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The Hartmann Report: Are We Living in a Police State Yet?

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2026 //
7

Thom Hartmann reflects on the question: are we living in a police state yet?

Read his article and judge for yourself.

He wrote:

Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century. 

He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.

By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”

ICE says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement. 

The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.” 

The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”

The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.

Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”

I lived in Germany for years, working with Salem International, some of that time in the little village of Höchheim hard up against the East German border, where the guard towers and the death strip were part of the landscape you saw on your way to buy bread. 

I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1986 and felt what a mature police state does to ordinary people: the lowered voices indoors, the glance over the shoulder before anybody said anything real. (If you’ve never experienced that world, watch the brilliant film The Lives of Others; it captures the East German surveillance state better than anything else on film.)

My spiritual mentor and employer in Germany, Gottfried Müller, had been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army who renounced Nazism, was captured by the British in Iran, and spent most of the war in prison; he devoted the rest of his life to peace work. 

And my dear old friend Armin Lehmann, who was the teenage Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker who delivered the news to Hitler that the war was lost (I still have a picture of him with Hitler, that’s on the cover of his book), spent his last decades in America as a peace activist. 

Both men told me essentially the same story about how it began. It started getting scary, they noted, when the regime began to explicitly come after verbotener Gedanke, “forbidden thought.” For example, the radio stations, they said, used to encourage ordinary Germans to call in — to the shows and to the police — and “out” their neighbors who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the regime. Informing became one of the highest expressions of patriotism.

The Germans even have a word for the process by which their entire society was brought into line during 1933 and 1934: as Timothy Snyder notes, it’s Gleichschaltung, a coordination, a synchronization. 

Germany didn’t become a police state in a day, and there was never an announcement.

There was just a series of Fridays, each one slightly worse than the last, until one day the question, “Are we in a police state?” had become dangerous to ask out loud.

So instead of waiting for an announcement that’s never coming, let’s do what Herr Müller would have done and run through the inventory necessary to create a fascist police state:

— A police state is a nation where the police answer to the leader rather than to the law, and where nobody outside the leader’s circle is permitted to hold them accountable. It’s a nation where they can arrest, beat, torture, imprison, and even kill with both anonymity and impunity.

In January, ICE officer Jonathan Ross reportedly shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, through the window of her car in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on a public street days later. Within hours, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling both dead Americans “domestic terrorists,” a slander she refused six times under oath to retract. 

Murder is a state crime, and in America state investigators have always worked police shootings alongside the feds. Not this time. The FBI agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the morning Good was killed, then reversed itself the same day after Trump declared Minnesota officials “crooked.” 

Federal agents physically blocked state investigators holding a valid judicial warrant from the scene of the Pretti shooting. Federal prosecutors who wanted to pursue the Good case as a civil rights matter were pressured until they resigned. Today, Good’s car sits shrink-wrapped and unexamined in an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and the state has been forced to sue the federal government just to learn the names of the agents who killed two of its citizens. 

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called the categorical withholding of all evidence “unprecedented in American history.” Now the same machinery has closed around the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. It won’t be the last time.

— A police state imprisons its dissidents, and it makes the sentences spectacular so everyone else gets the message.

On June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced eight members of a local book club who held a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center to a combined 450 years in prison, a figure the Justice Department bragged about in its own press release. Benjamin Song, who fired at an officer after the officer drew his weapon on the crowd, got 100 years. 

Maricela Rueda, a doula and mother who was acquitted by the jury of every violent count against her, got 70 years in prison. Five others who were likewise acquitted of the attempted murder and firearms charges got 50 years apiece, because prosecutors persuaded the jury that wearing black and using the Signal messaging app constituted “material support for terrorism.” 

And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a Denton teacher and poet who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist political zines at his wife’s request, literature the prosecutors admitted was protected by the First Amendment. 

For comparison, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6th, and Trump pardoned him anyway. In this America, leading an armed attempt to overthrow the government earns you a pardon, while a book club that protests ICE earns its members what amounts to life without parole.

— A police state criminalizes thought itself, as well as any expression of or action on that thought, no matter how “otherwise legal” it may be.

Last September, Trump signed NSPM-7, a national security directive that names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “indicators of domestic terrorism” and calls anti-fascism the “organizing rallying cry” of domestic terrorists. Consider how many of the roughly 75 million Americans who voted against Trump it could plausibly cover. 

In December, then-AG Pam Bondi ordered every federal law enforcement agency to mine five years of data for anything “Antifa-related” by average Americans and hand it to the FBI, and directed the Bureau to publicize its domestic terrorism call-in tip line and establish a cash reward system for informants. 

The FBI has since retooled its roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces and their 4,000-plus personnel toward the American “left” and stood up a new Joint Mission Center that’s investigating the funding of anti-Trump protest movements and payment of bounties while actual crime fighting goes begging. 

When Herr Müller and Armin told me about German radio hosts urging listeners to inform on their neighbors, I thought I was hearing history, but it turns out I was hearing a forecast, and the American version pays cash.

— A police state knocks on your door in reaction to your opinions, should you dare to express them out loud or in print.

In January, a Rochester software professional named David Streever sent a three-paragraph email to then-ICE Director Todd Lyons after watching the videos of ICE killings in Minneapolis. 

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” he wrote. “You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.” 

The email contains no threat of any kind, just a prophecy about a man’s conscience, the kind of furious letter Americans have been writing to powerful officials since before there was a Constitution to protect the practice. 

Five months later, two federal agents rang his doorbell while he was in Finland with his seven-year-old daughter and handed his wife a document headed “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” When he flew home, an agent showed up at his New York City hotel, a hotel whose location his wife had never disclosed, meaning Homeland Security found him anyway. 

He’s now suing with the help of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which could, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple DC law firms, cause the Trump regime to put FIRE in their crosshairs next. 

That same week, federal agents confronted Paigelynne Gonyea while she was working the polls during New York’s primaries, over an Instagram post about the already-publicly-identified officer who killed Renee Good. Federal agents questioned this poll worker, at her polling place, during an election, about her opinion of a federal agent who killed an American citizen on live video for the world to see.

— A police state builds a security force loyal to the leader and his oligarch cronies rather than the nation.

Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post describe a new National Guard “quick reaction force” of roughly 23,500 troops across all fifty states, trained for domestic riot control, with the first units ordered ready by last January 1 and the rest by April, timed neatly to the midterms. 

Trump has claimed “unfettered authority” to deploy troops into American cities, boasting “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted,” while governors are cut out of the chain of command and Pete Hegseth has barred military personnel from even talking to Congress without approval. 

Vladimir Putin built exactly this in 2016; he called it Rosgvardiya, and its job was never national defense but regime preservation. Hitler built his version too, and it started small, as a “protection detail,” which in German is Schutsstaffel. History remembers it as the SS.

— A police state needs a compliant press, and you don’t have to nationalize the networks when you can simply arrange for a friendly morbidly rich oligarch to buy them.

Last month the Justice Department approved Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, placing CNN, CBS News, HBO, and two major studios under David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby and a Trump ally who, the Wall Street Journal reported, privately assured administration officials he’d make “sweeping changes” at CNN if he got that network, too. 

— A police state rewrites the past, because people who remember accurate history make poor subjects. As George Orwell wrote of fascism: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In March of last year Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and the sanitizing began: the National Park Service was ordered to strip signs and exhibits about slavery from national parks, including “The Scourged Back,” the famous photograph of the whip-scarred back of a man named Peter who escaped enslavement in Louisiana, and materials about John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. 

In Philadelphia, the administration went to court to replace the interpretive panels at the President’s House telling the story of the nine human beings George Washington enslaved there. 

Trump himself complained that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” because its museums discussed “how bad Slavery was,” and this past weekend, on the Fourth of July no less, the White House released a report declaring that the National Museum of American History “cannot be trusted” to tell America’s story, faulting its director for, among other sins, wanting to move the museum away from an “America First mentality.” 

That’s the same slogan under which 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers rallied at Madison Square Garden in 1939 beneath swastikas and a three-story portrait of George Washington, a chapter of our history this crowd would clearly prefer you never learn. 

Herr Müller and Armin lived through the original version of this, too: within months of taking power the Nazis had burned the books, purged the universities and museums of “un-German” scholarship, and rewritten the textbooks so that German children would grow up inside a glorious past that never existed. Control what people remember and you control what they’ll accept.

— And finally, a police state controls the vote.

In January, FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voter rolls on an affidavit that omitted the state findings debunking its own claims, with then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard on scene and Trump personally on the phone with the agents. 

On Tuesday, the same day Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the Justice Department sent letters to the election chiefs of all fifty states threatening each of them individually with criminal prosecution if noncitizens are found on their rolls, giving them five days to respond, this after the department lost eleven straight court cases trying to seize those very rolls. 

Yesterday, Trump removed from office all of the members of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency created by Congress that has the power to call out and punish election fraud, illegal campaign tactics and spending, and vote-rigging when it’s committed by candidates, parties, or state or local officials. It’s now effectively shut down. 

And when senators asked, under oath, whether ICE agents would be kept away from polling places this November, both Kristi Noem and her successor and former plumber Markwayne Mullin refused to rule it out, while the White House press secretary said she “can’t guarantee” it and Steve Bannon openly muses that ICE at the airports was a “test run” for ICE at the polls.

So, are we in a police state yet?

Armin and Herr Müller taught me that we’re asking the wrong question — or at least at the wrong moment — because nobody ever wakes up one morning and notices, “Gee, I guess I’m inside a police state…”

Instead, a police state gets assembled around you, one component at a time, while officials assure you that each component is perfectly normal and even necessary to “maintain order” or, more insidiously, to “preserve freedom.” 

Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview ten “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here. 

The stories he heard are so familiar to me, as I heard the same things over and over when living in Germany in the 1980s while talking with people who’d kept their heads down through the 1930s and early 1940s just to survive day-to-day. 

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security….”

As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. …

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. … [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. …

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

In a police state, everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.

Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you inevitably realize that:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

So, here we are. The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: every component is now built, tested, and humming.

But what we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten. 

That’s precisely why they’re working so hard on the machinery of that election, and precisely why the single most subversive act available to a free American this year is to vote, and to help everyone you know do the same.

So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative to defend state authority over elections, demand independent investigations of the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and put a statutory ban on federal agents at the polls. 

Check your registration right now at vote.org, because voter roll purges are already happening in Red states. 

Sign up to be a poll worker in your county; they want poll workers intimidated, and the answer to that is more of us, not fewer. 

Program the Election Protection hotline into your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and share it. 

Support the people fighting this in court, from FIRE to the Blue state attorneys general. 

And if this piece helped you see the machinery used to construct a police state more clearly, please share it and support independent media like my Hartmann Report, because a free press that can’t be bought by billionaires is one component of democracy they haven’t figured out how to seize. 

At least not yet.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Trump

Federal Judge Drops Case Against Leaders of the Proud Boys

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2026 //
1

Trump pardoned the convicted criminals who were sentenced because of their actions on January 6, 2021. Those who committed the most serious crimes were accused of seditious conspiracy and did not receive a pardon. They are leaders of the Proud Boys, a group of right wing extremists. They were later pardoned by Todd Blanche.

CNN reported:

(CNN) — A federal judge on Friday dismissed the seditious conspiracy case against several Proud Boys members — granting a request from Trump’s Justice Department and undoing one of the Biden administration’s most celebrated victories against those who it said inspired the January 6, 2021, attack on American democracy.

US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, begrudgingly agreed to drop the case against the four members, saying he “lacks the authority to compel the Executive to pursue a prosecution, full stop.”

“President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6—whether those views are based on fact or fiction—are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them through the Executive Order,” Judge Kelly said, referring to Trump on his first day back in office signing an order commuting their sentences.

Trump’s order granted pardons to over 1,000 people convicted in the attack but left in place the convictions of the four Proud Boys members — Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.

In April, the Justice Department under Todd Blanche moved to vacate their convictions.

Dismissing the case against the Proud Boys associates erases some of the most serious convictions from the sprawling investigation of the US Capitol riot, one of the largest federal investigations in US history. Nordean, Biggs and Rehl were found guilty in 2023 of seditious conspiracy and a range of other charges. Pezzola was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy but convicted on other charges related to January 6.

The US district judge who sits in Washington, DC, said in his order that the Trump administration sought to “treat this case essentially the same way it has all January 6 cases, without regard for the seriousness of the conduct at issue or even whether the case was initiated after President Biden took office or, like this one, while President Trump was still in power.”

“The decisions to issue the Executive Order and to abandon this prosecution—even after the Government secured convictions for serious crimes relating to the attack on the Capitol on January 6—are solely the Executive’s,” Kelly continued. “No one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions.”

Rehl, one of the Proud Boys members, celebrated the dismissal in a post on X, saying, “Finally, it’s all over! January 6th can now be a thing of the past for me!”

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the group who had also been pardoned by Trump, was also quick to boast on X Friday night: “Justice is served! Proud Boys don’t lose. We win. This is our victory.”

Trump has long lambasted the January 6 prosecutions as an injustice against his supporters, even referring to those in jail as “hostages.”

The president has repeatedly called January 6, 2021, “a day of love and peace” and claimed his supporters posed “zero threat.” His comments are contradicted by hundreds of video clips of Trump supporters beating police with flagpoles, batons, wooden clubs and baseball bats; deploying stun guns and chemical sprays; and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police officers.

The judge, calling the insurrection “a perilous event,” said it was “an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government—Congress—that the Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, what President Reagan called ‘nothing less than a miracle.’”

Closing his order with a somber warning, Kelly said, “Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people—no matter their partisan preferences—will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework.”

Categories Accountability, Character, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Timothy Snyder: “On Tyranny” and Our 250th Birthday

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2026 //
3

Timothy Snyder is a leading historian of Europe. He was a professor at Yale University. Last year, he accepted a professorship and chair at the University of Toronto, because he feared that Trump was taking the U.S. into a fascist future.

He wrote this post for publication today. It includes a video, which you may watch by opening the link.

He writes:

On the Fourth of July, Americans celebrate a rebellion…

We are told today, by the men who would humiliate us, that America was founded in a spirit of innocence, that its leaders never did anything wrong, and that patriotism means insisting on our own blamelessness and assigning all evil to others. 

If we accept that offer, we not only get history wrong, but we cede our own power to change things for the better. We let the oligarchs steal our money and the fascists rob the greater treasure of our liberty.

If the republic has lasted so long, it is because it was radical in its beginnings. Insofar as it has thrived, it has been through successful and continual struggles against its own limits. 

And that has only been possible because Americans have seen those limits, because they have chosen to see the truth about their history and themselves. I was thinking of self-recognition and self-correction ten years ago when I wrote On Tyranny; today, as a small part of a celebration our two hundred and fifty years, some friends of freedom have joined me to read its lessons aloud.

On Tyranny (the book)

On Tyranny (free resources)

In On Tyranny, I wrote that “the precedent set by the founders demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny.” The truth on which this country was founded is not that people are perfect, but that they are not. They — we — are vulnerable to those who amass wealth and deploy propaganda. We can be turned against one another. Because we are imperfect, said the founders, we place our trust not in any one person — no kings, no tyrants — but in a system of laws, checks and balances, and civic representation by voting that allows us to live in the dignified understanding that power arises from consent.

The rebellion of 1776, in other words, arose from ideas of what was right — “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness“ — but no one thought that those good things could be established once and for all. The point was to create conditions under which we could see, at every moment, the problems that we tend to create ourselves, and under which we could find solutions to those problems. This included — with time, with work, with suffering, with pain borne by some more than others — the ability to see the humanity in one another, to see the horror of slavery for what it was, and to recognize that we all deserve an unhindered voice and an unhindered vote.

On the Fourth of July, 1776, nothing was completed. Something was undertaken, at great peril and risk. The founders did not think of themselves as great men whose faces should be on mountains, as demigods whose stone faces should invite us to submit to future tyrants. When, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, they pledged to one another “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” it was in a cause that they believed was right, but it was also in a cause that was difficult, even desperate.

After victory in the Revolutionary War, the founders debated how to found a republic, conscious of the failures of liberty in history. They knew from the ancient Greeks that oligarchies — rule by a few wealthy men — easily coalesce. They understood from the Roman Stoics that freedom requires a self-discipline that defied the immediate circumstances. They saw from the failed republics of their own times that wealth easily captures institutions. And so in a second moment of insight, they added a Constitution to the Declaration of Independence.

Sadly, those who lead our official celebration today represent every threat to liberty that the founders named: arbitrary rule; indifference to law; undue accumulation of wealth; corruption of the government to attain that wealth; collusion with foreign powers to attain power. And we confront a spirit that is contrary to freedom, one that tells us that we should trade a history of freedom for the smoke of fireworks and a face mirrored on a mountain. The past is being used to tell us that we have no choice but to accept the present.

As Frederick Douglass reminds us, in a great speech on another Fourth of July, “the cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.” That is, sadly, exactly what is happening today. That is the essence of today’s official commemoration. As he understood, the founders, though wrong about many things, were rebels in their own time, people who took risks. To celebrate them justly is not to wish that the past return, or to worship them as flawless, or least of all to accept the aspiring tyrant who is undoing the best of their work.

To celebrate a rebellion means not to obey in advance, not to accept any of this as normal: not the lies told about the history by the people destroying our future, not the saccharine veneration of the Constitution by people who violate it every day, not the seizure of the mantle of revolution by a band of reactionary oligarchs. It is to be as courageous as you can: to speak the truth, to protect the elections we still have, and above all to organize in a great a joyful coalition.

History is not something that our oligarchs and fascists can take, try though they will today. History is what we make. It does not come to us. We come to it — with what we know, what we say, and what we do. Nothing in history dooms us; and nothing in history saves us. In the months between now and the next elections, there will be much forecasting, speculating, and worrying. None of that matters. All that matters is organizing a great and joyful coalition.

All that matters is the work. If my words are useful, if the beautiful reading here of my words is useful, it is only because those words bring you to act.

To celebrate a rebellion is to know that, from a flawed world, we can make new things. We can hold on, we can find each other, and not just imagine but create a much better America.

PS: The lessons: (1) Do not obey in advance; (2) Defend institutions; (3) Beware the one-party state; (4) Take responsibility for the face of the world; (5) Remember professional ethics; (6) Be wary of paramilitaries; (7) Be reflective if you must be armed; (8) Stand out; (9) Be kind to our language; (10) Believe in truth; (11) Investigate; (12) Make eye contact and small talk; (13) Practice corporeal politics; (14) Establish a private life; (15) Contribute to good causes; (16) Learn from peers in other countries; (17) Listen for dangerous words; (18) Be calm when the unthinkable arrives; (19) Be a patriot; (20) Be as courageous as you can.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump, Tyranny

Federal Judges Block Trump Censorship at National Parks

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2026 //
3

Early on in Trump’s second term, he rolled out executive orders demanding censorship of exhibits and signage at museums and national parks, as well as other institutions that received federal funds. He complained that federal funds should not support anything that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion, anything that he deemed “woke,” and anything that reflected badly in our history. On Friday two federal judges ruled against his administration’s censorship of historically accurate accounts.

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signs, films and other materials at national parks across the country to comply with a directive from President Trump.

The ruling pauses enforcement of an executive order that called for removing or covering up materials at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans” or cast the United States “in a negative light.”

The judge, Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, also ordered the Park Service to restore within three weeks any exhibits that it had dismantled or altered.

The ruling provides a temporary reprieve for the plaintiffs, a coalition of advocacy groups that sued over the executive order in February, while the litigation continues to unfold.

To comply with the president’s directive, the Park Service has taken down plaques about slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, a sign about climate change at Fort Sumter in South Carolina and a sign about Indigenous people at Acadia National Park in Maine.

Another federal judge has already ordered the Park Service not to make further changes to the slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site at Independence National Historical Park, as she considers a separate lawsuit filed by Philadelphia.

Judge Kelley, who was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., sharply rebuked the Trump administration for taking down materials. “Not only does this undermine the integrity of the national parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization,” she wrote.

Judge Kelley began her 63-page ruling by listing examples of national parks that help educate visitors about difficult periods of American history, as well as contributions made by people of color, gay and transgender figures, women and other marginalized groups.

“From the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry, to the genesis of the modern L.G.B.T.Q.+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument, to the retreating ice of Glacier National Park in Alaska, the national parks preserve the multifaceted and multilayered history of our nation, including the good, the bad and the ugly,” she wrote.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that removing the materials was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. They also accused the Park Service of exceeding its legal authority.

Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Park Service, suggested that the administration would appeal the ruling.

“This ruling is from a liberal activist judge,” Ms. Martin said in an email. “The department will look at our appeal options while we celebrate U.F.C. Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House this weekend in honor of our nation’s 250th with the greatest president in the history of our country — President Donald J. Trump.”

Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, one of the advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, applauded the ruling.

“National parks are not propaganda tools, nor should they be used for partisan purposes,” Ms. Thompson said in a statement. “They exist to preserve and interpret the full American story, not just the parts that make some politicians comfortable. This ruling is an important step to help ensure that remains the case.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Extremism, Fascism, Racism, Trump

“They Walk Among Us”–Who Are They?

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2026 //
9

Masha Gessen, columnist for The New York Times, describes the Trump administration’s latest effort to dehumanize immigrants and to desensitize U.S. to Trump’s inhumane treatment of them.

Gessen writes:

“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And the scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.

“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.

This web page, which invites users to look up the number of immigrants supposedly arrested on charges of criminal activity in American cities and towns, belongs to a subgenre of Trumpian gestures that are menacing and sophomoric at the same time. “Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile,” is how Ernesto Verdeja, a genocide-prevention expert at the University of Notre Dame, described it to me. These gestures are hard to write about: The ugliness is undisguised, so what is there to say? And yet, these statements, step by preposterous step, change the world we live in.

With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

Who are they? Elon musk? Peter Thiel? Dangerous immigrants!

Categories Bigotry, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Trump

Commonweal: “Simply Murder” in International Waters

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2026 //
3

We continue to see stories about American military attacks on small boats in the Caribbean or the Pacific. We read that our planes destroyed a boat carrying drugs and drug dealers. How do we know whether the boat was carrying drugs? No evidence is presented. How do we know that the men killed were drug dealers, not fishermen? We don’t. We have to trust Pete Hegseth.

Dominic Preziosi, editor of Commonweal, says that without evidence, the attacks on small craft might be “simply murder.” Commonweal is a liberal Catholic journal that is thoughtful and definitely worth reading.

He writes:

Now that his appeals have been denied, former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte faces trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. Duterte is charged with killing alleged drug addicts and dealers during his terms as mayor of Davao City and as president from 2016 to 2022—about six thousand people, though some estimates put the total closer to thirty thousand. Duterte dispatched police death squads to carry out his campaign of extrajudicial executions, which was condemned at the time by rights groups around the world and by Catholic leaders in the Philippines, who called it a “reign of terror.” Duterte once bragged of having stabbed someone to death, and while president said he would “be happy to slaughter” three million drug addicts in the country if he could.

Donald Trump was an early admirer of Duterte. In April 2017, three months into his first term, Trump called Duterte to praise him for his murderous crackdown. “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” he enthused. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing.” Just a month before that, the U.S. State Department had criticized Duterte in its annual human-rights report, citing “apparent governmental disregard for human rights and due process.”

There are unmistakable echoes of Duterte’s “unbelievable job” in the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which was launched last September under the pretext of protecting the “American homeland” from drug cartels and so-called narcoterrorists. In fifty-eight attacks by drone and aircraft—the most recent on May 26—nearly two hundred people have been killed. In at least one instance, U.S. forces returned to kill survivors clinging to the wreckage of a vessel already struck. The U.S. military has also used aircraft painted like a civilian plane to carry out some of the attacks. Both of these would qualify as war crimes. Wary of being linked to human-rights violations, allies like Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have stopped sharing intelligence that they think could be misused by the United States to target vessels. Shortly after the attacks began, Arizona senator Mark Kelly and several other Democratic lawmakers—all of whom served in the military or intelligence community—issued a joint statement reminding service members that they do not have to obey illegal orders. 

In none of the boat strikes has the military seized drugs or produced evidence that those it killed were involved in the drug trade. Many of the victims appear to have been fishermen or other laborers. This hasn’t stopped Trump from demonizing those killed or members of his administration from releasing celebratory video clips of vessels being destroyed from high above. Vice President J. D. Vance has cracked that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world.” In defending the campaign, called “Operation Southern Spear,” Hegseth uses bizarre theocratic rhetoric, warning that “Christian nations, under God” cannot be led astray by “radical narco-communists.” 

Trump, meanwhile, spouts nonsense about the targeting program’s effectiveness. He has claimed that the strikes have prevented twenty-five thousand cocaine-related deaths in one year, though experts say that there have not been that many such deaths over the past fifty years in total. He has baselessly declared that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” since the killing spree began. He has failed (repeatedly) to distinguish between cocaine and fentanyl—which has taken a deadly toll on Americans, but which enters the country via land routes and is not transported by sea. Meanwhile, traditional interdiction—stopping suspicious vessels, confiscating drugs, arresting traffickers, all while refraining from indiscriminate killing—continues to be the most effective means of disrupting shipments. 

But in many ways that is all beside the point. The strikes are wrong on legal, ethical, and moral grounds. The administration’s contention that the United States is at war with “narcoterrorists”—an argument that builds on the spurious reasoning of the Bush administration to justify its use of torture in the “global war on terror”—doesn’t permit it to launch lethal attacks on civilians. Even John Yoo, the former Bush official who devised that reasoning, has qualms about the Trump administration’s rationale for killing people in international waters. “Never before in the country’s history has the government asserted this type [of] power,” Seton Hall law school professor Jonathan Hafetz told The Guardian. “This is a clear example of unlawful killing by the United States.” 

The Pentagon’s internal watchdog recently announced it will investigate the boat strikes, but that it will only evaluate “the joint process for targeted vessels”—how the military conducts the attacks, leaving aside the matter of their legality. While Duterte may have to answer for his crimes, no American official involved in killing civilians at sea—from Trump and Hegseth on down—will face trial in an international court, since the United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. The families of two Trinidadian fishermen killed by the United States have filed suit against the administration in a Massachusetts court, but it’s hard to know how their case will fare given that foreign nationals are not protected by federal law. Yet their charge seems beyond dispute: “[The attacks] were simply murder, ordered at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.” 

Dominic Preziosi is Commonweal’s editor.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Fascism

Trump Administration Wants All Federal Grants to Be Subject to a Loyalty Test–Loyalty to Him and His Policies

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2026 //
7

Despite appearances, the most powerful person in the Trump administration is not Donald Trump: it’s Russell Vought, Director of Office of Management and Budget. He is the brains of this administration. Vought was at the Heritage Foundation and was one of the writers of project 2025. He controls the budget and makes the decisions about which government programs should live or die. Trump has impulses, whims, and passing fancies; Vought is methodical and determined to impose his rightwing views on the entire federal government. Every federal grant, Vought believes, should align with Trump’s anti-woke, anti-DEI agenda.

Tony Romm wrote about Vought’s strategy in The New York Times:

The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump.

While the administration says that its primary goal is to safeguard taxpayer money, its proposal amounts to a major escalation in its attempt to reimagine the nation’s spending, even as Congress and the courts continue to rebuke the president for abusing such powers.

Mr. Trump’s ambitions were made clear in a roughly 400-page blueprint that was released to little fanfare on Friday. If finalized, it would require all federal grants to be approved by the president’s political appointees, who must ensure that the money would “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.”

For the agencies that issue those awards and the nonprofit groups, local governments, universities and other entities that receive the money, the Trump administration would also impose a set of highly prescriptive and political criteria.

The government could not issue grants to projects or groups that “deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,” for example. Nor could it seek to fund initiatives that “promote anti-American values,” contribute to illegal immigration, advance diversity, equity and inclusion or assist in voter registration.

The rules would further limit the ability of grant recipients to engage in some “issue advocacy.” Those that are funded would be scrutinized for their compliance with “religious liberty laws” and their “memberships and affiliations” with outside groups. And they could face the outright termination of their grants if the Trump administration someday determines that their actions are not in the “public interest.”

The restrictions echo the string of executive orders that Mr. Trump signed shortly after returning to office, many of which have been challenged or blocked in court. This time, however, the White House has pursued its restrictions by proposing a regulation, which is expected to become final after the government solicits public comment. The result could be applied far more broadly, and perhaps in ways that are harder to fight legally or undo later, according to budget experts.

The consequences could fall hardest on health and science, a field in which Mr. Trump has pursued some of the steepest cuts in his second term.

In exchange for federal assistance, researchers would face limits on the subjects that they can explore, the foreign labs with which they may collaborate and even the conferences at which they can appear. Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, the chief executive of the American Public Health Association, a professional organization and advocacy group, said the policy could “devastate innovation, science and research” in the United States.

Categories Bias, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Research

Why Did Washington Press Corps Invite Trump to Dinner?

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2026 //
16

Kevin Cullen, a columnist for The Boston Globe, lambasted the Washington press corps for inviting Trump to be their speaker. What did they expect he would say? Did they want to be insulted as “enemies of the people” and “fake news”?

Sure, it’s customary to invite the President. But did anyone expect Trump to forget about his hatred of the media? Cullen thinks they should be more careful in choosing a speaker, like picking someone who appreciates the First Amendment.

He wrote:

So many questions after a deranged, thankfully inept gunman tried to force his way into the White House Correspondents’ Association gala, where President Trump was a guest.

The biggest one being: Why was Trump there in the first place?

Like all fascists, Trump hates a free press and has done his level best to humiliate, intimidate, harm, cancel, and even prosecute journalists and news outlets. Like all authoritarians, he has tried to limit press scrutiny of himself and his administration.

So what on earth were the White House press corps thinking when it invited this guy to their annual dress-up party?

It’s like inviting your obnoxious neighbor to a family barbecue after he relieves himself in your pool.

It’s like inviting a jackal to a tea party for a bunch of cute little bunny rabbits.

Let’s roll the tape:

In 2015, when he was running for president, Trump mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital joint condition. Trump was just getting warmed up.

In 2017, after a Republican congressional candidate in Montana assaulted and body slammed a reporter for The Guardian, Trump voiced support for the attacker, saying, “He’s my kind of guy.”

In 2020, after MSNBC’s Ali Velshi was hit by a rubber bullet during a protest after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump called it a “beautiful sight.” Trump misidentified Velshi as being with CNN, but, hey, all the fake news is all the same to Trump anyway.

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in November 2024, Trump stood behind bulletproof glass and reassured his supporters he was safe, noting that anyone who tried to shoot him would have to shoot through a bunch of journalists standing in front of him, adding, “I wouldn’t mind that so much.”

More recently, the FBI, led by Kash Patel, the laughably unqualified frat bro whom Trump appointed as FBI director, launched an investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, a New York Times reporter who had the temerity to point out that the FBI is spending untold taxpayer dollars providing a SWAT team to “protect” Patel’s girlfriend, Weymouth’s own Alexis Wilkins, when she engages in risky public acts like getting her hair done.

Even more recently, after Saturday’s attack, Trump insulted CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and questioned her professionalism, calling her a “disgrace” for asking a question about the gunman’s manifesto.

If you’re noticing a pattern here, Trump really doesn’t like women journalists who question him.

I could go on — and I haven’t even mentioned the shakedowns of all the networks, and Trump using his influence so Edward R. Murrow’s storied CBS News becomes more like Fox News Lite — but you get the point. 

And yet, Trump’s press secretary stood before journalists after Saturday’s attack and claimed, with a straight face, that the leftist press and Democrats are responsible for the violent rhetoric that leads to attacks like the one at the Washington Hilton.

So what did the Washington press corps think was going to happen when it gave Trump a platform at its shindig?

Did they think he would have some Jeffersonian conversion, pronouncing that if given the choice between a government without journalism or journalism without government, he would choose the latter?

Thomas Jefferson believed strongly in the idea of a free press that would act as a watchdog against government corruption and overreach.

Trump hates a free press for those very same reasons. He doesn’t want the public to know about his cons, about him using government to enrich his family and his cronies. He can’t stand the idea of the press, or anyone, questioning his judgment, or pointing out the folly of his ways, about him starting a needless war when he ran for president claiming he would never start a needless war.

Trump resembles not Thomas Jefferson, but George Jefferson, the TV character who hated everyone and everything. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest Trump is more familiar with George Jefferson than Thomas Jefferson.

Why give Trump a platform to spew his fascist hatred of a robust, free press?….

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Hungarian Voters Oust Viktor Orban!

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2026 //
31

In what appears to be a historic turnout, voters in Hungary ousted Viktor Orban!

This is great news for NATO and bad news for Trump and Putin, who lauded Orban as the future of Europe. MAGA loved Orban, who claimed to have created an “illiberal democracy.”

Orban was a European version of Trump, censoring or closing down anyone who disagreed with him. He harmed freedom of the press, universities, and the judiciary. He stridently opposed LGBT rights.

The victory of Peter Magyar, who seems to have won more than 2/3 of the seats in Parliament, means a new day for Hungary, NATO, and the European Union.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Higher Education, International

JD Vance: Master of Hypocrisy

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2026 //
7

JD Vance traveled to Hungary last week to help right-wing leader Viktor Orban, whose Presidency is being decided today by the voters.

Orban is the hero of the MAGA cult, because he has cracked down on universities, free speech, the judiciary, and the LGBT community. Hard-right conservatives in the U.S. admire Orban because of his success in curbing people and institutions who disagree with him. He is the successful template for curbing freedom and democracy. Orban has a close relationship with Putin and has strongly opposed aid to Ukraine in repelling the Russian invasion.

Today, his party is being challenged by a new party formed by Peter Magyar, a former ally of Orban. The polls predict that Magyar’s party, Tisza, is likely to beat Orban’s party, Fidesz.

Opponents of Orban’s authoritarianism fear that he will rig the election, or like Trump, refuse to accept a loss.

JD Vance arrived last week and spent a few days boosting Orban’s campaign and endorsing his anti/democratic accomplishments. Vance did not mention the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who have left the country or the country’s low economic growth.

Vance denounced interference in the Hungarian election by EU nations and Ukraine. This foreign interference, he said, was deplorable.

Did it occur to Vance that his vigorous campaigning for Orban was precisely the foreign interference of which he accused other nations? Imagine how Americans would feel if top officials from other nations showed up in the closing days of a major election to campaign for their favored candidate? Not good, I suspect.

It’s odd to see Trump and Putin coalescing behind the same candidate. And ominous. It will be a healthy sign if Hungarian voters toss out this authoritarian bully, this champion of censorship and repression.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Vance, J.D.
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