*delayed due to technical glitch.
Let it snow!
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
They’ll believe anything
But at least we can celebrate our Dear Leader’s birthday:
In 2026, Americans will get free admission to national parks on President Donald Trump‘s birthday but no longer on Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, according to the National Park Service website.
Previously, the National Park Service included these two federal holidays among its free-entry days for around 100 park sites.National parks ordered to check gift shops for DEI-type items
Federally recognized in 2021 under the Biden Administration, Juneteenth has been celebrated for more than a century and a half. The day commemorates the final end of slavery in Confederate states just after the end of the Civil War.
The NPS also added more free-admission days for next year – calling them “patriotic fee-free days” – such as Trump’s birthday on June 14, July 4th weekend and the 110th Birthday of NPS.
Maybe focus on the latter instead of doubling down on the former
I’ve said it since 2017 at least, Democrats’ idea of finding a new gear is doing the same thing they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it, just more of it. Democrats’ dogged “kitchen table” focus misses their most glaring problem: Democrats.
Polling from Data for Progress reached these conclusions about the popularity of progressive policies ahead of the 2018 elections:
Key Finding 1: Many progressive policies are incredibly popular
Key Finding 2: Progressive policies poll well across rural, suburban and urban voters
Key Finding 3: Some progressive policies are popular with Trump voters
Key Finding 4: Progressive policies are popular with 2016 nonvoters
Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college (from 2019)
Trump Wins While Americans Vote for Progressive Policies (from 2024)
Working-Class and College-Educated Voters Want New Progressive Economic Policies (from June 2025)
You get the idea. Democrats’ policy positions are popular. The problem is Democrats are not. In 2024 the country voted for Donald Trump, a con man, convicted felon, twice impeached, and instigator of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Dems’ own polling shows massive brand problem ahead of 2026 (from March)
Democrats should focus on the economy, but “the brand is a mess,” Congressman Tom Suozzi says (from August)
The Democratic Party Brand Is Broken — and Moving to the Middle Won’t Fix It (from November)
Democrats keep pursuing policy answers to their political problem. They assume people voted for Trump because they are uninformed (low-information), or worse, simply racists. Yes, they assume that good policy speaks for itself. (It doesn’t.) Yes, Democrats suck at marketing their popular policies. But what they really suck at is selling Democrats.
Yes, recent polling suggests Democrats to be heavily favored in next year’s elections: (NPR, Nov. 19, 2025):
Heading into the 2026 midterm elections, there are some very big warning signs for Republicans in the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.
The survey of 1,443 adults, conducted from Nov. 10-13, found:
- Democrats holding their largest advantage, 14 points, since 2017 on the question of who respondents would vote for if the midterm elections were held today;
- President Trump’s approval rating is just 39%, his lowest since right after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol;
- A combined 6-in-10 blame congressional Republicans or Trump for the government shutdown; and
- Nearly 6-in-10 say Trump’s top priority should be lowering prices — and no other issue comes close.
The party out of power generally does wll in midterms, as Democrats likely will next year. And maybe epically better. But what happens in 2028? More “kitchen table” issues? More failed attempts at voter education and vilification of Republicans (who are hard at work now on doing that work for Democrats).
Democrats shouldn’t abandon “kitchen table” issues. The economy is still a driver of voter behavior. But what Democrats need is for voters (and more of them) to feel that Democrats see them and have their backs. It would be better if there were policies passed (actions) that proved it. In the minority and with Trump in the White House that’s going to be tough to pull off.
Democrats need to be liked. Take a lesson from the 2024 election. Having popular policies does not win presidential elections (and the power to appoint Supreme Court justices) when people dislike and distrust you. Democrats need to stop pursuing policy answers to their political problem. They need an image makeover.
* * * * *
Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
No King’s One Million Rising movement
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
Your “tricks and traps” economy
Hang in with me for the next two paragraphs.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has long complained that corporations bilk consumers. Hidden bank and credit card fees, terms of service agreements pages long, class action waivers, binding mandatory arbitration, noncompete clauses, etc. Consumers daily step on economic land mines buried in legalese that only corporate lawyers might understand. Tricks and traps, Warren calls them. She proposed, lobbied for, and won establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011 to defend consumers. Business hated it. Through last December the CFPB had returned over $21 billion to consumers in “monetary compensation, principal reductions, canceled debts, and other consumer relief.”
Then in 2025 came Trump 2.0, Elon Musk, DOGE, and Trump’s acting director Russell Vought to neuter the CFPB. Their actions, Helaine Olen wrote, constitute “an overt power grab by Big Tech — and their gain could result in the rest of us losing much more than almost anyone realizes.”
All that is prelude to this report in The Guardian:
On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop.
Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf prices. He carried the scanned bar codes to the cashier and watched as item after item rang up at a higher price.
Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.
All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.
The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
It’s not just Family Dollar stores. The Guardian reviewed records from Family Dollar and Dollar General stores in “45 states and more than 140 counties.”
The dollar-store industry, including Family Dollar and its larger rival, Dollar General, promises everyday low prices for household essentials. But an investigation by the Guardian found that the prices listed on the shelves at these two chains often don’t materialize at checkout – in North Carolina and around the country. As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it – customers who often don’t even notice they’re overpaying.
These overcharges are widespread.
Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.
In Arizona, in New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Ohio, state attorneys general have reached consumer fraud settlements with the two companies. Both declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about their practices. Dollar General has a history of chronic understaffing resulting in clutter and unsafe working conditions. It’s little wonder why their price tags are months out of fate.
The New York Times (March 28, 2023): Dollar General Is Deemed a ‘Severe Violator’ by the Labor Dept.
NPR (July 16, 2024): Dollar General will pay $12 million in fines over workplace safety violations
The stores are regulated by state-level agencies, as the reporting above notes. But there is a wider consumer impact.
Dean Baker comments at The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in a post titled “Dollar Stores: Where Trumpian Sleaze Meets Affordability“:
This piece is striking for three reasons. First, insofar as this sort of cheating is common, it indicates that inflation could be greater than is generally recognized. Second, it brings home the problem of “affordability” in a way that many of us probably did not anticipate. If someone thought they were buying $80 of groceries, only to have the cash register ring up $100, it is understandable they would be upset. Finally, it shows how the Trump-Musk habit of laughing at consumer fraud has very real pocketbook effects.
If the practices are widespread enough beyond the dollar stores it could mean that inflation measured in the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) is understated. “It would take some footwork to answer this question,” Baker writes, “but my guess is that if companies know they can get away with cheating their customers, they probably do.”
Baker continues, and here we get back to the CFPB:
Trump has made a point of laughing at efforts to rein in corporate abuses of all forms. He has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and many other agencies created to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. His sidekick, Elon Musk, thought it was hilarious that he was “deleting” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency set up to prevent banks, credits card companies, and other financial institutions from ripping off their customers.
The mispricing of items at the checkout counter by major retailers would seem to be exactly the sort of reason for which God created government. (Lawsuits should work also, except the piece indicates that the Dollar chains largely preempt class-action suits by requiring arbitration. Good luck getting a lawyer to sue for being overcharged $20.) Anyhow, Trump’s laugh-at-corporate-crime approach is directly pulling money out of people’s pocketbooks in this Dollar chain story.
What Trump apparently thinks is all good fun, is companies making people pay more for the necessities of life. Yesterday, Trump told people that affordability is a “con job.” That could be right, although probably not quite in the way that Trump intended.
And these stores cater to (or take advantage of, pick one) low-income urban and rural communities lacking larger chain food stores (food deserts).
The Guardian again:
“My 87-year-old mother and I have frequented Dollar General for years, and there have been innumerable times we have made purchases that were well higher than advertised,” wrote Robert Hevlin of Dayton. “My mother and I have literally lost thousands over the years with this company, but both of us being on social security, we have little choice in where we shop.”
Yes, the Windsor, N.C. inspection dates from two years prior to Trump 2.0 taking office, but the report points up the chronic nature of corporate rip-offs Warren’s agency is meant to curb. Instead, Trump 2.0 is curbing the CFPB. And the grift goes on.
* * * * *
Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
No King’s One Million Rising movement
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
How odd
In their big press conference yesterday they made it sound like the FBI under the Biden administration was covering something up. I thought they were intent upon weaponizing everything against poor old Trump. So why would they do that if the pipe bomber was a Trumper?
The man charged with planting pipe bombs outside Republican and Democratic national party headquarters before the Jan. 6 Capitol riots told the FBI he supported Donald Trump and believed Trump won the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with his interview.
Brian Cole Jr., 30, who was arrested Thursday at his family home in a Northern Virginia exurb of Washington and criminally charged, confessed to the FBI that he planted the bombs near the Capitol on Jan. 5, 2021, according to two sources familiar with Cole’s interview who requested anonymity to speak about a sensitive ongoing investigation.
Investigators also found social media posts in which the suspect appeared to express anarchist leanings, complicating their efforts to determine a clear motive, the sources said. But they found no evidence that he colluded with militant organizations or with any Trump supporters who organized the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the sources said.
Will Trump pardon him too? He really should. It’s the only fair thing to do.
On the other hand, he’s Black so never mind.
In fairness, you have to be old to remember when inflation was very high before 2022 when it spiked due to the post pandemic economic upheaval. I do. And I also remember people were still talking about it eight years later even though it had abated years before. There’s something about inflation that just sears into people’s minds and it takes a long time for them to get used to seeing those prices and for wages to feel as if they’ve caught up.
Trump is out there saying outright that it’s a hoax and a scam. And while Biden is hit for trying to take credit for a vastly improved economy and big jobs numbers (which was true) I don’t remember him ever saying that inflation was a hoax. Nonetheless, it was instrumental in taking down Harris because people were , and still are, incredibly agitated over the cost of living which has only gotten worse since Trump took office.
G. Elliott Morris has some thoughts:
Economic malaise is a serious problem for Trump. He won in 2024 because economic anxiety conditioned lots of voters to pull the lever against the incumbent. But now, he is the target of their ire. Losing economy-focused swing voters would cause a bloodbath for Republicans in the 2026 midterms. The 2025 statewide elections and special election in Tennessee’s Seventh District on Tuesday confirm the party is in trouble.
But, in quantitative terms, how bad is this problem for Trump, really? Are we talking about Bush 2008 levels of disapproval? Worse than Trump’s first-term ratings after Jan. 6, 2021? Today’s Chart of the Week: How low could Trump’s approval go?
[…]
The core question we are interested in is the following: What would Donald Trump’s approval rating be if current supporters abandoned him because of economic anxiety?To start with, here are Trump’s job approval and disapproval ratings from my average for SIN sister site FiftyPlusOne. Today, we estimate that 39.7% of adults approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 56.1% disapprove of his job.
For context, this is a pretty bad number. With a -16 net rating, Trump is as unpopular as he was at this point in his first term, and more unpopular at this point than any president who came before him.
So Trump is starting in a pretty bad place. But even at a 39% approval rating, things could be worse. That’s because his approval rating is currently being shored up by Republicans who do not think he is doing a good job on the economy.
He goes on to run a number of complicated simulations that show how low Trump’s approval rating could go if the economy stays the same or gets worse. This would happen if more Republicans who are upset about the economy finally turn on him. He says this could reduce his floor by 1-4 points. But there’s more:
For a final simulation, we can reduce Trump’s approval rating among all Republicans by 10 percentage points. Per YouGov, that is roughly the same decline in support the president has seen since taking office (so it’s not an unreasonable simulation).
Dropping Trump’s approval rating by another 10 points among Republicans puts him at a 33% approval overall. Of course, in that scenario, political independents might also move against the president. Decrease their approval of Trump (from an already terrible 27%), and he ends up at 31.7% overall.That would be almost as bad as his approval rating after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol (29%, according to the Pew Research Center).
[…]
[A] larger drop in Trump’s approval (to the mid-30s) would require broader political problems, or a sustained decrease in his rating among Republicans — regardless of how they feel about the president’s performance on the economy. Another 10-point drop in Trump’s approval with GOP voters would put him at a 33% rating — near his all-time low.
The implications of this piece for Democratic strategy are two-fold. First, considering campaigning on affordability and Trump’s economic mismanagement is a high-leverage way to reach hesitant Trump approvers inside the Republican Party.
[…]
But second, campaigning on affordability won’t be enough in isolation to drive Trump’s approval down to its previous lows. That will require sustained opposition to the president’s policies in general. And on that subject, there are plenty of unpopular policies to point to.
Trump began his presidency with talk of a broad mandate for change and popular will at his back. But over the last year, we have gotten a lot of data about how small his core constituency truly is. If economic anxiety keeps rising, it’s going to get even smaller.
So, affordability is key as we know. Trump is incapable of admitting that the economy isn’t getting better or taking any responsibility for it and the toadies around him will sing the same tune. It’s clear that people are not buying it and frankly, I think it’s too late to turn it around even if the economy rebounds. As I said, inflation scares the hell out of people and it takes a long time to wring that “vibe” out of the culture. It’s not like recessions, which people are more accustomed to.
But the Democrats can’t just myopically talk about that and nothing else. The country is is an existential crisis with the assault on the constitution and the change in the world order. It’s making everyone feel like they are living on the edge. People may attribute it to the price of eggs but it isn’t and unless the Democrats make it clear that all of this is the result of the white nationalist oligarchy Trump and the Republicans have finally institutionalized they’re going to be held responsible for the chaos right along with them once they win power.
The Republicans need to be utterly repudiated before there is even a slim hope of our liberal order somehow being salvaged enough to rebuild after the carnage of this hideous experiment in reality show politics. They need to walk, chew gum, stand on their heads and sing “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic” all at the same time.
Donald Trump needs to put the phone down at night and get some sleep. After spending three hours Monday night manically sharing more than 160 bizarre posts on Truth Social, he spent most of Tuesday’s televised cabinet meeting struggling to stay awake — and he lost the battle more than once. This was just the most recent example of his flagging energy and focus. But he woke right up when it came time for him to rant about immigrants.
It’s hard to know if Trump is simply ratcheting up his deportation policy to distract from his low poll numbers and a foreign policy that seems increasingly beyond his comprehension, or if this escalation is a specific policy push by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. What’s clear is that the administration has entered a new phase in its plan to rid the nation of immigrants.
What started out as a campaign promise to deport the “worst of the worse” gang members like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua has progressed to a full scale purge of any non-white, non-citizen. Trump is now even talking about “denaturalization” and “re-migration,” two terms that are right out of the Great Replacement Theory playbook.
After the shooting of two National Guard soldiers on Nov. 26 in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national who worked for a CIA-run counterterrorism team, Trump seized on the crime as an excuse to target Afghan refugees, particularly those who had come into the country following the American withdrawal in 2021.
At the time, many Republicans were highly critical of Joe Biden’s administration for not allowing more Afghans to emigrate and using the alleged failure as yet another cudgel with which to batter Biden for fulfilling the agreement that Trump had signed before he left office. The shooting by what appears to be a mentally ill refugee opened the door for more criticism of Biden and a pledge to send Afghan refugees back to where they came from.
This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted legal immigrants for removal… There’s no reason for it.
This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted legal immigrants for removal. The administration has already withdrawn Temporary Protected Status from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela, and are in the process of deporting those who are already here under that program, although there is still litigation pending. There’s no reason for it.
Like so many of the immigrants who are being harassed and abducted on the streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with Customs and Border Patrol, every day, they have been working and contributing to our society. But Trump has arbitrarily decided they have to go.
When speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Thanksgiving — the day after the shooting — he pivoted from his attacks on Afghan immigration to railing against Somalians as well. They are “ripping off our country,” he said, pledging “we’re not going to put up with these kind of assaults on law and order by people who shouldn’t even be in our country.” When a confused reporter asked what Somalians had to do with the Afghan suspect, the president blithely replied, “nothing, but Somalians have caused a lot of trouble,” and then insulted Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. He continued that theme in his crude, late-night Thanksgiving “message” on Truth Social that characterized Somalians in Minnesota as roving gangs “looking for prey as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.”
The president had apparently been exposed to an article by Christopher Rufo, one of the right’s most celebrated propagandists, who co-wrote an hysterical article claiming that Somalians had been committing welfare fraud and sending the proceeds to the terrorist group Al-Shabaab, which has not been confirmed. That’s exactly the kind of charge that makes Trump automatically reach for collective punishment.
Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of Trump’s comments, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has jumped on the most recent xenophobic bandwagon head first, calling for a “full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” The country’s founders and forefathers, she said, “built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
On Monday, the administration announced it had paused all immigration applications from 19 countries it has already restricted from travel to the U.S., and is now halting citizenship and green card processing for all of them. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the administration is halting all refugee admissions — except for white South Africans whom they have deemed to be the victims of racial discrimination. Trump also banned the country from the 2026 G20 summit due to its alleged oppression of white citizens.
Trump’s comments at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday put his racism and xenophobia on full, incontrovertible display. “We keep taking in garbage into our country,” he said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage…when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but b***h, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”
Vice President JD Vance pounded the table and the Cabinet burst into applause. Noem pledged to deploy ICE to Minnesota to root out the Somali- Americans she claims fraudulently obtained their citizenship.
Imagine what it’s like to be a Somali-American today. Your president is calling you “garbage” on national television and his Cabinet applauds the sentiment. The government is sending masked thugs into your neighborhood to hunt you down. You thought this was your country and now you’re being told it isn’t. Imagine what it’s like to be any immigrant in America right now.
Salon
It’s a service, not a business
This report is a few weeks old, but I nominate the narrative as one of Paul Krugman’s zombie lies (Reuters):
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) – The U.S. Postal Service said on Friday it was seeking new administrative and legislative reforms as it reported a $9 billion yearly loss, down slightly from the prior fiscal year results.
New Postmaster General David Steiner said USPS must be more efficient and that it still has a “significant systemic annual revenue and cost imbalance.” He added: “To correct our financial imbalances, we must explore new revenue opportunities and public policy changes to improve our business model.”
Someone named The Comfy Dude complains this morning about an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government being judged by private marketplace standards:
After President Joe Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, USA Today reported (emphasis mine):
When the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 became law, it required the postal service to serve all Americans while also breaking even.
“It basically introduced an identity crisis that had very real consequences for USPS’s operations ever since: is it a business or is it a service?” said Porter McConnell, co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition.
Decades later, in 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was passed, which required the USPS to put money aside for future retiree health benefits and restricted the services the agency could offer in the future to only the ones it already offered.
Yeah, well, that didn’t work out too well. Hence the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022. But USPS is still not allowed to operate as a government-mandated, universal service. It’s what conservatives require when they want to kill any government service they consider a crime against capitalism. Especially against competing capitalist ventures represented by high-paid lobbyists.
I’m going to check Dude’s math here. USPS “lost” $9.5 billion in fiscal 2024 on operating expenses of $89.5 billion. There were an estimated 340.1 million persons in America in 2024. If taxpayers had to make up the “loss,” it would in theory cost $27.93 per person. If USPS were simply a no-fee, taxpayer-supported service (anyone who’s bought stamps knows it never has been), that would be $263.16 per person.
Now let’s look at the Pentagon’s budget: $883.7 billion in fiscal 2024. The Pentagon is a no-fee, taxpayer-supported service. That would be $2598.35 per person, or over 90 times the 2024 USPS “loss” per person.
I await the cries of horror from free-marketeers on the right about the Pentagon’s $883.7 billion loss in 2024 the way Fox News described the “whopping” $6.5 billion loss from USPS two years ago.
* * * * *
Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
No King’s One Million Rising movement
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
Yes, Bovino’s stormtroopers are that incompetent
Your eyes do not deceive you. The thugs Kristi Noem is hiring to harass citizens and non-citizens, in its drive to round up and deport “violent” non-white people for Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing program are as dumb and brutish as hundreds of cell phone videos reveal.
In the Department of Homeland Security’s rush to hire 10,000 deportation officers by year’s end, Customs and Border Patrol’s (CBP) hiring and training standards have gone to hell. Recent hires include “recent high school graduates and applicants who can ‘barely read or write’ as well as those who lack basic physical fitness and even have pending criminal charges.” It’s the Daily Mail, but an unusually long report (emphasis mine):
Most of the new hires in the $30 billion initiative are retired law enforcement who are receiving virtual training and being repurposed for desk duty.
I’ve written since July, “If like me you have wondered if ICE is finding its masked agents on Craigslist and taking them unvetted, and if it seems that they must be getting their training in law enforcement over Zoom or over the weekend,” there’s your confirmation.
Meanwhile, total novices are being fast-tracked into the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where instructors have been left astounded at the levels of incompetence.
‘We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English,’ one Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told the Daily Mail.
‘We even had a 469-lb man sent to the academy whose own doctor certified him not at all fit for any physical activity.’
Insiders say the vetting process has been so rushed that officials didn’t even wait for drug test results to come back before hiring recruits and flying them off to Georgia, only to discover afterward that tests came back positive.
Washington, D.C.-based DHS spokesliars like Tricia McLaughlin insist the department maintains the highest training and physical standards. Unnamed staff at the Brunswick, Georgia home of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) tell The Mail otherwise:
In one shocking incident, they were left shaking their heads when one student asked to be excused from class so he could attend a court date on a gun charge.
Other recruits were even discovered to have tattoos associated with gangs and white supremacists when they stripped off their shirts during workouts.
Reports from FLETC include incidents of violence, disruptive behavior, and allegations of sexual misconduct on campus, most handled internally.
One recruit, 29-year-old Darien Coleman, was arrested by county police for allegedly exploding at a FLETC bus driver and smashing his phone, according to records obtained by the Daily Mail. He was described as a ‘known problem’ on campus who had just resigned when he demanded a ride from the driver.
Sources say another male recruit, after hitting the bars, was caught barging into a female dorm and hitting on the occupants. Another groped a woman in class.
DHS has widened its age brackets to help reach its goal. It’s raised its maximum age from 40 to 65 and lowered its minimum age from 21 to 18. That $50,000 signing bonus and starting salaries as high as $80,000 per year must sound pretty attractive. How far do recruits think those signing bonuses will carry them once no other employer will hire them with CBP/ICE in their work histories?
A former instructor tells the Mail:
‘Stephen Miller and Corey Lewandowski want what they want and are going to do whatever they have to do to get people through,’ the father said, referring, respectively, to the DHS adviser and Noem’s ‘de-facto’ chief of staff.
‘But once you’ve prostituted your hiring standard, you’ve prostituted everything,’ he added.
‘Everyone from ICE sees what’s coming into the field and they’re f**king petrified.’
The DHS official sounded a similar alarm.
‘We do have some new recruits that are fantastic, but we’re now bringing people in who shouldn’t be hired at all into any federal government job, definitely not one that has a badge and a gun,’ the official said.
We’ve already seen agents trained to threaten protesters with arrest for “impeding” federal officers based on 18 USC 111 just for standing too close and filming their arrests. If that’s more than an empty threat, I’ve yet to see a video of them actually doing it. (Maybe a reader will update me.) If it were me, I’d remind agents that if they actually arrested me they’d have to explain, sans mask, before a federal judge just how filming them “forcibly” impeded or interfered with “the performance of official duties” per subsection 1. If it were me, I’d remind agents that after that pissed-off judge throws their case out of court, they’d personally face a lawsuit for violating my civil rights.
Marimar Martinez should file one against the agent who shot her. Makinge him an example would be a public service.
The Mail’s unnamed DHS official laments:
‘This isn’t the department of baking cookies,’ the source said. ‘This is the Department of Homeland Security, where you can be deported from the country.
‘And we’re now employing people who are not equipped to tie their own shoelaces.
‘This whole thing is a complete disaster from beginning to end.’
Now CBP’s Comandante Gregory Bovino and his thugs are concentrating on New Orleans. Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch reported from there on Thursday (gift link):
By the end of the day, observers tallied around 12 to 14 apparent arrests. There was no evidence that any of these people were on the list of 10 most-wanted actual criminals Homeland Security pictured along with Wednesday’s launch — catnip for the Fox News audience clinging to the delusional Big Lie that Team Bovino is only targeting bad guys.
Instead, his secret police just swarmed wherever they could find the most brown-skinned people — the Home Depot lot, a white van filled with contractors, Mexican restaurants — and acted like the gun-toting officer in the recent movie Civil War who famously asked, “What kind of American are you?”
In Bovino’s past operations, only a fraction of those arrested and facing deportation had criminal records — just 44 out of 370 in last month’s Charlotte op — and there was no evidence that Louisiana’s “Catahoula Crunch” would be any different.
DHS has turned on its head the old maxim, “You get what you pay for.”
* * * * *
Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
No King’s One Million Rising movement
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense