The best thing you will hear today. Jane Fonda has been an activist almost her whole life and she knows how to talk the talk and walk the walk. Right now, Hollywood needs to take a page from her book and speak the fuck up.
It’s a wonderful speech especially at the end when she speaks out against what’s happening and inspires people to fight back, evoking the Black List and how good people in Hollywood fought back.
She was well received but you could tell that people in the audience were nervous. I suppose some of them are just getting by but most are rich and famous and can easily afford to speak out like she did. The worst that would happen to them is that they’d have to move to the south of France and live in a villa. No excuse for silence from people the MAGA brownshirts would love nothing more than to destroy.
She never mentioned Trump and Musk’s names. She didn’t have to. We all know what’s happening. It shouldn’t take an 87 year old lifetime achievement winner to be the only one to sound the alarm.
The pessimism, wrong track numbers and general vibes on the economy are already low so I will be surprised if these layoffs don’t turbo charge the negative vibe. (I’ve been surprised by this stuff before, so don’t take my word for it…)
The job cuts could ultimately be the biggest in U.S. history. IBM’s purge of about 60,000 workers in 1993 is thought to be the largest corporate layoff.
The Trump administration’s purge of federal workers may ultimately amount to the biggest job cut in U.S. history, which is likely to have ramifications for the economy, especially at the local level, according to economists.
[…]
There were about 220,000 federal employees with less than a year of tenure as of May 2024, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Additionally, more than 75,000 federal workers have accepted a buyout offer, according to a Trump administration official. They agreed to resign but get paid through September.
The total of these two groups — nearly 300,000 workers — would make these actions amount to the “largest job cut in American history (by a mile),” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, wrote Tuesday.
That sum doesn’t include others who may be on the chopping block, such as contractors who work at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Career civil servants who got promotions in the past year are also at risk of losing their jobs, since they’re technically on probation in their new role, Jesse Rothstein, a public policy and economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, said in a podcast Thursday.
Some of them pooh-pooh the idea of a recession because of this but they all understand that massive layoffs, deportations of large numbers of workers and Trump’s tariffs are all adding up to economic turbulence.
I like to think that might be the thing that finally pressures Trump into taking a breath and stopping the shock and awe campaign. But honestly, I think he totally believes his own hype now and is pretty much impervious to public opinion. Sadly, it will probably take a major crisis — and we already know how he handles those.
Considering the carnage being inflicted upon the country by the Trump administration over the past four weeks you would think that the GOP would be the most unpopular political party in the country. After all, the polls show that the public is very unhappy with Donald Trump’s policies while the Republican elected officials appear to be in a state of suspended animation unable to exercise their own prerogatives as an equal branch of government even as the president and his henchmen usurp their power while basically laughing in their faces. Sadly, despite the fact that the GOP is extremely unpopular, the prize for most loathed political party at the moment belongs to the Democrats.
The numbers are very bad. According to the Quinnipiac poll, 57% of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party. It’s the highest that’s been since they started asking the question back in 2008. By contrast only 45% of voters are unhappy with the GOP. The Democrats are at a lukewarm 31% favorability rating.
You might wonder why people would be so negative about the party that has no institutional power and has virtually no ability to stop the Trump/Musk trainwreck. But it’s not actually unusual for Democrats to turn on their own party when they lose. Unlike the Republicans who simply double down, get more extreme and gather their energies for the fight, Democrats get introspective, indulge in soul searching and self-flagellation and often end up over-compensating for their losses by making abrupt changes in policies. Sometimes they go so far in the other direction it appears that they have no values or ideology beyond what they think will “work better.” That habit can leave a bad taste in voters’ mouths.
I recall losses going back to the 1980s and early 1990s when everyone was convinced that the Republicans had an unbreakable grip on the presidency because they had held it for 12 years. The amount of navel gazing that took place in those years was epic as Democrats twisted themselves into pretzels trying to find the formula that would finally get them back into the White House. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, two Southern white men with card carrying membership in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council ended up finding it, largely by offering baby boomer identity cred in combination with pretty conservative ideology.
Everyone thought they had the formula down until Gore barely lost to George W. Bush in 2000 and the Democrats spent the next few years once again running away as fast as they could from gun control, abortion rights, affirmative action etc. and demonstrating that Democratic values were always negotiable. It wasn’t until Barack Obama came along and changed the paradigm in 2008 and winning by a big margin that they showed some confidence again.
It’s obviously important to analyze what went wrong and where better tactics and strategies could have been deployed. Understanding why the voters chose as they did is invaluable. But when you lost by only 1.4% and a couple hundred thousand votes across the battleground states as the Democrats did last November, donning a hair shirt and behaving as if the loss was a complete repudiation of everything you believed in is overkill to say the least. More importantly it validates the fantasy that Trump won some kind of a mandate for his extremist agenda which is simply not the case. Democrats do not need to reinvent the wheel this time.
Having said that, it is disheartening to see the Democrats in Washington appear to either be ineffectual or totally missing in action. (Of course the same can be said of Republicans which is even more bizarre.) There are those who are unafraid to do politics even when they are unable to do policy which is the comfort zone for most of them. People like Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, D-N.Y., and Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Brain Schatz of Hawaii among others are aggressively confronting the Republicans where they can. But the Democrats in general do not have the flair for opposition and obstruction that Republicans do and it’s what their voters are yearning for.
Lately, those voters have been taking matters into their own hands and are confronting their Representatives at town hall meetings and at their offices demanding to know what in the hell they’re going to do to stop the carnage that’s taking place in DC right now. And it’s not just Democrats. Republicans and Independents are showing up as well. Perhaps this kind of politics is more potent coming from the grassroots anyway.
Soon, however, the Democrats are going to have a real chance to show what they are made of and if they play this hand well, I suspect they will win back some of the respect they’ve lost. There is one thing left in American politics that the congress has no choice but to engage and Trump and Musk have no control over and it’s funding the government. On that, despite their minority status, they have leverage and power because the Republicans can’t agree on anything.
There are just three weeks left until the continuing resolution that was punted to March 14th before Christmas runs out three weeks from now. And while the Senate and the House are dreaming about massive tax cuts and taking a machete to Medicaid, they apparently haven’t given a thought to the fact that even with all the DOGE sturm und drang the government is about to run out of money.
As we know, the Republicans in the House have a faction that will not vote for spending. They just won’t. So with their tiny majority they need Democrats to cover for their intransigence. But with Trump and Musk busily destroying the executive branch and seemingly enjoying the carnage they’re creating while doing it, Democrats understand that the Republicans are going to have to deal with their people on their own this time.
The GOP has created the politics we are all living through and they have all the institutional tools they need to pass whatever they want to pass. Unfortunately, they are completely dysfunctional and that dysfunction will likely result in a government shutdown. It could be a painful one but the government is already engulfed in Musk’s firestorm so if the congressional Republicans get in on the act too, it’s all the more clarifying. As Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Ct., the ranking minority-party member of the House Appropriations Committee told the Washington Post, “Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House. It is their responsibility to find the votes to pass the final measures.” It’s that simple.
There is every reason to believe right now that the Democrats are going to hang tough this time. They pretty much have to. With a 31% approval rating they certainly don’t have much to lose but they have a lot to gain as their voters see that they are refusing to go along with this MAGA trainwreck. Sometimes the best way to show leadership is to just say no, especially to bullies, thieves and thugs. The American people will thank them for it.
I thought I’d lived through history during the assassinations of the 1960s, the Apollo 11 moon landing, Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, September 11, and the election of the first Black president. Then came Trumpism, COVID, and the upending of constitutional order. This feels more like the end of history.
Heather Cox Richardson makes history her business. She brings that perspective to Elon Musk’s nuttiness even as “the lug nuts on the wheels of the Musk-Trump government bus” seem to be coming off.
Fellow historian Timothy Snyder concurs, posting, “Something is shifting. They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading.”
Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump’s destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a “thief and a robber.” “[W]hosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command…ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another,” Locke wrote.
Neem notes that Trump won the election and his party holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. He could have used his legitimate constitutional authority but instead, “with the aid of Elon Musk, has consistently violated the Constitution and willingly broken laws.” Neem warned that courts move too slowly to rein Trump in. He urged Congress to perform its constitutional duty to remove Trump from office, and urged voters to make it clear to members of Congress that we expect them to “uphold their obligations and protect our freedom.”
“Otherwise,” Neem writes, “Americans will be subject to a pretender who claims the power but not the legitimate authority of the presidency.” He continues: “Trump’s actions threaten the legitimacy of government itself.”
That is the autocrat playbook. That has been the Republican playbook ever since the 1930s. FDR’s administration meant conservatives’ ability to taylor government exclusively to the needs and desires of the rich was slipping. Then the social revolutions of the 1960s galvanized conservatives to action. Decades of backlash investment into think tanks and media later, here we are. But you know that.
Americans have failed to learn the lessons of history. Whether through complacency or deliberate undermining of public edcuation is unclear. But Sen. Angus King (I-ME) reminded the Senate in a floor speech last week. Trump’s actions are “absolutely straight up unconstitutional” and as “illegal” as Nixon’s impoundment efforts in 1973:
“[T]he reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power,” King said. “They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn’t want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure,” King said. “[T]he people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened,” he said to his Senate colleagues, “is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now we’re just sitting back and watching it happen.”
“This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country,” King said. “It’s the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis…. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don’t want to buck the President, we’ll let the courts take care of it…. [T]hat’s a copout. It’s our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That’s what we swear to when we enter this body.”
“What’s it going to take for us to wake up…I mean this entire body, to wake up to what’s going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What’s it going to take?”
“[T]his a constitutional crisis, and we’ve got to respond to it. I’m just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don’t do it this way. We don’t do it this way. We do things constitutionally. [T]hat’s what the framers intended. They didn’t intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that’s what we’re headed for…. We’ve got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America.”
The problem is that the Republican majority to whom King is appealing don’t want to defend the Constitution. They don’t want free and fair elections if they cannot predetermine the outcome. They want to ignore the will of the people when the country’s mood turns against them.
Richardson offers more historical common sense from Maine, including a yardstick once used to gauge public opinion: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Let’s hope so.
Thank you, Janet Mills.
This is how all our elected officials everywhere should be confronting Trump's authoritarian "we are the law" sentiment. Head on. https://t.co/X0Ka9ACn6T
On the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (ICYMI: Ukraine did not start it, DJT.), coverage in The Washington Post and The New York Times spotlights U.S.-Ukraine relations and what Donald Trump’s fluffing of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin means for the world more than it addresses what Ukraine continues to suffer at Putin’s hands.
Three years of resistance. Three years of gratitude. Three years of absolute heroism of Ukrainians. I am proud of Ukraine! I thank everyone who defends and supports it. Everyone who works for Ukraine. And may the memory of all those who gave their lives for our state and people… pic.twitter.com/HeNMpJX891
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) February 24, 2025
CNN on this anniversary leads with the war’s impact on Ukraine itself:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday hailed Ukraine’s “absolute heroism” as he marked the third anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion, and as European leaders began arriving in the capital Kyiv in a show of support for the embattled country.
“Three years of resistance. Three years of gratitude. Three years of absolute heroism of Ukrainians. I am proud of Ukraine!” Zelensky wrote on X alongside a video showing scenes from the frontline and Ukrainian civilians supporting war efforts during the grinding conflict.
“I thank everyone who defends and supports it. Everyone who works for Ukraine. And may the memory of all those who gave their lives for our state and people be eternal.”
The anniversary comes with Ukraine facing great uncertainty about its future after US President Donald Trump pivoted toward Russia and US officials insist that Europe can no longer rely on Washington for its defense.
The embodiment of “the old spirit of the kleptocrats,” Trump would have marked an anniversary like today’s with a paean to himself.
Franklin Foer begins his essay in The Atlantic this morning by recounting Trump’s effort via U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to pressure Zelenskyy into handing the U.S. hundreds of billions in mineral rights. It is no wonder Trump has slandered him lately. Besides resisting Trump’s proposal, Ukraine’s president is leading the worldwide resistance to authoritarians Trump wants to lead.
The former Ukrainian comic did not begin his tenure as “a sturdy bulwark against autocracy,” Foer explains:
But he became one in the face of an unrelenting assault. Having preserved his nation’s independence, however, he’s now facing not one but two of the world’s most powerful illiberal leaders, conspiring in tandem. For reasons both petty and pecuniary, Trump seems intent on fulfilling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of crushing Ukrainian sovereignty. The American president is pressing for Russia’s favored resolution to the war, without even allowing Zelensky a seat at the negotiating table. And the resource deal he’s pursuing amounts to World War I–style reparations, but extracted from the victim of aggression. It would force the Ukrainians to hand over the wealth beneath their ground, without any guarantee of their security in exchange. The extortion that Trump proposes would deny Ukraine any possibility of recovering economically, and consign its people to a state of servitude.
Zelenskyy said on Sunday, “I am not signing something that 10 generations of Ukrainians will have to repay,” while admitting Ukraine could yet be forced into it (given Trump’s appeasement of Putin).
As for Trump’s accusation that Zelenskyy is a dictator, more than a few recognize that if Trump really thought that he’d have his nose far up Zelenskyy’s rectum. Zelenskyy’s counter at a Sunday press conference was that he would resign in exchange for Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
Foer concludes:
American institutions have largely faltered amid Trump’s assault, and European allies have aimlessly panicked. But Zelensky’s very presence reprimands the West for its futile opposition; his resoluteness shames Republicans, who once admired him as a latter-day Winston Churchill, for their own abject capitulation. Although he arguably has more to lose from a Trump administration than anyone on the planet, he’s kept pushing back, with resourcefulness that recalls Ukraine’s guerrilla tactics in the earliest days of the Russian invasion. When the history of the era is written, Zelensky will be seen as the global leader of the anti-authoritarian resistance, who refused to accept the terms that the powerful sought to impose on his nation. He clarified the terms of the struggle with his heroic example. He reminds despairing liberals, “We are still here.”
Plucky Ukraine and its president will be a thorn in the side of authoritarians so long as they resist. May we be as persistent here at home. We haven’t yet begun to pay the price Ukraine has. But the costs will mount the longer our own resistance takes to congeal.
The third anniversary of the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. Three years of absolute heroism by our people.
Eternal memory to all who stood up in defense of our state and our people, giving their lives so that Ukraine may live.
This is what it’s come to. A right wing podcaster troll is now working at the highest levels of the FBI with virtually unfettered power under a similar right wing troll as his boss.
He does have law enforcement experience as a NY police officer for four years and a secret service agent for nine. So there is that. But it’s his record as a right wing gadfly that really qualifies him for the job as Kash Patel’s deputy. As you can see above, he is uniquely suited to the job of wreaking revenge on MAGA enemies. It’s his raison d’etre.
The job doesn’t require confirmation so I assume he’ll be starting right away.
I think we knew that the feds under Trump would not zealously go after gun crimes. It was always going to be a free-for-all. But this is a little bit different.
President Donald Trump’s newly-confirmed FBI director, Kash Patel, is expected to take on another top law enforcement role in the administration as head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to a White House official and two other sources familiar with the plan.
Patel’s appointment could be made official as soon as next week with a swearing-in ceremony, the sources said.
The ATF, a law enforcement agency housed in the Department of Justice, is responsible for enforcing federal laws regarding the illegal use, sale and trafficking of firearms and explosives, as well as the illegal diversion of alcohol and tobacco products.
It has been a frequent target of Republican lawmakers who perceive the agency as infringing on the Second Amendment, particularly as former President Joe Biden empowered it to regulate the sale of “ghost guns” and close a loophole that eased the process of buying a firearm.
Trump earlier this month signed an executive order to “halt existing policies designed to curtail the clear right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.” A White House release on that order accused the ATF of unfairly targeting gun owners.
Is Trump running out of loyalists or are they just preparing to get rid of the agency altogether (which has been a fringe position for decades among the blood and guts 2nd Amendment crowd.) I would expect Kash to be perfectly willing to take that step.
I’m just a little bit surprised that ATF wasn’t among the first targeting by the DOGE wrecking ball. Wouldn’t that have made MAGA more ecstatic than anything?
Apparently, they’re taking the incremental path. I’m not sure why.
Attorney General Pam Bondi last week fired the chief counsel of ATF, Pamela Hicks, after three years of service, according to a LinkedIn post shared by Hicks. Bondi said, without evidence, that Hicks was among the leaders at the Department of Justice who were weaponizing the agency. “These people were targeting gun owners. Not gonna happen under this administration,” Bondi said in an interview with Fox News.
I assume they were targeting gun owners who broke the law but that’s obviously off the table now. Fire away gun nuts. Nobody’s going to stop you.
I wrote earlier about the reporting that Musk is threatening to shut down Starlink, his satellite service on which Ukraine depends for all its communications unless they capitulate to Trump’s demands to allow him to seize whatever natural resources he wants and hand their country to Putin. The idea that this man has such power over world events is like something out of a James Bond film. Only there’s no James Bond, just GOP cowards, feckless Democrats and a plodding judiciary.
It’s actually much worse than I realized. Josh Marshall wrote this thread on BlueSky last night, jumping off an earlier post about what historically happens when someone becomes more powerful than the sovereign (“over-mighty subjects”) which, in our American democracy, is something called “the American people.”
Musk is a quintessential “over-mighty subject” perhaps the mightiest ever:
A couple years ago the Times did a really strong package about the power of SpaceX. Not only is SpaceX. Not only is it now one if not the preemptive orbital delivery company in the world it also has a fleet of satellites so large that according to that Times article more than half the functional satellites in earth orbit today are owned by SpaceX, and thus under the control of Elon Musk. That’s the basis of Starlink.
Again, half the functioning satellites in orbit are under the control of one man. Must built SpaceX on US govt subsidies and contracts, much as he built Tesla, on the back of subsidies to grow the EV industry. But those are the rules the US government set up. He played by them. Under our system he gets the benefit of those decisions and that good fortune. However, the US government has many laws that make clear that if and when a government contractors decisions threaten the national security of the United States that things change. In the case of SpaceX, he gets the profits.
But there are limits on where the decisions are his. Just to make the obvious point, Musk couldn’t just say okay I’m only going to launch Chinese military satellites. Too bad, Pentagon, what I say goes. Private company, etc. That’s not how it works. And seldom invoked US is pretty clear on that.
Needless to say this isn’t a question most military contractors have any interest in testing. US policy, for better or worse, provides plenty of markets where they can sell their weapons. But already in the early Biden years Musk was starting to run what amounted to his own foreign policy. This came out early in the Ukraine War when it emerged that Musk was running his own arrangements with Vladimir Putin which looked very much like it was running counter to US foreign policy which at the time was Biden’s to make. It also goes without saying that no other federal contractor and no one with a highly level clearance could be having unreported discussions and bargains with an adversary foreign state. Here’s where we get back to the question of over-mighty subjects.
Musk has vast wealth and control over core national security technologies which give him the ability, along with his wealth, to rival the power of the US on the foreign policy stage. Here’s where the acquisition of Twitter becomes a much bigger deal and a much kind of deal than many I think realize. Musk has this overmighty power but the US govt *in extremis* has laws and powers to curtail that power.
But when Musk took personal control of one of the country’s most powerful and pervasive communications mediums AND began using his limitless money in the political real he made himself essentially too big to touch. You can see it in his vast grip on US politics and now also in the UK and now Germany. Whether he’s able to shift the result of the German general election we’ll see. But he’s made it quite clear that there are vast costs to any nation-state which challenges him.
Can he turn the course of an election? I’m skeptical. But no national government wants to find out. And pretty clearly any US national government really wants to find out. This is why the combination of Twitter, plus the vast wealth, plus the critical national security technologies created something genuinely new under the sun.
Musk is truly a Bond villain, untouchable in the normal sense. Why the US Government allowed this to happen is the big question. How could they have put so much power in the hands of one eccentric billionaire? Was it just money, laziness or design? I would guess it’s all three.
Well, get ready. A huge part of the DOGE plan is to do a lot more of it:
Bessent downplays DOGE's mass government firings, saying "we're gonna re-privatize this economy like President Trump promised." pic.twitter.com/nBBQME0MX1
Bessent downplays DOGE’s mass government firings, saying “we’re gonna re-privatize this economy like President Trump promised.”
Musk and his rich buddies plan to privatise all the services and security we currently entrust to our government over which we have some control through our elected representative. Not anymore. These will be at the whim of billionaires (trillionaires!) who will be too big to fail. It’s a terrifying prospect and this may actually be our final chance to stop it.
Enrique Tarrio, a domestic terrorist is wandering around Washington getting in the faces of Capitol Police officers:
Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—released last month after Trump pardoned him along with 1,500 other Jan. 6 rioters—confronted ex-Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, who was injured defending the Capitol from criminals like Tarrio.
Fanone responded: “You are a fucking traitor to this country.” He actually is a real life seditionist, convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Trump pardoned him. Now he’s stalking people who defended the Capitol.
That happened today at the Never Trumper Principles First confab:
Fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids began to spread the day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time. Posts on social media and Reddit claimed that ICE had already been spotted in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff, where Latino immigrants began to settle in large numbers in the 1970s and have profoundly shaped the culture of the vibrant community.
That same Tuesday morning, an X account with over 17,000 followers named GlomarResponder made an ominous post. “Yeah, I’m in a courthouse wating [sic] on warrants,” GlomarResponder wrote. “Turns out there’s a lot of bitch work to be done to make mass deportations happen.” One day prior, GlomarResponder had posted that he “Can confirm all of those,” regarding a list of cities where ICE was expected to begin deportation operations the next day. “May have a betting pool to see who can guess which one I’m at on any particular day, based on the news,” GlomarResponder wrote.
These were but the latest posts that GlomarResponder has made over the years that suggest the operator of the account is an ICE employee. GlomarResponder has also routinely expressed blatantly racist and anti-immigrant views. Through an extensive review of GlomarResponder’s X posts, publicly available documents, and other social media profiles and posts, the Texas Observer has identified the operator of GlomarResponder as James “Jim” Joseph Rodden, a 44-year-old who works as an assistant chief counsel for ICE in the Dallas area. Rodden represents the agency in immigration court hearings where judges decide whether an individual is removed from the country.
He’s a real piece of work. A self-proclaimed fascist:
Since GlomarResponder was first created in 2012, the account has posted hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us,” GlomarResponder wrote last month. “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck,” the account posted in September of last year. “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” GlomarResponder wrote four months prior, further clarifying the post was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a reply to a comment. “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist,” GlomarResponder posted a couple weeks later. “Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”
In August, GlomarResponder posted: “‘Migrants’ are all criminals.” Two months later, GlomarResponder shared an image that reads: “It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes.” Some GlomarResponder posts evoke anti-immigrant violence: “Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders,” the account posted in March 2024. “Yet. Give it a few more weeks at this level of invasion, and that will be the moderate position.” And in January: “My WWII vet grandfather didn’t get a chance to kill asians, so he volunteered for Korea. He’d be asking for a short term job with ICE kicking doors and swinging a baton.”
He’s saying it right out loud. But we are admonished not to use the work because it offends Republicans. Sorry. You run with fascists, expect to be called one.
Now watch this video from last night at a public meeting in Idaho. Unidentified men dressed in black, with no official authority, physically removed a woman from the meeting. Nobody knew who they were and some people in the crowd were appalled. (Not enough, but it’s Coeur d’Alene so I’m surprised there were any.) It turns out that their leader was the sheriff, who was dressed just as they were in some kind of unofficial uniform. He claimed he wasn’t acting in his official capacity.
Remember when Trump ordered that nursing babies be yanked away from their mothers during the first term? Yeah, that was really popular. Now they’re going after the unaccompanied minors who are in the U.S. usually living with relatives:
The Trump administration is directing immigration agents to track down hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the United States without their parents, expanding the president’s mass deportation effort, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo outlines an unprecedented push to target migrant children who crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors. It lays out four phases of implementation, beginning with a planning phase on January 27, though it did not provide a start date for enforcement operations.
More than 600,000 immigrant children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian since 2019, according to government data, as the number of migrants caught crossing illegally reached record levels.
Tens of thousands have been ordered deported over the same time frame, including more than 31,000 for missing court hearings, immigration court data show.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to a request for comment about the memo and the Trump administration’s plans.
The Washington Post poll already shows this stuff isn’t popular and it’s going to get worse:
Americans strongly oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who aren’t criminals (57-39), who arrived as children (70-26) and who have U.S. citizen children (66-30).
70% do not want undocumented kids deported. This is going to be very ugly.
The psycho Trump has tapped as his immigration czar, Tom Homan, appeared at CPAC this weekend and I don’t think he got the memo:
I have faith that the immigration advocates in the country are preparing to document these atrocities and ensure that the American people can see it. Unfortunately they have a lot of practice.
Oh, and by the way, they know this is a dicey policy. Last week Trump’s wrecking crew eliminated legal aid for unaccompanied minors. As NBC news reported, “federal funds allow nonprofit groups to provide lawyers for children, some of whom are too young to speak and are making their way through the immigration system without parents or guardians.” These kids are often described as having” feet that don’t touch the floor,” meaning when they are sitting at the defendant’s table in a courtroom before a judge.
The good news is that the administration rescinded the order on Friday. I haven’t seen any explanation as to why they backed off but I think it’s fair to assume that somebody knows this deportation plan and withdrawal of legal representation for minor kids is a hot potato.
