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.

Within a few hours of the killing of Renee Nicole Good, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem accused her of refusing to obey commands of ICE agents to get out of her car and then she said Good had “weaponized her vehicle and attempted to run a law enforcement officer over.” Noem defined Good’s actions as “an act of domestic terrorism.”

If you look up the U.S. Federal Code, you won’t find a law forbidding domestic terrorism. This is because when Democrats in Congress wrote and passed a bill called the “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2023,” Republicans in the Senate got together and refused to vote for it on the unfounded theory that the proposed law targeted right wing groups and the organizations that funded them.

Last year, Donald Trump realized that had been an error, because such a law could be used against “left wing lunatics” and Antifa. So, he issued an executive order declaring Antifa a terrorist organization, and he followed that up with “National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7” and titled it “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”

If you think Trump’s order targeted groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, which have been convicted of organized political violence and terrorism for their acts on January 6, 2021, you would be dreaming. Nope, the only group he mentions is Antifa, but his target is much, much wider – pretty much any liberal or lefty group that has ever protested anything. Trump’s memo goes after “radicalism…to include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Yep, that’s us all right.

Trump’s order calls for the formation of so-called “Joint Terrorism Task Forces” to go after “all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them.” It directs the Treasury Department to investigate and disrupt left-wing organizations and deny their tax-exempt status. The Attorney General is authorized to identify any group “engaged in activities meeting the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’” and designate them as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

The FBI did something unnervingly close to this back in the 1960’s and 1970’s when they went after Civil Rights and anti-war groups in a wholesale way. The FBI came up with a “Rabble Rouser Index” and a “Security Index” that listed “key activists” and left-wing organizations as “national security threats.” They used the indexes to target individuals and groups for surveillance under COINTELPRO, a program that targeted everyone from Martin Luther King, the United Farm Workers, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Moratorium Committee, the Black Panthers, and the American Indian Movement (AIM). I know for a fact that I have subscribers who were associated with some of those groups. Nobody was breaking any laws, but that wasn’t the reason for the FBI’s lists. The point was to harass and intimidate individuals and groups that the government saw as subversive.

Isn’t it amazing how quaint the word “subversive” sounds from the perspective of today? The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Good’s wife, Becca, for her connections to “activist groups” that oppose his immigration policies. On Sunday, Trump called Renee and Becca “professional agitators” who were part of a campaign of “paid protestors” without a shred of evidence that anyone is paying a single person to turn out on the streets of Minneapolis or anywhere else to protest against ICE and its campaign of rounding up immigrants and citizens alike.

In December, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an “implementing memo” for Trump’s NSPM-7, including Trump’s definition of radical targets to include groups and individuals who advocate “adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity.”

We aren’t anti-American, or anti-capitalist, or anti-Christian. Trump is trying to define anyone who doesn’t support him as anti-American, and anyone holding beliefs he doesn’t approve of are domestic terrorists. Apparently, calling Trump a fascist has really gotten under his skin. He is mobilizing his government to go after “terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’” Trump claims that “this ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.”

You are part of the anti-fascist “lie” if you believe in your right to be secure in your own home against unreasonable searches, if you believe in your right to love the person you want to love whatever his or her gender, if you believe you have a right to demand redress of grievances against laws passed by a corrupt Congress and signed by a corrupt president, if you believe in the right to protest – if you believe, essentially, in freedom.

This is what it has come down to. The president of our country sees being anti-fascist as illegal. There may not be law against protesting yet, but if you attend the next No Kings rally, if you show up to protest ICE roundups, if you march in the street against Trump’s newly-hatched militarism, they will be watching.

There are more of us than there are of them. Every poll today supports this, including recent polls that show 57 percent of the public is against ICE roundups of immigrants. Keep marching but watch your step.

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The attack by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., is far from over, in part because of the untested legal workaround Hegseth is using as intimidation.

The case remains an unexploded, irksome explosive that could seek to destroy free speech to keep Hegseth from having to answer questions from the public he is supposed to serve.

Like most of the Trump administration assaults on perceived political enemies, Hegseth is nasty, under-evidenced,  overly personal, and seeks a punishment most easily achievable rather than focusing on proving a declared violation.

As with threatened but failed prosecution attempts against James B. Comey Jr., former FBI director, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and others, they are meant as retribution and protection of Trump and his circle, not resolution of crimes or civil law violations. As in those cases, the threat of reconstituting cases continues.

In November, Kelly was among six lawmakers to make and distribute a video citing the military’s own warnings for officers and enlisted personnel to consider whether they are being given illegal orders to carry out, and that they have the right to say no. Yesterday, Kelly filed suit in federal court, saying that Hegseth had unlawfully punished the senator for his speech and violated his due process.

Though Kelley and company, all veterans or former intelligence officials, did not reference specific military orders that should be questioned, we’ve seen several instances recently in which the orders to strike anew at stricken crew members on a suspected drug boat, the deployment of National Guardsmen to city streets, or now, by extension, the shooting of an unarmed Minneapolis citizen protesting against the spreading ICE raids in residential neighborhoods all raise legal questions.

In what has become pattern in this administration, Kelly’s “crime” here was to point out the law that is taught to every officer and enlisted soldier, sailor, airman, Marine and Guardian. Only in the cockeyed view of this administration is a dissenting word from existing law seen as a cause for punishment. Kelly has promised to fight any punishment as unwarranted.

Hegseth Took Easiest Route

Though Hegseth had threatened to re-active Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, to stick him before a court martial board, Hegseth settled on a censure letter to Kelly’s file that says that the senator’s actions were prejudicial to good order and discipline.

That letter – something he could do without process or consultation – opens the way to possible reduction in retirement grade and pay.

That judgment remains pending before Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, who must recommend an action to Hegseth – who already has made up his mind. Regardless, the censure letter cannot be changed, but Kelly remains within time to file an opposing letter to answer its claims. (As an aside, Phelan contributed more than $800,000 to the then-candidate Trump’s joint fundraising committee.)

The possibility of a court martial still hangs in the air, though a board of military peers sitting as jury would have to overlook the statements that Kelly quotes as having come directly from the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) to which they all swore an oath. Hegseth has referred the others in the video to the FBI for investigation as having committed “acts of sedition.”

According to USNI News, which covers the military as an independent voice, Hegseth has a variety of punishments available, though most of them are intended for application towards serving military troops, not retirees, and not U.S. senators whose job includes oversight of the military. There are some limitations on what retirees can say freely, but there must be a direct link between objectionable speech and actual military operations. It also must involve something contemptuous against a politician or member of the chain of command.

Kelly’s remarks telling service members to refuse unlawful orders don’t fall under restriction from good order and discipline, and don’t advise specific military orders to refuse. Any broad contempt for Hegseth is shared far more widely than Kelly alone.

Legally Dubious

Meanwhile, the very same Hegseth has declined to cooperate with Congress about releasing videos of the September “double-tap” strikes against a suspected drug-smuggling boat crew and generally has withheld information about National Guard deployments or details about current orders and plans for the military in Venezuela.

Donald Trump himself told The New York Times in a recorded interview that he sees adherence to domestic and international law as relatively optional, that that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality.”

Obviously, ordering military strikes in Venezuela without a specific aim other than capturing leader Nicolás Maduro to face drug charges, does not violate Trump’s morality. Nor do attacks on shipping, or on small, suspected drug boats, deployment of troops on our own city streets or extending paramilitary status to undertrained Homeland Security agents.

Given the number of court actions that have found legal problems with Trump administration enforcement actions, the possibility of “illegal” orders seems endless.

For a host of reasons, the warnings from Kelly and company seem well founded. Hegseth’s one-man prosecution campaign seems unfair and reflective of an administration that finds legal boundaries mere guidelines.

Opening Fraud Charges for Fed Chair

In like fashion, the Justice Department’s announced investigation of criminal fraud charges against Fed chair Jerome Powell begs many of the same questions, though the prosecutor is U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and the circumstances involve construction costs for a replacement complex on the National Mall and lying to Congress.

As a result, the probe comes across as a political swipe against Powell over disagreement with Trump about the nation’s basic interest rates, not a fix for high building costs. It’s another move towards intimidation rather than for justice, all because Trump wants lowered borrowing rates from an independent Fed panel. On top of all else, Powell’s term will expire this year and Trump can name his replacement (Trump did name Powell, of course.)

Two aspects stand out: The investigation has become public before it has collected necessary evidence, and it is shaped around a criminal charge as a first alternative, rather than one of multiple routes towards controlling the money spent or planned to finish construction. Criminal fraud will necessitate proving intent, among other things, and at this point, the prosecution does not even have the basic construction documents in hand.

Once again, the Trump administration is bending law enforcement around its desire for political results, not sifting evidence first to even determine if there is a crime here.

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The post Hegseth’s Pursuit of Mark Kelly appeared first on DCReport.org.

What does it really mean for a state to be “dementia-friendly”?  

Over seven million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease and countless others suffer from other forms of dementia and cognitive impairment. As the prevalence of dementia and related diseases continues to rise, how we define dementia-friendliness matters.  

Recent rankings of dementia-friendliness emphasize disease burden and late-stage dementia capacity, like the number of memory care beds available. This definition is both antiquated and incomplete, though. Breakthroughs in early detection, disease-modifying treatments, and clinical trials are reshaping what it means to live with Alzheimer’s and dementia – but access to this progress depends heavily on state policy.  

In my recent piece for Health Affairs Forefront, I argue for redefining dementia-friendliness around the state policies that make early diagnosis, high-quality care, and community support possible. Across the country, states are already leading the way by expanding coverage for biomarker testing, investing in the workforce, supporting caregivers, and coordinating care across the disease continuum.   

You can read more here.

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I’m taking a little bit of a break from the firehose of political news for something a little different: Holographic anime girlfriends.

No, this is not from a movie or TV show. This is something that is for sale in the real world and is just as weird and creepy as it sounds:

Even Razer’s own marketing pushes this uncomfortable idea of bonding a little too closely with Project Ava. Razer refers to Ava as a “Friend for Life,” and something that will “bridge the gap between virtual assistance and physical companionship by providing a 24/7 digital partner that lives right alongside the user.”

Holographic girlfriends are not a new idea. They’ve been around for several years, but now they’re being mass-marketed, and this is going to get really ugly, really fast. One of the things I do with my writing is look ahead at certain trends and ask, “Is that going to be a problem, and if so, how bad?” AI girlfriends is one of those trends.1

Two years ago, almost exactly, I wrote about AI-powered sex dolls and how excited the incel community was to finally get one over on the “feminazis” ruining their lives.

Sex dolls, particularly AI-powered ones, are really expensive, several thousand dollars apiece. The barrier to entry was too high to be a real problem. But these holographic “companions” will sell for just $120 or so. That’s very affordable, and there are multiple versions coming out from different companies. This is something the tech world is pushing REALLY hard.

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On the one hand, a little virtual AI assistant that can “see” you with a camera and respond to your movements and facial expressions is a sci-fi dream come true. But that’s not what these are going to be used for. We all know that. If they were, the little anime girl wouldn’t be in a t-shirt and…nothing else. Here’s one that’s completely normal and not 100% at all designed for the male gaze.

Sure. These aren’t going to be immediately used for sex. Did I mention that Project AVA by Razer runs on Grok, the Twitter AI now famous for spewing out Nazi propaganda and child porn on command? Oh, and tech companies having a camera and microphone watching and listening 24/7 to your most intimate conversations definitely isn’t a privacy nightmare waiting to happen.

What could possibly go wrong here? However could someone abuse this kind of technology? I’m sure it will all work out just fine.

Now, there’s a larger problem with all of this. Even if the technology was safe, which I promise you it is not, it’s not healthy.

There are multiple levels to the problem of male loneliness. We, men, have been conditioned to treat feelings like a toxic fungus on the bottom of our shoes. Anger is ok. Vulnerability is not. Empathy is literally being denounced as dangerous and antithetical to civilization.

It’s really hard to bond with others when you cannot express emotions of any kind. It’s all but impossible to forge a relationship with a woman if empathy and caring are off the table. The work we men need to do to attract a partner is just that, work. And too many men don’t want to do it.

Never mind the grooming or financial aspects. No one wants to date/marry a broke slob. Too many men don’t even want to do the bare minimum of treating a woman like a person. Lila, my now 18-year-old surrogate daughter, has told me repeatedly that the vast majority of guys she’s talked to last a week or so before they ask for naked pictures. She’s just a sex object to them. It’s hard to imagine why women aren’t throwing themselves at men. We may never solve this confounding mystery.

But now they’ll have anime AI girlfriends to tell them how funny and smart they are. How handsome and manly they are. How much they love to spend time with them, and how they can’t believe how lucky they are to be their AI girlfriend.

AI “friends” do not have a personality. They tell you what you want to hear. If you want flattery, they will flatter you. If you want them to laugh at your jokes, they will. Every single time. If you want them to love you, they will tell you that you are the center of their universe and they cannot live without you.

This is not a healthy dynamic. This is a funhouse mirror and a number of people have already been led down a dark path by AI, and this was BEFORE they started to make these things explicitly for the purpose of romantic relationships.

It’s important to understand that each generation of AI is worse than the one before it. They get more sophisticated, but also more deranged. The programmers do not fully understand how their creations work and cannot predict at all how they will behave during extended use. There is no scenario in which a human will develop a normal, healthy relationship with an AI girlfriend.

This isn’t even a Band-Aid over a growing problem. This is pouring salt on a wound and pretending it’s helping. Men will flock to this because they have been told that women are the enemy. That feminism has ruined their lives. The solution, of course, is to create the perfect woman yourself. One who never argues or talks back or says “No.” But such mindless sycophancy will only lead to frustration and even more anger at real-world women who are complicated and have agency. Women who would happily date a man if he could just think about someone other than himself for more than five fucking seconds.

These holographic girlfriends are not a solution for an external problem. They are an accelerant for an internal problem, and if they catch on, it’s going to be a disaster in just a couple of years. If we’re very lucky, men will buy them and get bored very quickly. If not, if they get addicted to the fawning feedback, the withdrawal is going to be terrible, and we’ll all suffer for it.

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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 293 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.

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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