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Goebbels had nothing on these guys

An item from Brian Stelter’s newsletter sets one aspect MAGApublican behavior in shaprer relief:

Disinformation dangers

Disinformation has completely destabilized global politics, from the Oval Office to the town council level. Deliberate lies and disinformation campaigns make it much harder for neighbors to relate to one another and share the same reality. But – as if to prove the point – conservative thought leaders decided several years ago that the real danger was “censorship.”  Ergo, “Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the agency’s hub for fighting foreign disinformation campaigns,” Politico’s Maggie Miller wrote. Rubio’s announcement was titled “Protecting and Championing Free Speech at the State Department.”   >> Eileen Guo, who broke the news for MIT Technology Review, said it’s “a win to foreign governments like Russia, Iran, and China — and the office’s mostly conservative critics.”   >> In a more constructive political environment, we’d be able to hold two thoughts in our head simultaneously: That free speech must be protected and that disinformation must be recognized as a danger. Alas…

It’s no accident that the White House now uses preventing antisemitism as cover for clamping down on free speech and academic freedom. Debunk disinformation and this administration will call it censorship.

Spin is a long-recognized tool in both major parties’ campaign toolbox. (You’ve got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive | E-lim-i-nate the negative, as Johnny Mercer wrote in1944). But that’s not what we see nowadays from a radicalized right wing. It’s outright, bald-faced, relentless lying.

In the case of the MAGA king, it’s often unclear whether he believes the nonsense he extracts his ass or not. But that’s not the point. The lies are, and the fact that the press refuses to challenge them in real time, if at all.

What left my mouth agape this week was White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller completely misrepresenting the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Even Reason magazine rolled its “eyes”:

“The Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously,” Miller told Trump.

The term misinformation has become somewhat overused in recent times. But it seems applicable here. Miller egregiously misrepresented what the Supreme Court actually said in its order. Was he lying? Did he fail to correctly read the Court’s order and is now publicly operating based on his erroneous understanding? Either way, it was a disgraceful performance.

For her part, AG Pam Bondi stands by DOJ claims and Miller’s, citing court documents for Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest based on heresay, “Gang Field Interview Sheet” (GFIS) statements by a Prince Georges County detective, and his wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. Abrego Garcia has no criminal record. But the detective does … now:

When Mr. Abrego’s lawyers in 2019 went to interview the detective and find out more about this supposed informant, they were unable to talk with him because they were told he was suspended. What they couldn’t know at the time was that he had been suspended less than two weeks after making the accusation against Mr. Abrego for the crime of trading police secrets to a sex worker in exchange for  sex. The detective wasn’t publicly indicted until June 2020, after Mr. Abrego’s case had already concluded.

At his bond hearing, ICE submitted that GFIS document as evidence of his membership in MS-13 — and nothing else.

But I digress.

What I see clearly is that the MAGAfied Trump cult has, following Dear Leader’s cues, adopted lying as company policy. Not spin. Not misinformation. Lying.

They’ve adapted “Fake it till you make it.” It’s now accepted practice to lie about “it” until the public accepts the lie as true. Until they’ve broken reality and the republic. Goebbels had nothing on these guys.

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North Carolina’s state Supreme Court soap opera continues

There was promising election news from North Carolina on Tuesday. Project 2025’s predations continue apace, DOGE continues its Long March through government agencies, and President Donald Trump may appear any day with a generalissimo’s epaulets atop his ill-fitting suits. But prospects for stopping a Republican election theft of a Supreme Court race in North Carolina brightened (WFAE):

The North Carolina Board of Elections said in a court filing Tuesday that only 1,675 voters will be impacted by Republican Jefferson Griffin’s challenge against Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs for a seat on the state Supreme Court.

The board said it will require 1,409 overseas voters in Guilford County to provide photo ID within 30 days for their ballot to count. Griffin had challenged Guilford voters, as well as overseas voters in three other Democratic-leaning counties.

But the Democratic-controlled state elections board said it will only require Guilford voters to provide ID, since Griffin’s challenge of that county’s overseas voters was his only protest completed in time, as required by state law.

Griffin will appeal the Board’s following black-letter state law on the filing deadline. But win or lose, consider this GOP election-stealing effort a shakedown cruise for challenging election losses near you. If you live in a red or purple state with a GOP-majority state Supreme Court, you could see this in coming elections.

To recap, after two recounts, Riggs led Griffin by 734 votes. Griffin refused to concede. He filed challenges to over 60,000 votes, alleging based on the digital records that most were from improperly registered voters, another 5,500 military and overseas absentee votes were invalid for not including photo IDs, and another couple of hundred were invalid votes from so-called “never residents.” Griffin challenged votes from four of North Carolina’s largest, bluest counties.

Last Friday, the state Supreme Court dismissed the 60,000 registration challenges, but instructed the appeals court to work out the details on the remainder with the state Board of Elections.

Now the Board has informed the U.S. District Court that the remaining federal challenges will be limited to the only county where Griffin filed his challenge by the deadline. This leaves only 1,675 votes in question: 1,409 overseas and military votes from Guilford County, and the votes (statewide) from perhaps 266 “never residents.”

But wait. Popular Information and Anderson Alerts researched the “never resident” votes and published a report on Monday that many voters on Griffin’s challenge list actually live or lived in the state. Some previously voted in person in North Carolina:

Overall, Popular Information and Anderson Alerts identified 29 people — through voting records, publicly available information, and interviews — whose votes were discarded who have lived or currently live in North Carolina. There were numerous others who also appear to be erroneously included on the list, but whose history could not be definitively established. These errors are particularly harmful because the North Carolina Supreme Court did not give impacted voters any opportunity to prove their eligibility.

How would these people end up on a list of people who never resided in North Carolina? According to Gerry Cohen, a member of the Wake County Board of Elections, the people ended up on Griffin’s list by filling out a Federal Post Card Application for an absentee ballot and checking the box that read, “I am a U.S. citizen living outside the country, I have never lived in the United States.”

It is possible that some voters checked that box in error. (In an interview, one voter confirmed they had checked the box by mistake.) In other cases, there could be an error in the records kept by the North Carolina Election Board. But either way, it does not make these voters “never residents” or invalidate their ballots.

The Board in its filing Tuesday referenced these reports and pledged to replicate its procedures for validating “never resident” absentee voters. The Board will instruct county boards to review submitted forms to verify that voters did indeed check the “never lived” box. Next, they must “review the voter’s registration record and voter history record to ensure that the voter in question does not have a record of registering previously or voting previously under a claim of residency in the county.”

Having voted in person or absentee before or before would “show that the challenged voter attested, under penalty of perjury, to having resided within the county during a prior election.” They would thus fall outside the scope of Griffin’s “never resident” challenge. Local Boards will mail remaining voters to inform them of the challenge and give them 30 days “to submit a sworn affidavit stating that they have resided in the county and identifying their prior residence address.”

This filing will, of course, infuriate Griffin. He will challenge the Board’s proposed course of action. But his late filing on the other counties is not a mistake other GOP losers will make next time, perhaps in your state.

But the clock is ticking on the current makeup of the State Board of Elections. The lame-duck legislature moved authority over elections from the governor to the (Republican) state Auditor. The Auditor’s authority to appoint new Board of Elections members begins on May 1. If the current Board’s plan for limiting the scope of Griffin’s challenges somehow gets rejected, it could be a different Board with a Republican 3-2 split that will reformat the plan.

Riggs has already appealed the order by her state Supreme Court colleagues to federal court. She had recused but remains on the court until the election dispute is settled. This isn’t over.

Republicans are relentless.

Update: I want to repeat for those who missed it, Griffin has provided no evidence of anyone voting illegally. His challenges are based on mere allegations backed up by the kind of shoddy digital data scrapings common among proponents of voter fraud. Popular Information and Anderson Alerts showed that up as garbage. Instead of Griffin having to back up his illegal voting charges (as required by law, IIRC), he demands that thousands of voters he’s challenging prove they voted legally.

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The NY Times reports that the big law firms didn’t know they were being turned into indentured servants. Have they met Donald Trump?

When some of the nation’s biggest law firms agreed to deals with President Trump, the terms appeared straightforward: In return for escaping the full force of his retribution campaign, the firms would do some free legal work on behalf of largely uncontroversial causes like helping veterans. Mr. Trump, it turns out, has a far more expansive view of what those firms can be called on to do.

Over the last week, he has suggested that the firms will be drafted into helping him negotiate trade deals. He has mused about having them help with his goal of reviving the coal industry.And he has hinted that he sees the promises of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services that he has extracted from the elite law firms — including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes.

“Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump: $100 million, another $100 million for damages that they’ve done,” Mr. Trump said at an event last week with coal miners, without specifying what he meant by damages.

None of the firms have acknowledged any wrongdoing. They were targeted with punitive executive orders or implicit threats for representing or aiding Mr. Trump’s political foes or employing people he sees as having used the legal system to come after him.

[…]

But now that nine firms have agreed to deals and committed to nearly $1 billion worth of pro bono legal work, some Trump advisers have started having discussions about a range of options for what the firms’ lawyers can be deployed to work on, according to two people briefed on the matter. That work could include sending the lawyers to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or deploying them to aid the Justice Department, they said.

White House officials believe that some of the pro bono legal work could even be used toward representing Mr. Trump or his allies if they became ensnared in investigations, according to the two people.

Are they just going to go along with this? I don’t kniow but I think this accurately describes what’s going on:

“They thought they made one-shot deals which they would fulfill,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School who was an author of a paper that called executive orders targeting the firms unconstitutional retaliatory measures. “But the administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude.”

Of course he does. But why wouldn’t they know this? Have they met Donald Trump?

This is the reason I don’t wake up every morning hoping that Trump died peacefully in his sleep last night the way I did in the first term. I certainly didn’t love Mike Pence. But he wasn’t a total psychopath.Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez at Rolling Stone reports:

In a lengthy X post published on Tuesday, JD Vance wrote: “To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.” 

It’s a nonsensical interpretation of due process rights. At their core, rights are not supposed to be negotiable based on how much resources the government has, or the amount of people they’re looking to deport. The Constitution includes legal protections to ensure the system is as fair and unbiased as possible. Is this always the case? No. Does the executive get to do away with these protections because they run counter to his political platform? Usually only in crumbling fascist regimes. 

“Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?” Vance added. “If the answer is no, they’ve given their game away. They don’t want border security.” 

He’s a sick piece of work. This country is totally capable of dealing with immigration in a humane fashion. It is also not an emergency, they have made that up out of whole cloth. Arresting students and detaining them in prisons far from where they lived for their political views, turning border crossings into dystopian hellscapes for travellers, deporting people without notice and putting them into foreign gulags is completely beyond all imagining in the past. Now they are talking about doing this to American citizens.

And then there’s this:

Vance is not the only White House official defending the administration’s attempts to skirt the rule of law. During a Fox News interview on Tuesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued that Kilamar Abrego Garcia — a migrant living in Maryland who the Trump administration admitted was sent to a gulag in El Salvador due to an “administrative error” — was not entitled to due process. 

“He’s an illegal alien from El Salvador with a deportation order from the United States. He is not legally even allowed to be in our country,” Miller said. “Under due process that these Democrats so venerate for illegal invaders, it is legally impermissible for him to have one more minute in this country. So we honored the law and obeyed the law by getting him out of the country.” 

He’s lying, of course, He was here legally through a judicial order that gave him protection and they snatched him up and threw him in a Salvadoran gulag without even getting a hearing. It’s pure fascism.

Ramirez concludes:

It’s never been about securing the border, as Vance claims, it’s about a consolidation of authority in the presidency that would allow the executive to abuse the powers of his office with impunity. Undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and green card holders have already been used as test subjects. There’s no telling what comes next.

Oh I think we can see where this is going. His attacks on higher education, science, expertise of all kinds shows that he is already using the power of the federal government to intimidate and deconstruct all liberal institutions all across society. His order to go after Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, who he believes betrayed him in the last election was the first shot at explicit political vendettas being carried out by the Department of Justice. His enthusiastic hatchet woman Pam Bondi is happy to oblige.

If Trump does shuffle off his mortal coil and Vance takes the reins I think it’s possible he might even be worse. There’s something purely evil in him.

The Wall St Journal with a closer look at Elon’s seed spreading:

Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known. 

He’s a total freak:

Musk’s baby-making project is relevant to his ambition for NASA, which he wants to move faster to go to Mars. He said on X that making people multiplanetary is “critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it.” 

In Musk’s dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. He is driven to correct the historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence, according to people familiar with the matter. 

His businesses are set up to serve the idea: The main objective of SpaceX is to build a rocket ship capable of getting to Mars, and his other companies, including electric-car maker Tesla, help finance the plan. 

Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion,” a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire. During St. Clair’s pregnancy, Musk suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has recruited potential mothers on his social-media platform X, according to some of the people. 

Musk has used his wealth to buy the silence of some women who have his kids, according to St. Clair as well as other people, text messages and documents reviewed by the Journal.Nondisclosure clauses are part of some of the payment agreements. If the mothers push back or seek outside counsel, Musk’s advisers, including Birchall, have threatened financial retribution, according to the documents and people. 

Birchall described Musk’s expectations to St. Clair: “Privacy and confidentiality is the top of the list in every aspect of his life, every aspect, and his entire world is set up to be, like, a meritocracy.” Benefits flow, he said, when “people do good work.”

A meritocracy??? Seriously??? What an egomaniac.

Jerod Birchall, by the way, is Musk’s “fixer” who makes all these deals for Musk. Ugh.

Brian Beutler raises the alarm about something we don’t want to think about but should: will our elections be safe? As he points out there is every reason to believe that Trump and the Republicans are going to deploy every trick in the book to limit their losses in 2026. He writes:

I don’t know if the effort will be diffuse and disorganized or choreographed from on high like Donald Trump’s failed 2020 coup. I don’t know if Republicans will abuse power to ratfuck Democratic candidates (as Trump attempted when he tried to extort Volodmyr Zelensky in 2019) or try to overturn elections they lose (the way Trump attempted in 2020, and North Carolina Republicans are attempting right now, with a state Supreme Court seat on the line). Some combination of the two would be a safe bet.

I confess that this is one of the things that’s keeping me up at night too. It’s not so much that I think they can rig elections themselves but that I’m almost certain that they will not acknowledge losses in red states where we might see some upsets in a wave election. We are going to have to start thinking about how to respond to this.

Beutler runs down the ways they may do this in more detail but also helpfully points out the ways in which Democrats have some advantages:

Republicans can’t just snap their fingers and steal elections, and Democrats aren’t totally powerless. If anything, at the moment, Republicans are drunk on hubris, and Democrats are recalibrating to the existence of an existential threat:

• Notwithstanding the slow start, and some missteps, Democrats have not been entirely complacent, and seem to grow less so each day.
  
• We have a strong tradition of elections in the U.S. This is not to say we had a perfect democracy before Trump (far from it) or to say that enough Americans take their civic duties seriously (they don’t). But even on the right—and notwithstanding Trump’s efforts to subvert faith in elections—most people treat basic democratic ideas as truisms: “It’s a free country.” “One person one vote.” “We settle our differences at the ballot box.” People who disagree with these assertions represent small minorities. Even Trump understands this. The narrative basis of his plot against America isn’t (as his tech-world loyalists say) that democracy is outmoded; it’s that democracy is sacred and Democrats are the real election stealers.
  
• Notwithstanding Trump’s obvious contempt for the courts, he still tries to fabricate narratives of compliance with the courts. To some extent this is just trolling, but it also suggests he’s uncertain what would happen (to America and his presidency) if he dropped the ruse and told John Roberts to fuck off. Even in wiping his ass with the 9-0 Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he and his aides have maintained an artifice of compliance—lying about what the ruling says, stonewalling—while appearing before and responding to the lower-court judge overseeing the case on remand.
  
• A real and durable protest movement appears to have awakened.
  
• Trump really is misgoverning himself into toxic unpopularity.
  
• Elections in the U.S. are decentralized so even a top-down effort to cheat in 2026 can’t really be too systematic.
  
• Democratic litigators have lots of experience defeating Republicans in frivolous election cases.
  
• Special elections so far have been mostly uneventful, except insofar as Democrats have dramatically overperformed.

Beutler’s comment above about the Supreme Court is particularly well taken. Trump is certainly not dealing with the Court’s orders in good faith but he mostly has been at least paying lip service to the idea that he will follow its orders. When they stop lying and come out saying they don’t have to follow the court orders, we’ll be in a different world.

I assume Democrats are very aware of this election year danger. Let’s hope they are planning accordingly.

Dan Pfeiffer says Democrats have both a moral and political obligation to talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia:

Over the weekend, I made the case that Democrats needed to speak up against Trump’s assault on the Constitution. Too many are leaning exclusively into economic arguments, letting Trump’s offenses against our democracy go unchallenged in the public square.

Speaking out against Trump was never more necessary, as evidenced by the absolute shitshow of an Oval Office meeting between Trump and El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. On live television, Trump and his aides declared that they wouldn’t abide by the Supreme Court ruling to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the man mistakenly sent to rot in an El Salvadoran gulag. They then openly discussed sending U.S. citizens to CECOT.

This is the moment. We are at a crossroads. It’s time to speak up. Corporations have bent the knee; law firms are submitting to Trump; Congress is ceding its authority, and corporate media is making excuses. The courts are trying to stop Trump’s worst offenses, but he ignores their dictates.

Our only weapon is immense public pressure, and no one can exert it but ourselves.

Democrats’ reticence comes from our fear that Trump is leading us into a political trap. Stephen Miller said the quiet part out loud, declaring that Abrego Garcia’s incarceration is a 90-10 issue of public opinion. After getting hammered on border security in the 2024 campaign, many Democrats are once bitten, twice shy when it comes to talking about immigration.

If Trump is laying a trap, it’s not a particularly good one. Democrats have a strong case in calling for Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return. Public opinion is on our side.

Pfeiffer goes on to suggest that Democrats tell the real story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He is not a criminal or a gang member. He was in the country legally, is married to a U.S. citizen and has American children. He was allowed to stay here when a judge found that he had a credible reason to fear the gangs in El Salvador, his reason for emigrating here in the first place. (Rendering him to that notorious prison full of MS-13 gang members is one of the cruelest actions they could have taken against this man.)

As Pfeiffer points out, while polling shows support for deporting undocumented criminals, people do not support deporting the hardworking, long term immigrants like Abrego Garcia.

He writes that a Pew Poll from last months showed that “only 15% believe that undocumented immigrants with jobs should be deported; 14% think that undocumented parents of American children should be deported, and only 5% want the spouses of U.S. citizens deported.”

If people know what Trump is doing to this man and others like him they will rebel. Even a MAGA cultist can see that this is grotesque.

Pfeiffer also suggests that people be reminded that the Trump administration has already admitted that this whole thing is a result of an “administrative error.” He points out that despite Stephen Miller’s lies that a “Democrat saboteur” is the one who did that, the Solicitor General, an ICE official and the DOJ lawyer have all testified that Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported.

And as I posted yesterday, polling shows that large majorities do not want the president ignoring the courts and right now that’s what they are doing by pretending that the court said something that it didn’t. (I’m afraid the Court is going to have to clear this up and I’m not sure they will.) Even about 20% of 2024 Trump voters don’t like the idea of continuing to deport people despite a court order telling them not to.

He concludes:

Trump and the MAGA media think they have a winning issue. They don’t. Democrats can win this fight, but we must make the case aggressively and strategically. We have to be loud, or we will be drowned out by the arrogant and insecure liars who sentenced a father and husband to die in a gulag.

Amen.

Pentagon’s “SWAT Team Of Nerds” is done with DOGE

“They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” a former Pentagon official said of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. If not stealing government information.

Daily Beast:

Nearly every staffer at the Defense Digital Service (DDS) is resigning over the coming month, according to the program’s director Jennifer Hay and three other current members of the office—effectively shutting down the program.

“The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said, according to Politico. She plans to leave by May 1.

Dubbed the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” the DDS was created in 2015 with the aim to modernize defense operations with fast tech fixes and digital tools for the military.

The DOGEes are instead firing swaths of employees or pressuring them to quit.

If you haven’t read NPR’s long report on DOGE’s suspicious handling of data at the NLRB, do so. Rachel Maddow spoke with an NLRB whistleblower last night. It makes us wonder if DOGE is stealing government info (including from the Pentagon) for Musk’s AI development and/or is sharing it with foreign adversaries. To be continued, I guess.

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Who knew?

Stella: From what I’ve seen, Paden doesn’t seem to care about money.
Cobb: Ha! Paden doesn’t seem to care about anything, except he does. You just can never tell what it’s going to be.
— dialogue from Silverado

Donald Trump cares a lot about money. He measures his manhood by it. He almost stumbled into the presidency in 2016 trying to build his brand and increase his stash. But once Trump faced the prospect of jail time while out of office, and real accountability for the first time in his life, power itself became more intoxicating. Now he’s pursuing the power to punish his enemies as greedily as he once sought riches.

Average Americans, though, are more like Kevin Kline’s character, Paden, from Silverado. You can never tell what they’ll care about. Money, sex, sports, toys, religion, guns (a substitute for real power), race. Racism, I’d argue, is not about skin color as much as it is about keeping whites atop the established hierarchy (power).

But who knew average Americans cared about esoterica like their constitutional right to due process of law guaranteed in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? Well, they do when they see it publicly denied to people as powerless as themselves. People like Kilmar Abrego García, 29. The Trump administration kidnapped the Salvadoran citizen, a Maryland resident married with kids, a union apprentice, and consigned him for life to a Salvadoran gulag in violation of a court’s protective order.

An “administrative error,” the Trump administration first told the court. Then they justified the error they refuse to correct (in defiance of another court order) by alleging Abrego García is an MS-13 gang member. A terrorist, alleged White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller without providing evidence. No hearing. No due process. Just the say-so of an administration led by a convicted felon and world-famous for lying.

It turns out that Abrego Garcia is not a faceless number like the several hundred Venezuelans Trump shipped off to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) one month ago in defiance of yet another court order. His wife held a press conference on Tuesday to plead for his return. Even Fox News covered it.

“My heart aches for my husband,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura said. “I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive.”

"My family can't be robbed from another day without seeing Kilmar. This administration has already taken so much from my children, from Kilmar's mother, brother, sisters, and me." pic.twitter.com/qwtT3qbPRh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2025

You can never tell what Americans will care about. Americans are beginning to see themselves in Abrego Garcia and to care that they might be next.

His union loudly demanded Abrego Garcia’s return.

One of the most shameful things

Sen. Chuck Grassley, Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, got an earful about due process at a meeting with Iowa constituents on Tuesday, “which frankly I wasn’t expecting,” said one ABC anchor.

The Guardian:

“I believe very strongly in my Christian faith. I preach on Sundays,” said one attendee, “Turning away people who have come here for asylum is one of the most shameful things we are doing right here.”

CNN:

“We would like to know what you, as the people, the Congress, who are supposed to rein in this dictator, what are you going to do about it?” one man asked Grassley. “These people have been sentenced to life imprisonment in a foreign country with no due process. Our government cannot do anything?”

ABC News:

“You going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?” an audience member shouted.

“That’s not a power of Congress,” Grassley responded.

“El Salvador is an independent country … The president of that country is not subject to our U.S. Supreme Court,” he added later.

You could hear a loud groan from a woman before a man yelled, “I’m pissed!”

View on Threads

You know what I always say to do when opponents are cut over the eye? The Trump administration is about to be on its back foot on Abrego García’s abduction. People are waking to the truth that our budding dictator could do the same to any of us. If I were you, I’d spread Jennifer Vasquez Sura’s Easter plea for her husband’s return everywhere.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 19 (Details coming; scroll for local events)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense