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OK, I rarely RARELY write about this newsletter. I find it distasteful when some people who shall remain nameless write crap like “We’re under attack by Trump!” or “Republicans Try To Take Us Down!” and then ask for money. Some newsletters do this so regularly, one wonders when they have time to write any actual news or analysis.

But I am going to write about how an article I wrote last week sent Nazi-stack into a frenzy of rage and how the frenzy is still going. Not because it’s funny, although it really fucking is. Not because I’m patting myself on the back for pissing off Nazis, although that was definitely a perk. But because watching them shake their little Nazi fists and scream their little Nazi rage reinforced a point I’ve been making for a very long time: Racist white men are absolutely fucking terrified of accountability.

Let’s step back to the distant past of…last Thursday.

With 21,500 views1, there’s a good chance you either read this article or saw it on your timeline:

If you haven’t read it yet, this was not a deep or complex article. It was a straightforward call to action and an observation: We must continue to talk about holding the racist white men of the regime accountable because until we believe that can happen, it never will. And it must happen, or the cancer killing our nation will never be defeated.

Now, I do occasionally go viral2 despite Substack’s best efforts to throttle my newsletter (that’s a whole different conversation). Sometimes it’s the headline, sometimes it’s the image, sometimes it’s the article itself. Usually, it’s a combination. But once I get to 200-250 restacks, I draw the attention of the filthy Nazis. Or anti-vaxxers if the article happens to be about vaccines.3

This time, I got up to 400 restacks4 before Nazi-stack noticed me. If you’re not familiar with it, Nazi-stack is exactly what it sounds like: The sewer of Substack where all the Nazi filth dwells. Most people are not directly aware of them because unlike other social media platforms, Substack does not constantly try to shove white trash down our throats to goose outrage engagement. My wall, and most people’s walls, are almost exclusively people and newsletters we follow, and nothing else. You know, what social media USED to be before promoting fascism became the business model (I’m looking at you, Twitter and Facebook).

But when an article goes viral enough, the filth inevitably comes sniffing. By Saturday night, they were swarming the comments. By Sunday morning, the weak manbabies were sharing it among themselves by the dozens, restacking my article with increasingly hysterical comments. I spent a few hours deleting and blocking. Taking out the white trash is tedious, but, like I said, instructive.

There were a lot of racial slurs. They couldn’t make up their minds. I was either a Jew (correct) or an N-word (incorrect). A lot of sexual slurs. I’m neither gay nor transsexual.5 I got called a communist a lot, too. As if these fucking inbred imbeciles could even explain what communism is.

The vocabulary of white trash is very limited. It speaks to their lack of imagination and the fact that they live in a sealed propaganda bubble, only talking to themselves. It’s an endless loop of mindless hate masquerading as intellectual debate. They really do think they’re “free thinkers.” Poor dumb bastards.

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Anyway, after deleting the 50th or 60th whining troll, I noticed that the most recurring theme was just raw anger. They were pissed. Mind you, I didn’t say we should frog march all white men to the ocean, shoot them, and feed their bodies to the fish. I said the racist white men of the regime should be arrested and tried for the crimes we can all see them committing right in front of us.

From the reaction, you would think I had personally punched each of them in their micropenises.

Etc. Etc. Etc. Dozens of comments just like. Plenty of death threats. Nonstop vitriol. Why? Because I dared to demand consequences for racist white men committing crimes.

This is the thing that really freaked the right out after January 6th. We started arresting people. Over 1,600 of them. We came for the Republican fake electors who tried to steal an election. We came for Trump, and we would have come for his inner circle if Merrick Garland and the FBI hadn’t dragged their fucking feet and let corrupt judges fuck us all.

But watching racist white men face consequences for the first time in 150 years sent shockwaves through the American right. Mind you, this country was not screaming for heads on a platter after the 2020 election. We wanted to “get back to normal.” We wanted to “look forward, not back.” Just like we had after every disastrous period where racist white men threw the country into chaos. The only reason Trump and his footsoldiers faced the possibility of justice was that the crime was so large, it couldn’t be ignored. And because Trump wouldn’t shut the fuck up and go away like previous criminal Republicans had (Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 all vanished from public life).

The result was that the right threw itself into fascism. If America was going to hold racist white men accountable, then America had to fucking go.

Now, imagine you are a racist white man, masturbating to dreams of a Nazi police state. Imagine you spent most of 2025 wallowing in the hate and cruelty of ICE, enjoying every liberal tear as Trump destroyed the country. A thousand-year-reich! Woohoo!

But then it all started to fall apart. Despite assurances from all of your totally true right-wing media, the public did not support the Dear Leader. They really didn’t support the violence against Those People. Every special election was a fucking bloodbath, and the midterms were shaping up to be a complete wipeout.

Worse than all of that, though, were the calls for accountability. That was new. Racist white men had faced electoral defeat before. They had been on the wrong side of public opinion before. But this growing demand for consequences, real consequences? What the hell was that about?

No talk about healing the nation. No talk about looking forward, not back. No talk about putting the past behind us. The left kept talking about Nuremberg Trials. Executions. Life in prison. Mass firings and blackballing. Public shaming. Real consequences that would last a lifetime.

But…this is America! We don’t DO that! We don’t hold racist white men accountable for the violence they visit on the nation! We wag our fingers, cluck our tongues, and send the racist white men home to “learn their lesson.” Then we watch as they regroup and try to destroy America again and again, like Batman sending the Joker to prison where he’ll escape over and over, racking up a body count each time. That’s the America Nazi-stack is familiar with.

So seeing articles like mine is scary. Seeing an article like mine go viral is even scarier. It means there is an audience for it. That people are not just listening, they think that, yeah, making the filth pay for what they’ve done is a Pretti Good idea. It means that this is an idea that has traction and is not going away. America got a taste for punishing racist white men for the evil they do, and we fucking want more of that.

Consequences, real, lasting consequences, for the party of “personal responsibility” is like holy water on a vampire. They can only react in horror and anger. They’re outraged that the glorious future they masturbated to is not only disappearing faster than every woman they ever sent an unsolicited dick pic to, but is now being replaced with a dark and frightening future where they have to answer for their actions. That’s not fair! That’s not right! That’s oppression!

That is the sound of fear and desperation. It’s in every rage-filled comment calling for me to die. In every attempt to dox me.6 In every attempt to hurt my feelings or piss me off.7 They’re lashing out because the future I speak about is horrifying to them and growing increasingly more likely than theirs. And they fucking know it.

Shed a tiny tear for the limp-dicked losers sitting in their basements, scared of what’s coming. Boo fucking hoo.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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There are 273 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The millions of pages of documents the Department of Justice has released – more than a month late – are not about who was on the private jet, or who was invited to dinner or when they sent emails or what was in the emails and texts. One way or another, the pages are about raping children. A powerful man wanted to “invest” money with Epstein? It’s not about the money. It’s about what that money ultimately was used for: raping children.

Elon Musk was busy on his X account yesterday doing what the New York Times is now calling “distancing” himself from Epstein. Why would he bother posting what I guess we could now call a distancing denial? “I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express’,” Musk wrote. Elsewhere, we learn that Musk’s “very little correspondence” with Epstein amounted to 14 emails. Musk admits that it isn’t the number of emails that matters right there on X with the words “Lolita Express.” Why would an aircraft be given that name if not to indicate that the rape of children was its purpose?

Listen to this from a Musk email to Epstein in November of 2012: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Note the date: four years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for promoting prostitution with underage girls, three years after he was released from his pretend home-confinement sentence. Musk also posted on X yesterday that he didn’t know Epstein “very well.” By 2012, you would have to be functionally illiterate and blind and deaf not to know of Epstein’s criminal conviction and what he was convicted of. Musk wasn’t emailing Epstein about the date of his “wildest party.” He was emailing him knowing that Epstein had been accused of raping children and had been convicted of procuring a girl under the age of 18 for the purpose of prostitution. Every newspaper, every cable news report, every place there was coverage of Epstein’s conviction reported that he had pleaded guilty to the charge.

So, anyone emailing with Jeffrey Epstein after the year 2008 knew that he had been convicted of raping children, even if prosecutors had agreed to couch the crime in the more gentle language of “procuring for prostitution.” That would include Steve Bannon, who we are now told had a correspondence with Epstein that amounted to thousands of text messages in 2018 and 2019, ten years after Epstein’s conviction in Florida. Reports yesterday said that Bannon and Epstein had texted about all kinds of things – “shaping European coalitions” and investments in the Middle East. Epstein allowed Bannon to fly around the world, including to Rome, on his private jet.

Steve Bannon worked in Donald Trump’s White House as an aide in 2016. He helped in Trump’s attempt to get reelected president in 2020, and again when Trump ran in 2024. Bannon’s texts to and from Epstein might have been technically about money or “investments,” but where did that money go? What was it ultimately used for? Men raping children, that’s what.

What about Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick? The newly released raping children files reveal that Lutnick and his family went to lunch on Epstein’s island in December of 2012, four years after Epstein’s plea-deal conviction for raping children in Florida. Is that why, every time he has been asked, Lutnick has denied a friendship with Epstein? So, Lutnick not only went to lunch with Epstein, he took his family along. Was Lutnick unaware that Epstein’s island had been where Epstein and others raped children? How could Lutnick, a billionaire who ran the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, not know that Epstein’s island had been paid for, directly or indirectly, with money that came from raping children?

Lutnick has spent the last couple of days distancing himself from Jeffrey Epstein. British Billionaire and owner of his own private Caribbean island, Richard Branson, has been distancing himself from Epstein, too, after the recent raping children document drop revealed that he had visited Epstein in 2013, five years after his Florida conviction. Branson later emailed Epstein, “Any time you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!” The New York Times was told by a “Branson representative” that his meeting with Epstein had been about “business” and that the reference to a “harem” had been about adult women, and that the women had not attended the “business” meeting between the two men.

Glad that’s all straighten out. Distancing, it seems, has to be rather specific after the DOJ dump of the child rape files.

Why all the wiggling and squirming and distancing by these powerful men, these billionaires, these men who have run major companies, some of whom now serve in Donald Trump’s cabinet?

The major problem with the three million documents that were just released is that the names of Epstein’s co-conspirators are redacted. But do you know what the DOJ did not redact? The images of more than a dozen children who were raped by Epstein and others. They are in a part of the files that reveals photographs of what are referred to as “Epstein victims.” Their ages are given. All are under 18 years of age. But their faces are right there, unredacted. Aaron Parnas reported today that he found a document with a list of 32 “Epstein survivors,” 31 of whose names are unredacted.

It’s not about having lunch or investments in the Middle East or even harems or wildest parties. It’s about men raping children. These powerful men – Musk and Branson and Lutnick and Donald Trump himself, whose name is all through the files -- don’t want to be associated with raping children. Because that is what the so-called Epstein files are about. It’s why Trump feels it’s necessary to tell the lie that the files “absolve me.” They’re about men raping children. The files absolve no one. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

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My dad genuinely had no interest in music. Well, almost none – he did enjoy novelty songs from time to time, but not really for the music. Our friend Bob, who is otherwise quite sensible, used to try to convince him that listening to music would enhance his life. I had more sense (I did, briefly, join Bob’s campaign to get my dad to use a smartphone but, again, it was pointless).

So I never shared The Bar Steward Sons of Val Doonican with Tim. I discovered them about 3 months before he died. I believed he didn’t have long to live, and was unusually glum at a cross country meet my son was running in, just walking around for exercise, when spotify played The Cockwombling Song for me, following on from something else. I was puzzled for about 15 seconds before feeling sudden joy. They love what they are doing, and even on record their enthusiasm is utterly infectious. That fall I listened to them a lot, especially when I was feeling down. Songs I’ve never cared for – like, The Lady in Red, and Walking in Memphis have, in the hands of the Doonicans (as The Lady in Greggs, and Walking in Manpiss), became staple listening.

In my excitement I texted my friend Juliette who I knew would just love them: her response was to the effect of “Yeah, Harry, I know all about them, I’ve seen them live twice, they’re even better that way”. To which my thought was “well if you knew all about them, why didn’t you tell me?” [1]

So, I had to see them live. It was a very small venue (maybe 150 people, how the hell do the economics of that work?) and, indeed, they are even better that way. The couple behind me knew about them, but the couple next to me, and I’d guess up to half the audience, only knew them because they follow the venue and looked them up when they saw the listing. And then there are the real enthusiasts, wearing garishly coloured tank-tops (vests), and shouting “Al-an, Al-an” every time Scott mentioned that Alan had written a song. I was entranced.

After the show I had a nice chat with Scott, who said, I think falsely, that he has never written a political song, but that what is going on in the US has made him think perhaps he should.[2] I didn’t express an opinion, but actually I think it might be a good idea, only because I know he has the subtlety to glance a blow rather than fire a shot. The tearful moment of my initial hearing of The Cockwombling Song is the casual mention of the execrable Katy Hopkins, not as a cockwomble, but as an arsehole. It is simply… joyful, and I felt, actually, not so much gratitude as relief about being in a world in which people like the Doonicans do what they do.

And, in that moment, I thought about my dad, and knew it was pointless sharing it with him, but wished he appreciated music. Because if he did I knew it would have reduced him to tears of laughter.

2026 is their 20th birthday. See them live, if you can. If you don’t live in the UK: well, one of my favourite people has crossed an ocean to see Taylor Swift, and, marvelous as she (Swift, though my favourite person too, for that matter) is, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do the same to see the Doonicans.

[1] In fact, I’m glad she didn’t. That fall was bloody hard, and discovering the Doonicans just then made them even more special than they’d otherwise have been.

[2] They tell you not to meet your heroes. Still nonsense, in my experience.

Maybe the most emblematic photo of the ICE/Border Patrol assault on Minneapolis will turn out to be the one above of Alex Pretti holding up his phone as he confronts a Border Patrol agent on the street.

No, let me revise that. There are several photos of Pretti holding his phone as if it is a shield. There is a photo of Pretti holding his phone in his right hand as he lifts his left hand to protect himself from pepper spray that another agent is shooting directly in his face. Finally, there is the third heartbreaking photo taken as Pretti is being shot that shows his phone still in his right hand as he attempts to struggle to his feet.

We know that Pretti was armed with a handgun. And yet the defensive weapon he wielded throughout his confrontations with masked federal agents was his phone, gripped in the classic position one holds a cell phone while filming, so Pretti could see the video on his phone screen facing him.

There are thousands of photos online showing Minneapolis residents holding their cellphones aloft while videoing masked ICE and Border Patrol agents as they arrest people, crowd through the front doors of homes, shove people to the ground -- all the gross, aggressive stuff they’ve been doing throughout Trump’s “largest deportation in history.” There are more photos showing citizens of Minneapolis holding their cellphones during confrontations with ICE agents in clouds of tear gas, being sprayed in the face with pepper spray, being manhandled by agents who are shoving and herding them.

It is clear from the photos that people’s cellphones are not only being used to record the often extreme and overbearing actions of ICE agents, but for self-defense. Masked agents have guns. Citizens have cell phones. The contrast is remarkable, especially in the photo that shows the masked agent shooting Alex Pretti in the back as he attempts to struggle to his feet, still holding his phone in his hand.

There are court decisions I could quote that establish a First Amendment right of citizens to use a cell phone or other camera to record the actions of law enforcement officers in public where “there is no expectation of privacy,” as at least one of the courts put it. If you are on a public street or sidewalk, or even if you are in a building such as a county facility serving the public in some way – a DMV or a refuse center or even a police headquarters – the same theory applies, that anyone serving the public has no right or expectation of privacy as they carry out their duties to serve the public. That is why people can use their phones to photograph or video police during traffic stops. Cellphones are used defensively because they might provide evidence of police misbehavior, use of disrespectful language, or excessive use of force. Lawsuits against police officers have been won based on video evidence taken with a cellphone.

Homeland Security agents are just the latest law enforcement officers whose misbehavior, excessive force, or illegal actions have been recorded with cellphones. In Minneapolis and Chicago and New Orleans and elsewhere, citizens have deployed their cellphones as a warning to masked agents that even though the agents are concealing their identities, their actions cannot be hidden from people recording them with their phones. We do not yet know the identities of the Border Patrol agents who murdered Alex Pretti, but they have been identified by the color of the knit caps they were wearing, the design of their bulletproof vests, the color and type of their jackets, whether they were wearing olive drab pants or blue jeans. The fact is, neither photographs nor videos tell lies. They record everything. Videos have established that civilians did not move aggressively against agents and did not hit them or hinder their actions. The publication of photos and videos of confrontations in Minneapolis has led to the release of citizens who were arrested for alleged assaults on agents that never happened.

Photos taken by photographers working for newspapers and television news crews have been used in the past to establish that people killed in confrontations with police or National Guard soldiers were unarmed at the time they were shot. The iconic photo of the girl kneeling next to the Kent State student who was killed by National Guard soldiers is one such photo.

But now, everyone is a photographer or a camera operator. Everyone has not only the instrument to record the action, but the ability to quickly publish it online, where as we know from the recent murders in Minneapolis, the photos and videos take on a life of their own.

While cellphones have become instruments of self defense for civilians, ICE and Border Patrol and FBI agents are using cellphones as another kind of weapon, recording demonstrations on the street as potential evidence against arrestees, and to use photo recognition programs to identify protesters for later arrest, or to make them targets of investigation after a protest is over.

Trump’s fascistic campaign against immigrants has turned into a war on American streets. One side, Trump’s side, is armed with guns and flashbang grenades and tear gas and clubs and pepper spray – and with cellphones and drones they are using to record the actions and identities of the other side. The civilians who live in the cities they are terrorizing have their cellphones and goggles and gas masks and not much else.

As in almost all wars, the struggle is lopsided in terms of weapons in favor of one side against the other. But the war in the streets against Trump and Stephen Miller and ICE is being won in the court of public opinion. Trump’s poll numbers are falling rapidly. Recent polls have shown Trump’s net approval underwater at minus 24 points. According to Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, “Trump is underwater with women by 32 points and with men by 15. He posts catastrophic numbers among voters of color: –71 with Black respondents, –45 with Hispanics, and –48 with Asian Americans. Even among white voters — long his strongest demographic bloc — he is still net negative.”

They have guns and bullets, but we have cellphones and videos, and we are winning.

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This is the week the fascist regime backed down against the power of the American people. Now that we know the regime is just as weak as we always believed it to be, we need to talk about bringing the monsters to heel and making them pay for all of their crimes. There will be no “moving on to heal the nation” until Nazis are crying in prison and swinging from the gallows.

America heals when the Nazis are gone.

Monday: Look at that…America still fucking hates Nazis. Surprise!

Tuesday: Drug-addled billionaires are going to fuck us all unless reality fucks them first.

Wednesday: Did you catch the livestream?! You missed all the fun!

Thursday: Podcast!

Also Thursday: “They always let us get away with it before!” Not this time, motherfucker.

Friday: Lot of family stuff to do today. Sorry. No article.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

1. The real story of the FBI raid on Fulton County, Atlanta - You are watching the theft of 2026 before your eyes by Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann at Greg Palast Investigates

2. Federalism can protect Americans from tyranny - The Constitution provides tools to resist the regime. by David R. Lurie at Public Notice Ogre Note - This is what I’ve been saying for months, you know, written by someone smarter than me. :)

3. So What’s Up With ICE Funding? - To understand this better, we need to level set about what is and isn’t achievable now. by Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo

4. Lies and Lawlessness - The Camps, the Executions, and the Future by Timothy Snyder at Thinking About…

5. Democrats must make reforming the corrupt GOP Supreme Court a top priority! - The Court is corruptly using the shadow docket to help Trump! by Dean Obeidallah at The Dean’s Report

Let’s call Trump’s rampaging federal agents what they are: Secret police. Some of them may have badges saying “ICE” or “Border Patrol” on their bulletproof vests; the camo and olive drab uniforms of others are marked simply “Police.” But none have badges with their names or other identifying information on them, and all of their faces are concealed by masks. They are unnamed and unaccountable.

All of these masked men are armed with semi-automatic pistols and/or fully-automatic AR-style assault rifles.

Let’s remember from just the last few weeks in Minneapolis what they are empowered to do. They have guns, and they used them to kill two United States citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As of today, no one has been charged for these murders. Trump’s secret police have asserted the right to enter private homes without judicial warrants. That means tomorrow, a gaggle of these helmeted and masked jackboot thugs could show up on your doorstep, and as they have done in Minneapolis and Chicago, use battering rams to break your front door and enter your home without providing you with a warrant signed by a judge, without showing you identification, without showing their faces, without so much as saying, “Hello, we’re from the government and we are here to search your house and take you away.”

Think about that for a moment. Break-ins and arrests by masked and anonymous Border Patrol and ICE agents have happened in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Memphis and Nashville, in New Orleans, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Charlotte, in Las Vegas, in Brownsville and Dallas and Fort Worth, in Newark, in Detroit, in Boston, in Dallas, and in Indianapolis. Most of the people whose homes were invaded and who were arrested were alleged to be in this country without proper immigration documents, but some of them in Minneapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere have been American citizens who were required to provide proof of citizenship before they were released.

This is the nightmare that the authors of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution foresaw and forbade. Here is what the Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That is about as specific as anyone could imagine.

Agents of the federal, state, and local governments are not permitted under law to enter your home, automobile, hotel room, motor home, or any other place where you are without a warrant showing probable cause that you or others in your presence, in your home, or other domicile are engaged in or have committed a crime, and that warrant must be signed by a judge or magistrate.

Federal agents from the FBI recently showed up at the homes of James Comey and John Bolton. The agents were not secret police. They identified themselves with badges and presented legally obtained warrants before they entered the homes of the two former government officials. That’s the way it is supposed to be done. That is not the way agents affiliated with the Department of Homeland Security are operating.

The Fourth Amendment is being violated on a wholesale basis by Donald Trump’s jackbooted thugs overseen by Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff who has no connection to law enforcement. At least we know the names of Trump’s so-called immigration enforcement leaders. We do not know the names of practically everyone under them. The name of Gregory Bovino became known because he is a showoff who enjoyed having his picture taken and posting his exploits on social media. But everyone else in every photo of Bovino has been unidentified. The men standing around Bovino on the streets of Minneapolis in recent weeks could have been his college roommates or poker buddies, for all we know. They had no name tags. No identifying badges other than “Police.” But they were armed, every one of them, with guns and tear gas and cannisters of pepper spray.

What is the reason for the anonymity of these men? We are told they must be anonymous because they might be “doxed.” That means, if someone learns their name, their home address and other identifying information could be published, and they could – allegedly – be subject to harassment.

So what? Every police officer in every city I cited above is required to wear his or her badge that displays their name and identifying number at all times. If a person who is, for example, stopped for a traffic violation by one of these officers, that person can put up a social media post with the officer’s name and the circumstances of the traffic stop, if the person feels the stop was wrongful. The person can report the officer to his or her higher ups in the police force. A person wrongfully stopped or arrested by a police officer can get a lawyer and file a lawsuit against that officer for wrongful arrest or harassment.

That is the way the system works or is supposed to work. As citizens, we pay the taxes that provide the money to pay the salaries of law enforcement officers to whom we grant the authority and great power to take away the freedom of us or our fellow citizens if crimes have been committed. We give them the authority, if a citizen is caught in the commission of a crime, to detain that citizen, to search his or her person and car or domicile for evidence of the commission of a crime.

We don’t pay our taxes so that masked thugs in pretend military costumes can detain us on the street, throw us to the ground, hit and kick us, and in the recent cases in Minneapolis, kill us because we got in their way or pissed them off by yelling at them or using our cell phones to videotape or take photos of them.

All of us grew up in this country learning in school and college about foreign nations with secret police forces. We learned about Nazi Germany’s Gestapo; the Soviet Union’s KGB; East Germany’s Stazi; Iran’s SAVAK; North Korea’s State Security Department and China’s Ministry of State Security. We read in the news about Chile under Pinochet and Argentina with their secret police “disappearing” people, many of whom were never found or accounted for after decades of looking. In all these countries and in Iraq and Egypt and Cuba and, we learned that secret police were everywhere and could seize people off the streets or out of their homes and spirit them away to secret prisons and keep them behind bars or in cages without warrants, without charges, and without trials.

This is exactly what is being done in this country right this very minute. It was announced by ICE today that on Sunday, 956 people were arrested for immigration offenses. NBC News reported later that the real number was closer to 1,200 arrests, and of that number, NBC discovered that only 613 “were considered criminal arrests,” which probably means the arrestees had criminal records. On Monday, ICE made 1,179 arrests.

I think it is logical to assume that none of those arrested on Sunday or Monday were shown criminal warrants or could learn the identity of the masked agents arresting them. We do not know the names of the prisons or concentration camps where these arrestees are being held. We do know that most ICE arrestees are not granted access to lawyers until deportation proceedings begin against them. They are held in the meantime without knowing the specific immigration offense they are accused of.

Can you imagine being arrested at gunpoint by a masked man and spirited away in an unmarked car and not knowing where you are going, and further, not knowing where you are when you get there? We saw last week an American citizen of Laotian descent arrested by masked and armed men and taken away in an unmarked car wearing nothing but his undershorts and a child’s blanket. After his citizenship was determined hours later, he was returned to his home without explanation or apology. His door had been broken down and his home ransacked by the masked agents. They did not offer to fix the door, straighten up his home, or give him the money to have the door repaired.

This is what the president of the United States has ordered and what the Congress is countenancing every day. Without so much as a vote in Congress, or the presentation of anything more than a bogus “executive order” signed by Trump, we now have the same kind of secret police force that terrorized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Cuba and North Korea and the rest of the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes we once thought we were better than.

No longer. We now have secret police paid by our tax dollars committing crimes against the Constitution on a daily basis. We have seen the enemy, and he is us.

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