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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

For-profit Fascism

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 31, 2026

Are there no forced labor camps?

You may have heard that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is devoting a portion of its outsized persecution budget to create more detentions centers for the persecuted (Bloomberg):

Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history.

The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents in Minneapolis and other cities. Those aggressive enforcement actions have ignited clashes with protesters and led to agents killing two US citizens.

On Jan. 16, the administration paid $102 million for a site near Hagerstown, Maryland, according to a local court filing. A week later, the government paid $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona. The price tags — roughly in line with the industry average for the warehouse market — cover just the acquisition of the sites, which are currently empty shells. ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas and then run them as detention centers.

Place your bets. Once built, there will be a sunk-cost argument for keeping these camps open even if Shadow President Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant pogrom flames out. Now let’s see, who else might private contractors make bonuses housing there?

People like this?

Perhaps ICE’s private-sector partners will extract more profit from prisoners by turning ICE detention centers into forced labor camps?

Trump 2.0 and its partners no longer care about public opinion or the optics. They’re working hard to render public opinion irrelevant by November 3.

The Civics War

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 31, 2026

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.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

It’s been so cold in most of America and we’re chilled to bone by what ICE is doing. So here’s some good cold news for a change:

Scientists expected the opposite, but polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic islands of Svalbard have become fatter and healthier since the early 1990s. Polar bears rely on sea ice, which is declining, as a platform from which to hunt the seals that they rely on for blubber-rich meals. The bears’ fat reserves provide energy and insulation and allow mothers to produce rich milk for cubs. Researchers think that Svalbard bears have adapted to recent ice loss by eating more land-based prey, including reindeer and walruses.

Ok, you deserve some cute cubs:

No Bread, Lots Of Circuses

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

He is Nero.

Picked The Wrong Day To Give Up Distractions

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

Like drinking news from a firehose

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice released another 3 million Epstein documents Friday morning. I’m seeing comments (unconfirmed) that they’ve padded the release with some old materials. Whatever. What’s appearing on social media proves why Trump did not want these released:

The files released Friday appear to contain at least 3,200 documents that mention President Trump. The Times is going through the documents and that number could increase.

The White House will claim that a lot of these mentions are hearsay, unauthenticated tips, etc., and some may be. But it’s going to be hard to convince a majority of the public that all these women made up such detailed tales of debauchery and sexual violence out of whole cloth.

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https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00622303.pdf

Those 3,200-plus references to Trump are perhaps why the administration is filling the air with lots of brightly gleaming chaff today:

Will there be casino gambling like Monte Carlo?

Pay no attention to the Epstein files release!

There Is No Silent Majority

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

The majority is speaking out loud and clear

No they do not. The new Pew Poll:

  • Trump’s approval rating stands at 37%, down from 40% in the fall.
  • By more than two-to-one, Americans say the administration’s actions have been worse than they expected (50%) rather than better (21%).
  • Only about a quarter of Americans today (27%) say they support all or most of Trump’s policies and plans, down from 35% when he returned to office last year. That change has come entirely among Republicans.

A new Pew Research Center survey of 8,512 U.S. adults, conducted Jan. 20-26, also finds that – across six key qualities and abilities needed to serve as president – more Americans express little or no confidence in Trump than say they are extremely or very confident in him.

Confidence is down on all six measures since last year, particularly among Republicans.

Those numbers are much too high on every question. But this is interesting:

Only 66% saying he has the mental fitness is pretty telling. His lunacy is becoming obvious even to them.

This too:

Notice, the decline in support has come exclusively among Republicans. Last year, 67% said they supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies. Today, 56% do.

Considering that Trump’s approval ratings are down in the 30s and sinking fast, it should be obvious that Democrats must stand up. After all, he is trying to destroy the country — and the world.

G. Elliot Morris commented on this poll this morning:

A new poll from the Pew Research Center out this week finds that 37% of Americans approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, but only 27% say they support “most” or “all” of his policies.

This reminded me of an article I wrote at FiveThirtyEight (RIP) in Feb. 2025 titled “Americans voted for Trump, but don’t support his agenda.” Since I wrote that piece, according to Pew, the percentage of adults who support most or all of Trump’s policies has fallen eight points, including a nine-point drop among Republicans. Now, just a bare majority of Trump’s own party says they support all or most of his plans and policies.

[…]

On Immigration and Customs Enforcement in general, a new Fox News survey this week found 59% of voters now say immigration enforcement has been “too aggressive,” similar to YouGov’s 60%. But Americans haven’t turned against the idea of immigration enforcement. YouGov found 87% still support deporting immigrants who committed violent crimes. The problem is everything else: only 22% support deporting long-term residents with no criminal record, only 21% for parents of U.S. citizen children, only 17% for people who came as children. (Here’s a piece from me on similar numbers from last April.)

The atrocities are piling up and the American people do not like it. Even Republicans are getting queasy and Democrats have an obligation to oppose them vociferously. Some of them are doing that very effectively, others not so much. There’s no room for tepid, moderation when a democracy is under siege.

Lindsey Graham’s Wet Dream

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

I’m pretty sure this is all Graham’s doing. He’s been licking Trump’s boots about the “peace president” bs and has no doubt convinced his that they will not be able to deny him the Nobel Prize if he bombs Iran into submission. Trump is losing what’s left of his mind so he probably believes it:

U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing options against Iran that include targeted strikes on security forces and leaders to inspire protesters, multiple sources said, even as Israeli and Arab officials said air power alone would not topple the clerical rulers.

Two U.S. sources familiar with the discussions said Trump wanted to create conditions for “regime change” after a crackdown crushed a nationwide protest movement earlier this month, killing thousands of people.

To do so, he was looking at options to hit commanders and institutions Washington holds responsible for the violence, to give protesters the confidence that they could overrun government and security buildings, they said. Trump has not yet made a final decision on a course of action including whether to take the military path, one of the sources and a U.S. official said.

The second U.S. source said the options being discussed by Trump’s aides also included a much larger strike intended to have lasting impact, possibly against the ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. allies in the Middle East or its nuclear enrichment programmes. Iran has been unwilling to negotiate restrictions on the missiles, which it sees as its only deterrence against Israel, the first source said.

You may recall that we had a deal like this which Trump trashed in his first term on the word of the likes of Lindsey Graham who really just wants to bomb Iran into submission.

We are a very short trip to Trump becoming the worlds biggest neocon, invading other countries to “free” them. I’m sure Graham’s got him believing they’ll greet him with flowers.

Update —Not his only wet dream apparently:

Saving Lives Is No Longer On The Menu

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

You may have heard that Moderna is no longer going to be funding vaccine trials:

Moderna chief executive officer Stephane Bancel said the company does not plan to invest in new late-stage vaccine trials because of growing opposition to immunizations from health officials in the United States. 

His comments were made last week during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

“You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market,” Bancel told Bloomberg TV. He said the vaccine market in the United States is much smaller as more anti-vaccine guidelines have become the norm.

Since last May, the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership has greatly reduced general recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, and most recently cut the number of recommended childhood immunizations from 17 to 11. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, also in attendance in Davos, remarked Kennedy’s policies are “almost like a religion” and “anti-science.”

Economic analysts said Bancel’s comments mean Moderna’s phase 3 clinical trials for vaccines will likely be on the chopping block. Moderna has already been facing declines in sales after a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This is a tragedy:

The COVID vaccines saved millions of lives but because we have a stupid, superstitious, conspiracy-addled faction in America that’s pulling the strings, we’re going to deny the world anything like that in the future. We’re just determined to kill the human species one way or another.

I Do Not Regret To Inform You

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

“that we are going to win”

https://bsky.app/profile/thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3m7ikj3hdx22b

Looking back through the archives, I’ve advised celebrating little victories again and again and again and again. Just not recently.

But over at The New Republic, Perry Bacon interviews Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, on keeping our eyes on the prize, as it were.

Táíwò began garnering attention last fall for saying repeatedly, “I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win.”

The point of hyper-violence, Táíwò tells Bacon, is to keep us back on our heels and “to keep us from realizing how much power we have to resist.”

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) 2025-10-21T23:40:12.060Z

But why this phrase and not “we are winning,” asks Bacon:

Táíwò: Yeah, I think that phrasing is important because one of the things that I alluded to when I first explained why I use that phrase is: what I’m not trying to do is look at these heinous murders, look at this mass campaign of ethnic cleansing, and say nothing bad is happening or “this is what victory looks like.”

That is absolutely not the impression that I’m trying to give. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Why I’m saying this is because things look so dire. And the ability of federal forces to concentrate on slivers of the country and generate these spectacles of hyper-violence is part and parcel of their political strategy to make it look like they have power that they don’t, in fact, have.

Donald Trump is a creature of reality TV. He’s about creating spectacle. Of course, he’s choosing cities he targets not only for maximum media coverage, but also for political payback. The strategy cannot work everywhere, Táíwò believes:

This is a massive country. They’re facing massive resistance even in the large cities that they target—and that resistance is effective, by the way. They can’t deploy this strategy everywhere, right? So they depend on generating these spectacles, generating a social media environment of fear and capitulation as a force multiplier.

If they can just harass and attack this many children, they think they can convince people that their victory is inevitable. And it is important now, more than ever, to remind people that’s not, in fact, true. The brave people risking their lives on the streets of Minnesota are in fact doing something that is effective; they are in fact doing something that we can and must learn from and are in fact doing something that can work at scale.

The more we pay attention to how they’re resisting, rather than just the evil they’re resisting, the likelier we are to realize that we can win, we must win—and we will.

Not unlike Donald Trump’s attempts as we speak to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the right has spent decades trying to reverse its “world-historical defeat of the politics of segregationism and apartheid.”

And this hysterical, comic-book villainy is their attempt to spectacle and meme and “earned media” their way out of the reality that no one likes what they stand for.

I’d quibble with that last bit, considering that, as I noted earlier, Americans as a people elected Trump not once but twice, the second time as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. Or perhaps a portion of his 2024 national majority know what he stands for and simply don’t care.

The rest is at TNR (subscription req’d), but the video above has it all.

Do We Have Any Decency?

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

Have a look in the mirror

Osama bin Laden is applauding from his watery grave.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff famously argued (contra liberal “best interests” arguments) that people do not vote their interests; they vote their identities. So, just who are we? Americans should do some soul-searching and ask themselves. Do we have any decency? We elected Donald Trump not once but twice, the second time as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. We knew just who and what he was and installed him back in the Oval Office, some say over the price of eggs. (Jonathan Swift could write a biting satire.) What kind of people do that?

The world is asking (The Washington Post, gift link):

Outside the U.S., the perceived havoc wrought by federal agents has also left its mark. This week, Giuseppe Sala, mayor of Milan, spoke out against the expected arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as part of a routine deployment of U.S. personnel to the Winter Olympics in Italy. “I’m sure that the Milanese are unhappy with having this sort of militia” here, “which kills people in the U.S., entering houses without permission,” Sala told my colleagues, referring to recent events in Minneapolis. Of the Italian government, he asked: “Is it possible that you could say ‘no’ once to Mr. Trump? Once! Quite simply.”

Then of course there was the attempted breach of the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis this week. Nations from around the world with diplomatic missions stationed here must be questioning the safety of their personnel.

Trump’s Interior Ministry

Germany has issued a travel advisory to its citizens.

Trump officials balk at criticism of their actions, and have cast descriptions put forward by Democratic lawmakers and activists of ICE as a modern-day “Gestapo” as endangering U.S. federal officers. But viewed from afar, the developments in the U.S. seem familiar. “You have your own Interior Ministry,” an Arab business executive told me on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.

They were gesturing to the all-powerful policing apparatuses that exist in other countries, especially autocracies where strongmen leaders lean on security forces distinct from the army to consolidate control and suppress dissent. During the upheavals of the Arab Spring more than a decade ago, for example, it was the notorious Interior Ministry of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak that was the focal point of popular rage.

The whole world is watching.

In its cover story this week on the excesses of ICE, the Economist pointed to three “warning signs” of states giving way to “paramilitarism”: “One is when governments start to rely on armed force as a first resort, rather than the last. Another is when internal disciplinary mechanisms cease to function properly,” noted the British publication. “A final red flag is when forces looking for bad guys treat local civilians ‘as support networks of the enemy,’ perhaps because polarizing politicians describe them as such.”

I’ve entertained the notion of creating a protest sign reading HONK IF YOU’RE A DOMESTIC TERRORIST.

Joy Reed early this morning posted a collection of political cartoons inspired by current events. The one at the top struck a nerve and inspired this post.

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