What we are seeing across the country as organized gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is not civil disobedience. It isn’t even protest. It’s just crime.
The word “civil” in civil disobedience refers to the fact that the protester is allowing themselves to be arrested in order to emphasize just how important their cause is to them. It is also generally done in a context that threatens minimal harm to police and bystanders.
Today, across the country, but especially in bastions of democratic socialism like Minneapolis, Portland and Seattle, we see something entirely different: bands of people following, harassing, doxxing and sometimes engaging in direct assault against ICE agents.
What these ICE Watch groups across the country, of which Good was reportedly a trained member, do is entirely different. They are trying to impede federal agents from carrying out democratically enacted laws, not sending a message, and importantly, they are trying to evade capture.
Sorry, that is crime, not protest.
Further, we need to ask ourselves, quite seriously, if groups of people training and then executing missions that put law enforcement and the public in harm’s way may, in fact, be criminal conspiracies.
If one’s job is to be a neighborhood lookout for a street drug dealing operation, that is a crime. It’s not entirely clear why doing the same thing to protect illegal immigrants, including many of whom are vicious criminals, isn’t a similar activity.
According to a recent poll, only 24% of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18-44, that number leaps to an astounding 61%.
Maybe they are listening to too many true crime podcasts, but we have to ask ourselves, how on Earth did this become acceptable behavior in our society?
The short answer is that for most of this century, our law enforcement agencies and courts have just let it happen. They have decided that some criminal activity is just fine so long as your cause is just.
Yeah:
Then they came for the wine moms ….
One might think that the brutalizing and killing of white women would be a bridge too far even for the bloodthirsty, racist MAGA cult but I’m afraid not. Sure, they love a trad wife, a Mar-a-lago Botox babe or a hard-core wingnut female scrapper. But consider what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene when she dared to cross Trump. He actually called for an investigation into her.
Obviously, they’re misogynists (many of them outright incels) who resent women who dare to defy them just as much as they resent people of color and immigrants of all stripes. It’s just that they used to generally keep their violence against them behind closed doors. The masks and the costumes and the get-out-of-jail-free card dispensed by the president of the United States have given them permission to let it all hang out.
Paul Krugman delivered a comprehensive look at the U.S. economy at year’s end that’s worth paying for his Substack to get. (Actually, it’s always good.) He makes several points and answers many questions we might have but this is an overview. It’s not good:
How is the U.S. economy doing?
Early every month the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data on the state of the job market the previous month. The Employment Situation report is based on two surveys: a survey of employers and a survey of households. The employer survey produces, among other things, estimates of total employment. The household survey produces, among other things, estimates of unemployment.
While these data are noisy on a monthly basis, last Friday’s final job report for the year smooths out the noise and gives us an assessment of U.S. job performance over 2025 as a whole. And it definitely wasn’t great. As the chart at the top of this post shows, job growth in 2025 was clearly weak. In fact, the year of the Covid pandemic aside, it was the weakest in a decade.
This is not a hot economy. Indeed, by multiple measures it’s notably worse than the economy Trump inherited from Biden.
And it may be even colder than reported. BLS employment numbers are often significantly revised when more comprehensive information comes in. Cognizant of that fact, Federal Reserve officials believe that recent BLS employment numbers may have been overstating job growth by as much as 60,000 a month. If that’s true,employment may have been flat for 2025 as a whole.
If the US is not gaining jobs, is it at least adding good jobs while shedding bad jobs? A Thursday night Trump Truth Social post appears to make this claim.
That Truth Social post represented an extraordinary breach of the rules for handling BLS reports. These reports, publicly issued at 8:30 AM on a Friday, are provided to the White House the previous night — but only on the strict condition that the information is to be kept confidential, with officials refraining from comment until half an hour after the public release. This rule is intended to prevent insider trading. Yet Trump’s Thursday post included job numbers that were under the disclosure embargo. So the post was illegal and would probably have led to jail time if a staffer had done it.
Trump’s intention was clearly to spin the report. He wanted to claim that weak employment growth in 2025 was partly a result of layoffs by DOGE, in which supposedly unproductive jobs were eliminated. However, it’s likely that Trump didn’t realize that this claim doesn’t make any sense — 2025 was a very weak year even if one only counts private-sector jobs:
Similarly, Trump administration officials have suggested other definitions of what constitute “real” jobs in order to spin the weak employment numbers. For example, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has dismissed strong employment growth under Biden by saying that it was overwhelmingly government jobs or jobs in “government-adjacent” sectors like health care and education. But if your position is that government or government-adjacent jobs don’t count as “real jobs,” then 2025 looks even worse: All net job creation took place in health care and social services, with employment in the rest of the economy declining:
I could go on. Joey Politano notes that 2025 was marked by a decline in blue-collar jobs, aka “manly” jobs — basically jobs that might possibly require upper-body strength. There is simply no plausible way to slice and dice the data to make the 2025 job creation numbers look good.
That said, weak job growth didn’t lead to a huge rise in unemployment. The BLS defines unemployment as the number of people who are actively seeking work but don’t currently have a job — a number that is estimated using its monthly survey of households. The unemployment rate rose during 2025, but only from 4.1 to 4.4 percent. This was a significant rise, but not enough to trigger the widely used Sahm rule indicator (originally devised by Claudia Sahm, who I interviewed early in 2025), which generally signals that a recession has begun.
Why didn’t unemployment rise by more? As I will discuss later, Trump administration policies have reduced the demand for labor. These policies are probably the main reason job growth has declined so much. But the combination of a crackdown on new immigration and deportation of people already in the United States has simultaneously reduced the supply of labor, and thereby reduced “breakeven employment growth,” the number of jobs the economy needs to create each month to keep unemployment from rising. In effect, without the crackdown on immigration and deportations, it’s likely that the unemployment rate would have risen substantially.
It’s important to understand that I am not saying that anti-immigrant policies have been good for native-born workers. They suffered rising unemployment over the course of 2025. I’m just trying to explain the mechanics here — how very weak job growth in the Trump economy is consistent with only a moderate rise in unemployment.
He points out that while there haven’t been mass layoffs, people are rightly freaked out about the job market because there just hasn’t been much hiring. And “because it’s hard to find a job, long-term unemployment — the number of people who have been unemployed for 15 weeks or more — has risen much more than total unemployment.”
Why aren’t things better than they are?
Trump’s grandiose claims about what his policies would achieve never made sense. But Trump’s tariffs did offer some industries a lot of protection against foreign competition. Why didn’t manufacturing employment expand, at least somewhat? And why has hiring plunged, leading to a very bad job market?
A large part of the answer to the first question is that international trade in the 21st century works very differently from the way trade worked in the 1890s, when William McKinley imposed the tariffs Trump admires. At the end of the 19th century nations basically traded final goods that were sold to consumers. In 1890 America basically exported agricultural products while importing manufactured goods, end of story. But modern trade is dominated by “value chains” in which most imports are inputs into the production of other goods.
Given this reality, Trump’s tariffs actually made U.S. manufacturing less competitive against foreign products, because the tariffs raised the cost of imported inputs. In the end, the loss of competitiveness due to the higher cost of imported inputs more than offset the benefits of protection from import competition that the tariffs provided.
And even as manufacturing has suffered from higher costs, U.S. farmers — who are highly dependent on export markets — have been severely hurt by foreign retaliation.
It’s also the uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic decision making and the unknown consequences of this AI boom.
He concludes:
Trumponomics 2025 is a story of how Trump worsened the economy that he inherited from Biden through big promises and policy choices that failed to understand how the economy actually works. The uncertainty created by Trump’s constantly changing tariff policy during 2025 appears likely to continue, as he delivers a stream of unworkable, half-baked ideas. While the stock market may be doing well, the rest of America isn’t. And it may very well get worse before it gets better.
Read the whole thing if you can for the details and charts that fill out this story.
If Donald Trump were really a Russian agent, would he be doing anything differently? Or so goes the speculation. One might also ask that if he really were trying to wreck the U.S. economy, would he be doing anything differently? Like the way his anti-immigration policies are lowering “the annual rate of economic growth by almost one-third.”
Or by pretextually threatening Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with a criminal indictment to gain his compliance with Trump’s whims. Powell until now has reserved criticism of Trump’s strongarm efforts to dictate how the Fed sets interest rates. If nobody knows how to goose U.S. economic growth like Trump (see above), then the toddler must also be the nation’s foremost expert on managing interest rates.
Powell is finally speaking out. He’s calling Trump’s threatened criminal indictment what it is:
This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role; the Fed through testimony and other public disclosures made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.
This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.
Investors took one look at the Trump administration’s criminal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and they decided to resuscitate the “Sell America” trade, selling off US stocks, bonds and the dollar.
Stock futures traded lower Monday morning. Dow futures were down 350 points, or 0.7%. S&P 500 futures fell 0.6%. Futures tied to the Nasdaq were 0.9% lower.
The US dollar weakened against other major currencies. The dollar index, which tracks the dollar’s strength against six major currencies, was down 0.4% – a sharp move for the greenback.
Treasuries fell somewhat, too. The benchmark 10-year yield, which trades in opposite direction to prices, rose to just under 4.2%, near a one-month high. Bond yields’ move higher suggests the Trump administration’s action against the Fed could backfire, and rates may not start sinking as the president has demanded.
Topkapi(1964), the classic caper film, stars the late Melina Mercouri. By chance last night, I came across and watched it again on TCM. After its run, the host made a point of mentioning how the late Greek actress, after the Greek military junta in 1967 stripped her citizenship, issued a classic comeback.
Mercouri was performing in New York at the time. She condemned Brig. Gen. Stylianos Pattakos, one of the junta’s principals, and began an international effort to help bring down the dictatorship. The junta stripped Mercouri’s Greek citizenship, revoked her passport, and confiscated her property. (Her citizenship was restored after the junta fell. She was elected to Parliament in 1977. She was appointed Minister of Culture in 1981.)
Mercouri responded, ”I was born a Greek and I’ll die a Greek. Pattakos was born a fascist and he’ll die a fascist.”
Americanized, there’s a quote for our time.
Video shows ICE agents going door to door in South Minneapolis, kicking in doors and using force. Reporting says agents relied on administrative ICE paperwork, not judge-signed warrants, which do not authorize forced entry into private homes.pic.twitter.com/6hKVcEejJ7
BREAKING: ICE agents rammed this United States Marine veteran’s car and put her through torture just because she was following them from a safe distance. “they said ‘have you not learned: this is why we killed that lesbian bitch’”
The Trump administration announced that it would suspend funding of food stamps and other hunger relief programs in Minnesota just as a federal judge blocked a similar effort to freeze funding for social services amid allegations of widespread fraud in the state.
Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, posted a letter addressed to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota saying that she would suspend payment of $129 million in federal funding from the Agriculture Department, citing unfolding investigations of fraud in Minnesota’s social safety net, which have involved members of the Somali-American community.
In the letter, which included Trump-style insults to Mr. Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, Ms. Rollins said the state government would need to provide “payment justifications” in the next 30 days for funding of services like food stamps to be restarted. It is unclear what that means, and the Agriculture Department did not immediately respond to a question on what information it was requesting.
It’s very interesting that they’ve decided to make Minnesota the example. It’s not as big a state as California or Illinois so that makes it easier. And certainly the Republicans want to take down Tim Walz.
But really it’s just about race. Many states have large immigrant communities but they want to focus on blue states (which means Ohio, for instance, isn’t really on the menu.) To hit the real MAGA sweet spot they needed a Democratic state with a large Black immigrant, Muslim community and Minnesota perfectly fits the bill. Add in the fact that the George Floyd murder, which sparked the BLM protests that the right wing is still whining about, and you have a perfect target.
That the first killing is a blond, lesbian “wine mom” makes it just:
In between building his ballroom, invading Venezuela, threatening Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Greenland with military strikes, Trump is injecting himself into the Iran protests by threatening more violence:
The options being presented to Trump would range from targeted strikes inside Iran to offensive cyber attacks, one official granted anonymity to discuss ongoing conversations said, adding that the administration would want to avoid options that create massive civilian impact so things that can be tailored to targeting Iran’s military forces are preferable. The administration is also looking at whether it can send terminals for Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service, a former U.S. official said.
“We could step up the pressure campaign in a number of ways,” the official said. “The window [for the President to take action] is small but the people are angry.”
Trump is not expected to send American forces to the country, and the second official said at the moment no large troop or asset movements are currently in the works. Some in the administration fear that U.S. action might inflame tensions in the Middle East or backfire in its attempt to help the escalating protest movement.
[…]
“I think Trump will bomb them, because he said so,” said a Republican foreign policy strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about possible military action. The person added that likely targets if Trump is looking to send a message to Iran’s leaders would be regime symbols and oil infrastructure.
The regime over the weekend has stepped up repression and violence against protesters.
A crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran has killed at least 538 people and even more are feared dead, activists said Sunday, while Tehran warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be “legitimate targets” if America uses force to protect demonstrators.
He’s also taking over the municipal golf courses, pushing ICE to stop protests by any means necessary and planning several monuments to himself, including desecrating the West Wing of the White House.
He can do it all, I guess, with the knowledge that he’s gotten away with blindly implementing every impulse he’s ever had. Why shouldn’t he think he can just order every thought that passes through his head? He is morally empty, emotionally stunted and intellectually bankrupt and nobody ever stops him.
I don’t spend a lot of time on X except to download videos of political leaders and various government accounts for the blog so I’ve only been peripherally aware of this outrageous new AI deep fake capability on Grok that has the whole world freaking out and rightly so. I can hardly believe it’s actually happening:
Like thousands of women across the world, Evie, a 22-year-old photographer from Lincolnshire, woke up on New Year’s Day, looked at her phone and was alarmed to see that fully clothed photographs of her had been digitally manipulated by Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok, to show her in just a bikini.
The “put her in a bikini” trend began quietly at the end of last year before exploding at the start of 2026. Within days, hundreds of thousands of requests were being made to the Grok chatbot, asking it to strip the clothes from photographs of women. The fake, sexualised images were posted publicly on X, freely available for millions of people to inspect.
Relatively tame requests by X users to alter photographs to show women in bikinis, rapidly evolved during the first week of the year, hour by hour, into increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis, then in bikinis made of dental floss, placed in sexualised positions, and made to bend over so their genitals were visible. By 8 January as many as 6,000 bikini demands were being made to the chatbot every hour, according to analysis conducted for the Guardian.
This unprecedented mainstreaming of nudification technology triggered instant outrage from the women affected, but it was days before regulators and politicians woke up to the enormity of the proliferating scandal. The public outcry raged for nine days before X made any substantive changes to stem the trend. By the time it acted, early on Friday morning, degrading, non-consensual manipulated pictures of countless women had already flooded the internet.
Evie retweeted the image to give awareness to the problem and it resulted in more and more degrading pictures including her completely naked with a ball gag in her mouth. Once people understood what they could do with this thing it was a short trip to kids, swastikas or naked women being covered in what looks like semen.
By Thursday, the chatbot was being asked to add bullet holes to the face of Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by an ICE agent in the US on Wednesday. Grok readily obliged, posting graphic, bloodied altered images of the victim on X within seconds.
[…]
Men began asking for women to be improved – with demands that they be given bigger breasts or larger thighs. Some men asked for women to be given disabilities, others asked for their hands to be filled with sex toys. Perceived defects were removed by the chatbot instantly in response to requests such as: “@grok can you fix her teeth.” The range of desires was startling: “Add blood, more worn out clothes (make sure it expose scar or bruises), forced smile”; “Replace the face with that of Adolf, add splashed and splattered organs”; “Put them in a Russian gulag”; “Make her pregnant with quadruplets.” Images of the US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Hollywood actor Zendaya were altered to make them appear to be white women.
Individuals, groups and governments have tried to get Musk to stop but he doesn’t want to do it.
CNN reported later that day that Musk had ordered staff at xAI to loosen the guardrails on Grok last year; a source told the broadcaster that he had told a meeting he was “unhappy about over-censoring” and three xAI safety team members had left the business soon after. In the UK, there was rising fury from women’s rights campaigners at the government’s failure to bring into force legislation passed last year that would have made this creation of non-consensual intimate imagery illegal. Officials were unable to explain why the legislation had not yet been implemented.
You can click over to the Guardian article linked above for more details if you haven’t been following this story. It’s truly unbelievable.
Musk has completely lost all restraint just like his erstwhile bud, Donald Trump:
This is stuff is right out in the open now, propagated by the richest man in the world on a global information network completely controlled by him.
If it seemed that “woke” went too far in policing racism and misogyny, what are we talking about now?
Government data show the Trump administration’s immigration policies reducing the number of foreign-born workers did not help U.S.-born workers in 2025. The latest data indicate a substantial drop in foreign-born workers did not translate into better labor market outcomes for U.S.-born workers or encourage more workers to enter the labor force. The U.S.-born unemployment rate increased over the past 12 months. Trump officials, including White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, predicted fewer immigrant workers would produce significant benefits for U.S.-born workers.
The latest jobs report confirms what other monthly reports showed in 2025: Fewer foreign-born workers are in the U.S. labor force due to the Trump administration’s policies on legal and illegal immigration. “The Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey shows a decline of 881,000 foreign-born workers since the start of the Trump administration in January 2025, and a drop of 1.3 million since a peak in March 2025,” according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis.
The NFAP analysis notes the drop in the size of the immigrant labor force represents a shock for the U.S. economy but is even larger when compared to the expected level. In their assumptions, the Congressional Budget Office and the Social Security Administration expected approximately 1.3 million more foreign-born workers in 2025, which would create a gap of more than 2 million expected workers once 810,000 fewer foreign-born workers in the latest BLS data are added.
So what’s the story here? Could it be that he Trump people have massively misunderstood basic economics? Why yes:
Why is labor force growth essential? Economic growth, which raises a country’s living standards, relies on labor force growth and productivity growth, and immigrants are essential to both, particularly given their role in boosting productivity and America’s aging workforce. Immigrant workers accounted for more than half of U.S. labor force growth between 2014 and 2024.
“The Trump administration’s policies on illegal and legal immigration would reduce the projected number of workers in the United States by 6.8 million by 2028 and by 15.7 million by 2035 and lower the annual rate of economic growth by almost one-third,” according to an October 2025 NFAP analysis.
This is, of course, another Miller special:
According to Stephen Miller and other Trump officials, deporting foreign-born workers and restricting legal immigration would benefit U.S. workers. “In one meeting during the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump said that if it was up to Mr. Miller there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Mr. Miller, according to a person with knowledge of the comment,” reported The New York Times.
Miller’s theory, based largely on what economists call the “lump of labor fallacy” or the belief that an economy holds only a fixed number of jobs, has hit head-on with reality. Reducing the labor supply has not benefited U.S. workers.
He’s not an economist and is driven solely by bigotry. But he has a direct link to Donald Trump and the MAGA cult’s collective lizard brain and they are in agreement that they would like the country to be empty of people of color. And frankly, they would be happy to see all white people who disagree with them leave as well — or maybe be turned into servants of the regime.
This is the problem:
Several factors explain why the decline in foreign-born labor did not create an economic boon for U.S. workers in 2025 and will be unlikely to do so in the future. First, when business owners and potential entrepreneurs find an insufficient number of workers, they scale back or abandon plans to invest or expand, which can lead to fewer jobs for U.S. workers. Second, immigrants create jobs through their consumer spending on food, housing and other items. Third, immigrants foster job creation by starting new businesses, and their availability in the labor market may encourage businesses to keep work in the United States rather than outsourcing overseas.
According to Regets, “Immigrants help exports, create jobs as consumers, fill niches in the labor market and produce dynamism for the U.S. economy that wouldn’t be there.”
Economists, backed by decades of data, note that it is incorrect to assume fewer immigrants are necessary to create more opportunity for U.S. workers or that increasing immigration or growing the labor supply in other ways will mean fewer jobs for Americans. “The amount of economic activity in the United States is not fixed,” said Mark Regets. “Otherwise, when soldiers came back from World War II, we would have had mass unemployment rather than an economic expansion.”
Maybe they can force all the wine moms into breeding programs to create population growth a la Handmaid’s Tale. Sure, that’s the ticket. If not, we’re looking at a decline in economic activity that Americans aren’t going to like. In fact, they may come to hate it even more than they hate immigrants. By that time it will be too late.
My Friday overpass sign. There were many honks and waves.
“Anti-ICE Protests Spread Nationwide” reported The New York Times on Saturday:
Mounting outrage over an ICE agent’s killing of a woman in Minneapolis spilled into streets across the country on Saturday, as crowds of protesters mobilized against what they called the excesses of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
The “Ice Out for Good” campaign held demonstrations in small towns and major cities, including some that have been central targets of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. The protests came three days after an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen at the wheel of a car, during an encounter in South Minneapolis.
During a Sunday morning Bulwark chat between Bill Kristol and Sam Stein — “Is the Minneapolis Killing an Inflection Point for Trump?” — Stein recounts driving out Saturday to Shenandoah farm country in the rain [timestamp 33:10]. When he drove into a small Virginia town of maybe 1,000, Stein found 50 people with signs protesting ICE and Renee Good’s death along the highway in pouring rain.
I’m mildly hopeful. Given short attention spans, I’m not holding my breath. On the other hand, DHS shows only signs of ramping up its violence, not only against anyone who looks (to agents) like an immigrant, but against citizens as well. We don’t need to see their faces. They don’t give a damn if we have our “papers.” If this is a tipping point, I want to see more anti-DHS momentum.
🚨 JUST IN: ICE agents are storming homes in Minneapolis and detaining an entire family.
This is happening right now; on video.
Federal agents kicking in doors, rounding up families, while the city is already reeling from the killing of Renee Good.
Blue state lawmakers have had enough of ICE thuggery:
State legislatures across the country are accelerating efforts to shape immigration enforcement policy after the deadly shooting of a Minnesota woman by a federal agent, raising tensions between local leaders and the Trump administration.
From California to New York and Illinois to New Jersey, they’re pushing a range of bills aimed at limiting enforcement and protecting people targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while turning up the rhetoric with comparisons to the Gestapo.
Some policies were moving before an ICE agent fatally shot Renée Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother last week. But her death has been cited by lawmakers as reason to squeeze ICE out of their states.
Politico offers examples from across the country, and this from New Jersey state Sen. Britnee Timberlake:
“Anyone who is an ancestor of a Holocaust survivor will tell you, this is how it starts,” Timberlake said. “If you don’t believe me, just ask the children of the 37-year-old woman from Minnesota, a white American citizen, who was just shot and killed by ICE.”
Tokyo Rose Garden shot back, calling such language (but not ICE thuggery) “gross”:
“From comparisons to the modern-day Nazi gestapo to glorifying rioters, the vilification of ICE must stop,” she said.
Timberlake, in response, told POLITICO “if they want to stop parallels to the Gestapo and Nazi Germany, then they should stop behaving that way.”
Not. Gonna. Happen. As mentioned on Saturday, DHS is recruiting men inclined to behave that way. Recruiting posts characterize their job as repelling violent, nonwhite invaders:
DHS is looking to pay racist bullies to get drunk on power. It has a $1 million campaign to recruit thousands more agents from “gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts” (read: militias) as part of a “wartime recruitment” strategy.
That war is against you. DHA recruits need not have a college degree. They are undertrained, undisciplined, armed, and the sorriest excuse for professional law enforcement since Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke. Trump 2.0 is not recruiting law enforcement. They are building Trump’s personal army of armed thugs.
On the congressional front, Democrats have filed five Bivins-related bills this term to strip qualified immunity from Trump’s federal Enforcers. The bills would make it easier for citizens to personally sue federal agents for civil rights violations: H.R. 4944, H.R. 6091, H.R. 6493, S. 3187 and S. 3470.
Reps. Dan Goldman (N.Y.) and Eric Swalwell (Calif.) have announced their own bill is in the works to dial back qualified immunity.
None of these bills have a prayer this term, of course. But I’d be inclined to present the stack to any DHS agent threatening me and ask him if he knows what the statute of limitations is in this state.
Juan Carlos is a U.S. resident who is currently unhoused and living in his car. Yesterday, 1/9, around noon, he was targeted and assaulted by CBP agents near 22nd & Chicago in Minneapolis. pic.twitter.com/actXLmlAxS
