Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.
Can we cease using the euphemism detention centers for these facilities? By any reasonable definition, they are concentration camps. The public understands the heinous quality of concentration camps. Let’s begin speaking of them with accuracy.
Demanding basic human rights is now “naked judicial activism.” While a protest against stripping prisoners naked, feeding them worm-infested food, denying medical care to those who clearly need it, and treating human beings who seek refuge and asylum like cattle to be traded for money to the highest bidder is just a “public relations stunt” rather than a moral stand against forced bondage and slavery.
Everyone knows that Memorial Day should be observed properly — shopping for furniture at bargain prices, for example, not for anything political, like exercising due process, inspecting prisons or holding customs officials accountable to law and procedures — the stuff that countless thousands enlisted and died for, to whom nothing but lip service is offered in return.
Not just the most corrupt and least competent — but way and above the most fucked up administration in American history, bar none.
And why approximately 1/3 of this population can't see that it is a heinous act in itself is the question for the ages. However, there is this explanation that is offered.
How will these people ever be reached? The stupidity is unbelievable.
Why bother trying to reach them? Simply exclude them from their civic responsibilities, since they have demonstrated that they are incapable of performing them.
Wandyrer, at least those people exercised one of their civic responsibilities by voting. We don’t agree with their vote and they may not have the education, the time, or whatever to take more civic responsibilities. Given today’s standards, they may not even have a sense of the duties of a citizen. The political parties have by-and-large suggested that voting for their candidates is all one really need do.
We need to get massive messenging across to the USA population that voting every two years is NOT all that citizenship requires.
The millions who decided not to even bother voting or protested by sitting out the vote are more concerning to me.
These people voted to literally set the Republic on fire and try to impose human rights violations, slavery, fascism, religious intolerance, and corruption on the US government. They should be thrilled if they don't get rounded up and shot or hanged, like we did with the last Nazis we confronted, and like we should have done to the Confederates.
I'm not remotely concerned by the inaction of the millions of people who recognized they were offered nothing by any of the candidates being proposed and stayed home, because they recognized the difference between inaction and ACTIVELY MAKING THINGS WORSE.
Holly, I don't mean to "like" your comment; I wish there was a button to click to say "AGREED!"
(I see you are a 2 month paid subscriber. Be ye a long time "free" reader or returned/lapsed paid subscriber, THANK YOU for subscribing! As the self-designated Walmart greeter of the comment forum, I wish to WELCOME you!👋🏼 I am very grateful for each person who "puts their money where their mouth is" because every person who adds there voice here helps shine a light on the insanity of MAGA)
Remember Nazi Germany came to us to learn how to be better Nazis. This has been a long time coming, but from the moment the 3/5ths compromise was written into the constitution it was always going to lead here.
I agree it is obscene. What makes it obscene to me is the republicans that continue to go along with this heinous republican regime. mike johnson actively pursuing the misnamed "christian nationalism" bullshit. Of course he wants to believe the DHS crap over credible reporters. How about john thune. I wonder what he thinks when he goes to church on Sunday. How about tom emmer R-MN. Claims he lives by his Catholic beliefs. Ahh, this is Catholicism? This is loving your neighbor? How about anyone that claims they are "Christian". Are they really still claiming they are followers of Christ? Is this called loving your enemy? Loving your neighbor as yourself? Are these incarcerated immigrants even really the enemy? The hypocrisy of the right wing evangelical "Christian " church is nothing short of blasphemy in it's worst form. That's what I call obscene!
The hypocrisy in religion is why I don’t believe in the tenets of any belief. One cannot be a ‘good’ Christian and still go home, beat the kids, ignore those less fortunate, etc. There is nothing Christian-like about tRUMP or those puppeteers who control him.
There's a better reason for not believing in any religious tenets. We share our DNA with every single living thing on earth: plants, animals, insects. We all have evolved from a single-celled creature (LUCA) that lived 3.5 billion years ago. We now know from further study that Lucy (3.2 million years ago) was not the first human. So much for Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.
It's Come to This, just as I expect, y our comments are right on target!! I do wish more people would pay attention and stand up and say "no more, not in our name!"
I agree, Norman. Maybe they’re not using gas to actively kill detainees, but they sure as hell trying to kill them in other ways while still holding off any responsibility. “Oh, he died of an infection? Ooopsie…”
For hundreds of years, autocrats and dictators have used starvation as a weapon including Trump, Bibi, Putin, Hitler, etc.
EVERY REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT AS WELL AS EVERY PERSON THAT OWNS A PIECE OF THESE CORPORATIONS THAT ARE PROFITING FROM THESE INHUMANE ACTS.
Not surprisingly, their names are never reported, just like the sexual predators and human traffickers in the Epstein files.
Dont Forget Joseph Stalin who used Starvation to kill Thousands of Ukrainian Farmers and their families in the 193O's in what is called the "Holomodor", because the farmers refused to take part in Stalin's collectivization.
Virginia, he used to drop in unannounced while some of his underlings were having a meal. They all hoped they and their families would not suffer any ill consequences...of course, some of them did. Unpredictability and the fear it produces. Sound familiar??
Before uncle Ralph Kuhn died in Italy he had a copy of Three women in North Africa, emaciated beyond survival standing on the roadside hoisting their long robes above their naked waists as columns of G.I.s marched north trying not to see them. When his footlocker came home to Montana I found it covered in cobwebs in the basement of my aunt Jimmie’s home in 1964. I wanted to ask her if they were saved but I couldn’t risk her grief. I cried for her and those women resolving to fix the world. As time has passed the crux of the situation has worsened. This, the foulest thread of human degradation, the starvation deaths, the begging of prostitution, the brutality uncaught, unchecked, undenied, and unforgivable brings to mind the Mortal Sin.
Now as our exalted Congress plays ping pong tapping lightly leadership tethered to this weighty matter with a promise of a forever answer we are asked to believe we must count these women and children as liars proposing a cunning deceit. Sure. The victims as opposed to the used car salesmen selling us the transmission filled with sawdust.
We have the pictures. We have the dialogues. We have the geologic fortification. We have the money trail. We have those entrapped lies. We have the bodies. We have the histories. They are intertwined, entangled, inextricably cohabiting congressional allegiances. We have the never ending broken laws and reinterpretations of the constitution in order to produce invalid code like bute ridden mounts seeking Kentucky derby royalty which will never pass the blood test. I ask you all, For whom the bells toll. Which part of all of us dies as this slides into impunity?
Now Americans believe “Nazi” when they hear about Ukraine and remembering the history of Holomodor, it’s easy to understand why some Ukrainians welcomed the Germans as “liberators” in 1941. Starvation is a great teacher.
This is why in the Northeast, where Citizens Bank is a major player, the campaign to get people and institutions to move their money out of it is catching fire. Citizens invests in and does business with both GeoGroup and CoreCivic after other banks had decided to withdraw. Focus your energy on CB and whatever banks still work with the concentration camp companies. And check your portfolio for investments any of them.
GJ, every bit of insanity and cruelty of Trump has pained me, but it has been the cutting of SNAP benefits in the US, and USAID around the world that was the final straw. We've been donating to WCK and also, I have been snatching up loss leaders at the grocery store to donate to our local food pantry. We bring a few bags of groceries every couple of weeks. It's not a great deal, but its the best immediate thing I can do.
What gets me is that under Democratic Presidents when we give to the food banks there is usually enough to go around. And now even teachers need to use the donated foods. We do the same when we can Miselle and hope it's enough so that people don't go hungry. But that doesn't help those in foreign countries.
GJ, I've mentioned on here I have a daughter who lives in a Chgo suburb but works in a rural district 40 minutes away. She has over a decade of experience and has yet to crack a $50K yr salary. We help out as much as we can. Her pride must be acknowledged, so I don't offer cash, but I "treat" her to a tank of gas at least once a month when we fill up, and I will pick up things I know she can use.
I get it and that should be a crime (to pay teachers that little.) My daughter is a pharmacy tech and makes about $50K. My sister-in-law makes her lunch every day which saves her quite a bit. $25/hour is barely a living wage for one person in most places in the US.
I can stretch my donation this way. Those loss leaders might not be things I want. I can't recall if it was D4N here, or Pat Cole? but someone whose family relied on a food bank years ago suggested canned chili to me, so I always donate some of that. I was grateful for the suggestion. (Also, our food bank was DELIGHTED to get about a dozen new toothbrushes I had! I use an electric one, but the dentist gives us a new manual at each visit. Our store also had a loss leader of toothpaste, 99 cents a tube.)
Between 15 and 55 million people starved to death during the Great Chinese Famine from 1959 to 1961. This catastrophe was primarily a man-made result of Mao Zedong’s "Great Leap Forward"
During the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór) between 1845 and 1852, roughly 1 million people died from starvation and related diseases, due to British rule.
"America first"? Nope. "America last." Trumpty-Dumpty has effectively finished the USA as a world power, and as a first world country. The ultrarich are bleeding it dry while the American citizens die of poverty and measles epidemics.
While some may have been benign neglect and careless self interest from both parties, our present maniacal misleader sets new records for malicious wreckage of some of the best works of our usually,albeit slowly, ever improving democracy.
I suspect -- if reincarnation is anything other than a compensatory fantasy -- what we would find here in 2076 (assuming, of course, the Unified Reich is somehow miraculously kept from following the advice of its Messiah Hitler and destroying the world in an ultimate assertion of victory), is the genuinely civilized, genuinely democratic Union of Canada expanded to include most of what are now the so-called Blue States. The resultant nation is infinitely protected by a fully militarized British Commonwealth; by an equally militarized European Union; and by a thoroughly reorganized United Nations now structured to minimize the power and influence of anti-democratic regimes – this based on official recognition that anti-democratic is also pro-apocalypse. As to the remainder of the failed United States, I suspect all of the former Confederacy and the so-called Red States will be mere Third World banana republics, one or two squabbling confederations of Christian theocracies awash in Aryan male supremacy and ruled with lynch-mob brutality as zero-tolerance slave plantations by Ted-Bundy-caliber tyrants. Continued Nazism, religious warfare and class strife however disguised (including by the maliciously deceptive euphemisms "capitalism" and "neoliberalism"), will still keep world peace out of reach, but our pridefully subhuman cousins, Homo sapiens inhumanus, will at least no longer be able to reverse humanitarian evolution as they are now doing. The alternative? Nothingness: The eternal nullification of our species, the eternal murder of our Mother Earth by her reduction to a Precambrian lifelessness toxified to permanence. That's what I see -- and my prognosis is by no means a solitary conclusion. Quoth a trio of our True Prophets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5al0HmR4to
(The above sequence of links is a dialogue, and were I not so paralyzed with compu-loathing, I would have figured out how to mail it as a playlist. With https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DwE1u45a5U&list=RD_DwE1u45a5U&start_radio=1 as an explanatory footnote and the Graves' translation of the "Hanes Taliesin" as context.)
I was deeply affected by the movie about Cambodia, The Killing Fields. Is it hyperbolic to have deep concern about possibly disappeared people around that swampy marshland camp in FL?
I landed in West Palm Beach FlA yesterday and a family member drove me to see my sister who is ill. On the way she pointed to a building under construction and said, "Now they're building these warehouses, I don't know what they're for" and I asked, detention centers? She answered in disbelief, mentioning Alligator Alcatraz and brushing all else off. An intelligent woman but her news sources are from TV. I've seen maps of where these concentration camps are and many are so tiny (in strip malls) that we might pass by without knowing. Like with most of the Regime's crimes, In Plain Sight. This is something we all can act on. The Sherriff in my MA county shows up and speaks out, clarifying that it will not happen in jails and prisons she oversees. Thanks to HCR for this post and all who keep opening our eyes!
“In February 2025 the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison.”
Joan,the GEO Group headquarters is in Boca Raton.They have major contracts throughout the state and, of course, are bigly Republican donors.
The Department of Homeland Security unveiled its bold new immigration policy this week, officially titled “Everything Is Fine, Please Stop Looking.”
Under the program, detainees are welcomed into private facilities where they receive the full American efficiency experience: spoiled food, missing medical care, overcrowded rooms, and court hearings timed carefully to prevent the dangerous spread of due process.
Officials described the system as “humane,” noting that every detainee is given several thoughtful options, including self-deportation, confusion, despair, or being transferred somewhere their lawyer can’t find them.
When lawmakers attempted to inspect the facility, DHS responded with the warm hospitality taxpayers have come to expect, by pepper-spraying everyone within range, including a United States senator. “This is what transparency looks like,” a spokesperson explained. “Sometimes democracy needs a chemical assist.”
Inside, detainees reportedly sent out an S.O.S., which officials dismissed as “left-wing punctuation.” Hunger strikes were also rejected as “performative calorie management.”
Private detention executives praised the policy as a win-win. “The government pays us, the public gets denials, and the detainees get character-building trauma,” said one detention executive, polishing a spreadsheet no human being should ever have to live inside.
Asked whether conditions would improve, DHS promised immediate action.
“We are reviewing the situation,” the spokesperson said, “and once the review is complete, we will classify compassion as a security threat.”
“The dangerous spread of due process” indeed. Extra points for snark brilliantly blended with truth.
Heaven help us should we actually become a society “dedicated to the…unfinished work remaining before us…the increased devotion to that cause for which these (fallen) gave the last full measure of devotion…”
Your comment is very funny, and witty. And the serious points you make are horrifying. Good to keep focus on what a low point our general level of operation has become. Thank you for this.
Kate, this is apparently your first day here as a paid subscriber!
WELCOME!! 👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼
I, Miselle, the self-appointed Walmart greeter of the forum, am grateful to have you here and for you to add your voice to the forum! EACH person who reads HCR Letter grows this community which not only frightens the MAGA, but strengthens those of us to hold onto our humanity which the Right is attempting to shred.
You'll see the occasional troll--please don't feed them, regardless of how tempting it is. There are so many people here who post comments that add to the Letter, thanks to their own careers, experience and knowledge. Enjoy engaging with them, as they are a fantastic bunch! 😁
Hi Miselle! Thanks for the welcome. I have been reading and listening to HCR for quite a while. One of the best informed, most scrupulous historians who ever plied the trade, in my view. We are very, very lucky to have a few people of this caliber (add to the list Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum, and Charlie Sykes , Phillips O'Brien, and a handful of others).
For anyone who “feels” the word, may we call them gulags? From stories of Siberian prisons and my daily submersion in ICE sirens at all times of day or night when a working or reporting in immigrant might be out, I feel like part of this nightmare. Why are Republicans so cruel?
Uh... "feeling" a word and then attributing a false meaning to it? How will that help us defeat fascism?
The Gulag was a concentration camp system where political prisoners were forced to work - aside from living in horrible conditions.
The ICE prisoners are not forced to work, so no, this is objectively NOT a gulag.
The only way to fight back against fascism and its massive fake news propaganda is to stick to the truth rather than just beginning to make stuff up too.
As to cruelty: my guess (not an objective truth) is that the GOP is training a militia that cultivates and admires cruelty. For now, they're trying it out on immigrants. I presume that day by day, the people working in these prisons are encouraged to break one moral taboo after the other, until they become entirely immune to human suffering as soon as a group of superiors depicts them as inferior human beings. Next step: deploy this militia against the American people.
Why does the GOP want to cultivate cruelty in the first place?
Because fascism vitally needs a high level of cruelty in society as a whole for it to be able to thrive. The only way you can force people to do whatever the top commands, so the only way to make them massively accept violence and obey, is to make ordinary people SO cruel that they don't care about the suffering of their fellow human beings anymore. Margaret Atwood described this perfectly in "The Handmaid's Tale"...
Ok. I take your strict definition seriously, but conditions (cruelty, inedible food, unjust imprisonment in more than 70% of the cases and “black hole”—difficulty with getting in touch with lawyers and relatives —) are similar enough to what I have learned of gulags, that I shall continue to call ours by the name. It may bring more protesters and help US defeat Stephen Miller’s fascism which is shared by far too many IMO.
One of the main reasons why we got here in the first place is that, while the right was building its horrible neofascist propaganda machine, the left started indulging in abandoning truth altogether.
No more need to study history to learn how a democracy works and how to keep it. No more need to even use dictionaries so that we can communicate accurately. Just go with however things "feel", and feel to YOU as an individual, and somehow, miraculously, we would be able to avoid a disaster.
Also, neofascism IS what the GOP ideologically believes in, today. So if you want "bad words" and somehow believe that that should be how we organize (rather than engaging in real debates with fellow citizens, so that they get access to the truth and are truly motivated to stay in it for the long haul), that one is bad enough and has the additional advantage of also being true...
The lack of respect for education and the disintegration of the public school system in America is a large part of “how we got here.” As a teacher and from a family of teachers, although I appreciate scholarship and strict definitions, in this particular case, I hope for many, for some of whom the word “gulag” might be a wake-up call, to understand who we are at this time.
But the result is also that even those who still value education now switched to a "method" where "student validation" trumps real transmission. Your idea of going with however a word "feels" to you individually is - with all due respect - imho a perfect illustration of how the left got education wrong too, and for decades already.
The GOP destroyed education by trying to make it as elitist and expensive as possible. The left (not so much Democrats, but the "ideological" left on the ground) destroyed it by politicizing and individualizing everything, and then adding a "post-truth" attitude to it. Now, anything goes. You FEEL something is true? Good for you! And that's about it, when it comes to pedagogical methods on the left (yes, I'm exaggerating a little here... but barely!).
And then again, I wasn't even referring to gulag "scholarship" (yet another horrible habit of the left today is to imagine that "we the people" should ignore it), I merely consulted an online Oxford ordinary language dictionary... .
History has proven that EITHER you accept lying OR you actively keep/strengthen a democratic civil society. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Virginia, I can't figure that out either. What does it take to wake them up? Are photos of these people looking becoming human-skeletons like Nazi Germany necessary? Is that what has to happen?!?
Where does all the virulence come from do you think? When hate is so irrational sounding, there quite often is guilt at the bottom of it, denial about something. Any thoughts on this idea?
I think it is fear of what is different of what is known or familiar. And to paraphrase LBJ, nothing makes people feel big than by making others feel small.
Norman, the good professor has called them concentration camps when she discusses them on her podcast. She seems to be one of the few resources I follow that is keeping this issue in the news.
The onslaught of this regime's constant lack of humanity is mindboggling. I now truly understand the rise of Hitler.
Now we have 'HM' Corporations. Capitalism brought to stockholders and funded by Human Misery. HM.
"... not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.” RCH
That's what I thought; these aren't "detention centers". They're concentration camps meant to starve, maim, and kill brown people. What has happened to the soul of America?
Norman, I have been calling them concentration camp prisons almost since I first heard of them in the time of the separation of kids from their parents and putting them in cages back in 2018. Pretending those facilities are anything else is a lie, just like nearly everything that comes from the mouths of this appalling Trumpian regime!
Thank you Professor Richardson for providing information to fuel us to speak up - everyone, read/listen and speak up!
Resource below to easily contact all of Congress - Be LOUD. Trump/the administration is dangerous for our country 💔🤍💙
Use/share this spreadsheet (bit.ly/Goodtrouble) to contact members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly.
Reach out (beyond your own) to as many in the Senate and House as you can. All of this is bigger than “I only represent my constituents” issues.
Funny how the same people screaming about “government efficiency” seem strangely comfortable writing blank cheques to private contractors for cages, corruption and performative brutality. If there’s a giant neon sign flashing WASTE FRAUD ABUSE, it’s hanging right over this entire ‘for-profit’ detention-centre racket.
Trump and cronies burn though the public's money like they won the assets of the US Treasury in a lotto game. So much for there fiscal conservative claims, or really conservative anything. They are just RICO opportunists looting the common weal.
"looting the common weal" is beautifully said; the simply put, sad, infuriating truth of it. It's not just that they're looting us financially; they're looting our happiness, our well-being. That people we know, or at least share a country with, are still supporting them and in some cases cheering them on, is unfathomably despicable.
On the May 26 edition of The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, James Talarico said, “Divide and conquer is the oldest strategy in the book.” For the first time, James and I disagree.
Carefully examine all the evidence before interpreting your observations with logic. Then apply rigorous skepticism to the testing of that logic until every identifiable flaw has been systematically corrected, and everyone returns the same verdict. The “oldest strategy in the book” is repeating Talarico’s healthy “united we stand” message. Comparatively speaking, Ken Paxton’s strategy is simultaneously “newly arrived” and “on life support.”
Talarico’s strategy emerged roughly 12,000 generations ago in the first generations of modern humans. “Divide and conquer emerged roughly 400 generations (100 centuries) ago as the last prehistoric generations of humans met the dawn of the Neolithic Period (as the first agricultural settlements were beginning to appear).
The verdict isn’t because prehistoric modern humans survived (that might be pure luck). The verdict is unanimous because we thrived. Late-prehistoric humans were the dominant vertebrate species on the planet specifically and exclusively because we genetically inherit the “united we stand” strategy. And it is “genetically” inherited because it’s written indelibly into a part of human DNA (the larger “shared in common” part).
Prehistoric “divide and conquer” strategies didn’t exist because they couldn’t survive. Members of hunter-gatherer bands were far more aware of the consequences of selfish behavior and were far too concerned with self-preservation.
A historic “divide and conquer” strategy MIGHT “work” (if you’re okay with defining “work” as “killing the goose that laid the golden egg”).
The predator needs to “smell” its prey. Then it dresses up in sheep’s clothing and hides in large groups where it repeatedly lies, “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” The “strategy” involves turning the predator’s cynicism into the victim’s naivety.
Conclusion: Paxton’s soulless strategy is to continuously increase the number of sad and lonely people. The rubber hits the road when the victim’s pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The “cure” is in Paul McCartney’s words, “And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.” Someone please tell James Talarico.
The ‘United we stand’ approach in hunter/gatherer societies was a combination of two factors. First, of course, was indeed the knowledge of the fragility of their existence. The other, however is implicit in more modern documents like the famous Mayflower Compact signed by the Pilgrims prior to setting up their colony in Massachusetts Bay and explicit in such studies as that of Knud Rasmussen in his pioneering studies of the Netsilik Eskimo.
That message is ‘our way or the highway’.
I’m not sure Mr Talarico would endorse that idea.
The appropriate median approach was made clear by Baron von Steuben as he experienced the American soldier at Valley Forge. As he explained it, one tells European soldiers what to do and they did it. But in America, one first has to tell soldiers why they ought to do it, and then, if they buy one’s explanation, they do it.
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, keep pretending you don't see. I'm counting. One. This has everything to do with the topic. This is the topic. Don't just tell me my logic is flawed. Identify one flaw.
Evidence that my comment has nothing to do with the topic: zero likes and one critical reply.
Evidence that it does: Talarico must win. His brand is "the competent practice of politics." His opponent's brand is "engaging in political malpractice in the first degree." There should be no contest, but he has no more than a good chance of winning. WTF!?!?
Evidence of "many lapses in logic" in my comment: Those three words alone (meaning unsupported by a specific identification of a logic flaw) in your comment.
Evidence of sound logic in my comment: Your inability to identify a single logic flaw despite your original claim plus the opportunity you've ignored to do so since you made that claim.
I don't want to be too critical of the one response sung to a choreus of crickets without being critical of the crickets, but I'll tell everyone how to shut me up. Give me a good-faith reason to believe that Paxton's political carrier is dead.
Option 2: Give me a good-faith reason to believe that "they" need to look in the mirror and "we" are perfect. If it's good enough, I'll pass it on to my "two spiders in a jar" friend Rick Sender. Don't worry about him being someone who doesn't listen. I'm pretty good at translating into language people can understand (assuming they're "keeping up" as Rick likes to say).
Pilgrim, about 40 years ago, I was a young professional who was mentored by a general manager named Joe F. Brown, Jr. His South Carolina drawl disguised his great wisdom. One time, we were in a meeting with a visitor who pontificated at great length about an irrelevant topic with high-sounding verbiage that seemed meant more to impress than to resolve anything. Joe leaned over and stage-whispered to me, "Looks like someone is impressed with the smell of his own perfume."
James has a point, but I'm not sure how relevant the point is. In evolutionary psychology terms, a social species like human beings doesn't flourish as a species unless it can cooperate. But Great Apes also have an us/them brain algorithm that functions to cohere and protect the group of which an individual is part.
Does it matter which came first? Is that even a sensible question?
Laurie ... same as what I said to James ... that is a serious reply worthy of a serious response that I will get to asap (except "p" is not now). P is tomorrow morning.
They are literally looting the planet and the wellbeing of posterity. They removing the civil from our civilization; all in a monomaniacal egocentric quest for absolute power; the devil incarnate.
Reagan's rhetorical theme was that the government (formed among people to secure unalienable human rights, with the consent of the governed) was an foolish encumbrance to liberty, and TV sold it effectively. Utter BS. Repurposing a quip from G.K Chesterton, democracy was not tried and found wanting, it has been tried and found difficult; and yet it is so worthy of the ongoing struggle.
The siren song of "let the rich and powerful do the difficult stuff" is seductive to many, but it is exactly not what our founding documents prescribe. It shows contempt for recognition and defense of human rights and agency that we necessarily, mutually pledge to each other, to maintain and improve a civilized society in a democratic republic.
Thank you again, Loren Bliss, for staying in the fight. Cruelty at the top, leaking down and taken up. Remembering Bonhoeffer and Santayana. Then, for the Christo-Fascists, there’s Jesus of Nazareth. Time to read books instead of tablets and phones. Novels can teach what action movies don’t, cost less, and many have moments of pure joy.
Novels and for that matter, non fiction books, communicate in a way that is different than video. A picture may at times impart an understanding that a thousand words cannot do so precisely, and yet be inadequate in other ways. The camera records appearance in our outer world, yet is less articulately representative of our inner world, our humanly experiential one. Not that there is no overlap, or no stunningly worthy film art, but I just think that words can reach a different kind of human depth. Not with Newspeak. Not with slogans; but with a contemplative probing and poetic framing that one finds in perspicacious writing, the human relevance of which outlives it's author. Reading and writing are participatory, and humanly resonant, in ways that have no equal, and we neglect that key human resource at the risk of our own experiential impoverishment, and potentially, to our own agency, and liberty.
The message is always so clear. Waste, fraud, abuse and violations of human rights on a daily basis don’t matter if we win, anymore than savaging the 14th Amendment is wrong and unconstitutional, as long as we can get away with it.
One day soon, Trumpism will be but a distant nightmare people will have awakened from long ago. In the meantime, the lessons this wrong-is-really-right political movement is imparting to our children, who pay close attention to the hypocrisies they see taking place around them, cannot be underestimated. Trumpism poisons them as effectively as a neurotoxin. It twists their values, perverts their own desire to do good, and increases their cynicism about the world they live in a thousandfold. We will be paying for this foulness a long time to come.
Like all authoritarian regimes they will topple, and there will be dancing in the streets. I honestly think that this government had to happen, if for no other reason than to wake people up to the fragile ecosystem that democracy really is.
But we have a huge charge in front of us when this is all over, of making sure this NEVER happens here again. If we want the younger generation to take the right message and discard cynicism, we too need to act earnestly to instill a society that centers economic fairness and equal justice for all under the law. Part of why we are here is our failure in the past to live up to that. We have to do better. We have to live that message daily, and deliver results that matter. And no, I am not interested in reconciliation with the enemy. They can recant their ways or they can rot. Or as they like to tell us “don’t like it here? Then why don’t you just leave.”
When the American Nuremberg trials begin, can Stephen Miller be first in line to be tried for his crimes against humanity, such as those in Delaney Hall as well as in the first orange regime?
I was just thinking this EXACT thing. There is no punishment on earth that is fit for Miller except to be locked up in a camp and forced to eat worm-ridden food and sleep on cold, cement floors in complete darkness and solitary confinement. Temu Goebbels deserves a Fate worse than ☠️ for all the immense suffering, torture and deaths his policies are causing.
Thanks, Megan! And HCR's article provides all the facts for the letters and calls we make today. These are concentration camps. These are rump's brown shirts.
(I have all Democratic reps but I've made Thom Tillis a special project of mine...)
Tom Tillis is speaking out, hoping to bring the state he has represented (and which from my days at UNC-CH I loved and thought when it was purple that it might be a beacon for the whole South), to its college and university filled potential. (How many know that, until it was closed by Native American attacks, UNC-CH was the first public university in the country?)
I have a different reaction to Tillis. I think he is still the same Republican NC Senate chair that ushered in extreme gerrymandering in NC and is amoral Republican to his core.
I think he has his eye on a presidential run and view his Medicaid vote and strategic criticisms of Trump from that perspective.
Do we dare hope that having given up his “chair,” he may learn to take his democratic constituents more seriously? At least he is speaking up. Thank you for letting us know your suspicions from on the ground, however. I’ll be watching as (excepting Duke) I hold great expectations for NC.
Tillis was,and still is a tea party Republican. He sounds like an adult only because of the contrast between his recent statements and the idiocy and evil actions of the MAGAs.
Wendy, because I used to live in NC and still have an address there - and he's been very vocal that Hegseth is incompetent and should be fired, and that Stephen Miller should be fired, and Patel. I don't trust him but he's often the only R opposing this madness.
Alexandra - I agree that Tillis gets a lot of press as one of the few Rs "opposing this madness". Talk but never any action that makes a difference.
I get the canned responses to my calls and emails. Party line. And was really furious when instead of being troubled by the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti he was concerned that ICE agents needed to be masked to hide their identities from "domestic terrorists".
I do NOT trust him - like you. I think he's a wily Mitch McConnell but better looking. Because I do think he is eyeing 2028, I worry that so many are being persuaded that he is one of the "good" Republicans. There is no such thing in Congress.
We need him voting the way he does, though. So I stay on top of him! I feel I made a difference with Burr, too, before he retired. I know, delusional! There are no good Republicans, I agree.
Please also consider writing about the May 21, 2026, US Customs and Immigration Service memo forcing immigrants to return to their home countries to apply through the local US consulate for changes in status. It is performative cruelty. This is undoubtedly Stephen Miller's work. He knows that many immigrants affected are from countries that are under State Department DO NOT TRAVEL advisories. Many consulates are ill-equipped to process applications following the State Department's personnel cutbacks during DOGE.
Below is the link to the memo issued on the policy change. It is blatant in its cruelty. The tone is "We've always had the discretion to turn the screws. Now we are going to use it."
There are quotas for different categories of visa adjustments that have "waiting" lists where wait times can be up to 10 years for categories like parents of US citizens.
Below is the link to the page that tells you how long people have to wait in various categories from various countries for processing at consular offices. The dates in the spreadsheet are the dates when documentation for the visa application was deemed complete, and are now finally being processed.
Meanwhile, the administration has been slow-walking processing visa status adjudications for people seeking a change to immigrant status in the US. Applicants risk overstaying their original visa, which could then prevent them from ever changing status.
This new policy is a labyrinth of gottchas. It is an attempt to suppress LEGAL immigration.
Refugee categories have been extremely hard hit. Trump’s team reversed the Biden‑era policies by slashing the annual U.S. refugee ceiling from 125,000 to about 7,500 for FY 2026. Administration documents and reporting make clear that most of those 7,500 slots were explicitly prioritized for white South Africans, especially Afrikaners, on the grounds of “illegal or unjust discrimination” and violence against white farmers.
This was a major break with the traditional global, needs‑based approach to refugee resettlement, because it largely excludes applicants from other conflict zones while giving preference to a relatively small, racially defined group from South Africa. This is grotesquely racist.
On May 26, 2026, adding insult to injury, the administration moved to increase that already‑prioritized intake. An AP report, describes a new decision to admit an additional 10,000 white South Africans as refugees during the current fiscal year. This raises the cap for that group from the initially planned 7,500 to 17,500, with the administration justifying the change by citing “unforeseen developments in South Africa” and characterizing the situation as an “emergency refugee” scenario.
And yet the (deluded) belief persists that the ChristoNazi conquest of this (decisively) failed and subjugated nation can be ended by anything less than a World-War-II-caliber effort: an alliance of humanitarian nations; a functioning shadow-government dispersed for security amongst allied capitals abroad (London, Paris, Berlin, Seoul, Tokyo etc.,); an active partisan Resistance as in France, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union during WWII; and lastly, D-Day II: the invasion, defeat, Liberation and disassembly of the Hitler- copycat "Unified Reich"; and then -- as in the Soviet Union -- the no-forgiveness, zero-tolerance prosecution of all fascists, especially all Nazis, Christo and otherwise.
That -- and nothing less -- is what an accurate reading of history is telling us it will take to win this war, but until a sufficient number of us -- we the dwindling number of true humans -- awaken to those facts and organize accordingly, the Regime's gleefully inflicted toll of atrocities will continue unabated, skyrocketing until the ecogenocidal intensity and apocalyptic function of Aryan Christian male supremacy exceeds that of the anti-First-Nations and Original-Nazi holocausts combined.
Wake up, people; it is both astounding and literally terrorizing beyond description how many of us remain trapped in the fatal paralysis imposed by the USian cults of prideful ignorance and mandatory optimism. Thus the Moronic Majority remains willfully oblivious to the fact that what our conquerors are doing is restructuring all of global society into a death camp, thus to "cleanse" the planet of everyone save their ecogenocidally Aryan selves.
I believe that Trump has 1/3 of the electorate under his control, psychologically incapable of accepting anything negative said about him, because they see it as a direct attack on them. Polling shows that disillusionment with Trump is at 2/3 on several major issues and is moving in that direction on others.
Both political parties have self-destructed at this point. The old labels just mask the lack of leadership on both sides of the aisle. There needs to be a reorganization to reflect the reality with new leadership—it is no longer Democrats vs. Republicans, it is democracy defenders vs. authoritarians. Democracy defenders need to organize and put together a shadow cabinet with representation from Never Trump former Republicans, Independents, and Democrats of all stripes. The old labels have to be dropped, as was the case in the successful overthrow of Orban in Hungary.
I do not think we are approaching the apocalypse that you see. But we do need help from our former allies to shine a light on Trump’s lies and unreliability, especially in regard to NATO and Ukraine. They need to put up continuing committed resistance to his crazy, as they have with the steps they immediately took to defend Greenland. A loss by Starmer or Merz to right-wing forces, or Carney witnessing Alberta’s secession, will complicate the situation.
The most crucial issue is recognizing that Xi is turning Russia into a vassal state by delaying the decision on the Siberia 2 pipeline deal, which Russia is counting on for cash to prevent economic collapse. Xi will ultimately be the new hegemon and will determine the outcome of the Ukraine War, and hence the fate of Carney’s “middle countries” agenda. Xi sees a balance between the enormous trade potential with Europe and the US, versus his expansionist desires for Taiwan. Weakening the US by supporting Iran is in Xi’s and China’s best interest. Trump and his minions are blind to the threat.
Georgia, I agree emphatically with all but one of your conclusions. Xi is indeed our upcoming global hegemon. And I'm sure you see the karmic irony in the fact it is the unforeseen consequence of Putin's attempt to seize the entire Ukraine that has reduced him to Xi's vassal -- more proof of my longstanding suspicion extended periods rendered chaotic by war inevitably kindle the deterioration of more complex human societies to the militaristic simplicity of feudalism.
But there are surely no unintended consequences in the ever-more-undeniable truth Trump's reelection was the voters' hatefully deliberate reduction of the U.S. to a pariah state. (I am eagerly awaiting someone to undertake a credible journalistic investigation of the depth of a grotesque truth I learned during my years in the South: that such hatred is typically bred of envy; it is then disguised as moralistic loathing to keep the haters from recognizing their own Ted-Bundy selves.)
As to the probability of apocalypse, three points: (1)-a PhD environmental biologist I know and trust tells me we are already long over the Ragnarok red-line, but she says the ChristoNazi termination of all environmental protections is turning an irreversible but mercifully slower decline into a terrminal nosedive; (2)-the ChristoNazi religious cult, like its less-obviously political snake-handling and koolaid-drinking cousins, devoutly prays for its god to destroy this "fallen" (i.e., "demon-conquered') world -- and given the armed forces' ongoing refusal to obey their oath to defend the Constitution, it is obvious the world's most powerful military is now under the complete control of these ecogenocidal fanatics; and, perhaps most importantly, (3)-the fact that unless by some genuine miracle we discover a way to do the scientifically impossible -- that is, until we can do as UFOs are said to be able to do and shut down the (entire) USian bio/thermonuclear attack machine -- there is no way to stop the ChristoNazis from following their messiah Hitler's advice and declaring victory by destroying the planet.
I've also been alarmed by this new USCIS policy to require that green card applications/renewals be processed from out of the country. Clients going to USCIS offices should set up their family preparedness, while we attend to how to most effectively proactively protect them, and support them in the event of detention.
I am supporting a refugee from Ethiopia - whose husband was murdered by government militias, who then set her on fire. Fortunately, the courts said refugees cannot be detained by ICE. But they are obviously withholding or slow-walking her green card. I cannot believe how my government allows the naked punishment and imprisonment of law-abiding immigrants. (Not to mention conducting wars of conquest…..)
Trump, Miller, Vought, Hegseth, Blanche are finished. Americans hate these ghouls' agenda. Everyday in everyway they humiliate America and the human dignity we have stood for throughout our lives.
Believe me. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. They all suffer from it. They are all deranged.
I think the last 4 can be impeached and convicted before 2028. I don’t think Trump will be unless he crosses the oligarchs. His ability to force the primary outcomes scares me, although I think it is a stupid move on his part.
US SENATOR Andy Kim was my Representative to Congress so this feels very personal. The gaslighting and lies from DHS are disgusting. We know where the WASTE, FRAUD & ABUSE are happening, in the bowels of the trump regime, spending billions of our tax dollars on needless wars, crony corruption and monuments to self-glorification of Dear Leader.
Anyone: Please post The court's (sic) 1 day list of 'cases'.
Thank You.
***********
Answer:
"To access the daily docket for immigration cases being heard at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility, use the ICE ERO eFile Portal. Because local immigration judges are actively processing large daily dockets, exact, real-time lists of pending cases and hearings are managed by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) and are available to registered legal representatives online."
**************************************
Regardless, I will follow up with Professor Kanstroom yet another brilliant Boston College Professor: "Daniel Kanstroom is Professor of Law, Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar, Director of the International Human Rights Program, and an Associate Director ... Read more".
You know, Heather I just love, destroying all your posts. They’re so biased. They’re so one-sided. Why don’t you just tell your audience hear the truth you don’t need $2 million all the time just tell them the truth they’ll still respect you they’ve pay they forgiven you for forgetting about truth and your historical history.
So try telling them the whole truth from now on see what happens just test it just test the water you’ll be happier. They may be pissed for a while, but they’ll get over it because the truth always rules
Do you know you should probably evaluate your own post. It’s never about the words that come out of someone’s mouth. It’s about the capacity of the ignorant, stupid readers or listeners. So you could be very correct.
And so far as the Trump is concerned, there’s only so much stupidity that you can tolerate so much ignorance, so much hate so self-inflicted wounds to the other participants here. I didn’t realize there were these many suckers/lemmings in the country. Alas. Without shame, they keep rearing their heads. Sad and it’s very depressing.
The troll just admitted he is a "destroyer" not a troll. The platform, Substack Inc. admits that the corporation is bound by their own TOU & their own choice of law.
Do you know what this group calls a troll? They have people here who post 20 and 30 times a day and as long as they commiserate with the other people here and swim in the same urine as the other people here,
They are not trolls. The only troll is somebody to post something that disagrees with them. Usually cowards used to be big members of Twitter Until it was purchased by Elon, and then became a 5348 proposition led by Democrats, but then the people here actually had to listen to the real story the whole story and saw things I didn’t like. So they slithered over to blue sky Where they didn’t have to fear any facts or posts of reality. They could live in their own pool of urine together
Why don't you spend more time on Twitter/X? It certainly seems more suitable to your sort of drivel. As a 'destroyer of distortion of posts' you might even start a cult there.
You know your problem is Russell. You’re in fucking denial.
Twitter used to be an 85% or 90% liberal website liberal functioning site. And what happened was Elon Musk was smart enough to buy it and he balanced it and made it pretty much a 50-50 proposition although it was still 5347 liberal to Cohen conservative
And all people like you you fucking cowards you slid over you slithered over to Bluesky where you could all swim in the same piss in the same lies and not have to deal with reality and that’s what happened here
All the chickens that don’t want to know the truth like you do that
You have literally become a waste at least back then when you wanted to discuss global warming or climate change, we could have
Climate change is now not even in the top 10 And anything that happens with climate change will be taken care of with new technology
Even Al Gore has now turned around from his fucking fantasy before about the North Pohl totally melting by 2013. That’s what he said.
And now he’s claiming what’s gonna happen next we’re gonna have a cooling period because the Gulfstream is going to get cold and gonna cool down the entire seaboard of the East Coast of the US
And he’s even wrong about that But AOC is gonna get blasted in a few few years for her ridiculous comments about global warming, and climate change
You are locked in your position and I’m not If Joe Biden had done any of the things that Donald Trump is doing, I’d be hailing Joe Biden as a good president
Do you have access to a computer or a laptop or an iPad? That’s all you need
Just as a touch of an example a few weeks ago, and then again, probably a week ago she addressed the fact that Trump’s Republican Party was coming apart. The wheels were falling off. And every single indication, since then has been the opposite. Trump is stronger than ever stock market is stronger than ever. He decides how when and He’s going to finish off the war with Iran
And he won the war on the day it began. And then addition, if you noticed how many candidates in the primaries, he has an endorsed. Check them out
I don’t think she’s avoiding it It’s not avoiding it she’s just giving you the picture, but she wants you to hear She’s avoiding to tell you the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Donald Trump is now the most positively influential human being on planet. That’s what she should be telling you
Once again, you should not be asking Questions like I say, most liberals, especially the ones here or what we call superficial dermatologist is touch the surface of the skin and see a headline they like and swallow it whole
Thanks for replying Rick. I'd say the only careful thinking bit of what you wrote is that she may have done what goes on a lot in politics, which is to claim that the wheels are coming off the other peoples chariot.
That to claim as you do that DT won the war with Iran the day it began is just amazingly simplistic on your part. fact that getting on for two months since April 8 when the ceasefire was because he wasn't winning in any simple sense of the word. It gives me no pleasure to say that Iran is doing enough damge to oil infrastructure in that part of the world that the US had to stop unless it really did go far enough to produce a recession. Which it might still and then the US will be heavily blamed for that not least by Americans come November.
Thats just one response to a simple claim of yours. But your simple declaration that 'she's avoiding to tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth' Rick applies at least as strongly to you, probably more so.
The war was over on day one Ian. How do they say that the rest is positude or conclusion This war will end badly for Iran. But hopefully there will be enough impact to stifle the proxies for quite a while or end them entirely because they won’t be funded ‘
There is no reason why Donald Trump should give them back their billion dollars we should spend it on our own reparations. And we should continue to bomb until they kneel,… I am quite surprised as our most people who have evaluated Donald Trump over the years very surprised that he stopped bombing. Although the next targets to bomb would’ve been substantially more serious But that’s what it’s gonna take And like I said what he should be doing now is escorting ships with American ships through The strait And if our ship is attacked, all bets are off for the Iranians.
And by the way, that’s all that the left was talking about when Trump took office recession stock, market crash, depression, economically, failing, and every single thing they could do to describe what is going to happen with Trump and he is defied every single expert
Pundit after pundit mostly from the liberal/Democratic side have now admitted that they were wrong that they thought inflation would happen that they thought this recession would happen that they thought the tariffs would backfire and now they’ve learned
And for not for this war that is helping not only the world, but Israel specifically as well this country would be sailing and if any of the fucking Democrats would do what Clinton and Gingrich did which is what made this country great was get together and formula Policy that settles at much as they can than this country would be rocking
But every fucking democrat is doing everything he possibly can to disrupt anything that Donald Trump tries.
They would listen to him if he hadn’t stopped bombing. You know it and I know it and the world knows it eventually it would be all over
And I’ll say it again, Russell the United States should be escorting ships through the street and if they get shot upon or damaged, Iran is done evacuate Tehran drop a huge arsenal of bombs and level it and then let’s see if they listen to him
Russell he should’ve never stopped bombing ever ever ever, and all his military associates said the same thing and a majority of Americans feel the same way. He did like some presidents or many presidents do which is unlike him he let them off the hook if he had kept bombing every single day, Iran would not be in the position that it’s in right now. He should’ve taken over car Island. He should’ve escorted ships through the Through the street with American ships, and if Iranian hit an American chips, it would be the end of Iran. Which in the 1980s would’ve been a sin but today would’ve been a miracle for the planet
For him, that was a huge mistake to stop bombing. And sooner or later, if he’s gonna make any progress, he’s going to have to hit a strategic civilian target that will help caused the indigent population to rise up to whatever degree possible. And if he continues to starve the run in government of profits from the oil that will go along way to move. But he should start trickle bombing, every Single day and not let up
Heather's exactly spot-on as to the extent of thuggery metastasizing under criminal Donald.
These ICE agents (and Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and others to whom Donald wants to feed our tax money) all aim to kill the rule of law. And we've had a most successful previous 80 years, in America and across the world, for many of the institutions and alliances the U.S. nurtured: for democracy, science (including vaccines), open seas, and other forms of navigation and mobility, with education for all to rise.
Donald and his criminal syndicates didn’t kill this, but rode on an already extant criminality, at least since the Powell memo of 1971. That with its far-right foundations set the corporate classes and the rich to rule, in the U.S. and around the world, for all the dictators and demagogues to whom Donald has been kissing up, and all the pedophile and other criminal rings he’s been covering up.
Donald’s tsar of hatreds, Stephen Miller, epitomizes the thug power and brute force of all oligarchs, and Donald’s pal rapists. But we've got great ones among us opposing them, such as Ezra Klein and Yuval Noah Harari in a recent podcast discussing how, among history’s greatest achievements, have been in the cooperation we’ve also much longer enabled.
This hasn’t anything to do with “the Powell Memo” — your own private shorthand fantasy to explain everything from the arrival of crunchy peanut butter to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. You just can’t resist inserting your own bizarre bugaboo into everything — all without a speck of lubricant. And you do so practically every day, in the most tiresome, tendentious and utterly predictable ways, like a cuckoo clock always striking thirteen.
It’s so bizarre I can’t recall Heather or any other serious contemporary observer ever talking about it, much less any candidate for any office anywhere making this a platform issue worthy of discussion. I wonder why…
Look at what the Powell memo's key foundations did, ICTT.
That is, from the Heritage Foundation, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), and more, there's a through line to what ICE, CBP, and criminal Donald have been doing today.
At the end of Ezra Klein's talk with Yuval Noah Harari, the latter suggested further reading. The key book he chose for understanding all the acolytes of brute force and today's moneyed dominance, now most represented by Stephen Miller (and ICE, and CBP) is best explicated, he said, by Frans de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics."
Funny, when it was first published I read every page of Harari’s “Sapiens” with serious study in mind, but don’t recall a single sentence about “the Powell memo.” Must be the caliber of the company I keep, I guess.
The Frans de Waal book explains the Stephen Miller type, ICTT.
That's according to Yuval Noah Harari, who said in talking with Ezra Klein that reading it was a seminal moment in his understanding the history leading to criminal Donald, ICE, and CBP.
ICTT, I wrote my comment on Lewis Powell before reading yours to Phil Balla. You are undoubtedly aware of the power of communication of some people. Why do you call what he wrote “name dropping”?
He came of age, Marge, in the first flush of the Powell memo.
When he started college, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and the Hoover Institution (at that time also one of the most far-right) all perfected money and organization for massive lobbying campaigns of shame against academics using any humanities.
They targeted any uses of novels, memoirs, histories, or other arts as marginal, decorative, ornamental at best, in intellectual life which they all posited as professionally necessarily "objective" only, neutral, specialist-specialized.
Combined with the serious budget cuts for public colleges and universities which ALEC wrested from all U.S. state legislatures, they won. Not only eliminated humanities from American public life, but convinced all of ICTT's age that using any ever exhibited oneself as amateur, dilettante only.
More of the results from this history appear in Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police" (2003).
You literally haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. You know nothing whatever about me, my education, background, training. Such shameless arrogance is difficult even to fathom.
We should think about Powell as a “Southern gentleman” as he would have had slaves before 1860. As he would have ejected me from his dinner table as he did not “recognize” me there—invited by his wife and daughter who had been a student of my professor husband—since learning the effect of the Memo, I have understood the source and the intended force.
More to the point, every military-age (16-55) male amongst those 17,500 South Africans cited by the astute Georgia Fisanick is a potential addition to the new Gestapo the ChristoNazis are building to enforce their agendas of zero-tolerance theocracy and Aryan male supremacy.
There were a ton of stories to report on yesterday. Several primaries (including Cornyn’s loss to a fanatical Trumper and indicted criminal in Texas), the South Carolina state Senate’s refusal to take up redistricting (for the second time) before the mid-terns, and maybe most importantly — a three-judge federal panel in Alabama voting unanimously (including two Trump appointees) that the attempt to gerrymander voting districts in Alabama had NOTHING to do with “partisanship” and everything to do with race, and therefore violates the 14th Amendment. Their ruling took 89 pages and specifically condemns attempts to use “partisanship” as a flimsy veneer to conceal race-based gerrymandering, which in turn necessitated rare federal judicial intervention in state elections.
That is an enormous ruling with serious, immediate implications. The reasoning, the length of the ruling itself, the fact that 2 out of 3 judges were Trump appointees — all makes it increasingly difficult for the Supreme Court to ignore arguments, critical rulings, and further pretend that “partisanship” is anything else other than a flimsy white robe meant to conceal one goal only.
And, oh yes, the small matter about the supposed cease-fire in Iran blowing up in Fatty Chancre’s face at the very moment he was bloviating nonsense about having made a deal in order to manipulate the markets — only about the 11th time he has done so.
My point wasn’t that outrage about this other very important development isn’t newsworthy, but that it did have a lot of competition on Memorial Day that helped crowd it out. Some of those other events were true hard-won victories indeed and needed explanation and citation. I have no doubt we’ll hear more about Senator Kim and Customs’ crude attempt to gag free speech and accountability in the coming days.
The level of atrocities rises daily! Humans can't keep up! Epstein files, crypto grift, outright bribery for favors, the J-6 slush fund, inhumane treatment of alleged illegal immigrants, murder of citizens on our city streets, a questionable war with Iraq, the cost of living that is ever rising, the destruction of the East Wing and the subsequent ballroom/bunker construction. This administration is squandering BILLIONS of dollars daily. A billion is 1,000 million! Imagine what could be done with that money to help people. November can't come soon enough.
Kim, Frost and others fighting for accountability and justice are brave patriots. With the Orange Felon-rapist-traitor ailing and his regime failing but causing seemingly infinite and outrageous harms, I just made this toolkit to help ensure that in November people vote in numbers TOO BIG TO RIG!
It has actions any of us can take to Get Out The Vote:
Damn well said! (And if we had a functioning shadow government. we'd have the functioning Ministry of Education necessary to get those billboards up and speaking.)
Yes! This is really one of the saddest failures. There were strong advocates from Rep. Wiley Nickel of North Carolina to Tim Snyder, writer of ON TYRANNY and general sustainer of sanity on Ukraine and everything else, but it seemed to prove too exhausting at a time when we just couldn't believe this had happened again to our country, only this time we actually elected a convicted criminal. And Texas may do it again.
Thanks, Vee. "Action is the antidote to despair," right?
Seeing so much complaining and doomsaying in online comments, including about horrors like the $1.8 billion fund, which is not yet operative but treated by so many as a done deal, I wanted to provide people with ways to TAKE ACTION and MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
My goal:
20% repeating what's horrible and what's wrong
80% reporting on the people and organizations fighting back and actually stopping criminality and corruption and cruelty, and on giving individual readers actions they can take.
Shameful. The actions of Trump and his DHS thugs and Republican enablers are immoral (maybe the word should be amoral—there is no morality there), illegal, and unAmerican. Not to mention the money that should be used for things the country wants and needs but is being wasted or handed out to cronies. It makes me sick.
Immoral works for me. As you indicate, cruel, sick, shameful, criminal. The patent polar opposite of "Liberty and Justice For All. It;s hard to see why anyone except the crooks collecting the cash would support it.
‘What this office is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.
The Executive Office of the President has no inspector general. There are zero required privacy disclosures filed across all twelve programs and no published contracts with any outside vendor. Forty federal websites run behind one personal Cloudflare account. And the Presidential Records Act seals everything for twelve years the day this administration ends, meaning until 2040, no one outside the White House can see who works there, what they collected, or where any of the data went.’
🤨 #ContactYourCongress - is your confidential personal information secretly being recreated by the White House / Designed and Engineered in D.C. by National Design Studio.
Be afraid, but keep protesting every way you can and “VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION YOU ARE ENTITLED TO VOTE IN!” From Maude B. Motley, VA, teacher of world history and civics, Varina High School, 1949.
I watched five minutes of the local 11:00 news last night on WTNH-8, the New Haven ABC affiliate owned by right-wing Texas chain Nexstar, and they showed a clip of the demonstration -- but not one single comment about Andy Kim beibg pepoer-sprayed, which was already long in the news cycle.
All the local CT stations (except Viacom-owned WVIT-30 in West Hartord) are owned by right-wing chains. I immediately shut the damn thing off rather than wait around for Kimmel. These stations have no cred with me.
You need USNOW, formerly MSNBC. There is Andrew Weissmann, Ali Velshi, Joe Scarborough, Judge Luttig, and a lot of congresspersons of all stripes, and pretty much no holds barred. It’s cable, a bit clumsy mechanics, but the best for intelligent presentation. CNN is watchable, but less interesting.
We have created camps and are torturing people within them. One day, people will look at the humans who were in those camps, and say, "they are camp survivors." And one day, people will look at every US citizen who was alive during this time, and say, "What did they know? What did they do? Were they complicit? Did they look away?"
Thanks Dr. Richardson, and to all of you who are doing something, for bearing witness and not looking away, and taking action.
These ICE agents have no souls. I hope they all end up incarcerated in the very detention centers that they so cruelly use to abuse people who merely want to live and work here. And that hope extends to the Trump lackeys. I’d hate to be any of them when they meet their maker!
(1) “Democrats Can Flip The Senate By Winning 4 Of These 6 States! (w/ Dan Pfeiffer) - YouTube” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWtFUPyGcak. Jen Rubin of the Contrarian interviews Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America.
(2) Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project interviews Democrat Bobby Palido who is running for U.S. Representative in the 15th district of Texas and Democrat James Talarico who is running for U.S. Senator in Texas against Ken Paxton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILLzH38kyCc
(3) LegalAF interviews Stephen Spaulding of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School about the Brennan Center’s proposals for reforming the U.S. Supreme Court. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro-Ow_YeJdg
The idea that everyone, even criminals (which these detainees are most emphatically not), deserve dignity, is already gone for certain people - many people in MAGA circles and even beyond that, I'd venture. They are spreading the old idea that some people are not even people - they are not *really* humans, and thus do not deserve, well, anything. Not even the preservation of their lives. It's really frightening when you realize how many people have thoughts and beliefs along those lines. Immigrants, democrats, "the wokes", queer people - well, they're not really people like us, are they? It's not like they really have rights...
yet people STILL have their knickers in a knot about Clinton saying ten years ago that half of Trump supporters are a basket of deplorables! (And she went on to offer ways to help the other half, but nobody ever mentions that part. Policy is boring. Pearl-clutching - about some people - is fun.)
It's been said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. That's not a house in debate or coping with controversy; it's a fracture of the solidarity that defines a nation. In the case of the Civil War, follow the money. In the events of the day, follow the money. Not for nothing "the love of money" (and other forms of power) has long come with warning labels.
This is a major escalation and provocation. Things are getting really interesting in a hurry. The regime is desperate and degrading rapidly. They’re in crisis and so are we.
Joel, I regret to inform you that those "slimy invertebrates" have not been under rocks. They have lived in the house next door and the house down the street. They live in your town and my town. They have been with us since the first white Europeans set foot on the North American continent and said to the Indigenous Peoples, "We'll have your land. We can do this the easy way or the hard way." First it was easy, then it was hard.
The white invaders have been here so long, they've forgotten they weren't here first. Now, they think they have the right to erase melanin-endowed persons from their stolen land.
In the past, laws made these cruel bigots hide their cruelty and prejudice. But they've found a champion to flout the law with impunity, and in turn, create an environment where any white person can flout the law in service to the tyrant.
Money is the great seduction. As the public school system cracked, aided by desegregation of public schools and mega churches (mob “Christianity”) the uneducated dropouts, lost contact with democratic principles (see the Powell Memo described today in these comments). Desperate for jobs and answers, many Americans, Depression still close to mind, grasped for the “American Dream” any way they could. Then we got the current SCOTUS nightmare to finish the wrecking.
Can we cease using the euphemism detention centers for these facilities? By any reasonable definition, they are concentration camps. The public understands the heinous quality of concentration camps. Let’s begin speaking of them with accuracy.
Demanding basic human rights is now “naked judicial activism.” While a protest against stripping prisoners naked, feeding them worm-infested food, denying medical care to those who clearly need it, and treating human beings who seek refuge and asylum like cattle to be traded for money to the highest bidder is just a “public relations stunt” rather than a moral stand against forced bondage and slavery.
Everyone knows that Memorial Day should be observed properly — shopping for furniture at bargain prices, for example, not for anything political, like exercising due process, inspecting prisons or holding customs officials accountable to law and procedures — the stuff that countless thousands enlisted and died for, to whom nothing but lip service is offered in return.
Not just the most corrupt and least competent — but way and above the most fucked up administration in American history, bar none.
“……the most fucked up administration in American history…” = America’s first openly fascist regime.
And why approximately 1/3 of this population can't see that it is a heinous act in itself is the question for the ages. However, there is this explanation that is offered.
How will these people ever be reached? The stupidity is unbelievable.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2456629481475440
Why bother trying to reach them? Simply exclude them from their civic responsibilities, since they have demonstrated that they are incapable of performing them.
Wandyrer, at least those people exercised one of their civic responsibilities by voting. We don’t agree with their vote and they may not have the education, the time, or whatever to take more civic responsibilities. Given today’s standards, they may not even have a sense of the duties of a citizen. The political parties have by-and-large suggested that voting for their candidates is all one really need do.
We need to get massive messenging across to the USA population that voting every two years is NOT all that citizenship requires.
The millions who decided not to even bother voting or protested by sitting out the vote are more concerning to me.
These people voted to literally set the Republic on fire and try to impose human rights violations, slavery, fascism, religious intolerance, and corruption on the US government. They should be thrilled if they don't get rounded up and shot or hanged, like we did with the last Nazis we confronted, and like we should have done to the Confederates.
I'm not remotely concerned by the inaction of the millions of people who recognized they were offered nothing by any of the candidates being proposed and stayed home, because they recognized the difference between inaction and ACTIVELY MAKING THINGS WORSE.
I would bet good money that we'll more than half of those 37%ers could pass the citizenship exam without extensive studying, if then.
The inhumanity is staggering. What have we become? Nazi Germany hid the truth too….
Holly, I don't mean to "like" your comment; I wish there was a button to click to say "AGREED!"
(I see you are a 2 month paid subscriber. Be ye a long time "free" reader or returned/lapsed paid subscriber, THANK YOU for subscribing! As the self-designated Walmart greeter of the comment forum, I wish to WELCOME you!👋🏼 I am very grateful for each person who "puts their money where their mouth is" because every person who adds there voice here helps shine a light on the insanity of MAGA)
Like button = agreed
Remember Nazi Germany came to us to learn how to be better Nazis. This has been a long time coming, but from the moment the 3/5ths compromise was written into the constitution it was always going to lead here.
The old film Mortal Storm worth a watch.
Thank you for recommending "The Mortal Storm". I looked it up and plan to watch it soon. The parallels to today are disturbing.
It’s obscene.
I agree it is obscene. What makes it obscene to me is the republicans that continue to go along with this heinous republican regime. mike johnson actively pursuing the misnamed "christian nationalism" bullshit. Of course he wants to believe the DHS crap over credible reporters. How about john thune. I wonder what he thinks when he goes to church on Sunday. How about tom emmer R-MN. Claims he lives by his Catholic beliefs. Ahh, this is Catholicism? This is loving your neighbor? How about anyone that claims they are "Christian". Are they really still claiming they are followers of Christ? Is this called loving your enemy? Loving your neighbor as yourself? Are these incarcerated immigrants even really the enemy? The hypocrisy of the right wing evangelical "Christian " church is nothing short of blasphemy in it's worst form. That's what I call obscene!
The hypocrisy in religion is why I don’t believe in the tenets of any belief. One cannot be a ‘good’ Christian and still go home, beat the kids, ignore those less fortunate, etc. There is nothing Christian-like about tRUMP or those puppeteers who control him.
There's a better reason for not believing in any religious tenets. We share our DNA with every single living thing on earth: plants, animals, insects. We all have evolved from a single-celled creature (LUCA) that lived 3.5 billion years ago. We now know from further study that Lucy (3.2 million years ago) was not the first human. So much for Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.
Emmer, from Minnesota, "living his Catholic beliefs?" The Inquisition?
100%!!!!
It's Come to This, just as I expect, y our comments are right on target!! I do wish more people would pay attention and stand up and say "no more, not in our name!"
Yup. Yup. And yup.
Yes, Norman. Naming the beast is critical to recognizing the grotesque evil of concentration camps right here in our country.
I agree, Norman. Maybe they’re not using gas to actively kill detainees, but they sure as hell trying to kill them in other ways while still holding off any responsibility. “Oh, he died of an infection? Ooopsie…”
For hundreds of years, autocrats and dictators have used starvation as a weapon including Trump, Bibi, Putin, Hitler, etc.
EVERY REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT AS WELL AS EVERY PERSON THAT OWNS A PIECE OF THESE CORPORATIONS THAT ARE PROFITING FROM THESE INHUMANE ACTS.
Not surprisingly, their names are never reported, just like the sexual predators and human traffickers in the Epstein files.
Dont Forget Joseph Stalin who used Starvation to kill Thousands of Ukrainian Farmers and their families in the 193O's in what is called the "Holomodor", because the farmers refused to take part in Stalin's collectivization.
Millions then KMD, not thousands.
Even one is too many.
Thank you, Phil Balla, for the true scope of that atrocity. Another unloved child ruler with no learned empathy.
Virginia, he used to drop in unannounced while some of his underlings were having a meal. They all hoped they and their families would not suffer any ill consequences...of course, some of them did. Unpredictability and the fear it produces. Sound familiar??
Which “he”, Michele? Trying to find him?
Millions of Iranians also died from disease and starvation in WW2. Under the watchful eyes of the US and Britain.
Before uncle Ralph Kuhn died in Italy he had a copy of Three women in North Africa, emaciated beyond survival standing on the roadside hoisting their long robes above their naked waists as columns of G.I.s marched north trying not to see them. When his footlocker came home to Montana I found it covered in cobwebs in the basement of my aunt Jimmie’s home in 1964. I wanted to ask her if they were saved but I couldn’t risk her grief. I cried for her and those women resolving to fix the world. As time has passed the crux of the situation has worsened. This, the foulest thread of human degradation, the starvation deaths, the begging of prostitution, the brutality uncaught, unchecked, undenied, and unforgivable brings to mind the Mortal Sin.
Now as our exalted Congress plays ping pong tapping lightly leadership tethered to this weighty matter with a promise of a forever answer we are asked to believe we must count these women and children as liars proposing a cunning deceit. Sure. The victims as opposed to the used car salesmen selling us the transmission filled with sawdust.
We have the pictures. We have the dialogues. We have the geologic fortification. We have the money trail. We have those entrapped lies. We have the bodies. We have the histories. They are intertwined, entangled, inextricably cohabiting congressional allegiances. We have the never ending broken laws and reinterpretations of the constitution in order to produce invalid code like bute ridden mounts seeking Kentucky derby royalty which will never pass the blood test. I ask you all, For whom the bells toll. Which part of all of us dies as this slides into impunity?
Now Americans believe “Nazi” when they hear about Ukraine and remembering the history of Holomodor, it’s easy to understand why some Ukrainians welcomed the Germans as “liberators” in 1941. Starvation is a great teacher.
And when you vote this year, remember what Gary said—every.republican.is.responsible.
This is why in the Northeast, where Citizens Bank is a major player, the campaign to get people and institutions to move their money out of it is catching fire. Citizens invests in and does business with both GeoGroup and CoreCivic after other banks had decided to withdraw. Focus your energy on CB and whatever banks still work with the concentration camp companies. And check your portfolio for investments any of them.
Myra, excellent idea as loss of money is a great incentive to change policies.
https://investigate.afsc.org/banks-financing-private-prison-companies?utm_source=chatgpt.com
For the record, Citizens Bank & Trust in Florida is not affiliated with Citizens Bank (Citizens Financial Group.)
GJ, every bit of insanity and cruelty of Trump has pained me, but it has been the cutting of SNAP benefits in the US, and USAID around the world that was the final straw. We've been donating to WCK and also, I have been snatching up loss leaders at the grocery store to donate to our local food pantry. We bring a few bags of groceries every couple of weeks. It's not a great deal, but its the best immediate thing I can do.
What gets me is that under Democratic Presidents when we give to the food banks there is usually enough to go around. And now even teachers need to use the donated foods. We do the same when we can Miselle and hope it's enough so that people don't go hungry. But that doesn't help those in foreign countries.
GJ, I've mentioned on here I have a daughter who lives in a Chgo suburb but works in a rural district 40 minutes away. She has over a decade of experience and has yet to crack a $50K yr salary. We help out as much as we can. Her pride must be acknowledged, so I don't offer cash, but I "treat" her to a tank of gas at least once a month when we fill up, and I will pick up things I know she can use.
I get it and that should be a crime (to pay teachers that little.) My daughter is a pharmacy tech and makes about $50K. My sister-in-law makes her lunch every day which saves her quite a bit. $25/hour is barely a living wage for one person in most places in the US.
Miselle, excellent idea. Thank you.
I can stretch my donation this way. Those loss leaders might not be things I want. I can't recall if it was D4N here, or Pat Cole? but someone whose family relied on a food bank years ago suggested canned chili to me, so I always donate some of that. I was grateful for the suggestion. (Also, our food bank was DELIGHTED to get about a dozen new toothbrushes I had! I use an electric one, but the dentist gives us a new manual at each visit. Our store also had a loss leader of toothpaste, 99 cents a tube.)
Interesting. Good suggestion Miselle. If you can't afford the dentist, then you won't get the free toothbrushes. Good point.
Absolutely!
Between 15 and 55 million people starved to death during the Great Chinese Famine from 1959 to 1961. This catastrophe was primarily a man-made result of Mao Zedong’s "Great Leap Forward"
During the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór) between 1845 and 1852, roughly 1 million people died from starvation and related diseases, due to British rule.
What a terrible way to die.
https://carriekaufman.substack.com/p/the-world-is-reorganizing-itself?r=cb67r&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
"America first"? Nope. "America last." Trumpty-Dumpty has effectively finished the USA as a world power, and as a first world country. The ultrarich are bleeding it dry while the American citizens die of poverty and measles epidemics.
Let's not forget, Dutch, those also dead from:
1) years'-long opioid epidemic;
2) AR-15s in the hands of loner young men;
3) obesity and other untreated ill health due to poor nutrition among the millions of the working class whose jobs cynical elites offshored.
Absolutely right, Phil... But don't forget the young women dying of complications from illegally performed abortions.
Dutch Mike, women also die because hospitals are afraid to treat them. Childbirth has always been dangerous and so we are making it so here.
While some may have been benign neglect and careless self interest from both parties, our present maniacal misleader sets new records for malicious wreckage of some of the best works of our usually,albeit slowly, ever improving democracy.
I suspect -- if reincarnation is anything other than a compensatory fantasy -- what we would find here in 2076 (assuming, of course, the Unified Reich is somehow miraculously kept from following the advice of its Messiah Hitler and destroying the world in an ultimate assertion of victory), is the genuinely civilized, genuinely democratic Union of Canada expanded to include most of what are now the so-called Blue States. The resultant nation is infinitely protected by a fully militarized British Commonwealth; by an equally militarized European Union; and by a thoroughly reorganized United Nations now structured to minimize the power and influence of anti-democratic regimes – this based on official recognition that anti-democratic is also pro-apocalypse. As to the remainder of the failed United States, I suspect all of the former Confederacy and the so-called Red States will be mere Third World banana republics, one or two squabbling confederations of Christian theocracies awash in Aryan male supremacy and ruled with lynch-mob brutality as zero-tolerance slave plantations by Ted-Bundy-caliber tyrants. Continued Nazism, religious warfare and class strife however disguised (including by the maliciously deceptive euphemisms "capitalism" and "neoliberalism"), will still keep world peace out of reach, but our pridefully subhuman cousins, Homo sapiens inhumanus, will at least no longer be able to reverse humanitarian evolution as they are now doing. The alternative? Nothingness: The eternal nullification of our species, the eternal murder of our Mother Earth by her reduction to a Precambrian lifelessness toxified to permanence. That's what I see -- and my prognosis is by no means a solitary conclusion. Quoth a trio of our True Prophets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5al0HmR4to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Y-Kiqz-4g&list=RDb8Y-Kiqz-4g&start_radio=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdEmGATyFPI&list=RDpdEmGATyFPI&start_radio=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO8862McM00&start_radio=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEARBuipahM&list=RDTEARBuipahM&start_radio=1
(The above sequence of links is a dialogue, and were I not so paralyzed with compu-loathing, I would have figured out how to mail it as a playlist. With https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DwE1u45a5U&list=RD_DwE1u45a5U&start_radio=1 as an explanatory footnote and the Graves' translation of the "Hanes Taliesin" as context.)
Adden-dumb 09:40PDT27May26: finally figured out how to post playlists: Here are the above links in LP form: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNB7VTPWjLJJhCfGOrbWVY03PeGK1qFne&si=U6FjRuqhF1yfqTHy
Detainee suicide rates are rising as well.
They only have the ‘weapon’ of suicide to use against their illegal seizure and inhumane imprisonment.
The cover-up is organized and just as ‘planned’ as all the other falsehoods emanating from the ‘Liar-in-Chief’.
Apx 60 years of practice in DUPLICITY, FRAUD, EMBEZZLEMENT, ADULTERY, INSIDER TRADING, TREASONOUS SCHEMES, SLANDER & LIBEL, BRIBERY, 💀DEATH THREATS💀, FALSE NEWS, SCOTUS…
The detainee martyrs are gambling that their sacrifice will MATTER…
…MAKE IT SO!
And after the Communist Revolution in China, apparently thousands “committed suicide” by jumping out 5th story windows….
I was deeply affected by the movie about Cambodia, The Killing Fields. Is it hyperbolic to have deep concern about possibly disappeared people around that swampy marshland camp in FL?
Norman: I second your motion. Where do I sign?
I third this.
I landed in West Palm Beach FlA yesterday and a family member drove me to see my sister who is ill. On the way she pointed to a building under construction and said, "Now they're building these warehouses, I don't know what they're for" and I asked, detention centers? She answered in disbelief, mentioning Alligator Alcatraz and brushing all else off. An intelligent woman but her news sources are from TV. I've seen maps of where these concentration camps are and many are so tiny (in strip malls) that we might pass by without knowing. Like with most of the Regime's crimes, In Plain Sight. This is something we all can act on. The Sherriff in my MA county shows up and speaks out, clarifying that it will not happen in jails and prisons she oversees. Thanks to HCR for this post and all who keep opening our eyes!
“In February 2025 the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison.”
Joan,the GEO Group headquarters is in Boca Raton.They have major contracts throughout the state and, of course, are bigly Republican donors.
Thank you, Kathy, for adding to our information. I look for GEO patches on uniforms now.
Good to know. I’ll get more info because facts hit home.
My snarky take...
The Department of Homeland Security unveiled its bold new immigration policy this week, officially titled “Everything Is Fine, Please Stop Looking.”
Under the program, detainees are welcomed into private facilities where they receive the full American efficiency experience: spoiled food, missing medical care, overcrowded rooms, and court hearings timed carefully to prevent the dangerous spread of due process.
Officials described the system as “humane,” noting that every detainee is given several thoughtful options, including self-deportation, confusion, despair, or being transferred somewhere their lawyer can’t find them.
When lawmakers attempted to inspect the facility, DHS responded with the warm hospitality taxpayers have come to expect, by pepper-spraying everyone within range, including a United States senator. “This is what transparency looks like,” a spokesperson explained. “Sometimes democracy needs a chemical assist.”
Inside, detainees reportedly sent out an S.O.S., which officials dismissed as “left-wing punctuation.” Hunger strikes were also rejected as “performative calorie management.”
Private detention executives praised the policy as a win-win. “The government pays us, the public gets denials, and the detainees get character-building trauma,” said one detention executive, polishing a spreadsheet no human being should ever have to live inside.
Asked whether conditions would improve, DHS promised immediate action.
“We are reviewing the situation,” the spokesperson said, “and once the review is complete, we will classify compassion as a security threat.”
“The dangerous spread of due process” indeed. Extra points for snark brilliantly blended with truth.
Heaven help us should we actually become a society “dedicated to the…unfinished work remaining before us…the increased devotion to that cause for which these (fallen) gave the last full measure of devotion…”
Your comment is very funny, and witty. And the serious points you make are horrifying. Good to keep focus on what a low point our general level of operation has become. Thank you for this.
Kate, this is apparently your first day here as a paid subscriber!
WELCOME!! 👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼
I, Miselle, the self-appointed Walmart greeter of the forum, am grateful to have you here and for you to add your voice to the forum! EACH person who reads HCR Letter grows this community which not only frightens the MAGA, but strengthens those of us to hold onto our humanity which the Right is attempting to shred.
You'll see the occasional troll--please don't feed them, regardless of how tempting it is. There are so many people here who post comments that add to the Letter, thanks to their own careers, experience and knowledge. Enjoy engaging with them, as they are a fantastic bunch! 😁
Hi Miselle! Thanks for the welcome. I have been reading and listening to HCR for quite a while. One of the best informed, most scrupulous historians who ever plied the trade, in my view. We are very, very lucky to have a few people of this caliber (add to the list Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum, and Charlie Sykes , Phillips O'Brien, and a handful of others).
⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️
Michael, I don't have any social media accounts, but I hope everyone who DOES will post this in theirs!!
For anyone who “feels” the word, may we call them gulags? From stories of Siberian prisons and my daily submersion in ICE sirens at all times of day or night when a working or reporting in immigrant might be out, I feel like part of this nightmare. Why are Republicans so cruel?
Uh... "feeling" a word and then attributing a false meaning to it? How will that help us defeat fascism?
The Gulag was a concentration camp system where political prisoners were forced to work - aside from living in horrible conditions.
The ICE prisoners are not forced to work, so no, this is objectively NOT a gulag.
The only way to fight back against fascism and its massive fake news propaganda is to stick to the truth rather than just beginning to make stuff up too.
As to cruelty: my guess (not an objective truth) is that the GOP is training a militia that cultivates and admires cruelty. For now, they're trying it out on immigrants. I presume that day by day, the people working in these prisons are encouraged to break one moral taboo after the other, until they become entirely immune to human suffering as soon as a group of superiors depicts them as inferior human beings. Next step: deploy this militia against the American people.
Why does the GOP want to cultivate cruelty in the first place?
Because fascism vitally needs a high level of cruelty in society as a whole for it to be able to thrive. The only way you can force people to do whatever the top commands, so the only way to make them massively accept violence and obey, is to make ordinary people SO cruel that they don't care about the suffering of their fellow human beings anymore. Margaret Atwood described this perfectly in "The Handmaid's Tale"...
Ok. I take your strict definition seriously, but conditions (cruelty, inedible food, unjust imprisonment in more than 70% of the cases and “black hole”—difficulty with getting in touch with lawyers and relatives —) are similar enough to what I have learned of gulags, that I shall continue to call ours by the name. It may bring more protesters and help US defeat Stephen Miller’s fascism which is shared by far too many IMO.
It's not "my" definition, it's THE definition.
One of the main reasons why we got here in the first place is that, while the right was building its horrible neofascist propaganda machine, the left started indulging in abandoning truth altogether.
No more need to study history to learn how a democracy works and how to keep it. No more need to even use dictionaries so that we can communicate accurately. Just go with however things "feel", and feel to YOU as an individual, and somehow, miraculously, we would be able to avoid a disaster.
Also, neofascism IS what the GOP ideologically believes in, today. So if you want "bad words" and somehow believe that that should be how we organize (rather than engaging in real debates with fellow citizens, so that they get access to the truth and are truly motivated to stay in it for the long haul), that one is bad enough and has the additional advantage of also being true...
The lack of respect for education and the disintegration of the public school system in America is a large part of “how we got here.” As a teacher and from a family of teachers, although I appreciate scholarship and strict definitions, in this particular case, I hope for many, for some of whom the word “gulag” might be a wake-up call, to understand who we are at this time.
Education: yes, I fully agree.
But the result is also that even those who still value education now switched to a "method" where "student validation" trumps real transmission. Your idea of going with however a word "feels" to you individually is - with all due respect - imho a perfect illustration of how the left got education wrong too, and for decades already.
The GOP destroyed education by trying to make it as elitist and expensive as possible. The left (not so much Democrats, but the "ideological" left on the ground) destroyed it by politicizing and individualizing everything, and then adding a "post-truth" attitude to it. Now, anything goes. You FEEL something is true? Good for you! And that's about it, when it comes to pedagogical methods on the left (yes, I'm exaggerating a little here... but barely!).
And then again, I wasn't even referring to gulag "scholarship" (yet another horrible habit of the left today is to imagine that "we the people" should ignore it), I merely consulted an online Oxford ordinary language dictionary... .
History has proven that EITHER you accept lying OR you actively keep/strengthen a democratic civil society. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Because the orange god told them to be, if they didn’t already lean that way.
⬆️🎯
Virginia, I can't figure that out either. What does it take to wake them up? Are photos of these people looking becoming human-skeletons like Nazi Germany necessary? Is that what has to happen?!?
Many MAGA are unreconstructed racists and want these unfortunate people gone. Deported, dead, all good to them.
Where does all the virulence come from do you think? When hate is so irrational sounding, there quite often is guilt at the bottom of it, denial about something. Any thoughts on this idea?
I think it is fear of what is different of what is known or familiar. And to paraphrase LBJ, nothing makes people feel big than by making others feel small.
Good points :-)
It’s certainly possible, although the general starvation that this winter may bring may make such photos unseen.
Starting with the NYT, WSG, CNN and any other news sources not yet intimidated and/ or corrupted by Trump.
None have mentioned the Ashley St. Clair/Musk admissions.
And the magic word is till EPSTEIN.
The Ellisons have their eye on CNN, hoping to Trumpify it.
The US concentration camps are almost as bad the Israeli camps for Palestinian people. Funny how nazi ideas take hold
Norman, the good professor has called them concentration camps when she discusses them on her podcast. She seems to be one of the few resources I follow that is keeping this issue in the news.
The onslaught of this regime's constant lack of humanity is mindboggling. I now truly understand the rise of Hitler.
Now we have 'HM' Corporations. Capitalism brought to stockholders and funded by Human Misery. HM.
"... not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.” RCH
That's what I thought; these aren't "detention centers". They're concentration camps meant to starve, maim, and kill brown people. What has happened to the soul of America?
CORRECT: CONCENTRATION CAMP, AS IN ‘ARBEIT MACHT FREI’ CONCENTRATION CAMPS.
WHAT IS THE DEATH TOLL IN THIS GULAG ARCHIPELAGO?
THAT IS BUT ANOTHER NUCLEAR SCANDAL THAT WILL BLOW UP IN THE FACE OF THE MAGA MOVEMENT WHEN IT BEGINS TO COME OUT.
They are Human Trafficking Hubs.
Norman, I have been calling them concentration camp prisons almost since I first heard of them in the time of the separation of kids from their parents and putting them in cages back in 2018. Pretending those facilities are anything else is a lie, just like nearly everything that comes from the mouths of this appalling Trumpian regime!
You are correct. Today’s letter is horrifying and disturbing. How can this country treat people like this and get away with it?
Thank you Professor Richardson for providing information to fuel us to speak up - everyone, read/listen and speak up!
Resource below to easily contact all of Congress - Be LOUD. Trump/the administration is dangerous for our country 💔🤍💙
Use/share this spreadsheet (bit.ly/Goodtrouble) to contact members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly.
Reach out (beyond your own) to as many in the Senate and House as you can. All of this is bigger than “I only represent my constituents” issues.
Comments/reactions help keep this bumped ✊
Funny how the same people screaming about “government efficiency” seem strangely comfortable writing blank cheques to private contractors for cages, corruption and performative brutality. If there’s a giant neon sign flashing WASTE FRAUD ABUSE, it’s hanging right over this entire ‘for-profit’ detention-centre racket.
Trump and cronies burn though the public's money like they won the assets of the US Treasury in a lotto game. So much for there fiscal conservative claims, or really conservative anything. They are just RICO opportunists looting the common weal.
"looting the common weal" is beautifully said; the simply put, sad, infuriating truth of it. It's not just that they're looting us financially; they're looting our happiness, our well-being. That people we know, or at least share a country with, are still supporting them and in some cases cheering them on, is unfathomably despicable.
On the May 26 edition of The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, James Talarico said, “Divide and conquer is the oldest strategy in the book.” For the first time, James and I disagree.
Carefully examine all the evidence before interpreting your observations with logic. Then apply rigorous skepticism to the testing of that logic until every identifiable flaw has been systematically corrected, and everyone returns the same verdict. The “oldest strategy in the book” is repeating Talarico’s healthy “united we stand” message. Comparatively speaking, Ken Paxton’s strategy is simultaneously “newly arrived” and “on life support.”
Talarico’s strategy emerged roughly 12,000 generations ago in the first generations of modern humans. “Divide and conquer emerged roughly 400 generations (100 centuries) ago as the last prehistoric generations of humans met the dawn of the Neolithic Period (as the first agricultural settlements were beginning to appear).
The verdict isn’t because prehistoric modern humans survived (that might be pure luck). The verdict is unanimous because we thrived. Late-prehistoric humans were the dominant vertebrate species on the planet specifically and exclusively because we genetically inherit the “united we stand” strategy. And it is “genetically” inherited because it’s written indelibly into a part of human DNA (the larger “shared in common” part).
Prehistoric “divide and conquer” strategies didn’t exist because they couldn’t survive. Members of hunter-gatherer bands were far more aware of the consequences of selfish behavior and were far too concerned with self-preservation.
A historic “divide and conquer” strategy MIGHT “work” (if you’re okay with defining “work” as “killing the goose that laid the golden egg”).
The predator needs to “smell” its prey. Then it dresses up in sheep’s clothing and hides in large groups where it repeatedly lies, “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” The “strategy” involves turning the predator’s cynicism into the victim’s naivety.
Conclusion: Paxton’s soulless strategy is to continuously increase the number of sad and lonely people. The rubber hits the road when the victim’s pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The “cure” is in Paul McCartney’s words, “And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.” Someone please tell James Talarico.
The ‘United we stand’ approach in hunter/gatherer societies was a combination of two factors. First, of course, was indeed the knowledge of the fragility of their existence. The other, however is implicit in more modern documents like the famous Mayflower Compact signed by the Pilgrims prior to setting up their colony in Massachusetts Bay and explicit in such studies as that of Knud Rasmussen in his pioneering studies of the Netsilik Eskimo.
That message is ‘our way or the highway’.
I’m not sure Mr Talarico would endorse that idea.
The appropriate median approach was made clear by Baron von Steuben as he experienced the American soldier at Valley Forge. As he explained it, one tells European soldiers what to do and they did it. But in America, one first has to tell soldiers why they ought to do it, and then, if they buy one’s explanation, they do it.
James ... that is a serious reply worthy of a serious response that I will get to asap (except "p" is not now).
This has nothing to do with the topic, and has many lapses in logic, or English.
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, keep pretending you don't see. I'm counting. One. This has everything to do with the topic. This is the topic. Don't just tell me my logic is flawed. Identify one flaw.
Evidence that my comment has nothing to do with the topic: zero likes and one critical reply.
Evidence that it does: Talarico must win. His brand is "the competent practice of politics." His opponent's brand is "engaging in political malpractice in the first degree." There should be no contest, but he has no more than a good chance of winning. WTF!?!?
Evidence of "many lapses in logic" in my comment: Those three words alone (meaning unsupported by a specific identification of a logic flaw) in your comment.
Evidence of sound logic in my comment: Your inability to identify a single logic flaw despite your original claim plus the opportunity you've ignored to do so since you made that claim.
I don't want to be too critical of the one response sung to a choreus of crickets without being critical of the crickets, but I'll tell everyone how to shut me up. Give me a good-faith reason to believe that Paxton's political carrier is dead.
Option 2: Give me a good-faith reason to believe that "they" need to look in the mirror and "we" are perfect. If it's good enough, I'll pass it on to my "two spiders in a jar" friend Rick Sender. Don't worry about him being someone who doesn't listen. I'm pretty good at translating into language people can understand (assuming they're "keeping up" as Rick likes to say).
Correction ... one like just came in.
Pilgrim, about 40 years ago, I was a young professional who was mentored by a general manager named Joe F. Brown, Jr. His South Carolina drawl disguised his great wisdom. One time, we were in a meeting with a visitor who pontificated at great length about an irrelevant topic with high-sounding verbiage that seemed meant more to impress than to resolve anything. Joe leaned over and stage-whispered to me, "Looks like someone is impressed with the smell of his own perfume."
Perhaps Mr. Carey has recently visited Sephora.
James has a point, but I'm not sure how relevant the point is. In evolutionary psychology terms, a social species like human beings doesn't flourish as a species unless it can cooperate. But Great Apes also have an us/them brain algorithm that functions to cohere and protect the group of which an individual is part.
Does it matter which came first? Is that even a sensible question?
Laurie ... same as what I said to James ... that is a serious reply worthy of a serious response that I will get to asap (except "p" is not now). P is tomorrow morning.
They are literally looting the planet and the wellbeing of posterity. They removing the civil from our civilization; all in a monomaniacal egocentric quest for absolute power; the devil incarnate.
Reagan's rhetorical theme was that the government (formed among people to secure unalienable human rights, with the consent of the governed) was an foolish encumbrance to liberty, and TV sold it effectively. Utter BS. Repurposing a quip from G.K Chesterton, democracy was not tried and found wanting, it has been tried and found difficult; and yet it is so worthy of the ongoing struggle.
The siren song of "let the rich and powerful do the difficult stuff" is seductive to many, but it is exactly not what our founding documents prescribe. It shows contempt for recognition and defense of human rights and agency that we necessarily, mutually pledge to each other, to maintain and improve a civilized society in a democratic republic.
They certainly greased the wheels of corruption.
And this is (still) merely the beginning: https://jessica.substack.com/p/north-carolina-bill-would-legalize
Thank you again, Loren Bliss, for staying in the fight. Cruelty at the top, leaking down and taken up. Remembering Bonhoeffer and Santayana. Then, for the Christo-Fascists, there’s Jesus of Nazareth. Time to read books instead of tablets and phones. Novels can teach what action movies don’t, cost less, and many have moments of pure joy.
Novels and for that matter, non fiction books, communicate in a way that is different than video. A picture may at times impart an understanding that a thousand words cannot do so precisely, and yet be inadequate in other ways. The camera records appearance in our outer world, yet is less articulately representative of our inner world, our humanly experiential one. Not that there is no overlap, or no stunningly worthy film art, but I just think that words can reach a different kind of human depth. Not with Newspeak. Not with slogans; but with a contemplative probing and poetic framing that one finds in perspicacious writing, the human relevance of which outlives it's author. Reading and writing are participatory, and humanly resonant, in ways that have no equal, and we neglect that key human resource at the risk of our own experiential impoverishment, and potentially, to our own agency, and liberty.
Thank you.
And plumbed its depths.
The message is always so clear. Waste, fraud, abuse and violations of human rights on a daily basis don’t matter if we win, anymore than savaging the 14th Amendment is wrong and unconstitutional, as long as we can get away with it.
One day soon, Trumpism will be but a distant nightmare people will have awakened from long ago. In the meantime, the lessons this wrong-is-really-right political movement is imparting to our children, who pay close attention to the hypocrisies they see taking place around them, cannot be underestimated. Trumpism poisons them as effectively as a neurotoxin. It twists their values, perverts their own desire to do good, and increases their cynicism about the world they live in a thousandfold. We will be paying for this foulness a long time to come.
Like all authoritarian regimes they will topple, and there will be dancing in the streets. I honestly think that this government had to happen, if for no other reason than to wake people up to the fragile ecosystem that democracy really is.
Wont be the first time in history that’s happened, of course. But what a cost, what a cost…
Kazz McKnight,
What this government reveals is the MANY men and women involved at the highest levels of power, and corruption.
Throwing men and women mostly of Hispanic origin in prison is a mirror of what the Nazi's did to the Jewish citizens.
When will we ever learn?
Getting rid of a power hungry dictator involves high cost. Dictators often end up dead, such as Mussolini.
But we have a huge charge in front of us when this is all over, of making sure this NEVER happens here again. If we want the younger generation to take the right message and discard cynicism, we too need to act earnestly to instill a society that centers economic fairness and equal justice for all under the law. Part of why we are here is our failure in the past to live up to that. We have to do better. We have to live that message daily, and deliver results that matter. And no, I am not interested in reconciliation with the enemy. They can recant their ways or they can rot. Or as they like to tell us “don’t like it here? Then why don’t you just leave.”
When the American Nuremberg trials begin, can Stephen Miller be first in line to be tried for his crimes against humanity, such as those in Delaney Hall as well as in the first orange regime?
JennSH, yes. He’s the most toxic self hating thing of all. Not human because he has no heart, no soul, no consciousness.
He’s our very own Herman Göring.
In the interests of government effciency he and the others should be offered the option of a "suicide pill."
Putting on such trials really cost a lot. $$$
I was just thinking this EXACT thing. There is no punishment on earth that is fit for Miller except to be locked up in a camp and forced to eat worm-ridden food and sleep on cold, cement floors in complete darkness and solitary confinement. Temu Goebbels deserves a Fate worse than ☠️ for all the immense suffering, torture and deaths his policies are causing.
Kazz: Very, very good points. Thank you for making them.
Thanks, Megan! And HCR's article provides all the facts for the letters and calls we make today. These are concentration camps. These are rump's brown shirts.
(I have all Democratic reps but I've made Thom Tillis a special project of mine...)
I know what I would like my irrational self to do but I can’t say it.
Tillis is the senator from my state. Please carry on with your special project.
Why Tillis? (NC here).
Tom Tillis is speaking out, hoping to bring the state he has represented (and which from my days at UNC-CH I loved and thought when it was purple that it might be a beacon for the whole South), to its college and university filled potential. (How many know that, until it was closed by Native American attacks, UNC-CH was the first public university in the country?)
Hi Virginia,
I hope you are right about Tillis.
I have a different reaction to Tillis. I think he is still the same Republican NC Senate chair that ushered in extreme gerrymandering in NC and is amoral Republican to his core.
I think he has his eye on a presidential run and view his Medicaid vote and strategic criticisms of Trump from that perspective.
Do we dare hope that having given up his “chair,” he may learn to take his democratic constituents more seriously? At least he is speaking up. Thank you for letting us know your suspicions from on the ground, however. I’ll be watching as (excepting Duke) I hold great expectations for NC.
Tillis was,and still is a tea party Republican. He sounds like an adult only because of the contrast between his recent statements and the idiocy and evil actions of the MAGAs.
Wendy, because I used to live in NC and still have an address there - and he's been very vocal that Hegseth is incompetent and should be fired, and that Stephen Miller should be fired, and Patel. I don't trust him but he's often the only R opposing this madness.
Alexandra - I agree that Tillis gets a lot of press as one of the few Rs "opposing this madness". Talk but never any action that makes a difference.
I get the canned responses to my calls and emails. Party line. And was really furious when instead of being troubled by the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti he was concerned that ICE agents needed to be masked to hide their identities from "domestic terrorists".
I do NOT trust him - like you. I think he's a wily Mitch McConnell but better looking. Because I do think he is eyeing 2028, I worry that so many are being persuaded that he is one of the "good" Republicans. There is no such thing in Congress.
We need him voting the way he does, though. So I stay on top of him! I feel I made a difference with Burr, too, before he retired. I know, delusional! There are no good Republicans, I agree.
No, not delusional.
Fabulous - working with the tools you have.
Here's to you for never giving up.
Please also consider writing about the May 21, 2026, US Customs and Immigration Service memo forcing immigrants to return to their home countries to apply through the local US consulate for changes in status. It is performative cruelty. This is undoubtedly Stephen Miller's work. He knows that many immigrants affected are from countries that are under State Department DO NOT TRAVEL advisories. Many consulates are ill-equipped to process applications following the State Department's personnel cutbacks during DOGE.
Below is the link to the memo issued on the policy change. It is blatant in its cruelty. The tone is "We've always had the discretion to turn the screws. Now we are going to use it."
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-602-0199-AdjustmentOfStatusAndDiscretion-20260521.pdf
There are quotas for different categories of visa adjustments that have "waiting" lists where wait times can be up to 10 years for categories like parents of US citizens.
Below is the link to the page that tells you how long people have to wait in various categories from various countries for processing at consular offices. The dates in the spreadsheet are the dates when documentation for the visa application was deemed complete, and are now finally being processed.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-bulletin/2026/visa-bulletin-for-june-2026.html
Meanwhile, the administration has been slow-walking processing visa status adjudications for people seeking a change to immigrant status in the US. Applicants risk overstaying their original visa, which could then prevent them from ever changing status.
This new policy is a labyrinth of gottchas. It is an attempt to suppress LEGAL immigration.
Refugee categories have been extremely hard hit. Trump’s team reversed the Biden‑era policies by slashing the annual U.S. refugee ceiling from 125,000 to about 7,500 for FY 2026. Administration documents and reporting make clear that most of those 7,500 slots were explicitly prioritized for white South Africans, especially Afrikaners, on the grounds of “illegal or unjust discrimination” and violence against white farmers.
This was a major break with the traditional global, needs‑based approach to refugee resettlement, because it largely excludes applicants from other conflict zones while giving preference to a relatively small, racially defined group from South Africa. This is grotesquely racist.
On May 26, 2026, adding insult to injury, the administration moved to increase that already‑prioritized intake. An AP report, describes a new decision to admit an additional 10,000 white South Africans as refugees during the current fiscal year. This raises the cap for that group from the initially planned 7,500 to 17,500, with the administration justifying the change by citing “unforeseen developments in South Africa” and characterizing the situation as an “emergency refugee” scenario.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-refugees-white-south-africa-border-cap-bfe3974adf6c655eca7a5c30c1f9197f
And yet the (deluded) belief persists that the ChristoNazi conquest of this (decisively) failed and subjugated nation can be ended by anything less than a World-War-II-caliber effort: an alliance of humanitarian nations; a functioning shadow-government dispersed for security amongst allied capitals abroad (London, Paris, Berlin, Seoul, Tokyo etc.,); an active partisan Resistance as in France, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union during WWII; and lastly, D-Day II: the invasion, defeat, Liberation and disassembly of the Hitler- copycat "Unified Reich"; and then -- as in the Soviet Union -- the no-forgiveness, zero-tolerance prosecution of all fascists, especially all Nazis, Christo and otherwise.
That -- and nothing less -- is what an accurate reading of history is telling us it will take to win this war, but until a sufficient number of us -- we the dwindling number of true humans -- awaken to those facts and organize accordingly, the Regime's gleefully inflicted toll of atrocities will continue unabated, skyrocketing until the ecogenocidal intensity and apocalyptic function of Aryan Christian male supremacy exceeds that of the anti-First-Nations and Original-Nazi holocausts combined.
Wake up, people; it is both astounding and literally terrorizing beyond description how many of us remain trapped in the fatal paralysis imposed by the USian cults of prideful ignorance and mandatory optimism. Thus the Moronic Majority remains willfully oblivious to the fact that what our conquerors are doing is restructuring all of global society into a death camp, thus to "cleanse" the planet of everyone save their ecogenocidally Aryan selves.
I believe that Trump has 1/3 of the electorate under his control, psychologically incapable of accepting anything negative said about him, because they see it as a direct attack on them. Polling shows that disillusionment with Trump is at 2/3 on several major issues and is moving in that direction on others.
Both political parties have self-destructed at this point. The old labels just mask the lack of leadership on both sides of the aisle. There needs to be a reorganization to reflect the reality with new leadership—it is no longer Democrats vs. Republicans, it is democracy defenders vs. authoritarians. Democracy defenders need to organize and put together a shadow cabinet with representation from Never Trump former Republicans, Independents, and Democrats of all stripes. The old labels have to be dropped, as was the case in the successful overthrow of Orban in Hungary.
I do not think we are approaching the apocalypse that you see. But we do need help from our former allies to shine a light on Trump’s lies and unreliability, especially in regard to NATO and Ukraine. They need to put up continuing committed resistance to his crazy, as they have with the steps they immediately took to defend Greenland. A loss by Starmer or Merz to right-wing forces, or Carney witnessing Alberta’s secession, will complicate the situation.
The most crucial issue is recognizing that Xi is turning Russia into a vassal state by delaying the decision on the Siberia 2 pipeline deal, which Russia is counting on for cash to prevent economic collapse. Xi will ultimately be the new hegemon and will determine the outcome of the Ukraine War, and hence the fate of Carney’s “middle countries” agenda. Xi sees a balance between the enormous trade potential with Europe and the US, versus his expansionist desires for Taiwan. Weakening the US by supporting Iran is in Xi’s and China’s best interest. Trump and his minions are blind to the threat.
Georgia, I agree emphatically with all but one of your conclusions. Xi is indeed our upcoming global hegemon. And I'm sure you see the karmic irony in the fact it is the unforeseen consequence of Putin's attempt to seize the entire Ukraine that has reduced him to Xi's vassal -- more proof of my longstanding suspicion extended periods rendered chaotic by war inevitably kindle the deterioration of more complex human societies to the militaristic simplicity of feudalism.
But there are surely no unintended consequences in the ever-more-undeniable truth Trump's reelection was the voters' hatefully deliberate reduction of the U.S. to a pariah state. (I am eagerly awaiting someone to undertake a credible journalistic investigation of the depth of a grotesque truth I learned during my years in the South: that such hatred is typically bred of envy; it is then disguised as moralistic loathing to keep the haters from recognizing their own Ted-Bundy selves.)
As to the probability of apocalypse, three points: (1)-a PhD environmental biologist I know and trust tells me we are already long over the Ragnarok red-line, but she says the ChristoNazi termination of all environmental protections is turning an irreversible but mercifully slower decline into a terrminal nosedive; (2)-the ChristoNazi religious cult, like its less-obviously political snake-handling and koolaid-drinking cousins, devoutly prays for its god to destroy this "fallen" (i.e., "demon-conquered') world -- and given the armed forces' ongoing refusal to obey their oath to defend the Constitution, it is obvious the world's most powerful military is now under the complete control of these ecogenocidal fanatics; and, perhaps most importantly, (3)-the fact that unless by some genuine miracle we discover a way to do the scientifically impossible -- that is, until we can do as UFOs are said to be able to do and shut down the (entire) USian bio/thermonuclear attack machine -- there is no way to stop the ChristoNazis from following their messiah Hitler's advice and declaring victory by destroying the planet.
I "liked" your comment (because it seems to express reality) but dammit, I don't like any of it!!!
Thank you for both the "like" and the comment. (Though I doubt I'll live to see the worst of it, I too deplore what I fear is forthcoming.)
I've also been alarmed by this new USCIS policy to require that green card applications/renewals be processed from out of the country. Clients going to USCIS offices should set up their family preparedness, while we attend to how to most effectively proactively protect them, and support them in the event of detention.
https://www.ilrc.org/community-resources/know-your-rights
Here's a graphic of the "labyrinth of gottchas:"
https://www.gofundme.com/f/urgent-support-for-rays-asylum-childs-care?
Thanks for the resources!
Can they make this change without congressional approval?
Thank you, Georgia, for the research and reporting the connections.
I am supporting a refugee from Ethiopia - whose husband was murdered by government militias, who then set her on fire. Fortunately, the courts said refugees cannot be detained by ICE. But they are obviously withholding or slow-walking her green card. I cannot believe how my government allows the naked punishment and imprisonment of law-abiding immigrants. (Not to mention conducting wars of conquest…..)
What organization are you working with to support her?
Trump, Miller, Vought, Hegseth, Blanche are finished. Americans hate these ghouls' agenda. Everyday in everyway they humiliate America and the human dignity we have stood for throughout our lives.
Believe me. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. They all suffer from it. They are all deranged.
I think the last 4 can be impeached and convicted before 2028. I don’t think Trump will be unless he crosses the oligarchs. His ability to force the primary outcomes scares me, although I think it is a stupid move on his part.
Thanks, Megan!! Your spreadsheet is a wonderful resource and I try to share it everywhere to amplify the voices of We the People! Thank you!💜
US SENATOR Andy Kim was my Representative to Congress so this feels very personal. The gaslighting and lies from DHS are disgusting. We know where the WASTE, FRAUD & ABUSE are happening, in the bowels of the trump regime, spending billions of our tax dollars on needless wars, crony corruption and monuments to self-glorification of Dear Leader.
Commenting for Boost! As Usual! Keep going Megan!
Question & Request:
Anyone: Please post The court's (sic) 1 day list of 'cases'.
Thank You.
***********
Answer:
"To access the daily docket for immigration cases being heard at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility, use the ICE ERO eFile Portal. Because local immigration judges are actively processing large daily dockets, exact, real-time lists of pending cases and hearings are managed by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) and are available to registered legal representatives online."
**************************************
Regardless, I will follow up with Professor Kanstroom yet another brilliant Boston College Professor: "Daniel Kanstroom is Professor of Law, Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar, Director of the International Human Rights Program, and an Associate Director ... Read more".
Well said, Megan!
Thank you again for posting your contact Congress spreadsheet!
So easy to use.
Thank you for providing this tool for us to use to contact our representatives. Your persistence is contagious!
✊🏻
Thank you, Megan.
Per NYT authors Max Bearak, Erika Solomon, Ryan Ward & Michael Levenson:
"Iran's Revolutionary Guard said Tuesday that it would launch a " decisive reciprocal response to any attack that violated the ceasefire ....
14 U.S. dead in Trump's War so far.
Thank you Megan!
Time to make calls, write emails or letters and protest again/ still. Thank you Megan as always.
You know, Heather I just love, destroying all your posts. They’re so biased. They’re so one-sided. Why don’t you just tell your audience hear the truth you don’t need $2 million all the time just tell them the truth they’ll still respect you they’ve pay they forgiven you for forgetting about truth and your historical history.
So try telling them the whole truth from now on see what happens just test it just test the water you’ll be happier. They may be pissed for a while, but they’ll get over it because the truth always rules
?
The actionable admission against interest of the self identified "destroyer" above you was noted & reported.
I destroyed distortions of posts, Brian that’s I’ve become pretty good at that here.
Yikes. I am not making much sense today.
Do you know you should probably evaluate your own post. It’s never about the words that come out of someone’s mouth. It’s about the capacity of the ignorant, stupid readers or listeners. So you could be very correct.
And so far as the Trump is concerned, there’s only so much stupidity that you can tolerate so much ignorance, so much hate so self-inflicted wounds to the other participants here. I didn’t realize there were these many suckers/lemmings in the country. Alas. Without shame, they keep rearing their heads. Sad and it’s very depressing.
Then do something else, Rick!
I would Russell, but I’m making so much progress here And I’m keeping people from continuing to stay ignorant Including you
But you don't tell us just what you think she's avoiding. Come on now, have the honesty to be upfront. Or is it mainly inuendo? Ian
Don't feed the troll.
The troll just admitted he is a "destroyer" not a troll. The platform, Substack Inc. admits that the corporation is bound by their own TOU & their own choice of law.
Do you know what this group calls a troll? They have people here who post 20 and 30 times a day and as long as they commiserate with the other people here and swim in the same urine as the other people here,
They are not trolls. The only troll is somebody to post something that disagrees with them. Usually cowards used to be big members of Twitter Until it was purchased by Elon, and then became a 5348 proposition led by Democrats, but then the people here actually had to listen to the real story the whole story and saw things I didn’t like. So they slithered over to blue sky Where they didn’t have to fear any facts or posts of reality. They could live in their own pool of urine together
Why don't you spend more time on Twitter/X? It certainly seems more suitable to your sort of drivel. As a 'destroyer of distortion of posts' you might even start a cult there.
I just answered your question
You know your problem is Russell. You’re in fucking denial.
Twitter used to be an 85% or 90% liberal website liberal functioning site. And what happened was Elon Musk was smart enough to buy it and he balanced it and made it pretty much a 50-50 proposition although it was still 5347 liberal to Cohen conservative
And all people like you you fucking cowards you slid over you slithered over to Bluesky where you could all swim in the same piss in the same lies and not have to deal with reality and that’s what happened here
All the chickens that don’t want to know the truth like you do that
You have literally become a waste at least back then when you wanted to discuss global warming or climate change, we could have
Climate change is now not even in the top 10 And anything that happens with climate change will be taken care of with new technology
Even Al Gore has now turned around from his fucking fantasy before about the North Pohl totally melting by 2013. That’s what he said.
And now he’s claiming what’s gonna happen next we’re gonna have a cooling period because the Gulfstream is going to get cold and gonna cool down the entire seaboard of the East Coast of the US
And he’s even wrong about that But AOC is gonna get blasted in a few few years for her ridiculous comments about global warming, and climate change
You are locked in your position and I’m not If Joe Biden had done any of the things that Donald Trump is doing, I’d be hailing Joe Biden as a good president
Do you have access to a computer or a laptop or an iPad? That’s all you need
Just as a touch of an example a few weeks ago, and then again, probably a week ago she addressed the fact that Trump’s Republican Party was coming apart. The wheels were falling off. And every single indication, since then has been the opposite. Trump is stronger than ever stock market is stronger than ever. He decides how when and He’s going to finish off the war with Iran
And he won the war on the day it began. And then addition, if you noticed how many candidates in the primaries, he has an endorsed. Check them out
I don’t think she’s avoiding it It’s not avoiding it she’s just giving you the picture, but she wants you to hear She’s avoiding to tell you the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Donald Trump is now the most positively influential human being on planet. That’s what she should be telling you
Once again, you should not be asking Questions like I say, most liberals, especially the ones here or what we call superficial dermatologist is touch the surface of the skin and see a headline they like and swallow it whole
Thanks for replying Rick. I'd say the only careful thinking bit of what you wrote is that she may have done what goes on a lot in politics, which is to claim that the wheels are coming off the other peoples chariot.
That to claim as you do that DT won the war with Iran the day it began is just amazingly simplistic on your part. fact that getting on for two months since April 8 when the ceasefire was because he wasn't winning in any simple sense of the word. It gives me no pleasure to say that Iran is doing enough damge to oil infrastructure in that part of the world that the US had to stop unless it really did go far enough to produce a recession. Which it might still and then the US will be heavily blamed for that not least by Americans come November.
Thats just one response to a simple claim of yours. But your simple declaration that 'she's avoiding to tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth' Rick applies at least as strongly to you, probably more so.
Ian
I'll leave it there for now
The war was over on day one Ian. How do they say that the rest is positude or conclusion This war will end badly for Iran. But hopefully there will be enough impact to stifle the proxies for quite a while or end them entirely because they won’t be funded ‘
There is no reason why Donald Trump should give them back their billion dollars we should spend it on our own reparations. And we should continue to bomb until they kneel,… I am quite surprised as our most people who have evaluated Donald Trump over the years very surprised that he stopped bombing. Although the next targets to bomb would’ve been substantially more serious But that’s what it’s gonna take And like I said what he should be doing now is escorting ships with American ships through The strait And if our ship is attacked, all bets are off for the Iranians.
And by the way, that’s all that the left was talking about when Trump took office recession stock, market crash, depression, economically, failing, and every single thing they could do to describe what is going to happen with Trump and he is defied every single expert
Pundit after pundit mostly from the liberal/Democratic side have now admitted that they were wrong that they thought inflation would happen that they thought this recession would happen that they thought the tariffs would backfire and now they’ve learned
And for not for this war that is helping not only the world, but Israel specifically as well this country would be sailing and if any of the fucking Democrats would do what Clinton and Gingrich did which is what made this country great was get together and formula Policy that settles at much as they can than this country would be rocking
But every fucking democrat is doing everything he possibly can to disrupt anything that Donald Trump tries.
And they’re in lies the problem
Yes, if only those darned Iranians would listen to him.
They would listen to him if he hadn’t stopped bombing. You know it and I know it and the world knows it eventually it would be all over
And I’ll say it again, Russell the United States should be escorting ships through the street and if they get shot upon or damaged, Iran is done evacuate Tehran drop a huge arsenal of bombs and level it and then let’s see if they listen to him
Russell he should’ve never stopped bombing ever ever ever, and all his military associates said the same thing and a majority of Americans feel the same way. He did like some presidents or many presidents do which is unlike him he let them off the hook if he had kept bombing every single day, Iran would not be in the position that it’s in right now. He should’ve taken over car Island. He should’ve escorted ships through the Through the street with American ships, and if Iranian hit an American chips, it would be the end of Iran. Which in the 1980s would’ve been a sin but today would’ve been a miracle for the planet
For him, that was a huge mistake to stop bombing. And sooner or later, if he’s gonna make any progress, he’s going to have to hit a strategic civilian target that will help caused the indigent population to rise up to whatever degree possible. And if he continues to starve the run in government of profits from the oil that will go along way to move. But he should start trickle bombing, every Single day and not let up
Heather's exactly spot-on as to the extent of thuggery metastasizing under criminal Donald.
These ICE agents (and Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and others to whom Donald wants to feed our tax money) all aim to kill the rule of law. And we've had a most successful previous 80 years, in America and across the world, for many of the institutions and alliances the U.S. nurtured: for democracy, science (including vaccines), open seas, and other forms of navigation and mobility, with education for all to rise.
Donald and his criminal syndicates didn’t kill this, but rode on an already extant criminality, at least since the Powell memo of 1971. That with its far-right foundations set the corporate classes and the rich to rule, in the U.S. and around the world, for all the dictators and demagogues to whom Donald has been kissing up, and all the pedophile and other criminal rings he’s been covering up.
Donald’s tsar of hatreds, Stephen Miller, epitomizes the thug power and brute force of all oligarchs, and Donald’s pal rapists. But we've got great ones among us opposing them, such as Ezra Klein and Yuval Noah Harari in a recent podcast discussing how, among history’s greatest achievements, have been in the cooperation we’ve also much longer enabled.
So I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NCxS__rtAo
Thank you for sharing this, including the link, Phil.
I second that, Vee!
This hasn’t anything to do with “the Powell Memo” — your own private shorthand fantasy to explain everything from the arrival of crunchy peanut butter to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. You just can’t resist inserting your own bizarre bugaboo into everything — all without a speck of lubricant. And you do so practically every day, in the most tiresome, tendentious and utterly predictable ways, like a cuckoo clock always striking thirteen.
It’s so bizarre I can’t recall Heather or any other serious contemporary observer ever talking about it, much less any candidate for any office anywhere making this a platform issue worthy of discussion. I wonder why…
Look at what the Powell memo's key foundations did, ICTT.
That is, from the Heritage Foundation, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), and more, there's a through line to what ICE, CBP, and criminal Donald have been doing today.
At the end of Ezra Klein's talk with Yuval Noah Harari, the latter suggested further reading. The key book he chose for understanding all the acolytes of brute force and today's moneyed dominance, now most represented by Stephen Miller (and ICE, and CBP) is best explicated, he said, by Frans de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics."
Yeah…as I said, nothing to do with your own private bugaboo. But do feel free to name-drop some more, though…
To you, ICTT, it's name-dropping.
To Ezra Klein, Yuval Noah Harari, and others of their caliber, it's serious study.
Funny, when it was first published I read every page of Harari’s “Sapiens” with serious study in mind, but don’t recall a single sentence about “the Powell memo.” Must be the caliber of the company I keep, I guess.
The Frans de Waal book explains the Stephen Miller type, ICTT.
That's according to Yuval Noah Harari, who said in talking with Ezra Klein that reading it was a seminal moment in his understanding the history leading to criminal Donald, ICE, and CBP.
ICTT, I wrote my comment on Lewis Powell before reading yours to Phil Balla. You are undoubtedly aware of the power of communication of some people. Why do you call what he wrote “name dropping”?
I haven’t thought of you as being this brutal. It’s disappointing.
He came of age, Marge, in the first flush of the Powell memo.
When he started college, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and the Hoover Institution (at that time also one of the most far-right) all perfected money and organization for massive lobbying campaigns of shame against academics using any humanities.
They targeted any uses of novels, memoirs, histories, or other arts as marginal, decorative, ornamental at best, in intellectual life which they all posited as professionally necessarily "objective" only, neutral, specialist-specialized.
Combined with the serious budget cuts for public colleges and universities which ALEC wrested from all U.S. state legislatures, they won. Not only eliminated humanities from American public life, but convinced all of ICTT's age that using any ever exhibited oneself as amateur, dilettante only.
More of the results from this history appear in Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police" (2003).
You literally haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. You know nothing whatever about me, my education, background, training. Such shameless arrogance is difficult even to fathom.
We should think about Powell as a “Southern gentleman” as he would have had slaves before 1860. As he would have ejected me from his dinner table as he did not “recognize” me there—invited by his wife and daughter who had been a student of my professor husband—since learning the effect of the Memo, I have understood the source and the intended force.
Where is the media? Why is this not headlines in the NYT?
What media? Dead and paid for.
In the service of plutocracy.
More to the point, every military-age (16-55) male amongst those 17,500 South Africans cited by the astute Georgia Fisanick is a potential addition to the new Gestapo the ChristoNazis are building to enforce their agendas of zero-tolerance theocracy and Aryan male supremacy.
facts.
There were a ton of stories to report on yesterday. Several primaries (including Cornyn’s loss to a fanatical Trumper and indicted criminal in Texas), the South Carolina state Senate’s refusal to take up redistricting (for the second time) before the mid-terns, and maybe most importantly — a three-judge federal panel in Alabama voting unanimously (including two Trump appointees) that the attempt to gerrymander voting districts in Alabama had NOTHING to do with “partisanship” and everything to do with race, and therefore violates the 14th Amendment. Their ruling took 89 pages and specifically condemns attempts to use “partisanship” as a flimsy veneer to conceal race-based gerrymandering, which in turn necessitated rare federal judicial intervention in state elections.
That is an enormous ruling with serious, immediate implications. The reasoning, the length of the ruling itself, the fact that 2 out of 3 judges were Trump appointees — all makes it increasingly difficult for the Supreme Court to ignore arguments, critical rulings, and further pretend that “partisanship” is anything else other than a flimsy white robe meant to conceal one goal only.
And, oh yes, the small matter about the supposed cease-fire in Iran blowing up in Fatty Chancre’s face at the very moment he was bloviating nonsense about having made a deal in order to manipulate the markets — only about the 11th time he has done so.
My point wasn’t that outrage about this other very important development isn’t newsworthy, but that it did have a lot of competition on Memorial Day that helped crowd it out. Some of those other events were true hard-won victories indeed and needed explanation and citation. I have no doubt we’ll hear more about Senator Kim and Customs’ crude attempt to gag free speech and accountability in the coming days.
The level of atrocities rises daily! Humans can't keep up! Epstein files, crypto grift, outright bribery for favors, the J-6 slush fund, inhumane treatment of alleged illegal immigrants, murder of citizens on our city streets, a questionable war with Iraq, the cost of living that is ever rising, the destruction of the East Wing and the subsequent ballroom/bunker construction. This administration is squandering BILLIONS of dollars daily. A billion is 1,000 million! Imagine what could be done with that money to help people. November can't come soon enough.
It’s an awful lot to stare at without your eyes glazing over, indeed.
And…lo and behold, in this morning’s New York Times, with multiple photos….
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/nyregion/delaney-hall-nj-detention-center-protests.html
Well, Trumpty-Dumpty did it: nobody is talking about the Trump-Epstein files anymore. BUT BIDEN AND OBAMA….
That shows you Dutch the immense stupidity of a good portion of the American people.
why arent we surprised lol.
It's called normalizing, Christina.
A tiny fraction of Americans read that old rag.
Ah, the media sold out long ago because Democracy dies in darkness and this is their goal.
Kim, Frost and others fighting for accountability and justice are brave patriots. With the Orange Felon-rapist-traitor ailing and his regime failing but causing seemingly infinite and outrageous harms, I just made this toolkit to help ensure that in November people vote in numbers TOO BIG TO RIG!
It has actions any of us can take to Get Out The Vote:
https://sensational-fenglisu-96222c.netlify.app/
Share widely. A BLUNAMI Can overcome voter suppression. WE ARE GOING TO WIN!
A great resource! Please share widely!
Thank you, Eric!
commenting for boost of this resource, thanks Eric.
A sign I have seen that hits the bullseye is "If your vote really did not matter, they would not go to such lengths to suppress it."
Good billboard material.
Damn well said! (And if we had a functioning shadow government. we'd have the functioning Ministry of Education necessary to get those billboards up and speaking.)
Yes! This is really one of the saddest failures. There were strong advocates from Rep. Wiley Nickel of North Carolina to Tim Snyder, writer of ON TYRANNY and general sustainer of sanity on Ukraine and everything else, but it seemed to prove too exhausting at a time when we just couldn't believe this had happened again to our country, only this time we actually elected a convicted criminal. And Texas may do it again.
Thanks, Vee. "Action is the antidote to despair," right?
Seeing so much complaining and doomsaying in online comments, including about horrors like the $1.8 billion fund, which is not yet operative but treated by so many as a done deal, I wanted to provide people with ways to TAKE ACTION and MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
My goal:
20% repeating what's horrible and what's wrong
80% reporting on the people and organizations fighting back and actually stopping criminality and corruption and cruelty, and on giving individual readers actions they can take.
Thanks for the link. A good resource.
There is NOTHING too big to rig. Hasn’t the current regime already proven that?
Get it done, for everybody's sakes!
Shameful. The actions of Trump and his DHS thugs and Republican enablers are immoral (maybe the word should be amoral—there is no morality there), illegal, and unAmerican. Not to mention the money that should be used for things the country wants and needs but is being wasted or handed out to cronies. It makes me sick.
Immoral works for me. As you indicate, cruel, sick, shameful, criminal. The patent polar opposite of "Liberty and Justice For All. It;s hard to see why anyone except the crooks collecting the cash would support it.
makes everyone sick, Susan..
‘I Found a Second vote.gov and it’s registered to the White House’
THE DREY DOSSIER | MAY 26 2026 | Substack
*Video Article - click and watch*
https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/i-found-a-second-votegov-and-its?r=kxzps&utm_medium=ios
‘What this office is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.
The Executive Office of the President has no inspector general. There are zero required privacy disclosures filed across all twelve programs and no published contracts with any outside vendor. Forty federal websites run behind one personal Cloudflare account. And the Presidential Records Act seals everything for twelve years the day this administration ends, meaning until 2040, no one outside the White House can see who works there, what they collected, or where any of the data went.’
🤨 #ContactYourCongress - is your confidential personal information secretly being recreated by the White House / Designed and Engineered in D.C. by National Design Studio.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Be very aware. This report bears further examination.
Be afraid, but keep protesting every way you can and “VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION YOU ARE ENTITLED TO VOTE IN!” From Maude B. Motley, VA, teacher of world history and civics, Varina High School, 1949.
THIS is extremely important and dangerous to everyone in the US.
Very scary.
I watched five minutes of the local 11:00 news last night on WTNH-8, the New Haven ABC affiliate owned by right-wing Texas chain Nexstar, and they showed a clip of the demonstration -- but not one single comment about Andy Kim beibg pepoer-sprayed, which was already long in the news cycle.
All the local CT stations (except Viacom-owned WVIT-30 in West Hartord) are owned by right-wing chains. I immediately shut the damn thing off rather than wait around for Kimmel. These stations have no cred with me.
THAT IS NOT JOURNALISM. IT IS OFFENSIVE TO JOURNALISTS!!
There is more open and honest journalism on here than the cable tv.
You need USNOW, formerly MSNBC. There is Andrew Weissmann, Ali Velshi, Joe Scarborough, Judge Luttig, and a lot of congresspersons of all stripes, and pretty much no holds barred. It’s cable, a bit clumsy mechanics, but the best for intelligent presentation. CNN is watchable, but less interesting.
MS Now is the best for coverage on regular TV channels.
We have created camps and are torturing people within them. One day, people will look at the humans who were in those camps, and say, "they are camp survivors." And one day, people will look at every US citizen who was alive during this time, and say, "What did they know? What did they do? Were they complicit? Did they look away?"
Thanks Dr. Richardson, and to all of you who are doing something, for bearing witness and not looking away, and taking action.
And bless you every which way for your response, EcstaticRationalist!!!
These ICE agents have no souls. I hope they all end up incarcerated in the very detention centers that they so cruelly use to abuse people who merely want to live and work here. And that hope extends to the Trump lackeys. I’d hate to be any of them when they meet their maker!
The Trump goon squad.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/23/trump-immigration-uniforms-ice-agents-visual-guide
ICMI: Here is hopeful news to brighten your day:
(1) “Democrats Can Flip The Senate By Winning 4 Of These 6 States! (w/ Dan Pfeiffer) - YouTube” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWtFUPyGcak. Jen Rubin of the Contrarian interviews Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America.
(2) Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project interviews Democrat Bobby Palido who is running for U.S. Representative in the 15th district of Texas and Democrat James Talarico who is running for U.S. Senator in Texas against Ken Paxton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILLzH38kyCc
(3) LegalAF interviews Stephen Spaulding of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School about the Brennan Center’s proposals for reforming the U.S. Supreme Court. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro-Ow_YeJdg
The idea that everyone, even criminals (which these detainees are most emphatically not), deserve dignity, is already gone for certain people - many people in MAGA circles and even beyond that, I'd venture. They are spreading the old idea that some people are not even people - they are not *really* humans, and thus do not deserve, well, anything. Not even the preservation of their lives. It's really frightening when you realize how many people have thoughts and beliefs along those lines. Immigrants, democrats, "the wokes", queer people - well, they're not really people like us, are they? It's not like they really have rights...
As predictable a moment as the sun rising in the east, ever since he used the word “vermin” to describe human beings — and long before that as well.
yet people STILL have their knickers in a knot about Clinton saying ten years ago that half of Trump supporters are a basket of deplorables! (And she went on to offer ways to help the other half, but nobody ever mentions that part. Policy is boring. Pearl-clutching - about some people - is fun.)
It's been said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. That's not a house in debate or coping with controversy; it's a fracture of the solidarity that defines a nation. In the case of the Civil War, follow the money. In the events of the day, follow the money. Not for nothing "the love of money" (and other forms of power) has long come with warning labels.
This is a major escalation and provocation. Things are getting really interesting in a hurry. The regime is desperate and degrading rapidly. They’re in crisis and so are we.
and guess who will pay in the end, you think the leaders or the power handlers? NO, IT IS THE GODDAMN CITIZENS OF THE COUNTRY. THE BURDEN ARGH.
The sooner this unconscionably vile administration is swept from power, the better off the whole world will be.
Absolutely shameful.
terrible.
Where did the Trump administration find enough rocks to look under for the slimy invertebrates who became ICE agents?
Spot on!!!
Joel, I regret to inform you that those "slimy invertebrates" have not been under rocks. They have lived in the house next door and the house down the street. They live in your town and my town. They have been with us since the first white Europeans set foot on the North American continent and said to the Indigenous Peoples, "We'll have your land. We can do this the easy way or the hard way." First it was easy, then it was hard.
The white invaders have been here so long, they've forgotten they weren't here first. Now, they think they have the right to erase melanin-endowed persons from their stolen land.
In the past, laws made these cruel bigots hide their cruelty and prejudice. But they've found a champion to flout the law with impunity, and in turn, create an environment where any white person can flout the law in service to the tyrant.
Money is the great seduction. As the public school system cracked, aided by desegregation of public schools and mega churches (mob “Christianity”) the uneducated dropouts, lost contact with democratic principles (see the Powell Memo described today in these comments). Desperate for jobs and answers, many Americans, Depression still close to mind, grasped for the “American Dream” any way they could. Then we got the current SCOTUS nightmare to finish the wrecking.