America has officially become an authoritarian state as far as I'm concerned. Given my views, I'm at risk of being detained and deported if I go there.
I’m hearing that if you fly to ‘Murikkka from a foreign airport where you pre-clear US customs, then you should use pre-clear because if they deny you entry, at least you’re not detained in ‘Murikkka and dealing with that subsequent nightmare or wasting your time in a crappy airline seat.
If you’re travelling overseas on a US passport, be prepared for retaliatory treatment, depending.
America has officially become an authoritarian state as far as I'm concerned. Given my views, I'm at risk of being detained and deported if I go there.
yep. wife and I agreed we shall not cross that border while that fascist is in power.
"every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers"
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brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 43,062
America has officially become an authoritarian state as far as I'm concerned. Given my views, I'm at risk of being detained and deported if I go there.
It absolutely is. And those who voted for that don't even have one single clue.
I don not blame any you, my Canadian friends, for not coming to this country. I surely would not recommend doing that. And I am sad to say all this. Very sad.
All these people screaming at town halls. Those who voted for Trump have no right saying anything. They’re getting what they voted for.
They are getting what they voted for. Some of them (the ones not screaming at town halls; which I'd guess is most) love it. Others bought the absolute nonsense they hear from Twitter, OAN, Charlie Kirk, or whatever fearmongering misinformation source convinced them they were saving America.
In any case, I don't want to absolve them of their responsibility, but aside from their first amendment right to say something (which I realize is not what you likely meant by "right") I'd argue that the more regret the better. I'm not particularly hopeful that this too shall pass, but without messages of regret and anger from his voters, the slim chance of getting out of this gets even slimmer.
You’re 100% correct. I figured everyone knew what I meant but I didn’t even think of the discord and how them screaming could help.
I think it’s too late to go back. The plan is and was in place and they’re moving so quickly on all of it and no one is one step ahead of the atrocities yet to come. It’s difficult to imagine how diabolical these government officials have become if you’ve always held compassion and empathy as your moral standard.
I was watching American History X last night. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it. I had to cover my eyes and ears through many parts. I guess I didn’t quite remember how upsetting it was. I started to wonder if this is where we are headed again. It feels like it. And it’s sad and extremely disturbing.
I was watching American History X last night. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it. I had to cover my eyes and ears through many parts. I guess I didn’t quite remember how upsetting it was. I started to wonder if this is where we are headed again. It feels like it. And it’s sad and extremely disturbing.
Well that never went anywhere. White nationalism in America has been alive and well since that movie was made. Certainly now they are able to grow and strengthen in a way nobody could back when American History X came out. Now they have more money, more methods to collaborate, and much more government tolerance than they did back then.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
A behind-the-scenes effort to call a convention to amend the Constitution is focused on the national debt but could open the door to other changes — including making it legal for Trump to run for a third term.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
A behind-the-scenes effort to call a convention to amend the Constitution is focused on the national debt but could open the door to other changes — including making it legal for Trump to run for a third term.
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 43,062
Heather's letter today hugely illustrates how dysfunctions thing have gotten. In case you missed, here it is (and I mean, seriously, this is worth your five minutes):
Today the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic,
Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped the story that senior members of the Trump
administration planned the March 15 U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen
over Signal, a widely available encrypted app that is most decidedly not
part of the United States national security system. The decision to
steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide
conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week
and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be
archived.
According
to Goldberg, the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage
Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the
national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and
officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a
sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use
approved government equipment.
The
use of Signal to plan a military attack on Yemen was itself an
astonishingly dangerous breach, but what comes next is simply
mind-boggling: the reason Goldberg could report on the conversation is
that the person setting it up included Goldberg—a reporter without
security clearance—in it.
Goldberg
reports that on March 11 he received a connection request from someone
named Michael Waltz, although he did not believe the actual Michael
Waltz, who is Trump’s national security advisor, would be writing to
him. He thought it was likely someone trying to entrap him, although he
thought perhaps it could be the real Waltz with some information. Two
days later, he was included in the “Houthi PC small group,” along with a
message that the chat would be for “a principles [sic] group for
coordination on Houthis.”
As
Goldberg reports, a “principals committee generally refers to a group
of the senior-most national-security officials, including the
secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director
of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I
have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting,
and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I
had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The
other names on the app were those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio,
Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi
Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegseth, Brian McCormack from the National Security Council, Central
Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine
negotiator Steve Witkoff, White House chief of staff Suzy Wiles, perhaps
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Trump’s nominee
for head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent.
Goldberg
assumed the chat was fake, some sort of disinformation campaign,
although he was concerned when Ratcliffe provided the full name of a CIA
operative in this unsecure channel. But on March 14, as Vance, for
example, took a strong stand against Europe—“I just hate bailing Europe
out again”—and as Hegseth emphasized that their messaging must be that
“Biden failed,” Goldberg started to think the chat might be real. Those
in the chat talked of finding a way to make Europe pay the costs for the
U.S. attack, and of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities.”
And
then, on March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will
not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,”
Goldberg writes. “The information contained in them, if they had been
read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been
used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly
in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.
What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of
this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational
details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about
targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
On
the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an
American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete
and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great
work and effects!”
In
the messages, with a reporter on the line, Hegseth promised his
colleagues he would “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” or operations
security. In a message to the team outlining the forthcoming attack,
Hegseth wrote: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
Two
hours after Goldberg wrote to the officials on the chat and alerted
them to his presence on it by asking questions about it, National
Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes responded: “The thread is a
demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between
senior officials.”
When asked about the breach, Trump responded: “I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic.
To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it’s not
much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they
had what?” There is nothing that the administration could say to make
the situation better, but this made it worse. As national security
specialist Tom Nichols noted: “If the President is telling the truth and
no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In
any other administration, [the chief of staff] would have been in the
Oval [Office] within nanoseconds of learning about something like this.”
Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth is evidently going to try to bully his way out
of this disaster. When asked about it, he began to yell at a reporter
that Goldberg is a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called
journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time
again.” Hegseth looked directly at the camera and said: “Nobody was
texting war plans.” But Goldberg has receipts. The chat had “the
specific time of a future attack. Specific targets, including human
targets…weapons systems…precise detail…a long section on sequencing…. He
can say that it wasn’t a war plan, but it was a minute-by-minute
accounting of what was about to happen.”
Zachary
B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top
jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA)
told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction... was 'what absolute
clowns.' Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what
happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as
government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted:
“These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the
history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”
Many
observers have noted that all of these national security officials knew
that using Signal in this way was against the law, and their comfort
with jumping onto the commercial app to plan a military strike suggests
they are using Signal more generally. “How many Signal chats with
sensitive information about military operations are ongoing within the
Pentagon right now?” Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) posted. “Where else are
war plans being shared with such abject disregard for our national
security? We need answers. Right now.”
National
security journalists and officials are aghast. Former commanding
general of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army Mark Hertling
called the story “staggering.” Former CIA officer Matt Castelli posted:
“This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships’, this is a criminally
negligent breach of classified information and war planning involving
VP, SecDef, D[irector of the] CIA, National Security Advisor—all putting
troops at risk. America is not safe.” Former transportation secretary
Pete Buttigieg, who spent seven years as an intelligence officer in the
Navy Reserve, posted: “From an operational security perspective, this is
the highest level of f**kup imaginable. These people cannot keep
America safe.”
Rhode
Island senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services
Committee, said: "If true, this story represents one of the most
egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever
seen. The carelessness shown by President Trump's cabinet is stunning
and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the Administration
immediately." Armed Services Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE), a former
Air Force brigadier general, told Axios that
“sending this info over non-secure networks” was “unconscionable.”
“Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone.”
That
the most senior members of Trump’s administration were sharing national
security secrets on unsecure channels is especially galling since the
people on the call have used alleged breaches of national security to
hammer Democrats. Sarah Longwell and J.V. Last of The Bulwark
compiled a series of video clips of Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi
Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and especially Pete Hegseth talking about the
seriousness of handling secret information and the need for
accountability for those who mishandle it. When they were accusing
then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton of such a breach, they called
for firings, accountability, and perhaps criminal charges. Indeed, Trump
rose to power in 2016 with the charge that Clinton should be sent to
prison for using a private email server. “Lock her up!” became the chant
at his rallies.
Today, for her part, Clinton posted a link to the story along with an eyes emoji and wrote: “You have got to be kidding me.”
I suppose the left is overreacting to this story? lol
That's because we're "radicals".
Weird how the language changes. Once upon a time destroying property such as a Tesla was called "sabotage". Now it's called "terrorism". Once upon a time, attacking Capitol police would have been called "terrorism". Now its called "patriotism". It's all noise and nonsense. But intelligent people still understand what terms like "radical", "sabotage", and "terrorism" really mean. I suppose part of the problem is that these days it's not cool to be too intelligent. Today, "intelligent" means being "elitist". :rollmyfuckineyes:
I suppose the left is overreacting to this story? lol
They aren't even open to the opinions of these who don't. It's their way or the highway.
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Nothing like telling college kids to shut the fuck up. Or anyone for that matter. That cherished right, or what used to be cherished because now it scares us, slowly being taken away. And with DOGE consolidating all the government data points about you, you’ll be identified and detained. Careful what you say or post. What a future. Ed might want to be careful of what he says from the Shell Oil stage in ‘Nawlins. Shut up and sing, right? Good to know so many fans are all in.
US intensifies crackdown on peaceful protest under Trump
Forty-one anti-protest bills in 22 states have been introduced since start of 2025, according to law tracker
Anti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests – especially targeting those speaking out on the US-backed war in Gaza and the climate crisis – have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.
Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year – compared with a full-year total of 52 in 2024 and 26 in 2023, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.
This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines – a crackdown that experts warn threaten to erode first amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly and petition.
In one example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would create a new federal felony offense that could apply to protests that “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – which would be punishable by up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 for individuals or $500,000 for organizations.
The language in the bill is vague, which could, critics warn, lead to a rally blocking a road used for moving equipment or a lawsuit challenging a pipeline’s permit being classified as disruptive and prosecuted. It is sponsored by seven Republicans including the senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the country’s largest oil and gas producing state, who chairs the committee considering whether the bill should progress.
The pipeline bill closely resembles model critical infrastructure legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a rightwing fossil fuel-funded group that brings together corporations and lawmakers to create draft bills on environmental standards, reproductive rights and voting, among other issues. So far, Alec-inspired bills restricting protests against fossil fuel infrastructure have been enacted in 22 states.
“The new federal pipeline bill is extremely concerning because of the breadth of the language, and with Ted Cruz as a co-sponsor it could move forward,” said Elly Page, senior legal adviser at ICNL.
“The anti-protest bills that have passed into laws since 2017 create a chilling effect and deter people from speaking out – and are incredibly repressive. It is especially concerning that now, when we see other pillars of civil society under attack, lawmakers are also trying to further suppress dissent and foreclose what is a critical means of democratic participation.”
Repressive anti-protest laws have proliferated since the 2016 Indigenous-led anti-pipeline protests on the Standing Rock Indian territory in North Dakota, with 52 bills introduced in 2017, when ICNL created its tracker.
Lawmakers across the US have repeatedly responded to new social movements with bills to crack down on protests. In 2021, 92 bills were introduced across 35 states in response to the social uprising triggered by the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Legislative sessions are still going in most states and so far 2025 is on track to be the second-worst year, after 2021, for anti-protest initiatives.
The current spike is a “clear response to the protests on Palestine and campus protests in particular”, according to Page.
In March, three federal bills targeting university campus protests were announced including the Unmasking Hamas Act, which would make it a federal crime subject to 15 years in prison for wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way. The bill, which is almost identical to the Unmasking Antifa bill introduced in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests, does not define “oppressive” or “disguise”.
A separate bill would exclude student protesters from federal financial aid and loan forgiveness if they commit any crime at a campus protest, even a non-violent misdemeanor such as failing to disperse. In both cases, sponsors have made clear that the bill is a legislative response to pro-Palestinian protesters, many of whom wore masks to avoid retaliation and doxing.
According to Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the slew of anti-protest laws threatens the core of US democracy.
“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights,” said Leventoff.
In North Dakota, where the Standing Rock tribe organized against the Dakota Access pipeline, lawmakers have approved four anti-protest bills since 2017. The latest initiative seeks to create a new criminal offense punishable by up to 12 months in jail for anyone wearing a mask “with intent to conceal the identity” while “congregating in a public place with any other individual wearing a mask, hood, or other device that covers, hides, or conceals any portion of the individual’s face”.
The bill exempts public gatherings such as Halloween and a masquerade ball, but does exempt masks worn during protests to avoid doxing, or for health or religious reasons.
Hannah Meyers, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a rightwing thinktank criticized for promoting skepticism about climate science, testified in favor of the masking ban, which has now passed the statehouse.
Last year, Meyers co-drafted similar model legislation for Manhattan Institute, which has called on the federal government to crack down on protests “by invoking statutes like Rico [racketeering], the anti mafia, anti organized crime statute, to look at the organizations that deploy civil terrorists for their own ends”.
According to Meyers, referring to masking bans as anti-protest was “incorrect”. “Mask ban laws are aimed – many explicitly – at individuals masking to conceal their identity with the intent to commit crimes, menace others, or avoid arrest and prosecution. They are not related to ‘retaliation and doxing’,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, a group criticized for conflating criticism of Israel and the defense of Palestinian rights with antisemitism, has lobbied in favor of a bill banning protest encampments on campuses in Arizona and for harsher sentencing for protesters wearing masks in Missouri.
“The large number and variation of anti-protest bills introduced in just three months – in combination with the self-proclaimed ‘law-and-order president’ administration’s revoking of student visas and disappearing of student protesters – indicates a movement towards fascism,” said David Armiak, research director with the Center for Media and Democracy.
An ADL spokesperson said: “ADL objects to the wearing of full-face masks by those who seek to intimidate and harass others. We support anti-masking laws that create an additional penalty for already-prohibited behavior (engaging in targeting, threatening, vandalizing or violence). Such laws are not a mask ban and have no bearing on peaceful protest.”
The Trump administration’s effort to cast pro-Palestinian protesters as terrorists – and then use anti-terror and immigration laws to deport legal residents and quell campus demonstrations – appears to be inspired by Project Esther, an anti-protest blueprint published shortly before last year’s election by the Heritage Foundation, the creators of Project 2025.
Project Esther, which claims to be about rooting out antisemitism, promotes public firings of pro-Palestinian professors and using anti-racketeering laws to break up progressive anti-war groups. Critics say the plan promotes censorship and is a tool of Christian nationalism.
“The Trump regime claims to be cracking down on antisemitism on campus by kidnapping and deporting student activists,” said Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace – an anti-Zionist group that organizes anti-war and Palestinian liberation protests. “Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”
The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties, which can tie up activists in expensive litigation for years.
Five states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Ohio – are considering bills that introduce new or harsher civil penalties for protesters. Free speech experts have warned that malicious civil litigation or so-called Slapps (strategic lawsuits against public participation) – are being increasingly deployed by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements.
Last month, a jury in rural Morton county in North Dakota ruled that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay $667m to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable for defamation over the Standing Rock protests – in a ruling widely condemned as “chilling”.
In Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.
Data from 2017 shows that the majority of bills fails or never make it out of committee and expire. And while most anti-protests bills enacted into law have been in Republican-run states, there are notable exceptions.
The ACLU is urging the Democratic governor of New Jersey to veto a 2024 bill intended to improve community safety by cracking down on street brawls but which is “overbroad, vague, and risks undermining fundamental freedoms protected under the first amendment, including the right to protest and assembly”.
On Monday in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.
The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council did not respond to a request for comment.
Deport them now, right? The director of ICE has publicly stated that he wants to detain and deport people with an Amazon style sense of efficiency. Sound familiar? Speaking of which, can anyone not see the similarities, particularly given the cabinet meeting today, or are you still with the belief that “it can’t happen here?”
People better wake the fuck up but maybe you’ll wait until the national emergency is declared and martial law is imposed?
I’m a Jewish Israeli in the US standing up for Palestine. By Trump’s logic, I’m a terror supporter
I’ve called the Gaza war a genocide and spoken in favor of sanctions on Israel. I was also in the IDF. I ask the FBI: should you arrest me?
Given recent patterns, the FBI might need to take a hard look at my actions over the years. If Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri and other recent Ice detainees are considered threats to national security, then so am I.
I have committed the same acts they have committed, including publishing an article that calls the war in Gaza a genocide, participating in a protestagainst the genocide in Gaza, speaking and protesting in favor of BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions against Israel), participating in a sit-in at UC Davis about 10 years ago, and being vocal in general about the atrocities committed by Israel against the people of Gaza and Palestinians.
Let me tell you a little more about myself and all the additional reasons you might want to investigate and perhaps arrest me. I was born in Israel and became a naturalized US citizen through my American mother. Given the administration’s recent challenges to the 14th amendment, which provides birthright citizenship, you might proceed from detaining legal residents to revoking the rights of naturalized citizens. Like other fascist regimes before you, you’ve been testing how much resistance you face in your effort to turn the United States into a fascist country. You start with the most marginalized, sending incarcerated trans women to men’s prisons, Venezuelans accused of gang affiliation to El Salvador, and detaining Arab and Muslim legal residents. But if the past is any indication, your next target might well be children of undocumented immigrants or naturalized citizens. Of course, as every student of fascism well knows, the ultimate goal is to apprehend all the supposed enemies of this administration, regardless of their legal status.
Furthermore, I must confess to using academic concepts that have come under scrutiny as antisemitic by the Department of Justice taskforce for antisemitism. As a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, I have come a long way. It took me many years of soul-searching to realize that I was complicit in a settler-colonial occupation force and that my best recourse to make amends for that was to be outspoken about my country’s atrocities. As I tried to better understand the terrible tragedy of Zionism – a nationalist ideology that sought to free Jews from oppression only to end up as oppressors in Palestine – I confess to describing concepts such as apartheid, settler colonialism, ethno-nationalism and more. Perhaps even more disturbing from your perspective, I recently employed such concepts as genocide, settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing in a book I wrote about early American history.
I also confess that in the past I have targeted white supremacist allies of this administration in my community of Chico, California. Clearly employing extralegal militias is part of this administration’s fascist playbook, as Trump already proved during the events of 6 January 2021. For instance, when my house was a target of antisemitic leafleting, I sought the help of a colleague and a local investigative journalist to make this very real form of antisemitism known to authorities. In the process the journalist uncovered troubling information that there is an armed white supremacist in our community who holds deep antisemitic convictions and now knows where I work. Had you really been interested in investigating antisemitism, you might have looked into the whereabouts of that individual. But since you want people like him around so that they can be activated when needed, and since all you really want is to cynically weaponize antisemitism, you might want to arrest me instead. After all, according to your standards, I – a Jew targeted by white supremacists – was all along the biggest threat to Jews in my own community.
I have long heard stories about the rise of fascism in Europe from my grandparents, all of whom fled Europe and were refugees from antisemitism. The similarities between the actions of this administration and what my grandparents have lived through are unmistakable. I tell them here so that before you choose to arrest me, you will have one more opportunity to decide whether you will go down in history as aiding and abetting the rise of a fascist regime or as someone who refused to be part of another dark episode in this country’s history. Be forewarned: even if you yourself never directly suffer for your crimes, history will judge you.
My dear grandfather, Otto, may his memory be a blessing, escaped Austria by the skin of his teeth when he was only 13 after the Nazi takeover of the country. Having witnessed the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938 – the night when local mobs violently rioted against Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses across much of Germany and Austria and arrested 30,000 citizens just for being Jewish – his parents made the decision to flee to Shanghai, the only port that would accept them. Clearly, our current president’s rhetoric regarding enemies of the American nation from within and without, against immigrants, trans people and people deemed un-American in their political commitments (like myself), are eerily reminiscent of the stories my grandfather told me about the scapegoating of Jews.
As I consider the memory of dear grandmother Rachel, may her memory be a blessing, who grew up in Poland and survived the Holocaust, including enduring a harrowing year in Auschwitz and the death march to Germany, I cannot shake the sense of another parallel. As Hitler and the Nazi party were consolidating power, they appointed sycophants like yourself and so many others to positions of power in the Nazi administration. The most important criterion for Hitler was not that the people in positions of power were competent or even knowledgeable, but that they would be spineless and loyal to him.
According to the historian Ian Kershaw, this type of leadership, where all bow to the great leader, led to the Holocaust, as the people surrounding Hitler constantly sought to outdo each other in their loyalty to the Führer. Knowing Hitler’s hatred for Jews, they constantly tried to curry favor by suggesting the most radical and far-reaching policy ideas towards Jews. This dynamic, which Kershaw called “working toward the Führer”, ultimately led Hitler and the people surrounding him to decide on the “Final Solution”, the plan to exterminate all the Jews in the world on an industrial scale in death camps. This idea of working toward the leader is upon us today, as we see institutions and even some in the Democratic party bowing before the great leader and his will. Instead of standing up to the administration at every turn, institutions, businesses and politicians across the country prefer to anticipate the administration’s wrath and eliminate any behavior or materials that might come under scrutiny. Meanwhile, Republicans rush to outdo each other in flattering the great leader, as American society seems frozen with fear in face of the rising tides of fascism.
So, Kash Patel, do you want to arrest me and help bring about fascism?
Eran Zelnik grew up in Israel and came to the US 15 years ago to complete his PhD in history. He now lives and teaches in Chico, California
It just crossed my mind that my instinct at the moment is to cheer on China rather than America right now with this trade war. For me, that is saying a LOT. I am super anti-Chinese government, and really am concerned about China taking over the world's economy in the long run. China plays the best long game in the world, by far. Even so... I am rooting for China right now, between the two, like, emotionally, at least. That is DISTURBING.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
Yeah, I suppose that makes some kind of crazy sense, hahaha. Wild times man.Usually I'm not even sure what to think, since shit changes every fucking 30 minutes.
Post edited by PJ_Soul on
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
You might want to check whether being married to a foreign national is a sufficient test of loyalty to ‘Murica. From Letter From An American:
Former secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall wrote in Newsweek yesterday that the position Haugh held is “one of the most sensitive and powerful jobs in America.” Kendall writes that NSA and CYBERCOM oversee the world’s most sophisticated tools and techniques to penetrate computer systems, monitor communications around the globe, and, if national security requires it, attack those systems. U.S. law drastically curtails how those tools can be used in the U.S. and against American citizens and businesses. Will a Trump loyalist follow those laws? Kendall writes: “Every American should view this development with alarm.”
The politicization of data is also indisputable. Billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) claims to be saving Americans money, but the Wall Street Journal reported today that effort has been largely a failure (despite today’s announcement of devastating cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that monitors our weather). But what DOGE is really doing is burrowing into Americans’ data.
The first people to be targeted by that data collection appear to be undocumented immigrants. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported on Wednesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using a database that enables officials to search for people by filtering for “hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” including scars or tattoos, bankruptcy filings, Social Security number, hair color, and race. The system, called Investigative Case Management (ICM), was created by billionaire Peter Thiel’s software company Palantir, which in 2022 signed a $95.9 million contract with the government to develop ICM.
Three Trump officials told Sophia Cai of Politico that DOGE staffers embedded in agencies across the government are expanding government cooperation with immigration officials, using the information they’re gleaning from government databases to facilitate deportation. On Tuesday, DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi sent the first 6,300 names of individuals whose temporary legal status had just been canceled. On the list, which Moghaddassi said covered those on “the terror watch list” or with “F.B.I. criminal records,” were eight minors, including one 13-year-old.
The Social Security Administration worked with the administration to get those people to “self-deport” by adding them to the agency's “death master file.” That file is supposed to track people whose death means they should no longer receive benefits. Adding to it people the administration wants to erase is “financial murder,” former SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley told Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard of the New York Times. Those people will not be able to use credit cards or banks.
On Tuesday, Acting Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Melanie Krause resigned after the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security agreed to share sensitive taxpayer data with immigration authorities. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes, in part to demonstrate their commitment to citizenship, and the government has promised immigrants that it would not use that information for immigration enforcement. Until now, the IRS has protected sensitive taxpayer information.
Rene Marsh and Marshall Cohen of CNN note that “[m]ultiple senior career IRS officials refused to sign the data-sharing agreement with DHS,” which will enable HHS officials to ask the IRS for names and addresses of people they suspect are undocumented, “because of grave concerns about its legality.” Ultimately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed the agreement with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
Krause was only one of several senior career officials leaving the IRS, raising concerns among those staying that there is no longer a “defense against the potential unlawful use of taxpayer data by the Trump administration.”
Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that for the past three days, DOGE staffers have been working with representatives from Palantir and career engineers from the IRS in a giant “hackathon.” Their goal is to build a system that will be able to access all IRS records, including names, addresses, job data, and Social Security numbers, that can then be compared with data from other agencies.
From Letter From An American. Let that sink in. Meh, he’s brown, eh?
This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so.
It’s happening. And we know some are all in on this. All in. Again, from Letter From An American:
Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.
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If you’re travelling overseas on a US passport, be prepared for retaliatory treatment, depending.
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UK and Germany warn travelers heading to the US
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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Today the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped the story that senior members of the Trump administration planned the March 15 U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a widely available encrypted app that is most decidedly not part of the United States national security system. The decision to steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be archived.
According to Goldberg, the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use approved government equipment.
The use of Signal to plan a military attack on Yemen was itself an astonishingly dangerous breach, but what comes next is simply mind-boggling: the reason Goldberg could report on the conversation is that the person setting it up included Goldberg—a reporter without security clearance—in it.
Goldberg reports that on March 11 he received a connection request from someone named Michael Waltz, although he did not believe the actual Michael Waltz, who is Trump’s national security advisor, would be writing to him. He thought it was likely someone trying to entrap him, although he thought perhaps it could be the real Waltz with some information. Two days later, he was included in the “Houthi PC small group,” along with a message that the chat would be for “a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis.”
As Goldberg reports, a “principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The other names on the app were those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Brian McCormack from the National Security Council, Central Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff, White House chief of staff Suzy Wiles, perhaps White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Trump’s nominee for head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent.
Goldberg assumed the chat was fake, some sort of disinformation campaign, although he was concerned when Ratcliffe provided the full name of a CIA operative in this unsecure channel. But on March 14, as Vance, for example, took a strong stand against Europe—“I just hate bailing Europe out again”—and as Hegseth emphasized that their messaging must be that “Biden failed,” Goldberg started to think the chat might be real. Those in the chat talked of finding a way to make Europe pay the costs for the U.S. attack, and of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities.”
And then, on March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg writes. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
On the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great work and effects!”
In the messages, with a reporter on the line, Hegseth promised his colleagues he would “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” or operations security. In a message to the team outlining the forthcoming attack, Hegseth wrote: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
Two hours after Goldberg wrote to the officials on the chat and alerted them to his presence on it by asking questions about it, National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes responded: “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”
When asked about the breach, Trump responded: “I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?” There is nothing that the administration could say to make the situation better, but this made it worse. As national security specialist Tom Nichols noted: “If the President is telling the truth and no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In any other administration, [the chief of staff] would have been in the Oval [Office] within nanoseconds of learning about something like this.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is evidently going to try to bully his way out of this disaster. When asked about it, he began to yell at a reporter that Goldberg is a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Hegseth looked directly at the camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” But Goldberg has receipts. The chat had “the specific time of a future attack. Specific targets, including human targets…weapons systems…precise detail…a long section on sequencing…. He can say that it wasn’t a war plan, but it was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.”
Zachary B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction... was 'what absolute clowns.' Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted: “These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”
Many observers have noted that all of these national security officials knew that using Signal in this way was against the law, and their comfort with jumping onto the commercial app to plan a military strike suggests they are using Signal more generally. “How many Signal chats with sensitive information about military operations are ongoing within the Pentagon right now?” Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) posted. “Where else are war plans being shared with such abject disregard for our national security? We need answers. Right now.”
National security journalists and officials are aghast. Former commanding general of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army Mark Hertling called the story “staggering.” Former CIA officer Matt Castelli posted: “This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships’, this is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning involving VP, SecDef, D[irector of the] CIA, National Security Advisor—all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.” Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who spent seven years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, posted: “From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of f**kup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.”
Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said: "If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen. The carelessness shown by President Trump's cabinet is stunning and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the Administration immediately." Armed Services Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE), a former Air Force brigadier general, told Axios that “sending this info over non-secure networks” was “unconscionable.” “Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone.”
That the most senior members of Trump’s administration were sharing national security secrets on unsecure channels is especially galling since the people on the call have used alleged breaches of national security to hammer Democrats. Sarah Longwell and J.V. Last of The Bulwark compiled a series of video clips of Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and especially Pete Hegseth talking about the seriousness of handling secret information and the need for accountability for those who mishandle it. When they were accusing then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton of such a breach, they called for firings, accountability, and perhaps criminal charges. Indeed, Trump rose to power in 2016 with the charge that Clinton should be sent to prison for using a private email server. “Lock her up!” became the chant at his rallies.
Today, for her part, Clinton posted a link to the story along with an eyes emoji and wrote: “You have got to be kidding me.”
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Once upon a time destroying property such as a Tesla was called "sabotage". Now it's called "terrorism".
Once upon a time, attacking Capitol police would have been called "terrorism". Now its called "patriotism".
It's all noise and nonsense. But intelligent people still understand what terms like "radical", "sabotage", and "terrorism" really mean.
I suppose part of the problem is that these days it's not cool to be too intelligent. Today, "intelligent" means being "elitist".
:rollmyfuckineyes:
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US intensifies crackdown on peaceful protest under Trump
Forty-one anti-protest bills in 22 states have been introduced since start of 2025, according to law tracker
Anti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests – especially targeting those speaking out on the US-backed war in Gaza and the climate crisis – have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.
Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year – compared with a full-year total of 52 in 2024 and 26 in 2023, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.
This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines – a crackdown that experts warn threaten to erode first amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly and petition.
In one example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would create a new federal felony offense that could apply to protests that “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – which would be punishable by up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 for individuals or $500,000 for organizations.
The language in the bill is vague, which could, critics warn, lead to a rally blocking a road used for moving equipment or a lawsuit challenging a pipeline’s permit being classified as disruptive and prosecuted. It is sponsored by seven Republicans including the senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the country’s largest oil and gas producing state, who chairs the committee considering whether the bill should progress.
The pipeline bill closely resembles model critical infrastructure legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a rightwing fossil fuel-funded group that brings together corporations and lawmakers to create draft bills on environmental standards, reproductive rights and voting, among other issues. So far, Alec-inspired bills restricting protests against fossil fuel infrastructure have been enacted in 22 states.
“The new federal pipeline bill is extremely concerning because of the breadth of the language, and with Ted Cruz as a co-sponsor it could move forward,” said Elly Page, senior legal adviser at ICNL.
“The anti-protest bills that have passed into laws since 2017 create a chilling effect and deter people from speaking out – and are incredibly repressive. It is especially concerning that now, when we see other pillars of civil society under attack, lawmakers are also trying to further suppress dissent and foreclose what is a critical means of democratic participation.”
Repressive anti-protest laws have proliferated since the 2016 Indigenous-led anti-pipeline protests on the Standing Rock Indian territory in North Dakota, with 52 bills introduced in 2017, when ICNL created its tracker.
Lawmakers across the US have repeatedly responded to new social movements with bills to crack down on protests. In 2021, 92 bills were introduced across 35 states in response to the social uprising triggered by the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Legislative sessions are still going in most states and so far 2025 is on track to be the second-worst year, after 2021, for anti-protest initiatives.
The current spike is a “clear response to the protests on Palestine and campus protests in particular”, according to Page.
In March, three federal bills targeting university campus protests were announced including the Unmasking Hamas Act, which would make it a federal crime subject to 15 years in prison for wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way. The bill, which is almost identical to the Unmasking Antifa bill introduced in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests, does not define “oppressive” or “disguise”.
A separate bill would exclude student protesters from federal financial aid and loan forgiveness if they commit any crime at a campus protest, even a non-violent misdemeanor such as failing to disperse. In both cases, sponsors have made clear that the bill is a legislative response to pro-Palestinian protesters, many of whom wore masks to avoid retaliation and doxing.
According to Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the slew of anti-protest laws threatens the core of US democracy.
“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights,” said Leventoff.
In North Dakota, where the Standing Rock tribe organized against the Dakota Access pipeline, lawmakers have approved four anti-protest bills since 2017. The latest initiative seeks to create a new criminal offense punishable by up to 12 months in jail for anyone wearing a mask “with intent to conceal the identity” while “congregating in a public place with any other individual wearing a mask, hood, or other device that covers, hides, or conceals any portion of the individual’s face”.
The bill exempts public gatherings such as Halloween and a masquerade ball, but does exempt masks worn during protests to avoid doxing, or for health or religious reasons.
Hannah Meyers, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a rightwing thinktank criticized for promoting skepticism about climate science, testified in favor of the masking ban, which has now passed the statehouse.
Last year, Meyers co-drafted similar model legislation for Manhattan Institute, which has called on the federal government to crack down on protests “by invoking statutes like Rico [racketeering], the anti mafia, anti organized crime statute, to look at the organizations that deploy civil terrorists for their own ends”.
According to Meyers, referring to masking bans as anti-protest was “incorrect”. “Mask ban laws are aimed – many explicitly – at individuals masking to conceal their identity with the intent to commit crimes, menace others, or avoid arrest and prosecution. They are not related to ‘retaliation and doxing’,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, a group criticized for conflating criticism of Israel and the defense of Palestinian rights with antisemitism, has lobbied in favor of a bill banning protest encampments on campuses in Arizona and for harsher sentencing for protesters wearing masks in Missouri.
“The large number and variation of anti-protest bills introduced in just three months – in combination with the self-proclaimed ‘law-and-order president’ administration’s revoking of student visas and disappearing of student protesters – indicates a movement towards fascism,” said David Armiak, research director with the Center for Media and Democracy.
An ADL spokesperson said: “ADL objects to the wearing of full-face masks by those who seek to intimidate and harass others. We support anti-masking laws that create an additional penalty for already-prohibited behavior (engaging in targeting, threatening, vandalizing or violence). Such laws are not a mask ban and have no bearing on peaceful protest.”
The Trump administration’s effort to cast pro-Palestinian protesters as terrorists – and then use anti-terror and immigration laws to deport legal residents and quell campus demonstrations – appears to be inspired by Project Esther, an anti-protest blueprint published shortly before last year’s election by the Heritage Foundation, the creators of Project 2025.
Project Esther, which claims to be about rooting out antisemitism, promotes public firings of pro-Palestinian professors and using anti-racketeering laws to break up progressive anti-war groups. Critics say the plan promotes censorship and is a tool of Christian nationalism.
“The Trump regime claims to be cracking down on antisemitism on campus by kidnapping and deporting student activists,” said Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace – an anti-Zionist group that organizes anti-war and Palestinian liberation protests. “Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”
The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties, which can tie up activists in expensive litigation for years.
Five states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Ohio – are considering bills that introduce new or harsher civil penalties for protesters. Free speech experts have warned that malicious civil litigation or so-called Slapps (strategic lawsuits against public participation) – are being increasingly deployed by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements.
Last month, a jury in rural Morton county in North Dakota ruled that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay $667m to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable for defamation over the Standing Rock protests – in a ruling widely condemned as “chilling”.
In Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.
Data from 2017 shows that the majority of bills fails or never make it out of committee and expire. And while most anti-protests bills enacted into law have been in Republican-run states, there are notable exceptions.
The ACLU is urging the Democratic governor of New Jersey to veto a 2024 bill intended to improve community safety by cracking down on street brawls but which is “overbroad, vague, and risks undermining fundamental freedoms protected under the first amendment, including the right to protest and assembly”.
On Monday in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.
The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council did not respond to a request for comment.
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I’m a Jewish Israeli in the US standing up for Palestine. By Trump’s logic, I’m a terror supporter
I’ve called the Gaza war a genocide and spoken in favor of sanctions on Israel. I was also in the IDF. I ask the FBI: should you arrest me?
To Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation:
Given recent patterns, the FBI might need to take a hard look at my actions over the years. If Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri and other recent Ice detainees are considered threats to national security, then so am I.
I have committed the same acts they have committed, including publishing an article that calls the war in Gaza a genocide, participating in a protestagainst the genocide in Gaza, speaking and protesting in favor of BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions against Israel), participating in a sit-in at UC Davis about 10 years ago, and being vocal in general about the atrocities committed by Israel against the people of Gaza and Palestinians.
Let me tell you a little more about myself and all the additional reasons you might want to investigate and perhaps arrest me. I was born in Israel and became a naturalized US citizen through my American mother. Given the administration’s recent challenges to the 14th amendment, which provides birthright citizenship, you might proceed from detaining legal residents to revoking the rights of naturalized citizens. Like other fascist regimes before you, you’ve been testing how much resistance you face in your effort to turn the United States into a fascist country. You start with the most marginalized, sending incarcerated trans women to men’s prisons, Venezuelans accused of gang affiliation to El Salvador, and detaining Arab and Muslim legal residents. But if the past is any indication, your next target might well be children of undocumented immigrants or naturalized citizens. Of course, as every student of fascism well knows, the ultimate goal is to apprehend all the supposed enemies of this administration, regardless of their legal status.
Furthermore, I must confess to using academic concepts that have come under scrutiny as antisemitic by the Department of Justice taskforce for antisemitism. As a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, I have come a long way. It took me many years of soul-searching to realize that I was complicit in a settler-colonial occupation force and that my best recourse to make amends for that was to be outspoken about my country’s atrocities. As I tried to better understand the terrible tragedy of Zionism – a nationalist ideology that sought to free Jews from oppression only to end up as oppressors in Palestine – I confess to describing concepts such as apartheid, settler colonialism, ethno-nationalism and more. Perhaps even more disturbing from your perspective, I recently employed such concepts as genocide, settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing in a book I wrote about early American history.
I also confess that in the past I have targeted white supremacist allies of this administration in my community of Chico, California. Clearly employing extralegal militias is part of this administration’s fascist playbook, as Trump already proved during the events of 6 January 2021. For instance, when my house was a target of antisemitic leafleting, I sought the help of a colleague and a local investigative journalist to make this very real form of antisemitism known to authorities. In the process the journalist uncovered troubling information that there is an armed white supremacist in our community who holds deep antisemitic convictions and now knows where I work. Had you really been interested in investigating antisemitism, you might have looked into the whereabouts of that individual. But since you want people like him around so that they can be activated when needed, and since all you really want is to cynically weaponize antisemitism, you might want to arrest me instead. After all, according to your standards, I – a Jew targeted by white supremacists – was all along the biggest threat to Jews in my own community.
I have long heard stories about the rise of fascism in Europe from my grandparents, all of whom fled Europe and were refugees from antisemitism. The similarities between the actions of this administration and what my grandparents have lived through are unmistakable. I tell them here so that before you choose to arrest me, you will have one more opportunity to decide whether you will go down in history as aiding and abetting the rise of a fascist regime or as someone who refused to be part of another dark episode in this country’s history. Be forewarned: even if you yourself never directly suffer for your crimes, history will judge you.
My dear grandfather, Otto, may his memory be a blessing, escaped Austria by the skin of his teeth when he was only 13 after the Nazi takeover of the country. Having witnessed the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938 – the night when local mobs violently rioted against Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses across much of Germany and Austria and arrested 30,000 citizens just for being Jewish – his parents made the decision to flee to Shanghai, the only port that would accept them. Clearly, our current president’s rhetoric regarding enemies of the American nation from within and without, against immigrants, trans people and people deemed un-American in their political commitments (like myself), are eerily reminiscent of the stories my grandfather told me about the scapegoating of Jews.
As I consider the memory of dear grandmother Rachel, may her memory be a blessing, who grew up in Poland and survived the Holocaust, including enduring a harrowing year in Auschwitz and the death march to Germany, I cannot shake the sense of another parallel. As Hitler and the Nazi party were consolidating power, they appointed sycophants like yourself and so many others to positions of power in the Nazi administration. The most important criterion for Hitler was not that the people in positions of power were competent or even knowledgeable, but that they would be spineless and loyal to him.
According to the historian Ian Kershaw, this type of leadership, where all bow to the great leader, led to the Holocaust, as the people surrounding Hitler constantly sought to outdo each other in their loyalty to the Führer. Knowing Hitler’s hatred for Jews, they constantly tried to curry favor by suggesting the most radical and far-reaching policy ideas towards Jews. This dynamic, which Kershaw called “working toward the Führer”, ultimately led Hitler and the people surrounding him to decide on the “Final Solution”, the plan to exterminate all the Jews in the world on an industrial scale in death camps. This idea of working toward the leader is upon us today, as we see institutions and even some in the Democratic party bowing before the great leader and his will. Instead of standing up to the administration at every turn, institutions, businesses and politicians across the country prefer to anticipate the administration’s wrath and eliminate any behavior or materials that might come under scrutiny. Meanwhile, Republicans rush to outdo each other in flattering the great leader, as American society seems frozen with fear in face of the rising tides of fascism.
So, Kash Patel, do you want to arrest me and help bring about fascism?
Eran Zelnik grew up in Israel and came to the US 15 years ago to complete his PhD in history. He now lives and teaches in Chico, California
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1996; 9/28 New York
1997: 11/14 Oakland, 11/15 Oakland
1998: 7/5 Dallas, 7/7 Albuquerque, 7/8 Phoenix, 7/10 San Diego, 7/11 Las Vegas
2000: 10/17 Dallas
2003: 4/3 OKC
2012: 11/17 Tulsa(EV), 11/18 Tulsa(EV)
2013: 11/16 OKC
2014: 10/8 Tulsa
2022: 9/20 OKC
2023: 9/13 Ft Worth, 9/15 Ft Worth
Former secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall wrote in Newsweek yesterday that the position Haugh held is “one of the most sensitive and powerful jobs in America.” Kendall writes that NSA and CYBERCOM oversee the world’s most sophisticated tools and techniques to penetrate computer systems, monitor communications around the globe, and, if national security requires it, attack those systems. U.S. law drastically curtails how those tools can be used in the U.S. and against American citizens and businesses. Will a Trump loyalist follow those laws? Kendall writes: “Every American should view this development with alarm.”
The first people to be targeted by that data collection appear to be undocumented immigrants. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported on Wednesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using a database that enables officials to search for people by filtering for “hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” including scars or tattoos, bankruptcy filings, Social Security number, hair color, and race. The system, called Investigative Case Management (ICM), was created by billionaire Peter Thiel’s software company Palantir, which in 2022 signed a $95.9 million contract with the government to develop ICM.
Three Trump officials told Sophia Cai of Politico that DOGE staffers embedded in agencies across the government are expanding government cooperation with immigration officials, using the information they’re gleaning from government databases to facilitate deportation. On Tuesday, DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi sent the first 6,300 names of individuals whose temporary legal status had just been canceled. On the list, which Moghaddassi said covered those on “the terror watch list” or with “F.B.I. criminal records,” were eight minors, including one 13-year-old.
The Social Security Administration worked with the administration to get those people to “self-deport” by adding them to the agency's “death master file.” That file is supposed to track people whose death means they should no longer receive benefits. Adding to it people the administration wants to erase is “financial murder,” former SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley told Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard of the New York Times. Those people will not be able to use credit cards or banks.
On Tuesday, Acting Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Melanie Krause resigned after the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security agreed to share sensitive taxpayer data with immigration authorities. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes, in part to demonstrate their commitment to citizenship, and the government has promised immigrants that it would not use that information for immigration enforcement. Until now, the IRS has protected sensitive taxpayer information.
Rene Marsh and Marshall Cohen of CNN note that “[m]ultiple senior career IRS officials refused to sign the data-sharing agreement with DHS,” which will enable HHS officials to ask the IRS for names and addresses of people they suspect are undocumented, “because of grave concerns about its legality.” Ultimately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed the agreement with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
Krause was only one of several senior career officials leaving the IRS, raising concerns among those staying that there is no longer a “defense against the potential unlawful use of taxpayer data by the Trump administration.”
Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that for the past three days, DOGE staffers have been working with representatives from Palantir and career engineers from the IRS in a giant “hackathon.” Their goal is to build a system that will be able to access all IRS records, including names, addresses, job data, and Social Security numbers, that can then be compared with data from other agencies.
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This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so.
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Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.
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