Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I think this guy speaks for a whole lot of conservatives, particularly the white men. And sadly, he probably represents a fair number of non-conservative men as well although they wouldn’t put it quite this plainly.

This is from the Daily Signal, Ben Shapiro’s shop:

Agatha Christie never spun a mystery as perplexing as that of white liberal women going all in on protecting criminal illegal immigrants. Screaming, screeching, blowing whistles, cursing like sailors with Tourette’s who just hit their thumb with a hot hammer….

Theories abound. Perhaps it’s the middle-age equivalent of dating the “bad boy” in high school. Except, we’re not seeing any indication that the women blocking ICE from its noble work have any interest in transforming the killers, rapists, and traffickers they’re protecting.

Perhaps it is, as some have speculated, a generation of women who have been taught to discount the value of motherhood, and their hardwired instinct for nurturing and protecting has been short-circuited in the service of the criminals. Think of Renee Good leaving her own child behind before trying to turn an ICE agent into a speedbump.

Except mothers are bringing their children to the protests, sincerely believing it’s good for their budding Zohrans to witness Mommy standing up to the Gestapo.

Why do they do this? Obviously, they’re so ugly that they’re sexually frustrated.

Perhaps noted feminist Naomi Wolf hit the mark with her theory that the lashing out stems from sexual frustration, that the aggression toward ICE officers is a physical release. Yes, it’s clear from their unhinged antics why most of those women wouldn’t be getting any action. Hunter Biden would turn down those women even if they were wearing parkas packed with cocaine.

It’s personal for him:

Around 2020, a strange thing happened. In short order, three women who’d been important in my life—three wonderful, intelligent, women—got uncharacteristically, disproportionately, perplexingly irate at me over politics.

My college girlfriend, who I’ve known since I was 12, never got mad at me back when I deserved it. If temperament were a city, she’d be San Diego. But one day, she snapped at me like a starving crocodile for defending Rush Limbaugh’s Presidential Medal of Freedom. Shocking? Like Rep. Ilhan Omar applying for membership to Mar-a-Lago.

Then there’s my former colleague, partner, and office mate. We worked side by side for years, with a closeness, chemistry, and intimacy that had people assuming we were hitched. Never an argument. Twenty years later, we reconnected on Twitter. Within 10 minutes, she was going full Joy Reid on me over politics. (OK, maybe not full Joy Reid. Never go full Joy Reid.)

Strangest of all, a woman I briefly dated in the mid-90s, and had not had any contact with since, tracked me down after coming across an article I’d written. Not to say, “Hi, how’s it going?” But: “Is this the same Al Perrotta who used to live in Southern California? You used to be so tolerant!”

“I hope it’s me,” I replied. “I’m using his driver’s license.”

Helpful Guy Hint: When you’re getting chopped down by childhood friends, smacked around by professional soulmates, and harassed out of the blue by sensitive, gracious clairvoyant poets, it’s wise to ask, “What gives?”

But I missed it, males missed it, and conservatives missed it. The anger festered during the Biden years, turned into rage with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And the reelection of Donald Trump, King of the Alphas? Like hitting the nucleus of Uranium-235 with a neuron.

King of the alphas? The narcissistic, make-up wearing freak who grabs women by the pussy and thinks they like it? Believe me, if he didn’t have money…

He thinks that even if Trump were a liberal the women would be angry and asks what this is really all about:

Perhaps at its core the women are suffering PTSD. The psychic injury from the Sexual Revolution indoctrination, the radical mutation of the women’s rights movement, the desecration of motherhood at the altar of “abortion rights,” even the transgender usurpation of what it means to be a woman.

White, liberal women have been told, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

“Yeah,” they replied. Looked around, and asked, “But where am I?”

I think I’d be lashing out too.

Lol. Right. Or maybe, more to the point, if we had just agreed to have sex with assholes like guy we would have been happy.

The truth is that once women had the freedom to make their own decisions and their own money they knew they didn’t have to put up with mediocre little men like this just to keep a roof over their heads. And he knows it.

Don’t kid yourself. This is one of the underlying issues in our society that’s driving a good bit of the divide. And the condescending bullshit from men like this jerk is something we confront all the time in real life.

In Virginia, 65 percent of women voted for Democrat Abigail Spanberger for governor, according to the Fox News Voter Analysis conducted from Oct. 22 to Nov. 4, compared to just 48 percent of men—a 17-point gender gap. 

In New Jersey, women backed Democrat Mikie Sherrill by 62 percent, compared with 49 percent of men—a 13-point gap that proved decisive in her win. 

How about this from a couple of months ago:

And it’s not getting any better as the right is cultivating these antideluvian ideas among young men:

Gender divides within adults ages 18 to 29 show up in questions ranging from how Americans feel about President Donald Trump to their views on what constitutes success. Young men and women also feel very different about mental health, cultural issues and questions about gender and the workplace.

Among Gen Z overall, 64% disapprove of Trump’s job performance versus 36% who approve. But young men are more evenly split (53% disapprove, 47% approve) than young women (74% disapprove, 26% approve). The 21-point difference in Trump’s approval rating is unchanged from April.

Naturally everyone sees this as a sign that nobody cares about men and their issues. Same as it ever was. But maybe, just maybe, this is really because women are sick of being treated like vassals and being forced to accede to the desires and demands of whiny creeps like that author or the likes of Andrew Tate, the rapist abuser Trump treats like a brother. There’s a reason Jeffrey Epstein was Trump’s best friend all those years.

As I said, this is a fundamental divide in our society and it’s one that nobody really wants to admit. It’s clear that one of the main reasons Donald Trump squeaked over the line to win the White House twice is because the Democrats had the temerity to run a woman against him.

*** And yes, there are plenty of female misogynists as well along with tons of decent men who don’t think this way. But those numbers do tell a story and it’s foolish to pretend it isn’t happening.

He is

Stories like this are starting to filter out:

Slovakia’s prime minister told EU leaders at a summit last week that a meeting with Donald Trump left him shocked by the U.S. president’s state of mind, five European diplomats briefed on the conversation said.

Robert Fico, one of the few EU leaders to frequently support Trump’s stance on Europe’s weaknesses, was concerned about the U.S. president’s “psychological state,” two of the diplomats said. Fico used the word “dangerous” to describe how the U.S. president came across during their face-to-face meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Jan. 17, according to two of the diplomats.

The conversation between Fico and his European counterparts took place in Brussels on Jan. 22 on the sidelines of an emergency EU summit arranged to discuss transatlantic relations in the wake of Trump’s threats to seize Greenland. Leaders used that gathering to try to calm tensions after the U.S. president walked back his threat to slap tariffs on some European countries over the issue a day earlier.

The Slovak prime minister made his remarks in a separate informal huddle between some leaders and chief EU officials rather than during the formal roundtable talks, the diplomats said. While none of the diplomats who spoke to POLITICO were present, individual leaders briefed them separately on the content of the conversation shortly after it.

All the diplomats were granted anonymity by POLITICO to allow them to discuss the confidential exchanges between leaders. They come from four different EU governments. The fifth is a senior EU official. All of them said they didn’t know the details of what Trump had said to Fico that had triggered his reaction.

Fico’s comments are especially pertinent because he’s among Europe’s most pro-Trump politicians, touting his access to the U.S. president in a Facebook video after the Mar-a-Lago meeting and voicing support for Washington’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine war. A year ago, Fico spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference and told Americans “your president is doing Europe a great service.”

[…]

Fico seemed to be “traumatized” by his encounter with Trump, one of the European diplomats said. Fico characterized Trump as being “out of his mind,” a diplomat said, using the words briefed to them by their leader, who was directly involved in the conversation.

[…]

Fears about the U.S. president’s health are “rapidly becoming a more conversed topic at all levels,” said an EU official who is involved in political discussions in Brussels and between capitals.

Fico adamantly denied that it happened but we know it probably did because he behaves like a lunatic half the time in public. Imagine what it’s like in private.

Speaking of Trump’s health, this story in NY Magazine will make you laugh — and cry. Here’s the lede:

When I arrived at the Oval Office in December to talk to Donald Trump about his health, the president was standing next to a couple of men clutching pieces of paper labeled TALKING POINTS.

“These are two doctors,” Trump told me before I could ask a question. “And by the way, I don’t know them, they’re not my best friends. They’re respected doctors that practice out of Walter Reed. And they happen to be taking care of me for anything — but I don’t need any taking care of because I’m in perfect health. I do purposely every year or less a physical, because I think the American people should know that the president is healthy so you don’t get a guy like the last one, who was the worst thing that ever happened to older people. Because I know people in their 90s that are 100 percent. Gary Player is 90 years old. He shot 70 with me the other day.”

It wasn’t only the doctors with ABSURD talking points. Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and every single person he spoke with sounded like they were one of the brainwashed soldiers in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Out of Stanford’s basement and onto our streets

Something clicked. Former federal prosecutor and ex-FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann spoke with MS NOW’s Ari Melber on Monday on how far removed DHS agents in Minneapolis are from professional law enforcement.

“They had the professional demeanor of criminals,” as one Minneapolis senior described his too-close enounter.

Weissmanm referenced a weekend statement by Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara on “Face the Nation.” O’Hara reacted to the Saturday killing of Veterans Administration intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in a hail of Customs and Border Patrol bullets:

“People have had enough. This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone. This is the second American citizen that’s been killed, this is the third shooting within three weeks,” O’Hara said. 

“That’s training,” Weissman said of MPD, “that’s people who are not looking to terrorize a civilian population. But if you create ICE as a model of “Lord of the Flies” or the Stanford Prison Experiment, where you’re telling people they have unfettered power [and] absolute immunity … that is what results in a group of law enforcement officers who are really not doing what many, many law enforcement officers in this country are trained to do day in and day out.”

End this experiment

For those needing a refresher, this is from Stanford University’s archive on the infamous 1971 psychology department experiment:

Carried out August 15-21, 1971, in the basement of Jordan Hall, the Stanford Prison Experiment set out to examine the psychological effects of authority and powerlessness in a prison environment. The study, led by psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo, recruited Stanford students using a local newspaper ad. Twenty-four students were carefully screened and randomly assigned to groups of prisoners and guards. The experiment, which was scheduled to last 1-2 weeks, ultimately had to be terminated on only the 6th day as the experiment escalated out of hand when the prisoners were forced to endure cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. The experiment showed, in Dr. Zimbardo’s words, how “ordinary college students could do terrible things.”

Given total control over the “prisoners” (fellow students), “guards” in the mock prison quickly became abusive: “Over the course of the experiment, some of the guards became cruel and tyrannical, and a number of the prisoners became depressed and disoriented.”

Donald Trump and Shadow President Stephen “Trump’s Brain” Miller have operationalized the Stanford experiment and loosed undertrained, militarized immigration thugs with a penchant for violence and a need to dehumanize civilians. They are the guards. We are the prisoners. Comply or die.

The people of Minneapolis were not having it. Even in the face of arrest and even death, they resist.

From Instagram comes this warning: “If they’ll arrest veterans, they’ll arrest you too.”

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Haaris Ali (@realhaarisali)

“History is being made here in Minnesota,” MS Now host Chris Hayes declared Tuesday night.

You are living through history. Make the best of it.

How do these morons manage to dress themselves?

How dumb can you be and still get hired by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem?

This dumb (The New York Times):

Ecuador’s foreign ministry said it lodged a formal diplomatic protest with the United States after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent attempted to enter the country’s consulate in Minneapolis without permission on Tuesday morning.

Employees of the consulate stopped the agent from entering, the Ecuadorean foreign ministry said in a statement Tuesday night. Under the Vienna Conventions, to which the United States is a party, foreign consular buildings are off-limits to law enforcement from the host country without authorization from consular officials.

The incident comes amid an aggressive federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota that has prompted an outpouring of anger in the state and across the country.

Video footage verified by The New York Times shows a member of staff rushing to an entrance to the consulate, where an agent appears to have opened the door. The employee can be heard saying, “This is the Ecuadorean consulate, you’re not allowed to enter.” The agent responds by saying, “If you touch me, I’ll grab you.”

🇺🇸🇪🇨 ICE AGENTS TRIED TO ENTER ECUADORIAN CONSULATE, GOT TURNED AWAY AT THE DOOR

Staffer ran to block them: "This is the Ecuadorian consulate.

You're not allowed to enter."

One agent threatened to "grab" him before backing off.

Ecuador filed a formal protest.… https://t.co/VGB2Ixk4rz pic.twitter.com/kOv7RvuDOj

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) January 28, 2026

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, notes that “there is a huge ‘consulate of Ecuador’ sign over the door” (image at top).

This retired couple had a close encounter with CBP/ICE goons who stuck guns in their faces outside their church. The gentleman says, “They were acerbic. They were obviously not trained at all….. These people were right off the streets…. They had the professional demeanor of criminals.”

ICE pointed semi-automatic weapons at a retired American couple in a church parking lot. No warrant. No rights read. Just terror.

This is not law enforcement. This is unconstitutional intimidation.
Under the Fourth Amendment, ICE cannot detain or search without a judicial… pic.twitter.com/SzroJ3n0xD

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) January 27, 2026

Axios with the latest:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for issuing misleading and incendiary information that claimed immigration agents killed an armed Minnesota protestor Saturday because he wanted to “massacre” them.

That language has now become a source of controversy in the Trump administration. White House officials are now blaming Customs and Border Patrol for furnishing inaccurate information, while others are targeting Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and top Trump adviser, six sources with knowledge of the situation told Axios.

You don’t say.

Miller’s power extends to de facto oversight of Noem, though she’s a Cabinet secretary who technically outranks him. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem told a person who relayed her remarks to Axios.

Oh my.

Here’s the tick tock:

Immediately after Pretti was fatally shot in Minneapolis about 10:05 a.m. ET on Saturday, administration officials in Washington knew they had a potential disaster on their hands but had little information. The officers directly involved in the shooting “all shut up and got lawyers real quick so there wasn’t a lot of information,” one source briefed on the statement said.

The CBP officers on the ground furnished a report that, White House officials told Axios, left officials with the belief that Pretti had brandished a gun. Miller “heard ‘gun’ and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to ‘massacre’ cops,” a source briefed on the process of assembling the press statement said. “Any early comments made were based on information sent to the White House through CBP,” Miller told Axios in response to an earlier version of this story in which others blamed him for the “massacre” statement.

 DHS posted the statement at 12:31 p.m. on X. Some White House officials had signed off on the statement. But others had not, leaving them frustrated.[…]

Minutes after the DHS statement, Miller posted on X and called Pretti “an assassin,” which a source said was also based on a preliminary report from Customs and Border Patrol.Vice President Vance then reposted it on his page.

Noem subsequently used that language at a news conference, as did the Border Patrol commander then overseeing operations in the Twin Cities, Greg Bovino.

Some members of the White House team blamed Bovino and Miller is saying that the Minnesota operation didn’t follow some new guidelines which would have divided the DBP between certain officers targeting the “criminal aliens” (which means all immigrants and anyone who looks at them sideways) and others deployed for crowd control to keep the “agitators” from interfering. Yeah, whatever. Like that would have changed anything.

Noem met with Trump for two hours on Monday night and Trump said today that he backs her to the hilt.

Noem has complained to others that she feels she’s being hung out to dry over the episode and has made sure to emphasize she took direction from Miller and the president, a source told Axios.

She may deny she said it but it wouldn’t have been leaked to Axios if she didn’t want it out there. Let the battle begin. (I have no doubt that in the end, Trump will choose Miller.)

There is also no doubt in my mind that just as the operation is 100% a MIller special so was the communications strategy that had them rush to the cameras and condemn Pretti. Miller knows the value of controlling the narrative and he wanted that out there. The videos killed the plan.

Miller, like Trump, just refuses to believe that reality will ever bite. They just got bitten.

I wrote earlier today about the fact that many of the “tree of liberty” types are suddenly defending the government saying people who carry guns should expect to be shot by police but as Garrett Graff points out in this piece, it’s not the only instance of the freedom-loving right suddenly feeling the love for Big Government jack-booted thugs:

The criticism was in line with another major recent rhetorical twist as the Trump administration’s heavy-handed crackdown on immigration has spread nationwide: The MAGA right, which just six years ago criticized Covid vaccine mandates as the first step toward concentration camps, have quickly fallen in line behind ICE and CBP raids — agreeing that Americans should just carry their citizenship documents everywhere and obey law enforcement demands instantly.

In the wake of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer, President Trump — who began his presidency by pardoning the 1,600 protestors convicted of federal crimes for their role in January 6th, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, and whose movement has made a martyr of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by Capitol Police after ignoring orders from officers to stop forcing her way toward the US House chamber — brushed off the shooting, saying, “That woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”

Anyone who didn’t obey law enforcement, like Good, deserved the ICE death penalty, the argument appeared to be.

In a similar vein in recent days, Kristi Noem — who as South Dakota governor rose to national prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 over her refusal to issue a statewide mandate to wear face masks — now in her role as DHS secretary proclaimed that Americans should just get used to carrying citizenship documents and showing them as necessary.

At first the series of rhetorical flip-flops may seem nonsensical — as if the world is upside down — but all of them are consistent with decades of evolution of white nationalist ideology and the far-right movement, which isn’t against tyranny per se, just tyranny by the “wrong people”: Democrats, women, or minorities.

In fact, what many have long short-handed as “anti-government extremists,” from Ruby Ridge and Waco to the Bundy showdowns of the Obama years to the crowd that stormed the Michigan State Capitol amid the Covid lockdown, are not actually “anti-government” or even “anti-tyranny.” They are instead simply “extremists,” driven by secondary motives — often threads of white Christian nationalism or white supremacy that date their vision back to texts like the 1978 bible-of-the-fringe Turner Diaries.

And now, looking across the American landscape, those far-right white nationalists feel comfortable flipping their rhetoric because they recognize the Trump administration is doing their business for them. The government is their kind of extremist now.

He notes a very interesting phenomenon:

Terrorism scholars noted with surprise how extralegal right-wing violence plunged in 2025; according to a September study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, through July 4, “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.”

Similarly, long-standing right-wing militia groups have gone quiet or dormant. An August article by The Atlantic asked, “Where have the Proud Boys Gone?” and concluded that there was little need anymore for the militia whose leadership was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” for their role in the January 6^th insurrection at the Capitol. “The group’s ideals are being pursued—but by ICE and the government itself,” the Atlantic wrote.

Who needs militias and domestic terrorism when the government is doing their work for them?

You could see this in the Reagan worship and the reaction after 9/11. Trump just pushed the envelope to the level of the Proud Boys because he comes out of that toxic petrie dish himself. Today it defines the Republican Party.

G. Elliott Morris with the latest issue polling average:

Focusing on Trump’s issue-by-issue approval, the president has also lost significant ground on immigration. When he took office in Jan. 2025, immigration was the president’s strongest issue. He was actually in positive territory — around +8 net approval — on handling immigration. Voters signaled in the 2024 election that they wanted tougher border enforcement — and at first, they trusted him to deliver it. Trump promised deportations for criminals and no new border crossings, and that’s what voters expected to get.

But now, a year later, that advantage has completely evaporated. My aggregate now shows Trump at -10 on immigration — a collapse of roughly 18 points from his peak. And on deportations specifically (which other aggregators, puzzlingly, do not break out as a separate issue), Trump is at -12.

He makes an interesting observation here that I think is true and I wish more people in politics would absorb:

The way I have been thinking about this is that by pushing extreme enforcement measures that are now resulting in the deaths of innocent American citizens, Trump has changed the images people attach to the word “immigration” in their heads. When “immigration” doesn’t mean “pictures of migrants under an overpass in south Texas” but “ICE officer killing a woman in her car and calling her a ‘fucking bitch’” or “regular guy being shot 10 times in the back after being tackled to the ground and disarmed”, that’s going to change how people view the issue.

As I wrote last April, opinions change when voters get new information about an issue. The information that has been saturating U.S. political news in the last month is violence against citizens that is a direct result of the president’s policies.

We can see this in the data. YouGov found on Jan. 24 that 48% of Americans believed the shooting of Alex Pretti was not justified, compared to just 20% who said it was. Among respondents who reported they had seen video of Pretti being killed, the margin widened to 63% unjustified vs 25% justified. Even among Republicans, only 44% call the shooting justified.

The Republicans live in a bubble and don’t want to hear that their Dear Leader is screwing up. But sometimes that news cannot be contained. And when it escapes the news silos it changes people’s minds. That’s why it’s important for the Democrats to do everything in their power (and I realize it’s not easy) to get that out.

I still maintain that this story has stuck because they made the decision to go to a very white, mid-western, northern city where the population is about as “Real America” as it gets and they treated them like they treat the inner cities in big blue states. They didn’t realize that there are millions of white Americans who find their policies to be abominable and are willing to take a stand on behalf of the minorities in their communities against this fascist onslaught.

When people see old people being brutalized and beaten on the streets, a young blond woman getting shot in the head by a panicked, out of control ice agent who says “fuckin’ bitch” after he shoots her and then two weeks later they gun down a 37 year old white, male, gun owner, it starts to sink in that this is an actual war against anyone who exercises their rights.

Something has changed and it’s important to adapt to that. I really hope the Democrats aren’t so stuck on the “don’t make trouble just talk about egg prices” strategy that they miss this opening to mortally wound the MAGA movement. We’ve been warning about this for years now and it’s finally here. Will they seize the moment?

CNN is reporting that Alex Pretti had an encounter with ICE a week before he was murdered when he was assaulted by a group of agents for filming and blowing his whistle and they broke one of his ribs. It’s unclear if they knew who he was when they killed him but it’s possible. They keep saying they’re building a database of protesters and observers or maybe one of the agents recognized him.

I wouldn’t be surprised. But the man Trump has sent in to calm the waters is in favor of making the protesters and observers “famous” by putting them on TV so that they can be harassed, fired and run out of town — or worse:

Some Trump officials have spoken publicly about the idea of creating a database of protesters, though it’s not clear what ICE has done with the information collected through the form circulated to agents in Minneapolis.

“One thing I’m pushing for right now … we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News earlier this month. “We’re going to put their face on TV. We’re going to let their employers, in their neighborhoods, in their schools, know who these people are.”

Meanwhile,the very delicate swarms of armed ICE agents dressed like they’re fighting in the streets of Fallujah, must keep their identities a secret because otherwise they might be yelled at in restaurants.

The government is apparently under the illusion that the protesters are the unpopular ones in their communities. That’s simply not true. But there is always a lone MAGA nut out there who could do some serious damage, not to mention the uniformed thugs who have been given a license to kill. I guess we just have to hope the gun nuts are sufficiently aroused to keep them out of the fray.

Mark Carney this morning: "To be absolutely clear, and I said this to the president, I meant what I said in Davos…It was a broader set of issues, and Canada was the first country to understand the change in U.S. trade policy that he initiated, and we're responding to that." https://t.co/GCmXlVJ9Wv

— Brian Platt (@btaplatt) January 27, 2026

This guy is rapidly becoming one of the worst members of the administration. He’s taking a public lead on trade and foreign policy and in the process has become a Trump clone, lying and trolling instead of being the serious steward of the economy.

Politico surveyed “political analysts, diplomats and scholars who specialize in a host of countries, from Canada and Ukraine to India, Turkey and more for their solutions.” Here’s just one.

If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend you read the whole thing. They come from many different perspectives and offer some warnings about how difficult this new organizing principle around the “middle powers” might be.

This is just one.

While it may not go down in history on a par with Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, Mark Carney’s address at Davos did something similar. It marked an end to illusions and signaled the beginning of a new era of global politics. The world order we once knew is now dead, and the Trump administration is both its assassin and its undertaker. Even longstanding allies are coming to terms with the reality that the United States has become a predatory hegemon: It no longer invests in the world order but is intent on upending it, exploiting coercive power to its own benefit and others’ detriment.

For individual middle powers — a catch-all category that could include most members of the G20 other than the United States and China — America’s imperialistic turn creates a dilemma, but also an opportunity. Individual middle powers cannot hope to confront the United States on their own, but they also have no desire to replace American with Chinese hegemony. Their only realistic strategic option, as Carney suggests, is to band together in defending international law, safeguarding national sovereignty and spearheading international cooperation. They must do so not only in major international bodies like the United Nations but in flexible, ad hoc coalitions, groupings of “variable geometry” designed for specific purposes, such as trade liberalization, climate action and energy security.

Forging middle power multilateralism will not be easy — middle powers are a diverse lot, often at odds on matters like climate financing, the reform of international financial institutions, alliance structures or even democratic commitments.

Middle powers are not starting from scratch, however. Following Donald Trump’s first election in November 2016, countries in both the North and South began hedging their bets. Much like investors in the market, they began to diversify their diplomatic portfolios, making side wagers and engaging in self-insurance to reduce their exposure to volatility and risk. As Trump begins the second year of his second term, those efforts are moving into overdrive.

They will take time to reach fruition, however. Trump has generated a geopolitical earthquake, but the most powerful tremors may be yet to come. As longstanding institutions are shaken to their foundations, middle powers will have to agree on how much of the old order they wish to preserve, and where it is better to clear the rubble and start anew.

Back in 2019, during Trump’s first term, the French and German governments announced the creation of an “Alliance for Multilateralism,” open to all other nations. It was conceived as a reaffirmation of the UN Charter, as well as a flexible platform for issue-specific policy coordination. It never went anywhere because it was conceived as a “Northern” project and because potential members worried about antagonizing the United States. One could imagine something similar today, but more encompassing. Call it a Partnership for Multilateralism, comprising middle powers of the Global North and South who remain dedicated to international law and amenable to practical cooperation on shared global interests.

Carney just made public a conversation that’s been happening for a while. The U.S. has become totally unreliable for the past decade (even the Biden interregnum featured the looming shadow of Trump) so they had to.

I think this is happening and we don’t know how long it will take to reorganize or what sand might be thrown into the gears from any number of directions, but change is coming for better or worse. There’s no going back.

The liars in the White House are making it worse for America every single day but more voters decided they wanted the freak show and here we are.

ICE agents shot and killed a U.S. citizen who was observing their activities in Minneapolis this week. He was legally filming them with his phone, an act which we know from many videos taken there and in cities around the country, inflames the groups of masked, armed federal agents who are roaming the streets randomly rousting anyone who looks at them sideways. Americans are legally entitled to record what is happening in the community at the hands of law enforcement and many of them bravely go out and do it so there will be a record of the savagery that’s been unleashed on our country. They are also legally entitled to carry a concealed weapon in many states, which the Trump administration now says in itself signals an intent to kill government agents, entitling those agents to shoot first and ask questions later.

The nation is still reeling from the events of last weekend but we should have been prepared for it to happen. After all, we had evidence long before the 2024 election that President Donald Trump wants law enforcement to brutalize citizens. All the way back in 1989 when he took out a full page ad entitled “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back the Police” he was agitating for the police to be “unshackled” from the “constant chant of police brutality.” More recently, in his first term the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper testified that he had angrily demanded that the military be deployed on the streets during the George Floyd protests and orders be given to shoot the protesters. Wall St. Journal reporter Michael Bender wrote in his book titled “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” that Trump’s language became increasingly violent as he would show videos of violent confrontations and demand more of it. “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” Trump would say, “Crack their skulls!” After federal agents ambushed an Antifa activist in 2020 (without ever seeing a gun) Trump called it “retribution.”

In the first term, he had people around him who would talk him down and explain that it wasn’t legal or politically wise. Today, he has his top domestic adviser Stephen Miller, his Justice department, Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon all on the same page with him. In the wake of both the murders, the top officials in the administration all jumped before cameras and took to social media to condemn the victims and defend the agents before the bodies were even cold. ( In fact, U.S. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino claimed the true victims of the shooting were the federal agents.)

They essentially say the real victims had it coming and use it as a warning for others to stop exercising their first amendment rights. Interestingly, they also came out of the gate condemning Alex Pretti for exercising his 2nd amendment rights which is generally understood to be sacred on the American right.

Pretti was legally carrying a firearm in a holster in his back waistband. The numerous videos of the event show unequivocally that he never showed it to the CBP officers who approached him on the street as he was filming, nor did he ever even touch it during the encounter. In fact, they didn’t know he had it until they had already sprayed him the face with pepper spray and had him on the ground on his hands and knees as which point one of the agents removed it from the holster and another one then immediately shot him in the back.

After all these years of right wing, gun proliferation activists bringing firearms to protests one would have thought this would be the last thing for which Trump officials would condemn Pretti. They brought guns into state houses to protest COVID restrictions and there were more than a few guns found among the January 6th protesters who President Trump pardoned. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old who was too young to legally own the AR-15 he used to shoot three people at a protest in Kenosha Wisconsin in 2020 is a MAGA celebrity, extolled as a great young man who loved his country.

But DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said of Alex Pretti, “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” claiming with no evidence that his intention was clearly to kill law enforcement. FBI director Kash Patel told Fox News, “no one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “I’m sorry he’s dead but he did bring a semi-automatic weapon to what was supposed to be a peaceful protest.” Trump himself told the Wall St. Journal “I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it. But I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn’t play good either.” (For the record, gun enthusiasts say that there is nothing unusual about having the two extra magazines. Holsters like Pretti’s commonly have a slot in which to put them.)

There were others repeating the same talking points, insisting that bringing a gun, legally or not, to a protest (or, apparently, just to the streets to film an ICE raid) meant he should have expected to get shot by federal officers. This flies so hard in the face of the gun rights movement that it should have bounced back and hit them again.

After the years and years of aggressive proselytism around the fundamental right to bear arms explicitly in order to defend against tyrannical government encroachment on our freedom — even carrying signs quoting Thomas Jefferson that say “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” — here we are with a GOP government saying that a man who was legally carrying a weapon deserved to be shot and killed by government agents simply because he was armed.

In fairness there is some push back from some Trump followers. Despite a mealy mouthed response from the NRA and some fatuous throat clearing about “both sides” there aren’t really all that many staunch gun rights advocates showing much opposition to the administration’s embrace of government tyranny. There’s little reason to believe that most of the MAGA faithful are all that upset that the Trump administration is saying that liberal protesters don’t have the same right to bear arms that they do. That’s just common sense in their minds.

The right wing second amendment fetish has always been about who gets to carry guns more than anything else. As historian Rick Perlstein memorably chronicled, Ronald Reagan was happy to sign a gun control law as California Governor after the Black Panthers showed up at the state House for a protest armed to the teeth. A government in the hands of one of their own will always be given the prerogative to use the power of their armed police and military against their common enemies. It is, as Perlstein points out, a simple truth known as Wilhoit’s Law, which says, “conservatism consists of the lone proposition that there must be in-groups the law protects but does not bind and out-groups the law binds but does not protect.”

Update: Houston, he’s got a problem…

Trump: "With that being said, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that. But it's just a very unfortunate incident."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-27T17:42:45.566Z