Forget what schools didn’t teach
Events in Minneapolis have unsettled us all. Donald Trump in late September told a gathering his top generals that Democrat-led American cities were dangerous places that they might use as training grounds for a “war from within.” By then his DHS goons had already made examples of Los Angeles and Portland. Chicago was under siege. Charlotte and New Orleans would be next. Trump found out he did not need his professional soldiers after all. His under-trained, over-armed, and amped-up Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement “troops” had been using cutely named “surges” as training exercises since January. They’d honed their brutal skills before descending on Minneapolis and murdering protesters.
Kathleen Parker is as unnerved as you are. She writes, “Never did I imagine that the existential threat to America’s democratic republic would be posed by our own government.” She’d always believed the nation’s commitment to moral principles and the rule of law was baked in (gift link):
But something has happened to the nation. We’re not the same people we were as recently as 2016, when the norm-shattering Donald Trump came to power. He stepped into a role tailor-made for him at a time when the future seemed up for grabs. His vision for the United States has hardened into something unrecognizable while his methods have escalated into lawlessness.
The chaos is not random, but strategic. “The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol didn’t quite do the trick” for Trump. And so Trump (more likely Shadow President Stephen “Trump’s Brain” Miller) sends chaos agents into cities to justify more crackdowns, and perhaps invocation of the Insurrection Act. He’s gone out of his way this week with an FBI raid on Fulton County, Georgia election records from 2020 to prepare for rendering elections in 2026 and 2028 mockeries of the people exercising their will.
Parker’s colleague, George Will, advised this week that “it is good citizenship to assume that everything ICE says, and everything the administration says in support of its deportation mania, is untrue until proved to be otherwise.” Like DOJ allegations against Trump enemies.
On Thursday night and Friday morning, former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort were arrested by federal agents in connection to their coverage of an anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul.
Into this darkness, a slice of light pierces the gloom. The worm seems to be turning. Most Americans oppose what is happening, while other countries file formal protests and issue travel warnings to citizens considering a U.S. destination. Even some MAGA voters must loathe what they’re seeing. Welcome to the light, friends. America’s partisans, and all of those trapped between, have a common enemy and a unifying mission to stop the madness. It’s time to take a stand.
Perhaps we will. But this is more than a political skirmish now. It’s a civil war in which only one side bears arms. The other struggles to fight with tattered civics schools no longer teaches and the Trump administration no longer regards as a constraint on its will-to-power. Trump 2.0 is using every lever of government it can get its stubby fingers on to eviscerate the republic and render the rule of law meaningless as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Congress once wrote and passed laws the president then signed and the federal government followed. Not anymore:
Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.
The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.
No new law. No congressional authorization. No “I’m Just a Bill” niceties. Executive fiat. The king’s say-so. The freedoms you took for granted teeter on a knife’s edge.