Trump is determined to punish states and cities that didn’t vote for him. So he sent large numbers of masked ICE agents to bully, beat, harass, and intimidate people in blue places, while recklessly killing two protestors.
He unleashed his fury on Minneapolis, sending in 3,000 ICE agents. They must have been trained to act like Brown Shirts because they do. They don’t just arrest people. They grab them, throw them to the ground, punch them, kick them, ziptie them, toss them into a van, picking up people who “look like” immigrants, and disappear them.
The people of Minneapolis resisted. They resisted with such determination that they forced Trump to back down. DHS announced that it will pull its occupying force out of Minneapolis. Everyone is waiting to see if ICE is really leaving. They will believe it when they see it.
Other cities and communities can learn from Minneapolis. The ICE bullies may soon be sent to your city, your community.
The resistance began immediately. People set up an alarm system, letting others know where ICE was operating. People protected their neighborhoods and communities. They turned out to blow whistles, to film ICE actions on their cell phones, and peacefully protest by their presence
Wherever ICE went, volunteers documented what they did. These videos proved to be powerful evidence of ICE brutality and lies.
Renee Good was murdered at one such protest. The White House and Department of Homeland Security called her a domestic terrorist and said she tried to run over an ICE agent, but multiple videos proved that they were lying.
Alex Pretti was murdered when he tried to help a fellow protestor who had been knocked on her back by ICE goons. He was filming with his cellphone. They called him a terrorist and an assassin, but again they were lying.
The people of Minneapolis treated each other as friends and neighbors and organized a powerful resistance. Volunteers organized to deliver food to people afraid to leave home. They drove people who were afraid to take public transit.
Schools protected their students as best they could. Many children from immigrant families were afraid to leave home. The schools went online to keep them learning. Schools stockpiled food for students and their families; volunteers delivered it. Teachers made home visits to check on students.
Columbia Academy, a middle school in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, became “a food bank, a counseling hotline, a missing persons task force, an immigration resource center and a refuge.”
Leslee Sheri, the principal of the school in Columbia Heights, a five-school district, said:
“We are the first call,” said Sherk, a first-year principal who has worked in the district for two decades. “They don’t call the police. They don’t even sometimes call their neighbors or different organizations. They call the school.”
Neighbors helped neighbors. Neighbors helped strangers. The people of Minneapolis reacted with surprising solidarity in opposition to the aggressive militarization of their city.
They stood up, often in bitter cold, spoke out, protected the vulnerable, and demonstrated what democracy, courage l, and compassion looks like.
Italia Fittante is a high school literature teacher in Minneapolis. This essay was published by Education Week. Trump promised during his campaign to deport “the worst of the worst,” criminals, rapists, murderers. Instead he has put a target on the back of every immigrant, no matter how long they have lived here, no matter how much they have contributed to society. Our children are experiencing a reign of terror.
One of my seniors walked into my classroom after school yesterday. He needed an extension on his final project, and I could see he’d been working up the nerve to ask me.
His parents haven’t left the house in over a week for fear of being stopped by immigration agents, which means someone has to work. At 17, that someone is him. After school every weekday and all day on weekends, every week, because the bills don’t stop.
He carries his U.S. passport everywhere now, tucked in his pocket, transferred from his jeans to his school uniform and back again, refusing to let it out of his sight even in my classroom. He’s been stopped twice on his walk home from work by masked men and women in unmarked cars, demanding he prove his right to exist in the country where he was born.
He wants to go to medical school; he’s always dreamt of being a doctor. He told me about the university in Mexico holding a spot for him, the contingency plan he never thought he’d need. Just in case things get worse here and he has to follow his parents across the border, just in case his future is decided by policy instead of potential.
I told him to forget the deadline.
Another one of my seniors came to me early Tuesday morning before class started, her eyes hollowed out and bloodshot from lack of sleep. She was concerned about making up a reading quiz she had missed the day before.
In tears, she explained to me that she was working the register at a fast-food restaurant over the weekend when ICE agents burst through the doors midshift. They pushed past her, forced their way into the back of the restaurant, and violently detained two of her co-workers. Nobody knows where they went, when they’re coming back, or if they’re coming back at all.
She told me she hadn’t slept since the raid. This student, who immigrated with her family to the United States just three years ago, described being paralyzed with fear.
I told her to forget the quiz.
The past few weeks in Minnesota have been marked by relentless federal immigration operations. Agents operate openly and without restraint. This week alone, ICE detained multiple students from a neighboring district, one as young as 5 years old. Children and teenagers have been taken on their way to school, from driveways and from cars. My students live with the constant awareness that anyone they love could be taken at any moment. They themselves could be next.
What we’re asking these kids to do seems impossible. Show up. Focus. Read about the American Dream in Advanced Placement Literature while you wonder if your father will be deported before graduation. Solve for x while you’re solving how to pay the electric bill. Write your college application essay about overcoming adversity while doubting you’ll survive it.
They already come to school knowing they might die there. We’ve made peace with that somehow. Lockdown drills and barricading doors are routine. My students can tell you the difference between shots fired in the building versus shots fired nearby. At the beginning of the school year, two elementary students were killed during mass at a Catholic school just miles from us. Before the media even covered it, my students were calling their parents. I could hear them crying in the halls, in my classroom.
Some of them knew the victims. Now, they come to school and know which corner of each room has the best cover. They are 17 years old and fluent in survival tactics.
My students carry U.S. passports in their pockets like keys to a house where the locks keep changing, navigating their own city like it’s hostile territory. Their walks to and from school are haunted by the persistent possibility that they’ll come home to silence, their parents taken by masked strangers who leave no forwarding address.
We’re creating a generation of students from immigrant families who understand exactly how little this country values their safety.
They’re learning the lesson we’re teaching, even if it’s not the one we claim to be giving. They understand the message we’re sending when we demand their labor and their silence and their gratitude, all while treating their existence as conditional and their families as disposable. How can we expect them to love their country when those in power have made it clear their country doesn’t love them back?
The curriculum is clear. Documentation determines dignity, and borders determine which families matter. Authority needs no accountability, not when violence can be rebranded as policy if it advances “our” goals.
My students understand what’s happening because they’re living it. The stakes are clearer to them than to most adults I know. They don’t need explanations or sympathy or platitudes or extensions. They need safety without surveillance, because this country is theirs, too. No child should have to carry identification to prove their right to exist.
What sort of nation terrorizes children and calls it enforcement? That demands loyalty while offering nothing but fear? My students already know the answer. They learned it the moment they started carrying passports in their pockets.
The state of Minnesota asked a federal judge to stop the federal militarization in Minneapolis. In a much-anticipated ruling, she said no. The judge, appointed by Biden, said that a previous ruling about federal tactics had been overturned, and she thought it was a signal that any ruling favoring the state would be overturned.
A federal judge has rejected a bid by state and local officials in Minnesota to end Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s massive deployment of thousands of federal agents to aggressively enforce immigration laws.
In a ruling Saturday, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez found strong evidence that the ongoing federal operation ”has had, and will likely continue to have, profound and even heartbreaking, consequences on the State of Minnesota, the Twin Cities, and Minnesotans.”
“There is evidence that ICE and CBP agents have engaged in racial profiling, excessive use of force, and other harmful actions,” Menendez said, adding that the operation has disrupted daily life for Minnesotans — harming school attendance, forcing police overtime work and straining emergency services. She also said there were signs the Trump administration was using the surge to force the state to change its immigration policies — pointing to a list of policy demands by Attorney General Pam Bondi and similar comments by White House immigration czar Tom Homan.
But the Biden-appointed judge said state officials’ arguments that the state was being punished or unfairly treated by the federal government were insufficient to justify blocking the surge altogether. And in a 30-page opinion, the judge said she was “particularly reluctant to take a side in the debate about the purpose behind Operation Metro Surge.”
The surge has involved about 3,000 federal officers, a size roughly triple that of the local police forces in Minneapolis and St. Paul. However, Menendez said it was difficult to assess how large or onerous a federal law enforcement presence could be before it amounted to an unconstitutional intrusion on state authority.
“There is no clear way for the Court to determine at what point Defendants’ alleged unlawful actions…becomes (sic) so problematic that they amount to unconstitutional coercion and an infringement on Minnesota’s state sovereignty,” she wrote, later adding that there is “no precedent for a court to micromanage such decisions.”
“If that injunction went too far, then the one at issue here—halting the entire operation—certainly would,” the judge said in her Saturday ruling.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison signaled his team would continue fighting to end the federal operation, writing in a statement that “this case is in its infancy and there is much legal road in front of us.”
“We know that these 3,000 immigration agents are here to intimidate Minnesota and bend the state to the federal government’s will,” he said. “That is unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment and the principle of equal sovereignty. We’re not letting up in defending our state’s constitutional powers.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi on X called the decision “another HUGE” win for the Justice Department in its Minnesota crackdown and noted that it came from a judge appointed by former President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
“Neither sanctuary policies nor meritless litigation will stop the Trump Administration from enforcing federal law in Minnesota,” she wrote.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have both called for federal agents to leave the city as the chaos has only intensified in recent weeks.
“This federal occupation of Minnesota long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement,” Walz said at a press conference last week after two Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti. “It’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of our state. And today, that campaign claimed another life. I’ve seen the videos from several angles. And it’s sickening.”
Backlash from Pretti’s killing has prompted Trump to pull back on elements of the Minneapolis operation.
Two CBP agents involved in the shooting were placed on administrative leave. CBP Commander Greg Bovino was sidelined from his post in Minnesota, with the White House sending border czar Tom Homan to the state in an effort to calm tensions. Officials also said some federal agents involved in the surge were cycling out of state, but leaders were vague about whether the size of the overall operation was being scaled back.
“I don’t think it’s a pullback,” Trump told Fox News on Tuesday. “It’s a little bit of a change.”
Former President Bill Clinton released the following statement about what’s happening in Minneapolis and other places, as Trump unleashes the armed, masked ICE agents to arrest, harass, and murder our fellow citizens in pursuit of undocumented immigrants .
Well said. Where are other retired Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Senators?
Please speak up, Former Presidents Bush and Obama.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Yesterday, December 7, was the 84th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said it was a day that will live in infamy. After the passage of so much time, Heather Cox Richardson sees that Pearl Harbor shines a light on our current political morass.
On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.
In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.
Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America, and on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.
The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.
Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.
The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were Black American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Indigenous Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.
The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.
Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?
Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.
But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.
President Donald J. Trump and his cronies have abandoned the principles of democracy and openly embraced the hierarchical society the U.S. fought against in World War II. They have fired women, Black Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans from positions in the government and the military and erased them from official histories. They have seized, incarcerated and deported immigrants— or rendered them to third countries to be tortured— and have sent federal agents and federal troops into Democratic-led cities to terrorize the people living there.
They have traded the rule of law for the rule of Trump, weaponizing the Department of Justice against those they perceive as enemies, pardoning loyalists convicted of crimes, and now, executing those they declare are members of drug cartels without evidence, charges, or trials. They have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations.
Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?
When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.
We hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the radical right will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.
Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.
Diane Ravitch's blog 