Finally Friday Reads: Our Racist President Rides Again
Posted: February 6, 2026 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, 2026 Elections, American Fascists, Donald Trump, Economic Racism and injustice, racism, racism in MAGA | Tags: American Decency, China and South Africa Trade Talks, Comfortably Numb, ICE, Jeff Bezos Asshole, John (repeat1968) Buss @johnbuss.bsky.social, Liam Conejo Ramos, Minnesota Nice, Paul Krugman, Trump & Racism 8 Comments
“The Orangeutan is full-bore flinging poo to distract from the Epstein Trump Files.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers
My outrage today at the latest, least presidential Truth Social Post that I may have ever seen knows no bounds. And yet, the boundless insanity of the “Press Secretary” tells me it’s fake. Don’t you just hate it when some Clairol MAGA Blonde bimbo tries to tell you how you feel? Here’s the headline at the New York Times. I’d share the Washington Post headline, too, but Jeff Bezos is busy ripping all the vital organs of that once great newspaper. “Trump Posts Video Portraying Obamas as Apes. The White House press secretary dismissed criticism of the clip’s racist content, shared by the president’s Truth Social account, as “fake outrage.” What an international disgrace of a country we’ve become!
Erica L. Green and Isabella Kwai share the lede.
President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, the latest in a long pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive stereotypes about Black Americans and others.
The brief clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election.
The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, used historically by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings and other atrocities. A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.
Mr. Trump has a history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants. And in his second administration, official posts from the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department have posted images and slogans that echo white supremacist messaging.
In response to questions about the clip, which Mr. Trump posted Thursday during a late-night spree on social media, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said criticism of the video was “fake outrage.”
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — the Senate’s only Black Republican — wrote on X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”
The latest clip appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle,” and an emoji of a lion.
In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former vice president Kamala Harris — were shown as various animals, while Mr. Trump was depicted as a lion. The Obamas, in the clip, were shown as apes. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Mr. Trump.
NBC News‘ Rebecca Shabad has further information on the disgusting post. “Trump shares racist video depicting the Obamas as monkeys. The White House defended Trump’s post, saying it was “from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle.”
The roughly minute-long video otherwise focused on false election fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, but at the very end it suddenly flashed to a clip of the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the heads of cartoon apes as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens played in the background.
The imagery, which evokes long-standing racist tropes against Black people, comes during Black History Month, which honors the accomplishments and contributions of Black Americans. Barack Obama made U.S. history as the first Black president.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to NBC News’ request for comment Friday morning with a statement: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
The video the White House referred to appeared to have been posted initially by an X user in October and shows the Obamas as apes in the beginning and other Democrats’ faces as the heads of other African animals as the song continues to play. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is depicted as a warthog and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker as an elephant, for example, while Trump is presented as a lion.
Representatives for the Obamas didn’t immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
Trump’s repost drew strong criticism on social media, including from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who sharply denounced the president on X. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” he said.
The President continues to do despicable things to immigrant families and to communities that stand up to his reckless and unconstitutional policies. This is from MPR News, located in the Twin Cities area. Regina Medina reports the story. “DHS has requested expedited deportation proceedings against family of Liam Conejo Ramos.”
The federal government has filed a motion seeking to end asylum claims for the family of Liam Conejo Ramos, according to the lawyer representing the family. The 5-year-old returned home this week after he was detained with his father on Jan. 20 and sent to a detention center in Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security filed a motion Wednesday to expedite deportation proceedings in the family’s case, said immigration attorney Danielle Molliver with Nwokocha & Operana Law Offices.
A hearing is scheduled for Friday, although Molliver is requesting more time to respond. She said she thought the motion was “retaliatory.”
“It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” Molliver said.
Molliver said the federal government may not deport them to Ecuador, their home country. Instead, the family could apply for asylum in a third country.
Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, said they don’t know what will happen to them.
“The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too,” Conejo Arias said. The interview was conducted in Spanish and translated by MPR News.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
I truly believe that the more he goes after this family, the more his polls will fall, and he will pull Republicans down further as the Midterm elections near. What is also clear is that the Washington Post will not be up to doing any kind of real reporting on any of this. Ruth Marcus of The New Yorker has this analysis. “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post. The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.”
On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.
The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.
Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”
Tech Bros and MAGA have ruined our democracy. Paul Krugman, however, argues that “American Decency Still Lives. When pushed far enough, Americans will do the right thing.” This is posted on his SubStack. I have found this to be true here in New Orleans. Even more so, I watch the city where I lived before moving here show the earnest Lutheran social justice so famously known as Minnesota nice. It has a yin and a yang, believe me.
If you want to accomplish anything in politics, you have to have realistic expectations about voters. Ordinary people aren’t deeply informed about policy or politics. They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. A large proportion of voters don’t have strong ideological preferences — not because they’re “moderates,” but because they don’t think ideologically at all. Instead, they think pragmatically – they think about things like the price of eggs and the cost of health insurance. And because the average voter isn’t a policy or data wonk, they are often misled – for example, by claims that crime is rising even when it’s actually falling.
Granted, some voting behavior is motivated by ugly biases. Racism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia, are still important factors in politics. But there’s a difference between political realism and nihilistic cynicism.
Many of my readers are probably aware of the famous confessional by the German pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for meI don’t know if Stephen Miller has ever seen these words. But if he has, he has taken them not as a warning but as operating instructions. MAGA’s ethnic cleansing plans — because that’s what they are — were clearly based on the cynical assumption that native-born white Americans wouldn’t rise to the defense of civil liberties and rule of law if state violence was directed at people who don’t look like them.
And for much of Trump’s first year in office many Democrats were reluctant to challenge his immigration policies, because their defeat in 2024 was widely seen as in part a response to surging immigration during the Biden years. Until recently, Democrats tried to keep the national conversation focused on affordability and Trump’s obvious failure to deliver on his promises to bring grocery prices way down.
While the Democratic strategy was an understandable response to a shattering electoral defeat, it rested on a cynical and nihilistic view of American voters: that they couldn’t be trusted to vote against a party that reveled in inflicting cruelty and injustice as long as the price of gasoline fell.
But recent events refute this nihilistic cynicism. Yes, Americans still name the economy as the most important political issue. But moral outrage over the Trump administration’s brutality (and its corruption, but that’s a subject for another post) has exploded as a political force over the past two months.
There was substantial resistance to ICE’s attempts to intimidate Los Angeles and Chicago. But the response since the invasion of Minneapolis (and now all of Minnesota) began in December has been on another level, a mass nonviolent uprising reminiscent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the color revolutions in the former Soviet empire.
MPR News reports that nearly 30,000 Minnesotans have been trained as constitutional observers, with another 6,000 volunteers registered to deliver food, give at-risk families rides, and so on. This is time-consuming, exhausting, dangerousactivism. Yet ordinary Americans in large numbers are willing to do it.
Cell phone cameras and whistles can’t completely stop ICE’s brutality and lawlessness. For some reason I’m especially troubled by tales of the many cars found abandoned in the middle of the street, their windows smashed and their occupants obviously abducted. But the resistance is throwing sand in the gears and producing acute frustration among the masked thugs, who have repeatedly been filmed drawing guns on citizens doing nothing but observing them.
And the public is not on the side of the thugs.
Plus, once again, a major nation is turning to China for its trade initiatives because our #FARTUS is too stupid and stuck-up to recognize that his economic policies are dooming a lot of our industries and jobs. This is from the AP. I cannot believe we keep repeating obvious mistakes from the past because no one in Congress will do their fucking job! “Facing high Trump tariffs, Africa’s leading economy says it’s close to a new trade deal with China.” Just think, a few years ago, we were on target to keep them in second place.
China and South Africa signed a framework agreement for a new trade deal on Friday as Africa’s leading economy looks to other options following the high import tariffs imposed on it by the U.S. and its diplomatic fallout with the Trump administration.
South Africa’s Ministry of Trade and Industry said the agreement would start negotiations over a deal that would give some South African goods, such as fruit, duty-free access to the Chinese market. The ministry said it expected the trade deal to be finalized by the end of March.
In return, the trade ministry said China will get enhanced investment opportunities in South Africa, where its car sales have seen rapid growth.
The U.S. slapped 30% duties on some South African goods under U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs policy — one of the higher rates applied across the world. South Africa has said it is still negotiating with the U.S. for a better deal.
The China-South Africa deal follows others looking for alternatives to U.S. partnership in the face of Trump’s aggressive trade policies.
The announcement on the negotiations between China and South Africa came days after Trump issued a short-term renewal of a longstanding free-trade agreement between the U.S. and African nations. The U.S. extended the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which South Africa is a major beneficiary of, just until the end of the year and indicated it would be modified to fit the administration’s America First policy.
China is already South Africa’s largest trade partner for both imports and exports, while Chinese economic influence across the African continent continues to grow and it dominates in the extraction of Africa’s critical minerals that are key components for new high-tech products.
“South Africa looks forward to working with China in a friendly, pragmatic and flexible manner,” the trade ministry said.
The Stupid. It hurts.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: The February 2026 Blues
Posted: February 2, 2026 Filed under: #FARTUS, Broligarchy, ethics, kleptocracy | Tags: Black History Month, Corrupt SCOTUS, Department of UnJustice, ICE Crimes Against Humanity, Welcome Home LIam!!! 6 Comments
“Groundhog Day is serious business for our illustrious Homeland Security Secretary.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
This year has started out with violence and erasure of those members of our diverse nation that are deemed inconvenient to the old white christian nationalist me. Trump and his Klan have forsaken everything promised in our laws and Constitution. They’ve replaced it completely with identity politics and allegiance to an orange guy who likely has never read an entire verse of the Bible in his lifetime. The headlines lack substance and describe horror.
I’ve two rather nerdy articles that will impact all of us if we don’t pay attention. The third is basically more deadly results of Trumpian incompetence. The Groundhog and the annual celebration of Black excellence are on the calendar, but not the news desks today. Let’s focus on why justice and equality of been taken off the American agenda and replaced with mayhem and hatred.
First up is an article at the New York Times. It’s written by Jodi Kantor. “How the Supreme Court Secretly Made Itself Even More Secretive. Amid calls to increase transparency and revelations about the court’s inner workings, the chief justice imposed nondisclosure agreements on clerks and employees.” There’s enough injustice nowadays to go around for everyone but rich old men and the traditional sellout members of disenfranchised Americans.
In November of 2024, two weeks after voters returned President Donald Trump to office, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. summoned employees of the U.S. Supreme Court for an unusual announcement. Facing them in a grand conference room beneath ornate chandeliers, he requested they each sign a nondisclosure agreement promising to keep the court’s inner workings secret.
The chief justice acted after a series of unusual leaks of internal court documents, most notably of the decision overturning the right to abortion, and news reports about ethical lapses by the justices. Trust in the institution was languishing at a historic low. Debate was intensifying over whether the black box institution should be more transparent.
Instead, the chief justice tightened the court’s hold on information.Its employees have long been expected to stay silent about what they witness behind the scenes. But starting that autumn, in a move that has not been previously reported, the chief justice converted what was once a norm into a formal contract, according to five people familiar with the shift.
Over the years, journalists and authors have sought to penetrate the court, and the justices have tried varying methods to guard its secrets. Some generations of clerks, but not others, said they were asked tosign a different kind of confidentiality pledge.
The New York Times has not reviewed the new agreements. But people familiar with them said theyappeared to be more forceful and understood them to threaten legal action if an employee revealed confidential information. Clerks and members of the court’s support staff signed them in 2024, and new arrivals have continued to do so, the people said.
A spokeswoman for the court declined to comment about the nondisclosure agreements. She also did not respond to a question about whether the justices have been asked to sign the contracts.
The people who described the agreements spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about court matters.
The justices are accustomed to controlling what the public knows about their work, sealing nearly everything but their oral arguments and written opinions behind a high wall of secrecy. Courts are excluded from the open records laws that require many other government bodies to maintain and make available internal information.
The justices claim their papers belong to them, not the government or the public, and generally arrange to have them locked away until long after their deaths. The court releases no visitor logs to reveal who meets with the justices.
This comes after a series of leaks and reports about the Court’s inner workings. We’re entering a period where it will take some real balls to be a whistleblower, knowing what kind of misfortune comes to those in any branch of government who dare question the wannabe king and his court of sycophants. The second article on liberty and justice comes from Steve Vladeck’s Substack One First. “207. The Justice Department Beclowns Itself (Again). The denouement of DOJ’s misconduct complaint against Chief Judge Boasberg provides useful lessons relating to both the Department’s continuing misbehavior and the emptiness of calls for impeachment.”
There is, as ever, too much court- (and Court-)adjacent news to cover, including this morning’s New York Times double-feature on the Chief Justice’s move to have Court employees sign non-disclosure agreements and on the Times’s own expanding coverage of the Court. But I wanted to use today’s “Long Read” to come back to a post I wrote last July—shortly after the Department of Justice submitted (and then Attorney General Bondi tweeted about) an unprecedented judicial misconduct complaint against the chief judge of the D.C. federal district court, James E. Boasberg. As I wrote at the time, DOJ’s complaint was “almost laughably preposterous.” The gravamen of its charge was that Boasberg had violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges by relaying (at a private breakfast with the Chief Justice and a group of other district judges before a meeting of the Judicial Conference of the United States) that several of his colleagues were worried about the Trump administration potentially defying their rulings.
That complaint is back in the news because late last week, we finally learned about its outcome. After a bit of procedural shuffling that I’ll explain below, it was dismissed, quite cursorily, by Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton in a … brusk … seven-page memorandum and order. Not only did Sutton pour cold water on DOJ’s theor(ies) of Boasberg’s misconduct, but he also expressed understandable frustration with the fact that DOJ never produced the document that it claimed memorialized Boasberg’s alleged misconduct—even after it was specifically told that it needed to do so to substantiate its claims.
In other words, after filing an unprecedented complaint against a sitting federal judge, making a big public stink about it (which, by the way, was itself a violation of the law), and having its complaint invoked as one of the grounds for the proposed impeachment charges against Chief Judge Boasberg, DOJ … never followed through. It turns out, it was never about adjudicating Boasberg’s behavior; it was about making splashy headlines and fueling right-wing attacks on the judiciary without regard to whether DOJ’s specious charges would withstand meaningful scrutiny.
The obvious takeaway is that the Department of Justice has once again beclowned itself. I’d say it has shredded even more of its credibility, but when you’re publicly soliciting for new lawyers to apply via Twitter (with the primary qualification being that they “support President Trump”), there may not be any credibility left to shred. Instead, the more significant takeaway is that this really ought to be the final nail in the coffin of congressional Republicans’ breathless efforts to gin up impeachment charges against a judge whose only actual sin, as it turns out, was to decline to roll over when the government defied one of his orders, and then lied about it.
Read more details on the case at the link. Watching a war within the Judicial Branch is not something I had on my bingo card. This tragic headline is reported by Stephanie Kothan, writing for the San Antonio Current.”Source: Measles outbreak reported at ICE’s Dilley family detention facility. ICE officials informed members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about the outbreak, immigration attorney Eric Lee said.”
After a week of public outcry over the South Texas Family Residential Center’s treatment of young children behind its walls, the Dilley facility is experiencing a measles outbreak, according to immigration attorney Eric Lee.
Lee, who went viral last week for capturing the moment a protest broke out inside the facility, told the Current that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) informed Senate Judiciary staff of the outbreak over the weekend. At least two cases have been confirmed at the facility as of press time, the attorney said.
Over 400 children are detained at the Dilley facility, which currently holds approximately 1,200 detainees.
Speaking with the Current on the phone, Lee detailed the harsh conditions families already experience inside, including “food with worms, bugs in it.” Lee also described the putrid smell of the water families are forced to drink, which they also have no choice but to mix with baby formula.
Lee represents a family of six inside the facility, including several small children.
One of the children, all of whom have spent a birthday in the facility, suffered from appendicitis and was told by staff to take a pain reliever. He was later rushed to the hospital to have his appendix removed after his condition had worsened.
“He nearly died,” Lee said.
Speaking at a press conference outside of San Antonio City Hall on Wednesday, Congressman Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio spoke of a 2-month old baby detained at the facility “for four or five days.”
Measles was declared eliminated in the Unites States in 2000, but it is again circulating in parts of the country.
“[I]ncreasing numbers of measles infections — driven by misinformation about vaccines and reduced vaccination rates in some communities — have been reported over the last five years,” according to report by University of Chicago Medicine.
CBS News has this follow-up. “ICE halts all movement at Texas detention facility due to measles infections.” This story is reported by Camilo Montoya-Galvez.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement halted “all movement” at a detention center in Texas for families and quarantined some migrants there after medical staff confirmed two detainees had “active measles infections,” the Department of Homeland Security said Sunday.
The measles cases at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center were detected Friday, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to CBS News. The ICE facility houses parents and children taken into federal custody over alleged violations of immigration law. It is located in south Texas, roughly an hour drive from San Antonio.
“ICE Health Services Corps immediately took steps to quarantine and control further spread and infection, ceasing all movement within the facility and quarantining all individuals suspected of making contact with the infected,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin said medical officials were monitoring detainees and taking “appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection.”
“All detainees are being provided with proper medical care,” she added.
Before McLaughlin’s statement on Sunday, immigration lawyers had reported concerns about a potential measles outbreak at the Dilley center.
Neha Desai, a lawyer for the California-based National Center of Youth Law, which represents children in U.S. immigration custody, said she hopes the measles infections at Dilley are not used to “unnecessarily” prevent lawmakers and attorneys from inspecting the detention center in the near future, citing broader concerns about the facility.
“In the meantime, we are deeply concerned for the physical and the mental health of every family detained at Dilley,” Desai said. “It is important to remember that no family needs to be detained — this is a choice that the administration is making.”
This neat link shows that at many levels of the Federal Government, our Federal Workers are still trying to make it work! “February is Black History Month. The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.” It covers many topics, including the role of Black Americans in the Military,
More than 400 years of Black history and heritage are preserved in national parks and communities around the country. Discover stories shared by people who formed powerful connections with these places of history, nature, and enjoyment. Inspire others by sharing your “park story”!
Here is one sad example of the backsliding today, as reported by Dr. Stacey Patton on SubStack. “A Law Written to Stop White Men from Lynching Black People Is Now Being Used Against Black Journalists. Sit With That!”
The Klan was not a disorder problem. It was not a public nuisance. It was a domestic terror machine built to erase Black citizenship through fear, spectacle, and mass killing.
And now, more than 150 years later, that same legal architecture is being aimed in the opposite direction. Not at racial terror networks. Not at organized white nationalist violence. Not at the groups openly fantasizing about civil war and racial cleansing online. At Black journalists documenting racial injustice in real time. That is not irony. That is the goddamn strategy!
Because American racial power has never only been about domination. It has always been about narrative control. Who defines violence. Who defines disorder. Who defines threat. And one of the most reliable tools in that playbook is inversion.
Inversion is when civil rights law becomes “reverse discrimination.” Anti-lynching language becomes “law and order.” Voting rights enforcement becomes “election interference.” Anti-racist speech becomes “racial division.” And now, a Reconstruction-era anti-terror statute becomes a tool to criminalize Black documentation of racial injustice.
The pattern is brutally consistent. Civil rights protections are not just attacked. They are eventually repurposed. Not immediately. Not clumsily. But strategically. Once enough historical distance exists for the original bloodstains to be blurred, sanitized, or erased. And that erasure is not accidental.
Because you cannot weaponize civil rights law against Black people unless you first strip it of memory. You have to remove the smoke. The photographs. The testimonies. The written admission that white citizens once terrorized Black ones while state governments stood aside.
Once you erase that, you can do anything.
Orange Caligulia cannot keep his hands off our National Treasures. We’ve already lost the historic East Wing of the White House. Are we about to see the Kennedy Center be the next disaster brought on by Trump’s nasty taste and love for wrecking real estate? This is from the AP. “Kennedy Center will close for 2 years for renovations, Trump says, after performers’ backlash.” This seems to be the destiny of some of our most important Federal and Heritage sites.
President Donald Trump said Sunday he will move to close Washington’s Kennedy Center performing arts center for two years starting in July for construction, his latest proposal to upturn the storied venue since returning to the White House.
Trump’s announcement on social media follows a wave of cancellations by leading performers, musicians and groups since the president ousted the previous leadership and added his name to the building. Trump made no mention in his post of the recent cancellations.
His proposal, announced days after the premiere of “Melania, ” a documentary of the first lady was shown at the center, he said was subject to approval by the board of the Kennedy Center, which has been stocked with his hand-picked allies. Trump himself chairs the center’s board of trustees.
“This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment,” Trump wrote in his post.
Neither Trump nor Kennedy Center President Ric Grenell, a Trump ally, have provided evidence to back up their claims about the building being in disrepair, and last October, Trump had pledged the center would remain open during renovations. In Sunday’s announcement, Trump said the center will close on July 4th, when he said the construction would begin.
So, that’s it for me today! Take care of yourselves and remember that there are more of us than them. We just need to continue to remind them of it!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: We are all Minnesotans Now
Posted: January 16, 2026 Filed under: #FARTUS, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE raids, just because | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, ICE Criminals, ICE Raids and Crimes, Minneapolis, Renee Good 2 Comments
“The hypocrisy of this Trumplican administration continues to reach unfathomable levels. If you’re not paying attention, shame on you. If you’re paying attention but ignoring it, shame on you. Violent protest is what they are provoking. Contest the alternative so-called facts everywhere you can, woke is what they fear! Elon hasn’t funded a vaccine for the Woke Mind Virus, yet.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
My home and I have been going through a major streak of Danshari (断捨離) at the beginning and end of the year. It sure feels good to throw junk out and get down to the basic, simple life, but wow, is it time-consuming and brutally exhausting after living in a house for 25 years and letting things accumulate. My house is quite small, and still, stuff piles up. Time to toss out all the things that you don’t need, don’t want, and that really create a burden on your way of life and take up needless time.
This is how I feel about the Trump administration. We never needed them; the health effects of having their garbage pile up are devastating and exhausting. Time to toss them all out.
Having gone through a period of ICE Raids and watching other American cities suffer in similar ways, I have to admit that what’s going on in Minneapolis right now is beyond the pale. It’s like they used the rest of us to beef up their levels of assaulting normalcy, morality, and decency. Time to remove the real refuse and live a simpler, more productive life.
This first suggested read is from the AP. “Federal immigration agents filmed dragging a woman from her car in Minneapolis.” This is not the American Dream. It’s an American Nightmare.
A U.S. citizen on her way to a medical appointment in Minneapolis was dragged out of her car and detained by immigration officers, according to a statement released by the woman on Thursday, after a video of her arrest drew millions of views on social media.
Aliya Rahman said she was brought to a detention center where she was denied medical care and lost consciousness. The Department of Homeland Security said she was an agitator who was obstructing ICE agents conducting arrests in the area.
That video is the latest in a deluge of online content that documents an intensifying immigration crackdown across the midwestern city, as thousands of federal agents execute arrests amid protests in what local officials have likened to a “federal invasion.”
Rahman said that she was on her way to a routine appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center when she encountered federal immigration agents at an intersection. Video appears to show federal immigration agents shouting commands over a cacophony of whistles, car horns and screams from protesters.
In the video, one masked agent smashes Rahman’s passenger side window while others cut her seatbelt and drag her out of the car through the driver’s side door. Numerous guards then carried her by her arms and legs towards an ICE vehicle.
Philip Bump, writing at MS NOW, has the Op-Ed up. “Trump could be close to unleashing the state violence he’s always wanted. President Trump suggested on Thursday that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act. He’s wanted to do that for years.” He’s doing this while trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which still blows my mind. He’s also after protestors while telling Iraq we will attack them if they attack peaceful protestors. Go figure. You may remember that Bump was noticeably crying during the reporting on the death of Renee Good, imagining her small child and the backseat filled with stuffed animals.
On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump suggested — not for the first time — that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing him to deploy active-duty soldiers to combat protesters. The president’s musing about the Insurrection Act should not be understood as a reaction to what’s happening right now. It should instead be understood as the next link in a chain of events that Trump set in motion back in his first administration — and dramatically accelerated in his second.
Trump seems to have lingering regrets about not doing some of the things he wanted to do back in 2020, when protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spawned unrest across the country and outside the White House.
When Trump was hurried to the bunker at the executive mansion one evening, it projected weakness. Members of his administration pushed back against his ambitions to unleash more forceful responses — such as deploying soldiers against protesters. This frustrated the president, contributing to his removal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Trump returned to Washington last year even angrier at the establishment and his opponents, but now he’s well-versed in the levers of power and understands how flimsy the barriers to that power can be. Since early in his second term, he’s seemed eager to show that this time around, he won’t waste any time in using an iron fist against dissent. And he’s staffed his Cabinet with people who aren’t likely to object.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his allies insisted that immigration laws needed to be tightened and that people living in the country illegally needed to be removed. They often insisted that they would prioritize criminal immigrants, people who — Trump said — were known to law enforcement and could be rolled up quickly.
Once inaugurated, however, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security initiated sweeping dragnets, first in Los Angeles, then in Chicago and now in Minneapolis. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (which includes Border Patrol), were given free rein to aggressively detain immigrants — and anyone who stood in their way.
Speaking to reporters in May, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, warned Democratic leaders in blue states that they could expect to see federal agents in their cities.
“If we can’t arrest a bad guy in the jail … you’re gonna force him in the community to find him,” Homan told reporters last week. “If we can’t find him in the community, we’re gonna find him at the worksite. So we’re going to flood the zone, and sanctuary cities will get exactly what they don’t want.”
Comply or we’ll blanket your streets, Homan warned. And they did.
Notice that Homan framed the threat as being about criminals: If cities wouldn’t hand over criminals who were in custody, ICE would “flood the zone” everywhere else. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin repeated this framing in an interview on Fox News this week centered on the current operation in Minnesota.
“If [Gov.] Tim Walz and [Minneapolis] Mayor [Jacob] Frey would let us in their jails, we wouldn’t have to be there at all,” McLaughlin said. “Currently, there are 680 criminal illegal aliens [in the city] … people who, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you would never want these people to be on your streets or your neighbors. That’s the people who we are targeting.”
This is untrue. There are numerous reports of federal agents in the city carrying out door-to-door sweeps and stopping or detaining American citizens, who definitionally aren’t criminal immigrants.
McLaughlin’s assertion is also untrue outside of the context of Minneapolis. Data released by DHS shows that more detainees in ICE custody have no criminal records than have criminal convictions or pending charges. A new report from the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group, summarizes the shift since Trump returned to office: “The result of … changes in arrest practice has been a 2,450% increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day.”
Those numbers alone give the lie to the idea that ICE is simply doing what it has always done. It isn’t. It’s doing something broader and more aggressive than what it has done in the past — at the direction of DHS leaders and with Trump’s approval.
Trumpian narratives are never backed by fact. They represent pure propaganda since these talking points are never true. Here’s a take from the Never Trumper Republican folks at The Bulwark. Yes, I’m quoting my strange bedfellow Bill Kristol again. “Fighting ICE’s Reign of Terror.”
The unjustified and indefensible killing of an innocent woman, Renee Good, by U.S. government agents; the lack of any recognition or acknowledgement by those agents or their superiors that what they did was wrong; the intensification of the government’s reign of terror in the streets of our cities and towns; the unabashed defense of brutality by the administration in power, and their wholesale lying about it . . . it’s horrifying.
But the less dramatic stories emerging from our reign of terror are also horrifying.
At around 3 p.m. Wednesday, four Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up for lunch at a small, family-owned Mexican restaurant, El Tapatio, in Willmar, Minnesota. They took a booth and apparently enjoyed their meal—though staff at the restaurant appeared “frightened,” according to a witness who spoke to the Minnesota Star-Tribune.
When the restaurant closed that evening at 8:30 p.m., ICE agents followed departing workers and detained three of them.
The agents presumably had a good laugh about this. Perhaps they relished their meal even more because the staff that served them was frightened. Humiliation of their victims, a kind of relish in their fear and misery, a kind of—let’s call it what it is—sadism has become a dominant part of the culture of ICE.
It does not, thankfully, appear to be dominant in the culture of the country. At least not yet. A Quinnipiac poll shows only 40 percent of Americans approve of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws, while 57 percent disapprove. In a CNN survey, 51 percent of Americans say they believe ICE is making cities less safe, while only 31 percent say ICE is making cities safer.
Those numbers in support of ICE are higher than they should be in a healthy and humane society. But still, in today’s polarized politics, a 17–20 percent margin is substantial. If only Democrats could win the national vote this fall by that amount!
White House border czar Tom Homan admits the administration has a problem. Not with the policy, of course. It’s just, Homan said yesterday, that ICE needs “to be better at messaging at what we’re doing.” Still, it’s good to see Homan on the defensive.
The question is whether the Democratic party is going to go on the offensive.
Yesterday Minnesota Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar put out a statement: “Our local law enforcement, mayors, and community leaders all agree: The best way to restore order and safety in Minnesota is for ICE to leave our streets. This Administration is escalating rather than de-escalating and it needs to stop.”
ICE of course could care less about local law enforcement, mayors, and community leaders, who can do little to stop ICE’s terror. But ICE is an agency of the federal government. It operates under authorities granted and defined by Congress. It uses funds appropriated by Congress.
So if ICE needs to stop what it is doing, it’s Democrats in Congress who need to try to do their best to stop it. Which does not mean offering a couple of pro forma amendments that will lose. It does not mean failing to excoriate Republican senators, by name, for refusing to stand up to their dear leaders. It does not mean going on to approve government funding as usual.
Heather Cox Richardson’s latest offering on Substack, “Letters from an American,” is bone-chilling.
You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?
They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.
Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.
They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”
The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”
As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.
While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.
In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like [the agents are] talking to us.”
This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you [sic] attention to this matter! President DJT.”
My friends in Minneapolis are experiencing the same kind of trauma that every city that has experienced an ICE invasion, but on a much larger scale. I wake up to read what is going on in their neighborhoods and their city, and I know the feel of those intense emotions. It freaks me out all over again.
This is the latest news on their latest reign of terror. It’s from the AP. “ICE says a Cuban immigrant died in a suicide attempt. A witness says guards pinned and choked him.
A Cuban immigrant died in a Texas immigration detention facility earlier this month during an altercation with guards, and the local medical examiner has indicated that his death will likely be classified as a homicide.
The federal government has provided a differing account surrounding the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, saying the detainee was attempting suicide and staff tried to save him.
A witness told The Associated Press that Lunas Campos died after he was handcuffed, tackled by guards and placed in a chokehold until he lost consciousness. The immigrant’s family was told by the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday that a preliminary autopsy report said the death was a homicide resulting from asphyxia from chest and neck compression, according to a recording of the call reviewed by the AP.
The death and conflicting accounts have intensified scrutiny into the conditions of immigration jails at a time when the government has been rounding up immigrants in large numbers around the country and detaining them at facilities like the one in El Paso where Lunas Campos died.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is legally required to issue public notification of detainee deaths. Last week, it said Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old father of four and registered sex offender, had died at Camp East Montana, but made no mention of him being involved in an altercation with staff immediately before his death.
This is exactly why the framers of the Constitution and the signers of the Declaration were obsessed with Due Process. Everyone should have access to a trial, to lawyers, to a judge, to a jury of peers, and to laws that protect everyone from unjust prosecution and punishment. This is at the absolute core of our American Way of Life and system of Government.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging List today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Mercy Me!
Posted: January 12, 2026 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, ICE raids | Tags: #Fartus #DeportUs, @repeat1968. John Buss, American Roulette, Enemy lists American Style, Federal Reserve Independence, ICE, Jerome Powell, Richard Nixon, Stock Markets Plunge, Trump cuts Childcare Support 1 Comment
“This was the plan all along. Authoritarianism has arrived and is on full display. Can’t wait to hear the “this is what I voted for” crowd crying when they are executed on the streets protesting the confiscation of their guns. But hey, there are no men in women’s sports!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Yet another start to a week in the cruel and vulture-ridden world of Donny J. His obsession with his own self-interest continues to plague the country with problems we don’t need, didn’t ask for, and most of us know they ruin our way of life. The most ridiculous aspect is that all these grudges have evolved into bizarre legal actions, which have been disrupting nearly every process and institution that we rely on. Today, stocks are falling because Trump just has to have someone to blame for his rotten economy.
Richard Nixon FAFO’d with the Fed back in the 1970s and learned exactly how international financial and monetary markets are massively disrupted by politicians meddling with these markets. This is a journal article that you can read if you’d like. (How Richard Nixon Pressured Arthur Burns: Evidence from the Nixon Tapes, Burton A. Abrams, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 20, no. 4, Fall 2006.)
A more updated analysis can be found at NPR. This is from February 2025. “What happened when Richard Nixon wanted more control over interest rates? This is a tale of a president pressuring the head of the central bank for political reasons. Burns fights it, then capitulates, and it lays the foundation for later inflation.” I lived through this as I was actually studying to be an economist. It has significantly shaped many of my perspectives on why politicians should refrain from certain functions. I can also offer testimony that everyone — including me at one time — who has worked for the Fed holds Fed independence as a sacred trust to the American People.
Whether the Federal Reserve raises, lowers or maintains baseline interest rates is one of the most important economic decisions it makes. And that decision is made outside of presidential control, at least theoretically. Kenny Malone and Mary Childs from our Planet Money podcast had the story of what happened when one president wanted more control over interest rates.
MARY CHILDS, BYLINE: In 1971, President Richard Nixon began secretly recording basically everything.
KENNY MALONE, BYLINE: Thirty-three years later, virtually all of those tapes were publicly available.
BURTON ABRAMS: Well, everyone else was interested in Watergate. I was interested in monetary policy.
CHILDS: Economist Burton Abrams drove down to the National Archives.
ABRAMS: They were available on reels, and then you had to put on earphones and try to make out the garbled conversations that existed.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RICHARD NIXON: Arthur, how are you? (Inaudible).
CHILDS: Arthur, how are you? Nixon says to Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve.
MALONE: Nixon was one year away from reelection, and unemployment had been rising.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
NIXON: So this will be the last conservative administration in Washington.
MALONE: This will be the last conservative administration in Washington.
CHILDS: Nixon seems to tell his Fed chair to let more money flow through the economy, which generally helps unemployment but risks inflation.
MALONE: Arthur Burns seems to push back and also seems to tap on the table to make this point.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ARTHUR BURNS: I don’t want to see interest rates exploding (inaudible).
ABRAMS: Burns is making an appeal to Nixon that he doesn’t want to stimulate anymore. He’s still holding out. Yep.
MALONE: So I assume Nixon is not super jazzed about that meeting.
ABRAMS: No, so I suspect that behind the scenes, pressure is still to give Nixon the monetary policy he wants.
MALONE: According to Arthur Burns’ personal diary, he was warned that White House operatives had their bayonets out for him and that Nixon was threatening to pack the Fed board and completely take control.
Economist Mark Zahn explains it all. This is from ABC. “Stocks fall after Trump’s DOJ opens criminal probe into Fed Chair Powell. Powell rebuked the probe as an effort to undermine the Fed’s independence.” It’s not nice to fool your major donors. We continue the Magical Misery tower with whatever this brand of “conservatism” claims to be. Republicans only want the government out of business when it suits them.
Stocks slid in early trading on Monday hours after reports that the Department of Justice had opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell centered on the central bank leader’s remarks to Congress about an office renovation project.
Powell, who was appointed by Trump in 2017, issued a rare video message rebuking the investigation as a politically motivated effort to influence the Fed’s interest rate policy.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 290 points, or 0.6%, while the S&P 500 fell 0.4%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq declined 0.3%.
Gold and silver — safe-haven assets often seen as a hedge against the stock market — moved higher on Monday.
The selloff on Monday also appeared to include reaction to a social media post from President Donald Trump advocating for a 10% cap on credit card interest rates for one year. Shares of several major banks fell in early trading.
The DOJ’s criminal probe follows a monthslong influence campaign undertaken by Trump as he has frequently slammed the Fed for what he considers a reluctance to significantly reduce interest rates.
The criminal probe appears to center on allegations of false remarks made by Powell about a renovation of the Fed’s headquarters during a congressional hearing in June.
Trump has repeatedly denounced Powell for alleged overspending tied to the central bank’s $2.5 billion renovation project. The Fed attributes spending overruns to unforeseen cost increases, saying that its building renovation will ultimately “reduce costs over time by allowing the Board to consolidate most of its operations,” according to the central bank’s website.
Federal law allows the president to remove the Fed chair for “cause” — though no president has ever done so. Powell’s term as chair is set to expire in May, but he can remain on the Fed’s policymaking board until 2028. Powell has not indicated whether he intends to remain on the board.
It’s sincerely hypocritical to me to watch a convicted and well-known lifetime felon try to trump up charges on some of the most ethical government servants we’ve ever had. Powell has released a statement through the usual Fed channels.
I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one—certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law. But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.
This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role; the Fed through testimony and other public disclosures made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.
This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.
No rational, studied, normal economist would disagree with his statements. However, sell-outs for money, power, and greed will always pop up to empower evil intent.
ICE continues to be a rogue organization with no respect for the law or for human life. Judd LeGume’s blog’s Popular Information has some great perspectives on the ICE Raids today. The inhumanity of their actions shows intent, organization, and planning. “Kill, smear, cover-up.”
“The known facts do not support the official federal government narrative of Renee Good’s killing. Now, in an unusual move, the federal government is excluding state law enforcement from the investigation.
Initially, the FBI and Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) agreed to conduct a joint investigation of Good’s death. This is standard procedure. But this agreement was quickly rescinded. The BCA says it has lost “access to the case materials, scene evidence [and] investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.” As a result, the BCA believes it will not be able to conduct a thorough investigation that will ensure “accountability and public confidence.”
Instead, the investigation will be led exclusively by the FBI, which is run by Kash Patel, one of Trump’s most partisan supporters. Patel wrote a series of children’s books that referred to Trump as a “king.”
“What are you hiding?” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison asked. “I mean, if you feel that you’re — that the ICE agent operated within the law, then let there be an investigation so that that can be revealed.” Ellison said that the federal government was undermining “a fair, transparent investigation” by excluding state investigators. According to Ellison, the FBI investigation “will look simply like a whitewash… covering up… what could well be nefarious, bad activity.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said. “Kristi Noem watched the videos and doesn’t want an impartial investigation because she knows her narrative about domestic terrorism is bullshit.”
After an officer-involved shooting, it is standard protocol for the officer and witnesses to remain on the scene to be interviewed. Further, nothing should be removed from the scene. But in this case a video shows “several agents, including the agent who opened fire, get in their vehicles and drive off, apparently altering the active crime scene.”
ICE policy requires “officers and agents… to activate body-worn cameras at the start of enforcement activities and to record throughout interactions.” But no body cam videos have been released.
Since the federal government has asserted control over the investigation, it has selectively leaked evidence to ideologically friendly publications. A 47-second video of the incident, for example, was shared with Alpha News, a right-wing outlet in Minnesota. It was then amplified by Vance. It was released by the DHS the next day.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced she was conducting her own investigation and urged the public to submit evidence directly to her office. Vance told reporters on January 8 that Ross has “absolute immunity” for Good’s killing. Moriarty said that is not true.
Moriarty revealed that federal law enforcement removed Good’s vehicle from the scene before state investigators could examine it. Good’s car is a key piece of evidence because it could help definitively establish if Ross was struck in any way.”
Joyce Vance warns us in her SubStack that “Tonight’s column is far longer than I like to run, perhaps the longest one ever. But please don’t give up on it. Although I’d planned to write about developments we expect this week in various lawsuits, these are the times we live in. The situation with ICE is critical right now. I’ve packed a lot of information you’ll need this week as the situation in Minneapolis develops into this post, but don’t feel like you have to read it all at once.”
We head into the coming week in an unsettled moment where the administration has blood on its hands. It would have been fair for the administration to call for time to investigate what happened in Minneapolis the morning Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent. But that’s not what ICE’s leadership, the DHS Secretary, or the White House has done. They blamed the victim. They criticized her for exercising her rights as an American citizen. They called her a terrorist. None of this suggests the administration has good intentions. Vice President Harris told us this would happen and now it has.
Sunday morning, CNN’s Jake Tapper showed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem video of the mob attacking the Capitol on January 6.
Tapper: “I just showed you video of people attacking law enforcement officers on January 6. Undisputed evidence, and I just said, President Trump pardoned all of them. You said that President Trump is enforcing all the laws equally. That’s just not true. There’s a different standard for law enforcement officers being attacked if they’re being attacked by Trump supporters. We just saw that.”
Trump’s September 2025 Presidential Memo titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” (NSPM-7) spelled this all out. It divides the country into good guys and bad guys. If you’re for Trump, you’re a good guy. If you’re against Trump, you’re a domestic terrorist. The rules that apply to the two groups are different. Attack the police in support of Donald Trump (January 6), and you get a pardon; stop to watch what an ICE agent is doing, and it’s a death sentence.
Trump attributed the need for NSPM-7 to dramatic increases in “Heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence.” He cited “the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk” and called out people who “adhered to the alleged shooter’s ideology, embraced and cheered this evil murder while actively encouraging more political violence,” as the justification for the memo. He also cited the 2024 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and “the 2022 assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh” as further justification, along with the two assassination attempts on his own life and what he calls “riots” in Los Angeles and Portland that were a “1,000 percent increase in attacks on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers since January 21, 2025, compared to the same period last year.” He also wrote that “Separate anti-police and ‘criminal justice’ riots have left many people dead and injured and inflicted over $2 billion in property damage nationwide.”
Trump claims the recent “political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically.” He says it’s the “culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” No evidence is offered to support this. But that doesn’t seem to matter in the rush to a conclusion: “A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.” Although at first this seemed targeted toward civil society and civil rights groups that advocated and litigated on behalf of Americans and their rights, now, it seems to be turned against anti-ICE protestors who are doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights.
This list is horrifying.
NSPM-7 identifies “common threads animating this violent conduct” as:
- anti-Americanism;
- anti-capitalism;
- anti-Christianity;
- support for the overthrow of the United States Government;
- extremism on migration, race, and gender; and
- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
If you have any of these tendencies, or if the administration believes you do, one of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) is directed to investigate you.
There are about 200 JTTFs across the country. They are the nerve center of the federal government’s efforts to ensure potential acts of terrorism are detected before they can be committed. Agents and prosecutors from federal and state agencies meet to review cases and ensure nothing important is swept aside. The work can be intense and urgent. Now, Trump has ordered that the JTTFs “shall investigate” an exhausting laundry list of potential infractions committed by people who oppose his views. In Trump’s view, Americans exercising their First Amendment and other rights are violent domestic terrorists.
But it’s all one-sided. Just like Noem’s failure to recognize the crimes committed by January 6 defendants in the question from Tapper that we started out with tonight. It’s all a thinly veiled mechanism for criminalizing innocent behavior by anyone who opposes this administration. Hence the characterization of Good, who was unarmed when she was shot and killed by a law enforcement officer, as the “terrorist.”
I have one more topic today that I find horrifyingly short-sided and cruel. This is all in the name of keeping women out of the workforce. This is from AXIOS. It’s reported by Emily Peck. “Trump funding freeze could stretch child care to a breaking point.”
Child care providers, already under financial strain, face their greatest test yet as the Trump administration imposes new rules and restrictions on funding.
Why it matters: Federal money underpins the entire industry — vital to millions of parents trying to manage work and family, across all income levels.
Driving the news: A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the administration from freezing more than $10 billion for five blue states, claiming widespread fraud.
- The administration, meanwhile, is also asking all states to provide more information to justify and support spending on care, a requirement that some state officials and advocates say is onerous and could delay funding.
The big picture: Even before the freeze, states were scrambling to make up for the loss of pandemic-era child care funding.
- “There hasn’t been a full-on collapse, but it’s just been a kind of slow-moving deterioration,” says Matthew Nestler, an economist at KPMG who tracks the sector.
Zoom out: Child care providers, mainly small businesses on tight margins, are struggling to stay afloat.
- Wait lists for child care are growing in some states, and prices are rising — that often means a parent needs to make a tough choice, and could leave the labor market entirely. Typically, that’s mothers.
- So many workers depend on child care that any policies that reduce investment in the sector have big knock-on effects for the entire economy, Nestler says.
Zoom in: Colorado froze new child care enrollments in some counties last year because of state budget constraints, coming on top of the pandemic pullback.
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That’s been devastating for Westwood Academy, a preschool and child care center in Denver, where two-thirds of kids, about 20, were on federally subsidized tuition at the start of 2025.
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Now, the program is down to just four of these kids, says RB Fast, who started the center in 2022 when pandemic funds were flowing. Last year, the center lost about $70,000. (Typically, she turns some profit.)
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She’s planning to open a second center in a wealthier suburb, where she’ll charge $2,200 a month for a full-day toddler care. In her current center in Denver, she charges $1,747.
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The upshot: “High quality child care is increasingly becoming a luxury good,” she says.
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In Indiana is facing similar struggles.
It’s hard to look daily at all the things this regime is doing to make our lives worse-off. Many are focused on harming the least and most vulnerable among us. I know all these grudges Trump holds impact his actions as does his level of greed, need for attention, and seemingly needless compulstion to be cruel.His brain is fed by the likes of Stephen Miller and some backward notion that life was better in previous centuries. But, the man has serious mental issues and personality disorders. Why don’t so many of his followers see that? Why doesn’t the Republican Party do something? They’re empowering the worst in humanity to destroy everything this country has every stood for.
The struggle continues.
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Finally Friday Reads: Descent into Cruelty and Madness
Posted: January 9, 2026 Filed under: "presidential immunity", #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Analysis Trump NYT interview, ICE Thugs, Orange Caligula, Renee Nicole Good, War on Venezuela 1 Comment
“The United States of Trump has been eliminated from the Quidditch World Cup. FAFO.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
While I have tried to prepare myself for the daily shock of what comes out of Trump’s mouth and his administration’s actions, I never seem to reach a point where I don’t spend massive amounts of time feeling overwhelmed. Today is no different. I also keep thinking all the physical work and concentration it’s been taking to work on the house would get the other stuff out of my head. That doesn’t work either, because it appears endless.
JJ sent me this link this morning, and I just can’t get over this headline in The Guardian. “‘I don’t need international law’: Trump says power constrained only by ‘my own morality.’ President says morality ‘the only thing that can stop me’ in New York Times interview on limits to his authority.”Maya Yang reports the story.
“Donald Trump has said, “I don’t need international law” and that his power is limited only by his “own morality”.
In a new interview with the New York Times, Trump said the only constraint to his power as president of the US is “my own morality, my own mind”.
“It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump said, adding: “I’m not looking to hurt people.” He went on to concede “I do” in regards to whether his administration needed to adhere to international law, but said: “It depends on what your definition of international law is.”
Trump, who spoke to the newspaper as his administration looks into “a range of options” in attempts to gain control of Greenland, also emphasized the importance of ownership.
“Ownership is very important,” Trump said, adding: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
Trump also dismissed concerns that his decision to oust Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s president would set the precedent of a potential Chinese takeover of Taiwan or Russia’s attempt to control Ukraine.
Justifying the US’s attacks on Venezuela, Trump repeated his controversial claims Maduro had allegedly sent gang members into the US.
“This was a real threat … You didn’t have people pouring into China. You didn’t have drugs pouring into China. You didn’t have all of the bad things that we’ve had. You didn’t have the jails of Taiwan opened up and the people pouring into China,” Trump said, adding that no criminals were “pouring into Russia”.
He said that he does not believe Chinese president Xi Jinping would seize control of Taiwan, telling the New York Times: “That’s up to him, what he’s going to be doing. But you know, I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t.”
The Guardian’s Jonathan Yerushalmy followed up to day with this headline. “Morality, military might, and a sense of mischief: key takeaways from Trump’s New York Times interview. Trump sounds off on Venezuela’s future, Taiwan’s security and his aims for Greenland, days after operation to seize Nicolás Maduro.” That’s quite the list of ways to become an international piriah.
Just days after launching an unprecedented operation in Venezuela to seize its president and effectively take control of its oil industry, Donald Trump sat down with New York Times journalists for a wide-ranging interview that took in international law, Taiwan, Greenland and weight-loss drugs.
The president, riding high on the success of an operation that has upended the rules of global power, spoke candidly and casually about the new world order he appears eager to usher in; an order governed not by international norms or long-lasting alliances, but national strength and military power.
Here are some key points from his interview with the Times.
1. US is in Venezuela for the long haul
When asked how long he would be “running Venezuela”, Trump said it would be “much longer” than a year.
After Trump initially claimed that the US was running the South American country, in the hours after the operation that seized President Nicolás Maduro, members of Trump’s cabinet sought to downplay America’s role in its governance. Since then however, Trump has continued to assert that he is in fact “in charge”.
2. Seize Greenland or preserve the Nato alliance?
Trump has spent the days since the attack on Venezuela renewing his push for the US to acquire Greenland and has not ruled out using military force to take it. He has framed the issue as one of national security, but when pushed by White House correspondent David E Sanger on why he hasn’t chosen to simply reopen bases and send troops to Greenland under the terms of a decades-old treaty, Trump insisted the territory must be part of the US.
“I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with … a lease or a treaty,” the president said, adding “that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”
When asked by the Times whether obtaining Greenland or preserving the Nato alliance was more important, Trump declined to answer. He did however acknowledge that it “may be a choice” between the two options.
Greenland was formerly ruled by Denmark – which still controls its foreign and security policies – and both countries are members of Nato. However in his interview on Wednesday, Trump said that alliance was essentially useless without the US.
“I think we’ll always get along with Europe, but I want them to shape up … If you look at Nato, Russia I can tell you is not at all concerned with any other country but us,” he said.
You may read the rest at the link. Dr. Paul Krugman also had a good headline for his latest SubStack post. “The Mad King’s Madness Deepens. Trump wants war, war, and more war – even against Americans.” He may want the Nobel Peace Prize, but he is definitely undermining his own arguments.
Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him underwater on every major issue. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently lamented that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled.
And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection.
So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.
What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Times reports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”
The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was initially very popular. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed.
And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where, on Wednesday, an ICE agent killedRenee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head.
Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.
A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy.
But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.
So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful — so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.
And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending.
Michelle Goldberg used her column at the New York Times to further elucidate the murder of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE Agent. “By Killing Renee Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All.”
Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”
The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”
In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”
It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she “rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.
Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be revealed.
Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The enemies are at the gates.”
Screenshot
I’ll conclude today’s offerings with an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack: Letters from an American.
On MS NOW today, columnist Philip Bump broke down when talking about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good yesterday in Minneapolis. “I have a six year old,” he said. “And…seeing the image of the stuffed animals in the glove compartment of her car—really emotional for me and…what I take away from this is, for me that’s the thing that stands out: that this was a family that could have been like mine.”
Bump went on to emphasize that “there are a lot of situations, a lot of incidents that have involved ICE, have involved the government over the course of the past thirteen months in which there is resonance for other families in similar ways,” but what he hit on in his first reaction to Good’s killing was the one the administration must fear most of all. Good was a white, suburban mother, whose ex-husband told reporters she was a Christian stay-at-home mom, and Bump is a white man.
President Donald J. Trump’s people see that demographic as their base. If it turns on Trump, they are politically finished, as finished as elite southern enslavers were when Harriet Beecher Stowe reminded American mothers of the fragility of their own childrens’ lives to condemn the sale of Black children; as finished as the second Ku Klux Klan was when its leader kidnapped, raped, and murdered 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer; as finished as the white segregationists were when white supremacists murdered four little girls in church in 1963.
Evidence that President Donald J. Trump has sexually abused children would likely be enough to crater his political support from this group, making it no accident that the administration is openly flouting the law that required the full release of the Epstein Files by December 19, 2025. The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of those files, and many of them were so heavily redacted as to be useless. In a court filing on Monday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “substantial work remains to be done” before it can release them all.
But there is no hiding the murder of Renee Good, captured on video by several witnesses as it was. And so the Trump administration is working desperately to smear Good and to convince the public that, contrary to widespread video evidence, the federal agent put in place by the Trump regime shot her in self-defense.
Just remember what Warren Zevon once said: “Enjoy every Sandwich,” we never know what comes next …
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