"The question I keep returning to is whether you can hold the desire for a political system’s end and grief for its victims at the same time. I think you have to. I think the people who can’t, on either side, are telling you something about what they’ve had to shut off in themselves to survive this"
287g programs are expanding rapidly -- funny enough, while a lot of funding has been promised, I've found very little has been delivered. (DHS won't say either way).
myemail.constantcontact.com/-Force-Multi...
This is an *excellent* synoptic view of our authoritarian present that shows, among other things, that the crisis has long been "hiding in plain sight."
‘Military service is one of the strongest predictors for becoming a mass shooter in the US.’
@lalehkhalili.bsky.social on the symbiosis of drugs and war.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
This is excellent and extremely clarifying - thank you. I'm very excited to read the new book.
How and why police actually support the federal invasions—I have been working on this article for ~6 months, trying to make sense of Trump’s nationwide surge of DHS officers, how it has evolved, what brought us here, and what will remain after it ends.
"Epstein’s victims experienced the rule of master and servant not just as economic but sexual violence. They were the first to name and resist our emergent political order."
A sharp and devastating piece from @melindacooper.bsky.social on the patriarchal household economy as political model.
On the hellish detention and deportation system built by EU countries. With quotes from the current and the former German chancellors expressing their commitment to the inhumane cruelty of this apparatus, described here in forensic detail.
Or, a different metric, the 2026 ICE+CBP roughly equals the 2024 appropriation for the Housing & Urban development dept. choices meme.
Population transfer. Ethnic cleansing. Transactional forced migration. Whatever you want to call it, it's happening.
Need a word for the Soon-to Previn and Ghislane Maxwell types—women who build their identities around their sexual appeal to men and have to make more and more ostentatious rejections of feminist sex politics as they age out of those men’s sexual desire.
“Scandal came for the company last year when Italian authorities reportedly used Paragon’s spyware to surveil prominent journalists and human rights activists. For the Trump administration, it might have been a proof of concept.”
On the surveillance tools now in the hands of ICE:
I live in constant terror of saying Richard Florida when I mean Gary Indiana.
The contradictions remained unsolvable because anti-immigrant policy could not deliver the better country it promised. As symbolically satisfying as one might find them, you can’t eat racism and war. The prevailing response, however, wasn’t that the strategy was wrong, but that it simply wasn’t being implemented with sufficient vigor
Border enforcement inevitably stokes racism and xenophobia because the fences, walls, and army of agents are a monument to racist and xenophobic principles. And these principles have the structure of an infinite, unsatisfiable demand whose fulfillment only reinforces the desire for more.
This piercingly sharp summary of immigration politics is doomed to become more and more relevant the longer we allow it to fester.
From @danieldenvir.bsky.social's 2020 book "All-American Nativism"
If media is going to claim a "pivot," let's stipulate some threshold questions: Is ICE still treating US cities like occupied territory? Will there be serious governmental investigations into ICE killings? Any accountability for them? If not, nothing is changing. 2/
newrepublic.com/article/2057...
"The crackdown has done nothing to address the origins of the upheaval, which lie in the country’s political economy."
NEW @kayhanvaladbaygi.bsky.social on the crisis in Iran
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ira...
At @phenomenalworld.bsky.social, @michael-macher.bsky.social examines the bipartisan origins of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
"A white man points both his middle fingers and releases a teeth-baring yell, and it seems as if he were drawing a current from the pavement straight out of his mouth" @kerryhowley.bsky.social, putting words to feelings like only she can nymag.com/intelligence...
"The impulse to drive hostile invaders from your home lives in your body in a place too deep to name. I finally bought a gas mask. You should get one too."
Reardon arrived in Germany in the second week of January 1939 and made appointments to see both Goebbels and Hitler's Foreign Office head, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Reardon was initially received by a deputy official, Richard Sallet, who had served several years in the German embassy in Washington and was very familiar with U.S. politics. According to the official German Foreign Office memorandum, included among documents captured at the end of the war, it was Sallet's task "10 entertain Reardon and talk to him about German problems." According te the report made by State Secretary Ernst Woermann, "Reardon talked against President Roosevelt and against the Jews, and conveyed Cough-lin's suggestion that Hitler personally make some sort of statement that the Nazis were supporters of Christian religion." Woermann noted that "after spending a few days with Sallet, Reardon saw Ribbentrop. To Ribbentrop he repeated the things he had told Sallet." Ribbentrop replied in vague terms that "they would do the best they could on it. At the close
of the interview, Ribbentrop said: 'Give my regards to Father Coughlin. I have a high regard for him.' »57 On January 21, Goebbels personally replied to criticisms of German treatment of Jews coming from across the Atlantic. In a speech entitled "What Does America Actually Want?" he decried the "distorted picture of Germany that was given by a Jewish-dominated press which did not represent the true views of Americans."58 His diary for January 24 records: The manager of Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest in America, tells us that America is basically more anti-Semitic than we give it credit for. He would like us to take a more positive attitude toward Christianity. I tell the Führer about this. He intends to touch on the question in his speech to the Reichstag. He intends to put out feelings to the Americans and give an outline of Germany's general posi-tion. I believe that this speech will be very important. 59 On the testimony of Joseph Goebbels, it would appear that Reardon not only encouraged a theme in a speech by Adolf Hitler but had potentially encouraged "feelers" of growing anti-Semitism in the United States. 60
Human Events Played a Part In the spring of 1958, at one of book ever written by a political figure Human Events' periodic staff meetings who had not yet become President with political leaders, James L. Wick, Following publication of the book, executive editor of Human Events, said a youth movement for Goldwater-now to Barry Goldwater: "We would like called "Young Americans For Free to see States ,you President of the United dom"-sprang up over the country. By the thousands-spontaneously— The senator, then in his first term, they travelled to the 1960 convention replied: "Oh no! Nothing like that can in Chicago and started a presidential happen. It will be a long time before boom. But Goldwater withdrew his the nation will elect a President with name and insisted that conservatives a Jewish name like Goldwater." support the Nixon-Lodge ticket. In its July 1, 1959 issue, Human In his speech to the convention, Events definitely proposed Goldwater he said: for President, adding that: "...Nomi "Let's grow up, conservatives. nation of candidates from small-popu-lation states (with only a limited num- Let's, if we want to, take this party back-and I think we can someday. ber of delegates to the convention) are Let's get to work." unprecedented- -but these are times of realignment of parties, political flux After Kennedy's victory in the No and crumbling of party traditions. In vember election, Goldwater took his thebe skange times, precedent may well own advice. He "went to work." He spent a large part of his time building Soon after, Leo Reardon, represent- up the conservative strength. ing the obscure Victor Publishing Co. He became the biggest drawing card of Shepherdsville, Ky., persuaded the at college and university assemblies. senator to write a book expressing his views. Aided by Brent Bozell, the sena- He was the principal speaker at four tor rewrote his speeches, Human Events Political Action Con- releases and statements of the previous five years. ferences. He…
Today's factoid from the history of US fascism: the guy who hatched the idea to publish Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative in 1960 (the ur-text of US conservatism) was Leo Reardon. In the 1930s Reardon was Father Coughlin's manager & he'd traveled to Nazi Germany as Coughlin's representative.
Like the University of Austin, I too experience internal divisions over ideological demands.
Atlantic publishes piece calling reality pedantic
What, if anything, does Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme have to say about American Jewishness in 1952 and now? Editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, senior editor Nathan Goldman, contributing editor @davidklion.bsky.social, and contributing writer Mitch Abidor discuss:
Feminizing my writing practice by listening to Grouper on repeat.
"As the organizing progressed, we learned that the boss’s kids were involved in Lower Manhattan’s lightly fascist film scene."
I'm late to the party but this by @grendan.bsky.social is great.
Book cover: "A Nation by Design" by Aristide R. Zoldberg
Book cover: "The Two Faces of American Freedom" by Aziz Rana.
Apologies for breaking the rules.
Trump has dispensed with the old legitimation strategies that were characterised by a dual commitment to rule-bound international order (with exceptions) and equal protection inside US national boundaries. Instead, he conflates immigrants, drugs and free trade as sources of weakness coming from outside, “poisoning the blood of our country”. At the same time, he inverts settled conceptions of external and internal: if we have Venezuela’s people (which we shouldn’t have), they have our oil (which they shouldn’t have). In turn, his administration invokes emergency war powers at home, to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants – and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law. Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’. The Trump administration envisions “reshoring” national security in a lasting way, drawing on the dubious norms and legalities of the War on Terror and the rancid infrastructures and policing capacities of America’s domestic penal complex. If George W. Bush helped invent the concept of ‘homeland security’ in order to “fight the terrorists over there” rather than here, Trump seeks to bring the war to “OUR hemisphere”. From Caracas to Minneapolis, legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.
"If we have Venezuela’s people (which we shouldn’t have), they have our oil (which they shouldn’t have)... Trump's latest regime reimagines and remakes the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’."
"The United States will be a source of chaos and volatility for the next several years."
while ICE has slashed training requirements for new recruits, it's also bringing in sketchy private security firms to train its elite tactical units (like the one Jonathan Ross is a member of) on "advanced techniques once exclusive to military protection units" www.levernews.com/shadow-contr...
