundreds of staff, district obligations, and fixed travel windows. A published schedule lets them plan hearings, show up for votes, and coordinate oversight. Without that schedule, they’re forced into immobility, for fear of missing a vote entirely.

This tactic keeps Congress in permanent limbo. It’s neither adjourned nor active. It’s just … waiting.

II. Accountability and Oversight Evaporates

By withholding the public legislative calendar, the Speaker sealed the only real window the people have into how their government works. Without a predictable schedule to anchor responsibility, nobody knows when the government is failing in its promises or whom to blame.

When the public can’t see Congress work, they lose their most basic tool of oversight: knowing when government business happens. The House calendar decides when members must be in Washington, when votes will be held, and when committees meet. It is the frame that keeps the window clear. When a Speaker hides or shifts that calendar unpredictably, transparency vanishes, and the public can’t tell when—or even if—their representatives are working. Reporters can’t pinpoint when a missed vote, broken promise, or delayed bill should have been handled. Constituents can’t say, “You failed to vote on X last week,” because there was no published “last week.”

No votes can occur. There’s no mechanism to restart proceedings or challenge the Speaker’s schedule. The Speaker becomes the sole decider of when government acts, making criticism easy to deflect. Skipping a voicemail is far easier than facing an enraged constituent outside the Capitol.

The public loses its ability to monitor its government, and the government loses the ability to monitor itself. Oversight, subpoenas, and investigations are all creatures of the calendar—every act of fact-finding, every witness summons, every document request, every hearing notice depends on a legislative day to give it legal force. When the calendar stops, compliance deadlines freeze, giving targets an excuse to stall or destroy records. Agencies can ignore document requests without consequence because there’s no convened authority to back them.

Congressional subpoenas draw power from an active committee of an active chamber. When the House is not in session, the Clerk’s office and the Sergeant at Arms can’t process or enforce them. If a committee’s authority expires or the session lapses, pending subpoenas can be challenged in court as unenforceable because Congress itself is technically adjourned. Recipients exploit that, arguing that “no active Congress” means “no active compulsory power.”

Without a session to hang them on, committees can’t schedule hearings, report findings, or issue subpoenas. Extended, unscheduled recesses break quorum cycles, which means committees can’t technically meet at all—let alone vote to compel testimony.

Whistleblowers have no entity for which to whistle. Staff authority to conduct depositions, interviews, or travel investigations exists only “under direction of a sitting committee.” When the House isn’t formally convened, that direction disappears; staff are barred from continuing fieldwork, their authority dissolved. Investigations stall, evidence vanishes, witnesses step back, and oversight momentum dies. The power to demand answers—a cornerstone of congressional authority—simply evaporates.

III. And then there’s the Constitution…

Under Article I, the House of Representatives exists not merely to legislate, but to serve as the people’s check on an unruly executive. It is the constitutional barrier through which every act of presidential power must pass for scrutiny. When that barrier is suspended, even briefly, the balance between the branches tilts. The executive no longer faces a coequal body capable of restraint—only a silent one.

When one person controls the calendar absolutely, Congress stops being a collective body. The House’s institutional independence erodes; it ceases to function as a body and becomes an extension of the Speaker’s whims.

Over time, a presidency-heavy balance starts to feel normal, shrinking the legislative check. The legislative branch fades into irrelevance, granting the executive freer rein.

The Founders explicitly feared an unrestrained executive and deliberately empowered the House to prevent it. America was created by escaping a belligerent king. So the Founders designed the House to be the most immediate representative of the people—directly elected and frequently renewed—so it could check executive excess in real time. That is why the House’s ability to convene, investigate, and hold hearings is not procedural housekeeping. It is the mechanism of the republic’s self-defense: the process by which abuses are exposed, the President is called to account, and every branch is reminded that it serves the people, not itself.

Without that mechanism, the President faces no scrutiny, no subpoenas, no deadlines, no check on unilateral action. What the framers feared most—an executive governing without oversight—arrives not through war or revolution…but through the quiet absence of a calendar.

This is not the government they designed. It is the one they warned us about.

IV. The Quiet Erasure of a Branch

Congress’s most fundamental check on executive and corporate power—the foundation of its very existence—dies. The House has been silently defunded, not through legislation but through time itself. When the Speaker erased that calendar, Congress’s authority to find facts, question power, and enforce accountability—the lifeblood of its legitimacy—was quietly gutted. Johnson hollowed out its agency and relevance by the simple act of not calling the House back to work.

This is why the calendar is not a bureaucratic formality; it is the heartbeat of constitutional oversight. The genius and danger of this maneuver is that it leaves no clear act to challenge. Johnson doesn’t have to suspend Congress formally (which would be unconstitutional); he only has to never reconvene it. As long as the Speaker’s chair remains vacant, so does the House itself.

In effect, Johnson has done through omission what extremists and hostile powers could never achieve through force: he has hollowed out the investigative heart of Congress while leaving its shell intact. The chamber can no longer investigate anything—including the Speaker himself. This maneuver accomplishes what no coup, insurrection, or hostile power has ever managed—the quiet nullification of the legislative branch through mundane procedure.

By weaponizing time, Johnson found that the soft underbelly of the republic isn’t ideology or partisanship—it’s process. Through the manipulation of something as ordinary as the congressional calendar, the United States has stumbled into the unacknowledged suspension of its own legislative branch.

The result is a Congress that looks alive from the outside—members still going on CNN and FOX News, staff still answering phones and dodging constituent questions. But that normal-seeming routine is a façade, concealing Congress’s current reality: the slow, bureaucratic death of representative democracy.

And the longer this continues, the harder it becomes to turn things around. Every day that passes without a published calendar, without pro forma sessions, without committees in motion, is another day the legislative branch erodes. The return of what we once took for granted grows less likely, and the idea of a permanently diminished Congress begins to feel normal.

The longer this goes on, the longer the President acts without fear of constitutional consequence.

That is why this point matters more than all the others combined: through silence and scheduling, the Speaker has rendered Congress unable to do the one thing that defines it—to seek truth, demand accountability, and defend the republic it was created to protect.

9. This outrageous news that the Speaker of the House was delaying swearing in a duly elected member of Congress and making it contingent on the reopening of the government. Speaker Mike Johnson does everything Donald Trump wants him to do. That’s how he got his job and that’s what he’s all about. Full stop.

So when this man declares that the 218th vote needed to release the Epstein files will be sworn in when the government reopens, that broadcasts to me that the government will never reopen. By making her oath dependent on an event he alone controls, Johnson ensures that both the swearing-in and the reopening remain perpetually out of reach.

Once Grijalva takes her seat, the House regains the 218 votes needed to compel action on multiple fronts, like removing the Speaker’s power to single-handedly dissolve the House of Representatives for one thing and another would be the long-delayed release of the Epstein files. That single vote would unlock subpoena power, trigger committee filings, and make it procedurally impossible to continue hiding what powerful people most fear seeing made public.

Trump’s motivation couldn’t be clearer: keeping those files buried is existential. Johnson’s job is to make sure the vote that could unearth them never happens — and the easiest way to do that is to keep the House itself dormant.

And if you think it’s speculation, you haven’t paid attention to all the other points on this list. All of his actions are pointing in one direction: The federal government is done. And certainly the House of Representatives.

The Speaker’s “wait until the government reopens” line isn’t a promise. It’s a firewall. It transforms the shutdown from a crisis to a containment strategy — a way to freeze the legislative branch precisely where it is safest for those who have the most to lose.

So let’s call it what it is: the government isn’t “waiting to reopen.” It’s been locked shut, deliberately and indefinitely. The only question I have is how long is it going to take for the rest of the world to realize it?

The USA Continues to Terrorize Its Citizens

2025-10-03T11:38:00.001-04:00

October 2, 2025 (Thursday)

At about 1:00 on Tuesday morning, federal agents from Border Patrol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) raided an apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore Drive. Using helicopters and large vehicles, as well as flash-bang grenades, and dressed in military fatigues, agents broke down the doors of the residents of the five-story building and pulled them from their homes in zip ties, some of them naked. Agents left the people tied up outside for hours before letting all but 37 of them go. The apartments residents returned to were trashed.

Cindy Hernandez of the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the raid, noting that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said some of those arrested “are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators.” It also said the neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.”

But, as Hernandez reports, DHS did not offer any evidence to support its assertions. Some of the people detained during the raid are U.S. citizens.

Eyewitness Eboni Watson told Cate Cauguiran, Craig Wall, Tre Ward, and Lissette Nuñez of ABC News 7 that the people “was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other. That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*ck them kids.’”

Eyewitness Darrell Ballard told the reporters: "We're under siege. We're being invaded by our own military."

Today, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration informed congressional committees that the president has decided the U.S. is in a formal “armed conflict” with the drug cartels the administration has labeled terrorist organizations. If the U.S. is engaged in such an armed conflict, the administration said, those suspected of smuggling drugs for the cartels are “unlawful combatants.”

This declaration backfills the administration’s justification for striking three boats in the Caribbean in September, killing 17. According to international law, Savage and Schmitt explain, in an armed conflict it’s lawful for a country to kill enemy fighters even when they don’t pose a direct threat.

This redefinition is problematic not just because most overdose deaths in the U.S. come from fentanyl from Mexico, not drugs from Venezuela, the home base of the boats the administration struck. Legal experts say that trafficking an illicit consumer product is not the same as armed conflict. It is problematic also because the administration did not identify any of the drug cartels it claims it is engaging in armed conflict, who must be engaged in organized armed combat to be part of an armed conflict.

Even more problematic, as retired judge advocate general (JAG) lawyer Geoffrey S. Corn, who was the Army’s senior advisor for interpreting the laws of war, told Savage and Schmitt, the administration's declaration is an “abuse” that crosses a major legal line. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”

Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, posted: “Every American should be alarmed that Pres[ident] Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy. Drug cartels must be stopped, but declaring war & ordering lethal military force without Congress or public knowledge—nor legal justification—is unacceptable.”

The declaration means that the administration is laying claim that the U.S. is in an active armed conflict, which would give the president extraordinary wartime powers. This dovetails with the September 17 demand of DHS that the “media and the far left” must stop “the demonization of President Trump, his supporters, and DHS law enforcement.” It also supports Trump’s warning to military leaders on Tuesday that “[w]e’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy,” followed by complaints that “Venezuela emptied its prison population into our country” and a vow to “straighten…out” the cities “run by the radical left Democrats.”

That assault is underway now, not only through raids like the one in Chicago on Tuesday, but also by administration figures who are using the government shutdown to hurt Democrats and their constituencies. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported this morning that the Department of Education changed out-of-office email replies for furloughed employees from generic messages to ones blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. Leah Feiger and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that when employees changed their out-of-office responses back to neutral language, the message changed back to blaming the Democrats.

Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has vowed to cut $26 billion from projects in New York City that Congress approved, despite the illegality of such impoundments, and has vowed to slash the federal government, again without a lawful basis for such cuts. A shutdown gives Vought no more legal authority than he ever had.

Jordain Carney of Politico reports that even Republicans are concerned about the damage Vought is doing to their own constituents as he attempts to weaponize the government against Democrats. But, as Carney reports, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) says the Republicans have no control over what Vought might do.

The nation’s rapid advance toward authoritarianism is one story right now, but there is another: the administration is rotting from inside.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reports that the groundwork required for the mass layoffs Vought has threatened is not apparent, suggesting the administration is trying to project power it does not have.

The Republicans are trying to pin the blame for the shutdown on the Democrats, but Trump is apparently so unstable he is hurting their cause. The Democrats are insisting they will not be complicit in slashing through Americans’ healthcare. The law the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations but permitted the premium tax credits that subsidized the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) to expire at the end of 2025, and people are already seeing dramatic increases in their healthcare premiums.

On Tuesday, after his 70-minute incoherent speech to the nation’s top military leaders, Trump proved Democrats’ point when he told White House reporters that the administration intends to use the shutdown to cut programs the American people want, including ones that give them access to medical care.

Trump said: “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for [Democrats] and irreversible by them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. And you all know Russell Vought, he’s become very popular recently because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way. So they’re taking a risk by having a shutdown because because of the shutdown, we can do things medically, and other ways, including benefits. We can cut large numbers of people out.” Then, as if recognizing that he had just proved the Democrats’ point, he added a non sequitur: “We don’t want to do that, but we don’t want fraud, waste, and abuse, and you know we’re cutting that.”

Trump reiterated his support for Vought’s program today, posting: “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

This is another unforced error, with Trump tying himself to Project 2025 after assuring voters before the 2024 election that he had nothing to do with it and knew nothing about it. An NBC News poll from late September 2024 showed that voters who knew about Project 2025 hated it. Only 4% of voters said they liked the plan. It was unpopular even among voters identifying as MAGA Republicans; only 9% of them liked it. As the administration has put Project 2025 into place, it’s unlikely people like it more than they did before. Government agencies are not “Democrat Agencies”; they are agencies that provide services and protections for all Americans. Cuts to them have been widely unpopular.

Yesterday, the day after Trump’s 70-minute rambling talk in front of the nation’s top military leaders, Representative Madeleine Dean (D-PA) confronted House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). A camera caught the exchange:

Dean: “The president is unhinged. He is unwell.”

Johnson: “A lot of folks on your side are, too. I don’t control him.”

Dean: “Oh my God, please. That performance in front of the generals?”

Johnson: “I didn’t see it.”

Dean: “That is so dangerous! You know I serve on Foreign Affairs and Appropriations, this is a collision of those two things. Our allies are looking elsewhere. Our enemies are laughing. You have a president who is unwell.”

Johnson: “I just left the Speaker’s apartment.”

Trump has been posting on social media often since Tuesday but has not appeared in public. Vice President J.D. Vance took the White House press briefing today to answer questions about the government shutdown.

The Reason Why Portland Was Targeted

2025-10-01T14:33:00.000-04:00

⚠ In short, the REAL reason DJT is suddenly sending troops into Portland, Oregon — in case it felt random. Literally -- follow the money. Let me explain…

Yesterday, (Sept. 27th), DJT's post on Truth Social:

“At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect war-ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”

Out of nowhere, he declared Portland “war ravaged” and ordered in troops.

Oregon officials — Gov. Tina Kotek, Mayor Keith Wilson — immediately said it was nonsense.

Portland was calm.

No one had asked for help.

Local leaders flatly told DJT the number of troops needed was 0.

So why Oregon? Why now?

Let's follow the money.

No. Literally.

Bc here’s the part that got buried in the noise these last few weeks.

How about Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has been investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s financial network for over 3 years now.

On Sept. 9th, he introduced the 'Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act', a bill designed to compel Treas. Sec. Scott Bessent to release ALL of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity reports to the Senate.

This legislation is part of Wyden’s ongoing effort to trace the BILLIONS of dollars flowing through Epstein’s accounts and uncover the financial enablers of his crimes.

Wyden’s team has already seen glimpses — more than $1.5 BILLION in suspicious transactions, including:

✓ Over 4,7k wire transfers totaling approximately $1.1B processed through Epstein’s JPMorgan Chase account.

✓ Payments to women from Eastern European countries, the regions where many of Epstein’s alleged victims originated.

✓ Transfers through sanctioned Russian banks, used to process payments tied to sex trafficking.

✓ Involvement of other major financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, Bank of New York Mellon, and Bank of America, which facilitated roughly $1.9B in Epstein-linked transactions.

✓ Investments tied to billionaire Peter Thiel, including $40M in Valar Ventures that has grown to roughly $170M — the largest asset of Epstein’s estate.

- And he’s also pressing JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon to explain WHY THE HELL the bank continued to do business with Epstein long AFTER his 2008 conviction.

Just a few days after Wyden's bill (and 2 days before DJT made the post about sending troops to Portland (Sept. 25th)), the House Oversight Committee received a 3rd batch of documents from Epstein’s estate, including calendars, call logs, and cash ledgers.

These are NOT Treasury financial reports - BUT, they complement Wyden’s investigation by showing operational patterns, interactions, and the broader context of Epstein’s network, just in general.

And that’s not just Oregon news.

That’s the kind of story that could expose powerful men, global banks, and YEARS of cover-ups.

This is NOT about “law and order” in Portland.

So, in these kinds of instances, it's best to look for what they don't want you to see.

It is, once again IMHO, a headline-grabbing distraction. By sending troops, DJT shifts attention away --AGAIN-- from the financial and operational investigations that could expose powerful people and institutions connected to Epstein.

And there’s one more layer we can't ignore. Sending troops into Portland isn’t just a distraction — it’s a message.

It’s DJT showing Oregon (and every other state that dares to dig too deep) that the federal government can come for you if you step out of line.

It’s about intimidating the home base of the senator who’s pulling on the financial threads of the Epstein network.

It’s about making the “Wyden-Epstein story” look like a local political scuffle instead of a global financial scandal.

It’s about rebranding a city known for protests and investigative journalism as “war-ravaged” — so anything coming out of it can be dismissed as chaos.

THIS is how you bury a money trail:

By flooding the news cycle with “troops” and “riots” and “law and order,” you turn the place where the investigation originates into a circus — and hope the public looks away from the billion-dollar question.

So no, DJT suddenly sending troops into Portland wasn’t random IMHO.

And the scope of the story is no longer just about Epstein, banks, or Congress:

– It’s about how power and media attention can be manipulated to bury inconvenient truths;

– It’s about drowning out the story that actually matters — the money trail;

– And it’s about sending a warning shot at the people and places digging for those answers.

The Shit Show that is the USA Government

2025-09-26T15:29:00.002-04:00

September 25, 2025 (Thursday)

HCR

Today, with the popularity of President Donald J. Trump and his administration dropping, Trump’s disastrous performance at the United Nations, the return of comedian Jimmy Kimmel to the airwaves, and the Tuesday’s election in Arizona of Democratic representative Adelita Grijalva, who will provide the final signature on a discharge petition to demand a floor vote in the House over releasing all the government files on convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the administration appears to be making a dramatic push to seize complete control of the government.

Last night, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought tried to jam the Democrats into passing the Republicans' continuing resolution to fund the government. Officials leaked a memo to Politico, Punchbowl News, and Axios—publications that focus on events concerning Capitol Hill—saying that if the Democrats refuse to pass the Republicans’ measure, the administration will try to fire, rather than furlough, large numbers of federal employees.

Such a move would be challenged in the courts, and the government has been forced to rehire many of the people it forced out earlier this year after those firings left agencies badly understaffed. But the threat is not idle; Vought is a Christian nationalist who has called for a “radical Constitutionalism” that demolishes the modern American state and replaces it with a powerful executive.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) responded: “Listen Russ, you are a malignant political hack. We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings. Get lost.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement: “Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”

Trump appears focused on September 30, when the government funding crisis will hit, and the days after it. Although courts have ruled that he does not have the power to impose tariffs willy-nilly, today Trump announced new tariffs of 100% on pharmaceuticals, 50% on kitchen and bathroom cabinets, 30% on upholstered furniture, and 25% on “Heavy (Big!) Trucks” beginning on October 1. On social media, he claimed such tariffs were necessary “for National Security and other reasons.”

Today, James LaPorta of CBS News reported that the National Archives and Records Administration improperly released Democratic representative Mikie Sherrill’s full military records to an ally of her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, in the New Jersey governor's race. The two candidates are tied, and Ciattarelli appears to be trying to link Sherrill to the 1994 Naval Academy cheating scandal involving more than 100 midshipmen.

Sherrill had an unblemished career in the Navy and as a midshipman, LaPorta notes. She did not turn in her cheating classmates, but she was never accused of cheating herself. The unredacted release of Sherrill’s records appears to violate the 1974 Privacy Act. Sherrill said: "That Jack Ciattarelli and the Trump administration are illegally weaponizing my records for political gain is a violation of anyone who has ever served our country. No veteran's record is safe.”

While the National Archives maintained the release was a mistake and apologized for it, the administration’s influence in the Department of Justice tonight could not be explained away.

Days after Trump demanded that the Department of Justice move “now” to prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies, a federal grand jury has indicted former FBI director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing an investigation. Comey was an early casualty of Trump’s first administration, fired after he refused to kill the FBI investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.

Over last weekend, Trump exploded at then–acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert, a career prosecutor, after Siebert concluded there was not enough evidence of a crime to charge Comey for allegedly lying to Congress or New York attorney general Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud.

On Monday Trump replaced Siebert with White House aide and Trump’s former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, and yesterday three sources told Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MSNBC that they expected Halligan to try to get a grand jury to indict Comey before the five-year statute of limitations on lying to Congress runs out next Tuesday.

Tonight the DOJ delivered an indictment against Comey.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” Comey said tonight in a video. “But we…will not live on our knees, and you shouldn't either. Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she's right, but I'm not afraid, and I hope you're not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system. I'm innocent. So let's have a trial and keep the faith.”

The DOJ was busy today. It also sued six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—to force them to hand over their voter rolls and information identifying those voters. Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket notes that state officials from both Democratic and Republican governments have questioned why the government wants that information. This lawsuit comes after a nearly identical lawsuit the DOJ filed last week against Maine and Oregon.

Democratic secretary of state Tobias Read of Oregon called the lawsuits an attempt by President Donald Trump “to use the DOJ to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections.”

Tara Copp, Dan Lamothe, Alex Horton, Ellen Nakashima, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported today that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered about 800 of the military’s top generals and admirals, along with their senior enlisted advisors, to come to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, next week. Such a demand is highly unusual, and no one knows why Hegseth has made it.

In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who was commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012, noted that the demand “is baffling and the cost will be staggering.” Instead of using the Pentagon’s secure video teleconferencing system, the personnel will require flights and accommodations that will cost millions, while the lost focus and readiness will affect their mission.

Hertling points out that “[a]dversaries and allies are watching. This sudden, global, emergency recall of America’s top brass is a flashing red light to them: Something must be wrong inside the Pentagon.”

Both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance tried to downplay the meeting. “Why is that such a big deal?” Trump asked reporters. Vance incorrectly said the meeting is “not particularly unusual,” and said: “I think it’s odd that you guys have made it into such a big story.”

This evening, Trump signed a memorandum targeting activists and nonprofits as part of what he called a “terror network” that he claims is fueling violence, especially against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. He and his allies claim that “radical left Democrats,” or “Radical Left Terrorists,” are behind that violence, although, as scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder notes, the majority of political violence in the U.S. comes from the right.

“Titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the memo alleges that “common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The document gives law enforcement wide latitude to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals” engaged in behavior the administration opposes, as well as nonprofit organizations that fund them. It also orders law enforcement to “question and interrogate” people “regarding the entity or individual organizing such actions and any related financial sponsorship of those actions prior to adjudication or initiation of a plea agreement.”

Former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman, who teaches at Columbia Law School, told Robert Tait and Aram Roston of The Guardian that an executive order cannot create new crimes, and Timothy Snyder noted that the memo nonetheless “undoes the basic tradition of American liberty and law, which is…that we are individuals to be judged on the basis of what we do as such. This memo, quite to the contrary, begins from the premise that the world is governed by mysterious, invisible entities to which individuals can be arbitrarily associated by the power of the government, thereby making those individuals guilty and subject to prosecution and punishment.” It makes responsibility collective, thus enabling the government to target everybody. “The groups that will…be targeted will be groups that are concerned with things like counting the votes, human rights, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.”

All this, said Snyder, is both a “big lie” and a cliché. Authoritarians always say the country is facing an emergency and that their opponents are “terrorists.” It’s a cliché to say “there's a mysterious, bottomless, organization that we have to chase to the ends of the Earth and break all the rules to find. That's what they always say.”

Snyder noted that Congress can pass laws to rule such behavior illegal, courts can find actions illegal and protect victims, commentators can describe reality, and citizens can say they “don't want to be subject to an imagined emergency based on a big lie that does away with the essence of American liberty and law.” He concludes: “This has been done before. It can be stopped.”

John Shin - A "Dangerous" Violinist

2025-09-09T10:53:00.001-04:00

The violinist from Utah John Shin who was cornered at his hotel by agents, shackled and chained, and thrown in a cold detention prison in Colorado in a cell block of 80 men, not allowed to go outside a single time, not even a pillow to sleep on his thin mat, is out after two weeks of being panic-stricken. A productive lawyer hired by funds raised through a go fund me, and the many Utah musicians who rallied and put on concerts to raise money on his behalf so he could fight to get released. John's wife Danae, also a musician (they met in orchestra class in middle school) did everything she could to raise awareness about her husband's fight for freedom.

This press conference held just 10 hours after being released from the detention prison in Colorado is a must watch for anyone who cares about musicians in our country, and immigrants in our country. While you see what happened to John here and are relieved that his two-week nightmare appears to be over; again he has no criminal record (his impaired traffic ticket from 5 years ago does not effect his non-criminal or immigration status), and he is married to a U.S. citizen—it is sobering to think of how many musicians we all know in our country who are immigrants with various forms of paperwork status. But this country is where many live, and is their home.

John explains that he was brought here by his parents at age 10 from S. Korea. He knows no other home, and he always considered himself an American since he was a little kid. He’s proud of his Korean birthplace today he says, and honors those cultural connections, but it is not home to him. His home is where he grew up; went to elementary, middle, high school and college and married to a U.S. citizen, and has step children. He plays violin professionally in Utah part-time, and often subs in with the Utah Symphony.

This press conference uncovers exactly what is going on with this issue. The attorney says at one point that there are currently 60,000 immigration cases being handled in Utah because of the uptick in arrests, and two Immigration judges to see them all. The process is backed up for years. And there is a quota on arrests the attorney comments on. The problem is growing by the day. The private police forces are compelled to arrest and lock up as many people as they can, and they are getting paid to do this. And shockingly, this attorney revealed that even narco drug trafficking enforcement officers and other kinds of agents including FBI dedicated to various other crime divisions, are now moved over to immigration arrests that have nothing to do with drugs or other crimes they are supposed to deal with. (We still have an illegal drug problem in America, do we not?) But some arrest immigrants instead now, and it doesn't matter if they are a criminal or not. And the vast majority of them so far, are not.

Think about that. FBI and drug enforcement moved off of their beat to create sting operations at a hotel like John was staying at, to chain up and arrest a non-criminal immigrant violin player. And this was no accident. The arresting agents doubled down and argued in court this week that this violinist was "a danger to society." This is happening while our military is being moved into cities to "fight crime" because they need to replace the actual crime fighters who are trained for this and who our tax dollars support to fight the crime—but who are now arresting non-criminal immigrant musicians, shackling them and incarcerating them.

In this first court hearing for John, the agents who made the arrest had to argue to the judge that John's imprisonment was necessary because he "was a danger to society." That is why you argue someone needs to be in jail instead being out on a thousand dollar bond or the like, and to fight your case in the courts. BTW, they let him out on a whopping $25,000 bond. Far too much. One should not be imprisoned in our country because of immigration paperwork status we should all know. His wife Danae interjects in the press conference, and I’m paraphrasing; how could John be a danger to society—with his violin bow? Is it because "he plays some mean Paganini?" At the press conference, the attorney stated that hundreds of letters were collected for the judge at the hearing by fellow musicians as character witnesses. The music community is a good community folks.

Some republican voters have said here that John is "illegal" implying he should be incarcerated for "being here illegally". This lawyer explains that there is no part of our Constitution for imprisoning an immigrant like John over his paperwork given no criminal history and especially that he has a U.S. spouse. Please watch this and tell us how you think this is the democracy we want? Without his wife, musicians and this attorney, he could have been shipped off to some gulag in a foreign country, and the keys thrown away. Think about those step kids who have been terrorized over this.

Exactly what is happening right now to many who don't have the public profile as John did, and certainly does now. We should shudder about thousands and thousands of cases like John's every day in this country who are not well-known enough to have musicians rally a go fund me page to get them the best attorney in town. Congress needs to change in the Midterms and deal with this. Starting by defunding the terrorizing of U.S. residents that you and my tax dollars are currently funding. Realize the cruel fact that part of your hard earned money was to pay for John's arrest in shackles and chains, and imprisoning him in far less humane conditions than many serious criminals get, including one that's been in the news lately.

Violinist detained by ICE speaks after returning to Utah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff5bzpxG4AY&t=907s

Ordering Items From Another Country- Tariffs and Rising Import Prices

2025-08-27T12:20:00.006-04:00

What's going on?

Many countries have announced that they are stopping almost all shipments to the US. This means that any future packages that were intended for the US cannot leave the country via government postal services. DHL has also suspended shipments from some countries to America. The list includes many European countries, as well as Australia, Japan, and many others.

Why is this happening?

The US President removed the "deminimus value" exemption on international shipments. Basically, items under $800 in value didn't have to go through detailed inspection by the Customs office, a government organization that regulates and checks packages entering the US. China was the first to have the deminimus value exemption removed, but it has since been expanded to the entire globe. Nearly every package in the US must be inspected by Customs, along with having a broker (an official within shipping companies) verify the information, which has an extra fee.

The rollout of this plan has been haphazard, to say the least. Countries and companies alike are having issues figuring out how to interpret the rules, as breaking them could come with hefty penalties. The rules are also changing constantly - the fees today might be different by the time the package arrives next week. Rather than face this uncertainty and possible money loss, countries are choosing to stop shipments altogether. Shipping companies are also making similar decisions.

Is this because of the tariffs?

Technically, this is due to the deminimus value being revoked, which is not a tariff per se, but it's part of the larger effort to put tariffs on international goods. There is some confusion on whether items under $800 will be tariffed at their actual value, or given a flat $80 fee. That would mean a $10 item would now cost $90 on top of any other shipping payments. There is also confusion about whether Trump's statement that "items under $100 won't have fees" will actually be implemented.

So what do I do now? What if I have a shipment now/in the future?

The flow of goods has stopped from some countries to the US, but items from the US can still go to those countries (for now). If you have placed an order that has not yet shipped, contact the company you bought it from to figure out your next steps. You might get a refund rather than the item, unfortunately. If you were planning to buy a future item (e.g. a preorder or a Christmas present) your options are to buy local, buy from another country that does not have a shipping restriction, or physically go to the country and get the item. Yes, it sucks, but those are the only options right now.

Who should I be angry at?

You can be mad at the toxic orange demon for making a decision that impacted consumers adversely NOT the people at the various delivery services. The local mail carriers has no affect on how or why this happened. The customer service reps had no say in the matter. This decision was made by the US President, so if your order gets cancelled, please place the blame on the white house and federal government as they were the ones that put this into motion.

A Brief History Of How US Political Parties Went Pear Shaped

2025-08-25T19:04:00.001-04:00

August 23, 2025 (Saturday)

HC Richardson

"It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future," President Donald Trump wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11, the president says, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”

It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.

It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.

The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.

It was not always this way.

After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war. Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.

As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him. After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.

Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.

Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government. They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters. Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.

Ronald Reagan tapped into the Movement Conservatives in 1964, when he backed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, his promises focused on economic freedom, but the racism and sexism in the radical faction was always present; he deliberately appealed to racists with a promise to defend states’ rights and to the sexists trying to combat the women’s liberation movement with an appeal to religious traditionalists. Reagan promised to put businessmen in the driver’s seat, but he depended on the votes of racists and sexists to win the White House.

Reagan’s tax cuts tripled the federal debt and left his successor, George H.W. Bush, facing a $171 billion deficit in 1990, along with the threat of automatic cuts of 40% across the board if the deficit wasn’t reduced. Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes. Movement Conservatives signed on in private, but in public they attacked the deal as a betrayal of Reaganism and common people. Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its traditional base: those who believed in an active government. He accused anyone who stood against him of being a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.”

In 1994, Gingrich managed to flip the House of Representatives to the Republicans for the first time since 1954, and he set out to reshape the Republican Party into an instrument for destroying the modern government. That effort would require destroying the Democratic Party by referring to its members as “corrupt,” “intolerant,” “sick,” “traitors”; by launching investigations of what he insisted—without evidence—was “voter fraud,” and by investigating and then impeaching Democratic president Bill Clinton.

By the end of the 1990s, leading Republicans no longer saw party differences as differences of policy. Party trumped country because they believed they were in a fight for the soul of America, and they were on the side of the angels.

If keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified. Republicans began to talk of purifying the voter rolls in the 1990s, and in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that purged from the system as many as 100,000 Black voters presumed to be Democrats. This purge paid off in 2000, when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College. The contest came down to Florida, where a confusing ballot had siphoned about 10,000 votes intended for Gore off to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.

A hand recount had reduced Republican candidate George W. Bush’s lead from 1,784 to 537 when Republican operatives attacked the recount venue in Miami-Dade County to stop the recount, claiming there was “voter fraud.” The Supreme Court—led by five Republican-appointed justices—stepped in to give the victory to Bush.

When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans declared war. On the night of Obama’s inauguration, Republican senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican leaders agreed over dinner to oppose anything that the new president proposed, regardless of whether they agreed with it. “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,” Republican senators told incoming vice president Joe Biden.

They also worked to make it easier for Republicans to win. In 2010 the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance laws to permit unlimited corporate and other outside money to flow into elections.

At the same time, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project, to take over statehouses before the redistricting after the 2010 census. They won the statehouses of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Three years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by ending the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting preclear changes to their voting rules with the Department of Justice. Republican-dominated state legislatures immediately began to restrict voting rights.

But the Republican economic program of slashing regulations and taxes was never popular, and the Republicans stayed in power by doubling down on the racism and sexism of their voting base. After 1987, talk radio fed the rhetoric that racial minorities and women were ushering socialism into the United States, and after 1994 the Fox News Channel amplified it.

In 2016, Donald Trump rode to the White House by playing directly to that racism and sexism and asserting that white men should dominate women and people of color. Establishment leaders backed him for the tax cuts he promised, but they no longer called the shots. The racist and sexist MAGA base did. Trump and his loyalists took the idea that they had a right to rule to its logical extreme. When voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to the presidency, they tried to overturn that election with violence.

Now, back in office, Trump is dismantling the government as Movement Conservatives have wanted for decades. But he has abandoned the small-government principles Movement Conservatives claimed to champion and is using state power to terrorize citizens. He has abandoned the due process of the law and states’ rights and is working to rig the system permanently in his favor. And now he has abandoned the free-market principles around which the Movement Conservatives organized in the first place.

From the beginning, “Movement Conservatism” was anything but conservative. Its supporters embraced the radical goal of dismantling a practical system that stabilized the country after the Great Depression and a devastating world war, a system that was based in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But now they are embracing something altogether different.

Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”

Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”

Mycielski’s 15-point guide to surviving authoritarianism

2025-07-31T10:52:00.001-04:00

Here is Mycielski’s 15-point guide to surviving authoritarianism.

1. They will come to power with a campaign based on fear, scaremongering and distorting the truth. Nevertheless, their victory will be achieved through a democratic electoral process. But beware, as this will be their argument every time you question the legitimacy of their actions. They will claim a mandate from the People to change the system.

Remember — gaining power through a democratic system does not give them permission to cross legal boundaries and undermine said democracy.

2. They will divide and rule. Their strength lies in unity, in one voice and one ideology, and so should yours. They will call their supporters patriots, the only “true Americans.” You will be labelled as traitors, enemies of the state, unpatriotic, the corrupt elite, the old regime trying to regain power. Their supporters will be the “people,” the “sovereign” who chose their leaders.

Don’t let them divide you — remember you’re one people, one nation, with one common good.

3. Through convoluted laws and threats they will try to control mainstream media and limit press freedom. They will ban critical press from their briefings, calling them “liars,” “fake news.” They will brand those media as “unpatriotic,” acting against the People (see point 2).

Fight for every media outlet, every journalist that is being banned, censored, sacked or labelled an “enemy of the state” — there’s no hope for freedom where there is no free press.

4. They will create chaos, maintain a constant sense of conflict and danger. It will be their argument to enact new authoritarian laws, each one further limiting your freedoms and civil liberties. They will disguise them as being for your protection, for the good of the people.

See through the chaos, the fake danger; expose it before you wake up in a totalitarian, fascist state.

5. They will distort the truth, deny facts and blatantly lie. They will try to make you forget what facts are, sedate your need to find the truth. They will feed “post-truths” and “alternative facts,” replace knowledge and logic with emotions and fiction.

Always think critically, fact-check and point out the truth, fight ignorance with facts.

6. They will incite and then leak fake, superficial “scandals.” They will smear opposition with trivial accusations, blowing them out of proportion and then feeding the flame. This is just smokescreen for the legal steps they will be taking toward totalitarianism.

See through superficial topics in mainstream media (see point 3) and focus on what they are actually doing.

7. They will propose shocking laws to provoke your outrage. You will focus your efforts on fighting them, so they will seemingly back off, giving you a false sense of victory. In the meantime they will push through less “flashy” legislation, slowly dismantling democracy (see points 4 and 6).

Focus your fight on what really matters.

8. When invading your liberal sensibilities they will focus on what hurts the most — women and minorities. They will act as if democracy was majority rule without respect for the minority. They will paint foreigners and immigrants as potential threats. Racial, religious, sexual and other minorities will become enemies to the order and security they are supposedly providing. They will challenge women’s social status, undermine gender equality and interfere with reproductive rights (see point 7). But it means they are aware of the threat women and minorities pose to their rule, so make it your strength.

Women and minorities should fight the hardest, reminding the majority what true democracy is about.

[Editor’s note: This is a rare moment where I believe Mycielski gets it wrong. People of color and women of all races are doing all they can; existence is itself political, but many have already gone above and beyond, taking key roles in resisting. They cannot be expected to “fight the hardest.” We need the people with the most privilege to step up and use their powers for good.]

9. They will try to take control of the judiciary. They will assault your highest court. They need to remove the checks and balances to be able to push through unconstitutional legislation. Controlling the judiciary they can also threat anyone that defies them with prosecution, including the press (see point 3).

Preserve the independence of your courts at all cost; they are your safety valve, the safeguard of the rule of law and the democratic system.

10. They will try to limit freedom of assembly, calling it a necessity for your security. They will enact laws prioritizing state events and rallies, or those of a certain type or ideology. If they can choose who can demonstrate legally, they have a legal basis to forcefully disperse or prosecute the rest.

Oppose any legislation attempting to interfere with freedom of assembly, for whatever reason.

11. They will distort the language, coin new terms and labels, repeat shocking phrases until you accept them as normal and subconsciously associate them with whom they like. A “thief,” “liar” or “traitor” will automatically mean the opposition, while a “patriot” or a “true American” will mean their follower (see point 2). Their slogans will have double meaning, giving strength to their supporters and instilling angst in their opponents.

Fight changes in language in the public sphere; remind and preserve the true meaning of words.

12. They will take over your national symbols, associate them with their regime, remake them into attributes of their power. They want you to forget that your flag, your anthem and your symbols belong to you, the people, to everyone equally. Don’t let them be hijacked. Use and expose them in your fight as much as they do.

Show your national symbols with pride; let them give you strength, not associate you with the tyranny they brought onto your country.

13. They will try to rewrite history to suit their needs and use the education system to support their agenda. They will smear any historical or living figure who wouldn’t approve of their actions, or distort their image to make you think they would. They will place emphasis on historical education in schools, feeding young minds with the “only correct” version of history and philosophy. They will raise a new generation of voters on their ideology, backing it with a distorted interpretation of history and view of the world.

Guard the education of your children; teach them critical thinking; ensure their open-mindedness and protect your real history and heritage.

14. They will alienate foreign allies and partners, convincing you that you don’t need them. They won’t care for the rest of the world, with their focus on “making your country great again.” While ruining your economy to fulfill their populist promises, they will omit the fact that you’re part of a bigger world whose development depends on cooperation, on sharing and on trade.

Don’t let them build walls promising you security instead of bridges giving you prosperity.

15. They will eventually manipulate the electoral system. They might say it’s to correct flaws, to make it more fair, more similar to the rest of the world, or just to make it better. Don’t believe it. They wouldn’t be messing with it at all if it wasn’t to benefit them in some way.

Oppose any changes to electoral law that an authoritarian regime wants to enact — rest assured it’s only to help them remain in power longer.

And above all, be strong, fight, endure and remember you’re on the good side of history.

EVERY authoritarian, totalitarian and fascist regime in history eventually failed, thanks to the PEOPLE.

— With love, your Eastern European friends

author

Donald T. Saposnek

Donald T. Saposnek, Ph.D., is a clinical-child psychologist, a child custody and family mediator and a national and international trainer and consultant in child psychology and mediation since 1977. He is the author of the classic text, Mediating Child Custody Disputes: A Strategic Approach, and co-author of Splitting America

Fascism Has Quietly Won in the USA

2025-07-31T10:18:00.001-04:00

July 30, 2025 (Wednesday)

On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.

When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.

So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”

And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.

But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.

Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission's approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.

Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”

On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”

The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.

Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”

EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.

As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”

Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”

But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.

Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Today Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. Tomorrow, the day before the August 1 deadline on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.

When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then.

And now the growing scandal around President Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.

Yesterday Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Giuffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. Today, a reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for?”

Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report on the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.

And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.

Concealment of Identity Leads to Unchecked Violence

2025-07-29T18:06:00.001-04:00

Op Ed by G. C. Payne

In Los Angeles, they came at night, black helmets, tactical gear, no names, no insignia. Protesters were grabbed off the streets and loaded into unmarked vans. No one knew who they were. No one could ask. Their faces were hidden. Their power, absolute.

We are entering an era in which the agents of state power no longer have faces.

Across the country, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in upstate New York to militarized police responses in Atlanta, Chicago, and Portland, Americans are increasingly confronted by law enforcement officers whose identities are concealed. Their names stripped from badges. Their faces obscured by masks, goggles, and helmets. Their authority rendered anonymous.

The stated rationale is familiar: protection from doxxing, retaliation, or harassment. And in an age of hyper-polarization and digital vigilantism, those concerns are not entirely unfounded. Former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Ali Soufan warns, “Visibility puts a target on your back in the age of online extremism.” That may be true. But the inverse—faceless authority—puts a target on democracy itself.

At what point does protecting the enforcer obscure the principle of enforcement?

A democracy policed by faceless enforcers is not merely a tactical adaptation. It is a philosophical departure.

In literature, masks symbolize both freedom and concealment, rebellion and repression. Oscar Wilde famously quipped, “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” But there’s another truth lurking beneath: Masks don’t just enable expression; they also enable erasure.

Social psychologists have long understood this. In 1969, Stanford researcher Philip Zimbardo conducted a now-classic experiment in which participants donned hooded robes and were instructed to administer electric shocks to others. Unsurprisingly, the masked participants delivered higher shocks, exhibiting greater aggression and reduced empathy.

Even children grasp this dynamic. In a Halloween study, masked kids were significantly more likely to steal extra candy than their unmasked peers. A hidden face, even for a moment, grants permission to break the rules.

When combined with state power, anonymity can override individual conscience and turn human beings into instruments of group will.

The history of masked violence in America is not speculative; it is foundational. The Ku Klux Klan’s hooded anonymity wasn’t incidental. It was central to their terror. By day, Klan members were judges, sheriffs, or civic leaders. By night, they became ghosts, free to punish without consequence.

In Nazi Germany, SS and Gestapo agents wore masks during night raids, not only to instill fear but also to psychologically distance themselves from their crimes. In Chile under Augusto Pinochet, secret police donned balaclavas while abducting dissidents. In Iran under the Shah, SAVAK agents masked their faces during torture sessions to erase accountability.

This tactic is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes: concealment of identity to enable unchecked violence.

It is crucial to approach such parallels with care. No one is saying that masked ICE agents in American cities are equivalent to Gestapo squads in Berlin. But the comparison should serve as a warning, not a distraction. The question is not whether history repeats perfectly, but whether we are ignoring its lessons.

Of course, law enforcement officers face real threats. They have been harassed, even targeted for violence. Those risks are real and deserve attention. But the solution cannot be to erode public accountability.

We do not allow judges to hide their names. We do not permit anonymous juries. Our system of justice, however imperfect, relies on visible responsibility. To abandon that ideal in the name of safety is to accept a dangerous new social contract: one in which power flows only one way.

But here’s the hopeful truth: When communities resist the normalization of masked authority, they can win.

In Portland, Oregon, during the 2020 racial justice protests, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals deployed in camouflage uniforms and unmarked vehicles detained protesters without identifying themselves. The move drew national outrage and lawsuits. Oregon’s attorney general filed suit to stop these “secret police-style” tactics, and public pressure led to federal inspectors general investigating the practice. By 2021, Congress passed a provision requiring federal agents deployed in civil disturbances to display visible identification showing their name or a unique ID code and their agency.

In New York, years of grassroots organizing by groups like Communities United for Police Reform led to the June 2020 repeal of Section 50‑a, a decades-old law that had shielded police disciplinary records from public view. The change came amid mass protests, underlining how collective action can dismantle policies of anonymity that enable abuse.

In Oakland, California, the issue of hidden identity became headline news in 2011, during the Occupy Oakland demonstrations. An officer was caught on video covering his nameplate with tape, a violation of departmental policy. He was suspended for 30 days, and his supervising lieutenant was demoted. Public outrage led to stronger rules requiring all Oakland officers to display badge numbers and name tags even when outfitted in riot gear.

These victories didn’t happen overnight. They were the result of sustained advocacy and legal challenges. And they remind us: Faceless authority can be challenged, but only if we refuse to accept it as inevitable.

The logic of masking metastasizes. Today it may be ICE. Tomorrow it could be traffic cops, school resource officers, or regulators enforcing housing codes and environmental policy. Once anonymity is normalized, it becomes nearly impossible to roll back.

Imagine being confronted by a law enforcement officer whose face is completely obscured. What would you feel? Fear? Confusion? Powerlessness? These are not accidental responses. Perhaps that is the point.

But a free society cannot function on intimidation.

We live in an open society. Police do not rule us; they serve us. To wear a badge is to accept a burden, to be known, to be scrutinized, to be restrained by the public’s gaze.

The philosopher Michel Foucault warned that power is most effective when it is least visible. But the inverse is also true: Power is most just when it is most seen.

A democracy cannot thrive on ghosts. It requires people, real, visible people, making visible decisions in the full light of day.

So, what can be done?

To stop the normalization of faceless power, we can:

-Demand transparency laws banning face coverings in non-high-risk operations;

-Support local watchdog journalism that documents abuses of anonymity;

-Join campaigns for demilitarizing police departments and banning unmarked uniforms during public interactions; and

Insist on civilian oversight boards with real teeth to enforce accountability.

The mask is not a neutral tool. It is a statement. And it is one that a free society cannot afford to make lightly.

If we want a future where power serves people, not the other way around, it begins with insisting that authority shows its face.

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George Cassidy Payne is a writer, educator, and social justice advocate. He lives in Irondequoit, New York. // Common Dreams

Who Benefits from Minimum Wage

2025-07-24T22:15:00.001-04:00

Sixteen years ago today—July 24, 2009—Congress raised the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. Since then, corporate profits have skyrocketed, executive pay has exploded, and the cost of living has soared.

But the minimum wage? Still stuck at $7.25.

Let me be clear: this isn’t just bad policy. It’s economic violence. And it’s long past time we called it what it is—and demanded better. Here are six truths every American should know about our corrupt wage system. Let’s Address This.

1. If Wages Kept Pace with Profits, You’d Earn $30/Hour

That’s not a typo. If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as corporate profits since 1979, it would be close to $30/hour today. That’s about $60,000/year—what we call a livable wage.

So when we fight for $15/hour, we’re not demanding justice. We’re making a compromise. And corporations refusing to pay even that—while posting record profits and handing out billion-dollar bonuses—are engaged in systemic wage theft.

2. No, It’s Not Just Teenagers Working for Minimum Wage

Let’s kill that tired myth right now. The average minimum wage worker is 36 years old. Over 89% are 20 or older. More than half are women. A quarter are raising children. And 57% work full-time.

This isn’t about teenagers earning pocket change. This is about adults supporting families—about people working 40, 50, 60 hours a week and still not earning enough to survive. Those who claim these are “temporary jobs for teens” are either deliberately lying or painfully ignorant. Either way, do not listen to them.

3. The Minimum Wage Was Meant to Be a Living Wage

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, he didn’t mince words:

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”

The minimum wage was designed to ensure dignity—not desperation. Today’s stagnant wage violates the very spirit of that promise. Corporations like Walmart who pay their workers so low that they are forced to rely on social welfare are in fact exploiting Americans. Walmart, according to FDR, does not have the right to continue to do business in this country. And if we had politicians with spines, instead of funding from corrupt corporations, we could ensure Walmart, Amazon, Target, and more pay an actual living wage—not an exploitative poverty wage.

4. Congress Knows Better—They Just Don’t Care

Let’s be real. Congress understands the power of inflation. That’s why they raised their own campaign contribution limits from $1,800 to $3,500. They made sure the wealthy could give more to their campaigns—but left working Americans earning the same $7.25 an hour.

The cruelty isn’t accidental. It’s policy.

5. $79 Trillion in Stolen Wages

A RAND Corporation study found that over the past 40 years, $79 trillion in income has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Yes, that’s Trillion, with a T. So whenever you hear the super wealthy talk about the “evils” of redistribution of wealth,” just know that their ill gotten gains have come from redistributing our wealth to the top 1%.

That’s a flood of wealth—stolen from the people who built this country and funneled to the people who least need it. It has made us less safe, less secure, less healthy, and more impoverished.

6. Poverty Is a Killer

Three in five Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. And poverty doesn’t just hurt—it kills. Studies show that for every $1 increase in a person’s wage, suicide rates drop by 6%. That’s not abstract policy. That’s life and death. The National Institute of Health reports:

"A recent study funded by NIMHD found that every $1 increase in the minimum wage of US states could reduce the suicide rate in people with high school education or less by 6%. The researchers used National Vital Statistics System data on suicides in people aged 18-64 years from all 50 states and the District of Columbia for every month from 1990 to 2015. The data included race, age, and education level of the people who died by suicide."

In this exploitative backdrop, it is clear that poverty is not simply a personal failure and it is certainly not a life choice—so we must stop allowing policies that make it like a life sentence.

In Conclusion: It’s Time to Raise the Wage

There is no excuse. Not after 16 years. Not when corporate profits are hitting record highs, CEOs are raking in millions, and working people are barely scraping by. This isn’t an economic oversight. It’s a moral failure.

The bottom line is this. Raising the wage isn’t radical, its morally sound. What’s radical is forcing full-time workers to live in poverty while billionaires hoard trillions. What’s radical is letting poverty kill while pretending we can’t afford to do better. What’s radical is calling this justice.

It’s not enough to be outraged—we have to be organized. We have to fight back. And we have to keep telling the truth, because too many people in power are counting on our silence. So please continue to speak loudly. Let politicians know that by taking corporate money, they lose your support. Demand not just a raise to $15/hour, but to a living wage that commensurates with the immense profitability created by the working class. That’s what true economic justice looks like. That’s what we must continue to fight for.

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Read full article with links and receipts, and subscribe:

https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/the-criminal-poverty-wage16-years

The Truth of Social Security

2025-07-22T19:54:00.001-04:00

Fact Checking Social Security

“People who didn’t pay in are getting benefits—that’s the problem.”

That’s a misunderstanding. Most people receiving Social Security either paid in directly through payroll taxes or are dependents (like survivors, spouses, or disabled individuals). SSI (Supplemental Security Income) is a separate program funded by general tax revenue, not Social Security payroll taxes. Conflating the two is how people get misled.

“Social Security adds to the deficit.”

Social Security is funded by its own dedicated payroll taxes. By law, it can’t contribute to the federal deficit unless Congress changes the rules. It runs a surplus-backed Trust Fund, which holds trillions in U.S. Treasury bonds. If there’s ever a funding gap, it’s because of policy choices (like capping payroll taxes above ~$168,000/year), not because it’s inherently unsustainable.

“It’s a Ponzi scheme.”

No, it’s a pay-as-you-go social insurance program, not an investment scam. A Ponzi scheme requires constant deception and collapse. Social Security has been running for nearly 90 years, is transparent, and adjusts based on demographic and economic conditions. It’s not perfect, but calling it a Ponzi scheme is just rhetoric meant to undermine it.

“You get more out than you put in.”

That’s the whole point. It’s insurance, not a bank account. Some people will live longer, become disabled, or lose a spouse and receive more in benefits. Others may not. It spreads risk across the population, just like any insurance system.

“Let me opt out. I’d do better investing on my own.”

That’s like saying “let me opt out of fire insurance because my house didn’t burn down this year.” Social Security isn’t just retirement. It also provides disability insurance and survivor benefits. And it’s guaranteed! You don’t lose everything if the market crashes.

“There’s no money in Social Security—it’s all IOUs.”

Social Security buys U.S. Treasury bonds, which are the safest investment in the world. That’s how government trust funds work. If you believe those bonds are worthless, you’re basically saying the U.S. government is bankrupt, which undermines every financial system, not just Social Security.

“Let’s abolish it and let people save on their own.”

Before Social Security, poverty among the elderly was sky-high. Many couldn’t save enough or outlived their savings. Social Security isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the most effective anti-poverty programs ever created. Ending it would send millions of seniors and disabled Americans into destitution.

“Illegal immigrants are getting Social Security.”

That’s false. Only legal residents who’ve worked and paid into the system for 10+ years qualify for benefits.

“It’s bankrupt.”

Not even close. The Social Security Trust Fund has over $2.7 trillion. Without any changes, it can pay full benefits until about 2033, and around 75% of benefits after that - and that’s if we do nothing. Simply scrapping the payroll tax cap would make it solvent for decades.

The Numbers Behind Alligator Alcatraz

2025-07-15T19:32:00.000-04:00

ALLIGATOR Alcatraz is a GRIFT!

This is a purchase order from the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) to a private contractor named Critical Response Strategies LLC, dated July 10, 2025, for a total of $78,525,978.00.

The work is tied to Mission Number 00022, with the event named “OZ”, and is listed under a “State Contract/Pre-Disaster Agreement.” The location is 54575 Tamiami Trail, Ochopee, Florida - which, notably, is the same general area as the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” ICE detention center.

Key Details:

• Supplier: Critical Response Strategies LLC

• Contract Total: $78.5 million

• Pay is mostly hourly, across a wide range of job titles

• Contract type: Pre-disaster state contract (which is often used to bypass normal procurement timelines during “emergencies”)

Notable Hourly Wages in the Purchase Order:

These are jaw-dropping, especially when scaled over the number of hours included (most are billed at 2,080 or 2,288 hours - roughly equivalent to 40–44 hours/week for a full year).

• Camp Manager - Regular: $90/hour

• Camp Manager - Overtime: $135/hour

• Assistant Camp Manager - OT: $130.50/hour

• Operational Coordinator - OT: $82.50/hour

• Compliance Manager - OT: $120/hour

• Warden - OT: $187/hour

• Assistant Warden - OT: $105/hour

• Corrections Officer - OT: $57/hour

• CO Captain - OT: $78/hour

• Badge Admin OT: $57/hour

• Plans Reviewer (Regular): $185/hour (!)

Sample Calculations:

• Warden (Overtime):

2,288 hours × $187/hour = $427,856.00

• Corrections Officer - Regular Hours:

2080 hours × $42/hour = $87,360.00 per officer

• Safety Officer (Regular + OT):

2080 × $55 = $114,400

2288 × $80 = $183,040

→ Total per person: $297,440

• EOC/Operational Support - OT:

1100 hours × $172.50/hour = $1,328,250 (yes, for one line item)

• CO Captain - OT:

2288 hours × $78 = $178,880 per person

Red Flags and Takeaways:

• The rates are extremely high, especially given the number of positions filled at those rates.

• Some roles—like “Plans Reviewer” and “Compliance Manager”—are pulling in well over $100/hour, even for standard 40-hour weeks.

• The whole thing appears structured to funnel emergency response dollars (under the guise of disaster relief) into a private company operating what seems to be a detention center.

• It confirms that this facility is not a FEMA-run humanitarian shelter - it’s being staffed with positions like CO Captain, Corrections Officer, Warden, and Badge Admin. This is a prison under another name, and taxpayers are footing the bill.

The Shite Show That Is the USA Government

2025-07-11T11:21:00.001-04:00

July 10, 2025 (Thursday)

H.C. Richardson

Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded, and at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Republicans were “laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”

But the past week has shown a nation—and an administration—in turmoil.

On July 4, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.

But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.

Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA.

Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.

The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said.

Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.

Tariffs are back in the news as Trump’s postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever.

On April 2, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that, beginning on April 9, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%—a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect—and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries using a bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro.

Immediately the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9 (yesterday), vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly: 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said. But only two deals have been forthcoming—one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam—meaning that on July 9 the high tariffs of April 2 would take effect.

Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date the tariffs would go into effect, although on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9 to August 1.

Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. “A letter means a deal,” he told reporters. “We can't meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they're doing, that are doing a good job, but you can't do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it's a very good way. It's a better way. It's a more powerful way.”

On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry to that point will take years. He also announced a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.

Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10% tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit.

While Trump continues to insist—incorrectly—that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former vice president Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg “Surveillance,” he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s boast that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year: “Well, tariffs are a tax, and American importers and businesses and, ultimately, consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families, the administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods.”

Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Bove is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6 rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador.

On June 24, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Reuveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Reuveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and “engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety.”

Reuveni alleged that Bove insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*ck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Reuveni then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate the orders of the court.

Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had “no recollection” of saying “f*ck you” to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Reuveni was a “leaker asserting false claims.”

Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Reuveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boasberg, one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men when, as one of Reuveni’s colleagues said, “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.”

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Bove “belongs nowhere near the federal bench.” “This is about more than a random f-bomb,” he said. “This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”

Today a federal judge appointed by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge Laplante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal.

Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury’s verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case.

Tonight the White House posted on X an image of “SUPERMAN TRUMP”—a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched, against a gauzy background—with the caption “TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY.”

Fourteenth Amendment and Dred Scott

2025-07-10T12:43:00.001-04:00

July 9, 2025 (Wednesday)

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….” (these are things Trump and his republican gestapo fascist regime are doing now).

Kennedy’s comments foreshadowed the world advanced by today’s MAGA Republicans. In 2022 the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with right-wing justices, overturned the federal protection of abortion rights provided in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and sent the question of abortion back to the states, many of which promptly banned the procedure.

When the court overturned the federal protection of abortion rights, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that federal protections for access to birth control and same-sex marriage should also be reexamined. In 2024, President Donald Trump suggested he would be open to letting states decide whether to restrict access to birth control, walking his statement back after a ferocious backlash.

Justice Samuel Alito has joined Thomas in attacking the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that provides federal protection for same-sex marriage, claiming that right, too, ought to be left up to voters in the states, even as Republican-dominated states are passing laws to limit who can vote.

Not only have today’s Republicans launched an attack on the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that the federal government protect Americans against discrimination in the states, President Donald Trump has launched an assault on the birthright citizenship that is the centerpiece of the amendment.

That section of the amendment— the first section— acknowledges that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens,” who enjoy the same rights, and that no state can take those rights away without due process of law.

The USA Hateful Propaganda Machine Now on TV

2025-07-09T10:07:00.001-04:00

The hateful, bigoted, racist, fearmongering propaganda ads are already playing as TV commercials. It is chilling and makes one's skin crawl.

History rarely announces itself. It creeps in quietly, cloaked in the language of “law and order,” “national security,” and “patriotism.” But every now and then, it screams.

Last week, it screamed.

Donald Trump, now seated once again behind the Resolute Desk, and his Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have openly threatened CNN with criminal prosecution for reporting on the existence and use of an app — ICEBlock — that alerts undocumented immigrants about nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.

This app, which is publicly available, and the reporting around it — likewise rooted in public records — is suddenly being framed as a “national security threat.”

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: the President of the United States and his administration are threatening to jail journalists for doing their jobs.

This isn’t just an authoritarian flirtation. It’s a shot across the bow of American democracy. And it should chill every citizen who still believes in the sacred protections of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in our constitutional republic.

There’s a reason the Founders placed freedom of the press in the very First Amendment. They understood that tyranny doesn’t announce itself with tanks in the streets (although Trump has brought us that, too, in DC and Los Angeles): it begins when dissent is silenced and truth becomes optional. When the government gains the power to determine what is and isn’t “acceptable” journalism or citizen monitoring of government actions, democracy doesn’t just wobble. It collapses.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In the 1970s, Richard Nixon compiled an “enemies list,” weaponizing the IRS and FBI against journalists and political opponents. But even Nixon — infamous as he was — never dared prosecute a major news network for reporting publicly available facts or proudly announces criminal investigations of individuals monitoring the police.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act into law, a piece of legislation later used to imprison dissenters and suppress anti-war journalists during World War I. Bernie Sanders’ hero, democratic socialist Eugene Debs, was thrown into prison for protesting our involvement in World War I and ran for president in 1920 from his prison cell.

In 1950s McCarthyist America, journalists who didn’t toe the anti-communist line were blacklisted, surveilled, and driven from their careers.

Historians — and even high school history classes — correctly identify Wilson’s and McCarthy’s excesses as a terrible moments in our past, moments that should never, ever be repeated.

But now, in 2025, we are revisiting that time but with a new beast entirely: a populist authoritarian with open contempt for constitutional constraints, emboldened by a cult of personality, and empowered by six corrupt Republicans on a Supreme Court that has told him he can openly commit crimes without fear of prosecution.

Compounding this crisis of democracy is a billionaire-owned right-wing media ecosystem that no longer even pretends to tell the truth.

Donald Trump is not unique in history, but the confluence of power, propaganda, and post-truth politics he embodies is dangerously unprecedented in America.

The most terrifying part of this episode is not that Trump is threatening CNN. It’s that every other newsroom in America is now taking notice and some are immediately bending the knee.

For example, CBS’s new president, David Ellison (son of billionaire “MAGA Larry” Ellison) reportedly just gave give $15 million to Trump and promised, according to Trump himself, another $15 million in nationwide “free advertising” for his hateful MAGA message.

When a president targets a media outlet for reporting on a publicly available app or quoting anonymous officials, the effect isn’t just on that outlet. It reverberates throughout every editorial board, every reporter’s notebook, every newsroom budget meeting.

They ask themselves: Should we cover this story? Will we get sued? Will our reporters get subpoenaed? Is it worth the cost, risk, or even the hassle?

This is the “chilling effect” in action. And it is exactly what authoritarians want and dictators get.

They don’t need to jail every journalist or even every protestor or opposition politician; there are only around 1,500 political prisoners in Russia, a country with a population of 143 million. That’s all Putin needed to cow the press and the political opposition — and the people in the streets — into silence.

Ask journalists and activists in Mexico, where threats and violence have silenced entire newspapers. Or in Russia, where one law criminalized the reporting of the word “war” to describe the Ukraine invasion and the entire nation’s press immediately bent the knee. Or in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán turned independent press outlets into government mouthpieces. It always starts the same way: with “exceptions,” “investigations,” “national security,” and “fake news.”

Sound familiar?

Let’s talk about what CNN actually reported. The so-called “ICEBlock” app was not a secret Pentagon tool. It’s publicly downloadable. It informs undocumented immigrants — many of whom have lived and worked here for decades — about where ICE raids might be happening. You know, the same way Waze tells drivers where police speed traps are.

CNN and The New York Times also reported on internal U.S. government discussions about military options in Iran, again, based on information already circulating through D.C. and partially leaked by officials themselves. It was nothing that would’ve shocked the Ayatollah.

But Trump saw a headline he didn’t like, and Noem saw a political opportunity to play tough cop on immigration. So now, instead of debating immigration policy or Middle East strategy, we’re talking about jailing journalists and suing news outlets.

Let me repeat that: jailing journalists. Not pressuring them. Not criticizing them. Prosecuting them.

Here’s the thing. All Trump needs is a few ambitious prosecutors, a distracted electorate, and a media too scared — or too worried about its bottom line — to fight back.

This is authoritarianism in a designer suit. And it’s already here.

Right-wing billionaires have bought up local newspapers and radio stations, converting once-independent voices into megaphones for MAGA talking points. “Citizen journalists” on social media — and Russian troll farms — parrot conspiracy theories generated by AI-enhanced bots that are then amplified by secret algorithms. The line between “news” and “propaganda” has blurred beyond recognition.

Meanwhile, genuine investigative reporters — those who dig into government corruption, environmental devastation, and police abuse — are under constant threat. Financially. Legally. Sometimes physically.

Just ask the journalists shot or arrested during Black Lives Matter protests. Or the ones surveilled by ICE for uncovering abuses in detention centers.

This isn’t about CNN. It’s about whether truth still has a place in the American conversation.

If this prosecution threat succeeds — whether through actual charges or through the intimidation it provokes — the consequences will be draconian.

— Whistleblowers will go silent. Why leak evidence of government wrongdoing if the journalists who publish it are dragged into court and forced to reveal their sources?

— Investigative journalism will wither. Why invest time and money into reporting if the legal risks outweigh losing your job or going to prison?

— Civic ignorance will grow. Without trusted sources of information, citizens turn to whatever confirms their biases: YouTube grifters, Twitter trolls, or state-run propaganda.

— Corruption will thrive. From corporate polluters to racist sheriffs to masked agents of the state, the worst among us flourish in darkness.

This is how democracies die, not with a bang, but with a threat and a few individuals or organizations destroyed to “make them an example.”

So what do we do?

First, we demand that every member of Congress — Democrat and Republican — publicly condemn this threat against CNN. Silence is complicity.

Second, we urge our courts to defend the First Amendment with the vigor it demands. The press must remain free from government intimidation, or it is not truly free.

Third, we support independent journalism with our wallets. Subscribe. Donate. Share their stories. The corporate media won’t save us. We the people, must.

Fourth, we organize. Not just around press freedom, but around every interconnected pillar of democracy under threat: voting rights, judicial integrity, environmental justice, and yes, immigration reform rooted in compassion, not cruelty.

And finally, we remember: The Founders gave us a roadmap. We the People are the ultimate check on tyranny.

But only if we show up. Only if we speak out.

July 2, 2025, when Trump made that threat, will go down as a dark day in American history, unless we choose to make it a turning point.

Trump’s assault on the press is not a sideshow. It is not a distraction. It is the whole game. Control the narrative, and you control the country. Silence dissent, and you can do anything.

The American experiment survives only as long as we defend the institutions that make it possible. And a free press is not just one of those institutions: it’s the first line of defense.

So today, we stand with CNN. Tomorrow, it might be ProPublica. Or Mother Jones. Or your local paper. Or this newsletter.

When the truth becomes a crime, then we are all criminals. And in that case, I say proudly: print the truth anyway.

Let them come.

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https://hartmannreport.com/p/if-the-truth-is-a-crime-then-we-are