The murders of US citizens in broad daylight are just the tip of the iceberg. The type of person who thinks roving the streets in a group, masked and heavily armed, detaining people violently and arbitrarily, people who are then detained in deplorable conditions, likely means that these people are not sticklers for chivalry and good manners. I worry about women and minors abducted by this cohort. If these federal agents aren't accountable for their actions, and they have demonstrated a poor understanding of citizens' rights, I would not be surprised if the treatment of non-citizens at some agents' hands has involved sexual assault.
We are already under operation: PROLIFERATION - SEIZE VOTING RESULTS - CRY FRAUD! At a critical point in this process, Trump will trigger the Insurrection Act and there will be nothing even the Republican congress will be able to do as the facism positions itself in full control over everything. EVERYONE needs to alert public perception of this NOW before it’s too late.
I truly wish that a large enough number of American citizens today had sufficient knowledge of history or social studies to follow your thought processes and arguments, but I have watched for decades ( I am 85 this month and have watched this country having studied the History of Ideas and Modern European History at a fancy eastern college) and have pondered the dumbing down of the American electorate with just such ideas in mind. It states in all the revolutionary manuals (from Mein Kampf to Mao's little yellow...or red...book, to the Communist Manifesto, to mention but a few...or just read 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley). Mind control a complex mixture of seduction with simple solutions, to identifiable minorities to persecute as the "root of all evil", to a little extortion with some blackmail thrown in, the mobilization of the airwaves (n.b.: Fox and CBS), a nice little secret police (afterall we can't have our own brand new federally funded, to the detriment of Health Insurance, police running around with their faces evident to the cameras) and there you have it. These mid-terms, if we are allowed to have them, will probably be the last elections we will be free to vote in. AND god help all 350,000,000 of us if we don't vote and make it count!
I see this Colin Wright is a Manhattan Institute slug. I fought those slime buckets in public over economics and welfare policy, and environmental policy more than 40 years ago.
This guy and his "mistakes will be made" because "we're running out of time" is precisely Trump and his lies, hate, racism, and misogyny.
As the US wealth and income divisions get more and more stark, the US needs people to blame. None of it has anything to do with crime or drugs. Trump is also a sociopath who's already shown he's willing to take food from low-income kids. I'm gonna guess Trump's decided that starving kids slowly is less dramatic than holding them down and shooting them. Leaves him more time to sell bibles and guitars.
I probably agree with more of MI's past work than you do (City Journal has published some good stuff over time), but they went down a VERY dark road toward the end of the Obama years. I used to sometimes attend their annual dinners. Stopped after 2017 when the speaker (forget who it was) ridiculed any conservatives who were failing to get on the Trump train as pearl-clutching weaklings.
Every single broken egg is a human tragedy, and this is recognized in the legal maxim with deep roots in EnglIsh and American law: It is better that ten guilty persons go free than that one innocent person is punished.
In the case of immigration enforcement, far more innocent eggs are broken than the number of worst-of-the-worst criminals who go free. Cathy mentions the broken lives, separated families, anxieties, humiliations and official harassment suffered by innocent immigrants, and of course innocent immigrants and citizens alike suffer humiliation, serious injury and death at the hands of the enforcers. All in the name of mass imprisonment and deportation.
I'm not willing to hurt, injure or kill any more innocent human beings for the sake of an omelet. Dunno, but I'd like to believe that at this point, anyone with a heart would feel the same way even if they voted for mass deportations in 2024.
The sadism is the point, especially when executed by the minions of vile "leaders" who are never themselves in any physical danger or of even being held to account for the horrors they commit. Regarding the putrid apologists, as Lincoln said about proponents of slavery, "I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
I appreciate you Cathy I used to follow you on Twitter before leaving. I just cant humor hearing their arguments. Im glad you can deconstruct them. I cant. Its gross to hear it. To read it. Its like a politburo’s wet dream of a propaganda machine.
I watched "The Postman" last night. After the overthrow of the United States, the restored US government is said to be located in Minneapolis. That's what happens in a movie; an actual restoration is happening in Minneapolis-St. Paul today.
The whole idea of America is that there are some eggs government doesn't get to break. Obviously Constitutional rights but also the idea that we are a lawful society with equal justice for all (while not perfect, it's been the standard/goal). In making these excuses, MAGA and compliant Republicans reveal the truth. Hanging on to power means burning down everything....Constitution, conservative values and American exceptionalism. The 2/3rds of the country that doesn't want that needs to learn lessons from Minnesota. The majority has tools. Time to use them.
Perhaps the issue was never immigration at all - but the need to finds an issue that would have mass appeal and which would enable the government to try out all of the authoritarian tactics and strategies it really want to install - and which have little support in other areas of life. In Trump and Miller and their assistants, I think we have a case in which cruelty and hatred and dividing others is the real psychological and emotional need and immigration is the biggest opportunity to do that. They've started making it clear that government is the only body that should have guns (not protesters or watchers), that law enforcement should be anonymous and masked and have no limits on how it treats anyone, including white Christians or clergy.
Between this and the NRA speaking out, I’m wondering if someone needs to go check on Hell; see if the ice storm crept in a bit. It’s not exactly strong pushback, but it ain’t nothing.
Hatred of immigrants is definitely what drives Miller, and it's a big issue for the Heritage Foundation people. Noem must be a True Believer to bring so much cruelty to the job.
Trump clearly has racist & ethnonationlist prejudices, though like every other issue it's secondary to ego and greed. But he found he had struck gold when his fans were saying "I don't care wat he does as long as he builds the wall!" Ann Coulter said “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in White House after this immigration policy paper.”
The immigration issue is very real in the minds of many Americans, whether it's from a respectable position that an orderly society must have rules, or from a position of ethnic anxiety and outright hatred.
I think the newly recruited ICE goons are motivated partly be ethnic hatred, and partly by the joy they get in pushing people around, especially people they identify as ideological enemies - but that ideological animosity seems closely bound up with the matter of ethnic identity.
Yes the greatest driving force here (among many) is Miller’s pure hatred of others. His instinct is to dominate, and the administration is just learning as it goes. They don’t have to be that smart to follow a powerful instinct for cruelty and see what happens. I don’t think the objective is even to make the country stronger. It’s to fulfill deluded fantasies and pretend it’s for a good cause.
So the murder of Laken Riley by one individual means that all immigrants, illegal or not, must be subject to the whims of Trump, Miller, et al and their state police but the general cruelty, thuggery and murders perpetrated by said police cannot be construed as institutional rot. Gotta love these MAGA deep thinkers.
I think there are valuable take home messages from where the Nazis were able or not able to deport Jewish populations during WW2. The Jewish population of Bulgaria, at least within the prewar border, survived largely intact because they were seen as part of the community and the attempts by the government were vigorously resisted by society — politicians were involved along with the orthodox church and trade unions etc. The Bulgarian government was also wiling to deport the Jewish community and even had detailed plans strip them of their citizenship and to ship them up the Danube to Vienna, but the plans were never implemented due to societal resistance. This did not apply to Bulgarian occupied areas such as Macedonia and Thrace where the Jewish communities were deported but lacked the citizenship and community ties of those within the prewar borders. Even in WW2 societal resistance could affect local governments and cooperation with Germany.
Despite the rights dehumanizing language and use of terms such as alien, most Americans see immigrants whether legal or illegal as part of our communities — we don’t know and don’t question their status on a regular basis. These are people we know, people who go to school with our children, people who clean our homes, take care of our gardens etc. There is evidence from history that trying to deport a populace that is integrated into society will face severe backlash something the administration has not taken into account. Even the Nazi leadership whined about the softness of the German public in the face of rounding up Jews in Germany proper where they were part of the communities. The price for this is very high and it cannot be done without the loss of a lot of freedoms.
Keith - I appreciate this evidence of people acting on our common humanity. Didn’t expect one day I’d add to my prayers that we might have the softness of the WWII German public but I’ll look for inspiration where it appears 😇
This administration has yet to learn that public acts of violence and rounding up civilians does not go down well. It wasn’t that the Germans were *soft* it’s that public arrests made the populace uneasy and didn’t produce the response the regime hoped for. In both cases the regime thinks the public should respond positively to the rounding up of the individuals they have dehumanized, but the reality is the opposite: it is unnerving to see people rounded up and arrested in our communities.
>>Yet those are precisely the kinds of people who are currently being rounded up by ICE (only about 5 percent of whom are violent criminals while 73 percent have no criminal convictions at all).<<
On a related note, I've been noticing this administration's love for the phrase "worst of the worst" (especially by Kristi Noem). Guys... they can't ALL be "the worst of the worst."
In fact, "mass deportations" is basically the opposite of targeting "the worst of the worst," which is what most normies WISH they'd do. They love the rhetoric from both angles, but you can't have it both ways.
Yeah, even among people they've rounded up with actual criminal convictions and touted as "the worst of the worst," I remember reading that there was one guy who had one DUI conviction. I certainly don't take DUI lightly, but if that's the "worst of the worst," what do you call rapists and murderers?
There are not/never were enough convicted (nor even charged) immigrants to approach the deportation target numbers Trump/Miller throw around. Since most media don’t challenge them with facts and Americans are widely innumerate, the wild numbers sell very well. Why deal in reality when our neurons are in a fearful dither?
"We must do this at very, very fast" is, in fact, an acknowledgment that the American people may choose to vote against what Trump and his hard-right allies are doing.
The murders of US citizens in broad daylight are just the tip of the iceberg. The type of person who thinks roving the streets in a group, masked and heavily armed, detaining people violently and arbitrarily, people who are then detained in deplorable conditions, likely means that these people are not sticklers for chivalry and good manners. I worry about women and minors abducted by this cohort. If these federal agents aren't accountable for their actions, and they have demonstrated a poor understanding of citizens' rights, I would not be surprised if the treatment of non-citizens at some agents' hands has involved sexual assault.
We are already under operation: PROLIFERATION - SEIZE VOTING RESULTS - CRY FRAUD! At a critical point in this process, Trump will trigger the Insurrection Act and there will be nothing even the Republican congress will be able to do as the facism positions itself in full control over everything. EVERYONE needs to alert public perception of this NOW before it’s too late.
History shows that those who propose breaking omelets end up getting their own personal omelets broken by the state in the process.
I truly wish that a large enough number of American citizens today had sufficient knowledge of history or social studies to follow your thought processes and arguments, but I have watched for decades ( I am 85 this month and have watched this country having studied the History of Ideas and Modern European History at a fancy eastern college) and have pondered the dumbing down of the American electorate with just such ideas in mind. It states in all the revolutionary manuals (from Mein Kampf to Mao's little yellow...or red...book, to the Communist Manifesto, to mention but a few...or just read 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley). Mind control a complex mixture of seduction with simple solutions, to identifiable minorities to persecute as the "root of all evil", to a little extortion with some blackmail thrown in, the mobilization of the airwaves (n.b.: Fox and CBS), a nice little secret police (afterall we can't have our own brand new federally funded, to the detriment of Health Insurance, police running around with their faces evident to the cameras) and there you have it. These mid-terms, if we are allowed to have them, will probably be the last elections we will be free to vote in. AND god help all 350,000,000 of us if we don't vote and make it count!
I see this Colin Wright is a Manhattan Institute slug. I fought those slime buckets in public over economics and welfare policy, and environmental policy more than 40 years ago.
This guy and his "mistakes will be made" because "we're running out of time" is precisely Trump and his lies, hate, racism, and misogyny.
As the US wealth and income divisions get more and more stark, the US needs people to blame. None of it has anything to do with crime or drugs. Trump is also a sociopath who's already shown he's willing to take food from low-income kids. I'm gonna guess Trump's decided that starving kids slowly is less dramatic than holding them down and shooting them. Leaves him more time to sell bibles and guitars.
I probably agree with more of MI's past work than you do (City Journal has published some good stuff over time), but they went down a VERY dark road toward the end of the Obama years. I used to sometimes attend their annual dinners. Stopped after 2017 when the speaker (forget who it was) ridiculed any conservatives who were failing to get on the Trump train as pearl-clutching weaklings.
Every single broken egg is a human tragedy, and this is recognized in the legal maxim with deep roots in EnglIsh and American law: It is better that ten guilty persons go free than that one innocent person is punished.
In the case of immigration enforcement, far more innocent eggs are broken than the number of worst-of-the-worst criminals who go free. Cathy mentions the broken lives, separated families, anxieties, humiliations and official harassment suffered by innocent immigrants, and of course innocent immigrants and citizens alike suffer humiliation, serious injury and death at the hands of the enforcers. All in the name of mass imprisonment and deportation.
I'm not willing to hurt, injure or kill any more innocent human beings for the sake of an omelet. Dunno, but I'd like to believe that at this point, anyone with a heart would feel the same way even if they voted for mass deportations in 2024.
The sadism is the point, especially when executed by the minions of vile "leaders" who are never themselves in any physical danger or of even being held to account for the horrors they commit. Regarding the putrid apologists, as Lincoln said about proponents of slavery, "I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
There's some of that, yes. Certainly a lot "I don't care about human suffering" vice signaling.
I appreciate you Cathy I used to follow you on Twitter before leaving. I just cant humor hearing their arguments. Im glad you can deconstruct them. I cant. Its gross to hear it. To read it. Its like a politburo’s wet dream of a propaganda machine.
lhow do you gave bandwidth to engage it?
Thick skin!
I watched "The Postman" last night. After the overthrow of the United States, the restored US government is said to be located in Minneapolis. That's what happens in a movie; an actual restoration is happening in Minneapolis-St. Paul today.
The whole idea of America is that there are some eggs government doesn't get to break. Obviously Constitutional rights but also the idea that we are a lawful society with equal justice for all (while not perfect, it's been the standard/goal). In making these excuses, MAGA and compliant Republicans reveal the truth. Hanging on to power means burning down everything....Constitution, conservative values and American exceptionalism. The 2/3rds of the country that doesn't want that needs to learn lessons from Minnesota. The majority has tools. Time to use them.
"The whole idea of America is that there are some eggs government doesn't get to break" -- well said!
Yet they claim the opposite w gun laws. Bc we can’t limit guns bc it’s a national travesty if one ‘good guy’ gets his gun taken away.
Perhaps the issue was never immigration at all - but the need to finds an issue that would have mass appeal and which would enable the government to try out all of the authoritarian tactics and strategies it really want to install - and which have little support in other areas of life. In Trump and Miller and their assistants, I think we have a case in which cruelty and hatred and dividing others is the real psychological and emotional need and immigration is the biggest opportunity to do that. They've started making it clear that government is the only body that should have guns (not protesters or watchers), that law enforcement should be anonymous and masked and have no limits on how it treats anyone, including white Christians or clergy.
Well. For Greg Abbott, this is unusual:
"In general, we need to have respect for law enforcement officers in the country," Abbott said, speaking on "The Mark Davis Show," a conservative radio talk show. "[Immigration and Customs Enforcement], they are law enforcement officers. And so they, being the White House, need to recalibrate on what needs to be done to make sure that respect is going to be re-instilled." https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/immigration/2026/01/26/541680/ice-shooting-minnesota-greg-abbott-texas-democrats/
Between this and the NRA speaking out, I’m wondering if someone needs to go check on Hell; see if the ice storm crept in a bit. It’s not exactly strong pushback, but it ain’t nothing.
Hatred of immigrants is definitely what drives Miller, and it's a big issue for the Heritage Foundation people. Noem must be a True Believer to bring so much cruelty to the job.
Trump clearly has racist & ethnonationlist prejudices, though like every other issue it's secondary to ego and greed. But he found he had struck gold when his fans were saying "I don't care wat he does as long as he builds the wall!" Ann Coulter said “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in White House after this immigration policy paper.”
The immigration issue is very real in the minds of many Americans, whether it's from a respectable position that an orderly society must have rules, or from a position of ethnic anxiety and outright hatred.
I think the newly recruited ICE goons are motivated partly be ethnic hatred, and partly by the joy they get in pushing people around, especially people they identify as ideological enemies - but that ideological animosity seems closely bound up with the matter of ethnic identity.
Yes the greatest driving force here (among many) is Miller’s pure hatred of others. His instinct is to dominate, and the administration is just learning as it goes. They don’t have to be that smart to follow a powerful instinct for cruelty and see what happens. I don’t think the objective is even to make the country stronger. It’s to fulfill deluded fantasies and pretend it’s for a good cause.
So the murder of Laken Riley by one individual means that all immigrants, illegal or not, must be subject to the whims of Trump, Miller, et al and their state police but the general cruelty, thuggery and murders perpetrated by said police cannot be construed as institutional rot. Gotta love these MAGA deep thinkers.
John - exactly! Because protecting that one life justifies it. While protecting lives of a mom or nurse in Minnesota… oops, never mind
I think there are valuable take home messages from where the Nazis were able or not able to deport Jewish populations during WW2. The Jewish population of Bulgaria, at least within the prewar border, survived largely intact because they were seen as part of the community and the attempts by the government were vigorously resisted by society — politicians were involved along with the orthodox church and trade unions etc. The Bulgarian government was also wiling to deport the Jewish community and even had detailed plans strip them of their citizenship and to ship them up the Danube to Vienna, but the plans were never implemented due to societal resistance. This did not apply to Bulgarian occupied areas such as Macedonia and Thrace where the Jewish communities were deported but lacked the citizenship and community ties of those within the prewar borders. Even in WW2 societal resistance could affect local governments and cooperation with Germany.
Despite the rights dehumanizing language and use of terms such as alien, most Americans see immigrants whether legal or illegal as part of our communities — we don’t know and don’t question their status on a regular basis. These are people we know, people who go to school with our children, people who clean our homes, take care of our gardens etc. There is evidence from history that trying to deport a populace that is integrated into society will face severe backlash something the administration has not taken into account. Even the Nazi leadership whined about the softness of the German public in the face of rounding up Jews in Germany proper where they were part of the communities. The price for this is very high and it cannot be done without the loss of a lot of freedoms.
Wow, fascinating. I did not know that about Buglaria!
Keith - I appreciate this evidence of people acting on our common humanity. Didn’t expect one day I’d add to my prayers that we might have the softness of the WWII German public but I’ll look for inspiration where it appears 😇
This administration has yet to learn that public acts of violence and rounding up civilians does not go down well. It wasn’t that the Germans were *soft* it’s that public arrests made the populace uneasy and didn’t produce the response the regime hoped for. In both cases the regime thinks the public should respond positively to the rounding up of the individuals they have dehumanized, but the reality is the opposite: it is unnerving to see people rounded up and arrested in our communities.
>>Yet those are precisely the kinds of people who are currently being rounded up by ICE (only about 5 percent of whom are violent criminals while 73 percent have no criminal convictions at all).<<
On a related note, I've been noticing this administration's love for the phrase "worst of the worst" (especially by Kristi Noem). Guys... they can't ALL be "the worst of the worst."
In fact, "mass deportations" is basically the opposite of targeting "the worst of the worst," which is what most normies WISH they'd do. They love the rhetoric from both angles, but you can't have it both ways.
Yeah, even among people they've rounded up with actual criminal convictions and touted as "the worst of the worst," I remember reading that there was one guy who had one DUI conviction. I certainly don't take DUI lightly, but if that's the "worst of the worst," what do you call rapists and murderers?
There are not/never were enough convicted (nor even charged) immigrants to approach the deportation target numbers Trump/Miller throw around. Since most media don’t challenge them with facts and Americans are widely innumerate, the wild numbers sell very well. Why deal in reality when our neurons are in a fearful dither?
"We must do this at very, very fast" is, in fact, an acknowledgment that the American people may choose to vote against what Trump and his hard-right allies are doing.
Yes, my point exactly. They know this isn't popular.
My point was exactly "Yes, you are right!"