Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

MIchelle Goldberg writes about a blogger and influencer named Alex Kaschuta whose podcast used to be “a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism” and who recently moved away from it saying that the “vibe has shifted.”

Apparently, she’s not the only one. An excerpt:

[S]everal people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”

Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)

Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.”

This is super interesting.

I recently watched some SNL episodes from 2020 and 2021 and I was gobsmacked by how much the zeitgeist has changed. If this part of that is finally going out of fashion it can only be a good thing. The ultimate red-pilled techbro who subscribed to this nonsense is Elon Musk. (He was a late bloomer.) I have no idea if this is going to be replaced by something worse. It’s certainly possible. But this “vibe” has been spectacularly destructive and if it’s moving on it can only be a positive.

Here’s a gift link to the whole piece.

The inspiration…

Here’s the opening of the RS write-up:

On March 27, 2022, on the heels of a weekend marked by dozens of gang-related murders, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and his legislature plunged the country into a régimen de excepción — a state of exception — and declared war against the gangs. The state of exception suspended fundamental rights like freedom of assembly and association, the right to legal representation, and the right to see a judge within 72 hours of detention. The age of criminal responsibility was lowered to 12.

The crackdown that ensued saw tens of thousands of arrests of suspected gang members, who were tried en masse and disappeared into the nation’s prison system without even the illusion of due process. Allegations of torture, extrajudicial killings, and other human rights abuses abounded — and still do. Bukele is serving a second term despite a constitutional prohibition against it. The state of exception — originally a 30-day decree —  has been extended 37 times. Over the course of three years, human rights in El Salvador have crumbled under its boot.

It’s here that President Donald Trump hopes to find a workable model for his own immigration crackdown, and the potential eradication of opposition to his nativist, right-wing agenda. 

Yeah:

“An activist judge is no judge at all, just someone wearing a costume,” Musk responded to a post from rightwing commentator Matt Walsh that suggested Trump should “go to war against activist judges”.

Musk has also received support from foreign leaders who have attacked their countries’ judiciaries and challenged the rule of law. He responded with a “100” emoji to a post from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that claimed “when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system”. Netanyahu attempted in 2023 to weaken the power of Israel’s judiciary, prompting nationwide protests and fears of a constitutional crisis.

El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele’s party ousted all supreme court judges in 2021 as human rights groups warned about a slide into authoritarianism, has become a repeated point of comparison for Musk. He retweeted a post from Bukele on Tuesday that claimed the “U.S. is facing a judicial coup” and repeated that language himself in later posts.

In another post, Musk responded “it is the only way” to a failed far-right US congressional candidate who suggested that the country should emulate El Salvador by investigating politicians and impeaching “all corrupt judges”. The former candidate, Valentina Gomez, received media attention last year for a campaign video in which she burned LGBTQ+-themed books with a flamethrower.

Musk, who has met with Bukele and praised his strongman presidency, has also previously suggested he wants to carry out a similar hollowing out of the judiciary. “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Musk tweeted on 25 February, reposting Bukele. “That is what it took to fix El Salvador. Same applies to America.”

Who needs laws when you’re a dictator?

Trump has signed fewer bills into law at this point in his presidency than any new president taking office for the last seven decades, according to government records.

Trump has signed just five bills into law so far: three Congressional Review Act resolutions overturning Biden-era regulations, the Laken Riley Act and a stopgap funding bill needed to avoid a government shutdown last month.

Congress actually passed the Laken Riley Act before Trump took office, but the GOP leadership held it so former President Joe Biden wouldn’t be able to sign it into law.

Trump has been signing Executive Orders turning the country into a dictatorial hellscape but he’s also playing a lot of golf and threatening people. And he’s doing permanent damage in dozens of different ways to the country and the individuals in it. But the only silver lining in all this is that EOs can be reversed. If we make it through the next four years and can replace him with someone sane (both tall orders) The new president will have her work cut out for her.

I saw my friend Alex Lawson on Maddow Friday April 12, 2025. He said,

a missed check for some people is a death sentence, a missed check for some people is going to mean that they are out on the street. So we have to come together. And understand that when this catastrophic failure happens, and I believe it will, there’s no indication that they’re trying to fix things, just accelerate it. 73 Million people rely on Social Security. Imagine the chaos that will come when those checks don’t go out. Rachel, it is going to be a scenario that’s hard to imagine how catastrophic it will be.

Alex Lawson, ED Social Security Works on The Rachel Maddow Show, Friday April 12, 2025

I put the date of the warning in here, because it’s important. Here’s how America currently works:

Someone on the left says something bad is going to happen and we need to stop it before it happens. Nobody listens.
The thing happens. Then, the people who were warned, who also knew it would likely happen but didn’t want to stop the thing, say, “Nobody could have anticipated…”

We have an old saying over at Eschaton, Atrios’ place, “We were right, but nobody listens to the Dirty Funny Hippies.”

So while it’s great to be able to say, “I told you so.” We do need to prepare for the bad thing, and then when it happens, don’t accept the excuses, prepare for them, RUB THEM in their FACES, and make your demands.

5 Steps to Stop #DOGE and save #SocialSecurity

1) Act. Alex tells people to get their Social Security info on paper. DO it. It’s easy. Go to ssa.gov

2) Call the Constituent services person at your Representative’s office.
(I wrote about what to say to the Constituent Services person based on Alex Lawson’s advice here.) Someone who watched Maddow did! From the comments under her video.

@jeaniebop
My idiotic senator is Ted Cruz. I called and called his office and finally got in touch with a young woman who was like Karoline Leavett. She was extremely condescending and had no compassion. She just told me not to worry! ??

My response, “Thank you for making the call! You know how Rachel says that ‘push back works’? You are part of that push back. When a bunch of normal constituents people call, it’s noticed. But warnings from the normals never count enough, BUT when his constituents DIE because of missed checks, it’s HIS fault for not stopping DOGE. The deaths are on HIS hands, because HE had power to stop it, and didn’t.”

3) Demand all DOGE people be KICKED OUT, NOW.
You can talk about your concerns to the Constituent services person NOW, since DOGE has already screwed up the Social Security Administration website that you need to access to confirm your earned benefits. You might think, “What’s the point, they don’t care. They’ll never go against Musk.” However, I want people to say it politely to them NOW, so when the BIG f’up happens and you call them later to do their job to get your benefits, you have their info and a history of concern.

Also include a comment about what you want in your remedy. This is as much for YOU as for them. You should know that before DOGE, a WORKING system for Social Security payments existed with competent people in the government who knew and STILL know how to run it. So, BRING THEM BACK.

4) The people who were FIRED have to be reinstated to return the system to where it was before DOGE touched it.

Here’s the thing, in America the people Republicans listen to are CEOs of companies. Those companies will be destroyed if DOGE is not stopped. They need to demand that DOGE be KICKED OUT NOW. But those CEOs are afraid of saying it publicly. Our protests at Tesla, Hands Off rallies, calls to the Reps and requests to constituent services all give the CEOs and Republicans cover from Trump wrath. ‘It’s not me, it’s the SHAREHOLDERS and constituents who want DOGE out of Social Security computer systems.”

As my sign at the #HandsOff Rally in SF read, “DOGE Boys, HANDS OFF all computer systems.”

I say this about Social Security Administration but it applies to all the agencies where people who managed the computer systems were fired by DOGE. They have to be reinstated so they can return the system to where it was before they touched it.

This is important, because DOGE’s whole point was NOT to make the systems better, but to TAKE information FROM the systems, and then USE those computer systems to control the agencies.

(BTW, this control of the computer systems is the primary goal of Russ Vought, architect of Project 2025 and now head of the Office of Management and Budget.)

For those who want evidence, this has been confirmed in this new report in NPR April 15, 2025, A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data.

As Digby said
DOGE people are playing very fast and loose with all of our personal information and nobody knows exactly what they are up to except that they are intent upon getting to it and won’t take no for an answer.

And here is her question that I want to answer.

And apparently there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them.

I think that there ARE people that can stop them, but first the f’up has to destroy something so bad that Wall Street notices. Rohan Grey, was on The Majority Report explaining DOGE’s opaque takeover of the Bureau of Financial Services and what a botched system shift for the federal payment systems would look like. He also explained how systems can be modernized without the DOGE chaos THIS IS important point to make now.

5) Trump’s OTHER crony companies can NOT be allowed to “Fix” it. Because they will want to use AI and privatize, as Rep John Larson said.

Marcy Wheeler said it very clearly on the Nicole Sandler show “Elon Musk is a very easy target. The richest man in the world fked up Medicaid for everyone in the country.”

And even if Musk, “pulls back” from Washington, Lisa Graves pointed out on the Nicole Sandler show that DOGE will still be there. Also, the Silicon Valley, break-things-for-profit, approach to computer systems will remain, unless they are removed ENTIRELY.

For people with empathy, like you and I, people dying should be enough to get the DOGE boys removed, but sadly we will have to wait until a massive financial crisis–for people in power–accompanies the deaths. Only that will stop Musk & DOGE.

Later I’ll post some thoughts on how to help activists talk to the media about the financial and human costs of DOGE’s disastrous access to government computers.

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain

If this article was done by anyone but a legit news organization I’d think it was fiction. NPR reports on what happened when DOGE showed up at the National Labor Relations Board in early March. I can hardly believe it’s real:

But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It’s possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.

The employees grew concerned that the NLRB’s confidential data could be exposed, particularly after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia, according to the disclosure. Eventually, the disclosure continued, the IT department launched a formal review of what it deemed a serious, ongoing security breach or potentially illegal removal of personally identifiable information. The whistleblower believes that the suspicious activity warrants further investigation by agencies with more resources, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the FBI.

The labor law experts interviewed by NPR fear that if the data gets out, it could be abused, including by private companies with cases before the agency that might get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data on competitors — Musk’s SpaceX among them. It could also intimidate whistleblowers who might speak up about unfair labor practices, and it could sow distrust in the NLRB’s independence, they said.

The new revelations about DOGE’s activities at the labor agency come from a whistleblower in the IT department of the NLRB, who disclosed his concerns to Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in a detailed report that was then provided to NPR. Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone “physically taping a threatening note” to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.

NPR verified all the evidence.

I think it’s pretty clear by now that the DOGE agenda is something other than what they say it is. They’re intent upon obtaining information for their own purposes. So far, they aren’t actually saving any money and their attempts to find “fraud” are absurd. Just this week they falsely labeled 6100 undocumented immigrants who are paying into social security as dead, “eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country.”

(THAT IS SO STUPID! These people are not collecting social security, they are paying into the system that supports the rest of us without any hope of getting the benefits. It’s unfair to them, of course but they do it because they are trying to work and earn money in America and it’s part of the deal. Trying to deport people like this, who are contributing much more than they are taking out is utterly braindead. )

Anyway, here’s how “efficient” this new self-deportation gambit is:

Jim Francis, a consumer law lawyer who is suing Social Security for wrongly entering a Maryland woman into the file, cast the repercussions in dire terms.

“It’s the source of that data that the whole world uses, which is why, if it’s inaccurate, it has such devastating impacts on people,” he told the Post. “Overnight, you literally become financially paralyzed.”

Tom Kind, a 90-year-old retiree in Colorado, told the Post that he had experienced being listed as dead, calling it a “nightmare.” In addition to losing benefits and health coverage, he faced a challenge convincing the agency that he was still alive. After jumping through a number of bureaucratic hoops, he had to show up to an office in person for an interview, proving he was alive.

DOGE is involved in pressuring people to self-deport and is using social security data to do it. They have no clue what they’re doing and 90 year olds are being financially paralyzed. What the hell?

I think a lot of this is because their actual agenda is something else entirely and this stuff is a cover. DOGE people are playing very fast and loose with all of our personal information and nobody knows exactly what they are up to except that they are intent upon getting to it and won’t take no for an answer. And apparently there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them.

I’ve been somewhat depressed by the idea that a majority of Americans support Trump immigration policy, as reflected in nearly all the polling. In fact, the way it appears, they like it so much that it’s what’s keeping his approval rating from completely cratering. Well, G. Elliot Morris, former polling analyst from the Economist and 538 says it’s just not true. When asked the vague question “do you support Trump’s immigration policy” people may say yes, but they do not like the specifics:

[T]he details of the policy Trump is carrying out are even more removed from the polling — even more unpopular, reflecting deep reservations among the public about what the president is doing.

For example, when various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.

Morris writes:

Donald Trump has made a series of missteps over the last couple of weeks. Voters are now souring on him on the economy and inflation, for example, and his tariffs are deeply unpopular, too. You can add Monday’s Oval Office meeting to this list.

The media narrative is that “Trump is popular on immigration.” But as we can see, that is not really true. On the specifics of his policy, and especially on the on-the-ground implementation, Americans are mostly opposed to what his administration is doing. (And the data above should probably be considered an overestimate, since the polls I’ve used are old and conducted before the Abrego Garcia news.)

This has to penetrate the national consciousness enough that people stop giving Trump any benefit of the doubt on immigration. He’s a monster and apparently it’s actually a minority that wants him to ignore court orders and send people to gulags in foreign countries after all. They need to know that’s exactly what he’s doing and his overall approval rating must reflect that. He probably doesn’t care — he’ll lie and say he’s actually got a 70% approval rating “in the good polls” —but other Republicans do.

I noted the other day that Scott Bessent was basically promoting a sort of MAGA Cultural Revolution by forcing white collar workers into manual labor and apparently, this is a common theme among our MAGA overlords. Paul Waldman looked at this in his newsletter today, pointing out that even their promise of good paying factory jobs is a bait and switch:

They have been quite explicit in their hope that the hundreds of thousands of workers being purged from the federal government can be sent to do more “productive” work in factories and mines, as Musk recently tweeted:

“We are shedding excess labor in the federal government,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and “that will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing.” The idea that a weather forecaster at NOAA or a cancer researcher at NIH or a clerk at the Social Security Administration or a therapist at the VA will only be “productive” if they’re mining copper or making pan-head screws is preposterous. That’s not because we don’t need copper and pan-head screws; we do. But the big mistake would be to assume that what our current rulers want is to create a manufacturing economy in order to produce widely-shared prosperity of the kind we were creating in the 50s and 60s. In fact, they would see that kind of economy as not a triumph but an abomination, one that would have to be crushed.

So what do they actually want? For that you have to keep your eye on the contempt with which they talk about (and treat) federal workers, their commitment to destroying labor unions, their hatred for universities, and their fantastical vision of the possibilities of artificial intelligence. The labor market they want to create is one with a tiny class of tech ubermenschen at the top, a gutted middle class whose jobs will largely be done by AI, a disempowered class of service workers whose wages are kept low, and a similarly disempowered class of manual laborers who can be told that because they are working with their hands they have recovered their lost masculinity.

No unions, no safety regulations, no workers rights. Basically a nightmare.

Do these people truly believe this is what Americans want? Or is it that they just don’t give a damn?

You’re on their menu

There’s that thing dogs do when they see or hear something that’s “off,” something they can’t immediately recognize. They cock their heads to one side and get a puzzled look. Baroo, they call it.

Sadly, we are not as attuned as dogs and usually let odd statements go by without a second thought. Later, maybe.

Olivia Troye, former Mike Pence national security advisor, had her ears prick up for you on Monday during Donald Trump’s Oval Office meeting with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Trump used a word that her ears caught when he said of jailing more people in El Salvador: “The homegrowns are next.” 

She writes:

I’ve worked in the rooms where these conversations happen. I know how this administration talks behind closed doors. When Trump uses the word “homegrown,” he’s not pulling it out of thin air. That kind of language signals internal planning is already in motion. It’s the next step in a rhetorical evolution we’ve seen before: “domestic terrorists,” “traitors,” “treason.”  Words chosen to justify extreme actions. Words that blur the line between political dissent and national security threats.

Trump doesn’t throw around words like “homegrown” lightly. Moments later, in that same press conference, he linked “homegrown criminals” to the very Americans he’s suggesting could be sent to prison in a foreign country. In his worldview, terms like homegrown, criminals, and domestic threats appear to be interchangeable. And once you’ve been labeled this way, the constitutional protections you’re entitled to as an American begin to disappear.

This is a five-alarm fire.

This is the pattern: speak out, and you’re labeled disloyal. Get in their way, and you’re cast as a criminal. Dissent is no longer disagreement. It’s being redefined as treason. It’s being recoded as terrorism. You don’t have to connect many dots here. The logic is unfolding in plain sight. Critics become traitors. Dissent becomes terrorism. Americans become enemies of the state. And if you’re a legal permanent resident, or even a citizen with the wrong name, wrong politics, or wrong profile, you may be next in line. This isn’t just a shift in language; it’s a signal of where the machinery is headed.

There is no legal justification for deporting U.S. citizens. Natural-born Americans are protected by the Constitution, including the right to due process, legal counsel, and judicial review. The fact that this administration is floating the idea anyway tells you everything you need to know about how far they’re willing to go.

This isn’t incompetence. This is intention. It’s happening by design, Stephen Miller’s design, a deliberate plan to sidestep the legal system and weaponize immigration law against U.S. citizens. It’s an extremist blueprint masquerading as policy.

I meant to offer something moreup lifting for my second post this morning. Then I came across Troye’s post on Threads. So, I’m a bit unnerved.

I meant to include more about the record crowds Sen. Bernie Sanders are drawing on their “Fight Oligarchy” tour. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Idaho last night put it bluntly: Donald Trump is a criminal.” Except they should rename their tour to what we are really fighting now.

When Donald Trump talks about 'rapists' and 'criminals,' he should look in the mirror. pic.twitter.com/Vr5BBV7Aoa

— Team AOC (@TeamAOC) April 15, 2025

LIVE from Nampa, Idaho: Tonight we stand up and fight for American democracy, an economy that works for all, and a more just society. https://t.co/1TK3BjYeNX

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 15, 2025

Update:

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 19 (Details coming; scroll for local events)
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

Welcome to the Third World

If you did not catch Donald Trump’s Oval Office visit with President Nayib Bukele, the Jailer of El Salvador, Digby provided a series of hair-raising clips. Including the one where Bukele tells Trump that “you have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people you have to imprison some.” Reagan was dubbed “the Great Communicator.” Bukele suggests Trump can be the Great Liberator by sending more people, Americans included, and on his say-so to Bukele’s concentration camp.

Trump urged Bukele to build more prisons, in fact. Bukele presented himself like a banana republic dictator from an episode of TV’s “Mission Impossible.” And Trump? He eats it up. Their exchange on why neither has the power to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) where he was disappeared erroneously(?) was as unscripted as an episode of “The Apprentice.”

The Trump administration play-acts as if it is not openly defying the Supreme Court’s instruction to return the prisoner for due process in the U.S., writes Adam Serwer, by “pretending it is complying while refusing to do so.” Trump could get him returned with a word or a phone call. He chooses not to.

Chief propagandist Stephen Miller declared Abrego Garcia a terrorist on his say-so and stood the Supreme Court’s 9-0 order on its head. It was a sweeping decision in the president’s favor, Miller insisted. But the flashing anger Miller displays at anyone challenging Trump’s dictatorial powers is not play-acting. It is psychotic.

Serwer writes:

This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law. The administration is maintaining that it has the power to send armed agents of the state to grab someone off the street and then, without a shred of due process, deport them to a Gulag in a foreign country and leave them there forever. The crucial point here is that the administration’s logic means that it could do the same to American citizens—after all, if deporting someone under a protective order to a Gulag without so much as a hearing is a “foreign policy” matter with which no court may interfere, then the citizenship of the condemned person doesn’t matter.

YOUR citizenship doesn’t matter.

“The Roberts Court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will,” Serwer continues. “This is not a power that any person, much less an American president, is meant to have.”

Joyce Vance writes at her substack what the world can (and did) see on Monday:

If there were a map that showed democracy slipping into dictatorship, we would be at the spot marked “You are here.” We shouldn’t sugarcoat the danger. Due process matters to immigrants and Americans alike. When the presidency refuses to honor it, we are all in danger. Donald Trump could snap his fingers and secure Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. We all know that’s true, no matter what pretense this administration assumes.

We’ve been warned. Our slip into dictatorship has happened, as Hemingway put it, “gradually, then suddenly.” Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to stop Trump and his hatchetmen, and rescue the American republic they’ve declared war on.

* * * * *

Have you fought autocracy today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 19 (Details coming; scroll for local events)
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