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.
“JD Vance has to come out and clean up for ICE Barbie….Noem is lawless. This administration is not following any laws in our country.” @repangiecraig.bsky.social slams Republican rhetoric on the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. She also details a push for the DHS secretary’s impeachment.
Kind of wild there has been almost no coverage of the fact that the federal government unleashed chemical weapons against literal kids *at school*.workdaymagazine.org/minneapolis-…
“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.
“Have y’all not learned?”
Behold:
An ICE agent in Minnesota showing their current mentality
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.
“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.”
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.”
“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.
Josh Marshall thinks Minneapolis may be a turning point. Acknowledging the danger of ever thinking such a thing he writes:
But it’s what we saw afterwards and especially today that took things to a new level – top Trump officials including the Vice President and Secretary of Homeland Security saying that what we see in these videos is in fact exactly what we want to see happen: a federal law enforcement officer, in danger of being killed, reacting with deadly force to someone “weaponizing” their vehicle. I don’t think that this kind of predatory up-is-downism is sustainable for a majority of the American people. We know that Donald Trump sees America’s blue cities as a kind of conquered territory. We’re now seeing what that actually means in practice, when the potential violence which has always been coiled up in federal law enforcement is vented on American citizens because of the predatory license granted by Trump’s example and his acolytes. The message is pretty simple. Your cities are a war zone, and any false move, any transient moment of non-compliance or any fidgety moment of misunderstanding can mean your death. Top Trump officials are saying emphatically that this is exactly how it should be and I don’t think that will stand.
[…]
The U.S. has a long tradition of intolerance of unleashing military and paramilitary forces on American civilians. You find it right there in the central role of the Boston Massacre in driving the final crisis of the American Revolution. You see it in the 3rd Amendment and numerous laws which are supposed to keep the U.S. military from being used in domestic law enforcement except under the most extreme circumstances, and now don’t seem to apply anymore.
ICE and CPB aren’t the military of course. But this is too literal a way of looking at the matter. They are being sent into American cities as forces of occupation and they are acting like that. They are very consciously decked out in the costumery of urban warfare and military occupation. We don’t have to stand for this. It’s outside of our traditions. It’s malevolent and predatory. It’s time to say enough. And this may be the turning point.
He says that ICE and CBP should be abolished and he’s right. (Even Bill Kristol says it!) I’d go farther and throw out the whole DHS edifice. It was a bad idea to begin with. The country can deal with immigration without this phony macho paramilitary force running around cos-playing like they’re in a video game.
Maybe this will be the moment the worm begins to turn. There are protests and some people are obviously upset. But I just don’t know if that’s going to be enough. Trump is juggling a lot of shiny objects right now — we have taken over a country and descended on a major American city all in one week and people are being killed in both places. Can we sustain our focus long enough to actually make a difference before he commits the next outrageous act and we all move on? I just don’t know.
Mostly what I’m finding among people in my real life is a general reluctance to engage with any of this. They just do not want to talk about it and resent me for bringing it up. I’m at a point where I’m just communicating here rather than even attempting to discuss current events socially. I mentioned the other night the famous Reverend Niemöller quote (“first they came for…”) and was told that I was being hysterical. I hope they’re right I really do.
The Cesspool of Sin found itself in the news last night when on perhaps three hours’ notice a couple of hundred gathered to protest the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good. “The Briefing with Jen Psaki” ran clips not just from here but from across the U.S. (Local coverage here.)
View on Threads
The right is itching for Donald Trump to swing his tiny Sharpie at anyone who, like Good, refuses to roll over onto their backs and submit like a frightened cocker spaniel.
On their target list is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, for example:
Republican lawmakers are urging President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
This comes after the embattled Democrat threatened to deploy the National Guard in response to the actions of ICE in his state.
Republican Mary Miller called for the president to arrest Tim Walz in a post to X.
Miller’s calls to invoke the act gives Donald Trump the power to arrest suspects obstructing federal law enforcement.
Walz’s threat came as a woman was shot dead by an ICE officer in Minnesota.
One imagines another Trump supporter named Miller is getting all moist in his nether regions over the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act. That is, when he and his boss are not fantasizing about bombing Iran.
The Ospreys left Fairford on Wednesday morning and have “gone dark” on flight trackers.Fairford is considered the main air bridge from the US into Europe, and flight data has shown several of the Globemasters moving on to Ramstein in Germany. www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/a…
The woman who flipped me off as she passed last night with her hand shaking with rage likely reflects the mood of authoritarian followers in the Trump cult about now.
Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Pam Bondi, et al. have a message for brown-skinned residents of this country: GET OUT!
“The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert picked up on the subtle metamessage that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Pam Bondi, et al. just sent the rest of us. In the wake of the deadly shooting of Renee Nicole Good, 37, in Minneapolis on Wednesday by an ICE agent, that message is, “OBEY OR DIE! And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey.”
Jimmy Kimmel’s Thursday evening monologue on the Minneapolis shooting, noted frantic efforts by the Trump administration to convince Americans that we did not see what we saw.
There once was a baseline of truth and decency in this country, Kimmel lamented. It doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
I was on the street with that same message about decency in mid-December.
Kimmel’s staff assembled multiple examples of authoritarian propaganda.
“If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion,” warned one talking head, you’ll end up just as dead as Renee Nicole Good.
Michelle Goldberg heard that “giddy sadism” 5 by 5. Homeland Security’s social media posts and recruitment videos telegraph “the creation of a far-reaching police state,” Goldberg writes:
In such a system, the relationship between every citizen and their government is transformed by the constant demand for submission. Since Good’s death, Republicans have been lining up to threaten those who don’t immediately comply with ICE’s orders. “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax.
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.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D) of Texas broke down in a committee hearing on Thursday over Good’s killing.
“A child has lost her mom!” Crockett sobbed before composing herself.
She later recalled that she first ran for Congress amidst protests in the wake of the George Floyd lynching (her word) by law enforcement in Minneapolis. She recalled the pro bono work she did with nonprofits then for protesters arrested in Dallas.
Unless there is some kind of justice for the “state-sanctioned execution that we all saw,” Crockett predicted, nonprofits that aid poor people unable to make bail will be kept busy again. Expect another wave of protests across the country.
Crockett at the time did not have the name of shooter. The Minneapolis Star Tribune identified him as Jonathan Ross. Perhaps Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin, will send Ross greetings from the Federal Correctional Institution in Big Spring, Texas.
Under the Trump misadministration, I have little confidence that Ross will join him.
