wj - Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol’s remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn’t.
True, but the CBP agents and the BOP personnel who are there in MN are there not as part of their departments' actions, but on assignment to ICE to make up for not having enough agents to make the surge sustainable any other way.
And then there are the bounty hunters and other contractors who are doing the legwork to find enough immigrant-y looking folks to round up and keep those quotas met. Doesn't matter if they have to release them later on, all the bonuses are tied to the front end.
It's a peckerwood banquet.
2026-02-03 01:37:50
lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.
Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:
Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:
The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”
(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)
In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.
Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515
So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.
2026-02-02 17:57:36
hairshirthedonist - I’m sure the “black helicopter” types are ready to use all the guns they’ve been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.
They're not only ready to use those guns, they are willing. Who do you think has been showing up at all those ICE/CBP recruitment seminars?
And they never thought they needed to overthrow an oppressive government to protect our rights. They were only worried about their rights.
Pluralism is for chumps and failed states.
2026-01-31 01:37:19
My campus is one of the campuses that had a pro-Palestinian encampment that was taken down with a massive law enforcement action. (I was not there. I had students and colleagues on either side whose perspectives and reasons for their involvement I can sympathize with. It was a complex situation. No one actually involved on either side wanted anyone else on campus to be physically threatened or harmed.)
I'm not going to get into a big post over this because bc has enough to respond to on other lines. I merely note that the public-at-large's understanding and descriptions of what was going on on campuses bear little resemblance to what it was actually like. The media accounts read like mock epics without any of the irony.
The actual drama and foment was tiny right up to the point where the helicopters and riot police showed up in overwhelming numbers and stormed in like they were dealing with a violent mob.
2026-01-31 00:50:55
bc - That Prairieland Detention Center case is definitely worth some examination. Bondi's people claim that 19 people so far are part of a "North Texas Antifa Cell," and are making much of the five guilty pleas.
Here are two articles about the action and the people who have been charged - from The Guardian and from The New Republic:
...of the two, I find TNR's article to be better supported and more nuanced, but the Guardian has more personal details about some of the people involved that seem like they are worth consideration.
Just based on what I have read about the case, I'd say that two or three of the people involved were dangerous idiot who might have aspired to being an antifa cell. Another small number were friends who were trying to help an idiot friend who did stupid things in support of them, but who weren't part of any plot at the start, and the majority were protesters who got caught in bad circumstances and exercised poor judgment in not backing out when the idiots started talking big in the encrypted group chat.
Throw the dudes with guns in jail. Treat the vandals like vandals.
As for the rest, I'd need to see a lot more evidence of actual coordination and planning and association before I believed anything that law enforcement said about the majority of the people who showed up.
Thank the gods none of them had a sandwich, or who knows what charges might have been filed?
2026-01-29 22:50:05
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.
2026-01-29 22:46:16
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.
2026-01-27 19:18:37
bc - My point is that by defunding ICE, you do give Trump what I think (I’m doing a bit of mind reading here) you fear: that he will militarize the response.
He's already done that when he mobilized the National Guard and deployed them in LA. We've seen that line crossed before. The people protesting aren't acting on pollyanna instincts. We've seen what the response could look like.
We've also seen what they will do if funds are withheld. But the fact that withholding funding won't stop this administration doesn't mean that there is no point in doing it. The Democrats in congress have to choose if they would rather be seen as having stood up to this wave of federal violence against their communities, or if they want to be seen as resignedly accepting that this administration and their enablers in congress and the courts will not be deterred.
Sanctuary cities/counties/states are actively resisting the enforcement of federal law. Those that think the obstruction isn’t part of and the cause of much of the violence (and intentionally so) are naive IMO.
The idea that if they are defied it will provoke a more violent response, and that the response is then the defiers' fault is what you see in the family members growing up with an abuser in authority. The abuser only wants to help the family. If everyone just did what he asked then no one would get hurt. Why do you keep provoking him?
The only ways to break that cycle are to leave the abuser or to stand up, knowing that the violence will happen, but also knowing that when it does it's no one's fault but the abuser's.
The narrative has to be broken before the cycle can be broken.
Take the resistance far enough and what you end up with may not what you bargained for. Or maybe some are bargaining for that response in search of the revolution.
What revolutionaries and battered family members bargain for is a chance for some change in an unlivable situation - hostage to the threat of violence. They choose to resist knowing what is likely coming.
I've been teaching classes about war and civil unrest long enough to not have any illusions about what could happen.
2026-01-26 01:54:34
...so I guess this adds a second formula to the one that Snarki outlines. Sometimes it is the "zoom out until the particulars blur" tactic. This time it's the "tight focus to leave others off camera" tactic.
Either way, it saves face for the people who continue to facilitate this push to authoritarian illiberalism.
2026-01-26 01:38:33
GftNC - However, on the subject that you and Snarki raise of his having an “unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position”, it seems to me that the whole piece is a really scathing denunciation of Trump’s character, conduct, motivations etc etc. And given, as we all see, that the GOP as a whole has cravenly and pathetically bent the knee to him, enabled him, acceded to his power grab from Congress and been totally mealy-mouthed about his attacks on the constitution, I think it’s odd to say that he is supporting the GOP.
I'd say that he's lending cover to the GOP as a whole when he writes:
Of these four, the unraveling of Trump’s mind is the primary one, leading to all the others. Narcissists sometimes get worse with age, as their remaining inhibitions fall away. The effect is bound to be profound when the narcissist happens to be president of the United States.
When you look at the things currently being done in the US, the majority of them are in line with what the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been working to get done for a lot longer than Trump has been on the scene. This administration is not acting on the whims of a mad king, they are taking advantage of the noise and foment that Clementine Caligula provokes to advance their own agenda. Brooks' heaping of all this on He Who Slumbers head is some fine scapegoating. At the end of the day it allows him to put all the sins of the GOP on one man's head and usher him into the desert, sins forgiven after having momentarily succumbed to a fever.
But really, the institutions are okay, and the people still believe in democracy in their hearts.
But I do know that events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record many cases in which a power-mad leader careening toward tyranny suddenly regained his senses and became more moderate.
See? No one else in frame. No lackeys. No institutional agendas. No long assault on the judiciary to facilitate this takeover. No discussions of illiberal democracy and wishing for a Red Caesar. It's all one madman dragging everyone else with him.
2026-01-24 21:52:12
wj's response to Brooks's ritual performance of balance calls to mind one of the books I read early in my Ph.D. studies when I was building my Media Studies chops: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Alexander Galloway. The central idea there being that what makes the modern networked world continue to function is not deregulation, nor is it centralization - it's the informal and changeable rules that negotiate the conflicts between those two poles, which Galloway identifies as protocol.
In the US, that protocol was largely a function of what we call The Deep State. Congress makes laws. Private citizens make products. The Market exists as a fluctuating hologram of the shifting dynamics between those two. The Deep State oversees the negotiations between those two in order to steer the overall system and keep it functioning within acceptable parameters for both sides. (His digital analogy for this is the system of protocols that allowed TCP/IP to work with the DNS system to facilitate information exchange.
Galloway was, like most of the Media Studies people writing in the moment between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, a bit of a utopian technolibertarian. He did point out that the authoritarian nature of DNS
allows whole realms of the Web to be blacked out with the flip of a switch, but the belief was that those things would self-correct as protocol adjusted to keep the system moving.
We are living in the moment when protocol has been destroyed in order to prevent the system from moving to preserve the privilege of the powerful. Without the federal bureaucracy, and with the legislative branch neutered, we have only the executive and the judicial, operating top-down with no negotiation.
Anyway, thought I'd mention the book in case any of the (more) tech savvy (than me) here wanted to find it and take a look.
2026-01-22 20:11:06
The next few lines too, which I love for how they render the mess of us.
...
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.
And a part of you,
For my part is the chorus, and the chorus
Is more or less a borderline between
The you and the me and the it of it.
wj - Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol’s remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn’t.
True, but the CBP agents and the BOP personnel who are there in MN are there not as part of their departments' actions, but on assignment to ICE to make up for not having enough agents to make the surge sustainable any other way.
And then there are the bounty hunters and other contractors who are doing the legwork to find enough immigrant-y looking folks to round up and keep those quotas met. Doesn't matter if they have to release them later on, all the bonuses are tied to the front end.
It's a peckerwood banquet.
lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.
Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:
https://www.pogo.org/investigates/hundreds-of-oath-keepers-have-worked-for-dhs-leaked-list-shows
Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:
The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”
(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)
In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.
Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515
So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.
hairshirthedonist - I’m sure the “black helicopter” types are ready to use all the guns they’ve been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.
They're not only ready to use those guns, they are willing. Who do you think has been showing up at all those ICE/CBP recruitment seminars?
And they never thought they needed to overthrow an oppressive government to protect our rights. They were only worried about their rights.
Pluralism is for chumps and failed states.
My campus is one of the campuses that had a pro-Palestinian encampment that was taken down with a massive law enforcement action. (I was not there. I had students and colleagues on either side whose perspectives and reasons for their involvement I can sympathize with. It was a complex situation. No one actually involved on either side wanted anyone else on campus to be physically threatened or harmed.)
I'm not going to get into a big post over this because bc has enough to respond to on other lines. I merely note that the public-at-large's understanding and descriptions of what was going on on campuses bear little resemblance to what it was actually like. The media accounts read like mock epics without any of the irony.
The actual drama and foment was tiny right up to the point where the helicopters and riot police showed up in overwhelming numbers and stormed in like they were dealing with a violent mob.
bc - That Prairieland Detention Center case is definitely worth some examination. Bondi's people claim that 19 people so far are part of a "North Texas Antifa Cell," and are making much of the five guilty pleas.
Here are two articles about the action and the people who have been charged - from The Guardian and from The New Republic:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/texas-antifa-ice-detention-center
https://newrepublic.com/article/204190/texas-antifa-protest-case-doj-free-speech-test
...of the two, I find TNR's article to be better supported and more nuanced, but the Guardian has more personal details about some of the people involved that seem like they are worth consideration.
Just based on what I have read about the case, I'd say that two or three of the people involved were dangerous idiot who might have aspired to being an antifa cell. Another small number were friends who were trying to help an idiot friend who did stupid things in support of them, but who weren't part of any plot at the start, and the majority were protesters who got caught in bad circumstances and exercised poor judgment in not backing out when the idiots started talking big in the encrypted group chat.
Throw the dudes with guns in jail. Treat the vandals like vandals.
As for the rest, I'd need to see a lot more evidence of actual coordination and planning and association before I believed anything that law enforcement said about the majority of the people who showed up.
Thank the gods none of them had a sandwich, or who knows what charges might have been filed?
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.
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.
bc - My point is that by defunding ICE, you do give Trump what I think (I’m doing a bit of mind reading here) you fear: that he will militarize the response.
He's already done that when he mobilized the National Guard and deployed them in LA. We've seen that line crossed before. The people protesting aren't acting on pollyanna instincts. We've seen what the response could look like.
We've also seen what they will do if funds are withheld. But the fact that withholding funding won't stop this administration doesn't mean that there is no point in doing it. The Democrats in congress have to choose if they would rather be seen as having stood up to this wave of federal violence against their communities, or if they want to be seen as resignedly accepting that this administration and their enablers in congress and the courts will not be deterred.
Sanctuary cities/counties/states are actively resisting the enforcement of federal law. Those that think the obstruction isn’t part of and the cause of much of the violence (and intentionally so) are naive IMO.
The idea that if they are defied it will provoke a more violent response, and that the response is then the defiers' fault is what you see in the family members growing up with an abuser in authority. The abuser only wants to help the family. If everyone just did what he asked then no one would get hurt. Why do you keep provoking him?
The only ways to break that cycle are to leave the abuser or to stand up, knowing that the violence will happen, but also knowing that when it does it's no one's fault but the abuser's.
The narrative has to be broken before the cycle can be broken.
Take the resistance far enough and what you end up with may not what you bargained for. Or maybe some are bargaining for that response in search of the revolution.
What revolutionaries and battered family members bargain for is a chance for some change in an unlivable situation - hostage to the threat of violence. They choose to resist knowing what is likely coming.
I've been teaching classes about war and civil unrest long enough to not have any illusions about what could happen.
...so I guess this adds a second formula to the one that Snarki outlines. Sometimes it is the "zoom out until the particulars blur" tactic. This time it's the "tight focus to leave others off camera" tactic.
Either way, it saves face for the people who continue to facilitate this push to authoritarian illiberalism.
GftNC - However, on the subject that you and Snarki raise of his having an “unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position”, it seems to me that the whole piece is a really scathing denunciation of Trump’s character, conduct, motivations etc etc. And given, as we all see, that the GOP as a whole has cravenly and pathetically bent the knee to him, enabled him, acceded to his power grab from Congress and been totally mealy-mouthed about his attacks on the constitution, I think it’s odd to say that he is supporting the GOP.
I'd say that he's lending cover to the GOP as a whole when he writes:
When you look at the things currently being done in the US, the majority of them are in line with what the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been working to get done for a lot longer than Trump has been on the scene. This administration is not acting on the whims of a mad king, they are taking advantage of the noise and foment that Clementine Caligula provokes to advance their own agenda. Brooks' heaping of all this on He Who Slumbers head is some fine scapegoating. At the end of the day it allows him to put all the sins of the GOP on one man's head and usher him into the desert, sins forgiven after having momentarily succumbed to a fever.
But really, the institutions are okay, and the people still believe in democracy in their hearts.
See? No one else in frame. No lackeys. No institutional agendas. No long assault on the judiciary to facilitate this takeover. No discussions of illiberal democracy and wishing for a Red Caesar. It's all one madman dragging everyone else with him.
wj's response to Brooks's ritual performance of balance calls to mind one of the books I read early in my Ph.D. studies when I was building my Media Studies chops: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Alexander Galloway. The central idea there being that what makes the modern networked world continue to function is not deregulation, nor is it centralization - it's the informal and changeable rules that negotiate the conflicts between those two poles, which Galloway identifies as protocol.
In the US, that protocol was largely a function of what we call The Deep State. Congress makes laws. Private citizens make products. The Market exists as a fluctuating hologram of the shifting dynamics between those two. The Deep State oversees the negotiations between those two in order to steer the overall system and keep it functioning within acceptable parameters for both sides. (His digital analogy for this is the system of protocols that allowed TCP/IP to work with the DNS system to facilitate information exchange.
Galloway was, like most of the Media Studies people writing in the moment between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, a bit of a utopian technolibertarian. He did point out that the authoritarian nature of DNS
allows whole realms of the Web to be blacked out with the flip of a switch, but the belief was that those things would self-correct as protocol adjusted to keep the system moving.
We are living in the moment when protocol has been destroyed in order to prevent the system from moving to preserve the privilege of the powerful. Without the federal bureaucracy, and with the legislative branch neutered, we have only the executive and the judicial, operating top-down with no negotiation.
Anyway, thought I'd mention the book in case any of the (more) tech savvy (than me) here wanted to find it and take a look.
The next few lines too, which I love for how they render the mess of us.
...
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.
And a part of you,
For my part is the chorus, and the chorus
Is more or less a borderline between
The you and the me and the it of it.