Have you seen any photographs in your newsfeed recently of National Guard troops on the streets of American cities? If the news you get is anything like mine, you’ve seen plenty of photos of ICE agents in ridiculous military cosplay get-ups with their masks and guns and tear gas cannisters. Have you wondered why the National Guard has almost completely dropped out of the news?

For one, the Guard is deployed, but only in three cities – Washington D.C., Memphis, and New Orleans. In D.C., Trump controls the National Guard, so he can do anything he wants with them, and he still has the Guard patrolling the streets. In Tennessee and Louisiana, he has Republican governors who were only too happy to call up units of their National Guard and put them on the street on Trump’s orders.

But Trump has lost court cases in California, Oregon, and Illinois that have barred him from federalizing the Guard and turning them loose on the streets of Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago. In California and Illinois, the courts were particularly brutal to the Trump administration, with a judge in California ruling that Trump had violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars use of the military for law enforcement purposes. In Illinois, two courts stymied Trump. A district court stopped Trump’s deployment of the Guard to Chicago. That order was upheld by the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that Trump’s claims of rebellion and rampant lawlessness in the streets of Chicago were overblown. In December, the Trump DOJ asked the Supreme Court for an emergency stay of the Appeals Court decision barring the Guard deployment, and for the first time in a case involving its emergency docket, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump and refused to issue the stay.

In Oregon, the decisions barring Trump from deploying the National Guard are complicated and mixed, with one restraining order against Trump being overturned and another upheld. Oregon requested an en banc hearing of an appeal of the 9^th Circuit’s mixed decision. That hearing is pending, but in the meantime, the National Guard units Trump had federalized from Texas and California have not been deployed in Portland.

What’s going on with Trump and the National Guard? Well, we got a hint from Trump himself last week in his two-hour interview with reporters from the New York Times. One Times reporter mentioned Trump’s threat in 2020 to have the National Guard seize election boxes. Trump was asked, in a discussion about the upcoming midterm elections, if having the National Guard seize ballot boxes would be an option for this election. Trump lamented that “I should have” had the Guard seize election boxes in 2020, but for this year, maybe not. Referring to the National Guard, Trump explained, “I don’t know that they are sophisticated enough. You know, they’re good warriors. I’m not sure that they’re sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats and the way they cheat, to figure that out.”

Sophisticated enough? It sounds like Trump doesn’t trust the National Guard to do what tells them to do. His deployments to Washington, Memphis and New Orleans have petered out. Nobody is paying attention to them. Photos of the Guard in D.C. show people jogging past groups of soldiers standing near monuments on the Mall. Photos from Memphis show small groups of Guard soldiers walking along the Beale Street blues district with civilians passing them calmly. Photos from New Orleans are similar, showing small groups of Guard soldiers in the French Quarter walking past civilian tourists.

In a word, Trump’s National Guard deployments have turned out to be anticlimactic. One reason may be the demographics of the National Guard, which is about 80 percent male, 20 percent female, 20 percent Black, about 10 percent Latino, and about 5 to 8 percent Asian or other. Close to the demographic makeup of the military generally, but where the National Guard departs from the greater U.S. Army is in age. The average age of Guard officers is about 38, with enlisted soldiers averaging 29 years old. The Guard is also better educated than the Army at large, with more than 50 percent having a high school diploma or some college, 18 percent having a bachelor’s degree, and 9.3 percent having an advanced degree.

This is Trump’s “unsophisticated” National Guard – older, better educated, and nearly as diverse as the rest of the U.S. military with too many moral scruples for his taste.

You know who Trump likes and trusts now: ICE agents. There are no figures for the age, gender, and racial makeup of ICE agents, particularly new hires. But I looked in vain to find even one photo taken of ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis showing either a female or Black agent. In the photos of Greg Bovino, the overall commander of the ICE and Border Patrol deployment to Minneapolis, he is surrounded by armed and masked white men.

ICE agents are doing exactly what Trump wants them to do in Minneapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere. They’re rounding up people without warrants who are non-white and appear to be foreign and speak English with an accent. They are using teargas or other “chemical irritants” against demonstrators. They are arresting street protestors at random, and they have killed one woman, Renee Good, who was not threatening or putting anyone in danger.

Kristi Noem, Trump, Vance, and all the rest of them are delighted, defending their out-of-control ICE and Border Patrol agents and attacking anyone who criticizes them. Trump himself accused Good and her wife of being “disrespectful” of ICE agents, as if that justified the shooting of Good and leaving her unattended in her car for nearly 20 minutes while waiting on the arrival of an ambulance.

Trump’s ICE recruitment campaign could be summed up as “normal people need not apply.” They aren’t trying to recruit people to defend the United States like regular Army and National Guard soldiers are hired to do. They’re recruiting an army of civilian stormtroopers, over-paying them with our tax dollars, and turning them loose on the streets of cities in Democratic Party controlled states like Minnesota and Illinois and Oregon and California. Trump’s ICE recruits are given minimal training in law enforcement because what they’re doing has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with aggression and repression and fear.

We have turned a corner. Using the National Guard isn’t working for Trump, because Guard soldiers do not fit the needs of Trump as he heads into the second year of this term. He has learned that he can’t use people whose allegiance is to the Constitution and the defense of the nation. He wants an army of pretend soldiers who have been hired to be loyal to him, who will follow any order they are given, including shooting people who are “disrespectful” and do not “comply” with orders.

Trump is doing the equivalent of hiring the people he pardoned for crimes committed on January 6 and giving them guns and vests and helmets and masks and turning his mob loose not on the Capitol this time, but on us.

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For several weeks now, protesters have taken to the streets across Iran to demand an end to the theocratic regime that has terrorized and repressed the population for decades. Hundreds and perhaps thousands have been killed by government forces that are raining bullets on unarmed citizens; more than 10,000 people have been arrested. The government has imposed an internet blackout as it tries to violently quell dissent.

It’s hard to overstate just how brave these protesters are. Every single night they turn out on the streets, knowing that simply by doing so, they may never come home. Every single person who protests risks their lives. And thousands upon thousands of them do it anyway.

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Iranians have risen up in protest before; their government has crushed them before. It is a fool’s errand to make any predictions about how this ends. But I hope, for the sake of Iranians, it ends with the fall of this regime and the blossoming of a vibrant democracy. Those are not likely nor easy outcomes. But bigger miracles have happened.

The Iranian regime, like most autocracies and certainly like all theocracies, is a fundamentally misogynistic one, and so it is perhaps not surprising that much of the protest momentum has come from women and those who support women’s rights (the Women Life Freedom movement lit a fire that was for a time dimmed to a mere ember, but clearly has not been extinguished). The Iranian regime’s control of women is vast and harsh. A severe and modest dress code including mandatory hijab is widely enforced, with the “morality police” roaming the streets and beating women who don’t comply; as is common in many authoritarian regimes, the authorities will sometimes relax enforcement, only to suddenly scale it up and make an example of some poor soul who did the wrong thing at the wrong time, creating a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity. Men have many more rights than women to jobs, money, property, power, and lives free from violence. Sons inherit more than daughters; widows barely get any their deceased husbands’ property, leaving them impoverished or dependent on whoever does; a woman’s testimony in court is worth only a fraction of a man’s; children almost always go to their fathers in cases of divorce, making it impossible for many Iranian women to escape abusive marriages; Iranian women are allowed to get degrees, but they cannot travel abroad without their husbands’ or fathers’ permission. Husbands can bar their wives from working. Men who abuse or kill women too often face little or no punishment.

The Iranian regime tends to clamp down harder on women’s rights when it feels under threat. “When the government faces unsolvable problems, it turns to issues it considers controllable,” one Iranian human rights lawyer told DW. “The oppression of women has become a central instrument of state power demonstration.”

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This is not unique to Iran. When autocrats grab power, they almost universally begin bulldozing the rights of women and minorities. Autocracy itself hinges on hierarchy, with a strongman at the top. Autocrats understand that their followers often want to see facsimiles of that hierarchy in their personal lives, with them at the top — and the easiest way to do this is to enforce gender hierarchies. This also creates a broader social normalization of top-down male rule, which of course the autocrat needs to be considered legitimate (an agent of the state who calls an unarmed woman a “fucking bitch” as he kills her and enjoys near-universal defense from the regime is representative, not anomalous). That the autocratic and theocratic Iranian government is also a fundamentally misogynistic one is not a coincidence, but a feature and a necessity of autocratic and theocratic regimes.

Supporters of and apologists for Islamism love to claim that they are the ones really truly standing up for Muslim women in opposition to a cunning West that uses feminism as a dirty trick to justify war and regime change. Like most widely-believed lies, this one has a grain of truth to it: The invasion of Afghanistan, for example, was bolstered by a sudden right-wing interest in the rights of Afghan women who had been long oppressed by the Taliban. But the cynical appropriation of feminist activism by George W. Bush and his administration — men and a few women who opposed women’s rights in just about every other context — is not the same thing as actual feminists beating the war drum. And I think you’ll have a very hard time finding many actual feminists today who argue that, because the Iranian regime oppresses women, the US should invade Iran, depose its leader, and usher in a new golden age of gender equality (this did not exactly work out well in Afghanistan).

But the misappropriation of feminist politics is now common among conservative reactionaries, pro-Islamists, and autocracy supporters. Some of it comes from a familiar “separate but equal” view of gender equality: That women and men have equal dignity in the eyes of God, but different roles and obligations and therefore different rights. In this line of reasoning, men having more authority and power and freedom than women isn’t indicative of inequality, but of the reality of different needs and abilities. Another line is that actually, Iranian women want theocratic rule and mandatory hijab, and so do millions of Muslim women around the world.

This is, of course, hot bullshit. That some women want to see other women oppressed (and yes, legally mandating that women wear specific “modest” garments is oppressive and misogynist) is not a good argument for oppressing women. That some people want to impose their religion on everyone else is not a good argument for theocracy. Lots of people have bad idea and want bad things. The foundational ideal behind liberal democracy is that generally, people should get to choose their own leaders and determine their own paths, while minority and long-persecuted groups should also be protected from the tyranny of the majority — everyone gets individual liberty, the collective gets self-governance, and if the results are bad you get to change your leaders through elections. This is admittedly an imperfect and horribly inefficient system, and also, to paraphrase a line you have certainly heard, better than all the other systems we’ve come up with.

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In short: The Iranian protesters no doubt have a wide set of beliefs when it comes to their country’s future and rights of their countrywomen. But what they’re demanding now is very simple: It’s the right to decide their own future. And the first thing they want is an end to the tyrannical misogynists who have strangled their nation for nearly half a century.

This should be an easy thing for liberals, leftists, moderates, and freedom-loving conservatives alike to support. But, no. The Iran protests have also revealed a deep moral rot among some in the American far left, and (not surprisingly) a profound hypocrisy and reflexive racism among many on the American right.

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America has a familiar pattern. The racist white men of the right break things. The left tries to fix it. The racist white men of the right break them again, but worse than last time. The left tries to fix it again and is blamed for not fixing it fast enough. No one pays a price for what the racist white men have done.

It has been this way since we failed to hang the leaders of the Confederacy as the traitors they were. When we didn’t hunt down and kill every last member of the original KKK. When we didn’t arrest and execute treasonous American Nazis during and after WWII, but we put 120,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps “just in case they were dangerous.”1

We didn’t arrest and execute the tens of thousands of racist whites who lynched thousands of blacks over the course of eighty years of terror. We didn’t arrest right-wing anti-government militias planning to overthrow the government. We dragged our feet on arresting Trump. We didn’t shoot several hundred insurrectionists on January 6th. There is always an infinite amount of forbearance for the fucking racist white men of America.

But I believe we have reached a tipping point. I believe that this time will be different, and woe be to the fascist fucks who brought us to this point.

Americans are an extremely punitive people. We only see morality when someone suffers for their crime. We are also a deeply racist people and tend to equate “crime” with “Those People.” We love to see Black teenagers put away for 20 years for stealing a $50 pair of sneakers, but cry bitter tears of regret if a white rapist in his early 20s gets any time at all for raping an unconscious woman. After all, we don’t want to ruin his future! He’s just a kid! Blablabla…

Still, we remain a punitive people. The left, traditionally, has resisted this impulse. Yeah yeah yeah…we’re the mob that “cancels” people all the time. Why, cancel culture is what “forced” the right to embrace fascism in the first place!

Sure it did, fucko.

There is, however, a slight difference between publicly shaming racists and misogynists and other assorted idiots and creeps, and holding racist white men legally accountable for their crimes. As mentioned, we traditionally do not do that. We like to “look forward, not back.” We prefer to “move on for the good of the country.”

The left is usually too busy trying to put out the fires the racist white men have set to be bothered punishing the racist white men.

I watched the left move on from the Bush regime because they had a country to fix. I watched them move on from Trump 1.0 because we had a lot of big problems that needed to be addressed.

Even before Bush and Trump left office, people were talking about “getting back to normal.” They weren’t talking about revenge or accountability. They just wanted Republicans out of office to put a stop to their criming. We just wanted it over so we could get on with fixing what they broke and put it behind us.

That’s not what is happening now. Just one year into Trump’s second time in office and no one at all is talking about getting things back to normal.

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You have the people whining that it’s all over. Everything’s ruined and nothing can ever be fixed. Those people are boring and lack the capacity to see anything beyond the next ten minutes. Ignore them.

There are, however, a lot more people who see the future very clearly. In that future, the regime topples. How is not really important. It could collapse and be driven out of power like so many fascist regimes before it (possible). Or we could push through to the ‘26 and ’28 elections with results so lopsided that no amount of tampering will be enough to keep the regime in place (likely).

Regardless of how it happens, the regime falls, and then come the reprisals. This is what will make this time different. There will be no “moving on for the good of the country.” There will only be investigations and commissions and trials, and if the regime continues as it has, mob justice.

Am I advocating violence? No. Am I going to shed a tear over ICE agents being found and dragged into the streets? Nah.

I keep reminding people that one of America’s foundational stories is that we kill tyrants and we are a country with 400 million guns. Choosing to be the tyrant in that equation comes with a price.

We are also a country that has glorified killing Nazis for the last 80 years. Maybe making your organizing principle Nazism is not a good idea in, again, a country with 400 million guns as well as a taste for killing Nazis.

Recruiting Nazis is a great way to be labeled a Nazi. Seems like common sense to me. What happens after that is pretty much all your own fault.

But I’m not really hoping for, or relying on, mass street justice. I predict/demand tribunals that will make the Nuremberg Trials seem quaint and provincial in comparison.

This is a regime that has three more years of escalation ahead of it. We’re already at concentration camps, secret police, and invading other countries after one year. The regime is obviously trying to speed run the entire Nazi playbook, and mass graves, if they haven’t already been dug, are being planned as I type this.

ICE is murdering people in the streets. They will continue to murder, and the frequency will increase as they attempt to spark a riot under orders from Stephen Miller. The tens of thousands of white nationalists flocking to recruitment offices will soon be out on the streets, poorly trained and heavily armed, with the belief they have “total immunity.”

They are all very, very wrong. Even when Stephen Miller uses the autopen to give them all a blanket pardon, it will not stop individual states from coming after them. It will not stop the next president from firing them all, stripping them of their pensions, and launching investigations anyway.

Here’s the important bit: I am not the only person saying this. It’s not just angry people on social media saying it. It’s not just random people at protests saying it. It’s people with platforms saying it:

Here’s Paul Krugman:

Here’s a warning to all his other enablers: if you do not do something to stop this madman, you will go down in history as traitors to this country.

And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

It doesn’t get much more level-headed and calm than Paul Krugman. And yet, here he is making the same case I am. There will be no “looking forward.” There will be tribunals and accountability for individuals. There are a lot of individuals to hold accountable, and look at that, the regime has conveniently built all this lovely prison space for us to fill with traitors.

Every day, there are dozens of new videos of ICE and CBP agents brutalizing people. Every day, new stories of horror come out of ICE detention centers. Every day, the regime pushes new levels of cruelty, and there are those eager to lap it up.

We see you and we will make you pay for what you are doing. You will cry and weep and rage at how unfairly you are being treated. Your wails will fall on deaf ears. Americans are not a forgiving people, and you have hardened our hearts, something you will come to regret. I promise you. You will miss the days of bleeding heart liberals.

I have faith in the better nature of mankind. But that is not what I am relying on here. Like the sun, our better nature will shine through once more. Eventually. For now, I have faith in our endless capacity for rage and our desire for revenge and justice.

We have let this cancer of white nationalism go for too long, and the racist white men have gotten too comfortable. They decided to go in for the kill. But if they fail, and it’s increasingly looking like they will, maybe they can try another insurrection. Then we’re right back to that equation of 400 million guns and watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.

Damn shame that would be. I’ll bring the popcorn.

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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 294 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 Opinionated Ogre is 100% reader-supported. Please help me continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!)! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!

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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.

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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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.