No Kings Coalition Announces Immediate Efforts and Builds Towards Next National Mass Mobilization on March 28

 

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – In 2025, millions of Americans came together in nonviolent protest to oppose the growing authoritarian actions of the Trump administration and affirm that this nation belongs to its people, not to kings. Since then, people have continued to rise up against ongoing authoritarianism and federal abuses, including the administration’s latest escalation in Minnesota. The No Kings Coalition has activated an immediate and ongoing nationwide digital organizing effort leading up to their next mass mobilization on March 28, including a flagship event in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

No Kings launched its Eyes on ICE training program Monday, a nationwide virtual training designed to equip people with tools to exercise their rights and safely monitor federal enforcement actions. The first training drew a historic turnout of more than 200,000 viewers, and additional nationwide trainings will be ongoing, with the next on February 5.

The Trump administration has escalated their brutality and authoritarianism on families and immigrants in Minnesota and across the country, killing people, including Keith Porter Jr., Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and at least six people in ICE custody so far in 2026. Last year, 32 people died in ICE custody, making it ICE’s deadliest year in more than two decades.

In 2026, the No Kings Coalition expanded its anti-authoritarian movement by welcoming new partners, including even more of those most impacted by the Trump administration’s brutality and authoritarian actions. You can see a full list of partners at nokings.org/partners.

President Trump’s attempts to rule through repression have called Americans across the nation to respond through morally grounded and non-violent protest. Organizers are trained in de-escalation and are coordinating closely with local partners to ensure non-violent, lawful, disciplined, and powerful local actions.

To connect with a spokesperson for interviews, email media@nokings.org.

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Contrarians, stay engaged and keep watching this space for updates. We will be out in force, coast-to-coast. Start prepping your signs and preparing for this next great mobilization for this essential fight to reclaim our country and our democracy.

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"We are still on the path to dictatorship"

...Eventually, people in countries that are in the process of flipping from democracy to fascism figure out that they’re now living in a dictatorship; by then, however, it’s usually too late.

For people in Hungary, it was May, 2020 when Orbán started arresting people for their Facebook posts. For folks in Russia, it was December, 2011 when Alexi Navalny and his supporters were first assaulted in public and then arrested and sent to brutal gulags in Siberia. For Germans, it was July 14, 1933 — six months after he became chancellor — when Hitler outlawed all political parties except his own.

But at first, the steps from democracy to fascism and tyranny always seems like “just another thing the government has to do to deal with a very real problem.” Something that reasonable people would understand and can’t reasonably object to. Something that, even if weird, makes a certain amount of sense.

After all, we do have millions of people in this country without documentation….

Until suddenly the mask is dropped and the twisted face of hateful fascism peers out at the country with laser-red eyes and a bloody mouth filled with threats and lies. Wearing camouflage, anonymous, face masked, carrying handcuffs and pepper spray while brandishing a gun.

Today, Trump appears to be backing away from his senior toadies who’re still blaming Nicole Good and Alex Pretti for their own executions, and both Democrats and the media are proclaiming Bovino’s departure as a “victory for democracy.”

It’s no such thing. This is a recalibration. Trump, like Orbán and Putin before him, is learning just how far he can go before he or his people encounter resistance, they can’t bludgeon their way through. They’re figuring out which messages will work to get us to accept the changes they’re making to America and our political and economic systems, including how much they can steal for themselves and their families, and which schemes won’t work out for them.

This is an old playbook that dates back to Machiavelli and before. It’s how every dictator ends up fabulously rich while wielding life-or-death power. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very “banality” and “ordinariness” of such evil is its greatest weapon.

Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote: “Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence... and yet still hours of pleasure... and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”

Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it). “To resist seemed pointless;” he wrote of himself, “finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”

And Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview ten “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”

As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book: “This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow-motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. … [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win: “You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. …

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

Everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.

Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you realize that:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

Sound familiar?

Consider Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial: “Well, the Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion.”) That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Can you imagine if Obama had asserted such a power? Now it’s barely a blip.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came into being), should have set off alarm bells. Instead, it got the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay…and eventually acceptance with barely a follow-up peep from the media.

It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicled in The New York Times: “And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.

“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than five times as many countries.”

Congressional Democrats, thinking they’re winning the PR war (and not realizing this is a battle within that war, not the war itself) are suggesting they’ll only vote to fund DHS/ICE this week to avoid a government shutdown under the following conditions, as Reuters reports: “Democrats are seeking: a prohibition on ICE detentions or deportations of American citizens; a ban on masks worn by ICE agents; a requirement to wear body cameras; explicit prohibitions on excessive use of force; prohibitions on raids of churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship, as well as hospitals and schools; and no absolute immunity from prosecution of agents violating codes of conduct.”

It’s a reasonable list, if ICE were a legitimate institution worth preserving. And, of course, we do need somebody to enforce our immigration laws.

But this agency has become so corrupt, has developed such a toxic culture, and has hired so many outright dangerous former felons and open racists, that it must be shut down and replaced. And what about arresting and prosecuting the people who committed the murders that we know about? And investigating the ones we’ve only heard rumors of? And letting that prosecution go right up the chain of command all the way to the top, like it did during Watergate, when the Attorney General of the United States went to prison for years?

Why aren’t Democrats talking like that? You know, if the shoe was on the other foot, Republicans would be.

Even if Republicans were to accept all these reforms — and odds are they won’t — we’d still be on the same path toward fascism. It would just look more orderly and lawful, and we’d breathe a sigh of relief, not realizing we’d just helped the Trump regime with their latest readaptation. When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.

But there is a path forward. The antidote to normalization is outrage and resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner tables.

Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by democracies, said: “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”

We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be appalled.

That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin” and attacks Somalis like Representative Ilhan Omar we don’t say “that’s just Trump being Trump”; we say, “That’s fascist rhetoric.” When he promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we organize and demand an end to the entire rotten undertaking.

History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either. This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us peacefully in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement. If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.

Don’t get used to fascism. Get loud. Get active. Get in its way. And demand that our Democratic leaders do the same.

 -Thom Hartmann

"A Lying Government"

In Minneapolis, two recent fatal encounters with federal immigration agents have produced not only grief and anger, but an unusually clear fight over what is real. In the aftermath of Alex Pretti’s killing on Jan. 24, 2026, federal officials claimed the Border Patrol officers who fired weapons at least 10 times acted in self-defense.

But independent media analyses showed the victim holding a phone, not a gun, throughout the confrontation. Conflicting reports about the earlier death of Renée Good have similarly intensified calls for independent review and transparency. Minnesota state and local officials have described clashes with federal agencies over access to evidence and investigative authority.

That pattern matters because in fast-moving crises, early official statements often become the scaffolding on which public judgment is built. Sometimes those statements turn out to be accurate. But sometimes they do not.

When the public repeatedly experiences the same sequence – confident claims, partial disclosures, shifting explanations, delayed evidence, lies – the damage can outlast any single incident. It teaches people that “the facts” are simply one more instrument of power, distributed strategically. 

And once that lesson sinks in, even truthful statements arrive under suspicion. And when government stories keep changing, democracy pays the price.

CNN’s Jake Tapper goes through key excerpts from a judge’s ruling which found that Border Patrol official Greg Bovino lied “multiple times” about events surrounding his deployment of tear gas in a Chicago neighborhood.

Lying in politics

This is not a novel problem. During the U.S. Civil War, for example, President Abraham Lincoln handled hostile press coverage with a blunt mix of repression and restraint. His administration shut down hundreds of newspapers, arrested editors and censored telegraph lines, even as Lincoln himself often absorbed vicious, personal ridicule.

The Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s brought similar disingenuous attempts by the Reagan administration to manage public perception, as did misleading presidential claims about weapons of mass destruction in the 2003 leadup to the Iraq War.

During the Vietnam era, the gap between what officials said in public and what they knew in private was especially stark. Both the Johnson and Nixon administrations repeatedly insisted the war was turning a corner and that victory was near. However, internal assessments described a grinding stalemate.

Those contradictions came to light in 1971 when The New York Times and The Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, a classified Defense Department history of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. The Nixon administration fiercely opposed the document’s public release.

Several months later, political philosopher Hannah Arendt published an essay in the New York Review of Books called “Lying in Politics”. It was also reprinted in a collection of essays titled “Crises of the Republic.”

Arendt, a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution and the very real risk of deportation to a concentration camp, argued that when governments try to control reality rather than report it, the public stops believing and becomes cynical. People “lose their bearings in the world,” she wrote.

‘Nobody believes anything any longer’

Arendt first articulated this argument in 1951 with the publication of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in which she examined Nazism and Stalinism. She further refined it in her reporting for The New Yorker on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a major coordinator of the Holocaust.

Arendt did not wonder why officials lie. Instead, she worried about what happens to a public when political life trains citizens to stop insisting on a shared, factual world.

Arendt saw the Pentagon Papers as more than a Vietnam story. They were evidence of a broader shift toward what she called “image-making” – a style of governance in which managing the audience becomes at least as important as following the law. When politics becomes performance, the factual record is not a constraint. It is a prop that can be manipulated.

The greatest danger of organized, official lying, Arendt warned, is not that people will believe something that is false. It is that repeated, strategic distortions make it impossible for citizens to orient themselves in reality. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie,” she wrote, “but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world … [gets] destroyed.”

She sharpened the point further in a line that feels especially poignant in today’s fragmented, rapid and adversarial information environment: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” she wrote. 

“A lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history … depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.”

When officials lie time and again, the point isn’t that a single lie becomes accepted truth, but that the story keeps shifting until people don’t know what to trust. And when this happens, citizens cannot deliberate, approve or dissent coherently, because a shared world no longer exists.

                                    Political theorist Hannah Arendt in 1963. 

Maintaining legitimacy

Arendt helps clarify what Minneapolis is showing us, and why the current federal government posture matters beyond one city. Immigration raids are high-conflict operations by design. They happen quickly, often without public visibility, and they ask targeted communities to accept a heavy federal presence as legitimate. When killings occur in that context, truth and transparency are essential. They protect the government’s legitimacy with the public.

Reporting on the Pretti case shows why. Even as federal government leaders issued definitive claims about the victim’s allegedly threatening behavior – they said Pretti approached agents while brandishing a gun – video evidence contradicted that official account.

The point isn’t that every disputed detail in a fast-moving, complicated event causes public harm. It’s that when officials make claims that appear plainly inconsistent with readily available evidence – as in the initial accounts of what happened with Pretti – that mismatch is itself damaging to public trust.

Distorted declarations paired with delayed disclosure, selective evidence or interagency resistance to outside investigations nudge the public toward a conclusion that official accounts are a strategy for controlling the story, and not a description of reality.

Truth is a public good

Politics is not a seminar in absolute clarity, and competing claims are always part of the process. Democracies can survive spin, public relations and even occasional falsehoods. But Arendt’s observations show that it is the normalization of blatant dishonesty and systematic withholding that threatens democracy. Those practices corrode the factual ground on which democratic consent is built.

The U.S. Constitution assumes a people capable of what Arendt called judgment – citizens who can weigh evidence, assign responsibility and act through law and politics.

If people are taught that “truth” is always contingent and always tactical, the harm goes beyond misinformation. A confused, distrustful public is easier to manage and harder to mobilize into meaningful democratic participation. It becomes less able to act, because action requires a shared world in which decisions can be understood, debated and contested.

The Minneapolis shootings are not only an argument about use of force. They are a test of whether public institutions will treat facts and truth as a public good – something owed to the community precisely when tensions are highest. If democratic life depends on a social contract among the governed and those governing, that contract cannot be sustained on shifting sand. It requires enough shared reality to support disagreement.

When officials reshape the facts, the damage isn’t only to the record. The damage is to the basic belief that a democratic public can know what its government has done.

-The Conversation

Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin 

 

Companies with the Biggest Contracts that Support U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement

AT&T: The telecommunications giant was awarded $90.7 million in 2021 to provide ICE with IT, network products and support in a contract set to expire in September, though it includes a potential end date of 2032 that could push the deal’s value to $165.2 million

Charter Communications: The company provides cable and internet services for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations field office in Beaumont, Texas, in a contract valued at $12,837, which may expand to $21,839 and extend until 2028.

Comcast: The company holds an ICE award valued at $60,965.64 to provide the agency with broadcast cable at five “regional wire rooms.”

Dell: The company’s government contracting arm was awarded $18.8 million in April 2025 to support the office of ICE’s chief information officer “through the purchase of the Microsoft Enterprise software licenses.”

Deloitte: ICE has awarded the consulting firm several multiyear contracts in recent years, including a $24 million contract in 2023 to provide “data modernization support” through 2027.

FedEx: The mail carrier provides delivery services for ICE through March 2027 in a contract valued at $2.3 million.

General Dynamics: The defense firm holds a $9.6 million contract with ICE to provide “background investigative services.”

L3 Harris: Defense contractor L3 Harris was awarded a $4.4 million contract with ICE in 2022 to provide equipment to “determine the location of targeted mobile handsets to investigate crimes and threats.”

Motorola Solutions: A separate firm from the cell phone maker Motorola Mobility that produces walkie-talkies and video surveillance systems, Motorola Solutions was awarded a $15.6 million contract in September 2023 to “implement and maintain” ICE’s tactical communication infrastructure.

Palantir: The tech and analytics software provider was awarded $139.3 million in 2022 to assist “investigative case management operations,” maintenance support and “custom enhancements.”

Surprising Fact

Management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company said in July 2018 it would stop work for ICE after disclosing it had done $20 million in consulting work for the agency. The disclosure reportedly sparked protests among current and former employees who opposed immigration policies during President Donald Trump’s first term. 

Employees at Microsoft similarly protested the company’s $19.4 million contract with ICE, though Microsoft never disclosed whether it cut ties with the agency (CEO Satya Nadella said in 2018 the company provided cloud support for ICE and called Trump’s immigration policies at the time “simply cruel and abusive.”). 

Last week, more than 250 employees at several tech giants—including Amazon, Palantir, Spotify, Google and Tesla, among others—demanded their employers to speak publicly against ICE, “call the White House and demand that ICE leave our cities” and to cancel all company contracts with the agency. It’s not immediately clear whether some of the companies hold contracts with ICE…There are many more companies than the aforementioned... 

-Forbes

 

The Trump Administration

Perhaps it was the sight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis using a terrified 5-year-old boy as bait. Perhaps it was the revelation that they voided the Fourth Amendment in a secret memo. Or perhaps it was when the country watched Trump — after a year of bombing Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen — sundown in the middle of his mob-boss routine over Greenland. 

Whenever it was, the Trump administration has ended the age of savvy temporizing and feigned ambiguity. There is no longer a stigma around the use of stark, simple terms, stated loud and plain, like, “These people and their actions are evil.”

We can also say this: Wherever you live in the United States, the Trump administration is going to bring an ethnic cleansing near you, if not directly to you, and they are going to use every term except that one to describe what they are doing. They will not stop until they have ethnically cleansed the United States, and they do not care if you die. The only lesson each new body teaches them is how inconsequential it is to make the next one.

It is natural to want to evade or resist the conclusion that putting a region under a constitutional interdict and then terrorizing, assaulting, kidnapping and potentially disappearing and/or killing any person of color caught up in sweeps made by the secret police is, in fact, ethnic cleansing. But, short of gas chambers and crematoria, it is pretty much exactly the image people conjure if you tell them to close their eyes and imagine an ethnic cleansing. “It’s different when we do it” is already a bad American habit, and it is one that is dangerously easy to keep applying until something tells you to stop.

Like the people in the streets in 2020, those in the streets of Minneapolis are the ones who are making sure you understand that the Department of Homeland Security has finally become the best version of itself, the apex of its predation. 

It is a criminal, fascist profanation of the Constitution and the spirit of this nation, a perfect symptom of the soup of moral and mental diseases that constitute Trump’s mind, his Cabinet’s and all those of the mediocre light-fingered gauleiters they’ve seeded the executive and judiciary with. It, like all of them, must be torn out.

They will not stop until they have ethnically cleansed the United States.

Collectible Nazi figurine Greg Bovino spent Wednesday doing photo ops at gas stations, grinning like the Johnny Cab from “Total Recall” while encircled by his ICE dancers, trying to incite the apocalyptic urban unrest that lies sent him to put a stop to. They and their meme squad of tactical videographers need something they can twist into the war they declared was already happening. Anything, really, to drown out the message that’s come through from the streets of Minneapolis, just like it did last time.

And yet, for some, habit will be enough to deny the evidence of testimony ringing from multiple precincts and voices up and down every demographic. Some will continue to accord equal or greater weight to a single, demented, infantile voice that lied to them as few as 30,000 times in a single presidential term. 

They will mulishly refuse to emerge, at long last, from Beltway chat-show heuristics and instead reject the exhilarating freedom of trusting themselves to bear witness to reality. They will persist even as the ethnic cleansing makes its way to Maine today, and God knows where tomorrow, perhaps stopping to make an encore appearance in Chicago or Los Angeles, mowing the lawn of what’s sprung up since, like the Israeli Defense Force’s former Gaza management strategy. Then out to the counties with the bigger non-white populations, leaving cleaning up the smaller ones for later — or, like the remnants in the cities, to the snitches.

You may be hurt or killed in the act of objecting to this. The Trump administration’s response to its murder of Renee Good has been to insist on its right to murder anyone if it has probable cause, which has been defined down to a simple yes/no about whether the officer in question is anxious, annoyed or feels like you are annoying him or triggering his anxiety in a “terrorist” or “crime” way. At the same time, the percentage of the population that DHS can assume constitutes a threat, criminal or a group of hot-dish terrorists has only increased.

The percentage of the population that the DHS feels it can safely exclude from terrorist or criminal designation is rapidly shrinking. Capital cities and state governments can’t be trusted, and Trump will only grow more convinced that any perceived obstruction constitutes a capital offense for public figures. 

As with anything Trump publicly covets long enough, someone will eventually work toward the Führer to make it happen, but Renee Good is proof that everyone else is already this disposable. Party members who have stomached things so far — the same people who responded to 2020’s road-closing protests for racial justice with support for legalizing vehicular murder — will learn to swallow bigger and bigger body counts.

So why not you? Or, to come at it from a different direction: Why wouldn’t you assume you were disposable already?

They have already told all levels of law enforcement to take the gloves off, and they take care to look the other way when “officers are on scene” and a “shooting transpires” and “it eventuates” that you die. They don’t care if you are detained and some combination of filth, disease, malnourishment, injury, confiscation of your medication or “discipline” makes you die. They don’t care if your insurance rescinds your coverage and you die. They don't care if they eliminate Medicaid and Medicare, and you have to fly home and take care of your mom before she dies. They don’t care if you fly home to see her, and your plane collides with something and you die, and they don’t care if it’s blown apart by the debris from a Nazi’s rocket that was busy exploding over a protected wetland and you die.

They have already told all levels of law enforcement to take the gloves off.

They don’t care if you get measles, mumps or rubella and die. Sometime in early summer of 2020 was the last time they cared that anyone got COVID and died. They resented passing COVID relief, themselves defrauded it with lusty abandon, and come the next pandemic, they will use their own crime as justification for the moral hazard of spending a cent to make sure you don’t die.

They don’t care if you die in Greenland, Venezuela, Mexico or a training exercise, but they’re going to make you watch your secretary of DUI do kettlebell bullshit that looks like something out of a suicide manual for the lumbar spine. They don't care if the inevitable, obvious, utterly destined response to any of their casually cruel and stupidly bellicose actions on the world stage is the reason why you die, and they don’t care about the abject wretched and revolting violation of using your death to make someone else’s kid sign up and die.

They don’t care if you eat green eggs and die or eat listeria ham and die. They don't care if they JDAM your boat and die, and if you’re close enough to whatever they designate a cartel area in the next minority-target-of-opportunity strike in the Americas, they don't care if you have your passport on you for that goat selfie you’re in the middle of when you die.

When you distill all of the now overtly Nazi iconography of this down to its essence, it is all being done, somehow, for the sanctity of white women, who, looking at maternal health care data — you guessed it! They don’t care if they die, either.

Why, then, would any of us matter, standing between them and an ethnic cleansing that represents the culmination of so many unstated, then dog-whistled, then whispered, then bellowed aspirations? We have, after all, waited a decade for someone to make them care. We’ve waited for the FBI and been failed and turned against. We’ve waited for the Supreme Court and have been failed and turned against. We’ve waited for the same from opportunists among his own party and our oligarchy, only to be teased with vindication before being abandoned, failed and usually turned against.

ICE is its own opposition recruitment poster; we have to paste it everywhere.

We’ve waited for the media and been failed and, at every point, either been exploited, championed, blamed or turned against — or some combination, but mostly blamed — depending on whatever most exculpates them from past responsibilities and obviates future ones. 

The purportedly opposition party has used the same Heisenbergian Responsibility principle, including still blaming, with the McGovern-like whiff of psychological eternity, one primary candidate and maybe a dozen podcasters from 2016, whenever they can’t think of a more current scapegoat before going to commercial. We delivered the opposition a mandate to seek justice for what Trump had set in motion, and they pretended that what America craved was the sclerotic status quo ante that brought us here.

Now that we are here, we are the ones coming to save us, and we have to learn from each other. ICE is its own opposition recruitment poster; we have to paste it everywhere. 

Many more of us have to wield the shame already pressing down on the goons, ruining their fully funded shitkicker holiday with the condemnation of communities who can find, if in nothing else, a wholeness in their rejection of fascism, of violence, of being stained with the lies and abuse of faceless oppressors and unaccountable violation. Our oppressors are humiliated by bravery and terrified of being seen. The sooner their crimes surround them, and scorn and shame and rejection pours into their ears — the sooner more voices join — the more of us we can save.

Like all abusers, the Trump administration cannot abide the word “no.” Minneapolis and businesses and activists around the state are saying it again today — not some official body, but the people who make a city, who shape a community, who give it breath and bind it in mutual recognition and in crisis. They are on strike.

The courage they are showing today and have been for days upon days has been heartbreaking and wondrous. Within reach of violent, deadly men — men knowingly armored by immunity and sanctified by a criminal presidency — we have watched the people of Minneapolis run to each other in acts of incredible, vulnerable bravery, to insist that they matter, and that their community matters. Because helping is a reflex, and because that’s what Trump is wasting another unearned fortune in lives and futures and mercenaries to stop.

Minneapolis is rejecting that. It can be frightening to be among the first to say “no,” but it is such an easy word, and such an easy word to say to Donald Trump’s inhumanity. It will be so easy to join them. Each of us only makes it easier for the next.

-Jeb Lund

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“This is a massive overreach of power by the Trump administration. Due process isn’t optional. It’s a fundamental right.”

The rogue Department of Homeland Security, declaring itself to be above mere constitutional restraints, has now murdered two Americans without provocation or excuse, lied about both, and tried to block any independent investigation (excluding even the FBI from the inquiry into Alex Pretti’s execution, suggesting it understands that not even Kash Patel’s bureau will consent to a coverup).

Moreover, DHS has said it need not abide by one of the cornerstones of our democracy, the 4^th Amendment (which sprang from a central grievance against George III’s tyranny), nor does it intend to protect the right wing’s favorite item in the Bill of Rights, the 2^nd Amendment. In doing so, the Trump regime reveals itself once again as a lawless rogue operation seeking to turn America into a police state.

What 4^th Amendment?

A whistleblower recently revealed an internal Department of Homeland Security memo purporting to assert unlimited authority to enter people’s homes by force to make immigration arrests without a judge’s warrant.

The ludicrous assertion of unfettered power amounts to the repudiation of critical protection against tyrannical rule. The ACLU asserted:

“This is a massive overreach of power by the Trump administration. Due process isn’t optional. It’s a fundamental right.” Or it used to be a fundamental right, before the Trump regime decided to go all in on the authoritarian project.

The 4^th Amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Institute of Justice explains: “Before the American Revolution, officials used general warrants to search and seize colonists’ property at will. These general warrants and ‘writs of assistance” gave officials unfettered power, since they specified neither the places to be searched nor what items to be seized.” That concern motivated the Framers to guarantee the new federal government would not adopt that practice. The principle that judicial warrants are required to arrest someone in their home has been confirmed in multiple Supreme Court opinions.

Once upon a time, self-proclaimed conservatives understood this principle. “The Framers often said that ‘a man’s house is his castle,’ a phrase that had existed in English common law for centuries. …After all, property isn’t truly yours if you fear that government officials may break down the door at any moment.” So much for the assertion of private property as the key to personal liberty, a concept which they frequently invoked as the basis for “stand your ground” protections for a resident to fire on intruders. Now, Republicans — having evidently lost their attachment to the Bill of Rights — remain silent.

Democrats, however, have spoken out forcefully against this constitutional butchery, as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D- Conn.) did last week during a CNN appearance: It is a blatant, craven violation of the Fourth Amendment — a bedrock protection for people in the privacy of their homes. Americans should be terrified that this secret ICE policy authorizes agents to break down doors and ransack through their homes, arresting or detaining people without a judicial warrant.

There’s a critical difference between that administrative warrant, which is signed by an ICE officer or a deportation official, and a judicial warrant where a judge and a court have to find that there is a cause — probable cause to enter someone’s home.

Plainly, DHS officials know what they are up to is blatantly unconstitutional. They have kept the memo under wraps, allowing it to be read only in person and conveyed verbally. (The term “evidence of consciousness of guilt” comes to mind.)

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who recently walked back his permission for racially profiled “Kavanaugh stops,” might be chagrined to know this regime does not put much stock in the 4^th Amendment. If Kavanaugh now concedes that “[t]he Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force,” surely he would be nonplussed that DHS thinks it need not abide by the 4^th Amendment when it comes to Americans’ most sacred territory, one’s own home.

MAGA throws the 2^nd Amendment under the bus

Republicans have long extolled the inviolability of 2^nd Amendment, pushed for concealed carry laws, and subverted attempts to impose even minimal restrictions on gun owners. They turned Kyle Rittenhouse, an armed protestor who killed two unarmed people in Wisconsin, into a national hero.

Well, that only applies to their own supporters, it seems. FBI director Kash Patel falsely stated on Sunday, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.” That is a lie. Minnesota has a concealed carry law that gun owners do not lose when they attend a rally. (Perhaps Trump should not have pardoned the armed, violent Jan. 6 protestors; perhaps they should not have lionized Rittenhouse.)

House Whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) said on CBS, “In most states, you are not allowed to carry a gun while you’re committing another crime, and interfering with law enforcement is a felony.” Alex Pretti, as multiple witnesses and multiple videos prove, was not interfering with law enforcement. Perhaps the NRA has wasted money all these years backing Scalise and other Republicans to the hilt.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the initial blowback: “The Second Amendment protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting—a right the federal government must not infringe upon,” the advocacy group Gun Owners of America said on Saturday afternoon in response to a Justice Department official’s suggestion that law enforcement officers would likely be justified in shooting anyone who approaches with a gun.

The Democrat's Response

Democrats need be prepared to call out every U.S. senator and House member on the ballot in November with simple questions: My opponent thinks you have no rights against tyranny, even in your own home. Is that what you want? My opponent thinks law enforcement has impunity to kill licensed gun owners abiding by the law. Is that what you want?

We can see what is going on here. As MAGA slips into kneejerk defense of out-and-out fascism, no Constitutional right is sacred. This is what the “democracy issue” entails: the loss of all personal freedoms to an all-powerful state. Now, Americans must decide whether they want to give up on the 250-year experiment in opposing tyranny. They should not be confused as to where Democrats stand or where Republicans are happy to take us.

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"Our president has the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old, and our country’s reputation is paying the price" - Thom Hartmann

 

— So much for the “anti-big-government right” in America. Growing up in Michigan, I had a friend whose dad was in the Michigan Militia, a rightwing group that used to go into the forests of northern Michigan to “train” with semiautomatic weapons and survival tactics for the day when the “jackbooted thugs” from the “big government” would try to “end our freedom.” My Republican activist dad told me they were just bigots and “boys who never grew up,” but I always felt like they’d be the shock troops for a fascist takeover, should that ever happen to America.    

That was sixty years ago, long before they tried to kidnap and kill Michigan’s governor and long before anybody took Trump seriously. But now, according to a fascinating report in this week’s Washington Post, those same government-skeptical right-wingers are now fully embracing Trump’s racist crackdown on brown people using so-called “Kavanaugh Stops” in which people are now legally racially profiled. The key to their change of attitude appears to hang on the race of the people the government is targeting; so long as it’s going after people of color, they’re 100% on board. 

Apparently, these yahoos have never read Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, “First they came for…” Government that selectively enforces the law to the detriment of one disfavored group will almost always eventually turn on others. These idiots are just too stupid to realize what they’re cheering on…   

— It was the third or fourth shot that killed Renee Good. An autopsy commissioned by her family found that the first shot nicked her arm and the second shot hit her breast, but neither would have killed her. It was the third shot, taken from the side of the car into her head and completely unnecessary, that killed her. This sure looks like pure homicide, which is probably why Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem are doing everything they can to cover up this crime.

— Trump’s war on the First Amendment threatens to change America forever. Colby Hall writes for Mediaite.com: “In a functioning democracy, the federal government does not compile dossiers on students for their political views, threaten journalists with prison for covering protests, or seize reporters’ devices as a warning to sources. Yet all three have now come into focus in the United States, supported by newly unsealed court records and recent actions by the Trump administration.” He then proceeds to document in painful detail multiple times the Trump regime has violated the basic tenets of our First Amendment, including arresting and deporting people based on their speech, searching journalists’ phones and computers without legal authority, and the president himself calling for the criminal prosecution of a reporter (Don Lemon). 

Our largest media outfits are ignoring this (after many of them paid Trump off), hoping to avoid Emperor Trump’s wrath, or openly sucking up to him (CBS/Washington Post/LA Times/etc.). This isn’t about partisan loyalty anymore; it’s about whether we’re willing to live in a country where speech is still technically legal but exercising it gets you threatened with arrest, searched without warrants, or singled out for prosecution by the president himself. This is what Ben Franklin warned about when he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Without a truly free and open press, the space for dissent quietly shrinks and people learn to stay silent just to stay safe. And our republic dies.

— How did America get to the point where a five-year-old hostage is an acceptable tool of law enforcement? When ICE can detain a five year old and reportedly use that terrified child as bait while armed agents sweep neighborhoods under an explicit promise of immunity from Gauleiter Stephen Miller, it’s fair to ask how America got to the point where a five-year-old hostage is an acceptable tool of law enforcement. This isn’t about enforcing the law, it’s about raw, naked power being used without restraint, and cruelty being inflicted on people without consequence, encouraged from the top and excused after the fact by people who know better. The surge in drawn guns, shootings, and intimidation isn’t a breakdown of discipline, it’s the logical result of telling agents they won’t be held accountable no matter who they harm or how they do it. 

When most of the people being arrested have no criminal record and children are dragged into the machinery of fear, the lie that this is about public safety collapses completely. A country that tolerates terrorizing kids to score political points doesn’t just brutalize families in the moment, it corrodes the moral core of America and teaches that raw force matters more than law, conscience, or humanity.

— House passes bill funding ICE with help from seven turncoat Democrats: the bill provides more billions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement with no meaningful constraints on its violent tactics in Minnesota or elsewhere. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Jared Golden (D-ME), Laura Gillen (D-NY), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Don Davis (D-NC), Tom Souzzi (D-NY), and Vincente Gonzalez of Texas all broke ranks with the American people and their constituents to give ICE even more money and absolutely no constraints. No outlawing masks or Klan hoods, no requiring actual judicial warrants before they kick in your front door, no funding investigations of their violence or their concentration camps, nothing. 

If one of these fools represents you, you may want to call 202-224-3121 and let them know what you think of this traitorous behavior. And don’t forget to let Hakeem Jeffries, who allowed this to happen in a way Nancy Pelosi would never have tolerated, know how disappointed we all are in his failure of leadership. If Chuck Schumer has a similarly difficult time holding his caucus in line when this hits the Senate, it’s past time for Democrats to seriously reconsider our leadership choices. At the very least, supporting fascism like this should result in the loss of committee appointments.

— The Trump administration goes after protesters that stormed a church but they’re entirely fine with the protesters who stormed the capitol, killed and harmed police, and smeared poop on the wall of the capitol. I understand that there’s no First Amendment provision that protects the right to bust into a church and disrupt their services, but the outrage coming from the Trump regime and Fox “News” around this makes a mockery of their deification of the people who attacked our Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. Republicans have managed to elevate hypocrisy to an art form…

— Trump is using our money to target states that didn’t vote for him. Surprise. Trump is reviewing federal funds to Democratic-led-states. Can anyone stand up to the bully? Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and now head of the Office of Management and Budget has ordered a “review” of pretty much all federal funds flowing into Blue States. Targets include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington state, and Washington, DC. 

“This is authoritarianism, plain and simple,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), whose state is the only one on the list with a Republican governor. “The Trump administration is targeting states that didn’t vote for him—including my home state of Vermont. Using federal power to punish political opponents is anti-democratic and blatantly illegal.” Amen. So, what are Democrats going to do about it? Inquiring minds want to know…

— King of the World bully uses “board of Peace” just like he uses Tariffs. It’s all about bullying and loyalty to Emperor Trump. Trump is now trying to replace the UN with a new “Board of Peace” with him as its unchallengeable leader for life, him alone able to appoint his own successor from his own family, and member states paying a billion dollars that Trump gets to decide how to use. 

Before all these bizarre details came out and this was just part of the UN’s plan for implementing a peace deal in Gaza, Canada had initially agreed to consider membership. But after that nation’s Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a fire-and-brimstone speech at Davos warning the world about Trump’s dangerous anti-democratic impulses, Trump went to his Nazi-infested social media site to un-invite Canada. Our president has the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old, and our country’s reputation is paying the price…

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"...[Moreover], for weeks now, people across the country have been rightly outraged by the spectacle of masked ICE recruits and other federal agents acting with impunity and engaging in tactics that seem designed to intimidate, harass, provoke and endanger the residents of a major American city. 

"These unprecedented tactics—which even the former top lawyer of the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration has characterized as embarrassing, lawless and cruel—have now resulted in the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens. 

"And yet rather than trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they've deployed, the President and current administration officials seem eager to escalate the situation, while offering public explanations for the shootings of Mr. Pretti and Renee Good that aren't informed by any serious investigation—and that appear to be directly contradicted by video evidence..."