The video is startling. Between 3-6 armed, masked ICE agents surround a man, wrestle him to the ground, throw punches at him while he seems to be completely immobilized.
Before that year is entirely forgotten, I want to say that it was one of the worst years in my life.
I learned in college that a sample of 1 is not useful for science, but it means plenty to me.
A year ago, a monstrous, lying braggart was sworn into office. A grifter and conman returned to fill his pockets and those of his family and friends, to double his net worth and to accept emoluments from foreign countries, send armed men to inflict brutality on blue cities, disregarding the Constitution.
In only one year, he has shredded our nation’s standing in the world, inflicted terror on our cities, alienated our allies, abandoned efforts to improve the environment, attacked our schools and universities, gloried in bigotry, and devastated the federal civil service.
He sends federal agents or the National Guard into urban districts, to terrorize the residents. People are snatched from their cars, their workplaces, the streets, even as they protest that they are citizens, that they have rights, that they want a lawyer. Their protests are ignored as a pack of masked men grab them, handcuff them, throw them to the ground, punch and kick them in their heads and bodies. Some are detained and disappeared into a network of prisons, then deported without due process. Some are imprisoned for days or weeks, then released.
Is this America? Never in my life have I been stopped by military officers and asked for my papers,
The cold-blooded murder of Renee Good was followed not by an investigation or apology but by smearing her and her wife as terrorists who were somehow responsible for her fate and deserved to die.
Who are these masked men? Why are they so violent? Are they Proud Boys? KKK? J6 insurrectionists?
Every day, I wonder if this is how decent Germans felt as Hitler took power and destroyed civil society.
What is happening to my country? To our Constitution? To the rule of law?
As I watch our values and rights degraded by power-mad politicians, I fight to preserve my body.
In the spring, I learned after my annual mammogram that I had breast cancer. I learned that I had invasive ductal cancer in my right breast, which required surgery. The post-surgery analysis revealed that not all the cancer was removed. The “margins” were not clear. So back I went for another surgery on the same site.
Radiation–five straight days of it–followed. it left me tired, but otherwise apparently successful.
I was reluctant to take a daily pill of anti-cancer medicine because of the numerous side effects. But I did and I suffered the predicted side effects. I had pain in my hips and joints. That was November.
Meanwhile I had a new mammogram. It showed that I had a new cancer, this time in my left breast. The surgeon recommended another surgery, and this time she got it all out. It was a tiny tumor, different from the first one. But a cancer nonetheless.
Radiation begins today, January 20, the first anniversary of Trump’s return to office. What a coincidence, cancer in my body, cancer in our nation.
It has been a nightmare year, for the country and for me personally. To make matters worse, our beloved dog Mitzi died. Through all of the personal trauma, my wife Mary stood by me steadfastly, through thick and thin, demonstrating her determination and love.
In a few weeks, we expect to get another dog. We will survive.
It remains to be seen whether our country will survive a second Trump term, another round of brutality inflicted on our norms, our values, our fellow citizens and our neighbors, our faith in our electoral system and our laws.
Norman Batley hosts a podcast called “Life Elsewhere with Norman B.” He is based in Tampa, Florida. The program is widely distributed through WMNF and NPR. He asks great questions, and I was thrilled to be invited to be on his show.
Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, wrote regularly for The New York Times. Now he writes a blog at Substack. In this post, he characterizes the deepening dysfunction of our president, Donald Trump.
Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him underwater on every major issue. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently lamented that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled.
And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection.
So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.
What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Timesreports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”
The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was initially very popular. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed:
And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where…an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head.
Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.
A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy.
But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.
So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful — so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.
And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending:
It’s a near certainty that Trump’s assertion that he arrived at an immediate 50% increase in the military budget after “long and difficult negotiations” is yet another lie. There’s been no indication whatsoever that a massive increase in defense spending was on anyone’s agenda before he suddenly posted about it on Truth Social.
So what was that about? Given the timing, it’s clear that Trump’s announcement was yet another exercise in self-aggrandizement, as well as an attempt to grab the headlines away from Good’s killing. But what’s also important to realize from Trump’s announcement is that he is now clearly conflating the size of the US military with his ego. Evidently the sugar rush of Maduro’s capture has left him wanting more and more military validation, particularly as his poll numbers tank.
So here’s a warning to the US military: if you continue to indulge the sick fantasies of this man, he will drag this country into more and deeper international morasses to feed his need for glory. Do what Admiral Alvin Holsey, an honorable man, did – stand down and refuse an illegal order. Here’s a warning to the Republicans: if you continue to allow this man to perpetrate war against his own people with impunity through the actions of ICE, you will be remembered as cowards and hypocrites. Here’s a warning to all his other enablers: if you do not do something to stop this madman, you will go down in history as traitors to this country.
And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Perhaps the strangest feature of Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is that he left the leadership of the regime in place, removing only Maduro and his wife. Four of the six Venezuelan leaders who were indicted for criminal activities are now running the country.
On the one hand, Trump avoids the problem of a renegade army and security apparatus, which can help repress the citizenry while the U.S. schemes to steal their oil.
On the other, the Maduro regime continues to be thuggish and corrupt.
The Economist magazine conducted a poll in Venezuela and found that most people were pleased that Maduro is gone.
The polling shows that Mr Maduro, who presided over torture and economic collapse and brazenly stole the presidential election in 2024, was deeply hated. Just 13% of respondents even mildly opposed his capture. Strikingly, more than half of them said their opinion of America had improved after the raid.
Its deputy editor Robert Guest wrote this commentary in the January 10-16 issue::
Outside a supermarket in Caracas a few years ago, I saw national guardsmen checking people’s identity before they were allowed in. The logic was that, courtesy of the revolutionary government, the state-owned shop sold essential groceries at below-market prices. So you needed men with truncheons and tear-gas to make sure shoppers only came in on their state-appointed shopping days.
Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship was one of the most thuggish in the world. It was also one of the most economically incompetent. When I walked into that shop, half the shelves were bare and none of the groceries that were supposed to be on sale for less than they cost to make were, in fact, available. A combination of price controls, socialist dogma and industrial-scale corruption had dramatically impoverished a once-prosperous country. The economy shrank by 69% under Mr Maduro—a swifter decline than would normally occur during an all-out civil war. Small wonder Venezuelans in Miami danced in the streets when Donald Trump kidnapped Mr Maduro and whisked him to a courtroom in New York. But they were not dancing in Caracas, for fear of being arrested and tortured. For though the despot is gone, the rest of the regime is still in place.
Heather Cox Richardson obtained a pamphlet written during World War II for our troops overseas. Its purpose was to explain the tactics of fascists: how they gain power, how they lie to distort reality, how they use hatred to divide and conquer.
The pamphlet is insightful, incisive, and remarkably relevant to the world we live in now.
What we are learning is that “It can happen here.” We must arm ourselves with knowledge to preserve our democracy.
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
Margaret Hoover is host of a weekly program about public affairs every Friday night on PBS. It’s called “Firing Line,” the same title as William Buckley’s talk show of decades back.
Margaret, a direct descendant of Herbert Hoover, is a Republican but is not especially conservative.
Elliot Abrams is an expert on foreign affairs and national security. He worked for President Reagan, President George H.W. Bush, and President Trump, in his first term. Abrams is known as a hawk.
What’s fascinating about the conversation is that Abrams is highly critical of Trump’s invasion.
He acknowledges that Maduro was a ruthless, brutal dictator who ran the Venezuelan economy into the ground and caused millions of Venezuelans to flee the country. Some of maduro’s top leaders have hidden bank accounts in which they have stowed hundreds of millions of dollars.
He asks why Trump failed to consult Congress.
He wonders why Trump ordered the arrest of Maduro and his wife but not the others who were indicted and are now running the country.
He wonders why Trump left the leaders of this corrupt regime in place. He assumes they will wait Trump out and continue to reap the rewards of their corruption. Given the cost and difficulty of reviving Venezuela’s oil industry, he doubts that any of the major American oil companies will risk doing so.
It’s a fascinating conversation. I urge you to watch.
I saw the show where Rachel Maddow tried to understand why Trump sent troops to invade Venezuela, kidnap its President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and bring them to the U.S. to stand trial.
She reviews the usual reasons and determines that each of them is insufficient.
This is a clip from his post. Open the link and read it all.
Schmidt writes:
What is Stephen Miller?
He is, of course, deranged, unserious, bombastic, crude, shrill and violent, but that alone does not suffice when it comes to seeing him clearly.
Let’s travel back in time a bit.
Let’s set the dial to September 21, 2025, and head to Phoenix, Arizona, on the occasion of the fascist rally that was dressed up as a memorial service that opened the gates to the best years of Erika Kirk’s life.
These words mark Miller as a Nazi, which, of course, is appalling, given that he is a Jew, and no doubt the cause of his family’s denouncements.
Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to interview Hitler, and the first to be kicked out of Nazi Germany, was well acquainted with the mentality of the Nazis.
Among her greatest columns was this piece, entitled “Who goes Nazi?” published in Harper’s in August 1941.
Here is how it begins:
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France.
I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers.
And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics.
Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it.
Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling.
I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance.
There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service.
Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality.
It appeals to a certain type of mind.
Stephen Miller has a contaminated mind, as does Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem.
Covering the crimes of a pedophile and prosecuting innocent people are the fruit of a poisonous tree, as is animal cruelty, as is the deep hatred for human beings that Stephen Miller carries within him.
Their poisonous ideology is a disease of the spirit and a sickness of the soul.
Why do they hate so many so virulently?
Thompson offered a take 85 years ago, but imagine her living in the era of TikTok, X and the algorithm.
She continues:
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation — the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war.
This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans.
It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work — a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature.
He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline.
He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions.
His body is vigorous.
His mind is childish.
His soul has been almost completely neglected.
A must-read Substack for me is Salty Politics with Julie Roginsky. She’s a brilliant writer, and a very accomplished Democratic campaign strategist, who has been personally sanctioned by Vladimir Putin.
He has banned her from Russia as Thompson was banned from Germany, with the difference that Roginsky was born in Russia.
I highly recommend that you follow her — and better yet — subscribe and support her work.
“We’ll Have Our Home Again” is a well-known neo-Nazi anthem.
The Toronto Holocaust Museum has documented it as a white nationalist song associated with a neo-Nazi fraternal group known as the Männerbund. When a federal law-enforcement agency adopts language drawn directly from white supremacist culture, it is not a coincidence. It is a signal.
If legacy media bothered to do its homework, this would be a national scandal. ICE is no longer even pretending to hide what it is. One almost expects the next recruitment poster to read “ICE Über Alles.”
I do have one minor disagreement with Julie’s observation.
It is not a signal.
It is a declaration.
Listen to the song. It is a Nazi marching song, and now it is the basis of the Department of Homeland Security Nazi recruiting campaign.
Josef Goebbels is an important figure for the MAGA gangsters who hold power because they are apostles of both his faith and greatest insight, which is that, as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “the broad masses of the nation more readily fall victim to a big lie than to a small lie.”
I must share something evil with you today, so that you may understand what Tony Dokoupil and Bari Weiss are apologists for, and what the MAGA party believes.
Why does Stephen Miller hate people with brown skin so much?
Why does he hate all Somalis, Mexicans, Venezuelans and Africans?
Why has Trump announced his hate for the people of what he calls “shithole nations?”
Goebbels explained to the world why the Nazis hated the Jews. It is a perfect window into why MAGA hates the Somalis, for example, and why JD Vance smeared Haitian immigrants in a peaceful Ohio town as “eating pets,” which was a pristine example of a Nazi calumny.
Goebbels was perfectly clear about where the hate came from when he published a paper entitled “Why are we enemies of the Jews?”
We are enemies of the Jews Somalis because we are warriors for the freedom of the German people.
The Jew Mexican is the cause and the beneficiary of our slavery.
He has used the social troubles of our broad masses in order to widen the split between the Right and Left among our people, he has split Germany into two halves.
Here is the real reason for the loss of the World War on one side and for the betrayal of the revolution on the other side.
For the record, Jews accounted for less than one percent of the German population and Somalians represent less than 0.1 percent of the US population.
The Jew Muslim has no interest in the solution of the questions regarding the German fate.
He can’t, since he exists only because they remain unsolved.
Once you turn the German people into a unified community and give them freedom on the world stage, there would no longer be a place among us for the Jew Somali.
He holds the better cards when a nation lives in domestic and foreign slavery than when it is free, hard-working, self-confident and united.
The Jew Venezuelan has caused our misery, and today he makes a living from it.
That is the reason why as nationalists and as socialists national conservatism we are enemies of the Jew Africans.
He has tainted our race, spread moral rot, undermined our morality, and broken our strength.
Thanks to him we are the pariahs of the entire world today.
As long as we were Germans, he was a leper among us.
Since we have forgotten our Germanic character, he has triumphed over us and our future.
The Jew Mexican is the malleable demon of decline.
Wherever he scents debris and rot, he comes out of hiding to begin his criminal butchery among the people.
He wears the mask of those whom he wants to deceive, pretends to be the friend of this victim, and before the unsuspecting victim knows it, he has broken his neck.
The Jew Muslim is uncreative.
He does not produce anything, he merely trades in goods.
With rags, clothes, pictures, precious stones, stocks and bonds, shares in mining operations, people and states.
And everything he trades in he has stolen somewhere at some point.
While he is launching an attack on a state, he is a revolutionary, yet as soon as he is in possession of power, he preaches peace and order so he can leisurely devour his prey.
What has antisemitism to do with socialism?
I’m asking in turn: what has the JewVenezuelan to do with socialism?
Socialism is the doctrine of work.
Who ever saw a Jew Somali work and not plunder, steal, sponge (schmarotzen) and profit from the sweat of another man’s brow?
As socialists we are enemies of the JewsMuslim because we see in the Hebrew the incarnation of capitalism, i.e. the abuse of the goods belonging to the people.
What has antisemitism to do with nationalism? I’m asking in turn: what has the Jew Mexican to do with nationalism?
Nationalism is the doctrine of blood, of race.
The Jew Somali is the enemy and the destroyer of unity created by blood, the deliberate destroyer of our race.
As nationalists we are enemies of the JewsHaitian because in the Hebrew we see the eternal enemy of our national honor and our national freedom.
“But Jews Mexican are human beings, too.”
Certainly, and none of us has ever doubted it.
We only doubt that he is a decent human being.
He doesn’t belong with us. He lives according to different inner and outer laws.
The fact that he is a human being is not a good enough reason for us to allow him to oppress and bully us in the most inhuman manner.
He is indeed a human being – but what kind?
If someone beat your mother in the face with a whip would you then say: “Thank you, he’s only human?”
That is no human being, that is a brute (Unmensch)!
How much worse has the Jew Somali done to our mother Germany and how much worse does he still do today?
[ . . . ]
Antisemitism is un-Christian. So that means that it is Christian to look on as the JewHaitian cuts bootstraps from our skin and to let him add insult to injury.
Being a Christian means: Love your neighbor as you love thyself!
My neighbor is of the same nationality and blood as I.
If I love him, then I must hate his enemies.
He who thinks like a German must despise the Jew Muslim. One results from the other.
Christ himself once saw that love is not the answer in all situations.
When he came across the jobbers and profiteers in the temple, he didn’t say: “Children, love each other!”
Instead he took a whip and drove the pack away.
We are enemies of the Jews Somalis because we stand up for the German people. The JewMexican is our greatest misfortune.
That is going to change, as sure as we are Germans.
Diane Ravitch's blog 