by liberal japonicus
This is the second post from this podcast by Hasan Minaj, with the transcript for the podcast linked here. Jacob Soboroff’s second book is Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster and he recounts a very strange anecdote that has been knocking around in my head.
Minaj pulls out these details from the book, and this story is that Soboroff is originally from the Palisades, which was ground zero for the LA wildfires. He and his family had moved away, but when the fires started, he immediately went there to report and this LATimes article talks about it.
He has a lot of interesting anecdotes and points, but the one that I can’t shake is this. The Palisades is next to Santa Monica, which is Stephen Miller’s hometown and while he is reporting on the fires, he gets contacted by Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s wife, asking him to check on the house of her in-laws, Stephen Miller’s parents, which is in the Palisades. Soboroff and Katie Miller were not in any way friends and in fact, Katie Miller was a flak for Homeland Security and after Soboroff’s reporting on family separation, they were on the outs. So Soboroff was pretty surprised that Katie Miller reached out to him.
He goes to the parent’s home and it has been destroyed and he let her know that. I’ll let Soboroff take it from here.
And like many friends of mine, she asked, can I go check on their house to see that I was the only person that she knew that was there? And she asked me to go look. And I did. And their house burned down and I let her know. And frankly, I felt awful for them and devastated and sad. And I thought, in a way, maybe this is going to be that olive branch that allows us to see these types of disasters and have a shared sense of humanity and to feel like we were in this together. But she had just been appointed to work for Elon Musk at Doge. And within, I think hours, both Donald Trump and Elon Musk were tweeting misinformation and disinformation about the fires. And it did the opposite of have a thawing effect with Katie. And in fact, in the long run, when it was an arsonist that was announced to have started the fire that became the Palisades fire, you know, she’s tweeting cheekily about, oh, I thought it was climate change. It didn’t do anything for all of us to see things in a common way.
They go on to talk about it more, but to me, this sounds like textbook sociopathy. The Manual of Mental Disorders lists it as Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), which is a “pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others” and this sounds exactly right, except for the fact that the anti- in antisocial has a hard time when you have whatever percentage you have who are willing to cheer Orange Douche on. Both Adorno and Bauman talked about the notion of negative ethics, where good and bad were swapped. When I read the anecdote of Katie Miller and it just seemed to be of a piece.
Seamus Healey wrote The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the end has often been quoted, but this story reminds me of the beginning:
Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.
People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
And most recently, the people who engaged in a deliberate scheme to overturn a lawful election, all on the right. And I am talking not just about the J6 rioters, although they most certainly are included.
I note this also. The number of examples of actual election fraud (voting dead peoples mail in ballots, etc.) is microscopic. BUT, the vast majority of those have been people on the right….
” The number of examples of actual election fraud (voting dead peoples mail in ballots, etc.) is microscopic. BUT, the vast majority of those have been people on the right….”
Note the distinction between “voter fraud” (beloved of RWNJ screamers) is something that individual voters would do, while “election fraud” is something much more systematic, typically by election officials at some level.
But yes, I’ve noticed that “voter fraud” seems to be something done by people on the right, for which they typically get an extremely mild ‘slap on the wrist’.
IMO, such election-related crimes are the ONE case where “loss of franchise” (temporary or permanent) is completely appropriate. It’s not as harsh as jail time, nor even as fines.
If they repeat offend? Yeah, jail time. CLEARLY unteachable.
Bruce Springstein’s The Streets of Minneapolis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKSoxG1K7w
And here, for anybody interested, are the two conservatives I have been speaking about (Frum and Brooks) talking about the current political situation, and (oh so politely) arguing about what should be done when (if) it’s over. Interestingly, I don’t see either of them taking the bc line. There is a transcript:
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/01/david-frum-show-david-brooks-neocons-democratic-society/685787/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCWT_-SXzv123sF8bQgX3NY8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I can’t now remember what subject prompted lj to suggest I post a column by Jamelle Bouie, but this is from today’s NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/opinion/minneapolis-ice-trump-gettysburg.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IFA.E1zv.ZSYzCWJWEKa_&smid=url-share
His concluding para:
ICE and C.B.P. still roam the streets, and Trump’s authoritarian aspirations have not dimmed. But surveying the wreckage of Operation Metro Surge — of this reactionary administration’s crushing defeat at the hands of another band of tenacious Northerners — it does look to me like MAGA’s Gettysburg.
FHLTGE
it does look to me like MAGA’s Gettysburg.
MAGA being, quite properly, assigned to role of the Confederates in this reprise.
Here’s hoping he’s correct.
Note the distinction between “voter fraud” (beloved of RWNJ screamers) is something that individual voters would do, while “election fraud” is something much more systematic, typically by election officials at some level.
This. Old school absentee mail ballots used to be quite susceptible to this. Probably the most common cases in the historical record are elections for sheriff in rural counties in southern states, where the county recorder sat down after the rest of the workers went home and manufactured enough false absentee ballots that her — and for some reason the recorders were mostly women — friend won the race for sheriff. Also the old big city political machines, typified by Chicago. As a friend from there described it, “Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get to vote.”
I always hammer on this next point. When academic experts rate current state election systems for security, accuracy, and ease of use, the top positions on the list are dominated by western vote-by-mail states. The reason they win on security is because contemporary vote-by-mail systems include major back-office auditing that makes fraud by election officials very difficult.
Any time somebody starts on about election fraud, that tells me that they have never been a poll worker. Or even an observer at the polls.
Every step of the way, from when the polls open to when the ballots are at the county elections office for counting, everything is dual custody. Meaning no one person is in a position to mess with the ballots. The ledger of who voted (from which you get the number who voted) is entirely separate from the ballots themselves, so if you want to add ballots in, you have to hack that, too. And the in-person ballots are also kept for audit or recount purposes. The only way to cheat requires a horde of people to be in on it. And all manage not to brag about it afterwards.
The number of glitches is microscopic. In 2020, a recount in Arizons (admittedly by a gang of untrained incompetents) only found a couple of hundred errors out of the whole state. (And, to their distress and despite their best efforts, the change favored the other guy, not the one on whose behalf the recount was demanded. Oops.)
When you have a pet theory, it’s not helpful to recognize empiricism when it contradicts that pet theory. When you oppose a policy, you must ignore the examples of that policy’s successful implementation, not matter how numerous. That is the law.
In 2020, a recount in Arizons (admittedly by a gang of untrained incompetents) only found a couple of hundred errors out of the whole state.
IIRC, the differences all involved ballots that the machines had rejected as unreadable and a human had to interpret “voter intent”.
In the category of “just give up, already”, the FBI arrived in Fulton County, GA this week with a warrant and seized all of the ballots from the 2020 election there.
Chiming in briefly to apologize, again, for the combative tone of my recent comments. In particular, in my responses to bc, whose participation here I appreciate and value.
This stuff is getting inside my head. Sorry about that.
To follow up on Michael’s comment about the FBI seizure of voting records from 2020: the man simply cannot give it up. He cannot accept losing. So they will undoubtedly attempt to find heretofore undiscovered “anomalies”.
If “discovered”, they will be bullshit, and I’m not sure what the point is, other than to further fluff his highness.
But here we go, again.
Three years to go.
Why bother to discover “anomalies”? So much easier, once you have control of the ballots, to just trash some and add others. Then turn the “improved” collection over to some useful idiots for a recount.
Purpose: Creating precedents. If His Orangeness can seize ballots now and the courts do not stop him, he will be able to do what he unsuccessfully already tried: seizing ballots on election day.
Red states will try it in any case but then it will formally be in-state and thus not per se unconstitutional (just like gerrymandering and disenfranchising). Let’s see whether or how SCOTUS will react. They tend to be rather jealously guarding their stated priviliege that it is THEIR not the executive’s right to decide elections against the will of the voters.
IMO, in the interests of mental health we all need somewhere to vent other than at our nearest and dearest. The world for people in our culture (for a wide definition of culture) is undergoing a prolonged and scary trauma, and bottling up our anxiety and anger doesn’t do us any good. Particularly, as russell says, because we still have (at least) another three years to go.
I’m kind of amused by the idea that russell’s tone is combative when I think back to the old days when regulars like Phil and Seb would go at each other hard and regularly. It read like parody sometimes because of the creativity with which they insulted each other. I would literally LOL reading their back and forth.
That’s just one example from a time when things weren’t as bad as they are now. I do wonder if things have gotten so bad more recently that those guys would be agreeing with each other.
Fulton Co is not happy about the seizure of the ballots.
hopefully a judge will slap TrumpCo hard enough to leave a mark.
russell: I appreciate your response. Sorry for my delayed response (day job). I find myself aligned with your manifesto. Thanks for sharing.
I understood “freaks” to refer to the rank and file, not their leaders. I see I was wrong. I shouldn’t assume. I understand calling political figures freaks, simply because they are public targets. They signed up for it.
My view on ICE is tempered by what ICE is dealing with in the streets.
I find the organized and calculated obstruction tactics coupled with the apparent involvement of socialist organizations and other far left groups (and maybe even local politicians) troubling because it tends to indicate there is much more going on here than opposition to immigration policy. The violence from the “protestors” is intended, IMO, to provoke. Yes, ICE shouldn’t take the bait and they sometimes do and that is a problem. I see the “protests” at least in part a continuation of the Antifa-led protests in 2020 that really weren’t much about George Floyd after the first several days. I don’t share your view on the balance of violence in the past years, and curious why you see it that way.
Tony P.: I have issues with the 4th Amendment violations, quotas, etc. The shootings are tragic. The organized obstruction and doxxing makes a dangerous job that much harder. That’s why I don’t see things as black and white. I have no problem with protest. This is beyond protest for the most part.
How to improve? I’d make body cameras and badge numbers mandatory for accountability purposes for starters. There are some situations where going undercover or safety mandate something else, but make it the exception. And more de-escalation training. My overall impression is that what I see appears less professional in a lot of situations than what I see with well-trained police forces, but I’m seeing it through the lens of protestors actively obstructing. ICE’s mission isn’t really crowd control (and it shows). Contrast that with the Maple Grove PD’s response when the rioters went after Greg Bovino’s hotel. But note how many officers it took to control those protestors.
I would also encourage local cooperation, something that has been actively discouraged by Walz and Frey. St. Paul Police Fed. Pres. Mark Ross called for local cooperation, even claiming it would have prevented the shooting deaths: https://nypost.com/2026/01/28/us-news/police-union-head-slams-minn-as-gov-walz-agrees-to-have-top-cop-work-with-border-czar/
hopefully a judge will slap TrumpCo hard enough to leave a mark.
Which judge looks to be an interesting question. So far as I can tell, the warrant was signed by a district court judge in Missouri. The FBI has removed the materials to somewhere unspecified in Virginia. Local FBI put up crime scene tape and excluded the Fulton County officials, so no one is sure exactly what was taken.
> The violence from the “protestors” is intended, IMO, to provoke.
sure. as is ICE’s presence. this is a political issue.
Trump and the whole GOP would absolutely love it if an ICE trooper was hurt. it would fit their “violent left” narrative and they would run the footage 24/7.
but, simple question: residents protesting or the amateur-hour thugs from ICE : who’s city is it? well, ICE claims it’s “their fucking city”. seems like one side has it all wrong.
I totally agree with bc that body cameras and visible badges with numbers ought to be mandatory. As it stands, there’s no reliable way to tell whether a particular individual or group is really ICE, or if they are just street thugs taking advantage of the chaos. (Personally, I’d characterize what I’ve seen of today’s ICE agents as thugs. Untrained ones. But that’s a separate discussion.)
Likewise I agree that having the local police involved would be good. Pity ICE seems unwilling to let that happen. Perhaps it would impact their photo ops.
I’ve not seen the violent opposition and interference that bc mentions. From what I can see, the protesters are doing little more than yell, blow whistles, and photograph what is happening. It may be noteworthy the this last seems to be what gets the ICE people most upset. One could almost believe they have something to hide.
I’ve been around situations where protests devolved into violence and riots. (Decades ago, but I remember.). Nothing I’ve seen in the last year resembles that.
it tends to indicate there is much more going on here than opposition to immigration policy
The ICE presence seems to me to be very little to do with “immigration policy”, given the seizing and detention of such an amazing number of US citizens, or people otherwise legally engaged in the system, not to mention the astonishing paucity of criminal records or convictions despite the rhetoric about “criminal illegal immigrants”.
bc, do you think it is acceptable for ICE to base their actions on the colour of people’s skin, or their accents? And do you think that the number of people on the streets, protecting their neighbours and otherwise monitoring and recording what is happening, demonstrates an “apparent involvement of socialist organizations and other far left groups”? Or do you think that perhaps this might be like the White House’s constant reference to “radical left lunatics” to describe anyone who disagrees with their actions? And what is your view, given the vexed question of States’ rights, of the fact that the states in question have objected to the deployment, and are pretty much all blue states? Does this not raise a question in your mind about whether the issue is indeed “immigration policy”, or perhaps something else?
“who’s”
ahh. damn you, homophones.
It’s interesting that under the Obama administration there were so many deportations – decried by many on the left, mind you – but without ICE roaming the streets grabbing people without cause and without the number of mass protests we’ve been seeing not just in Minneapolis but in cities all over the country. I don’t recall citizens being detained regularly (or being executed).
Maybe it’s the tactics and the hiring of 10K agents in an extremely short amount of time. Maybe it’s the militarization of the agents who appear to be going to war on US soil and are exceedingly aggressive and hostile.
George Floyd protests happen all over the country in large cities and small towns. Millions of people participated. A vanishingly small number of them were affiliated with Antifa. Yes, people rioted, looted, and vandalized – far, far fewer than than those who protested peacefully.
But why Minneapolis of all places for this swarm?
I would just observe that one of the reasons a dogpile develops is related to simple population mechanics. If you have more representatives of one side than the other, when a hot button topic emerges and you have the imbalance, the flood of questions should be seen as reflecting that rather than some flaw in the majority’s thinking.
While I’d like to draw out bc on some of his views, I don’t think it would be very useful, in large part because of these mechanics.
The only observation I would make is that it seems clear to me that DHS chose Minneapolis for this push rather than Texas or Florida (Operation Metro Surge) as another example of population mechanics. They wanted to create a chilling effect rather than actually address the problem they claimed they were solving.
One thing that the right consistently misconstrues/misrepresents about the left is the nature of the relationship between antifa, socialist activists, and the protesters as a whole.
Antifa, as much as they exist as organized groups, are small cells that don’t coordinate with anyone else. They don’t want contact. They are afraid that any contact and coordination will lead to fed infiltration. They are a miniscule presence within these protests, and they show up uninvited.
The only real relationship between the socialist activists and the majority of the protesters comes through the socialist groups offering tactical training for the protesters – all the whistles and communication things – as an open source information practice. They aren’t leading things in the sense of providing ideology and direction, they are sharing their practical experience about how, safely and effectively, to stand up to militarized federal agents who are violating the constitution.
The vast majority of the people engaging in the training are not activists or socialists, and have no interest in the ideology of the people who put together the training. All they want to know is how to prevent their neighbors from being snatched and sent to a government oubliette or dumped in a foreign country with no due process. Oh, and how to deal with the indiscriminate use of teargas and CS against them and their neighbors, and how to render aid to people being shot with less lethal rounds and beaten with batons – often in direct violation of the training and use of force guidelines.
Finally, consider this: Obama removed a whole lot of people during his presidency and went after traffickers and criminals with low-intensity, targeted operations even in sanctuary cities. No one was showing up to disrupt that because under Obama the agents were operating within normal enforcement protocols. Socialist activists were around and protesting during his time in office too (I know a surprising number through my work with my union and heard about a lot of this directly from them).
Those Minnesotans are not a bunch of radical socialists attempting to overthrow federal order, they are scared and angry midwesterners who are pissed off because the President has sent in masked, militarized enforcers to grab their neighbors without probable cause or due process. They just want things to go back to the way they were, and for ICE and CBP to go back to low-intensity work against actual threats to public safety.
hairshirthedonist and I are clearly receiving the same instructions from the Red Brigade for our comments. Slow down, bro. I’ll never get that toaster oven if you keep beating me to the quota.
I believe it’s a matter of public record.
Per the NIJ (National Institute of Justice, a division of the DOJ):
Not that it’s a contest, but the imbalance is striking.
That report, BTW, was removed from the DOJ website after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Make of that what you will.
Here’s an archive of it:
https://www.scribd.com/document/918595498/Wayback-Machine-NIJ-Issue-285-44
The removal is discussed here:
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118612/documents/HHRG-119-JU00-20250917-SD057-U57.pdf
And this from PBS, assuming you will consider them a reliable source:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/right-wing-extremist-violence-is-more-frequent-and-deadly-than-left-wing-violence-data-shows
From the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the historical pattern changed in 2025, with left-wing incidents outnumbering right-wing for the first time in recent memory. If you look at the numbers cited, that is mostly due to the dramatically lower number of right-wing incidents last year. Compared to previous years, the left-wing attacks grew from something like 2 to 5, Right wing attacks dropped from something like 30 to 1, where that 1 was the assassination and attempted assassination of MN elected officials.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states
Basically, the predominance of the right wing in US political violence is a pretty well established fact.
Unless I’m mistaken, “obstruction” in Minneapolis has consisted of using vehicles to get in the way of ICE/CBP vehicles, and making noise to alert people of the presence of ICE/CBP. That arguably interferes with the ability of the federal agents to move easily around Minneapolis and to capture people by surprise.
They also make a lot of noise outside of hotels where ICE/CBP people are staying, which I’m sure sucks for them.
They’ve also thrown snowballs at ICE/CBP agents.
There are some cases of throwing fireworks at them, which strikes me as an incredibly stupid exercise in poking the bear.
In general, they are doing their best to make the federal agents feel as unwelcome as they possibly can, without rising to physical violence toward them.
You are correct, there is much more going on than opposition to immigration policy. It is opposition to heavily armed and armored federal agents arriving in numbers that are multiples of civilian public safety officers, grabbing people off the street, from their cars, and from their homes on the flimsiest pretexts (skin color, accent) and assaulting people who are legally following and/or filming them as they go about their work.
None of what ICE and CBP are doing in Minneapolis and elsewhere is necessary for them to carry out their actual duty, which is to execute removal orders, whether judicial or of their own authoring. None of it.
The people they are grabbing are generally unarmed and pose no threat to anyone. They are line cooks, teachers, daycare providers, landscaping and trade laborers, etc. Most of the people – by far – who are being grabbed have no criminal history whatsoever.
The level of violence that ICE and CBP are bringing into American cities is insane, and utterly unnecessary for the work they are supposed to be doing.
Which makes me, in turn, think there is much more going on here than immigration policiy.
I think a long comment of mine is out there in the ether somewhere…
[ed. plucked from the bin and posted!]
Well well, talking of undesirable criminals:
The Trump administration pledged to deport violent criminals—but instead, some of them have been on the payrolls of the federal government’s most aggressive agencies.
ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection employed at least 30 people with sexual and violent criminal histories in recent years, according to a report published Monday by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance with research from the Pacific Antifascist Collective.
At least 20 of those individuals committed offenses with underage victims, according to the report.
The 30 listed individuals have been charged with a wide litany of crimes, including gunpoint sexual assault, child sex trafficking, aggravated assault, robbery, rape, torture, kidnapping, sexual abuse of a minor, and possession and production of child sexual abuse materials.
Their transgressions occurred between 2015 and 2025, with the bulk of abuse happening within the last two years.
https://newrepublic.com/post/205719/ice-cbp-agents-alleged-sex-crimes-children
>Which makes me, in turn, think there is much more going on here than immigration policiy.
a large part of it is an attempt to display dominance. when Bovino shouts, and the ICE troops reply “It’s our fucking city”, they make that perfectly clear. they are fulfilling Trump’s promise to take the fight directly to the left, to take back the ‘sanctuary cities’, to show us who the real boss is.
they’re proudly going to battle against the mythological ‘left’ that they’ve created for themselves, and they want everyone to see them do it.
I’m secretly trying to help you cut down on the Hot Pockets, man. You’re a little out of control. You’ll thank me later.