Let’s be very clear
I detect a distinct lack of Botox and hair extensions.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
He needed a good fluff session today
He really hates that affordability message:
The rest was no better. He’s promising much more pollution and a nuclear accident and took credit for things that happened before he became president. RFK Jr is pushing a health care bill that doesn’t exist, Lutnick showed why they call him Nutlick, Bessent said the economy is roaring and Witkoff said the Russians deserve a lot of credit.
And he repeated almost word for word an earlier anecdote about telling Macron that he’d better raise drug prices on the French people or he’ll hit them with tariffs on French wines and he fat-shamed an anonymous friend of his again, which he seems to be doing at every appearance these days for some reason, also word for word. That’s very weird.
Anyway:
Pro-choice advocates would like a word
The people behind it are the usual suspects. If you ever believed it was just about killing babies, you were wrong. It’s all the usual suspects:
Gotta make a living, dontcha know?
I wouldn’t think they could get very far with this. After all, even Trump has married gay men with kids in his cabinet. But these people play the long game. They’ll keep at it and the moment there’s a real opening they will go for it.
At the Golden Globes on Jan. 11, allegedly progressive Hollywood barely mentioned the Immigration and Customs Enforcement siege taking place in Minneapolis. Most didn’t gesture to the Trump administration’s war on free speech, particularly in the media. (In fairness, there were some who spoke out on the red carpet, and others wore pins indicating their support for Renee Good, who had been killed four days before by an ICE agent, but it was a very small contingent.)
The reluctance shouldn’t have been too surprising. America’s elite institutions and wealthy individuals have been among the most cowardly of all stakeholders in the country since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. Still, of all of them, Hollywood should have been out there saying something. The film industry has experience with blacklists and government witch hunts, and they should have realized what’s at stake — and how much they could stand to lose.
But Saturday’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care unit nurse at a local Veterans Affairs hospital, by Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis seems to have broken the entertainment industry out of its stupor. In the last few days there have been numerous statements from actors and musicians condemning ICE’s actions and demanding that the Trump administration end its mass deportation campaign and hold the perpetrators accountable. Reddit forums like FauxMoi are featuring anti-ICE statements from celebrities over the past few days — including Glenn Close, Billie Eilish, Ethan Hawke, Natalie Portman, Katy Perry, Edward Norton and many others — while also posting videos and commentary usually confined to political sites.
But it’s not just artists who are speaking out. As the Washington Post reported, “influencers devoted to adventure biking, baseball and Lord of the Rings to travel, sewing and women’s personal finance” have posted their outrage at Pretti’s killing, and their followers are weighing in with similar sentiments. Even a sub-Reddit devoted to playing your cat’s behind like a bongo — which has 800,000 participants! — came out swinging against ICE, with its moderator declaring, “If you still support Trump/ICE even slightly, you’re not welcome in this sub. We can no longer tolerate the people who are supporting or making excuses for this.”
Other cat lovers have also been taking a stand. On his Instagram “Business Cats” feed, comedian Drennon Davis has been posting his cats singing protest songs for the last couple of weeks. He similarly invites his followers who disagree to deport themselves to another forum if they don’t like it. In both cat cases, the up votes far outnumber the down votes. Everyone from fitness influencers to military groups to quilters are weighing in, and there is surprising agreement in the comments. Even a Reddit sex forum devoted to large penises waded into the topic.
Apolitical institutions are speaking out as well. Minnesota’s professional sports teams issued a joint statement calling for the “immediate de-escalation of tensions,” and the National Basketball Players Association announced that they “stand in solidarity with the people in Minnesota protesting and risking their lives to demand justice.” At an NBA game on Sunday, the Minnesota Timberwolves held a moment of silence for Pretti, and fans followed by yelling “F**k ICE!” and holding up protest signs throughout the arena. No altercations were reported.
Even in Silicon Valley, which has famously cozied up to Trump, “more than 800 employees, including those from Google, Microsoft, and Meta, called on their bosses to condemn ICE,” according to a Semafor. A couple of the big bosses, Sam Altman of Open AI and Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, spoke out against the agency’s authoritarian tactics. (They also bowed and scraped to Trump at the same time, but baby steps.)
Social media is responsible for this swift evolution. In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s shooting, the administration disseminated a narrative that was belied by the many videos of Pretti’s killing that were circulated across all the platforms. The graphic footage went instantly viral, with trusted influencers all over the internet sharing it and offering their own opinion, which created a permission structure and an invitation for people who are not immersed in politics to take a position.
Suddenly, what had always been apolitical forums have become platforms for the famous and non-famous alike to condemn the Trump administration’s deportation tactics — and that may have marked a turning point in the Trump administration’s assault on democracy. The normies got involved.
With the extreme polarization of our political information ecosystem, most of us exist, at least to some extent, inside media echo chambers. Regular people now pick up on current events in a more random fashion. After the 2024 presidential election, many Americans holding more mainstream, centrist beliefs backed off from participating in the political conversation, and they have been reluctant to join in again because of how chaotic and emotionally charged it has become. But when your quilting group on Facebook starts posting “F**k ICE” quilts and your favorite Instagram cats are singing protest songs, you start to pay attention.
On Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen — who has been a steady voice for the downtrodden throughout his long career — released “Streets of Minneapolis,” a moving protest anthem based on his Academy Award-winning song “Streets of Philadelphia.” The Boss’ lyrics — “Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice / Singing through the bloody mist” — have struck a chord; the track instantly garnered national media attention and has gone viral online.
The people Springsteen is singing about — the thousands of regular folks in Minneapolis who have emerged from their homes in bitterly cold weather to take to the streets in peaceful protest against Trump’s occupying paramilitary force — are a model of courage for the rest of America. And the horror of seeing two of them shot down by masked federal agents has sent a shock wave through the population. Politics has escaped the news silos — the true story of what’s happening in Minneapolis is now out in the world in a way that few stories ever are these days.
Even some Trump voters are starting to rebel. The gun groups, who were slow off the mark, are now condemning the administration’s line, reiterated by Trump on Tuesday, that Pretti shouldn’t have had a gun, despite possessing a conceal-carry permit. Polls show a sharp decline in support for the president’s mass deportation policy, and his approval ratings are continuing their descent into the 30s. The response of focus groups of voters who chose Trump in 2024 after going with Biden in 2020 should send chills down GOP spines. “You know, they killed that young man and they killed that young lady a couple weeks ago too,” one participant said. “They’re out of hand. [Trump’s] main priority, I think, for the last couple of months, [has] been the Nobel Peace Prize which is ridiculous.”
It is indeed ridiculous, as is the fact that the president’s first words after Pretti’s shooting was a lengthy Truth Social screed complaining about a possible delay of his precious White House ballroom.
Average Americans are seeing that Trump is more and more out of touch, and they’re recognizing, as that Trump voter has, that his administration is more and more out of hand. They likely wouldn’t be seeing it now if not for the influencers and others who are using their platforms to share their outrage in online communities where politics isn’t usually discussed. For all its toxicity — and it is profoundly toxic — in this instance, social media actually did some good.
Bruce speaks for most of us:
Affordability lacks emotional content
An angry man in a black pickup hung a firm thumbs down out his window at a tiny street-corner sign protest on Tuesday. He doubled back to shout at two activists, turned down a side street, then came back a third time before leaving the scene. On Wednesday, I heard more than the usual number of incoherent shouts and grunts from passing commuters (assumed to be Trump supporters; friendlies mouth “thank you,” smile, honk, and thumbs-up).
If those reactions are any indication, the Border Patrol killing of a licensed gun owner in Minneapolis has shaken the MAGA faithful as it has shaken the White House. It was a deadly attack on a civil liberty that the right thinks of as its own: the Second Amendment.
Aaron Regunberg writes at The New Republic:
“I Am One Of The People That Doesn’t Want ILLEGAL ALIENS Here Illegally But This Shit Is Out Of Control,” posted a guy I and a few friends follow for anecdata on how swing voters in my home state are feeling. “People Have NO RIGHTS In This Country With Actions Like These,” he wrote. “FUCK Untrained Ice Officers And FUCK YOUR PRESIDENCY If THIS Is How You RULE,” he added, comparing Trump to Hitler and ICE to the gestapo. A quick look around r/Conservative—the Reddit community for conservatives—shows that this reaction is far from isolated. In each of these cases, it seems people who are in many ways as far removed from a resistance demonstrator as it’s possible to be are coming to the same conclusion as your average No Kings participant: that this regime is dragging the U.S. into authoritarianism.
Whether these events mark a MAGA Waterloo, as Regunberg puts it, will depend in large part on whether Democrats convert this Trump 2.0 turnover into meaningful support for reining in his rogue administration. Multiple members of Congress and Democratic governors harshly condemned the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti: Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, California Rep. Ro Khanna, Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Wes Moore of Maryland, and more. But expressions of outrage — even two impeachments — have not stopped Trump’s gutting of constitutional limits and guaranteed freedoms in the past.
Lauren Egan of The Bulwark asks whether this assault is something the country can withstand for three more years, “or is American democracy truly in peril?” Some Democrats now vow not to provide more funding for the Department of Homeland Security without serious reforms. But is that really meeting the moment?
Egan writes:
That’s a significant shift from where Democrats were a little over a year ago, when party leaders had concluded that the Biden administration’s warnings about Trump’s threat to democracy appealed only to an elite audience, and that a narrow focus on affordability was the path back to power.
And yet affordability remains a party mantra heading into the fall elections.
BUT THERE’S NOW AN EMERGING BELIEF among Democrats that voters can be pissed off and motivated by two things at once—namely, the cost of living and Trump’s blatant disregard for the Constitution. In fact, they believe that the connection between the two creates a vulnerability for Trump, that there is a perception among voters that Trump is distracted by his pet projects—from turning ICE into his paramilitary plaything, to gilding the White House in gauche gold leaf—rather than focusing on bringing down the costs of groceries, health care, and housing. Fundamentally, it is all part of the same story.
“Democracy” seems less of an abstraction now. Conservatives seem chronically uninterested in social and civil rights issues until personally touched by them. Alex Pretti may not have been Team MAGA, but as a gun owner with a concealed carry permit, he was “MAGA adjacent.” His brutal killing after being face down and disarmed suddenly makes Trump’s evisceration of the Bill of Rights a live issue for conservatives.
Regunberg urges Democrats to visit Minneapolis to demonstrate solidarity (before DHA pulls back), to grab onto the issue and headlines with it. And not just for a quick photo op. Join observers. Do ridealongs. Don gas masks when fired upon with tear gas. It’s visual. It’s visceral. It conveys seriousness and commitment. Republicans wouldn’t dare match them.
As for “affordability,” it does not get to the nub of voters’ anxieties, especially independents’ worries. Affordability has rubbed me the wrong way for months. Yet Democrats across the board are using it, running on it. I get it. It’s convenient. It’s a one word, a six-syllable shorthand for the economic anxiety voters feel across the country. But it still feels like an abstraction. Clinical. Bloodless. There’s no feeling behind it. It sounds like the kind of policy-speak that turns off potential Democratic voters and tells them that Democrats — to borrow from Bill Clinton — don’t feel their pain.
I wrote in December:
Affordability continues to be a buzzword candidates and the press use as shorthand for the anxiety Americans feel in an economy wracked by a widening gulf between the elite and the rest. I wish Democrats would drop it. “Affordability” speaks to people’s heads when what people feel is more important. The term lacks — What was it Bruce Lee said to his student in Enter the Dragon? — emotional content.
I don’t have a better way to communicate that, but affordability doesn’t speak to people’s felt concerns:
“My paycheck won’t last out the month.”
“I’m buying store-brand foods and my family still goes hungry.”
“I’m having to skip meals so my kids can eat.”
“I had to stop taking my medications.”
“I’m behind on my rent and it just went up.”
“I dropped my ACA policy. It increased six times in January, and I have cancer.”
Voters desperately want to be seen. Democrats need to stop thinking with their policies and express themselves in terms of people’s problems.
Drink up
What’s left of Donald Trump’s “very good brain” is not going to last another three years. “Dangerous” is how Slovakia’s prime minister reportedly described Trump’s mental state. (Is there a betting line on whether his brain or body gives out first?) “Speculation about his fitness for office is rampant; armchair physicians have given him months and sometimes even days to live,” New York magazine reported Monday. Trump was flanked by two doctors when the magazine’s Ben Terris arrived for the interview. His instability is on display almost daily now.
A Daily Beast headline this morning reads, “Sleepless Trump, 79, Launches Manic 6AM Post-a-Minute Rampage.” To wit:
The president fired off almost 31 posts around 6AM Thursday on everything from his prospective invasion of Greenland to his long-running gripes against Barack Obama and his thoroughly debunked claims the 2020 election was rigged.
“TRUMP WON BIG,” Trump wrote of those results. “Crooked Election!”
Much of the MAGA leader’s early morning vitriol appears to have been prompted by the FBI’s raid Wednesday of an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, in search of evidence of widespread voter fraud nearly six years ago.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, was present at the site for the search.
Tulsi? That’s another story. at 7:14 a.m. ET, the Beast flagged Trump’s post rampage as “a developing story,” so he’s likely not done.
It is clear that Trump’s fixation on possessing Greenland, on the 2020 election in Georgia, on his gaudy ballroom and more indicate that he’s checked out on running the executive branch. Deputy Chief of Staff, Shadow President Stephen “Trump’s Brain” Miller is running the show. And directing Trump’s near-pogrom against immigrants.
“It’s just that this is all I care about,” Miller told a White House meeting on immigration policy in November 2019. “I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.” That’s about that time Miller got engaged to Katie Waldman, so make of that what you will.
Miller is backing away from “the recent fatal shootings in Minneapolis and the administration’s miscalculated response,” according to CNN this morning. He’s described as micromanaging Trump’s deportation program and insistent on underlings delivering on his quotas. He’s known to call Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem multiple times a day “to provide guidance and direction on how Trump’s immigration agenda is being executed,” CNN reports:
Miller, a former Senate aide who has long been fixated on immigration policy, joined Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign during its early stages, and was the rare White House aide to serve the full four years of his first term. He has become even more powerful during Trump’s second term, weighing in on a wide range of issues as Trump and his aides have sought to transform Washington.
This leaves Miller’s sleepy boss more time to focus on important presidential matters like his grievances and firing off angry “Truths.” (His very good brain obviously was not done at 7:14 a.m. ET):
All of this, Digby observed on Wednesday, points to a presidency hollowed out and fading. What’s more, Trump is surrounded by aides who sound like “brainwashed soldiers in ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’” The 25th Amendment is not coming to save us.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is worried that they’ve started sounding like characters from “Dr. Strangelove” and that we are the closest we’ve ever been to catastrophe.
It is now 85 seconds to midnight
A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.
So drink up. It’s 85 seconds to midnight somewhere.
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
— Victor Hugo
On April 7, 1968-just 3 days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nina Simone performed this song in New York:
Simone’s bassist Gene Taylor had composed it right after Dr. King was killed; the song (and Simone’s emotional performance) is all the more remarkable for being at once so timely, and timeless.
In 1968, music was our social media. Otis Spann was another artist who paid musical tribute to Dr. King, writing and performing two songs about the slain civil rights leader just days after his death. His “Blues for Martin Luther King” gives us the news and preaches the blues:
On May 4, 1970, 4 students at Ohio’s Kent State University died when National Guard troops opened fire on protestors. When Neil Young saw the photos of the incident in Life magazine soon afterwards, he was moved to write the now-iconic protest anthem “Ohio”, which was recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young just two weeks later and rush-released as a single one month to the day after the killings:
The following year, Bob Dylan felt similarly compelled to express outrage in song, after Black Panther leader/author/prison activist George Jackson was shot to death by guards during an escape attempt at San Quentin (there was contention over whether or not his killing was a set-up). Dylan’s single “George Jackson” was released just three months after the incident:
Flash forward to 2026. Folk singer Phil Ochs once said, “A protest song is a song that’s so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit.”
When they came for the immigrants
I got in their face
When they came for the refugees
I got in their face
When they came for the five year olds
I got in their face…
You may be thinking: “Those lyrics could have been written this week!”
If that’s what you’re thinking…you’re right. They were written this week, by political song smith extraordinaire/activist Billy Bragg, who posted this song on YouTube yesterday:
And we got this memo from the Boss today, posted on BlueSky:
I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
Stay free
You can’t mistake that for bullshit. It’s tough not to despair right now, but as Kris Kristofferson advised:“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
Previous posts with related themes:
Basket of Inflatables: A “No Kings” Mixtape
More reviews at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley
Big protests are “a tactic in search of a strategy”
Charles Duhigg contrasts political efforts based on mobilizing and on organizing. Mobilizing succeeds at garnering national attention (sometimes through large spectacle), at raising funds, and at building national advocacy capacity. On the downside, it tends to concentrate power at the top of organizations and not grow leadership farther down and locally. The latter focuses on building lasting community among its local members. Organizing works better as a franchise model: give local people basic tools and let them loose to find their way and raise up local leaders:
As the Johns Hopkins political scientist Hahrie Han likes to say, “Mobilizing is about getting people to do a thing, and organizing is about getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.” For a social movement to create real change, it helps to be skilled at both mobilizing and organizing. But that doesn’t mean that both skills are equally important.
The New Yorker article compares the Democratic Party’s and conservative organizing. The latter is less doctrinaire:
Today’s Democratic Party is great at mobilizing: it can propel people into the streets with big marches, raise billions of dollars for national candidates, and get liberals to bombard congressional offices with letters and phone calls. However, it’s less talented at organizing—building the kinds of local infrastructure and disparate leaders that are needed to sustain a large and ideologically diverse coalition. MAGA, on the other hand, is great at organizing—after 2020, the movement launched the so-called Precinct Strategy, which encouraged thousands of people to run for leadership positions within their local Republican Party chapters, and to become poll workers. This is a reason Donald Trump is in the White House again—and liberal and conservative activists alike say that it will be hard for the Democrats to start consistently winning until they mimic some of MAGA’s strategies.
It’s a useful read. Particularly regarding the penchant the left has for giving side-eye to people whose views don’t check enough of the right lefty boxes for acceptance by insiders.
Whereas MAGA welcomes anyone wearing the red hat, Democrats often require people to use new terms on pronouns and race, and they can punish or exclude anyone who strays.
Newcomers come out of curiosity, feel unwelcome, and leave. That’s no way to build a movement.
Duhigg recounts the infighting that broke out among leaders of the 2017 Women’s March. Anand Giridharadas devotes a section of “The Persuaders” to how purity tests undermined that effort. A repeated theme is “Is there room among the woke for the waking?” The issue at hand is whether those on the left edge of the left possess enough critical mass to move the culture in their direction by themselves. They do not. And they need to get over themselves. They need more allies. *
The sociologist Liz McKenna, of Harvard, told me that movements succeed best when people feel welcome. A movement becomes sustainable when members feel empowered and find friends. “The left loves big protests, but protesting is a tactic in search of a strategy,” she said. There must be some shared core values among a movement’s members, of course, but the requirement can’t be that every value is shared. “Making room for difference isn’t a nice-to-have thing—it’s table stakes,” she told me. “The rallies are by-products of the community, not the goal.” Most of all, even though anger can be useful, a movement also needs to provide some joy. “Trump rallies are fun,” McKenna noted. “The Turning Point campus debates are fun.” For a long time, she said, the left was less fun and more angry, “and so the right was out-organizing them at every turn.”
That’s why I’m the fool spinning signs and dancing on the street corner every week, Bluetooth speakers blasting dance music, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. As Anat Shenker-Osorio says, if you want people to join your party, throw a better party.
The successful mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, the Harvard researcher Liz McKenna notes, “was by all accounts joyful, hopeful, creative, and reflected a real sense of collective possibility. And that emotional culture translated into a major electoral upset.”
Duhigg sees The Faith & Freedom Coalition as “one of the most powerful conservative groups in the nation,” yet remains below most people’s radar.
Ralph Reed reminded me that, for Faith & Freedom and many similar conservative organizations, there are no showy national rallies. And there’s little strictness about ideological consistency. But during elections the group turns out millions of voters. When Reed looks at the left today, he said, “a lot of times it feels like they’re trying to hook people with big parades and free Beyoncé concerts.” That’s not how you win, he went on. “You win by offering people a set of values that give them meaning. Celebrities don’t deliver that. Small groups of neighbors do. And, as long as we’re building those groups, we’re gonna win.”
That’s happened in Minneapolis, but it took a paramilitary invasion and neighborhood organizing to give the less-engaged “permission” to join get off their couches and join the fight. Is that what it’s going to take everywhere?
* The pink pussy hat was an instantly recognizable symbol of resistance. A phenomenon. It disappeared as quickly as it came. We do that.
[A] man is legally observing ICE activity in his own neighborhood. Agents walk up to his car window and ask, “Are you following us?”
The man replies, “Yeah.”
An agent immediately escalates and says, “What you are doing is called impeding federal law enforcement. It’s an 18 U.S.C. §111 charge. This is your first and only warning. If you continue to impede and follow us, you will be arrested.”
The man then correctly responds, “Yeah, but I’m not impeding you.”
Another agent jumps in and says,“You just openly admitted you were following us, so…”
And again, the man correctly explains, “I am following you. I’m not impeding you. I’m observing you.” Which is a constitutionally protected right.
The agent responds anyway, “It is impeding.”
The man replies, “No, it’s actually not.”
At that point, the agents become visibly angry that he knows the law and threaten him again, saying, “This is your one warning. If you keep doing it, we will pull you back out and arrest you.”
Just to be very clear… Following and observing law enforcement, without interference, is not a crime. Threatening arrest anyway is an abuse of power. Threatening to “pull him out” of his vehicle is a threat of unlawful force. These agents are not enforcing the law, they’re misstating it, weaponizing it, and hoping intimidation will do the rest.
They don’t understand the laws they claim to enforce. They just parrot a few buzzwords and statute numbers, and expect the public to fold. And when that doesn’t work, they threaten violence.
Because the biggest threat to an ICE agent is someone who knows their rights.
Trump said yesterday that they were going to “de-escalate a little.” I guess maybe that means they don’t plan to shoot anyone in the face or the back in the next few days. Their deeply un-American tactics appear to still be in full effect.
He’s invited Russia (for real) but no word on whether North Korea is on board. They are very close friends so I’d expect to see him there.
Seriously, these are among the most repressive countries in the world. You’d have to laugh if it weren’t so insane.