To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame. To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children. Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets. No one is forcing you to lie to yourself, even as your bosses continue to lie to the American people.
- Keith Wilson, Mayor of Portland, Oregon
This week's featured post is "Did We Win?" about the situation with ICE in Minneapolis.
Ongoing stories
Once again, I'm dropping the ball on climate change and various wars to focus on the battle for democracy here in the United States. I hope things seem less urgent next week.
This week's developments
This week everybody was still talking about ICE
ICE and the resistance against it is the focus of this week's featured post, but there's a lot I couldn't get to there.
The five-year-old in the bunny hat is back home. Liam Ramos and his father were both released from a Texas detention center Sunday and flown back to Minneapolis. They had been in ICE custody since January 20. The release was ordered by a federal judge on Saturday.
US district judge Fred Biery said in his ruling on Saturday that “the case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children”.
The regime claimed that when they took Liam's father they had no choice but to take him too, because otherwise the child would have been "abandoned". The superintendent of his school district disputes this, claiming that “another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let them take care of the small child, but was refused”.
But here's the piece often left out of the story. Not only did ICE have no reason to take Liam, they had no reason to take his father either. He had entered the country legally, by turning himself in at the border and asking for asylum, claiming that he faced persecution back in Ecuador. His lawyer says:
These are not illegal aliens. They were following all the established protocols, pursuing their claim for asylum, showing up for their court hearings, and posed no safety, no flight risk and never should have been detained.
The judge's order says it best:
the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration's detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment. Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.
One of the zombie lies about anti-Trump protests is that the protesters aren't actual concerned citizens, they're professional agitators paid by George Soros or some similar conspiracy-theory villain. (When the protesters are Black, which they mostly aren't this time but were during the George Floyd demonstrations, the paid-by-Soros story plugs into a longstanding antisemitic/racist narrative: Jews are organizing and bankrolling Blacks to overturn White Christian society. This story has the advantage of validating stereotypes in both directions: Blacks wouldn't be smart enough to organize on their own, without some scheming Jew behind it all.) I'm not sure exactly when this conspiracy theory got started, but it was certainly spreading at the time of the Women's March in 2017.
If you think about this theory for more than two seconds, you'll see how easy it would be to infiltrate and expose the whole operation, if it were actually happening: Soros is supposedly recruiting tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. Somehow he's reaching out to them and convincing them to join. How hard would it be to cosy up to some left-wing acquaintance and get yourself recruited into Antifa, or whoever is supposed to be carrying this out? Then you could record everything, keep track of who paid you and how, and write a big expose' for the right-wing media. You could be the Whittaker Chambers of the 21st century.
So after nine years, where is that story? Where are the names named and the receipts published? (And where's my check, George?)
Anyway, the story never dies despite the complete lack of evidence, so I doubt that my two-seconds-of-thought is going to dissuade anybody. So the proper response is probably ridicule. With that in mind, check out this article from the humor site McSweeney's: "I Am the Payroll Accountant for Professional Protestors in Minnesota, and I Am Swamped". It's a collection of memos about being sure accounting has your right name (rather than Fight D. Power), and reminding protesters to fill out their timesheets and come to the office to pick up their checks.
Fox News continues to try to make the Minnesota resistance sound sinister. Friday, they published an "analysis" by a former CIA agent identifying the "insurgency" tactics being used in Minnesota.
"All of the evidence I’ve seen indicates to me that the insurgency is funded by foreign adversaries who want to see violence and Americans fighting each other," said de la Torre, now founder of Tower Strategies, an advisory firm based in Washington, D.C.
If you're looking for what that evidence might be, though, the article won't help you. The analysis is de la Torre's personal hobby horse. If you want to believe him, you can. But if you're skeptical, nothing here is even slightly convincing.
I'm particularly amused by the "funded" part. The resistance uses whistles, cell phones people have already, and free internet tools like Facebook and YouTube and Signal and Google Sheets. How much "funding" does that require? (Yesterday, somebody at my church was collecting money to buy handwarmers for the people who have been standing by our local road holding protest signs during the current cold snap. I suspect the involvement of the Chinese Communist Party, or maybe just a handful of my friends.)
A week ago Thursday, a group of white-haired protesters blocked the entrance to an ICE facility in Williston Vermont. Suspecting an operation by sleeper agents from Iran, I asked a friend in Vermont if she knew any of the people involved. She did, and would have gone herself if she hadn't been involved in a different resistance activity.
The day a drone takes out an ICE SUV, talk to me about "funding". Nothing we've seen so far requires "funding".
Paul Krugman looks at the same level of organization and sees an American "color revolution", like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or the Rose Revolution in Georgia.
and the Epstein files
DoJ released over three million pages of Epstein files Friday, only a month and a half after the deadline in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That's barely more than half the six million files prosecutors were talking about previously, but Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche insists this is the last release.
Once again, DoJ is claiming they have no evidence on which to prosecute anyone other then Epstein himself (who is dead) and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell (who is already in prison). And that may true, as far as it goes. But if these documents aren't enough to get convictions, it seems like there ought to be plenty to predicate investigations. Who might be called in and questioned? Are there other records that could be gotten through search warrants?
Despite the extra time taken to produce the documents, identities of the victims were not protected. Worse:
The Justice Department published dozens of unredacted nude images on its website, showing young women or possibly teenagers whose photos were contained in files related to the wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
I don't think we've heard the end of this yet.
and election tampering
There are two ways to look at the FBI seizing Georgia's 2020 election ballots and records Wednesday. Either this is
- one more Trump attempt to prove that Joe Biden didn't kick his butt in the 2020 election, which he lost by 7 million votes
- the opening salvo in Trump's attempt to rig this fall's midterm elections
Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, explains the first view:
I think the FBI is doing the president’s bidding and trying to create a criminal case against Georgia. And by carrying out this farce of an investigation, they’re just trying to placate his delusions. It’s all a power grab. They can’t come to grips with the fact that they lost. They really have this unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia and using lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”
and the second:
I think they’re using Georgia as a blueprint to see what they can get away with elsewhere, because if they’re allowed to seize election materials here, what would stop them from doing it in other states during the midterms?
David French imagines a variety of ways Trump could rig the election without controlling the count. For example, imagine ICE continues to racially profile non-Whites as potentially illegal immigrants, and continues to temporarily detain even legal residents and citizens in brutal conditions. Then ICE opens an operation near polling places in blue cities, so that non-Whites are afraid to show up.
Court orders might try to stop this, but the regime already ignores court orders.
and Don Lemon
Ex-CNN host Don Lemon, who was let go by CNN in 2023 and has since started his own YouTube channel (with over a million subscribers), was arrested Friday under two federal statutes, for covering a protest in St. Paul on January 18. I haven't done extensive research, but as far as I know this is unprecedented in the United States. Journalists are sometimes charged with trespassing when they follow protesters into some place they shouldn't be, but even those charges are usually dismissed. This looks like part of the regime's continuing effort to intimidate, co-opt, and otherwise control the press.
Let's start at the beginning: There's a Southern Baptist church in St. Paul with a pastor David Easterwood, whose weekday job has him leading the St. Paul ICE field office. On January 18, 30 or 40 protesters disrupted the church's Sunday service by chanting "ICE out" and "Justice for Renee Good". None of the accounts mention violence by the protesters, but congregants reported being frightened. One woman broke her arm when she fell while rushing to get out.
By the time police arrived, the protesters had moved outside the church. I don't know if the church went on to complete its planned service, but it could have. In the accounts, I can't see any mention of people being arrested at the scene by St. Paul police.
Then the regime's "Justice" Department got involved. There is a federal FACE Act (Freedom of ACcess to Entrances), which was passed in 1994 to prevent anti-abortion protesters from blocking the entrances of clinics. It also applies to churches:
Whoever ... by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship ... shall be subject to the penalties provided [elsewhere in the statute]. ... The term “intimidate” means to place a person in reasonable apprehension of bodily harm to him- or herself or to another.
Penalties for a first offense without violence are up to a $10,000 fine and six months in jail. However, the law also says
Nothing in this section shall be construed ... to prohibit any expressive conduct (including peaceful picketing or other peaceful demonstration) protected from legal prohibition by the First Amendment to the Constitution
So arresting protesters or the leaders of the protesters is already a bit of a stretch, and the case against them relies on proving that the protesters intended to inspire a "reasonable apprehension of bodily harm" in the congregants. In other words, it's not enough that a woman was frightened enough to break her arm leaving church. Her fear has to be reasonable, and the protesters had to intend to inspire that fear.
No way there will ever be a conviction here. A second charge is even more speculative: violating the Conspiracy Against Rights law, which was passed after the Civil War as an anti-Klan measure. People violate CAR
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same
That can get you up to ten years in prison.
This is an even bigger stretch, because the intention to intimidate can't just be a vague idea: Two or more people had to agree on a plan to do it. So OK, arresting protesters on these charges is more harassment than an actual threat of conviction. But the regime took it a step further: They arrested two independent journalists -- Don Lemon and Georgia Fort -- for covering the protest.
Lemon was live-streaming, so whatever he did is there in the video. (Clips of it were shown during his show.) I haven't watched it, but apparently he did not participate in the demonstration. He didn't, for example, do any slogan-chanting. He just followed the protesters in and interviewed people.
and you also might be interested in ...
Paul Krugman writes about Trump's hostility towards Canada.
Supreme Court arguments on Trump's challenge to birthright citizenship will begin on April Fools Day.
Another factoid that I am absolutely not making up: DHS Secretary Noem's full name is Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem. So if you want to refer to her by her initials, in an FDR or JFK style, it's KLAN. We seem to be living in a bad novel.
Heather Cox Richardson called out something Stephen Miller posted on social media:
Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein. Put another way: the easier your immigration policy makes it for newcomers to vote the more discerning your immigration policy must be.
Miller, in this post, does not say explicitly that it's a mistake to give a foreign laboring class full rights. But we know from his other statements that he's against it. He's against birthright citizenship and a clear path to citizenship for immigrants. Being the "first and only" civilization to do this, in his mind, is foolish. The previous day he had denounced Sherrod Brown for proposing to "Protect Ohio's Haitian community" by preserving their TPS legal status.
Under what definition are Haitian illegal migrants flown here by the Biden Administration an “Ohio community”? Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.
Richardson points out how "History is doing that rhyming thing again." Miller's hierarchical view of society, with a laboring class that can never aspire to anything higher, echoes arguments pre-Civil-War Southerners made for slavery and the subordination of women.
The hierarchical system Miller embraces echoes the system championed by those like [South Carolina Senator James Henry] Hammond, who imagined themselves the nation’s true leaders who had the right to rule. They were not bound by the law, and they rejected the idea that those unwilling to recognize their superiority should have either economic or political power.
These are not the principles America was built on.
and let's close with something that should have happened
Sadly, the ICE-chasing-a-rolling-finger video is AI-generated. Somewhere, there is a better world where this really happened.
