Author: Tom Sullivan

And The Pissed-off Will Lead

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 1, 2025

While you were streaming

Democratic senator Cory Booker holds marathon speech to highlight ‘recklessness’ of Trump policies

Senator Cory Booker has been giving a marathon speech on the Senate floor that has lasted into the early hours of Tuesday morning, highlighting what he described as the “recklessness” of the Trump administration.

The New Jersey Democrat began his address on Monday night and said he would continue to speak for as long as he could “physically endure”. By 7.30am ET, Booker was still going.

The focus of his remarks are concerns over president Trump’s proposed cuts to programs like Medicaid.

At the start of his speech, Booker said:

I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our nation is in crisis.

He went on:

In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety, financial stability, the core foundations of our democracy and even our aspirations as a people for – from our highest offices – a sense of common decency.

These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such.

It’s now 10:30 a.m. ET and Booker is still going. His voice is getting ragged. His colleagues are spelling him by interrupting to ask v-e-r-y l-e-n-g-t-h-y questions to answer. Thank you. Teamwork.

Let’s get real. The complaints are ubiquitous. “Where are the Democrats?” Democrats in Congress have been slow to react to Donald Trump 2.0’s DOGE/Project 2025 predations. Yes, they are in the minority in both houses. But if Rep. John Lewis were still with us, he’d have led a U.S. House sit-in by now.

Thankfully, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are showing more-stunned allies how it’s done in a string of packed rallies across the country. They are leading, a friend suggests. Booker is a weathervane. But he’s a weathervane with stamina, and that’s refreshing to see. Finally. Good on him.

But all of them are stepping up because millions of pissed-off Americans are voicing their fear and anger at seeing their institutions dismantled, their health and safety threatened, and the rule of law attacked by a criminal government-by-oligarch bent on turning this country into a dictatorship. Americans are turning up at packed town halls whether or not their elected representatives show up. Because an autocrat-friendly U.S. president with visions of imperialist expansion is telling the world and us that we are no longer the good guys. And we don’t like it one bit. And his Republican lackeys can’t find their values or their asses with two hands. We’re out in the streets ahead of our norms-bound leaders because Trump is attacking every check on his criminality from Congress to the courts to democratic elections. And when the people form a parade, politicians will hurry to position themselves in front of it. Good on you.

There are tools you’ll need if you mean to join the parade to save this nation from its 2024 folly. Some of them are below the asterisks. Actor John Lithgow invites you to attend to Timothy Snyder’s 20 Lessons on Tyranny.

Happy Warrior Entertainment is so proud to have produced this incredible project. Now, more than ever, we need the wisdom of our intellects, the patriotism of our citizens, and the passion and talents of those who still believe in the American experiment. I am deeply grateful to Timothy Snyder for his 20 Lessons On Tyranny and for talents of the brilliant John Lithgow for bringing them to life. Great thanks to David Bender for his vision, the support of Abigail Disney, Susan Disney Lord, and Timothy Disney, and the imagination and direction of Sean McGowan, the producer of the PoliticsGirl Project.

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Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Law Is Meaningless To Criminals

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 1, 2025

And so are you

Donald Trump is a criminal. By 34 convictions, by temperament, and by the behaviors of a lifetime. Like Vladimir Putin, his man-crush, Trump believes he can take what he wants. Greenland, for example. Or Canada (though he’s quieted about Canada recently.)

Putin would like nothing better than for Trump to take Greenland. It would finish off the North Atlantic alliance and help Putin justify his taking Ukraine and maybe Poland.

Trump, Elon Musk and co. also believe they can take the United States Institute of Peace building. The think tank founded under Ronald Reagan is a congressionally established independent nonprofit. Congress gifted its site on the Mall to the institute. Its building was constructed with a mix of federal and private funds. But DOGE wants to hand it to the General Services Administration, presumably to sell off. So it means to take it.

Trump the criminal believes he can take land he wants, and buildings. And people.

ICE took a Maryland man, a native of El Salvador living in the U.S. under protected status since 2011 (he was 16), and deported him to El Salvador’s “Terrorism Confinement Center,” Nick Miroff reveals in The Atlantic (emphasis mine):

But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring him back now that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody.

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s attorney, said he’s never seen a case in which the government knowingly deported someone who had already received protected legal status from an immigration judge. He is asking the court to order the Trump administration to ask for Abrego Garcia’s return and, if necessary, to withhold payment to the Salvadoran government, which says it’s charging the United States $6 million a year to jail U.S. deportees.

How much is the kickback from $6 million per year per prisoner?

“They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told me. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

Our mistake, says the Trump gang. Oopsie…

“What. The. Fuck.”

The Trump officials know deporting Abrego Garcia was their mistake and against the law, and they couldn’t care less. Trump has been saying he couldn’t care less a lot lately. Like about his tariff obsession. He wants his tariffs and couldn’t care less if they raise your cost of living.

It’s not as if Trump not caring less about you should be a surprise to anyone.

Miroff adds:

If the government wants to deport someone with protected status, the standard course would be to reopen the case and introduce new evidence arguing for deportation. The deportation of a protected status holder has even stunned some government attorneys I’ve been in touch with who are tracking the case, who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. “What. The. Fuck,” one texted me.

They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.

What else is new? It’s been the M.O. of the extremist Republican Party for over a decade: find the lines, cross them, dare people to push them back (in this case, the courts). Trump’s MAGAs simply made policy of ignoring the law and the Constitution. Because his is a criminal regime and a criminal political movement fronted by a criminal.

“Show me a criminal who does care about the law,” asks a recent TikTok video.

What Americans not yet in Trump’s crosshairs and think themselves safe need to realize is that what happened to Abrego Garcia foreshadows what’s coming.

Abrego Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the deportation flight, but was listed “as an alternate,” the government attorneys explained. As other detainees were removed from the flight for various reasons, Abrego Garcia “moved up the list.’’

Trump’s criminal movement won’t stop at removing immigrants, because if the law is meaningless, as Sandoval-Moshenberg observed, they “can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want.” They are already trying to strip the citizenships of native-born Americans whose parents were non-citizens. If the 14th Amendment is disposable, so are you. And we cannot count on the courts to hold under Trump 2.0’s relentless assault.

Fighting fascism is not how I expected to spend my retirement, but here we are. Still, we are not powerless. Defiance is an option. Rep. Pramila Jayapal is offering training.

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Have you fought the coup today?

Tomorrow In Wisconsin

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 31, 2025

And preaching to the choir

Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford.

Admittedly, I’ve not spent much time on Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election tomorrow. Here in N.C., we’re STILL trying to settle ours from Nov. 5. An appeals court decision on that race could arrive as early as Wednesday (1st and 3rd Wednesday decisions).

But you/we need Judge Susan Crawford to win her seat tomorrow in Wisconsin and put Elon Musk and his corrupt puppet in their places. You can still help. Because oligarchs like Elon Musk aren’t even being coy about buying elections anymore.

We’re not on the Road to Dystopia. We’re there. And we’re headed for Hungary. So….

Stop them in their tracks. This guy knows what’s going on.

Welcome to the new America. This is what happens when Republicans run the government. This is not normal.
We all must make a plan to fight back.#DemsUnited #DemVoice1 pic.twitter.com/EZUnqlyy8q

— Izzy Ⓜ️Ⓜ️ 🇺🇸🦅 (@1zzyzyx1) March 30, 2025

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Big Sister Is Watching You

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 31, 2025

Can a parking ticket get you deported now?

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/27/columbia-let-me-down-how-indian-scholar-expelled-by-trump-fled-the-us

Flying is already unpleasant enough. Judging by the crashes and near misses lately, it’s gotten more dangerous. Maybe not statistically so, but enough to make the cost and inconvenience more of a nuisance. So something I just ran across may make us even more reluctant to enter an airport.

It is the case of Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian doctoral student at Columbia who learned that, for reasons unknown, her visa had been revoked about the time immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil. Agents came twice to her door, and the Fulbright recipient pursuing a Ph.D. in urban planning did not answer. Before they could return with a judicial warrant, she packed some belongings and hopped a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.

The New York Times from March 15:

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that characterized Ms. Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer and accused her of advocating violence and being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization.” The department did not provide any evidence for its allegations.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, posted surveillance footage on social media that showed Ms. Srinivasan lugging a suitcase at LaGuardia as she fled to Canada. Secretary Noem celebrated Ms. Srinivasan’s departure as a “self-deportation.”

Noem is ghoulish enough, especially after her Frau Schmerz video from El Salvador’s Terrorist Confinement Center, but it’s that surveillance footage in the tweet below describing Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer that’s really unnerving.

“I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers use the CBP Home app to self deport,” Noem says. I guess that means CBP didn’t have a chance to check Srinivasan for tattoos.

It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America.

When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.

I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers… pic.twitter.com/jR2uVVKGCM

— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) March 14, 2025

WTF? Does the CBP Home app trigger a video capture of a departing foreigner? It doesn’t mention that on the website. Or is CBP surveilling everyone in the airports? (I’m naive, I know.)

It seems Srinivasan had her visa revoked for not reporting dismissed tickets on her visa renewal. And those summonses were for what?

Ms. Srinivasan’s current situation can be traced back to last year, when she was arrested at an entrance to Columbia’s campus the same day that pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building. She said she had not been a part of the break-in but was returning to her apartment that evening after a picnic with friends, wading through a churning crowd of protesters and barricades on West 116th Street, when the police pushed her and arrested her.

She was briefly detained and received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was quickly dismissed and did not result in a criminal record, according to her lawyers and court documents. Ms. Srinivasan said that she never faced disciplinary action from the university and was in good academic standing.

“She was taken in with roughly 100 other people after being blocked from returning to her apartment and getting stuck in the street,” said Nathan Yaffe, one of her lawyers. “The court recognized this when it dismissed her case as having no merit. Ranjani was just trying to walk home.”

Ms. Srinivasan said she did not disclose the summonses in the visa renewal form later in the year because her case had been dismissed in May and she did not have a conviction.

You know, in answer to “Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offense or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty, or other similar action?”

Apparently, “crimes against the American people” extend to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, jaywalking, or a parking ticket. You are a terrorist sympathizer or an actual terrorist if DHS says so, and no further evidence required. The Trump 2.0 administration and freaks like Stephen Miller and Noem have us well on our way to being a police state.

Update: The Trump administration’s roundup of student protesters is genuinely shocking

“The defining feature of American democracy, you could be forgiven for having thought, is that you can say what you think without having to fear that you will be arrested, locked up or deported for it.”

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Have you fought the coup today?

Reichy Rich Is Not Feeling Loved

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 30, 2025

Elon Musk feels unappreciated. Wonder why?

Some of the best satirical Tesla Takedown ads are in London because hurting Elon’s feeling in the U.S. might land you in a gulag.

Could it be that it’s not what Musk-Trump is doing for you but what they are doing to you?

CNN:

Hundreds of “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations are taking place in the United States, Canada and Europe as activists ramp up their opposition to CEO Elon Musk’s efforts to slash federal government staffing and budgets.

Since joining the Trump administration, Musk has aggressively pushed policies to reduce spending, curb regulations and downsize the workforce as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, all while repeatedly misleading the public about federal spending.

More than 200 demonstrations are planned at US Tesla locations on Saturday as part of the “Tesla Takedown” movement, which called for a “global day of action” aiming for 500 protests worldwide. The campaign wants people to sell their Tesla vehicles and their shares of Tesla stock as a way to denounce Musk, the world’s richest man, whose wealth is overwhelmingly linked to his Tesla holdings.

The Verge:

Thousands of anti-Tesla protesters took to the streets Saturday March 29th in opposition to Elon Musk and his efforts with DOGE to eliminate humanitarian aid, close federal agencies, and fire government workers. It was the culmination of nearly two months of steady, almost daily demonstrations aimed at hurting Tesla’s sales — and ultimately Musk himself. Today was billed as a “Global Day of Action” with protests targeting hundreds of Tesla locations in the US, Canada, and Europe.

The Verge attended protests from London to Akron, Ohio to Long Beach, California.

“For a supposed genius, Elon Musk sure does a lot of stupid shit,” write Adam Parkhomenko and Sam Youngman at thealtmedia. “But nothing … is as dumb as Musk thinking he could fuck with the American people and get a pass.”

No chance:

You see Elon is from South Africa. His family left when they did away with apartheid. He doesn’t understand our country or what makes it tick. When he claims on Fox News that he’s leading a “revolution,” he doesn’t understand that we take that shit pretty seriously.

He thinks he can call us parasites. He thinks he can wreck our systems. He thinks he can buy our votes. And he thinks we’re so dumb and he’s so smart that we’ll thank him for the privilege. Like we said, he doesn’t understand Americans.

It’s important for us to say here that we are opposed to violence and vandalism. Unlike Republicans, we actually are members of the law and order party, and so we are against people bombing and burning Teslas and Cybertrucks even if we think it’s funny to see them in flames on social media. But more than being hilarious, these acts of less than civil disobedience are creating a teachable moment (even if the methods should be condemned). The lesson is you can’t hurt Americans and expect them to just sit there and take it.

Hell, Londoners are not gonna take it. They have longer memories.

I love London even more now…

When the world’s richest man flirts with Nazis, Londoners make sure his brand wears it. No hiding from this. pic.twitter.com/xjFRYzXVsG
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) March 28, 2025

More satirical ads taking aim at the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been put up on London's public transport, this time labelling them the Inglorious Bad Turds 😅

Credit: Grow Up Art pic.twitter.com/qqoWzLauNH

— The London Economic (@LondonEconomic) March 28, 2025

Wisconsin tell Musk to get lost. Susan Crawford’s election is Tuesday. Send him a message he’ll hear Tuesday night.

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Have you fought the coup today?

Funny And Not Funny

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 30, 2025

Yes, he’s losing it

The wheels may not be coming off the Trump administration just yet, but it’s sure starting to feel wobbly. J.D. Vance’s visit to Greenland last week was a joke. That’s not right. Vance was the joke.

JD winning friends and influencing allies in Greenland pic.twitter.com/j3uE5UVac8
— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) March 29, 2025

Donald Trump himself is beginning to sound like a broken record.

What about car prices spiking because of his 25% tariff? “I couldn’t care less.“

What signal would it send to the world for him to take over Greenland? “I don’t really think about that; I don’t really care.”

But let’s not obscure what there is to care about. Inflation has hit cruelty futures. Cruelty was the point seven years ago. Now it’s become sadism, argues John Stoehr:

First, consider that US Attorney Pam Bondi has suggested strongly that there will be no investigation of the nation’s highest-ranking national security officials inviting a journalist to a discussion of highly classified military operations on an unsecured messaging platform.

Then consider that a longtime employee of the US Department of Homeland Security “inadvertently sent unclassified details of an upcoming Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation to a journalist in late January,” according to a report by NBC News.

Days later, the employee was placed on leave pending an investigation, the officials said. She was asked to take a polygraph test and surrender her personal cellphone, which she declined. She was then notified that the agency intends to revoke her security clearance, the officials said, which could keep her from working in the homeland security space again.

This is a pretty clear picture of unequal treatment before the law. As my senator, Chris Murphy, told MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, on the subject of Signalgate, but not on the DHS employee who’s being investigated: “There has to be criminal investigations as well here. If the criminal code doesn’t apply to powerful people, if it only applies to people without power, then we don’t have rule of law in this country.”

Takeaway: we don’t have rule of law in this country.

Kristi Noem’s “Frau Schmerz” performance in El Salvador got the attention she wanted. She’s running TV ads now warning non-citizens who stick a toe inside U.S. borders “we will hunt you down” if you commit “crimes against the American people.” Evidence suggests that those could be anything from entering illegally, asking for asylum, or speaking your mind.

Stoehr adds:

Andrew Sullivan had the righteous man’s reply: “These wannabe fascists publicly delight and revel in their acts of domination in a manner that even despotic regimes avoid. For the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, to posture in front of a third-world gulag, with a $50,000 Rolex on her wrist, in order to scare any brown person with a tattoo in the US, is an exercise in authoritarian pornography. It is fascistic in its essence.”

True, but it’s also sadistic.

Read the whole thing here or here.

Trump may be losing it, but we’re still at risk of losing the country. So remember this. Challenge Trump strongly (you know he admires strongly) and he backs down.

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Have you fought the coup today?

Every Day This Gets Harder

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 29, 2025

But also for the Gangster-in-Chief

And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again

— “The Mary Ellen Carter,” by Stan Rogers, 1979

Friends ask me how I am, and my stock reply is now “Managing my stress.” My mother, 93, tells me she and her friends are all wondering whether their Social Security checks will arrive in April. But then that’s just what a “fraudster” would say, according to Donald Trump’s billionaire Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, speaking from whatever planet that bastard lives on. My mother and her friends know all about his comments.

A friends laments that too many in the progressive sphere seem to think clicktivism is enough. Another looks at the descent of the U.S. into will-to-power lawlessness and says there’s nothing you can do. But that’s not true.

Read this carefully:

There is a lesson in there: Stand up to Trump and he backs down. He has a loud bark and a glass jaw.

In case you need reminding what Carney did:

Carney: “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.” pic.twitter.com/LKYkpO8JD0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2025

So attend those protests, the big and the small. Contact your representatives, even the MAGA ones. Write letters to the editor. Make phone calls for Susan Crawford in Wisconsin (the election is Tuesday). Even if the checks keep coming, I promise you that those reliably voting seniors on Social Security won’t forget the Trump-inspired stress and worry they feel over whether they will be able to pay their bills or, you know, eat.

The smiling, lying bastards only win if you give up first.

(h/t ER)

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So Much Mayhem, So Little Time

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 29, 2025

Chaos fascism

The good citizens of Gotham City elected the Joker as mayor. He appointed his friends to high positions in government. Batman is MIA. Things have gone about as you’d expect.

You’ve noticed? So has Michael Tomasky. Some headlines:

Trump Takes Government Secrecy Seriously. But Only When It Suits Him.

10,000 Federal Health Workers to Be Laid Off

Federal officials are preparing for agencies to cut between 8 and 50 percent of their employees

Trump-as-Joker would fire the police too, but why bother with AG Pam Bondi (as Harley Quinn) deciding which Trump enemies to prosecute and which Trump crimes to ignore? (All of them.) Besides, he needs police as enforcers. There’s little chance that Senator John Thune and Representative Mike Johnson will launch CapitolHill investigations into anything Trump.

“That’s a lot of mayhem, and it barely scratches the surface,” Tomasky explains:

Across human history, fascism has been imposed upon democracy mostly in one of two ways. First, by brute force—a military coup, that sort of thing. Second, a bit more stealthily, and legally—through legislation, executive decrees, and court decisions that hand more power to the leader.

Donald Trump is inventing a new way. Call it chaos fascism. Destroy the institutions of democracy until they’re so disfigured or dysfunctional that a majority no longer cares about them.

But they’ll care about this. Musk-Trump is degrading the Social Security system while propagandizing against it “with absurd and false claims about 140-year-olds cashing checks.” DOGE claims after being embarrassed by that that it can replace SSA’s archaic-but-functional COBOL software that DOGE coders don’t understand with Java in a matter of months. Experts say years. DOGE says trust A.I.

Then wreck the agency so that its service becomes crap. Let public anger at it build. And in time, they can just dismantle it and privatize the greatest social insurance system ever devised by this government and put people’s financial fate in the hands of rich cronies. If that’s not chaos fascism, I don’t know what is.

Then there is DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, shooter of dogs, sans jackboots, sans black uniform, looking into the camera and warning the world that if you come to the U.S. and transgress the unwritten law, well, its a Salvadoran hellhole for you.

For now it is left to the courts to attempt to put the brakes on Joker’s plans for mayhem. He’s already defying them, but hasn’t yet seen his SCOTUS buddies rule on his most blatant actions. For now, the country is whistling past the constituional crisis. Defying SCOTUS could backfire, Politico suggests, but may get something Republicans can regret at their leisure:

Trump is likely to get some of what he wants from the Supreme Court when all is said and done — maybe even a lot of it. But it is always useful to remember that when a president manages to devise new and more powerful tools for himself — whether legal or political in nature — he leaves them for his successors too. And there is no telling what will happen and how those tools will be used over the long haul.

That assumes there is a long haul.

With Batman MIA and the courts with no army, stopping the Joker’s chaos fascism may take Americans in the streets by the millions. Saturday, April 5 is your big chance!

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

Frau Schmerz And American Stasi

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 28, 2025

This is who we are now

As mentioned last week, tourism is a $2.3 trillion industry in this country, roughly 3 percent of GDP, with international visitors spending $155 billion into the economy each year. So with ICE snatching people off the street like Stasi in East Germany and detaining foreigners at U.S. airports, one might think it an inopportune time for Kristi Noem to produce an anti-U.S. tourism commercial.

Y’all don’t come!

But disincentivize U.S. tourism is just what the Homeland Security secretary did on Wednesday, filming in (of all places) an El Salvador gulag before a backdrop of prisoners reminiscent of Nazi concentration camp victims. And wearing, as the New York Post noted, a $60K Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch. If the point was for Frau Schmerz to get attention, she got attention. “Y’all don’t come!” was hardly the artistic choice the U.S. Travel Association might have made to entice foreign visitors to vacation here. But Schmerz-the-dog-shooter has other priorities.

Jeff Sharlet cautions that Noem’s Lara Croft, Tomb Raider look (sans twin automatics and ponytail) is intentional. It carries a certain kind of fascist sexy, “a kind of debased BDSM,” that’s a trap to spotlight because a certain rightwing man finds it seductive. (It’s not dissimilar to the retributive fantasies Donald Trump teased widely to regain the Oval Office.) My first impression was it’s a helluva way to sell a vacation at Disney World or in Las Vegas.

The greater irony is that many of the Venezuelan “terrorists” hastily shipped to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) without due process are there because U.S. authorities believe any and all tattoos mark them as members of a violent criminal gang. SecDef Pete Hegseth had best watch his back. (What is on his back?)

The Ink concurs:

The fashion critics at ICE seem to have decided that any tattoos, so long as they’re on a Venezuelan migrant, are enough to condemn a person to a lifetime of hard labor in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center. That may be in keeping with the Trumpian recipe for “common sense” (a dash of racism, a dollop of excessive force, a wave of the hand at the law, and a few dozen viewings of Dirty Harry), but it is exactly what the rule of law is meant to prevent. And considering that border czar Tom Homan has even admitted ICE is sweeping up plenty of innocent “collaterals” in their attempt to sow terror, it’s pretty clear his front-line troops have no idea what they’re seeing, let alone know it when they see it. Whatever it is.

As for Noem’s “extras” arrayed “to create a visual for Noem’s use,” Jonathan Last writes at The Bulwark, “We have seen this kind of thing before. Just not from America.” To be clear, “I want to be deadly serious about this: We are now the bad guys.”

The Geneva Conventions that White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales described as quaint when defending the Bush “enhanced interrogation” (torture) program prohibit display of prisoners for propaganda purposes. Yet here we are. Our system failed to bring the torturers and their bosses to justice then, just as it failed to hold Wall Street banks accountable after the 2008 financial crash. We are no longer a nation of laws.

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, a doctoral student at Tufts University, is detained on a Boston street by masked ICE officers.

In case the message Noem is sending this week is unclear, with Stasi-like DHS kidnappings and her gulag photo-op, Last is blunt:

The message is this:

America is no longer a shining city on a hill. It is no longer the leader of the free world. It no longer stands on the side of liberty as a beacon for those who yearn to breathe free.

This is the land of wolves now.

Canada has written us off:

Carney: "The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over." pic.twitter.com/LKYkpO8JD0
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2025

Resist before you find ash on your sills.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

Rethinking Deliverism

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 28, 2025

Why we still can’t have nice things

Ezra Klein in October 2021 interviewed data geek David Shor on the source of Democrats’ failure to deliver more on what Democrats claim they want. To win, Schor believed (in Klein’s words), “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” It was surprisingly controversial for reasons Klein describes in his essay.

David Dayen, responding at The American Prospect, suggested:

This bumps up against Democratic activist goals around diversity and inclusion and edge-pushing ideas around policing and immigration, and that’s the source of nearly all the tension around popularism. But I would argue that popularism is not only self-evident but approximately what Democrats have been doing in virtually every race of national import for the past 30 years. And that’s precisely the problem. You cannot talk about the same popular items, fail to deliver on them, and expect the voting public to keep listening to you. There are diminishing returns to parties that never seem to get results. At this moment, the only thing that will give Democrats a fighting chance is what my friend Matt Stoller just coined as “deliverism.”

Being a big-tent party means a lot of people want their say in how things get done. They demand that their voices be heard and their interests be represented. The problem is that sometimes those interests are not complementary but in competition. “Please all, please none” comes to mind.

After Kamala Harris lost in November, Sam Stein tapped out a piece for The Bulwark suggesting why Joe Biden’s deliverism didn’t deliver. “Biden’s domestic achievements didn’t resonate with voters,” Stein wrote. “And it’s left the party questioning whether deliverism is smart politics at all.”

But there is a tension there, somewhat, between Democrats’ legislative ability to deliver and their political ability to market those achievements. It’s not that they don’t have decent messages. (They’ve gotten better.) It’s that the left doesn’t have the right’s multifaceted, billionaire-funded media vectors for delivering it to people’s ears. What I’ve called the left’s “tree falls in the forest” problem.

But Klein and co-author Derek Thompson think it’s more than that. In “Abundance,” the pair argue that in liberals trying to satisfy every sub-interest group in their big tent, they’ve burdened the government with Jacob Marley-like chains. With the best of inclusive and environmental intentions, trying to please all has kept government from being nimble enough to build things on time and on budget that make people’s lives better. And not just at the national level, but the municipal as well. This is not helping. It’s undermined people’s faith in government action and it’s dragging down the Democrats’ brand with working people.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

I’m in the middle of the book now, so I don’t have fully formed thoughts. But I figured I’d drop in this conversation between Jon Stewart and Klein (that I’ve only just started) for some weekend listening.

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