The Next Election May Be Our Last. Donald Trump is determined to subvert the midterms. All that can save us, if he succeeds, is a national strike.

 

The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression.

Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.

If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections.

The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.

Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican. Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.

Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.

The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition.

Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.

Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

When Volodymyr Zelensky — whose presidential term ended in May 2024 — informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump responded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections…So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans – but voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night.

Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud,, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.”

This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.

I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists are enemies of the open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security.

These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.

Power — as in all dictatorships — is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.

The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs.

Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education — from kindergarten to graduate school — will be indoctrination. Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.

Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy — unlike anything seen in U.S. history — makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”

Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.”

“The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:

The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.

FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local ‘election integrity’ group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”

This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November.

Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.

First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations. “At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”

The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House — including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — make these institutions unreliable.

We can only save ourselves. This means shutting the country down. Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

The Week Ahead

The Week Ahead: Coming out of a Semi-quincentennial full of blunders and bad karma for Donald Trump, we prepped for developments in the E. Jean Carroll case, Katie Phang’s Epstein files case, and the prosecution of Olympian David Hearn over alleged Reflecting Pool vandalism.

The Graham Platner Story Reveals the Difference Between the Parties: No political candidate or public servant should get a pass for sexual assault. It’s up to Democrats in Maine to decide who will replace Graham Platner as their Senate nominee, but it was rewarding to watch a political process that didn’t try to ignore his behavior or pretend it was excusable. Republicans should take note.

ICE: Still Out of Control: The death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was fatally shot by ICE officers on his way to work in Houston, is now all over the news. We checked in the day it happened as details emerged, including my detailed analysis of how the courts are responding to ICE’s arrests and mass detention policy and the patterns we are seeing—and which we must not look away from.

Joyce and Norm on Coffee with the Contrarians: Norm and I discussed the week’s legal news, what it means for each of us, and offered some practical advice about what you can do right now to support democracy.

E. Jean Carroll is Going to Outlast Trump’s Delay Game: Trump has spent years using delay games to win in court. But he’s out of time in E. Jean Carroll’s case. Best of all, he’s already put the money that will be used to pay the judgment she obtained against him into a court fund, so Trump himself can’t hold up the payment. The clerk of court will release it to Carroll’s lawyers. Read for the full run-down on this case.

DOJ: Not Doing Justice: We look at updates in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents and the prosecution of Olympian David Hearn. The cases are separate, but the issues are linked. Both are products of an administration that has no regard for real Justice. Read the full piece to understand why if neither of these men are safe, none of us are either.

Live with Mimi Rocah: Former federal prosecutor and Westchester County, New York, District Attorney Mimi Rocah joins me to discuss her former colleague, Todd Blanche, who will face a confirmation hearing for his nomination to become the next Attorney General of the United States this week. If you missed us live, click the link to watch this lively discussion.

Five Questions with Professor Kim Scheppele: Civil Discourse readers know Kim Scheppele for her study of the rise and fall of constitutional governments and insightful analysis of what has happened in Hungary and what it means for us here in the United States. I appreciate her willingness and ability to speak the plain truth to power. I wanted to spend some time with Kim, assessing where we are and how we step away from the minutiae to assess the larger moment we’re in. Her answers to my questions were thoughtful and helpful, and we’ll be back with a Substack Live in the next few days... 

These are complicated legal times, and it’s easy for the truth to get lost in the chaos. Civil Discourse doesn’t just track today’s headlines—it connects them to the legal and political history that explains why they matter. We won’t forget what’s at stake or let Trump and his allies rewrite the past. 

You can subscribe to Civil Discourse for free and get clear analysis that helps you see the whole picture, delivered straight to your inbox. If you’re able, your paid subscription helps me devote the time and resources needed to write the newsletter. That means everyone has access to information they can share with friends and family—a constructive act we can all participate in right now, helping more Americans understand how critical this moment is.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

"This Is Where I Stand" - Janne Robinson

 

I’ve felt really bothered by anyone not standing up right now to be a voice for the violence, oppression and hate ripping through our planet. I’ve lost trust and respect for anyone I follow who hasn’t used their platform to say, “this is where I stand.”

Last week my privilege smacked me in the face. Because I’ve been the person who hasn’t thought it’s my “responsibility” as a poet or artist to speak about politics. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention here’s a recap of world events that happened in January:

1) On Jan 8th and 9th 30,000 people in Iran took to the streets to stand up against the incredibly oppressive Islamic regime. They were first advocating for their economy, and then it shifted into an outcry for human rights. The government instituted a near-total internet and communication blackout during this period and proceeded to kill 30,000+ people in 48 hours. The black out was to conceal the scale of the violence. The last time this many people were killed was the Babyn Yar Massacre in 1941: Over two days, September 29–30, 1941, German Einsatzgruppen and collaborators murdered over 33,000 Jews at a ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine.

2) ICE has been not only detaining “illegal” immigrants but also people here seeking asylum legally, people who are permanent residents. Extreme violence has been to happen to any non-white people — black, native, Indian. Anyone without white skin. Renee Good + Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents protecting and standing up for what’s morally just and right.

There have been accounts of rape in these detention centers in exchange for mothers being able to see their children by ICE agents. Inhumane conditions with rotten food and people getting sick and denied medical care (war tactics also used by Hitler).

A man who was a caretaker for his son with disabilities was detained and because he was unable to communicate with the outside world — his son died, and when he asked for permission to attend the funeral it was denied. Anne Frank didn’t die in a gas chamber — she died because of the conditions of her concentration camp.

3) Innocent people are still being killed in Gaza. What is occurring in Gaza has never been justified and never will be justified. You do not hold innocent people accountable for the actions of a specific group of people inside of a country. It is not a country that gets held accountable — it is the people who have committed crimes of hate that live within a country that need to be.

4) Russia is still at war with Ukraine. They’re currently cutting out electricity because it’s winter (war tactic). And everyone’s hands are tied because if anyone acts there will be a world war. Meanwhile a completely unjustified and incomprehensible war is happening to innocent people in Ukraine.

5) 300k black women in Brazil marched against racism GBV (Gender based violence). Sexual Violence is often used as a tactic and weapon of war. Rape and sexual assault are deliberately employed by armed forces and groups to terrorize, demoralize, and humiliate civilian populations. It’s a systemic war tactic being used from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia to contemporary conflicts in the DRC, Syria, and Ukraine.

6) The president has withdrawn from the United Nations including funding and stated that “he doesn’t believe in peace.” The Epstein Files contain not just sexual abuse, but murder and cannibalism and likely hundreds if not thousands of innocent children and lives and no one has been held accountable or put in jail.

He has also been posting racist things about the Obamas, which alone should be enough to remove him from the chat. We have felons, sociopaths and pedophiles in charge of some of the biggest choices of our country.

So — I don’t care about your morning routine. And I don’t care about your regular content.

This is a unique moment in time, and your values are showing and people are paying attention. I care about how you act when someone you will never know is treated. I care about your empathy, compassion and your courage for the people outside of your immediate community. I care about your ability to believe that humanity, equality and dignity are non-negotiable values.

-Janne Robinson

"Trump and his MAGA crew have inflicted untold trauma and misery on children!"

The irony should not be lost on Americans that the MAGA movement and its QAnon cousins made so much noise about how the hunt for pedophiles was their obsession. It turns out that those concerned about child sexual predators should have staked out Jeffrey Epstein’s island…not a D.C. pizza restaurant.

The list of those associated with pedophile and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein from the released files reads like a who’s who of the MAGA/oligarch class. Although the Trump-Epstein files contain reportedly “salacious” allegations against Donald Trump, he continues to deny wrongdoing. Despite ongoing efforts to minimize his ties to Epstein, “the two men bonded over their pursuit of young women,” the New York Times reports.) However, no one can dispute that Trump has gone to extreme lengths to prevent the full release of documents revealing the extent of Epstein’s orbit (perpetuating the trauma and injustice for Epstein’s victims).

That stated, the number of children Trump has harmed in his second term exceeds even those victimized by Epstein and his enablers. Beyond delaying justice for Epstein’s victims, Trump and his MAGA crew have inflicted untold trauma and misery on children. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine fetish has spawned measles outbreaks with serious health consequences for children and their parents. 

Cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, rollbacks to EPA regulations, slashed life-saving medical trials, and obliteration of USAID have taken their toll on the most vulnerable children here and abroad.

The mass deportation operation, however, is in a class by itself when it comes to cruelty and needless suffering inflicted on innocent children. Trump shock troops used five-year-old Liam Conjes Rojas as “bait” (then detained him and his father for days). They grabbed and whisked out of state a two-year-old. 

This paramilitary band of thugs have repeatedly left terrified toddlers in cars after their parents were snatched away. They routinely spray tear gas into peaceful crowds with children present and wrestle racially profiled Hispanic teenagers to the ground (refusing to believe they are citizens). Parents are afraid to send their children to school. And Renee Good’s children will grow up without their mother.

Liam was freed by court order after the judge excoriated the Trump operation. “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” Judge Fred Biery wrote. “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.” He signed the order “[w]ith a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”

But hundreds of children like Liam remain locked up like criminals. The Marshall Report found: The number of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention on a given day has skyrocketed, jumping more than sixfold since the start of the second Trump administration. The Marshall Project analyzed data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and found that ICE held around 170 children on an average day under Trump. During the last 16 months of the Biden administration, ICE held around 25 children a day.

That tally does not include those detained in the recent Minneapolis surge or “children in the custody of the Border Patrol or the Office of Refugee Resettlement, where children are held without a guardian.” (Yes, without a guardian.)

Moreover, as the Washington Post reported, “Advocates and attorneys contend that hundreds more youth have been affected in cases where authorities have separated families, which are not comprehensively tracked. Those include instances in which parents have been deported but their children remain in the United States in government custody.”

The Post continued: “Attorney Eric Lee said he saw children all over the facility during a recent visit, some as young as 3 or 4. ‘What is happening in these detention centers is worse than anybody thinks,’ he said.” Tragically, these cases are becoming commonplace:

Kristin Etter, an attorney for some of the new families, recently met with an Ecuadorian mother and her 11-year-old daughter who were arrested in Minneapolis while on their way to school. The fourth grader spends most of her time in the Dilley facility without opportunities for intellectual stimulation, Etter said… [A parent of a 3 yr. old] described inadequate medical care for herself and her toddler, who suffered diarrhea, and for the other detainees, who had to wait hours for treatment, even for serious illnesses.

The secret police now openly assault children and their parents. After the weekend tear-gassing incident in Portland, Mayor Keith Wilson decried the attack on a peaceful gathering, where many small children were present:

To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame… To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children.

The first departures should come from the White House, DHS, the Justice Department, and Republican caucuses in the House and Senate (which authorized the money and confirmed leaders of the mass deportation scheme). They are ultimately responsible for the deaths, mayhem, and damage (physical and otherwise) inflicted upon children.

Republicans need to stop inventing bogeymen to scare voters (e.g., Your child’s gender will be changed! Trans people are lurking in bathrooms!) and stand up to the real monsters. If only they recalled the religious (or secular) precepts they rely upon to demonize others, they might act to end this madness.

Academics and pundits spend too much time quibbling over whether the Trump regime is “authoritarian” or “fascist.” What is not debatable: a regime that abuses, terrorizes, and neglects children — and engages in a cover-up of monstrous sex crimes against kids — is evil. Anyone who has participated in or enabled these unforgivable actions should be banished from public life.

The Contrarian is community-supported. To receive new posts, enable independent journalism, help with litigation efforts, and keep this opposition movement engaged, please join the fight by becoming a subscriber.

Trump Is a Threat to Democracy.

Consider his autocratic abuse of presidential power, his constitutional ignorance, his lawless demagoguery, his sociopathic bullying, his pathological narcissism, his grandiose delusions, his anti-social personality disorder, his malignant arrogance, his felonious behavior, his moral relativism, his white nationalism, his perfidious nationalism, his hateful racism, his infectious nihilism, his outrageous iconoclasm, his ruthless competition, his puerile dereliction, his embarrassing stupidity, his provocative transgressions, his mocking disrespect, his impetuous vulgarity, his sexual predation; his belligerent intimidation, his incessant lying, his conspiratorial gaslighting, his obsessive vindictiveness, his hypocritical cowardice, his compulsive xenophobia, his callous misogyny, his insufferable bigotry, his disgusting buffoonery, his histrionic rallying, his seditious actions, his obstruction of justice and concealment, his army of thugs, his detention of children, and his dangerous authoritarianism... .

-Glen Brown

 

Tell Google & YouTube: Take down vile ICE recruitment ads now

 

Tell Google & YouTube: Take down vile ICE recruitment ads now.

The Department of Homeland Security is seeking to hire 10,000 new ICE agents to supercharge the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. To do it, DHS is pouring $100 million into what it calls an “aggressive” recruitment campaign—one steeped in wartime imagery and overtly anti-immigrant rhetoric. ICE recruitment ads are being targeted at listeners of right-wing and so-called “patriotic” podcasts, as well as people who express interest in guns and tactical gear. The messaging leans heavily on militarized language, invoking a “sacred duty,” the need to “defend the homeland,” and warnings about “foreign invaders.” After artists including Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and SZA condemned ICE for using their music without permission, DHS shifted tactics again—this time turning to “niche music beloved by neo-Nazis,” openly courting white supremacist aesthetics and audiences. As one researcher put it, “In the past, those dog whistles were coming from supporters. Now they’re coming directly from the administration.” While most of the spending is aimed at recruiting new ICE agents, DHS has also shelled out nearly $3 million for Spanish-language ads on Google and YouTube. These ads target Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. with harassment and intimidation, telling people to “go home.” No corporation in America should be enabling ICE—let alone accepting its money and profiting from this campaign of fear and dehumanization. Demand Google and YouTube take down these vile ads and stop accepting money from ICE. Send a message to the CEOs of Google and YouTube now.

TAKE ACTION

Thanks for taking action, The whole Common Dreams team

 

The Trump administration is immoral and unjust

The Trump administration is immoral and unjust. When we talk about morality, we are also talking about justice. We are talking about rights, duties, and mutually agreed principles based on trust and compassion, and how and why we should live moral and just lives through an interdisciplinary understanding of philosophical ethics, social and political psychology, evolutionary biology, and theology to create a framework and identification with morality and justice.

The Trump administration have failed. They do not care about how morality serves an important function in our lives as individuals and in our community. They do not care about what maximizes the well-being of others. They do not care about moral rights. They do not care about ethical principles that reconcile self-interest with the common good and promote personal integrity and respect for legitimate rights. They do not even care about children’s rights.

 -Glen Brown

Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis

streets of minneapolis song - Google Search 

Through the winter’s ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
‘Neath an occupier’s boots
King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes
Against smoke and rubber bullets
By the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
Trump’s federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow dead
Their claim was self-defense, sir
Just don’t believe your eyes
It’s our blood and bones
And these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
Now they say they’re here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown, my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight
In chants of ICE out now
Our city’s heart and soul persist
Through broken glass and bloody tears
On the streets of Minneapolis
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll take our stand for this our land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

streets of minneapolis song - Google Search

"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

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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