Although I do not know each and every one of you, dear readers, I know enough about you by now to realize that you don’t need any more evidence that our scattered, childlike president is losing his shit. But like it or not, here is the incredible news of the day: Only 48 hours after an American citizen was gunned down in cold blood by agents acting in his name, Donald Trump took the time to go on his Truth Social account this morning and post a diatribe about his bloody fucking ballroom.

He spent some time yesterday speaking on the phone with a reporter for the Wall Street Journal trying to figure out how he’s going to get himself out of the disastrous corner he’s backed himself into with the obsessive retribution he thought he would wreak on the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis for some unnamed reason – that they didn’t vote for him in even one of his presidential elections; that his nemesis Ilhan Omar is from there and represents a district with a large Somali population; that some half-wit with a cell phone camera convinced him that tens of billions of welfare fraud was being committed there, as if he would even take the good time out of his day to care about it.

Who knows why he dispatched his makeshift army of Bass Pro Shop camo goons to Minneapolis? It was clear by yesterday that he was starting to rethink the whole thing, because faced with copious video evidence that a murder had taken place, Republicans of multiple-MAGA stripes were beginning to back away from him and his policy of turning loose a totally untrained brigade of pretend-warriors on an American city with orders to break whatever norms and laws necessary to come up with a bunch of immigration numbers he could brag about.

By Saturday, he was losing his support on managing immigration, too, with several polls showing some minor slippage even among Republicans, but a major loss of popularity among People Who Evidently Matter To Him, which would be independents and the youth vote that lost its mind and backed him in 2024.

It’s not just the incredibly deteriorating situation in Minneapolis that should be on his mind, even if none of the following probably is. He has taken on a job that he has sworn for more than 20 years he would never touch – the running and rebuilding of a foreign nation. That would be Venezuela, after he kidnapped its leader and replaced that incredibly corrupt regime with the same corrupt regime with a new figurehead “president” whom he swears is under his control, but if history has taught us anything, is not and never will be.

He’s got what he calls an “armada” in the waters near Iran, threatening the regime with retribution because they killed their own citizens during recent protests. With two of his own citizens having been killed by his administration and his obvious, outrageous hypocrisy aired around the clock on social media, cable news, and on newspaper editorial pages around the country, Trump now faces an angry, embittered Iranian regime that today threatened “a regret-inducing response” to any new “aggression from the United States and the Zionist regime,” which would of course be Israel and its murderous leader, Trump’s pal Bibi Netanyahu.

Late update: Trump tells Axios this afternoon that Iran “wants to make a deal.” R-i-i-i-ght. That line of shit and $5.45 will get you an iced something-or-another at Starbucks.

He totally and completely lost his insane bid to “take over” Greenland, arriving in Davos last week with his surrender papers scrolling down a teleprompter so he could reassure the many, many billionaire pals who were clearly ready to threaten him with a gigantic loss of payoffs if he didn’t come to heel on his stupid Greenland demands. So, he took the hit. He caved into a slight modification of a 1951 treaty with Denmark on Greenland, tucked his tail between the cheeks of his considerable ass, and struggled up the stairs to Air Force One and went home.

He is continuing his full-fledged campaign of murder on the high seas by shooting yet another alleged “drug boat” out of the water on Friday, flaunting international criminal law, the Law of the Sea, and any normal person’s sense of morality, which Trump has twisted for his own ends by announcing a week or so ago that he “doesn’t need international law,” and all he needs to rely on is “my own morality and mind,” wherever they are currently located.

He is continuing his insane tariff regime that is driving up costs of everything from chocolate chip cookies to the chips he needs Taiwan to make so his billionaire buddies can continue to build massive data centers that are pissing off people – read: voters – everywhere from Virginia to Texas. He doesn’t know what to do about that, either. How is he going to manage the split between pleasing the Tech Bros and pleasing voters who are tired of their surging electric bills and turning on taps that only trickle water because some fucking data center needs groundwater to cool its hothouse filled with computers and servers and God only knows what else? And what’s he going to do about the growing realization among regular people out there that their privacy is being utterly destroyed by the AI that all those data centers make possible?

I could go on. Suffice to say that Donald Trump, no stranger to midday napping sitting up straight in his chair in the Oval Office, has more on his proverbial presidential plate than most presidents who came before him. And yet, what does he do this morning? Here, give him a listen:

“I’m building, on top of everything else that I am doing, one of the greatest and most beautiful Ballrooms anywhere in the World, with more than 300 Million Dollars of Great American Patriots’ money, and working closely with, right from the beginning, the United States Military and Secret Service. This is a GIFT (ZERO taxpayer funding!) to the United States of America, of 300 to 400 Million Dollars (depending on the scope and quality of interior finishes!), for a desperately needed space, sought for over 150 years by previous Presidents and Administrations, so that the White House would no longer be forced to use a cheap and unsafe “tent,” for big and important STATE EVENTS, Dinners, Meetings, Conferences, and already scheduled future INAUGURATIONS (for safety, security, and capacity purposes!), on a very wet, and subject to weather, White House lawn. Making such a large gift to the U.S.A. was thought to be, by almost everyone, “A WONDERFUL THING TO DO” — But no, as usual, I got sued, this time by the Radical Left National (No!)Trust for Historic Preservation, a group that couldn’t care less about our Country!”

He goes on to explain, an inadequate word if there ever was one, that he has already ordered everything necessary for the ballroom, all the steel and bulletproof glass and marble, and on and on, so there can be only one conclusion to be drawn: “IT IS TOO LATE” to stop his precious ballroom.

This is obviously the infantile ranting of a spoiled brat who has spent every waking hour of every day he has been alive in abject avoidance of the merest possibility of being told “no” about anything in his life. He didn’t want to be told “no” by women, so he grabbed their pussies and raped them. He didn’t want to be told “no” by the voters, so he tried to cancel their votes and steal the 2020 election.

What kind of blithering egomaniacal monster, facing the exploding scandal of two American citizens murdered by his own thugs in the space of a couple of weeks, spends the morning following the second murder obsessing about his fucking ballroom?

Our president, that’s who.

I beseech you: Don’t pull the pillow over your heads and hope it all goes away. The blood of our fellow citizens is in the street. We are being called on to act, if all we can do is throw open our windows and blow whistles and scream that we’ve had enough and we’re not going to take it anymore. Be of good heart. Our votes are out there waiting for us to cast them. The deaths of Good and Pretti will not be in vain. We are going to win this thing for them, for ourselves, for our country.

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They are arranged next to each other in the Constitution – the First Amendment and its guarantee of free speech and religion, and the Second Amendment, as currently interpreted, with its guarantee of the right to bear arms. Neither right is absolute. The First Amendment does not protect a right to slander someone, or in the classic example, to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. The Second Amendment does not automatically convey the right to everyone to buy or carry firearms. Gun laws limit sales of all guns to those over 18, and the sale of some guns only to those over 21. Various gun laws place limits on where you can carry firearms – not within businesses which ban guns, for example, not on the grounds of schools or universities which ban guns, not within churches that gun bans, and perhaps most interestingly, privately owned guns must be licensed on military bases and cannot be publicly carried even by the soldiers or sailors stationed there.

So, what happens when you combine the two rights? Did Alex Pretti have a Second Amendment right to carry a firearm while he exercised his First Amendment right to protest in the streets of Minneapolis? Not according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her designated Gestapo leader, Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who before even a minute had been devoted to investigating the shooting of Pretti, accused him of being bent on inflicting “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” simply because he was carrying a legally licensed semiautomatic pistol and “two magazines.”

What we have from Trump, Noem, Attorney General Bondi, and Bovino is an anti-Second Amendment presumption that anyone who chooses to legally carry a handgun at a demonstration is doing so with ill intent. And yet the Second Amendment makes no demand of intent on gun owners or gun carriers. The Second Amendment Right to “keep and bear arms” is not abridged by a requirement that one’s heart be pure and one’s behavior be unblemished. Gun rights advocates have gone into court repeatedly to argue that people who have been convicted of crimes such as domestic abuse should still have the right to own guns under the Second Amendment. Insurrectionists convicted of violent January 6 crimes such as beating police officers had their gun rights restricted after felony convictions. And yet Trump restored those gun rights with his pardons of violent felons convicted of January 6 crimes.

Let’s examine the case of Alex Pretti. There are numerous photographs of Pretti with his cell phone, confronting ICE or Border Patrol officers on the street in Minneapolis. We now know that when those photos were taken, he had his firearm with him, a 9-mm Sig Sauer pistol. There is no evidence that he had drawn his gun while he took cell phone videos of the action on the street. Nor is there evidence that once he was assaulted by federal agents, that he reached for his gun and “brandished” it, as he was charged with doing by at least one Trump administration official.

As ICE agents were pinning him to the ground and hitting him repeatedly – one agent was hitting him with the butt of a can of pepper spray – when his gun was discovered and removed from him, an agent called out “Gun!” and agents began shooting at him. He died from those gunshot wounds.

By the evidence as seen in cell phone videos, and according to the analysis done by the New York Times and CNN, Alex Pretti was killed because he was carrying a firearm. No agents pulled their weapons while they were attempting to pin him to the ground facedown. They didn’t pull their guns when they were shooting pepper spray at him. They didn’t pull their guns as Pretti struggled to get back to his feet.

They pulled their guns and fired them only after Pretti’s firearm had been taken away from him by one of the federal agents.

So, what are we to conclude from the circumstances surrounding Pretti’s killing? What the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice apparently want us to conclude is that it is legal for ICE and Border Patrol agents to carry guns, but it is not legal for civilians on the streets of Minneapolis to carry guns.

But that is not true. The NRA and other gun rights groups have been screaming for years that citizens should have what amounts to an unfettered right to publicly carry all manner of firearms, from semiautomatic pistols to AR-15 style assault rifles. Gun rights groups want people to have the right to carry concealed weapons and openly displayed weapons. They want that right to be absolute, without the requirement for a license to carry. In some states, gun rights advocates have been successful in getting laws passed allowing exactly that – no license, no training, no safety inspection, nothing is required for people to have open or concealed carry firearms.

What has happened in this country is that the advocates for Second Amendment rights have outstripped any and all practical considerations when it comes to enforcing the law. There is, in fact, no doctrine to deal with free-for-all gun ownership by American citizens. The gun advocate slogan, “The solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” has been shown to be patently ridiculous.

Who was the “good guy” in Minneapolis yesterday? Law abiding Alex Pretti, who obtained a license to publicly carry a firearm? Or ICE agents who were authorized by federal law to carry firearms in the carrying out of their duties?

It is becoming obvious that the federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis have not received adequate training. They don’t know what the law is. They violate common law enforcement practices every day. With the shooting deaths of two civilians in the space of two weeks, it is clear that their “use of force” training was either poor or non-existent.

By the evidence, I don’t think it’s possible to adequately train someone to deal with the wild west we have created with the Second Amendment madness of unrestrained gun ownership and public display of firearms. Military training is different. Soldiers are trained to understand that in warfare, they will face an armed enemy who is trying to stop them and kill them. Still, soldiers have use of force training. In Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers were trained that that they could not shoot at a civilian simply because they suspected him or her of being armed or outfitted with a suicide vest. Some action indicating that they were about to shoot or detonate a bomb had to be taken before soldiers could shoot at them.

ICE and Border Patrol agents appear to have gotten their use of force training from watching TV shows. On cop shows, when an officer shouts “Gun!” everyone starts shooting. But that is not the way it works on the ground with well-trained law enforcement officers. Officers don’t have to wait until they have been fired at to shoot back at a suspect, but if a suspect has a gun that is visible, the suspect must show an intent to fire at officers in order for them to discharge their firearms to prevent the suspect from shooting.

None of these circumstances were present with Alex Pretti.

There are many, many problems with the thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents who are on the streets of Minneapolis. But the biggest problem appears to be that they are being given free dispensation by the Trump administration at every level to use violence against protesters even when the protesters are not using violence against them. The assumption by Donald Trump and those who work for him is that everyone in Minneapolis, especially protesters in the street, is the enemy, and they should be treated accordingly.

The descriptions of Alex Pretti by Trump and Noem and Bovino are of an enemy in a war. They regularly describe what is going on in the streets as an “insurrection,” and protesters as “insurrectionists.”

In the case of Renee Good, who did not have a gun, Trump administration officials have tried to describe her car as a weapon she was wielding against ICE agents. In the case of Alex Pretti, when they discovered that he had a gun, they used that fact as a justification for killing him, even after his guy had been taken away from him.

But you can’t have it both ways: You can’t have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun that applies only to ICE and Border Patrol agents, but not to a civilian who is abiding by Minnesota gun laws. Gun rights are not just for one side but not the other. Trump, however, does not want even the First Amendment to apply to everyone. He wants the right to slander people and tell lies in public and on Truth Social, but when news organizations report negatively about him, or publish polls that he doesn’t like, Trump wants laws passed to make both forms of speech illegal.

The right wing has met its match with the Second Amendment. That’s why they’re fighting so hard to control the investigation of the killing of Alex Pretti. The right wing knows it’s going to blow up all their fantasies about gun rights and all their lies about protests in the streets of Minneapolis. The turning point we’ve reached is larger than we thought. The First and Second Amendments must apply to everyone, or they have no meaning at all.

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This is an image of the Minnesota National Guard moving into Minneapolis to assist local police in enforcing the law. Governor Walz has activated the Guard and announced that National Guard troops will wear high visibility vests over their olive drab and camouflage battle fatigues, and they will not be masked — all of this to distinguish them from ICE and Border Patrol agents who are on the streets of the city and have killed, arrested and pepper sprayed citizens.

What this means is that the people of Minneapolis, the city police, and the Minnesota National Guard will be on one side of the struggle, with agents allied with Donald Trump and his authoritarian regime on the other side.

This is unprecedented in the United States of America, a governor believing that he must use his powers to call up the state national guard in order to defend and protect the citizens of his state from a federal militia that has invaded the city of Minneapolis as if its armed and masked members are an enemy army.

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Obvious as it seems that the string of videos and stories spreading distrust for ICE and Homeland Security agents is spurring widening street protest of deportation policy, apparently it all seems like foreign, made-up stuff to much of MAGA.

It all worsened yesterday with another fatal shooting by federal agents that triggered more dispute, more street confrontations, and more dueling narratives about blame. What all should have been able to agree on immediately is the sole finding that Minneapolis has become a powder keg that requires de-escalation.

If people stick solely to the storylines being promoted in right-leaning media, the stories have not been fully told about citizens being pulled through car windows by masked ICE officers, or  the fatal shooting of a protestor at point blank range or about  agents using a five-year-old as a pawn in a deportation arrest.

Instead, the story consistently being told on Fox and many other sites is one of left-wing “agitators” who are interfering with totally legal Homeland Security efforts to enforce the law in blue cities that seek to hide lawbreakers. Played up are accounts of a resolute Homeland Security effort and allied Justice Department prosecutions of those who would dare to stand in the way, even threatening brave agents flooding Minneapolis and other cities to save us from serious criminals.

In an essay in Salon, Sophia Tesfaye notes that MAGA is “flailing” in learning that there is a significant protest going on because they have not been hearing about its causes, including the use of five-year-old Liam Conejo-Arias, now held somewhere with his father.

“To many Americans, the viral image of a child swept up in an enforcement dragnet is horrifying. Yet in the right-wing media silo, the reaction — if there has been any at all — is not concern but suspicion.”

Another Fatal Shooting

Yesterday’s shooting involved a U.S. citizen, identified as Alex J. Pretti, 37, who was lawfully carrying a 9 mm, semi-automatic handgun in an open carry permit Minnesota.  Pretti had no criminal record other than parking tickets. As in the previous shooting incidents, federal officials were not cooperating with local officials or making themselves available for investigation.

Multiple videos did not back up the Homeland Security explanation from ICE operations chief Greg Bovino who said the agents reacted under fear. Local officials said the circumstances needed investigation by an outside agency.

Federal agents looking to arrest another person saw Pretti approaching to help soimeone they had pushed to the ground. They reacted to seeing his holstered gun by subduing him. Videos showed Pretti held a phone not a gun, and that he showed no confrontational action before at least six agents had Pretti on the ground, striking him with fists. Multiple shots were fired likely from more than one agent.

No one questions that the incident drew a crowd within a half-hour, though there were conflicting reports and lots of live video on whether protesters were “interfering” or “attacking” federal agents.

What you want to believe may depend a lot on who is telling the story. Local officials said it showed federal armies should leave the state. Donald Trump said it showed local officials were “inciting” interference with federal agencies

Patterns of Propaganda

It’s a pattern of this Trump administration to lean on the media for storytelling that matches more with its ideology than that supporting First Amendment examination of what government is doing.

Through FCC pressure, unwarranted lawsuits, ridicule of reporters and expulsion of journalists at the Pentagon and White House who do not agree to promote Trump ideologies, the White House promotes propaganda to seek acceptance only of self-serving explanations. This Trump administration is out to control the message like a fictional Ministry of Truth.

The whole basis of a democracy requires listening to the voters, not the enforced training of voters to hear only what one partisan view of government says it must accept.  The democratization of media voices through internet and social posts, podcasts, alternative media outlets is providing its own check on whatever arrogance is perceived as coming from mainstream news outlets, which continue in most instances to insist on seeking verification and evidence over opinion alone.

Whether immigration, economics, the endless 2020 election loss rewrites, the Trump White House response is the same: Believe only what we are telling you. Documents, sworn testimony, even videos of thuggery in Minneapolis or from Jan. 6, 2021, couldn’t be true if it does not promote Trump. The message in this case is the medium, and it is no wonder that media that do not promote the message are considered enemies.

The problem, of course, is that eventually even the loyalists come to see that there is something seriously wrong with what they are being told. As Trump’s credibility disappears for claiming that some foreign country is paying for tariffs that we pay as a new national sales tax or that jobs are plentiful when they are not, or that supermarket prices are falling when they are rising, it all starts to play out as increased political vulnerability.

Political Consequences

Trump’s net approval among Gen Z voters, especially young men,  has plummeted from positive 10 points in February 2025 to negative 32 points now, a catastrophic 42-point drop in less than a year, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.  While Trump’s approval on immigration was 50-50 among voters in March 2025, now 61% disapprove, including seven in 10 independents who say ICE has gone too far.

Yet, much of the concern about deportation tactics by an army of masked, camouflaged Homeland Security troops is passing by without serious questioning in right-leaning media outlets. There has been little coverage of ICE agents stopping people at random or failure to get warrants before entering homes or the use of tear gas and other chemical irritants against non-violent protesters, who are regularly described as agitators.  Homeland Security offers arguments about the nature of the protests, which become headlines;  often the explanations are at odds with available video of the incident in question.

At some point, it must become apparent that whatever the perceived bias of “mainstream” news sites, the experience of what is being promoted on Fox, Breitbart, Newsmax and lots of right-wing podcasting is at odds with what millions of neighbors are experiencing. In that context, the breakaway of podcaster Joe Rogan to focus on excessive ICE tactics daily now is significant.

Maybe enough confusion will prompt viewers to look at more than one source for news.

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The New York Times has obtained another video of the killing – let’s call it what it is, the murder – of a man who turns out to be not only an American citizen, but an ICU nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis.

The murder victim’s name is Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

As shown in the video below, Pretti appears to be videotaping ICE and Border Patrol agents on the street. As agents begin to use pepper spray on Pretti and another protester, Pretti attempts to drag the protester away from the agent who is spraying the chemical irritant. At that point, five other agents begin dragging Pretti and forcing him to the ground. As the struggle continues, one of the agents can be seen holding a gun that appears to resemble the one DHS says that Pretti was carrying. As Pretti attempts to get to his feet, an agent can be heard yelling that he has a gun. A second or two later, one of the agents can be seen drawing his firearm. He immediately begins shooting at Pretti. The agents begin to scatter away from Pretti. More shots can be heard as Pretti lies prone, face down on the ground. The agents, with guns drawn, are at least 10 feet away from Pretti as the shooting stops.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/minneapolis-shooting-federal-agents-video.html

The article states that the video has been “verified” by the New York Times and that it “appears to contradict” a statement by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that Pretti had “committed an act of domestic terrorism.” Pretti is shown holding his cell phone and nothing else in photo captured from a video before the shooting. During the incident, when Pretti is shown attempting to drag the other protester away from the agents shooting her with pepper spray, Pretti has nothing in his hands but his cell phone.

There are multiple reports that Pretti had a valid license to carry a concealed weapon at the time he was killed by the ICE agents. He is not shown drawing or aiming his weapon at any time during any of the videos that are available online.

It appears to me from several viewings of two videos that the agents were pissed off at Pretti for getting in the way as they attempted to shoot pepper spray at him and other protesters. When Pretti started to drag the protester away from the agents, they became further enraged and began to shove him to the ground and hit him. At some point, one of the agents apparently discovered Pretti’s firearm. It appears that when Pretti’s firearm was discovered, one agent drew his gun and began shooting Pretti as he was still on the ground. He was quickly joined by other agents who also shot at Pretti. At no point does Pretti regain his feet or threaten the agents physically. At the time he is first shot, his gun has already been taken by one of the agents. The New York Times reports that 10 shots were fired in all.

I thought the killing of Renee Good would be a turning point, but the Department of Homeland Security muddied the facts surrounding her shooting with lies about what the videos clearly showed – that she did nothing wrong, and was attempting to drive away from the agents who were at the side of her car at the time she was shot with three bullets.

This time, the videos are clearer and, if anything, more damning. They show out of control and poorly trained agents, paid with our tax dollars, murdering an American citizen in cold blood.

The battle lines have been drawn. The Governor of Minnesota and the Mayor of Minneapolis are unified in their condemnation of the killing by ICE agents today of, as the Mayor said at a press conference, one of their “constituents.”

Donald Trump has ordered ICE and Border Patrol agents into Minneapolis as an invading army. He has claimed repeatedly that he “won three times” in Minnesota, when in fact, he lost the three elections for president that were held there. Trump has said, and he acts as if, anyone who did not vote for him is an enemy. Agents from ICE and Border Patrol are clearly being encouraged to act as if the citizens of Minneapolis are not people who deserve respect, but their enemies.

The citizens of Minneapolis are unified and are not going to take another murder by ICE in their city. A video online showed a massive demonstration yesterday in the downtown area of Minneapolis. A crowd completely fills streets for block after block. Have a look:

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1ZUVaCXZr8/?mibextid=wwXIfr

It has become clear today that people who are demonstrating against ICE in Minneapolis are putting their lives on the line. One of them, an intensive care nurse for the VA, gave his life today.

It is up to us to ensure that the loss of Alex Pretti’s life will not be in vain.

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If you've been worried that the federal Department of Education Office of Civil Rights has been napping-- fear not. Yesterday they announced that after an investigation, they have determined that Connetquot Central School District in Long Island, NY, has been Very Naughty.

Specifically, they changed their mascot's name from "Thunderbirds" to "T-birds." This was the end result of a lawsuit against the state over the state's rule that schools had to get rid of their Native American mascots. CCSD was one of the districts that sued the state, and the mascot change was part of the eventual settlement of that suit. It was a contentious decision, made just last fall, which Native Americans argued didn't change nearly enough to comply with the state order to drop school mascots based on Native American images, possibly because, as near as I can tell, the change seemed to involve going from a bird to, apparently, a bird with a slightly different name (a name that the school had often used in places where the full name wouldn't fit). It raised enough noise to attract coverage by Sports Illustrated. (This, mind you, is a district that has banned Pride flags.) 

But the feds have declared that this mascot change shall not stand. 

See, New York was already in trouble because the state education department had banned Native American mascots, which touched off a kerfluffle in Massapequa over the school's traditional "Chief" mascot. That earned them a visit from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, some noises of support from Trump, and a so-speedy-one-might-suspect-no-investigating-was-done investigation that determined that the state was violating the Trumpian interpretation of Title VI. Why could some schools call themselves, say, "Dutchmen," but not some kind of Native American (hint: some communities actually include people of Dutch descent). It's a complicated issue, but I suspect that for the Trump regime, it's no more complicated than "White people should get to use Native American imagery as mascots if they want to."

At any rate, CCSD was under "investigation" by the department months before they made a final decision. Almost as if the department was using the threat of an investigation to intimidate the district into a particular decision, a sort of agency level use of Dear Leader's fondness for lawfare and threats of lawsuits to bend opponents to his will.

But the department has now reached their conclusion. The announcement came from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey:

Today, we found Connetquot Central School District in violation of Title VI for erasing its Native American heritage to comply with a discriminatory New York state regulation. We will not allow ideologues to decide that some mascots based on national origin are acceptable while others are banned. Equal treatment under the law is non-negotiable. We expect the District to do the right thing and comply with our resolution agreement to voluntarily resolve its civil rights violation and restore the Thunderbirds’ rightful name. The Trump Administration will not relent in ensuring that every community is treated equally under the law.

Richey's background as announced by the department on her confirmation mentions that she "has consulted for various organizations, including Parents Defending Education, and previously served at the U.S. Department of Education from 2004-2009 under the George W. Bush Administration and more recently under the Trump Administration from 2017-2021." It also calls her a "certified teacher and attorney," though her LinkedIn account shows no signs of an actual teaching job. She has lawyered for the Oklahoma department of education, worked as managing director for federal advocacy and public policy for the National School Boards Association, deputy secretaried for Virginia's department of ed, and served as senior chancellor for Florida's department of education. 

OCR has "offered" the district the chance to sign off on a resolution agreement that would require them to "reverse its discriminatory erasure of Native American imagery by readopting the name 'Thunderbirds' for its sports teams," logos, mascots, etc.

This call to reverse this dreadful "erasure" comes the same week that the Trump administration removed the informational signs about slaves at the President's House in Philadelphia, attempting to erase the memory of Washington's slaves. It is also the week that, of course, the Department of Homeland Security continued its efforts to erase immigrants. So I'm not sure the high dudgeon over erased Native American sports mascots rings very authentically. 

The district has told news media that it is looking at its options. And while some community members think the old Thunderbirds mascot is just fine, Carolyn Gusoff of CBS in New York though to ask an actual Native American.

Chief Harry Wallace of Long Island's Unkechaug Nation disagrees. "It's a total fallacy to say that it honors the Native American people," he said.

He said the imagery is a desecration of their symbols and harms students.

"As they grow up from children into adults, they carry with them that stereotypical image of hurt and harm and shame," he said.

Despite the mention of funding loss in some coverage, the Ed Department release mentions no actual financial threat. Perhaps that is because district leaders and the feds are on the same side, and this is mostly a swipe at the state government. It's a whole situation with no winners.