Strong Man, Weak Man

Trump's illegal ousting of three major news outlets from the White House this week has gotten a lot of attention and finally some solidarity from the rest of the press corps, which suspended coverage by the press pool. Loss of the pool meant a decrease in visual coverage of his state visit with President Xi of China.

I think the timing of his attempt to ban the three was partly to show how strong he is to Xi, as was the timing of the ads the regime ran this week on Fox News and Newsmax that are essentially Trump campaign ads, but which end with the line "paid for by the U.S. government."

The ads have no content that could legitimately carry that endorsement. It's almost absurd to describe them. Their words say "America will never be a communist country" and boast about "the largest tax cuts in history" — both Republican talking points — and intersperse footage of Donald Trump with a chorus of voices singing the words "Love me." 

Anyone who made that ad, or accepted it to run, knows that it is in violation of U.S. law. Such a violation I wouldn't have even thought this regime would try it.

But it's a show of power, the same as Trump's ejection of the journalists, and it comes at the same time he has been praising the Chinese puppet media accompanying Xi. 

The ad has not gotten as much coverage as his action against CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, but it's of a piece. He's showing he's a strong man who can get away with anything. 

Meanwhile, the White House doctored a photo of Trump with Xi and others taken during the unprecedented ceremonial reception for Xi at Andrews Air Force Base, another show of his disregard for the existence of truth. 

He's a weak, weak man enabled by people who never tell him no. When will this end?

The DN3.1 Meter

There are so many outrages every day that one has to limit the aperture to a lot of them.

My personal F-stop for when one of Trump or the regime's acts cannot go without remark is whether I have to call Daughter Number Three-Point-One and tell her about it, or see if she's already heard about it.

That happened today when I heard that Trump had stood in front of a group of New York City first responders and made up a story about his heroics on 9/11. How he was pulled from the rubble at Ground Zero by two strong men (they carried him under his armpits... nice detail!). Somehow it seems worse to me than the AI images of him as a five-star general with his chest covered in medals.

There's lots of discussion on BlueSky about whether he's lying to take credit, as memories fade of that day, or is it a symptom of his cognitive decline.  

I think it's the latter, having known people in cognitive decline who've created similar though less egregious stories, inserting themselves into situations they had nothing to do with. 

It's shocking, but it will be worse if this laughable piece of confabulation causes nothing more than a ripple (or no ripple at all) in coverage of Trump, and no one holds Republicans accountable for supporting him. 

The man should be in memory care, not in charge of a government. 

Letting the Shooter Go in Texas

Late yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge refused to force Texas Governor Greg Abbott to sign extradition papers for the ICE officer who shot through a door in North Minneapolis back in January, injuring one man and endangering children and other people in the house. 

As I wrote a few days ago, this is an ominous sign of our country's devolution. 

Abbott pretends he is "carefully considering" whether the shooter, Christian Castro, is legally to be considered a fugitive under the Constitution's extradition clause. The judge gave the supposed reasoning that 90 days was not enough for Abbott to figure that question out... even though Abbott said at a press conference that his real reasons are clearly based on animus against Minnesota.

It is established that Castro, the newly released shooter, has discussed moving to Mexico to be with a woman he's romantically involved with, so he's an obvious flight risk. Normally, I would say Minnesota has a better chance of extraditing him from Mexico than Texas, but I guess that has to involve the federal government, so probably not. 

I hope there's still a legal way to compel his return and overrule this stupid decision because unlike the current regime, I'm a fan of keeping this country intact and functional for the betterment of all.

Devolving

I watched the first five episodes of the ABC television show Designated Survivor back in fall 2016. Looking at its Wikipedia page, it appears my cessation coincided with the 2016 presidential election.

Those two dates may or may not have had a causal relationship. I remember being annoyed by the direction the plot was going, but Trump's election probably made the show seem trivial in comparison.

The reason I bring it up now is because its early episodes included a subplot about one of the states defying the federal government in the midst of the crisis that's the subject of the show (the Capitol was bombed during a State of the Union address, and all of the top leaders of the government were killed, with only the designated survivor remaining to become president). 

In that subplot, the governor of Michigan violates the civil rights of Muslims in his state, and the new president of the U.S. has to decide whether to enforce the Constitution in the face of what he sees as devolution or secessionist action. 

About three weeks before Trump was elected, the Designated Survivor president on T.V. ordered the fictional governor of Michigan arrested.

It was only a few months later that the first Trump administration tried to institute its Muslim ban. What a contrast!

And now in Trump 2, we have the almost totally normalized idea that the 14th Amendment doesn't mean what it plainly means and "mainstream" Republicans feel free to say that only Christians should be allowed to hold public office.

Yesterday's Pioneer Press ran two stories that spoke of this country's devolution. The first follows from many other examples of the Trump regime withholding tax dollars from disfavored states:



The other story may not be as well-known nationwide as it is here:


Texas Governor Greg Abbott is refusing to sign extradition papers for the ICE agent who shot a man through a door in Minneapolis in January, and lied about it. 

Even the feds acknowledge his actions were bad. Texas marshals took him in, and he's in a jail in Texas. But Abbott will not send him to Minnesota to stand trial, which is what the Constitution requires.

Both of the actions described in the news stories are signs of devolution, breakdown of the national compact. Lawsuits attempt to get money freed up from Trump's interference, and the mid-term elections may finally stop this illegal impoundment, if Democrats retake at least part of Congress. 

Right now Minnesota's attorney general is suing to get Abbott to sign the extradition under force of a court order. If a judge doesn't force him to do it, that will be an even more terrible sign. 

Undoing Head Start

The Trump regime's assault on Head Start doesn't get the attention it should. This AP story from a few days ago and this update describe the latest assault.

Essentially, they plan to remove federal requirements, leaving the definition of what the federally mandated program called "Head Start" is up to individual states. So in Minnesota, for instance, that could mean child/staff ratios similar to what exist now, while in Mississippi the ratios would be... I hate to guess. And curriculum could be whatever tripe Republicans decide it should be.

According to the second story, programs would be limited to 5% in administrative expenses, instead of the current 15%. Anyone familiar with nonprofit organizations knows that is untenable. Plus, while they're taking away real family supports for health and wellness, which are essential to families in poverty, RFK Jr. gets to add his brand of "nutrition requirements." 

Quoting that first AP story,

Jody Smith, a lead Head Start teacher south of Seattle, said she’s seen firsthand how critical many of the requirements are, especially the ones for engaging with families and screening kids for disabilities. Smith was a high school dropout when she enrolled her first child in Head Start, where she was encouraged to go back to school and inspired to become a teacher. Later, Head Start helped diagnose her youngest child with autism.

Without Head Start, “I would have probably stayed as a poverty line,” Smith said. “And I don’t know that we would have gotten as far in life as we have.”

And:

Earlier this year, Trump officials also erased a Biden-era rule that mandated raises and greater benefits for Head Start employees. When the rule went in to effect in 2024, Head Start teachers, the majority of whom have bachelor’s degrees, earned less than $40,000 a year on average.

So the teachers are already earning well below their worth and educational attainment, and Trump will make sure that continues to degrade. 

This is in keeping with the regime's reclassification of many professions — including nurses, nurse-practioners, and physician assistants — as nonprofessional when it comes to graduate programs. (Theology and chiropractic graduate degrees are still considered professional, however.)

Just another part of the degradation of American infrastructure that barely gets noticed in the midst of Trump's constant conflagration. 

A Frame to Share

As ICE and DHS generally (and the National Guard and other paramilitary operations) ramp up their unconstitutional and violent actions around the country, I suspect this frame from a recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon will come in handy, so here it is for sharing as needed:

Did you hear that 2,000 National Guard troops will be quartered in D.C. for the next two years, based on a $292 million contract that was awarded for four apartment-style buildings? 

The new contract is cheaper than the hotels the Guard member have been staying in, of course, but it's still a lot more expensive than sending them home — which is what should have been done months ago. And it sucks up a bunch of the housing in the D.C. market, which I'm sure is not a good thing for regular people. 

Quoting that Military Times article,

The new arrangement comes on the heels of a May 28 report, meanwhile, that assessed that the 2,000-plus National Guard troops to have participated in the D.C. task force have had “no measurable effect on violent crime.

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As always, here's the reminder that you can support Tom Tomorrow by signing up for Sparky's List.
 

Tom Tomorrow and Flaming Hydra

It's time for my more or less annual reminder to support cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's Sparky's List, as all of the publications that pay cartoonists go out of business in this media environment. 

With it, you get an early view of his weekly comic, which tries to make sense of this indescribable time we are living through, plus his additional thoughts on it, and comments on life in New York City and sometimes an inside view of minor celebrity culture from a guy who's been on the edge of things for 40 or so years.

This week he shared an extra comic, which had the benefit of informing me of the existence of flaminghydra.com. It's a co-op of journalists, essayists, and other creatives, many of whom I see on BlueSky. Not sure why I haven't heard of it before. Like all independent media, Flaming Hydra also needs subscribers ($3/month). 

Here's the comic, to entice you to subscribe to either or both... and to once again remind us all of just how batshit the past 11 years have been:

About Those Pardons

I have a hypothesis about Trump's 250 pardons for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Of course, if it happens, people will pay him bribes for the pardons. That's not the hypothesis.

My thought is that it wasn't his idea. At this point, he's surrounded by people who are falling over themselves to come up with the next worst thing he can do. I bet one of those reprobates came up with this as both a way to stick it to his haters, and to give him another bite at a bunch of bribes. 

You probably heard that it has become well known at major law firms that a million or two million dollars buys anyone a pardon these days. That's what we've come to. 

By the way, if you have access to Apple TV, I recommend Star City for a fictionalized look at life in the USSR in the late 1960s. It provides a glimpse of what it's like to live under the type of government today's Republican Party would like to institute here in the U.S. 

Two Things About June

The Supreme Court makes me hate June.

As climatologist Peter Gleick said on BlueSky a few hours ago, 

Do I have this right? The Supreme Court affirmed that Donald Trump is a sexual predator, and then gives him unprecedented power to fire those who provide independent oversight at federal agencies? 

Tomorrow they will issue their ruling on birthright citizenship (and consensus seems to be that they will uphold its existence because... duh), but that the majority six will find wrongly on the other two remaining cases. 

Conservative Patrick Chovanec put it this way:

Over the past year or so, the Roberts Court has batted around a .500. But the half they get right merely hold the line, while the half they get wrong build the foundations for a dictatorship, brick by brick. 

It finally became summer here in Minnesota today, so it's over 90°F with high humidity. I have to go do the daily picking of black raspberries regardless of conditions, nationally or locally.  They always ripen at the end of June, just as the Supreme Court begins announcing all of its big decisions. 

Some day we will have a court structured for justice instead of whatever this travesty is. When that time comes, the berries will still need to be picked every day, but I won't be dreading the news from Washington as I find my way among the thorns.

Rush to Grab Power Before the November Elections

One name: Russell Vought. 

He wants to put himself (or people he controls) in charge of deciding how all the U.S. government's grant money — our taxpayer money — is spent. All of it: not just scientific grants. Yes, really.

Here are a couple of pieces about this proposed rule change, which is clearly illegal, but that means nothing these days: 

• A brief bit on Science Friday from today. 
• A story in The Nation, which should be accessible if you sign up for a free account. 
• And this thread on BlueSky by the author of The Nation story, epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves.

I'm going to quote Gonsalves's thread in full, because it's in keeping with why he wrote the thread:

Russell Vought is an evil man. This plan is nothing short of a personal take-over of federal grant-making. It will affect ALL of us. Political commissars will now be in charge of all agencies, reporting to him. But we are not powerless. See what you can do below.

First, write a letter to Congress. Personalize it. Get your friends and family to do the same. Will take 2–3 minutes of your time. 

Next write a comment on the proposed rule BEFORE July 13th. If you're not a scientist, this post explains what's at stake for your community here [and has great instructions and the comment link at the end].

If you are a scientist, this post has a primer for that too! 

This piece on Forbes also has a great piece about how the rule will affect your community.

And people need to know about this new proposed OMB rule. Consider writing an op-ed for your local paper.

This is it folks. All hands on deck. We need everyone now working to stop this. Please, please spread the word. Get five, better yet ten friends to take action.  

As the non-scientist explainer linked above put it,

Federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities function. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends. This rule puts that entire financial partnership between the federal government and the states under political control, without an act of Congress, effective October 1, 2026.

Vought's minions will be able to terminate any granted program at any time for any or no reason. New programs, of course, will have to align with Trump's ideology. Of course, all of the usual "anti-woke" words are used in the rule-making, so it's pretty clear what will not be funded.

The availability of grants will not be open and public, so — surprise! — this is an additional opportunity for graft. There will be no appeal process when applications are denied, and "organizational affiliation" can be used as the basis for denial. 

As usual, I find myself outraged that we need to write specifically formatted comments explaining to our government why it should not be trying to kill its people and destroy the infrastructure our tax dollars have been spent on for decades. But that's where we're at under the Trump regime as they rush to grab power before the November elections.

Write comments, write to Congress, write everywhere.
 

Today, Ugh

I'm overwhelmed by today's bad news (multi-decade sentences to the Prairieland defendants in Texas and multiple 6–3 SCOTUS decisions that wipe out various civil rights for everyone except corporations). The destruction continues.

I need to finish reading The Overstory, which is excellent but anti-escapist, and find something more diverting. 

The World Cup is not my thing, so I don't have that to fall back on. 

I must spend more time outside, and talk to more people. 

How to survive in the present moment.

Sometimes You Just Have to Say It

In the past few days, Facebook has shown me a couple of statements that resonate with the political situation we are in. First, this:



It reminded me of things said by people who live in completely Republican-dominated states. 

For instance, a few days ago, Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social posted this:

It’s wild to talk to folks about Missouri only to hear someone blame “the Democrats.” What Democrats? We’ve had a Republican legislative supermajority for over two decades and haven’t had a statewide elected Dem since 2018. Everything you see in this state is due to Republican authoritarianism.

That's in keeping with posts Piper has made at other times: whatever ills exist in Missouri, Republicans clearly have been in complete power for long enough that they have had every chance to at least begin to fix them. Instead, just about every measure of human well-being has gotten worse: schools, roads, health care, air. (They've had a trifecta since 2017, and controlled both houses of the Legislature continuously since 2003. When there was a Democratic governor between 2009–2016, all he could do was veto things, not pass anything positive.)

Lyz Lenz has said the same about life in Iowa since Republicans have dominated over the past decade. Everything has gotten worse for everyone since a Republicans became governor in 2011 and particularly since their trifecta began in 2017. 

And now we, of course, have the same thing on a national level. Alexander Ross @hardpolitics.bsky.social wrote this today:

Our country is tolerating Donald Trump presiding over severe national decline because the majority of white voters (who vote Republican) thought living under a Black president was worse than this. Not a popular or media-savvy assessment... it's also not wrong either.

Here's the second thing from Facebook:



We have to get these people out of office as soon as possible.

Oh, the Suffering Afrikaners

After yesterday's story about the tiny number of asylum cases that are found in favor of applicants by Trump regime judges, it was extra bad to see a version of this AP story in today's Star Tribune.

The headline is "Trump administration plans to admit more white South Africans as refugees this year," and the lede sentence reads, "The Trump administration plans to admit up to 10,000 more white South African refugees into the United States in the coming months, arguing that their status as Afrikaners has left them open to discrimination and persecution at home."

Are they threatened with death and sexual violence like the Central American woman described by Steven Thal in yesterday's Star Tribune op-ed? Only in Stephen Miller's racist imagination. Are they threatened by their families with death for being adopted and somehow disgracing their clan, like the young Somali man whose story in MinnPost I belatedly appended to yesterday's post? Of course not.

The version of the AP story that ran in the Star Tribune does not carry the AP byline, and ended with two paragraphs that are not in the AP story online:


Yeah, because having your history erased from school textbooks is clearly persecution that deserves a response from governments around the world. Maybe compensation! And any country that does that to some of its people should definitely stop doing it. 

How do people like Christopher Landau, who work for the Trump regime, manage to say things like this without their heads spinning right off?

Relocating 17,500 white South Africans to get them established here will cost U.S. taxpayers $100 million, according to AP. Which is only about $5,700 per person, so I'm not sure I trust that figure. It seems kind of low. 

What Do We Do with This?

Yesterday, I wrote that it wasn't possible to come up with adjectives to describe the corruption of Trump and his administration. As Chris Hayes said last night, the news of his stock trading and then promoting the same companies alone would normally be the biggest presidential corruption story of all time, if we didn't have the now-$1.8 billion IRS extortion scheme to talk about. 

Here is one day's worth of the best BlueSky posts I saw on the IRS story. These are in chronological order: 

Even by Trump standards, reading his “settlement” with the IRS made me feel insane. Every lever of this thing is controlled by Trump, or some lackey he controls. A diabolical little Rube Goldberg machine of corruption, to the tune of $1.8 billion in public resources. Vile stuff. Trump doesn’t literally decide who gets the money. But everyone on the commission is appointed by the AG, and can be removed by Trump *at any time*. It’s a machine to reward his allies. I promise you, not one dollar will go to anyone he doesn’t deem worthy of getting rich at your expense.
Jay Willis

the president is raiding the treasury to put your tax dollars into this man's personal checking account as a reward for what he's doing in this picture:


Andrew Lawrence

So you CAN get reparations you just have to be a reactionary white person who tries to overthrow the government because black votes shouldn’t count
Adam Serwer

In a sane world, we'd be discussing giving a million dollars to Jeffrey Epstein's victims and not to the traitors on January 6.
Christine Slemmer @slem63.bsky.social

An American president sues/extorts his own government, then settles with his own justice department to funnel money to his criminal allies. He will go down in history as the president who came up with forms of corruption never contemplated before.
Rick Stengel

Ask yourself: Why would a settlement over leaked tax filings include a prohibition on examinations of previously filed returns? One answer, which lots of people are missing: For years, Trump has been fighting an IRS audit that could have resulted in a $100M bill. No longer, apparently.
Connor Ewing

look trump can have his government sign any docs he wants; either the next democratic government throws all the corrupt motherfuckers in jail and seizes all their assets, or it's pointless anyway.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

A canny lawyer friend always says "A contract is just a starting point for a negotiation." The most generous fallback option the Dems should offer is "give it all back and retire from public life." Next best is "live the balance of your days in jail or embroiled in 25 concurrent prosecutions."
Daniel Suitor

Every day brings a new set of headlines that if you'd predicted them in October 2024, you'd have been diagnosed with a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome:


Matthew Gertz

There should be more screaming about all the corruption. And a corruption-watch/tally/list updated daily. Plus projections on DC federal buildings and airplanes trailing banners. Also Trump in jail.
Rebecca Solnit

I think the reason I've been a little ambiently mad all day is because January 6th rioters are statistically the most likely group of pedophiles in the world and they clubbed a guy to death and they're going to be rich from the tax money that I give to the country I live in.
Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president and VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social

And that's not even mentioning the 14th Amendment argument against the scheme. 

What do we do with this? What do we do with this? 

Primal Scream

I admit my imagination failed. 

I couldn't imagine how bad this second Trump administration would be, and I now know it will get worse. (Did you hear he has appointed a penile-implant doctor to head the hanta virus response, and one of Don Jr.'s hunting buddies to head the FDA? And those are just minor notes on a day ending in y, as they say.) 

A few days ago, Radley Balko reposted something he wrote the day after the election in 2024:

Fearing most:
- mass deportations, police state required to try it, resulting death/suffering
- severe recession or depression from tariffs, deportations, ensuing civil unrest
- violence against protesters 
- weaponization of DOJ, IRS, FCC
- “unleashed” cops & vigilantes
- Baltics, Poland, Taiwan 

And we're there, pretty much. The Baltics, Poland, not so much, but everything else on his list, yes, plus a lot else. The corruption that I feel foolish even trying to come up with adjectives to describe. RFK Jr and Elon Musk directly and indirectly killing millions of children. The complete reinstitution of Jim Crow. 

Withdrawing troops from Europe to let Putin in. Could you have imagined an American president doing that? 

Burning everything behind them, making it so, so hard to rebuild.

But at the same time, they are running scared. As political philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is fond of saying (and is often found quoted on BlueSky): I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win.

That Kind of Year

I've been saving this one:

It could have been posted any time, really.
 

This Is Not Partisan Polarization

I'm a Supreme Court watcher, but not professionally, and there's a lot going on these days. So I wasn't very aware of the major voting rights case, Louisiana v. Callais, argued six months ago, that was announced today.

Attorney Imani Gandy @angryblacklady.blacksky.app described it this way half a year ago:

Just so everyone is clear, the main issue in the Supreme Court voting rights case tomorrow is whether it's racist against white people to enforce the Voting Rights Act. I'm dead serious. We live in incredibly stupid times.

As anyone knows who has followed voting rights, John Roberts has had it in for the VRA his entire career. (See Ari Berman's book Give Us the Ballot, for instance.) When the Supreme Court killed pre-clearance back in 2013, the writing was on the wall, but they danced around the issue, pretending they wouldn't go the rest of the way, biding their time, waiting for the majority they needed.

Now is the time.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed BlueSky acccount.

___

SCOTUS rules that intentional discrimination required to find race discrimination under VRA, which is nearly impossible to prove. This will weaken VRA to point of irrelevance. Though Alito wrote majority opinion John Roberts has been trying to gut VRA for 40+ years since he worked in Reagan DOJ
Ari Berman

It's so disheartening watching this court carry out the explicit project of white supremacy so blatantly while gaslighting the public to say it's trying to stop discrimination. They're dismantling every major legacy of the civil rights movement. We need to reform this court.
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net

John Roberts has been trying to kill Voting Rights Act since he was young lawyer in Reagan DOJ in early 1980s. That's most important context for today's Callais decision. Roberts Court has now issued 3 major decisions gutting VRA, turning law into dead letter:


Ari Berman

Supreme Court rules Black voters had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
Victor Ray

The Voting Rights Act is essentially dead and it’s quite possible that we will, like when a similar SCOTUS gutted civil rights at the fall of Reconstruction, see a disappearance of much of the Black congressional representation, especially in the most heavily Black states, which are in the South.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones.bsky.social

If you want a picture of the Republican future, imagine a bench full of white men— and men who wish they were white — declaring in law that only They know what the Real racism is, and it's when they, personally, have to acknowledge any systemic inequalities which have disproportionately benefited them.
Dr. Damien P. Williams @wolvendamien.bsky.social

I say it again and again: Because we don’t learn the real history of this country, we do not understand what this country is capable of. After 1870, 22 Black men served in Congress. By 1901, because of racist SCOTUS rulings, electoral coups and election cheating and violence, there were none.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones.bsky.social

Supreme Court Overturns ‘Right v. Wrong’


The Onion

Headlines saying this Supreme Court decision "curtails the use of race" in voting are going to make me have a stroke. It empowers white supremacy. It does not curtail the use of race.
Victor Ray

Given the argument that ended the VRA, I think it’s time liberals did some self reflection about the now decades long obsession with partisan polarization as the problem, as opposed to authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism.
Jake Grumbach

technically, the Supreme Court decision legally blesses the use of race as a reasonable proxy for political leanings. it absolutely does not curtail the use of race – it permits it
Ann M. Lipton

Small point but today illustrates pretty clearly why they were so obsessed with banning critical race theory. Derrick Bell’s work predicts this type of regression on rights.
Victor Ray

I’m seeing people struggle to understand today’s SCOTUS ruling. That’s because the conservative justices took a law explicitly created for equity and said, “What if we just claimed it meant the opposite thing?” This is the judiciary’s playbook for dismantling every law from the civil rights era. Every decision like this is genuinely mind boggling if you attempt to understand it from a place of good faith. Because these are extremely bad faith interpretations.
Nicole Bedera

One of the most clarifying passages I've ever read on what "polarization" actually means in the U.S.":


Neil Lewis, Jr.

The pro-Confederate movement has been operating in plain sight because we’ve misunderstood America to be a democracy fending off attempts at fascism, instead of what it is and always has been — a fascist state fending off attempts at democracy.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Thoughts on Cole Allen

Depending on what you have read about Cole Allen, the attempted shooter at the White House Correspondents Dinner, you may or may not know that he held very "normie" political beliefs. He wasn't extremely left-wing or right-wing. If anything, he was anti-left, anti-socialist, in the kinds of things he posted and reposted in social media. He believed in capitalism, but that things had gone wrong under Republicans and particularly Donald Trump.

BlueSky posters who have read his "manifesto" say things like:

I love that the New York Post calls it “sprawling” and “crazed” when it’s barely 1,000 words and sane. I disagree strongly with his decision to try a mass shooting, but this is the sanest explanation by a mass shooter ever.
@dwilliamesq.bsky.social

He doesn't want anyone to follow his example because he doesn't want them to be hurt or punished. His objective was to stop the extreme actions of this regime. He doesn't even talk about avenging what's already happened or punishing anyone. He just wanted it to stop, which is the moderate position.
@antifunk.bsky.social

The point at which a sane, morally principled award-winning teacher who is angry about school shootings picks up a gun and thinks it’s the only way to make a difference is a bad place to be in. Dismissing him as a crazy person and blaming Dems is disingenuous and dishonest.
Elizabeth Spiers

We live in an era when most people of Cole Allen's age can probably name more school shooters off the top of their heads than they can activists who've successfully brought about institutional change, or politicians who've passed legislation that positively impacted their lives. That's sad. The Weather Underground was a revolutionary movement with an ideology informed by the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles of the Cold War era. Cole Allen appears to be a lone wolf actor, someone with blandly liberal politics who adopted the "theory of change" of a mass shooter.
Seth Cotlar

Yep. I described it to my husband as reasoned, rational and a very, very bad sign.
BratKnits

That someone like Allen would do what he did is a very bad sign: that is a recurring statement on BlueSky.  

Allen, it appears, grew up in a family that was part of an evangelical church that had splintered from the Christan Reformed Church in North America — the arch-conservative sect that's home to Betsy Devos — because the CRC was too liberal. (Local news story on his family here.) Given his current politics, Kathryn Brightbill, a writer on the religious right, speculated that Allen may be part of the ex-evangelical wave, where it's common for peoples' politics to have changed but their underlying comfort with violence has not.

She wrote:

I've been worried about something like this for quite a while now, because you can't flirt with the idea of justifiable violence as much as conservative Reformed culture does, even as they're condemning it on the surface, and not end up with people who rationalize their way to doing violence.

Someone else said that Allen sounds depressed and that his writings are a suicide note. I can see that. It makes me think of people who have self-imolated as protest. 

Fascism 101

Here's some news from today that may or may not get coverage:

RFK Jr. just said that immigration is to blame for the outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the U.S., not him.
Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD

Yet again I remind everyone that "foreigners are corrupting our pure blood with weakness and disease" is Fascism 101. Not some variant, not some metaphorically similar thing, not some echo — the thing itself.
David Roberts @volts.wtf 

This is a gift link to today's New York Times story by a British mother whose 11-year-old daughter died from measles complications 10 years after she had contracted it as an infant — at an age when children are too young to be vaccinated, and have to rely on herd immunity. 

I had no idea you could die from measles years later.

The even more messed up part of the RFK immigration B.S., at least here in Minnesota, is that there are people trying to convince our immigrant neighbors that vaccines cause autism, and it's having an effect on the vaccination rate. I don't know if they're run-of-the-mill anti-vaxxers or if they're anti-immigration, trying to use it to gin up hate against immigrants as unclean. It's so hard to tell these days. But it fits perfectly with what RFK Jr. is up to.

A Judge in His Own Image

The Trump regime has made a practice of firing qualified immigration judges and replacing them with loyalists who will follow Trump (and Stephen Miller's) ideological dictates. These types of judges are directly appointed and go through none of the usual vetting processes. 

The most recent example, here in Minnesota, is a man named Nathan Hansen. Minnesota Reformer tells us about Hansen's extreme history and, essentially, anti-qualifications for the job:

Hansen’s extensive social media history contains posts endorsing popular but widely debunked right-wing conspiracies including Pizzagate and Obama birtherism, to which President Donald Trump also subscribes. In 2024, he amplified posts about the “Haitian invasion of Ohio,” a racist conspiracy pushed by Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance that accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating family pets.  

More recently, Hansen called for Minnesota State Rep. Brad Tabke (D-Shakopee) to be jailed for filming ICE agents within his districts and posting about their actions online. 

It appears that Hansen has no experience in immigration law. 

The only semi-good news about any of this is that because immigration judges can be appointed so easily, they can also be fired just easily when/if Trump is out of office. That's if Trump doesn't manage to appoint Hansen to a real judgeship in the meantime.