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Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for less than one week, and he’s doing the one thing that the legacy press loathes above all else: He’s improving life for the average American:

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a historic announcement Thursday that puts New York one step closer to providing universal child care for all families.

Hochul said the state will pick up the cost to launch a program called “2 Care” in the city starting in September. It follows the Trump administration saying it is freezing child care funding in the city and other blue states.

The program will work with home-based providers and build on the existing 3-K program to provide child care for 2-year-olds.

The program launches in “high-needs” neighborhoods this September, before expanding citywide, fully phased in by the 2029-30 school year.

Kathy Hochul is not what one would call a bone-deep progressive. She is, however, not an imbecile. She knows her only path to reelection depends on riding Mamdani’s coattails, and she’s not going to fuck around and find out.

This presents a problem for the legacy press, particularly the New York fucking Times. They are heavily invested in Mamdani’s failure. They would much prefer to see the mayor at loggerheads with Albany and struggling to achieve a single piece of his “radical” agenda to make the city more affordable for non-millionaires.

But Hochul is not interested in the feelings of the NYT editorial board. She’s interested in getting votes, and that means giving Mamdani what he needs to get the job done. If she keeps that up, expect the Times to target her as well. My guess is that they’ll say New York (the state) needs “strong” leadership willing to “stand up” to Mamdani instead of being pushed around blablabla.

I don’t live in NYC anymore. I haven’t in over a decade. Now that I have a real pizza place and, more importantly, a real bagel place, I do not miss NYC at all. So why have I spent so much time posting Notes on Substack about their mayor? Generally speaking, I don’t give a rat’s ass about what’s going on up there.

Here’s the thing: Mamadani represents a real threat to the status quo, and that makes him both very dangerous and very much worth paying attention to.

Matt Taibbi has been melting down on Twitter, calling Mamdani, I fucking kid you not, a “Stalinist.” The New York Times has been deeply offended by Mamdani’s very existence for the better part of a year. The professional “centrists” cannot abide this fucking guy and his “socialism.” Le gasp. The horror.

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Take a step back and see the bigger picture, and you’ll understand why they’re all freaking out. If Mamdani succeeds at all, it will be proof that the “unworkable” policies of the left do, in fact, work. Taxing the rich will not crash the economy. Investing in childcare will not create lazy, dependent parents.1 Holding landlords accountable to the law will not cause a massive housing crisis.2 Baby baskets will not end civilization as we know it.3

But allowing those policies to work without sabotaging them runs the risk of those policies working as advertised. Unthinkable for a professional centrist. If you’ll recall, I wrote about “centrism” a while back. Professional centrism is not about an objective center. It’s about moving the goalposts to protect the Republican Party.

For the professional centrist, Mamdani cannot succeed lest Republicans be exposed as the lying death cult they are. The only option is to destroy Mamdani and discredit him. We’ve already seen them do this.

Joe Biden threatened to implement progressive policies and he was destroyed by the legacy press for his temerity. He was putting too much power into the hands of unions and the average worker. He was putting too much money into domestic manufacturing and building factories in rural areas. He threatened to move the United States back towards shared prosperity with progressive policies. Intolerable.

With Biden, the legacy press had the luxury of time. America is like a cruise ship. It has a massive amount of momentum and is slow to course correct. Republicans have spent decades steering us into the icebergs, and it will take decades to put things back on track. Biden started that process, so he had to fucking go.

NYC is different. While it is by no means a small city, it can change course far more quickly. That scares the shit out of the NYT.

It’s important to understand that the entire premise of American politics is that big cities are disasters. That large, diverse populations living together in harmony just doesn’t work. That large problems cannot be solved if we work together through out government. That everything is a zero-sum game that MUST have winners and losers.

That’s a lie, of course. It’s always been a lie. America used to work just fine…for white men. It was only after women and minorities got their seats at the table that the right decided everything was broken and needed to be dismantled. Thus started their long march towards fascism and where we are today.

But the legacy press cannot admit this. They cannot WILL NOT talk about the right’s blind hatred of this country and the concept of democracy and shared prosperity. Worse, they actively help Republicans maintain the fiction that we cannot solve our problems together by attacking any and all Democratic attempts to do so. It’s socialism! It costs too much! It’s impractical! It’s not fair to the billionaires!

Man, fuck the billionaires! And the centi-millionaires, too. And all of the morons who think they’re going to be millionaires in the very near future in a system designed explicitly to keep them in chains.

The billionaires and millionaires will always be rich, no matter how much we tax them to pay for schools and roads and Social Security and and and. Worrying about the welfare of the .001% is like worrying about the cancer cells trying to kill you. Save your empathy for something worthwhile.

Again, though, the legacy press cannot allow Mamdani, or anyone, really, to put the lie to their entire worldview. They would be forced to admit they were wrong, something they would rather swallow boiling lead than do, but it would also force them to admit Republicans were wrong. That is so forbidden, it might as well be tattooed on their foreheads.

Democrats can be wrong. Democrats can be wrong even if they weren’t, as far as the press is concerned. But Republicans? Republicans can never EVER be wrong. Their ideology cannot be discredited, no matter how many times it fails. No matter how many times cutting taxes does not produce jobs, the press will not admit it doesn’t work. No matter how many times adding work requirements to the safety net does not improve the safety net, the press will never concede Republicans are wrong/lying.

But if Mamadani succeeds in the largest, richest, most diverse city in the country? Literally everything Republicans have ever said about America’s urban centers will be proven wrong. To do so would be like proving Jesus doesn’t exist to a Christian. Their entire religion would collapse and that’s all Republican ideology is anymore: A religion based on faith, devoid of facts, and fanatically protected by the legacy press.

Now you understand why the New York Times and Matt Taibbi are incensed by Mamadani. He threatens the illusion of Republican infallability and they will lie, cheat, and steal to keep that from happening.

Pay attention to NYC. Mamdani’s success can and will be copied in other cities and the panic that engenders, and who does the panicking,4 will tell you a lot about who is working against the future of America.

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

There are 297 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.

I’ve been doing something at night after I get in bed that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone with a sane synapse in their head. I have been watching YouTube videos of traffic stops by police. Dozens of them. No, hundreds. They are, in a word, addictive.

Cell phones and police body cameras have made this phenomenon possible. For the most part, the videos show what appears to be police misconduct. An officer will turn on the lights of his patrol car and pull an alleged offender to the side of the road. The offense can be anything from speeding, to failure to signal a turn, to failure to stop at a light or stop sign, to not having a current registration sticker in the window of a car.

The officer approaches the side of the car and asks to see the driver’s license and registration and insurance. Sometimes the officer will approach a car parked on the side of the street, or a car in line at a fast food drive-through, and ask for the same documents. Sometimes, the driver who is sitting in a stopped car will ask why he has to provide these documents when he or she has not committed a traffic offense. The police officer usually persists, telling the driver he or she must produce identification on demand.

Sometimes the drivers are aware of laws on the books or court decisions that say you don’t have to produce identification on demand when you are not accused of a crime. That doesn’t work to defuse the situation.

This is what happens in those videos, over and over again. The officer says “Get out of the car!” or “Get out of the fucking car.” When the drivers don’t act fast enough to exit the car, the officer opens the door and forcibly drags them out of the car and throws them on the ground.

These are very violent confrontations. Sometimes, the driver films it on their own cell phone. Sometimes, it is filmed by a passenger with a cell phone. Often, the film from a police body cam emerges during a lawsuit against the officer for excessive use of force.

When it turns out that the driver has warrants, he or she will often attempt to flee the scene of the traffic stop. I have watched multiple videos where the officer making the stop shoots at the fleeing car.

According to a website called “Mapping Police Violence,” in 2024, the most recent year for which there are complete records, 114 people were killed by police during traffic stops. According to me, from my own observation of hundreds of traffic stop videos, many more hundreds of people were victims of unreasonable police violence, often thrown to the ground, hit by officers, kicked by officers, even choked and rendered unconscious.

These traffic stop videos have a common theme: the officer who makes the stop is often profiling the driver by race, or stopping a car for which he has “run the plates” and determined that its registration is out of date, or the reason for the stop is a faulty taillight or license plate light. In other words, the traffic stops are for very minor offenses, many of which are not even related to the driver having broken a law involving a moving violation, in other words, having driven the car in such a way as to break the law.

But the reason for the stop doesn’t matter. Once the driver does not follow the instructions of the officer to his or her satisfaction, things deteriorate rapidly into police violence. It can emerge that the car is carrying drugs, or the driver has arrest warrants, and in a few of the videos, the driver or passenger fires a weapon at the officer or officers. But usually, the officer fires at a car because he has told the driver to get out of the car, and instead of following that instruction, the driver flees the scene.

In the case of Renee Nicole Good, she was given conflicting commands by ICE agents. She was told by one to “Get the fuck out of the car,” and by another to drive away from the scene. The ICE agents are not police officers. They are not empowered to enforce traffic laws or make arrests unless they have a warrant or, under the Kavanaugh doctrine, they have profiled a person and suspect him or her of being an undocumented immigrant.

Renee Nicole Good was not an immigrant. She was a citizen. She was driving down a street following traffic laws. She had committed no crime. Videos of the incident show that the ICE agent’s use of force – firing his weapon at her – was clearly unjustified. She was not attempting to run him over. She was following one of the instructions she had been given by an ICE agent to drive away from the scene. She was, it seems from all the video evidence I have looked at, innocent of any crime. In other words, the ICE agent had no reason to shoot at her and kill her.

But Renee Nicole Good, as my headline says, is not alone. At least one other ICE arrest has resulted in the killing of a driver attempting to flee officers. Many of the police beatings I have seen in videos involved drivers who had not committed any traffic violation, or whose cars were not in violation of any laws, such as lacking a current registration. I have seen many videos of people pulled violently from their cars and beaten by police, simply because they refused to produce identification. In many instances, the police officer had refused to tell the drivers what law they were accused of violating. Some people were violently removed from their cars because they were legally parked at the side of a street in a neighborhood they did not live in and looked “suspicious.” Some were pulled out of their cars and beaten because they were suspected of having stolen the cars they were sitting in because the car was expensive, and they did not look like they could afford such a car. Some were forcibly removed from parked cars because a person living on the street had called 911 and reported a “suspicious” car in their neighborhood.

The police officers in the videos look for the tiniest reason to make a traffic stop. They use the excuse of a driver not following their “commands” to violently assault the driver and arrest them for “resisting arrest,” even when there was no offense the drivers had committed. This is exactly what ICE officers are doing right now.

It has been reported that ICE has cut the training of new enforcement officers to 47 days, apparently for two reasons: to “honor” the 47^th president, Donald Trump, and to meet new quotas for the number of agents necessary to carry out Stephen Miller’s orders for thousands of ICE detentions a week.

In the traffic stop videos I have watched, the police officers are wearing badges and name tags and their faces are not covered by masks. As you are aware, all of the ICE agents involved in the killing of Renee Nicole Good, the mother of a 6-year-old child who is now orphaned, were masked, and none displayed identification on the makeshift “uniforms” they wore.

It is apparent to me that this country is flush with police officers who are, in effect, spoiling for a fight. At least the police officers in the traffic stop videos are not immune from prosecution under state laws. The ICE agents involved in the killing of Renee Nicole Good are immune from state prosecution under the “supremacy” doctrine of the Constitution, which places federal laws above state laws. The federal government, in the case of Renee Nicole Good, is doing this, shielding ICE officers from prosecution for actions they took, including shooting a citizen to death, “under cover of law.” The federal government under Donald Trump is using the “cover of law” to be lawless in its campaign to deport undocumented immigrants. They have made illegal arrests of U.S. citizens and detained them unlawfully. They are regularly demanding citizens to see proof of citizenship that they are not required to either carry on their person or produce on demand by a police officer or ICE agent.

What ICE agents are doing in this country has been described accurately as “Gestapo tactics.” The sad truth is, law enforcement officers in every state in the Union have been using Gestapo tactics to arrest, harass, beat, kick, and kill U.S. citizens for years. We live in a police state that predates the administration of Donald Trump by decades. The traffic stop videos that I have watched on YouTube are there for anyone to see. I am willing to bet they are motivating at least some of the new ICE recruits to sign up for Donald Trump’s Gestapo.

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The tragic fatal shooting by an ICE officer a citizen feels as if was the inevitable failure of assigning armed, undertrained, masked agents into our city streets to do widespread deportation raids in residential neighborhoods.

So, too, is the pitched verbal battle over who was to blame.

Without any investigation or evidence. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Donald Trump already had decided that the slain woman was a “domestic terrorist” who “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted “to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” Noem said her officers felt under threat and were justified in firing into a car.

The woman, Renee Good, 37, had been parked in the street as part of nonviolent protest.

On the streets of Minneapolis, once again defiant citizens told a different story — one of an unprovoked shooting by a camo-clad agent into the car.

There will be investigations, but, as always, the lines of partisanship already have outlined the beliefs at odds here.

This Time, Videos

Videos by bystanders seemed to show that the shooting in full daylight and among a small crowd happened without provocation. The videos show agents approaching the car and one vigorously trying to open the driver door. The car clearly backed up away from ICE officers – something that contradicts Noem’s account. One ICE officer is seen partially in front of the car as it moves forward, away from the officers. That agent is seen firing his gun as the car drives by him. Three gunshots can be heard.

There was no attempt to save the shot woman despite the presence of a platoon of agents. A video showed agents keeping a doctor away from the shooting victim.

Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to get out of town, using vulgarities to say that rather than bringing safety to streets, they have disgorged violence. Gov. Tim Walz said the account from the feds could not be believed. Local clergy took to the streets to keep things calm.

By any law enforcement analysis, shooting an unarmed driver through the front windshield into a car is not approved policy or training. Noem couldn’t even get straight the detail that the agents were stuck in the snow, and were hemmed in. The videos say they weren’t.

The tragedy here is not only a death, but the idea that this outcome has been so predictable.

Random neighborhood immigration sweeps without specific suspects with serious criminal backgrounds conducted by undertrained Homeland Security agents is a bad policy, poorly executed. Instant government lies about the inevitable mistakes just makes it that much worse.

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The post A Tragic, Foreseeable ICE Shooting appeared first on DCReport.org.

The short answer is no. The long answer is no. The medium answer is no.

The answer is no.

Stephen “Please make me look good when you take my picture” Miller is Trump’s chief saber-rattler when it comes to invading foreign countries we don’t need to invade, such as Venezuela and Greenland. Miller attempted to justify what Trump wants to do in both places on Sunday when he told Jake Tapper of CNN, “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Since Miller was not there at the beginning of time, but I was, I will take this time to set forth how hard the “iron” laws of the world are when they apply to the United States. The answer is, not very.

At age 40, Mr. Miller, you are too young to recall the time in the last century when the United States attempted to “govern” the country of Vietnam by strength and force and power. Here is a photograph of how that worked out for us.

This is the iconic photo of the last rescue helicopter to leave the American Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975. It’s not even an Army helicopter. It’s an Air America “Huey” flown by a civilian contractor. Another helicopter, a Marine CH-46, came along soon after and evacuated the few Marine guards who were left guarding the embassy.

More recently, in 2001 and 2003, the United States attempted to force its iron will on the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. It didn’t work. Here is a photo of the final American military cargo jet to leave the Kabul airport on August 30, 2021. That aircraft was carrying the last U.S. soldiers out of Afghanistan.

These photographs are not stills from some Hollywood movie. They are not fantasies. They illustrate Miller’s concept of how American “strength” and “force” and “power” end up when they are put to use in the real world.

Stephen Miller, as he strides around the halls of the White House exercising what The Atlantic called his “dogmatic force” and “wrath,” has clearly not bothered to read two treaties between the United States and Denmark, “The Agreement Between the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, April 27, 1951,” and “The Amending and Supplementing Agreement of April 27, 1951” signed by Secretary of State Colin Powell on August 2004.

So, I took the time to read them. Here are a few of the provisions of those agreements which permit the United States, with the cooperation and aid of Denmark, to establish defense areas and bases “necessary for the development of the defense of Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty area.” To that end, the United States “may use such defense area in cooperation with the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark for the defense of Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty area and may construct such facilities and undertake such activities therein as will not impede the activities of the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark in such area.”

“The United States of America shall have the right to exercise exclusive jurisdiction over those defense areas in Greenland for which it is responsible,” and may “construct, install, maintain, and operate facilities and equipment,” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements, and operation of ships, aircraft, and water-borne craft and vehicles,” as well as “improve and deepen harbors, channels, entrances, and anchorages.”

The supplemental treaty of 2004 updates the treaty of 1951 to apply the terms of the NATO Status of Forces Agreement of 1955, which had apparently been overlooked when that document was signed. There is one clause mandating that in “the exceptional case of planned landings of military aircraft in Greenland outside airports,” the U.S. agrees to notify both the government of Denmark and the Home Rule Government of Greenland and pledges to “insure the protection of the environment and hunting areas in Greenland.”

The fact of the matter is that according to a treaty that has been in effect for 75 years, the United States can do whatever the hell it wants in Greenland, is already doing it. The U.S. is pledged to defend not only Greenland and the interests of Denmark, but all of NATO against any aggression by Russia, China, or anybody else. Miller might take the position that treaties are written on paper and not engraved on the “iron laws of the world,” but I would point out to him that the surrender documents of Japan and Germany that ended World War II, and the subsequent treaties that the United States signed with those two nations making them our allies, have held.

Our treaties with Denmark regarding Greenland are written in such a way that they are an adjunct of the NATO treaty to which 32 member countries are signatories. Yesterday, the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Great Britain, and Denmark signed a statement affirming Denmark’s sovereignty and the status of Greenland as a self-governing, autonomous territory. The statement declared that the Arctic is a region of strategic importance for all of Europe and is crucial for international and transatlantic stability. All five countries agreed to increase their “presence, activities, and investments” in the Arctic region.

I have a better idea. Call a meeting. Declare that the strategic importance of Greenland is so great that it is time for NATO to have military exercises there. Dispatch ten or twenty thousand or so soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women from all five countries that signed the “Joint Statement on Greenland” and any other NATO country that wants to contribute its forces. Establish, under the aegis of Denmark, permanent bases to house NATO forces in Greenland. Call Stephen Miller and notify him that a NATO “Iron Wall” has been established to defend Greenland from all the Russian and Chinese aggression Trump has asserted is a big problem in the region.

That’s what NATO is for: defending the members of the alliance. Invite Stephen Miller, since he is at the top of the totem pole in the White House, to observe NATO’s defenses in Greenland. Tell him that if he wants, he can bring along his wife and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Have a few NATO generals meet them on the tarmac in full combat gear. Show him what NATO’s strength and force and power look like in the real world. Have a photographer take his picture. Make him look good. For some reason known only to himself, Stephen Miller is concerned about how he looks in photographs.

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On Wednesday, ICE agents pulled up to Minnesota mother Renee Good’s car and shouted a series of confusing, contradictory demands. When Good attempted to drive away, one of the agents aimed his gun through her side window and shot her multiple times in the head. ICE agents then refused to let medical professionals through to render aid. They blocked an ambulance; paramedics had to get to Good on foot. She died at the scene.

The Trump administration is calling Good a domestic terrorist. The Department of Homeland Security put out what is, in my view, one of the scariest statements I’ve ever seen from a federal authority. “Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism,” the statement reads in part. DHS secretary Kristi Noem offered a totally different lie, claiming that ICE officers got their car stuck in the snow and “they were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”

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You can easily find multiple videos of this incident online. Good was not rioting. She did not block ICE officers. She did not attempt to kill ICE officers. The ICE officers were not trying to push a car out of the snow; they were surrounding Good’s vehicle. The whole thing is just invented, and the story keeps changing.

Think what you will about her actions — and ICE supporters generally argue she didn’t follow the ICE agent’s directives, and that as her car rolled forward he believed he had a right to act in self-defense — but the evidence is front of all of our faces. It’s clear that, whatever you believe about the ICE agent’s self-defense claim, Good was not a violent rioter. She did not attempt to run over ICE agents who were simply trying to push their car out of the snow. This government is demanding that you accept their patently false version of events — that you talk yourself out of what you can actually see, and into whatever they say.

This comes just a day after the Trump administration released its rewritten Jan. 6th history. MAGA loyalists jumped on board: “On this day in history in 2021, thousands of peaceful grandmothers and others gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building,” tweeted Republican Rep. Mike Collins, in a truly stunning series of lies (if I break into your house in the middle of the night and threaten to kill you, am I a peaceful mother taking a self-guided albeit unauthorized tour of your bedroom?).

Many of these “peaceful grandmothers” were actually able-bodied adult men and women who scaled walls, busted through doors and windows, hunted for politicians to murder, plotted to lynch Mike Pence, beat police officers within inches of their lives, and were eventually convicted of many serious crimes. Nearly 140 police officers were injured on Jan. 6th. They were beaten with flag poles and hockey sticks, sprayed with bear spray and hit with pieces of broken furniture. Lawmakers, including Republicans, hid in their offices, fearing for their lives. That reality has simply been whited-out of conservative history. The administration’s rewrite accuses former vice president Mike Pence of “cowardice and sabotage” for certifying the election results; it continues to claim, falsely, that the election was stolen.

Trump and his team are rewriting the truth. They’re insisting that you didn’t see what you know you saw. They are have already created a fake history to make themselves the heroes. They are selling you a fake reality right now. And their followers are going along with it.

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That Good’s murder happened in the first place was the entirely predictable outcome of having barely-trained masked and heavily armed thugs trawling American streets looking for people to abuse. But now that it has happened (and was caught on camera), the justifications have begun. ICE supporters say Good was accelerating toward an officer who feared for his life. If you watch the video, it’s hard to see a deadly threat. The most generous interpretation in favor of the officer is that he was scared and he overreacted with deadly results — but even that interpretation is pretty damning, because people who are handed guns and authority by the state should be trained to know how to respond to stressful situations. And the law governing most federal law enforcement agents, as far as I can tell, is fairly clear: Federal law enforcement officers cannot shoot at a moving vehicle unless the person in it is threatening them with deadly force using a non-vehicular weapon (i.e., pointing a gun at them), or unless the person is using the vehicle in a way that imminently threatens their life or safety “and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.” Emphasis mine. It’s possible this standard doesn’t apply to ICE, which is at this point little more than a personal presidential militia. But we should ask: Why not? Why aren’t we expecting ICE officers to comport themselves with basic professionalism?

This is one of those moments when I find myself pushed down to the deepest depths of despair. Not just because an innocent woman was killed, but because my country has fallen to such a profound low that a significant minority of its citizens continue to support a man who lies to their faces, and they hate people who politically disagree with them so much that they’ll justify murdering us in the streets and call it a morally righteous.

It’s important to understand why ICE was in Minneapolis specifically, and the answer also comes down to a series of right-wing lies alternately amplified and created by the Trump administration. ICE is of course all over the country. But they have lately focused on Minnesota because the state is home to many Somali immigrants, and Somalis have been in the MAGA crosshairs after allegations of mass fraud. Here’s the truth about the “Somali fraud” allegations: There really was a mass post-Covid fraud in Minnesota related to a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future (run by a white woman), that involved hundreds of millions of dollars being stolen in a scheme involving fake programs for autistic kids. It was a despicable plundering of public resources, and after a big criminal investigation, dozens of people were indicted; convictions have been steadily mounting. Most of the people prosecuted in this fraud scheme are Somali-Americans; the fraud worked because people within a specific community brought in friends and family members, which isn’t particularly unusual in a fraud case (heavily Mormon Utah is America’s fraud capital, seeing more Ponzi schemes than any other state specifically because of this in-group dynamic). What was unusual in Minnesota was the scope and brazenness of the crimes. It was very bad. And justice is being fairly served. The story might have ended there, except conservative johnny-come-latelies jumped on the story and used it as evidence of some inherent Somali criminality. They then started theorizing about other frauds, which culminated in MAGA influencers showing up at daycares with cameras, demanding to be let in to see the children. When they were rightly rebuffed, they accused scores of daycares of being fraudulent. So far, investigators haven’t found any daycares that weren’t operating as expected.

In other words, the original fraud was real, and had already been dealt with by law enforcement. But the great big Somali daycare fraud just… isn’t. Subsequent accusations of fraud worked kinda like the claims that Haitians were eating people’s pets in Ohio: They were mostly just racist, and not based in any reality, but they’re having devastating consequences for people whose only crime is being a member of a currently disfavored ethnic group.

Lack of evidence supporting the fraud allegations hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from reacting. They’ve already cut off childcare funding to Minnesotans until the state proves that their daycares are real. Trump called Somalis “garbage.” And his administration ramped up ICE activity in Minnesota explicitly to hunt down Somalis, who are the current favored target of all manner of MAGA racists.

Now a woman is dead. She is dead because of a MAGA lie. And her death is being used to create more MAGA lies.

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I don’t know what to do about people who are happy to be lied to, so long as the lies bolster their sense of righteousness and paint those who disagree with them as mortally dangerous enemies. I don’t know what to do about people who think it’s ok to kill people because their politics differ from yours. I don’t know how to get through to people who believe an armed agent of the state should be free to act with total impunity.

Law enforcement officers do not get to kill you just because you don’t listen to what they say. In most of the world’s democracies, an armed agent of the state killing an unarmed citizen would be an earthshaking scandal. In the US, it’s just Wednesday. What’s different now, though, is that the people in the White House aren’t even pretending they want to find out the truth; they aren’t even pretending that ICE officers are held to high (or any) standards. The president and his lackeys want a loyal personal militia, and they’ve created one in ICE.

It’s increasingly clear that Americans are not being governed; we are being ruled.

Narratives about authoritarianism often suggest that entire populations were browbeaten and intimidated into submission. But that’s not true. It seems to me that, in most societies, there is a critical mass of people who desire authoritarian rule. They want a big strong man to protect them and beat up on their perceived enemies. They don’t want the obligations and hardships that freedom brings — a free and pluralistic society requires owning your own life and decisions; it puts you into contact with people who have different ideas and ways of life; it forces you to think and to sometimes be challenged. If you’re part of the dominant and in-charge group, authoritarianism is an easier route, at least at first. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to be responsible for yourself. You can feel good and valuable by being the kind of person those in power say is good and valuable — you don’t have to work to prove anything. Things might go very badly for you if you are suddenly pushed to the outside (something Indian-American Trump supporters are currently learning the hard way). But for a certain kind of person, affiliation with the powerful — even superficial affiliation, by virtue of race or heritage or religion — can feel pretty meaningful. For a certain kind of (sadistic) person, seeing the powerful crush and abuse others can feel pretty good.

This is where we are. No one is being fooled or forced into accepting authoritarian governance. The people with Don’t Tread On Me flags who have for years stockpiled weapons in anticipation of a rogue federal government infringing on Americans’ rights are quite happy to see the Trump administration’s boot treading on Americans they deem less worthy of basic rights. Millions of Americans voted for this. And while I am heartened that many will see what happened in Minneapolis and feel sickened — that many less-plugged-in Trump voters will see what happened and feel sickened — I am troubled by the reality that millions of my fellow citizens do not want to live in a free and democratic society, but rather desire a totalitarian one that tells them what to do, what to think, and what is real. I don’t know how we salvage a nation of people who want to be lied to.

xx Jill

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Let’s say you are an American president, and you decide that with all the oil being produced in your own country – the U.S. is the world’s top oil producer, pumping more than 13 million barrels a day – that is not enough. You want more oil. You want oil from Iraq. You want oil from Syria. Those places are far, far away, in the Middle East.

And then you look south, in your own hemisphere, and you see Venezuela, and you think, I’d like some oil from there. We used to have American oil companies in that South American country. Then in 1976 – 50 years ago – Venezuela nationalized its oil industry and took over the oil fields and infrastructure built by American oil companies.

You are an American president whose favorite word, next to “billions,” is “unfair.” You think to yourself, how unfair it was to take all that oil away from U.S. oil companies. You don’t like the president who’s running Venezuela, this Maduro guy, because he doesn’t show you the respect you think you are due as the King of All That You See. So, you decide you’ll get rid of the disrespectful dictator of Venezuela, and you will take the oil.

You see yourself as much, much smarter than the bumbling George W. Bush, whose major error, when he invaded Iraq to get rid of its disrespectful dictator, Saddam Hussein, did not take the oil. You ignore the fact that the Bush family – Junior and Senior both – were in the oil business in Texas, so they at least knew something of what was involved in taking the oil, whether it was out of the ground in the U.S. or out of a foreign country such as Iraq.

You think you are smarter than George W. Bush because you know a lot of oil men. They supported your campaign in 2024. They have come to visit you at your resort/hotel/home in Palm Beach, Mar a Lago, and they have come to visit you in the White House. Some of those oil men run the companies whose oil was stolen from them back in 1976. They want their oil back, and you told them that you would get it for them, probably for a royalty (wonderful word, that one) to be paid to you personally through whatever your latest crypto scam is.

So, you call up your spray-tanned and tattooed Secretary of War, and you tell him, go get that fuckstick Maduro in Venezuela and put him in jail in New York City and take their oil.

There is always a problem. This is a rare one that isn’t caused by Democrats, or at least you haven’t figured out a way to blame it on Democrats yet. What do you do after you depose a South American dictator? Bush famously didn’t have a plan after he got rid of Saddam. It became his nickname: George W. “didn’t have a plan” Bush.

You don’t have a plan, either. What you have is a gaggle of yes-men, just like Bush had, who tell you not to worry, that you are King of All You See, so taking the oil won’t be a problem. You have the greatest military in the history of the world. Hell, your greatest military has been killing drug smugglers in boats for months now – the count is more than 100 – and it took your greatest military only two hours to spirit Maduro out of his fortified compound and put him on the USS Iwo Jima to send him on his way to New York City, where the national media is waiting to report on everything that happens to him in court, so they won’t be reporting on the 5.2 million new Jeffrey Epstein files. Or at least they won’t be reporting on the files as much.

What could go wrong down there in Venezuela? Your Chief Adviser on Everything in the World, Stephen Miller, tells you that power is the only thing you need to get whatever you want. The world will cower in the shadow of your power, says Stephen Miller. He even went on TV on Sunday and explained to Jake Tapper how you did what you did in Venezuela:

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce. So, for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country.”

See, that’s all it takes. You pick up the phone, you go on Truth Social, you say some stuff in ALL CAPS, and the world bends to your will.

Except for those pesky people who live in the countries from which you want to take the oil, and some of the pesky people who don’t even live in those countries.

Look at what happened in Iraq when Bush took over the country from Saddam Hussein. He hired some big U.S. companies such as KBR and Halliburton and Bechtel to go to Iraq and rebuild the country’s “infrastructure.” The Congress passed a $70 billion supplemental funding bill in November of 2003 to pay for the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure. I was in Iraq when that bill was passed. A West Point classmate of mine was in charge of USAID in Baghdad. All the infrastructure money was to go through USAID to help rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure so the big U.S. companies could get the oil fields pumping and the oil pipelines running. My friend, the USAID guy, told me all of the rebuilding money was going to the oil infrastructure. Not for sanitation and roads and rail systems and the electrical grid, except as those systems served the Iraqi oil business.

This was not reported in the press. One of the big U.S. companies, the Bechtel Corporation, issued a press release announcing its contract with USAID to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure. The press release was a lie. For one thing, Bechtel was hired with rebuilding oil infrastructure in northern Iraq, but the Americans working for the company got shot at and mortared and attacked by insurgents so much, they pulled out.

Attacks in northern Iraq on pipelines that carried oil from the Kurdish region around Kirkuk to a pipeline that ran north towards Turkey and south towards Baiji and Baghdad took place nightly. The 101^st Airborne Division, one brigade of which was stationed near Al-Qayyarah, was tasked with defending the pipeline that ran near the Tigris River. Well, they didn’t have enough soldiers to defend more than 100 miles of pipeline. Insurgents would watch where the U.S. soldiers went on their defensive patrols, then they would go to where the soldiers weren’t, and they would blow up a section of the pipeline, which ran aboveground, and was vulnerable to attacks with as simple a weapon as an IED made from a 155 mm Howitzer round, of which there were thousands in Iraq.

The Bechtel guys weren’t working on the infrastructure; the U.S. Army couldn’t defend the oil pipeline from Kirkuk, or the pipeline that ran north and south along the Tigris. So, what was happening? A comparatively small number of Iraqi insurgents were stymying American efforts to “take the oil.”

It’s still happening. Last summer, insurgents supported by Iran used drones to attack oilfields and pipelines run by Americans in the Kurdish region of Iraq. They hit an oil field run by HKN Energy, a company owned by the son of Texas billionaire Ross Perot, a big financial supporter of Donald Trump. According to Reuters, the Iran-backed insurgents also hit an Iraqi oil field run by another Texas oil company, Hunt Oil.

These are all friends of Donald Trump. According to Reuters, the attacks halted half of the Kurdistan region’s oil production. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio got very mad. He told Iraq’s leaders in Baghdad that Trump would impose sanctions on Iraq’s oil business if they did not reopen the oil pipeline to Turkey that led to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. Facing sanctions, Iraq and Turkey got together and reopened the pipeline, tilting Iraq away from its relationship with Iran and towards the U.S., according to Reuters.

All because some oil fields and an oil pipeline were attacked by Iran-backed insurgents.

In 2003, the attacks on the same pipeline were carried out by Iraqis on foot carrying IED’s in canvas sacks. Now those attacks can be carried out remotely by a guy sitting in a building somewhere looking at a little screen holding what amounts to a video game controller in his hands.

There are a zillion factions in Iraq today. There were a zillion factions in Iraq in 2003. There were vulnerable pipelines then, there are vulnerable pipelines now. The lesson here is that this shit never stops. There is always someone who doesn’t want American companies to “take the oil.”

What do you think is going to happen in Venezuela with its oil fields and oil pipelines when Trump sends American companies down there to “take the oil?” There are drug gangs like Tren de Aragua and Cartel de las Soles who are running cocaine through the areas where pipelines are. There is the ELN, the National Liberation Army of Colombia, which has strong units and allies in Venezuela. The FARC guerilla group from Colombia still has factions operating in Venezuela. There are so-called Colectivos, pro-government militias which control neighborhoods of Caracas and areas of Venezuela and frequently do battle with countervailing gangs and militias from the other side of the political spectrum.

There are pro-government militias and anti-government militias in Venezuela just like there were in Iraq. When we invaded, the sectarian struggle between the Shiites and Sunnis did not suddenly come to a stop just because George W. Bush got a hair up his ass and sent American soldiers there. When the Iraqi army was disbanded, factions formed their own militias. Some of them funded their operations by hacking into pipelines, stealing oil and selling it on the black market.

Gee, do you think that a country such as Venezuela, with a major system of cocaine production and smuggling, might also have a system of stealing oil and selling it on the black market? Bloomberg Business says it’s already happening. Do you think that there might be people in Venezuela who liked Maduro, and voted for him, who are unhappy that he was kidnapped? Do you think they might have an opinion about what happens to the oil in Venezuela that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller think is their right to take as Big Powerful People? Do you think that there might be some groups who plan to attack the complex system of oil pipelines that run through Venezuela to stop the U.S. from taking the oil?

This is how stupid Trump and Miller and Rubio are. They announced what they want to do with Venezuela’s oil. Trump used the word “oil” twenty times in his press conference about the attack on Venezuela at Mar a Lago on Sunday. Trump said Venezuela owes us oil, because they took it from us, so we’re going to take it back. I’m pretty sure they can get CNN International in Venezuela. They know we’re coming.

At least Bush and Cheney had the sense to tell a big fat lie that they weren’t in Iraq to take the oil, even though they were there for exactly that and used USAID to funnel borrowed money that wasn’t even appropriated from taxpayer funds in the U.S. Treasury to fund their attempt to rebuild and take over Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

We are still paying interest on those borrowed billions. How long will we be paying interest on the money Trump and Miller and Rubio spend to “take the oil” from Venezuela they think American oil companies are owed?

Because we know one thing for sure from the incredibly ill-advised adventure in Iraq that left us in debt for about two trillion dollars: Whatever we get up to in Venezuela won’t pay for itself. Trump thinks that “running the country” of Venezuela, to use Stephen Miller’s arrogant assertion, will make the U.S. and Trump rich. What neither of them understand is that when you exercise power using the U.S. military, it doesn’t make money. It costs money. Lots and lots of money, and usually American lives as well.

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