Month: December 2025

Charlie Sykes has a piece up about the latest highly disturbing directive from the Department of Justice targeting dissent:

Bondi’s memo links domestic terrorism to activity that “paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist,’” and connects this to “a recent string of political violence,” including the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

It then outlines plans to punish such offenses “to the maximum extent permitted by law.”

The new orders create a massive dragnet that focuses on Antifa but Bondi draws an extraordinarily wide circle of groups and individuals who challenge MAGA. It was first reported by Ken Klippenstein, but has not yet received a fraction of the coverage it deserves.

Bondi’s memo says it targets domestic terrorism. But the focus is exhaustively — almost singularly — on ideology. The memo’s language essentially builds a composite culture war enemy. Although the directive mentions the statutory definition requiring acts dangerous to human life, it directs federal law enforcement to investigate individuals whose “animating principle is adherence” to several viewpoints.

And the “extreme viewpoints” and ideological frameworks the Attorney General instructs federal law enforcement to prioritize include? (These are direct quotes)

• Opposition to law and immigration enforcement…

• Extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders…

• Adherence to radical gender ideology…

• Anti-Americanism…

• Anti-capitalism…

• Anti-Christianity…

• Support for the overthrow of the United States Government…

• Hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality,,,

To which the proper reaction is WTAF? How is an FBI agent supposed to measure hostility towards traditional views on family? And what does that even mean? Are they monitoring your social media, who you donate to? Who you are sleeping with? The criteria are so vague, they invite subjective interpretation and mission creep.

Critics are right when they warn that this will end up targeting views that are constitutionally protected. And that may be the whole point.

He points out that Bondi’s order exclusively targets the left despite the fact that the data show most of the threats of political violence are generated by the right (which they have actively suppressed.)

So groups or individuals who advocate for immigration reform, or trans rights, or are opposed to capitalism can now be slotted into this internal network mapping apparatus just based on their beliefs.

The chief legal counsel of Whistleblower Aid nails this, when he says “the memo expressly seeks to redefine political dissent against the president as domestic terrorism.”

[…]

You can read more about it here, here, here, and here.

But this is what I try to emphasize in today’s podcast: You don’t need to get a conviction, or even actually file a case to chill dissent.

If you scare away donors by suggesting the groups are under investigation for tax fraud or, terrorism. You cripple the organizations whether or not any charges are ever even filed.

I don’t mind saying that I think about it. I don’t censor myself and have for many years tried not to be too incontinent in my speech. But I’d be an idiot not to consider if I might come into the cross hairs. Not being a wealthy person it’s fairly intimidating to consider that what I have always considered to be my fundamental, bedrock right to free speech under the constitution could be the end of me.

You don’t have to be a blogger or columnist to be in this position. It could happen to any of us. If you’re on Facebook or Instagram, BlueSky or X you too could come up in some new AI data dragnet. But it’s important not to allow them to make us obey in advance by dropping out of the dialog. We’re not lost yet but we will be if we allow ourselves to be silenced. There is safety in numbers.

This from Sen. Chris Murphy is worth watching. He’s not wrong:

I need you to listen to and share this story – of how Trump is preparing to abandon Ukraine in exchange for Russian money for his billionaire friends.

It could be the greatest corruption of American foreign policy in our history. Russia gets Ukraine. Trump's friends get rich. pic.twitter.com/yqj2cAQZdx

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 8, 2025

Trump will sell this as the greatest peace deal the world has ever known, bringing in trillions and trillions of dollars to the United States. As Murphy says, this is all nonsense. It’s about giving billions to Trump’s rich family and buddies which, in fairness, to him is the same as “bringing it back” home. After all, l’etat, c’est moi.

The corruption is on an epic scale never seen before in America and I didn’t think there was anything we hadn’t seen before. Compared to these guys, the robber baron’s were a bunch of deadbeat losers.

From the very conservative Governor of Oklahoma:

Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, on Tuesday criticized the Trump administration for its elimination of wind energy projects across the country.

In one of his first executive orders earlier this year, President Donald Trump directed a federal review of existing onshore and offshore wind projects to determine whether their leases should be terminated or amended. Under the directive, the Trump administration canceled wind energy projects across the country and stopped issuing new leases.

“You cannot weaponize these things and just for political purposes put your thumb on the scale,” Stitt said while speaking at Semafor’s “Powering America’s Future” event.

Stitt’s comments come after a federal judge on Monday ruled Trump’s order unlawful.

Wind power is one of Trump’s most personal bête noirs. He is going to be very unhappy about this.

Yet another Republican expressing opposition to Trump. It’s not much. Baby steps. But coming from an oil patch governor it’s especially notable.

It’s not enough that he’s destroying small importers and raising prices. Let’s destroy the tourist business too!

This is utter lunacy. He truly is declaring war on Europe. But any money laundering, drug runner or middle eastern despot is welcome to come to America as long as they give Trump a big slurpy kiss.

2026 has already started. Get in the game.

If you are not in the habit of supporting non-federal downballot candidates, get in the habit. The election of Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia were harbingers of the 2026 wave that’s coming. More arrived last night (The Guardian):

Democrat Eileen Higgins was elected mayor of Miami on Tuesday night in a stunning upset victory that reversed a run of recent Republican successes in Florida.

The election of Higgins, 61, a former county commissioner, also added to a string of Democratic wins across the country that have served to highlight the growing level of resistance to Donald Trump in his second presidential term.

Miami-Dade, a county with a significant immigrant population, voted for Trump in historic numbers in 2024, making him the first Republican presidential candidate to win it since 1988.

That majority melted away in Tuesday’s run-off as Higgins became the first Democrat in 30 years to become mayor of the city of Miami. After winning 36% of the vote in last month’s election after which the top two candidates moved forward, she bested Republican Emilio González, a former city manager.

And from The Bulwark:

Meanwhile, Democrat Eric Gisler narrowly defeated Republican Mack Guest IV in a special election in the 121st state house district of Georgia. The district had been held by a Republican state legislator, and Trump carried it in 2024 by 12 points. Guest outraised Gisler, and was endorsed by the popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. But he couldn’t survive the anti-Republican wave.

Mother Jones reminds readers who might have missed last month’s other Democratic advances:

In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big. 

How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri.

By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.”

Listen, the Republican 2010 victories in NC set us up for a decade of redistricting, redistricting again, and redistricting some more. Plus repeated legal fights over vote suppression legislation. Plus a battle that lasted until May to secure a state Supreme Court seat Justice Allison Riggs won last November. We have yet to recover.

Downballot Matters.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Ethno-national imperialism

The president, in the words of an old TV commercial, is a chocolate mess. He held a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday backed by a banner reading “Lower Prices Bigger Paychecks.” He was there to connect with Americans seeing higher prices on every grocery store aisle and paychecks that haven’t increased and buy less. Instead he bragged that he’s ended inflation and lowered prices. One could say he lost the plot but it was never his plot:

He mocked the word “affordability,” touted how high the stock market had risen, and said Americans didn’t need so many pencils. He launched into a number of digressions to disparage the country of Somalia, the concept of climate change and the news media in the back of the room.

It’s a lesson Americans have been slow to learn. Don’t listen to what Trump says, watch what he does.

He hates neoconservatives, Adam Serwer lays out in The Atlantic. He’s mocked them and their mismanagement of military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, “though more in the tone of a fan angry about his team losing than of a principled opponent of militarism.”

Now with respect to his project for regime change in Venezuela, Trump is running the neocon playbook.

Serwer writes:

Like the neocons, Trump’s neo-neocons repeatedly invoke the West’s complacency and unwillingness to defend its own values, a frailty that can be rectified only through the ritual use of military force against weaker targets. The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg once articulated what he called the “Ledeen Doctrine,” after the neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which was: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Despite Trump’s rejection of George W. Bush, MAGA bears many similarities to the right-wing politics of that era—a fetishization of violence and torture, the treatment of opposition as treasonous, a disdain for due process, and an anti-Muslim bigotry at odds with fundamental American principles.

But not at odds with what for Trump passes for principles. More like a schoolyard bully’s need for domination.

Although the pretense of adhering to democratic values has been abandoned by an administration that disdains democracy, free speech, and the rule of law, the theory is nonetheless the same: Unless America defends ethno-nationalism against the forces of multiracial democracy elsewhere, ethno-nationalism will not be safe here. The Trump administration’s rabid hostility toward the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa, with its history all Americans can recognize, makes more sense in this context.

Some neocons actually believed in democratic principles, Serwer suggests, albeit “in their own misguided way.” Some of those became Never Trumpers. “But for others, the appeal of interventionism seems to have been more about a kind of ethnic chauvinism, about reiterating the superiority of the enlightened West over primitivist ‘Islamofascism.’ For that faction of former neocons, well, Trumpism fit like a well-tailored suit.”

Despite his condemnation of the neocons, what Trump really condemns are their failures. Their failure to subdue Iraq and Afghanistan (and Syria) overnight, as he would have, and to take their oil. (Venezuela has lots of oil.) Trumpism means not only to nurture ethnic chauvinism at home but to export it the way the neocons did, minus the pretext of exporting democracy.

Serwer wraps up:

The Trump administration’s strategy document states that “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” Trump has made clear that this is no anodyne statement—at a rally Tuesday he defended his “permanent pause” on “third-world migration” by expressing his dismay at the fact that instead of people coming from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, immigrants were coming to the U.S. from “Somalia, places that are a disaster, filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Trump is not concerned about “migration”; in some general sense, he’s concerned that the immigrants are not white.

This is the “Great Replacement” theory, applied globally. It is the same might-makes-right worldview of the worst neocons, but in service of the abhorrent principle of segregation instead of democracy, and suggesting a future of American imperialism unmoored from any pretense of a belief in the equality of mankind.

Trump the Incurious may have a deep preference for the skin tones (genes) of Nordic peoples. But he will never ask himself why more of them don’t want to join an American oligarcy in decline. They are happier in the social democracies they’ve built than they would be in the Trump-Miller-Vought white-nationalist project.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Seriously. can even his cult members buy this bullshit? After all he says about Biden every day?

Yes he is just a demented old man — with the power to destroy the world.

Is this how we end?

Earlier today, I talked about how the Supreme Court is now just another phony, dishonest, Republican activist group. Exhibit A:

Senior Trump advisers are telling top GOP donors that a pair of upcoming Supreme Court decisions are likely to bolster Republicans in the 2026 midterms — and transform the party’s power to win elections for years.

What are the Supremes planning to do to help the GOP this cycle?

1. Louisiana v. Callais

The court — which has a 6-3 conservative supermajority — is set to decide whether to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that prohibits the dilution of minority voting power in congressional redistricting plans.

• The law has resulted in the creation of “majority-minority” districts that ensure voters in predominantly Black areas can be represented by minorities.
• For years, Republicans have sought to weaken the law, arguing that it’s federal overreach and unfairly creates Democrat-friendly districts.
• Democrats say the law prevents discrimination and ensures that minority voters are represented in Congress.

[…]

The liberal-leaning Fair Fight Action has warned that overturning the law could result in Republicans dismantling as many as 19 Democrat-held majority-minority seats ahead of the midterms — “enough to cement one-party control of the U.S. House for at least a generation.”

• That, however, would require the court to rule quickly: Candidate filing deadlines in several states are coming up soon, and some already have passed.
• If the court overturns the law after next year’s filing deadlines, it would impact congressional line-drawing for the 2028 election.

2. National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) v. Federal Election Commission (FEC)

Oral arguments will be held Tuesday for this case, in which the justices will decide whether to eliminate a federal law that limits the amount of money big-money party committees can spend in direct coordination with favored candidates.

• Republicans argue the law violates the First Amendment and free political speech.
• Democrats say the law curtails corruption, and prevents major donors from flooding a candidate’s coffers with massive sums.
• The case is widely seen as the most consequential campaign finance-related dispute to land before the court since the landmark Citizens United decision in 2010 that lifted restrictions on political spending by corporations, unions and other groups.

Campaign finance experts predict Republicans would benefit more if the court overturns the law because the GOP relies heavily on billionaire mega-donors such as tech mogul Elon Musk, casino executive Miriam Adelson and hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.

I’m reminded that Musk spent a hundred million on a Supreme Court seat in Michigan and lost. Money isn’t everything. But it isn’t nothing either.

I expect that the DOJ is going to try to dismantle Act Blue for small donors before the election and I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see the Supremes step in with the shadow docket and rule that allowing ACT Blue to continue would cause Trump irreparable harm. That’s basically the argument they used to excuse the stopping of the vote count in Florida in Bush vs Gore. That certainly would give the GOP with its battalion of oligarchs an advantage.

But even with all that there is no reason that they would be a shoe-in for victory. Trump and the Republicans are extremely unpopular and many of the dipshits who just come out to vote like it’s American Idol whenever their favorite reality star is on the ballot are not likely to rouse themselves in this midterm. He’s never been all that successful in juicing turnout in off year elections.and the Democrats are champing at the bit. Still, it’s tragic that the Supreme’s are just a bunch of rank partisan hacks who don’t even try to hide that fact. Why should they? They have lifetime appointments and have learned that they can simply say “waddaya gonna do about?” Shamelessness … you know the drill.

The Democrats held a hearing on the ICE detentions of American citizens, based upon ProPublica’s reporting. (It would be nice if there was more press about it but…)

A congressional investigation out today has found that, contrary to the Trump administration’s claims, immigration agents have frequently detained and mistreated U.S. citizens. 

The report by Senate Democrats, which was prompted by ProPublica’s reporting, included interviews with nearly two dozen Americans.  Citizens told congressional investigators that immigration officers had dragged them from cars, detained them for days, fabricated claims of assault, routinely used excessive force and denied medical care.

The investigation also found that agents “treated children with reckless disregard for their safety and well being.” One citizen recalled that federal agents pointed guns at her youngest children, ages 6 and 8, and dragged her 14-year-old daughter out of a pickup and zip-tied her. 

The citizen, Anabel Romero, told investigators that an agent threatened to “fucking blow your head off” during the chaotic raid at a rural Idaho racetrack. Romero also said agents “wouldn’t let people get diapers or food for their kids.” 

Romero and her children were born in Idaho. 

And this is especially important, which a lot of congressional leaders probably don’t know unless they spend plenty of time on social media which has these reports in great numbers from all over the country every single day:

Five other citizens are giving their accounts publicly Tuesday on Capitol Hill.  The citizens’ accounts paint a dire picture, the senator behind the report told ProPublica in an interview. 

“What most struck me is the brutality and physical violence involved in every story,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “This is stuff that should be unrecognizable as AmericaBrutal. It should make everyday Americans outraged that their fellow citizens could be treated this way.”

If they’re doing it to American citizens you know they’re treating immigrants even worse. The government isn’t tracking any of this and insists that this is all a lie and they have never detained American citizens.

The issue is all the more critical since the Supreme Court issued a temporary order this fall allowing immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to stop civilians without clear cause.  Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that citizens had no reason to worry. “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”

That’s why they call these grotesque assaults, Kavanaugh stops. Many people are being traumatized, some being held for days despite their legal status or citizenship. It’s a nightmare.

Following up on the post below, this comment is one for the books. Trump is running an honest-to-goodness war against “narco-terrorism” allegedly to stop the flow of drugs into America. He thinks drug runners should all be executed on sight and he is doing it.

When asked in the Politico interview how he squares that with the pardoning of the former Honduran president and drug king pen he knows nothing. Get a load of this:

Well, I don’t know him. And I know very little about him other than people said it was like, uh, an Obama-Biden type setup, where he was set up … there are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know. And they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said I’ll do it.

How can anyone not realize that this man is a sniveling coward? He simply cannot take responsibility for any of his fuck-ups, big or small.

Trump is running the country on a series of daily whims that have people scurrying around like a bunch of rats, desperate to do his bidding and grab whatever slice of the grift they can get their grimy hands on. He is wielding his power indiscriminately and apparently he simply cannot be stopped.

I’m really starting to worry about those nuclear codes. He’s that mentally disordered.