VIDEO OF THE DAY: Pam Bondi makes shocking announcement amid ICE shooting
In one of the most horrifying acts by an administration who commits nothing but them, Attorney General Pam Bondi has issued an ultimatum to Minnesota: hand over your voter rolls to the Trump administration or the ICE rampage continues. “Allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Fulfilling this common sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law,” writes Bondi. Brian Tyler Cohen and legal expert Marc Elias break down the terrifying implications of this brazen effort to subvert our democracy and seize control of voter infrastructure.
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Trump and ICE are driving the country off a cliff
Ben Burgis, Jacobin: "Alex Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse at a Veterans’ Affairs hospital in Minneapolis. One of his colleagues there told the New York Times that the 'default look on his face was a smile.' Now he’s dead at the age of thirty-seven — the same age as Renee Good, who was murdered a little over two weeks earlier in the same city. Both were American citizens. Both were shot to death by federal agents in the streets of Minneapolis while they were unarmed. Subsequent statements by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE and the Border Patrol, have emphasized that Pretti had a gun on him at the beginning of the altercation.
But Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara has said that Pretti, who had no criminal record, had a valid permit to carry the gun. And the video evidence is decisive. He never tried to pull it, and it had already been confiscated before they killed him. He was holding neither a gun nor a protest sign but a phone. He was there as a legal observer, using his phone to record what the agents were doing and deter them from committing abuses — a form of civic engagement that’s entirely legal under the First Amendment. The agents only found the gun after he’d been knocked to the ground and brutalized for the crime of trying to help a woman who’d been knocked over and pepper-sprayed near him moments before.
It’s worth emphasizing that we know all this because the murder occurred on a crowded street in broad daylight, filmed by multiple people.
The DHS’s statement, never quite claiming he had drawn the gun but vaguely gesturing at a 'violent' struggle and the officer who shot him supposedly fearing for 'his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers,' is unlikely to be believed by anyone who watched any of those videos. Indeed, one of the most striking parts of all this is that these particular lies don’t exactly seem to be intended to be believed. Instead, it feels like the point is just to give the hardcore supporters of the current administration something to hang their hat on when a 'libtard' tries to give them a hard time about this. Better to say something anyone with access to the internet can see for themselves isn’t true than to be left with nothing to say at all. But this feels like a few steps from simply bragging about killing Pretti for being an annoying, disobedient thorn in the agents’ side. In any normal administration, the public relations catastrophe following Good’s murder would have led to some attempt to draw back and do damage control. The Trump administration had the opposite reaction, seemingly wanting to push the spiral of escalation further and further down the road to chaos.
Thus far, the restraint and unity shown by the overwhelming majority of the protesters in Minneapolis is remarkable. There have been mass demonstrations, an impromptu strike called by local organized labor, and an abundance of people filming ICE and the Border Patrol and letting them know that they aren’t welcome and that no one plans to make it easy for them to drag away their friends and neighbors. But there seems to be a widespread understanding that giving them an excuse for further mayhem would be a very bad idea. Even so, the more lawless and violent the behavior of masked and therefore totally unaccountable ICE agents become, and the more the Trump administration pours gasoline on the fire by smearing anyone and everyone they victimize as a “terrorist,” the more likely it is that some misguided individuals will meet violence with violence.
What comes next is anyone’s guess. Trump is already talking about the Insurrection Act. If we’ve learned anything from recent weeks, when the Trump administration has done everything from brazenly kidnapping a foreign head of state (and openly saying that they did it in part in order to gain control of his country’s oil) to threatening to seize territory from a NATO ally by force to calling a murdered mother a 'domestic terrorist,' it should be the simple and frightening truth that no one knows what limits they are or aren’t willing to go to. We know that the Trump administration is driving the country to the edge of a cliff. We know that they’ve pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor of the car. We don’t know what’s waiting for us at the bottom of the cliff. But there’s every chance we’re going to find out."
Union ironworker takes on Big Lie-pushing MAGA radical in battle for critical House seat
Brian Poindexter for Congress: Brian Poindexter is a union worker and city councilman who has worked hard his entire life in machine shops, on construction sites, driving trucks, and serving my neighbors. He’s the perfect candidate to win over the working-class voters of Ohio’s 7th district, which is currently represented by a Republican who has spent his entire political career being handed jobs by Donald Trump — and racking up a slew of nasty allegations, including domestic violence. Will you chip in to help jump-start Brian’s campaign and help Democrats pick up this vital House seat?
This year’s first big stupid idea: “retrain ICE”
Jason Linkins, The New Republic: "One of the consequences of covering American politics is that it forces you to have frequent close encounters with some of the dumbest people alive and their terrible ideas. Cutting taxes on wealthy people will eventually enrich the middle class. Invading and occupying Iraq will spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Michael Bloomberg should be president. The list goes on. Anyway, here’s the latest, greatest hit from the terminally stupid: We can fix ICE by retraining them.
The idea that a right-wing goon squad can somehow be reformed through the magic of Powerpoint presentations is squarely rooted in the fear among the Beltway-brained that proposing to abolish this rogue agency is going to cost Democrats a winnable election. The Searchlight Institute, the Beltway consultant class’s latest rebrand of gelatinous centrism, recently released a sternly worded memo tsk-tsking everyone who believes that it was a mistake to resurrect the Stasi and turn it loose to terrorize liberal cities. 'Let’s be clear that advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States—a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue,' the memo bleated. 'Instead, Democrats should embrace an aggressive plan to rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.'
To have a real-world understanding of what ICE has been doing makes calls for its reeducation land in the ears with a cloddish thud. These are marauding, fascist thugs who enjoy terrorizing people. They’re in their dream job. They raid churches. They abduct people. They abduct children. They use children to abduct other people. They shot a woman in the face. They tear-gassed a car of children. They grabbed an elderly man from his house and dragged him outside in his underwear in the freezing cold simply because he wasn’t white. They detained a 5-year-old, used him to bait his parents, and then took them all away. ICE misrule isn’t happening because someone skipped a meeting during their onboarding process. This is a deeply ingrained and incurable corruption—not that anyone at ICE wants to be 'cured.' ICE agents already receive comprehensive training, which they comprehensively ignore.
Retraining ICE isn’t just a stupid idea from an intellectual or moral perspective. It’s also really bad politics. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that for the first time, a bare majority of respondents—46 to 43 percent—were in favor of abolishing ICE. But what’s more important, from the perspective of Democrats, is that 80 percent of Democrats were in favor of it. That puts 'Reform ICE' at the business end of an electoral shellacking. The wine moms Democrats need to win anywhere aren’t having it with going soft on Trump’s hoodlums. If you bring a timid, half-measure response on ICE to the people whose bonds to one another have been forged in the fires of protecting their own neighbors from state violence, I promise: You will eat no small amount of shit."
Demolishing lies about Somali Americans
Richard Michael Solomon, Current Affairs: "The conservative Manhattan Institute recently claimed that Somali Americans are siphoning 'billions of taxpayer dollars' to a militant Islamist organization in Somalia called Al-Shabaab. The context for the allegation, made by the Institute’s City Journal, is a scandal implicating several dozen people from Minnesota, mostly of Somali descent, who defrauded the government through an autism service, housing program, and pandemic-era NGO called Feeding Our Future. The Trump Administration used these allegations to end Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, forcing hundreds of people to soon leave the country or face deportation. President Donald Trump first announced the plan shortly after the City Journal story went viral—blustering on Truth Social that 'Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!'
The fraud part of the scandal is real and not particularly new. Minnesota and FBI investigators have pursued the cases for years, including against Aimee Bock, the white woman who led Feeding Our Future. What City Journal authors Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe do is ignore the scheme’s white ringleader and other white suspects. They vastly inflate the numbers, blame Somali culture, and demand Somalis be deported en masse. Their evidence, too, for the Al-Shabaab connection is remarkably thin; key sources within the story itself have since called it 'bullshit.' Given Rufo’s track record (he once offered a $5,000 bounty for 'proof' that Haitian Americans in Ohio were skinning cats for meat), his rumor-based reporting is not trustworthy. But facts are no obstacle to Rufo’s imagination: in his words, 'Somalis in Minneapolis are stealing billions from American taxpayers, loading bags of cash onto commercial flights, and funding terrorism back in Mogadishu.'
Right-wing media has used the story to reinforce an emergent narrative that Somali Americans 1) are criminals, 2) drain welfare, and 3) don’t assimilate. Public attention has inspired imitators, including a widely-discredited video by YouTuber Nick Shirley on Minnesota daycares. Deadly ICE raids on Minneapolis have followed. A closer look at the allegations, however, reveals how detached they are from reality.
Rufo and his colleagues are charlatans who incite hatred and division, but their lies are not sophisticated. They rely instead on cheap rhetorical tricks and statistical distortions. Agitators like Nick Shirley similarly borrow from the visual language of investigative journalism, but actually just manipulate their viewers with cheap editing. The truth is that Somali Muslims in Minnesota are a law-abiding community with the same or lower crime rates than other Americans. Their rates of self-sufficiency are high, and measures of assimilation are also high relative to the historic record. So why the bigotry? The lies serve to distract attention from bigger fraudsters and divide working people from confronting those with real power over their lives."
Food for thought
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