They’re getting closer, or at least it feels that way.

A woman in Nebraska, Jamie Bonkiewicz, posted on social media Friday that she had been visited by a Secret Service agent and a local police officer and was questioned about a post she had put on X the day before. Her comment on X was, “When Karoline Leavitt gets what she deserves, I hope it’s televised.” The Secret Service agent, shrugging as if he’s just asking an innocent question, says “You don’t want to perceive any ill-will towards these people.” When Bonkiewicz answers, “Yeah, I want to see her trial,” the Secret Service agent nods, and says, “Okay, all right, no problem.”

Then he asks her, “Do you go to a lot of the - any demonstrations or things like that?” Bonkiewicz asks him, “Why do you want to know that?” He answers, “I’m just curious.”

The agent goes on to ask her whether she has any weapons in the house or has traveled to “any functions—Democrats, Republicans...any kind of rallies or anything like that?” Bonkiewicz says, “I just answered that question,” the agent says, “Okay, you don’t want to tell me.” Bonkiewicz’s husband, who has been filming the encounter, interjects by asking what the agent “considers crossing the line on social media.” Looking pleased with himself, the agent answers, “I mean, so technically, obviously, you have freedom of speech, everybody has that,” and goes on to explain that if someone makes a threat like, “I will go and kill the president,” or statements like that, he would “use the U.S. Attorney’s office.” “But something like this, a veiled threat, is it threatening in nature? Now that I know you didn’t mean anything by it, it’s basically a non-issue, right?”

Well, no, it’s not a non-issue, not for Bonkiewicz or us. An American citizen, exercising her First Amendment right to be critical of the government, in this case critical of Karoline Leavitt, gets a threatening visit from the Secret Service and local police and is questioned about any other political activity she has engaged in, including attending demonstrations – another exercise of her rights under the First Amendment.

In Northern Virginia, another woman, Barbara Wien, a retired professor of peace studies, was visited by FBI and Secret Service Agents and officers from the Virginia State Police who handed her a search warrant and confiscated her phone, alleging that it might contain evidence of her having committed a crime. She studied the search warrant, signed by a judge, and found that she was being investigated for engaging in a “coordinated plan to intimidate and harass Stephen Miller.” Three weeks before, she had shown up outside Miller’s home in Arlington and distributed fliers depicting Miller’s face with a red line drawn through it. When Miller’s wife Katie came out on the porch, Wien pointed two fingers at her own eyes and then at Mrs. Miller, in the classic “I’m watching you” signal. Days before she handed out fliers on Miller’s street, Wien had been critical of Miller on Instagram, posting, “I will devote my life to stopping him and other fascists like him!”

Katie Miller took the gesture as a threat, and apparently her husband didn’t like being criticized, so they called in the FBI and the Secret Service.

Wein lives in a Northern Virginia neighborhood where dozens of people who worked for the federal government lost their jobs in the first months of Trump’s term when Elon Musk and his DOGE idiots were running through the government, closing offices and getting people fired. Later, her television screen and social media started filling with images of heavily armed and masked ICE agents handcuffing and beating immigrants and even arresting citizens. The Trump administration was shooting boats out of the water in the oceans off both coasts without any evidence that the boats were carrying drugs or other contraband. More than a hundred people had been killed in the boat shootings.

Wien is politically active and opposed to practically everything the Trump administration is doing, especially the roundups of immigrants by ICE that are overseen by Stephen Miller. Now Wien is the subject of a criminal investigation, and her cell phone is in government hands, not hers.

Last week, FBI agents searched the home of Hannah Natanson, a reporter for the Washington Post who has specialized in covering the Trump administration’s wholesale attack on the federal workforce of Civil Service employees, firing thousands and investigating many for leaking information to the press. Natanson’s laptop, smartphone, and Garmin watch were seized in the search. Natanson’s laptop probably contained notes of her interviews with the subjects of her Post stories. Her phone contained the numbers of people she had talked to, and her Garmin watch was a complete record of where she had traveled by car, subway, and foot, containing every date and time she had spent at every address she had visited. The government was clearly after her confidential sources.

In Trump’s first term, the Department of Justice had subpoenaed journalists at the New York Times, the Post, and CNN, seeking telephone data and emails during leak investigations, a constant obsession of Trump and his minions. The Biden DOJ barred searching journalists’ records unless they were the targets of a criminal investigation. Trump returned to office, and Pam Bondi cancelled the Biden order on journalists and allowed searches of journalist’s papers, phones, and computers even if they are not the targets of investigations.

These are just the most recent examples of the Trump administration’s intimidation tactics against ordinary citizens exercising their rights to protest and speak out in criticism of the administration in general, and especially against individual Trump advisers such as Miller and Leavitt. The move against the Washington Post reporter, while not unprecedented, is another example of the escalation of Trump’s campaign to investigate and prosecute anyone he doesn’t like.

In Minnesota, where an ICE agent clearly and intentionally murdered a woman who was protesting ICE agents’ tactics in their ongoing roundup of immigrants, the Trump administration has opened criminal investigations of the dead woman, Renee Good and her wife, Becca Good, the Mayor of Minneapolis, and the Governor of Minnesota. The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good is the only one not under investigation.

People across this country are depressed and fearful of what might happen next. Who will be the next target? Who will answer their door and find FBI and Secret Service agents asking them questions about their social media posts and political activities? Which reporters and writers will they be coming for next?

Who will be the next to die at the hands of these masked bandits bent on stealing constitutional rights and people’s sanity?

Over the last year, I have gotten hundreds of messages from my subscribers expressing how anxious and fearful they are because of what is going on around them in this country. Everywhere they look, someone they value or some institution they revere is under attack. It’s impossible to go to bed at night and wake up in the morning without facing some new horror that has been perpetrated while people sleep.

Some of us have been through this before during the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. I have an FBI and Military Intelligence file that is two inches thick. I know for a fact that some of my subscribers have been under investigation for their political activities in the past. In a way, for some of us at least, what Trump and his thugs are doing is nothing new. But repression in the past was focused on the most visible and public people who were leading protests and publishing criticism in newspapers and books. People like Norman Mailer and Michael Harrington were targeted. Sam Brown and David Mixner, leaders of the Moratorium movement, were investigated. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were investigated, indicted, and prosecuted. Leaders of the Feminist movement such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Susan Brownmiller and Ellen Willis were harassed and investigated.

But agents were not arriving without warrants or subpoenas on ordinary citizens’ doorsteps to question them about a demonstration they attended or a social media post of a few words they had written.

Leaders are not the only targets now. Everyone posts on social media. Everyone attends No Kings marches and demonstrations. Everyone feels vulnerable, and that is why so many of us are depressed about what is going on around us, what is happening to people we read about practically every day. The feeling is growing that we could be next.

I remember a time in the early 1970’s when one of my West Point classmates and I were under investigation by the FBI and Military Intelligence for anti-war activity both in and out of the Army. The details are too long to go into here, but suffice to say, we became aware by deduction and induction that our phones were tapped and letters that we sent to each other had been opened and read by government agents.

This is what we did. Every time we wrote a letter or made a phone call, we began by stating that we were not advocating the violent overthrow of the government, and we had no intention to commit crimes in furtherance of our political objectives.

And then we went on and spoke and wrote just as we had before, making political statements, sharing plans for what we intended to do and who we intended to see and when, because we knew that they knew. There was no sense in keeping anything secret or concealing our activities because we were not breaking the law.

Things were bad then. People died at Kent State and elsewhere. Repressive parts of the government such as the FBI and Military Intelligence and elements of the Department of Justice were running rampant.

We had no way of knowing that the future we thought we were working towards would turn out the way it has. But we kept going then, and we must keep going now. We have rights to free speech and assembly. We should continue to use them. We had a sense back then that if there were too many of us for the government to keep track of, we would prevail.

We did then, and we will again. What we feel as we face the repression of Trump and his authoritarian regime is not the sum total of who we are. We are better than they are. There are more of us. We have the power of our numbers and our votes. We are Americans, and we will act like it with every cell of our beings.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

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!

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

⏪Press Rewind To Subscribe!⏪

Trump wants to declare martial law as his regime directs its Gestapo to become increasingly violent. Where does America go from here when its government declares war on its people? I don’t know, but I do know that we have to resist and make sure that when the regime falls, all of its footsoldiers pay the steepest price imaginable for “just following orders.”

A lot to get to this week. Let’s take a deep breath and catch up on what you missed.

Monday: No moving on “for the good of the country” this time.

Tuesday: Oh, this is going to work out just great for everyone. For sure…

Wednesday: Recording and working on the D&D campaign for a group of insane teenage girls.

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: Every dead Nazi is a warning to the rest - Never Again.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

1. Addressing misconceptions about the Insurrection Act by Robert B. Hubbell

2. Trump Backlash Is Fueling A Leftward Culture Shift - Trump’s disastrous immigration crackdown will go down as a self-own for the ages by The Big Picture and Todd Beeton at The Big Picture

3. These companies advertised on X as Grok produced sexualized images of kids - At least 37 major companies were advertising on the platform this week, a Popular Information investigation reveals. by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims at Popular Information

4. Right Wing Hate Ideology Is a Giant Inferiority Complex - They can’t recognize any achievement because it makes them feel bad about their complete lack of merit by Walter Rhein at I’d Rather Be Writing

5. ICE Now Has Sections for U.S. Citizens at Detention Sites by Dissent In Bloom

We have a president who, on a day he was not playing golf, threatened to invade and seize the territory of an American ally, deposited a check for $500 million from selling Venezuelan oil into an account in Qatar that only he controls, threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down demonstrations against ICE in Minneapolis, and suggested cancelling the midterm elections in November.

Four outrages in a matter of a few hours. In horse racing, they call that a superfecta. Karoline Leavitt told the members of the press at the regular White House briefing that Trump was “joking” when he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election” in November, because “when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms.”

This is a deadly combination for democracy. Trump is stealing public funds in plain sight. If Trump has received funds from Venezuela for any reason, that money belongs in the U.S. Treasury, not in a bank we don’t even know the name of in Qatar, the same corrupt Gulf monarchy that “gave” him the gold-plated 747 he is using public funds to refurbish and plans to rebrand as Air Force One and take with him when he leaves office.

Invoking the insurrection act is a last-option decision that has been made only a few times in recent years by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and George H.W. Bush. Kennedy and Johnson used the Insurrection Act to federalize troops in southern states when their governors would not use their own law enforcement officers to execute the Civil Rights laws that mandated the integration of public schools in Alabama and Arkansas. George H.W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act at the request of the Governor of California to help put down the riots that consumed Los Angeles after cops were let off for beating Rodney King in 1992. The L.A. riots went on for six days, with 63 people killed, more than 2,000 seriously injured, 12,000 arrested, and more than a billion dollars damage done to public and private property. I was there during the riots. We could see fires burning around the city from our street in the Hollywood Hills. It was a conflagration that threatened to consume much of the city.

The Insurrection Act allows a president to federalize command of U.S. soldiers and deploy them in a law enforcement role. The president can invoke the Act at the request of the governor of a state, or the president can invoke the Act against the wishes of the governor if local law enforcement cannot enforce the laws of the state or federal government because they are overwhelmed or refuse to enforce the laws. The Act also allows troops to be used in a law enforcement capacity if the civil rights of citizens are being violated and local law enforcement refuses to protect those constitutional rights.

Invoking the Insurrection Act suspends the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law which forbids using federally controlled soldiers to enforce the law.

What the Insurrection Act does not do is establish martial law, which is typically defined as the federal government taking over control of a state’s civilian government in an emergency. The Act does not permit soldiers to violate the constitutional rights of citizens. For example, under the Insurrection Act, soldiers cannot search private homes or businesses without a warrant. The Act does not permit soldiers to use violence, such as beatings and attacks using police dogs, to subdue people who are exercising their right to free speech. President Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act to protect the civil rights of marchers on their way from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, when they were being attacked and beaten by local and state police.

According to Supreme Court precedents, the Insurrection Act cannot be used in bad faith by a president or to “act in a way manifestly unauthorized by law,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The Act authorizes troops to be federalized and deployed in case of an “insurrection,” “rebellion” or “domestic violence,” but the Act does not define those terms. One Supreme Court decision from the 1930’s established the precedent that courts may review the use of the Insurrection Act by presidents in cases where federal troops have violated citizens’ constitutional rights or federal laws.

So even though a president can invoke the Insurrection Act at his own discretion, that right is not absolute.

The problem with this president is that “bad faith” is his way of governing. How can anyone, or any court, see using the U.S. military to attack a NATO ally as anything other than “bad faith?” How could theft of public funds be defined as executing the laws of the United States faithfully?

They can’t. But Donald Trump, protected by a corrupt decision of the Supreme Court making him immune from prosecution for any “official act,” acts every day with impunity. He tore down an entire wing of the White House without consultation with Washington D.C. agencies that control the modification or destruction of landmark buildings. Destroying the East Wing of the White House was an illegal act on its face. But with Trump himself in absolute control of the Department of Justice, who is going to stop him? According to the Supreme Court, the DOJ could not prosecute him, even if they wanted to. Similarly, the DOJ cannot prosecute him for theft of public funds, when his decision to deposit Venezuela’s oil money in Qatar would be defined as an official act.

The big question on the table, however, isn’t Trump’s theft or defiance of landmark preservation laws in Washington D.C. The question is Trump’s bad faith execution of the powers of the presidency across the board every day.

Can Trump invoke the Insurrection Act to use the National Guard in a law enforcement capacity to put down the demonstrations in Minneapolis? Probably. He would invoke the Insurrection Act on the basis that demonstrators in Minneapolis are on the streets with the express purpose of stopping ICE from enforcing the law by rounding up undocumented immigrants, which the law gives them the power to do.

Next fall, could Trump invoke the Insurrection Act to put soldiers on the streets to stop the midterm elections for Congress and state elections for representatives, judges, sheriffs, and other offices? Not by any fair reading of the Insurrection Act, he couldn’t.

But would he?

That is another question. His interview with Reuters was not the first time he has talked about cancelling the midterm elections. At a House Republican retreat last week, Trump raised the possibility of Democrats impeaching him if they win the midterms. He told House Republicans, however, that he would not cancel the elections because “the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”

That’s what we used to call a non-denial denial. Every breath Donald Trump takes is in bad faith. If he tells you he’s not lying, he’s lying. If he tells you he won’t do something, he’ll do it. If he tells you he was never on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, he was on it.

If he tells you he won’t try to cancel the midterm elections, he’ll try it. It’s up to us to be ready to use everything in our power, from the courts to the streets, to stop him.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

All the usual suspects are in the news this evening, plus Greenland and Iran. In Minneapolis, more ICE Nazis are on the streets, some of them going door to door looking for people to deport. A new and disturbing element came to light: ICE agents showed up at one house asking something like, Is this 456 Such and Such Street? The person who answered said, No, that’s next door. So, it turns out that “door to door” means that ICE is starting out with a list of addresses to look at. How they have come up with that list is what’s disturbing. How did they know the 456 address might be a place to look? I would guess by using some sort of intelligence that might be as simple as a list taken from utility bills with names that sound Latino or, in the case of Minneapolis, likely Somali.

There are other outrages, of course – a woman was stopped by ICE agents on her way to a medical appointment. When she didn’t get out of her car fast enough for their satisfaction, they broke her window and hauled her out by her arms. As she had already told the ICE agents, she was disabled and going to a scheduled appointment about her disability.

Senior White House Aide For All Things Grim Nasty and Deadly Stephen Miller went on the Will Cain Show on Fox News today and delivered what commentators are calling a chilling message. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you, or tries to stop you, or tries to obstruct you, is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

“Leftist agitator” and “domestic insurrectionist” is Trump-speak for persons exercising their First Amendment right to speak out and protest against government wrongdoing. Every day something happens that makes me want to write a sentence that begins, “This is where we are now,” but I have given up, because the lines defining our current gloomy location keep moving in the exact wrong direction.

Now, we move on to equally dark matters on distant shores. Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and Greenland’s foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, met with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House today. They answered Trump’s threats to take over Greenland “whether they like it or not” by making it clear that neither Greenland nor Denmark is interested in selling the territory to the United States. “We have shown where our limits are,” Greenland’s foreign minister told the press after the meeting was over.

Donald Trump had taken to his page on Truth Social before the meeting took place to announce, once again, that “anything less” than the U.S. “owning” Greenland is “unacceptable.” We already have treaties with both Denmark and Greenland allowing the U.S. to establish new military bases occupied by as many soldiers, sailors, or airmen as we want. The U.S. has had an Air Force base called Thule on the Northwest coast of Greenland for decades. Recently, the base was transformed to Trump’s “Space Force” and renamed Pituffik Space Base. It is staffed by what Pentagon sources call a “tiny” number of troops and is part of U.S. anti-missile early warning and space surveillance systems.

Trump disparaged Greenland’s defense forces as “two snowmobiles.” If we wanted to send an infantry division there and station a naval carrier group of warships in one of the deep water ports we maintain there, we could. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to establish the kind of U.S. presence on Greenland that Trump has said is “vital” for defense of the U.S. mainland. He could spend those dollars and establish a greater U.S. military presence on Greenland if he wanted without alienating our allies and endangering the NATO alliance. So far, all Trump has done is thunder to the press in the Oval Office and on Air Force One and post absurd but frightening threats on Truth Social. Denmark today announced that it will increase its “military presence in and around Greenland in the coming period.” Sweden announced that it has moved soldiers to Greenland for military exercises. As part of Denmark, Greenland is, of course, already under NATO protection.

The big news out of today’s meeting is that the U.S., Denmark and Greenland will convene a “high level working group” to turn down the diplomatic temperature and discuss the future of Denmark’s island territory. The New York Times reported late today that the Russian and Chinese warships that Trump has said are “circling Greenland” are 7,000 nautical miles from where Trump says they are in the Bering Strait, the body of water between Russia and Alaska that connects the North Pacific Ocean to the Arctic Sea. Either Trump can’t read a map, or he’s lying, knowing his MAGA followers don’t know where Greenland and the Bering Strait are or care. The red hats do enjoy listening to the sound of Trump’s sabers rattling, however.

In other looned-out international news, the Pentagon announced today that it will begin moving “non-essential personnel” out of the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar because of “rising tension” between the U.S. and Iran. Trump has been threatening to bomb Iran unless its regime stops killing protesters. Reports out of Iran say that at least 2,000 Iranians have been killed in more than two weeks of protests. Associated Press reported yesterday that more than 600 protests have taken place around the country’s 31 provinces. Trump put up a post on Truth Social yesterday telling Iranian protesters that “help is on the way.” What kind of help that would be is currently unknown, although Trump is fond of attacks using U.S. ballistic missiles and B-2 stealth bombers, which are based in the Midwest and must fly thousands of miles and be refueled multiple times to reach Iran.

As yet another day of madness and idiocy comes to a close, we have learned that protests against the Islamic regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are fine with Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, but protests against armed and masked ICE mobsters arresting and killing people in Minneapolis are part of an “insurrection,” and ICE agents who put down those protests are protected from prosecution by federal immunity.

He hasn’t threatened to bomb Minneapolis yet, but it’s only the middle of the month of January, giving him about three years to think it over.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

It feels like things in the US have finally tipped over an invisible edge. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot an unarmed woman in the face, muttering “fucking bitch” as he walked away. The Trump regime has not only defended him, it has leveraged the full weight of the US government to support its false narrative. The Department of Justice is investigating the victim, Renee Good, and her wife — not the officer who killed her. Various officials, including Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, have told the public demonstrable, flat-out lies about the incident, things that flatly contradict widely-available videos.

Americans are living under an authoritarian regime.

Subscribe now

And it’s growing clearer that we are living under an unabashedly white supremacist regime. And I don’t mean that in the amorphous sociocultural way, as in, systemic racism has been a part of America’s story since its beginning, white supremacy is everywhere and it’s our job to see it and resist it, everyone’s a little bit racist, etc etc. I mean it in a very stark and literal way, as in: There are Nazis in positions of power. There are people in power for whom “white people are the superior race and should therefore dominate” is a foundational belief. “White MAGA conservatives and those who share our politics will violently subjugate those who are not us” is a message being broadcast by the US government.

After ICE killed Renee Good, Noem stood behind a platform reading, “One of Ours, All of Yours” — a chilling threat of collective punishment, but also a clear statement that this administration sees some Americans as worthy of their protection, and others as outsiders and worthy targets of state violence.

It’s hard to overstate just how obscene this is. Whether one voted for Trump or not, his administration works for all Americans, and this country is all of ours; there is no “ours” and “yours.” Every president in my lifetime, and for decades before my lifetime, has been clear that there is only one America, that they preside over the whole of it, and that they work for all of us. They may not have always acted accordingly, but this — the statement that there are in-group Americans and out-group Americans, and that all of the out group will be liquidated if even one of the in group gets a paper cut — is truly unprecedented in modern times. It is the language not just of authoritarianism, but of collective punishment and crimes against humanity.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, the Department of Homeland Security and the president himself directly threatened Minnesota residents: “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”

Subscribe now

I don’t know how many ways to say that presidents should not threaten their own citizens with “reckoning and retribution.” But it’s clear, especially to ICE agents, that they have this regime’s permission to behave with total impunity — to abuse citizens, and to break the law. When Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner tweeted that ICE agents who commit crimes in his district would face prosecution, DHS responded with a meme: A listless “oh no” and then “anyway…”

That isn’t DHS saying “our officers have the right to defend themselves.” That is DHS saying: Our officers can break the law, and we don’t care.

ICE is also recruiting agents using white supremacist advertising, and Trump administration agencies are ripping off Nazi slogans. The US Department of Labor posted on social media: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” Grammatical errors aside, the phrasing was awfully reminiscent of the Nazi slogan Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer (One People, One Realm, One Leader).

The Department of Homeland Security tweeted lyrics to a white supremacist anthem, “we’ll have our home again.” The same department asked, “Which Way, American Man?” — nearly word-for-word the title of a well-known white nationalist book. They posted a painting glorifying Manifest Destiny (and the genocide of Native Americans) with the caption, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth defending.” The Department of Homeland Security shared a propaganda poster of Uncle Sam telling Americans to “report all foreign invaders” — an image they seem to have pulled from a white nationalist account (“Wake Up White Man” reads the account’s bio). The White House shared that one, too.

Unsurprisingly, many ICE agents and employees have turned out to be racists and neo-Nazis varying degrees. A captain at an ICE facility was an active member of a white supremacist internet group. ICE prosecutor James Rodden ran an X account in which he praised Hitler and wrote that “America is a White nation,” “All blacks are foreign to my people,” and “‘Migrants’ are all criminals.” He still has his job, and is appearing in Texas immigration court.

Subscribe now

Having intentionally recruited agents who respond positively to racist propaganda, ICE is now being dispatched en masse to Minnesota, a state that has angered Trump by not voting for him, and by being home to a large Somali population. ICE agents, like the rest of us, have been told by this regime that Somalis in Minnesota are subhuman “garbage” people who should not be in the country. Even Somali-Americans who have worked their way to positions of power in the American political system are not immune: Rep. Ilhan Omar may be a member of Congress and an American citizen, but her racist colleagues still call to deport her — so does Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world.

Speaking of that man — the one who has more resources than any human being in the history of human civilization, who had the president’s ear, who owns a popular social media platform — he has recently been tweeting about his nostalgia for apartheid-era South Africa, his affection for Rhodesia (a white supremacist state in which the white minority had near-total control over the Black population), and his belief in the need for white solidarity against the non-white hordes. White-run Rhodesia was “where the primordial darkness of the Stone Age was vanquished,” claims the tweet Elon Musk quote-tweeted to share. White rule across much of Africa was “a century of civilization;” now, it has turned back into a “Dark Continent.” Musk also gave a signal of approval — “100!” he wrote — to a tweet from a white supremacist who goes by Jerr. Musk shared it to his 232 million followers, and it reads: “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.” Jerr followed that tweet up with one advertising his book, which “explains why racism is moral and why White men were sentenced to emasculation after WW2.”

This is not a drill. These are not dog whistles or insinuations. This is a coordinated federal strategy to attract racists and to fold white supremacist ideology into the governing of the nation. This is the world’s richest man, and one of its most powerful, promoting white minority rule.

We have tipped into autocracy. There wasn’t a single moment; it was more like weights slowly added to one side of a scale. And this autocracy is an explicitly racial one. That isn’t new for America — the Southern US has had long periods of being a racist authoritarian sub-state — but it is different this time around, with different tools and pressure points, and with a federal government united in the imposition of tyranny. I don’t know how we navigate it, let alone come back from it. But the moment is here. It is, of course, our duty to defy despair and resist this regime however we can. And the absolute least we can do is call it what it is.

xx Jill

Subscribe now

Share

The Boone Community School District of Boone Iowa has a robust orchestra program that has existed for a century, an extraordinary achievement in any district. And now the school board has elected to end that program.

Boone is located north of Des Moines about a 45 minute drive. According to the 2020 census, there are a little over 12,000 people there, a median income of around $62K. The Lincoln Highway used to run through town until new four lanes bypassed the town in the 1960s. They got their start from coal mining in the post-Civil War days. 

Iowa is a state with a rich musical heritage. It's no coincidence that Music Man's Professor Harold Hill ends up trying to start a boys band in River City, Iowa; Meredith Wilson, creator of The Music Man was born in Mason City, Iowa in 1902 and came of age when town bands were becoming all the rage. Iowa became famous in music circles for passing the Iowa Band Law, a state law that allowed cities to levy a tax to help fund a town band. 

That law was passed in 1921, a few years before Boone launched its orchestra program. 

The program is remarkably robust for a smallish town district. There have been multiple ensembles at the high school, and a middle school orchestra, which is... brave. My rough estimate is that at maybe 20% of the middle and high school population takes part. I found some clips of the orchestra on Youtube (attached below) and the group plays a heartening assortment, from Verdi through Lady Gaga. It's a perfect assortment for a school music program--they get both the education of learning about the classics as well as the joy of making music that they know. 

And they sound good. Video clips can't capture the rich, luxurious sound of live strings (if you have never heard strings live, you just don't know, and I say that as a member of the brass instrument club, a group not known for our love of string players). But video clips can capture the painful noise of a bunch of string players scratching away in an out of tune clump-- and that sound is not in evidence here. 

As someone at last week's board meeting noted, Boone has been justly proud of having one of the last remaining orchestra programs in the state. Double points for a program that is actually good.

But as a handout at the meeting noted, orchestra is not required by the state, and the district was looking to make some budget cuts. 

Several hundred folks showed up to talk about the proposed cuts, and Ames Tribune reporter Celia Brocker didn't hear much in the extended comment period that favored cutting orchestra:

“The Boone school administration has supported the orchestra program through the Great Depression in the 1930s, the 2008 Great Recession and most recently the pandemic,” [Boone alumna Cara] Stone said. “I know the landscape has changed a lot, but don’t make cuts to the orchestra or choir program. These are programs that make students want to come to school.”

The board was looking to cut enough to cover $665,000. One member noted that cutting coaches would require cuts of 8 to 10 sports positions to get the cost of a full-time orchestra teacher (as with many districts, Boone pays its coaches a small stipend rather than a full salary). 

Why is the district scrambling for that much money? The district points to a couple of factors. One is Iowa's anemic state support for school districts. Boone's business director Paula Newbold points out that districts used to get a 4% raise in state funding every year, but for the past decade the annual increase is more like 2%. Unless Iowa lives in some special zone of the nation, that means state support, a major source of revenue for Iowa districts, has been steadily losing ground to inflation. 

Boone also has some declining enrollment numbers, though the cited decline of 630 students over the last 25 years is not exactly falling-off-a-cliff dramatic. Iowa has universal taxpayer-funded school vouchers, which are no help for either enrollment or funding; ironically, that has meant an influx of money for private schools, including those who have raised tuition to take advantage of the new taxpayer subsidy. 

Iowa Senator Jesse Green, who is from Boone, says on Facebook that Boone's troubles are totally not the legislatures fault and Boone's "poor budgeting and spending habits." He points to a graph that shows Boone raising property taxes while conveniently ignoring that rate of state subsidy support (pro tip: when your state support isn't keeping up with inflation, your alternative is to raise property taxes). 

Boone will, at least for now, keep other pieces of its instrumental music and arts programs, but it's losing health, PE, and some other positions. And it's losing a program that made it something special among other Iowan and American schools. I'm not going to make the old argument that music programs raise test scores, because I think music is more important than that (get the whole argument here) and is a critical piece of learning about humaning. Boone schools are going to be less than they were with the loss of this program.

We are going to have lots of these conversations in the years ahead. The young human population is dipping. Education privatization programs will spread already-inadequate funding over multiple school systems, like trying to cover six beds with one threadbare blanket. Districts are going to lose programs, staff, buildings, and I'm not sure we're really prepared for the difficult discussions about real causes and true solutions. The last time we had a chance to really talk about what education is for and what priorities would be was the days of Covid onslaught, and as a nation we pretty much punted that one, so I'm not optimistic about what comes next.

But in the meantime, Boone schools, city, and students are losing something that is distinctive, unique and special, which means we all are. Here's hoping things get better there soon.