Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland:
And the Vice-President of the United States:
… the more they stay the same.
On the other hand, a YouGov poll taken before the killing of Renee Good showed that 52% disapproved of the way ICE is conducting itself. It will be interesting to see if that has changed. I know what I hope has happened but frankly, no matter what, I’m still horrified that so many Americans support this violence. Obviously, I should have known.
Jeffrey Goldberg has a good piece about January 6th in the Atlantic and makes this important point that I think we should all make sure we make whenever we talk about this regime:
[I]n brief: Trump has dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he has encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life.
Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats the party of “evil.”
Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.
The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.
We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.
I’m pretty sure the pussy grabbing should have closed the case but your mileage may vary.
I harken back to the Brian Beutler piece I posted about yesterday. I know that we have always had indecent leaders. It’s no excuse, but in the past they did at least go to some trouble to preserve at least the facade of our stated ideals, mostly because they assumed that Americans were fundamentally decent and would reject them if they just let their violent freak flags fly.
It does occur to me that it’s possible the ICE thugs wearing masks may be the last vestige of that idea. They say they are afraid of being doxed by the vicious leftist antifa monsters. But are they really? They’re spending their days brutalizing gardeners and nannies and intimidating women with whistles and cameras. (When they’re not gunning them down.) They aren’t afraid of the left. They’re afraid of being exposed to the decent people of America doing their grotesque work.
On the other hand, maybe they just like idiotic cos-playing like special forces Ninjas and know that tens of millions of Americans aren’t actually fundamentally decent and have their backs if they open fire. Among them are the president, vice-president and the official Republican establishment.
Maybe the pussy grabbing spoke to a deeper problem?
Look at how that “agent” is dressed. It would be hilarious if they didn’t have a license to kill.
BTW: Shannon Watts is right.
In his 1971 book, “Kent State: What Happened and Why,” James Michener concluded the ultimate explanation for why the Ohio National Guard shot and killed multiple students is that the working class males in the Guard couldn’t handle disrespect, esp. from *coeds*.
This happened:
My second husband started doing stuff like this near the end pic.twitter.com/dOXLw48BUU
— TheRealThelmaJohnson (@TheRealThelmaJ1) January 10, 2026
“Hold on, I need to look at my beautiful ballroom. Wow. What a view! This is the door to the ballroom!”
(He lost Minnesota all three times.)
Too bad there isn’t a powerful trans-Atlantic alliance that could repel and such incursion. Oh well. I guess we’re on our own.
Oh my God…
We’re in such deep trouble.
It has been a tough week. As Donald Trump set about looting Venezuela, Trumpists are working double-hard on their ethnic cleansing operations at home. Not only to increase their capture numbers but, apparently, to grind down public opposition through fear and mental exhaustion.
The press is still tiptoeing around reporting what is happening before our eyes. In the wake of the snap execution of Renee Nicole Good this week in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, Jim Stewartson over at MindWar is blunt:
A word often used to describe Trump is authoritarian. But this is insufficient. Authority is the recognized right to control outcomes within a set of constraints accepted as binding—familial, religious, cultural, moral or legal.
The U.S. federal government is deliberately destroying the idea of any authority being legitimate except the ability to project coercive violence. We are living in the “might makes right” world of neo-Nazi ideology, a kratocracy.
William Montague defined kratocracy as: a government by those strong enough to seize control through violence or deceit.
What we are seeing is a rejection of law itself, supplanted by the “capability and willingness to commit violence.”
At least twice in the last 48 hours, the Vice President has said that ICE is going “door to door” to hunt for “illegal aliens.”
That is, this administration considers null and void a fundamental right for which American colonists fought a revolution.
Trump and his second, J.D. Vance, Stewartson argues, are “trying to replace constitutional authority with power, legal authority with violence, and truth with state propaganda.”
A friend observes that the propaganda issued on the DHS X feed and home page increasingly resembles statements from the former Nazi site, Stormfront. What must they be saying in private?
“Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?”
DHS is looking to pay racist bullies to get drunk on power. It has a $1 million campaign to recruit thousands more agents from “gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts” (read: militias) as part of a “wartime recruitment” strategy.
That war is against you. DHA recruits need not have a college degree. They are undertrained, undisciplined, armed, and the sorriest excuse for professional law enforcement since Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke. Trump 2.0 is not recruiting law enforcement. They are building Trump’s personal army of armed thugs.
This system has another name, Stewartson argues: totalitarianism.
The goal of an “authoritarian” like Trump is not to gain authority through coercion and violence, but to replace authority with pure power—enforced by constant threat of violence. This is more totalitarian than authoritarian, something even more extreme than dictators like Putin and Orban, who try in superficial ways to pretend they have the legal right to abuse power.
The sheer speed of Trump’s rapid descent into a totalitarian, personalist dictatorship is inseparable from several factors, in my opinion:
- Progressive dementia, exacerbated by age, stress, vascular problems
- Narcissistic collapse over Epstein and his fading popularity
- People around him weaponizing his decline—especially Miller and Vance, ideologues jockeying for power in a post-Trump regime
- Paranoia about the midterms and what it means for the regime’s ability to continue its crackdown
Today, Venezuela and Minnesota. Tomorrow Greenland:
Trump said on Friday morning: “It may be a choice” between the United States staying in NATO, and Denmark handing over their sovereign territory—meaning that Trump will use military force, and destroy our most powerful alliance, if his demands aren’t met. Violence, not authority.
Reporters caught former Minnesota governor, Jesse Ventura, outside his former high school after immigration raiders deployed chemical irritants against students hours after Good’s killing.
Ventura condemned Republicans for ignoring the Constitution.
“We’re a third-world country now,” Ventura argued. “Because in third-world countries they have the military doing their police work in the cities … That’s what happens in a dictatorship,” Ventura continued. What happened in 1930s Germany is happening here, he warned.
I first came across the phrase “might makes right” as a child in a comic book story about fighting Nazis:
The jingoistic lesson, of course, illustrated with images of air combat, was that the Allies eventually defeated fascism because, as Abraham Lincoln proclaimed at the end of his Cooper Union address, right makes might.
LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.
DHS and the Trump dictatorship mean to send a message to all who would resist. If it was not explicit in Chicago, it is in Minneapolis: Obey or die.
Renee Nicole Good smiled at federal immigration raider Jonathan Ross this week, saying, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Moments later he shot her multiple times in the face and killed her.
Trump has not dispatched immigration agents. He’s loosed undisciplined, armed enforcers. Like Ross, they are trigger-happy. More people will die.
“Forget Venezuela. Trump declares war on Minnesota,” declares Paul Rosenberg in response to this in the aftermath of Good’s killing:
“All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience,” wrote Michelle Goldberg this week.
Behold:
Update: I couldn’t resist.
If you’ve ever seen tourists invade a town when their ship has docked for an afternoon of shopping, it pretty much looks like that:
About 50 wayward sheep broke off from their flock and stormed a discount supermarket in a German town, startling and delighting customers as the animals rushed to explore the aisles before being escorted from the premises.
The woolly incursion occurred on Monday during a routine seasonal migration of the sheep in the Bavarian municipality of Burgsinn. A few dozen of the sheep had other ideas about the route and made their way into a store of the Penny retail chain.
“It was impossible to tell whether the sheep were looking for something particular on offer or just wanted to warm up,” the company said in a statement, noting that the flock seemed particularly fond of the checkout area where shoppers and staff were present.
Witnesses said that while the animals resisted the urge to nibble their way through the fresh produce on display, their foray into the store left a path of destruction in the drinks section as their bustling knocked glass bottles and other products from the shelves.
After about 20 minutes, the sheep were coaxed out the door and rejoined their flock.
The German embassy in London couldn’t resist a pun-filled post about the fluffy new mascots. “50 runaway sheep ram-paged through a German supermarket in rural Baa-varia, causing shear mania on Monday morning,” it posted on X. “After breaking away from their 500-strong herd, the brazen sheep spent 20mins milling around in the Penny supermarket before ewe-turning and seeing themselves out.”
Stiehler dismissed speculation that Penny planned to bill their shepherd for the damage or cleaning costs, with the company instead seizing on the nationwide media attention and viral posts to say it wanted to sponsor feed for the 50 runaways for a year.
Those of you who have been reading me for a while know that I’ve long said the Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy. Brian Beutler articulates something on the subject that’s been rattling around in my mind for the last couple of months and I’m glad to see it:
For my entire adult life, I’ve watched American leaders justify war and atrocity with lies about democracy and freedom and self-defense. Many of the architects of U.S. interventionism have been breezy cynics, cavalier about violence, happy to visit it on far off strangers to advance corrupt or bloodless ends. That overgeneralizes, but not by much. A war profiteer is more evil than a practitioner of realpolitik in some abstract sense—a distinction that may be of interest to God—but when their interests align, the result is mass destruction that they own jointly. There’s a reason their critics call them The Blob.
They’ve chosen war for reasons morally upright people would never countenance, then justified it in terms meant to assuage them: Domino theory, democracy promotion, nuclear nonproliferation, choose your window dressing.
When Donald Trump wields the same power in superficially similar ways, it’s thus tempting to take comfort in familiarity, or long-burning cynicism. We’ve been looting the third world, including in Latin America, for decades. Meet the new boss, etc. If you believed those old pretexts and false pretenses, you’re a chump.
Well, I didn’t believe the old pretexts and false pretenses. I found them despicable. Yet what’s so alarming to me about the recent dark turn in American politics is the fact that they’re gone.
He asks, as I have asked myself, are these things worth missing. and why am I so uncomfortable now that they are gone? Isn’t it better to know, upfront, what these people are up to?
Actually, it is not. Hypocrisy is better:
If you care about America’s highest aspirations—freedom, equality, self-governance rule of law—the pretexts matter. We can be clear eyed about the people who lay false claim to these ideals, yet still take some solace in their lies, because the lies confirm that the ideals still have power.
Why pretend that a war of plunder is meant to spread democracy or fight communism or defend the homeland, unless you know that the public values certain higher principles, and may revolt if you traduce them? If your true motives are toxic, you have to conceal them, because the people—we the people—are better than you.
This is the tribute vice pays to virtue in the rawest sense, and it is revealing. These are cynical people, many of whom have no place in their hearts for principle or consistency. But if that is their nature, why would they pay tribute to anything? Vice is vice.
They do it because virtue still controls. It’s still the default. Because they haven’t won the masses over to uncut evil.
As Brian points out, Trump (and Miller) think the people are as malevolent as they are.
I think this is what has people so unsettled. Why he has to be stopped preemptively and forced to reverse, or else be run out of office. If he prevails—not just in acting lawlessly, but in doing so nakedly, and without pushback—then it’s over. We become changed.
That’s why I miss the pretexts. It’s also why I take some solace in the fact that his Venezuela “policy” polls poorly. That his menacing of Greenland polls even worse. That the Senate just passed a war-powers resolution meant to foreclose further unauthorized military action. These things matter. They mean we aren’t changed. Yet.
Ultimately, the problem is that losing even the gesture toward decency, values and civilized ideals brings out the worst in everyone, particularly those who are both angry and violent. So far, most people aren’t succumbing to the lizard brain “might makes right” rationales coming from the right. Yes, there is still a sense of inertia and paralysis but maybe it’s starting to crack?
My greatest concern remains the fact that so many — tens of millions of us — led by the President and his henchmen, are going along with this program, aroused by it even. It’s as if I always knew that there were aliens from another planet living among us but I never knew there were so many.
I think this may be it folks. It’s official.
Here’s more from President Demento:
“the states are merely an agent for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the federal government, as represented by the president of the United States, tells them, for the good of the country, to do.”
That’s Stephen Miller talking, don’t kid yourself.
I’m not sure how this works but Miller and Trump are drunk with power and they’re ready to occupy America with secret police. And they aren’t just after immigrants anymore. They’re coming for the political opposition. We know this because they are justifying killing peaceful protesters in the street.
If it was not apparent by now, President Trump made it clear in his interview with The New York Times on Wednesday that it did not bother him if his family’s global moneymaking spree this past year raised concerns about whether his financial interests were influencing his administration’s official actions.
He said his family had restrained its international business activity during his first term, specifically to allay such worries, and got nothing but criticism.
“I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it,” he said. “I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.”
He added, “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”
Donald Trump Jr. has previously expressed similar sentiments, but the president addressed concerns about his family’s financial interests more fully than he has in the past. The White House has repeatedly said that Mr. Trump and his family never engage in conflicts of interests and that he puts the interest of Americans first.
Mr. Trump, in the interview, said that George Washington conducted business while president, and that while he did not do that, he saw no reason to limit his family’s endeavors. “I have a very honest family,” he said. He added that he had never accepted his presidential salary.
Keep in mind that they destroyed Hunter Biden’s life for being on the board of a Ukrainian business when his father was Vice President back in 2014. There was never any evidence that he did anything but get the job because his name was Biden.
The Trumps on the other hand have literally become billionaires from crypto businesses owned by criminals who Trump has pardoned. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Sadly, this is the least of our problems at the moment.
I wrote this 20 years ago last September in the days after Katrina:
I had the misfortune to be around some bigots this week-end as I watched the footage from New Orleans. I hadn’t heard some of this stuff so frankly admitted since I was a kid (when I heard it a lot.) The twisted, subterranean, politically incorrect world of racism has reared its ugly head.
This is just the latest chapter in the oldest story in America. We should be aware of it and understand it. And we should also be glad that it isn’t worse because in the past it certainly was.
Ever since 1791, there have been white Americans who get very nervous when they see a large number of angry black people in one place. That was the year that Haiti’s slaves rebelled and killed almost every Frenchman on the island. The fear of slave revolt — black revolt — entered the consciousness of the American lizard brain and has never left. From Gabriel Prosser to Nat Turner to Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael and the long hot summers of 66 and 67, notions of barbaric vengeance being wreaked upon unsuspecting white people has lurked in our racist subconscious. During slavery it was the immoral institution itself combined with horrible inhumane treatment. After the civil war it was the knowledge of seething anger at Jim Crow. During the 60’s the anger became explicit and words like “by any means necessary” reached deep into the American psyche and fueled the backlash against the civil rights movement — and set the conditions for the Republican dominance of politics today.
Race is America’s deepest psychic wound that festers in different ways over and over again. It has lost much of its original blazing pain, but it is still there, buried and waiting to come to the surface.
The memories of Nat Turner are still fresh to many for whom the Lost Cause is their defining cultural benchmark:
Starting with a trusted few fellow slaves, the insurgency ultimately numbered more than 40 slaves and free blacks, mostly on horseback. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the whites they could find; men, women and children alike. In all 55 whites were killed in the revolt.
In total, 55 blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising were killed. In the aftermath, hundreds of blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured and murdered by hysterical white mobs.
In the summer of 67, the cities of this country went up in flames. The rhetoric was the same as what we heard coming from the right this past week. Peggy Noonan suggested that looters be summarily shot. And, in that summer of fire, they were. In large numbers. Only, it turned out, they weren’t necessarily looters or rioters — they were just black. Ordinary people, housewives, kids were gunned down by renegade cops and national guard who were given orders to shoot to kill. Every african american killed by police that summer became a symbol of collective punishment. If you were black, you could be asked to pay with your life for the sins of other blacks. That’s just the way it worked.
In Rick Perlstein’s (as yet unpublished) new book, [Nixonland] which I’ve had the privilege to read a bit of, this is the real crucible of the 1960’s. Here is just a little bit of what happened in Newark that long hot summer after the cops took off the gloves and started doing what Peggy Noonan and Jonah Goldberg have been agitating for this past week in New Orleans:
“The press was interested in making the carnage make sense. A turkey shoot of grandparents and 10-year-olds did not make sense. The New York Daily News ran an “investigation” of the death of the Newark fire captain [killed by police] and called it “The Murder of Mike Moran.” The Washington Post left his cause of death as more or less a blank. The alternative–that when law enforcement spent days spraying … rounds of ammunition, more or less at random, even white people can get killed–seemed too horrifying for mainstream ideology to contemplate. Twelve-year-old Joey Bass, in dirty jeans and scuffed sneakers, his own blood trickling down the street, lay splayed across the cover of the July 28 Life.
The feature inside constituted a sort of visual and verbal legal brief for why such accidents might have been excusable. The opening spread showed a man with a turban wrapped around his head loading a Mauser by a window with the caption, “The targets were Negro snipers, like the one above.”
In actual fact the photo had been staged by a blustering black nationalist by the name of Colonel Hassan, what the copy claimed was an upper-floor vantage onto the streets actually a first-floor room overlooking a trash-strewn back yard. “The whole time we were in Newark we never saw what you would call a violent black man,” Life photographer Bud Lee later recalled. “The only people I saw who were violent were the police.”
Bud Lee’s famous photograph of Joey Bass:
Today the NY Times reports this about snipers:
In a city racked by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout on Sunday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants and a fourth in a later gunfight. A fifth suspect was wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.
Perlstein reports on this incident from Newark:
And around 4 pm a group of citizens were milling around outside front of the Scudder Homes housing project off Springfield when three police cars turned the corner. The crowd assumed the police must be firing blanks at them,until a .38 caliber bullet ripped through Virgil Harrison’s right forearm.
Men took off their undershirts to wave them as white flags. The cops just kept on shooting. They said they were looking for a sniper on the upper floors of the building. But they sprayed their shots at ground level. That was how Rufus Council, 35, Oscar Hill, 50, and Virgil’s father Isaac “UncleDaddy” Harrison, 72, and perhaps Robert Lee Martin, 22, and Cornelius Murray, 28, lost their lives. Oscar Hill was wearing his American Legion jacket. Robert Lee Martin’s family reported that money was taken from his body. Murray’s body was missing $126 and a ring.
There indeed were three snipers in Scudder Homes. But they began their shooting in response to these fusillades. They killed a police detective, Fred Toto, 33, a father of three, about on hour later, though in later testimony police claimed the order of the shootings was reversed.
I’m not saying that’s what happened in New Orleans in the incident I reference above — or any others. I don’t know the facts. I am saying that’s the kind of thing that tends to happen when rumor and paranoia get out of hand.
Here’s the Council of Conservative Citizen’s web site:
Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!
Yet this doctor who was ministering to the sick in the Superdomereports nothing like this:
Perhaps it’s the stench that Dr. Kevin Stephens will remember the most.
It was a stench that was a gumbo of human waste, sweat, and despair.
For four days, Stephens, the Health Department director in New Orleans, administered to the sick in the Superdome, his primary patients being those in wheelchairs and nonambulatory. He watched conditions deteriorate from one of calmness on the eve of Hurricane Katrina crippling the city, to one of frustration by the time he was evacuated to the adjacent New Orleans Arena on Wednesday. He was taken to Baton Rouge on Thursday.[…]
“I never felt threatened and I walked around the entire place,” Stephens said. “I was talking to people, administering first aid. But people were ready to get out of there. The conditions were horrid and horrible. The stench was unbearable. If we had electricity, it would have been so much better.”
Here’s a report from last Friday:
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome.
In Detroit during the riots there in 1967, Perlstein reports:
“I’m gonna shoot at anything that moves and that is black” an arriving National Guardsman declared.
(He also reports that the federal government and state blame game almost perfectly mirrors the current crisis. When things are hurtling out of control, politicians will dither until they figure out what the play is, I guess. Too bad about the dead bodies.)
The evacuees are a diaspora all over the country. They are “infiltrating” a bunch of cities and towns in large numbers. Many whites fear blacks in large numbers, especially those from the big city, those who are desperate. Most especially, they fear those who are angry. (Why if they get it in their heads to be mad about how they were left behind to die like animals, who knows what will happen? Lock the doors!)
I don’t honestly think there is any racist conspiracy at work. There doesn’t need to be. All it takes is a reactivation of long held racist beliefs and attitudes — attitudes that led the president to say that they had “secured” the convention center on Friday night — which we all saw in that amazing FoxNews footage actually meant that the desperate survivors had been locked inside the sweltering hellhole. It was the attitude that had tourists staying at the Hyatt hotel being given special dispensation to go to the head of the lines at the Superdome. It was the attitude that made my racist companions disgusted by the “animals” at the convention center because they were living in filth fail to grasp that these people had been expecting to be rescued at any moment for more than four days.
It’s that attitude that led these people to talk endlessly about rape with lurid imagery and breathless, barely contained excitement. This too is part of the American lizard brain.
I have no doubt that there was criminality on the streets of New Orleans. When the law disappears, that’s what happens. But when you look closely at our history you see that whenever large numbers of African Americans are featured, this is the kind of thing that is said and thought and done. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe it or that criminals shouldn’t be brought to justice. But our history suggests that when we hear reports of cops gunning down looters, snipers and rapists in the street, we should at least maintain a normal skepticism. Far too often in our history it has been shown later that things were not as they seemed at the time.
The richest man in the world is afraid of a slave revolt. He probably should be.