Resistance

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

– commonly attributed to George Orwell

What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist. If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.

– Rabbi Diane Tracht,
explaining why she joined the hundreds of faith leaders
who came to Minneapolis this week

This week’s featured post is “Turning Point or Tipping Point?“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. For the second week in a row, I’m ignoring all the other ongoing stories. I’ll get back to them as soon as the regime stops murdering people in the streets.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Minneapolis

That’s the subject of the featured post.

The Contrarian makes a list of reforms Senate Democrats might demand in exchange for passing DHS funding:

In the short run, Democrats can advance a batch of proposals, for example, to cut off funds to the Minneapolis deployment absent a request from the governor; limit CBP operations to the border (as used to be the case); require body cameras, immediate suspension of any agent after firing his/her weapon, and full cooperation with local and state authorities; eliminate masks; install an Inspector General to review all DHS actions and recommend policy and personnel changes; and ban arrests without a judicial warrant.

Minnesota’s Department of Corrections has gotten involved in a different kind of correction: pointing out disinformation coming from DHS. Here’s an example:

DOC quickly identified 68 cases in which individuals were lawfully transferred from Minnesota Department of Corrections custody directly to ICE, only for DHS officials to falsely claim these same individuals were “arrested” by waves of federal agents deployed into Minnesota communities.

The new ICE surge is underway in Maine.

and TACO Trump retreats on Greenland

This week European leaders proved something children have known for centuries: Fundamentally, bullies are cowards. If you give them what they want, they’ll demand more. But if you convince them you’re going to stand up for yourself, they’ll back down.

For months, Trump has been bullying Europe. Just a few months ago, the EU agreed to a 15% American tariff on their exports while maintaining a zero tariff on American imports. European leaders have tried to placate Trump with praise and flattery.

So of course, he asked for more: Denmark should give him Greenland, as if we were living in the age of absolute monarchs, and the rights and desires of 50,000 Greenlanders didn’t matter. He said ominous things about acquiring Greenland the easy way or the hard way. Stephen Miller, the ventriloquist who frequently speaks through Trump’s mouth, used his own lips to say that no one would fight us for Greenland.

But it turned out that someone would. Several of our (and Denmark’s) NATO allies sent troops to Greenland as an “exercise”. Not enough troops to repel a US invasion, but enough to possibly make American generals balk at killing allies they are treaty-bound to defend.

So Trump backed down on physical threats and instead threatened to raise tariffs again, breaking the agreement he had just made last summer. A list of European countries would face additional 10% tariffs, rising to 25% if they didn’t turn over Greenland.

And Europe held firm, threatening retaliatory tariffs rather than cringing in fear.

So Trump backed down, claiming that he had worked out a “framework of a future deal” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. The framework appears to be what Denmark was offering all along: expanded NATO military bases in Greenland and negotiations about mining rights.

But there is a long-term cost, as Fahreed Zakaria observes in “How Not to Lead“:

When I asked a senior European leader whether there was relief that Trump had stepped back from the threat of military action, he said yes. “But we’ve now seen a pattern in his dealings with us,” the leader said. “He treats us with contempt. And even if this crisis gets resolved, we will remember.”

and the regime’s “Nazi problem”

A number of commentators have begun to notice how often the Trump regime echoes white supremacist or even Nazi tropes. The Atlantic reports:

The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about their social-media strategies, but the trend is impossible to miss: Across the federal government, officials are advocating for a radical new understanding of the American idea, one rooted not in the vision of the Founders, but in the ideologies of European fascists.

This framing goes back at least to J. D. Vance’s speech about “heritage Americans” at the Claremont Institute in July. But lately it is in virtually every department of Trump’s government.

At a press briefing January 8, the day after the murder of Renee Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem spoke from a podium sporting the slogan: “One of ours, all of yours.” Regime critics widely interpreted this as a reference to the Nazi policy of collective retribution, as when the Czech village of Lidice was destroyed and all its adult males killed after the assassination of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich.

This attribution appears to be inaccurate, in that no one can find a record of the Nazis (in German, Czech, or any other language) using that slogan. But we’re left with the question: What was Noem trying to communicate here? Who is “us” and who is “you”? What are we — I assume I am one of “yours” rather than “ours” — being threatened with? Brendan Beebe examined the controversy in detail (and fairly, I would claim).

In the context of the Minneapolis incident, “ours” clearly referred to federal agents (and by extension, their political leadership), while “yours” implicitly meant the protesters, community watchdogs, and perhaps local authorities challenging federal actions. The slogan thus served to dehumanize and threaten the latter group – effectively saying their lives and rights are forfeit if they dare challenge federal power.

Beebe noted that Noem’s defenders refused to address the question of precisely what she meant.

Notably, few Republican politicians publicly commented on the slogan itself – neither repudiating nor explicitly endorsing it. Their responses mostly mirrored the administration’s talking points: defend the ICE agent, condemn “domestic terrorists” (a term Noem used for the driver and by extension the protesters[17]), and support sending federal reinforcements to Minnesota. By sidestepping the explicit phrase, allies of Noem effectively normalized it through lack of acknowledgement.

The same question could be asked across the board. If the people who made the “Which way American man?” post for the DHS Instagram page or the “Which way, Greenland man?” post for the White House X page weren’t trying to echo the classic white supremacist (and antisemitic) book “Which Way Western Man?” — then what were they trying to do?

and you also might be interested in …

The Epstein files still have not been released. Nor is there any coherent explanation of the delay. When DOJ tries to indict someone Trump wants revenge on, like Jack Smith or Letitia James, they’re fond of saying “No one is above the law.”

But Trump is. When a law applies to Trump or his lackeys, it means nothing.

So J. D. Vance excused Trump’s bad economy by blaming it on Biden, saying “You don’t turn the Titanic around overnight.” When I first heard that quote, I thought it must be fake. Surely the Vice President of the United States is not that stupid, because nobody is. If you compare something to the Titanic, it must be sinking. Everybody must know that.

J. D. Vance doesn’t. He really said it.

Just to make sure he wasn’t taken out of context, I watched a 12-minute clip of the speech he gave Thursday to an audience of manufacturing workers. (He says it at about the 9:30 mark.) As is always the case, fact-checkers must be having a field day with this speech: For example, he lumps the statistical averages in such a way that the impact of COVID falls mainly on Biden, not on Trump, who played a major role in letting the virus get out of control. (Two can play the let’s-ignore-COVID game. When Trump handed the economy to Biden, the unemployment rate was 6.4%. When Biden gave it back, unemployment was 4.0%. Now it’s 4.4%.)

What’s makes the metaphor even worse is that it wasn’t some off-the-cuff screw-up in response to a difficult question. The Titanic metaphor was part of Vance’s prepared remarks. As one commenter put it: “His speech-writer must hate him.”

Trump created the Board of Peace to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. Its charter makes interesting reading.

The Board is very much a top-down organization, as the charter gives all power to the Chairman. The Chairman invites members to join and can expel them at any time. He appoints the executive board. Decisions are made by majority vote “subject to the approval of the Chairman”. Decisions of the executive board are “subject to veto by the Chairman at any time thereafter”. There is no procedure for overturning the Chairman’s veto. The Chairman is the “final authority regarding the meaning, interpretation, and application of this Charter”. There is no provision for removing the Chairman, or a stated time when his term ends.

So who is this chairman? Who else?

Donald J. Trump shall serve as inaugural Chairman of the Board of Peace

Donald J. Trump, personally, by name, is the Chairman. He doesn’t hold office by being President of the United States. He holds office because he’s Donald J. Trump and his name is written into the charter. When his term as president ends, or even if he gets removed by impeachment, he continues as Chairman of the Board of Peace.

So let’s be clear: Any contribution to the Board of Peace is simply a bribe to Trump. He can do anything he wants with it, for as long as he lives. And like a medieval king, he names his own successor.

and let’s close with something threatening

BBC Wildlife posted its 2026 award-winning photos. The overall winner was this close-up of a crocodile. I hope to never see anything like this in real life.

January 26, 2026 – 12:55 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Turning Point or Tipping Point?

If the regime can repeatedly murder people in the streets with no consequences, there’s no turning back.
Fortunately, more and more people are beginning to realize that.

When I started the Weekly Sift nearly 20 years ago, my intention was to take a step back from the news each week, so that I could try to think about it clearly and encourage others to do the same. Lately that’s been difficult, because every day or two presents some new outrage to react to. After the murder of Rene Good, the arrest and detention of 5-year-old Liam Ramos, homes routinely being invaded without judicial warrants, and countless images of peaceful protesters being pepper sprayed, tear gassed, dragged from their cars and beaten, Saturday brought the killing of Alex Pretti.

Because protesters now know that the best weapon against ICE’s violent attacks is a camera, we have video of the killing from multiple angles. None of them support the claims DHS is making to justify the Border Patrol agents’ actions.

They show a man named Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who is filming ICE activity in Minneapolis, intervening when federal agents assault a woman. In response, the agents grab Pretti, force him to the ground, beat him, and ultimately shoot the defenseless man repeatedly. Pretti was pronounced dead on the scene.

Murdered VA nurse Alex Pretti

Pretti was licensed to carry a gun, and may have been carrying one legally at the time. But he was holding a camera, not a gun, and none of the videos show him with a gun in his hand. Eye witnesses echo that account.

“I did not see him attack the agents or brandish a weapon of any kind,” the physician said, under penalty of perjury.

“The man did not approach the agents with a gun,” the woman testified. “He approached them with a camera.”

It’s hard to respond rationally to a gang of government thugs that now has murdered two people in the street about two weeks apart. Or to the government that not only allows them to commit these crimes with complete impunity, but which manufactures lies to justify them.

Nonetheless, here we are. Responding with violence, an eye for an eye, only plays into the regime’s hands. The American people and their elected representatives need to respond with resolve and determination, but not with violence. [1]

Fortunately, many people seem to be doing just that. This week has also seen a number of hopeful signs. In saying that, I know how naive I sound. People of good will have been looking for hopeful signs for 11 years now. [2] Again and again, we have heard events described as turning points, as moments when Trump had finally gone too far and would be swept away by public revulsion. Again and again, the moment passed. Maybe it will pass again.

If there is a difference this time, it’s that the consequences of rolling over and doing nothing are more obvious than they’ve ever been. If Trump’s goon squads can murder people in the streets, tell lies obviously contradicted by the video evidence, and then paint their victims as “domestic terrorists” or “assassins” who deserve what they got — then quite likely we have passed a tipping point. There may be no going back without violent revolution and civil war.

If you’re keeping track on the timeline of Nazi Germany, I would place us roughly at the Night of the Long Knives, in July of 1934. There are obvious differences. But before that night, Nazi violence could be easily explained away as unfortunate clashes between Hitler’s storm troopers and rival Communist gangs, with occasional collateral damage. But the killings that night were obviously murders. Going forward, everyone knew Hitler could murder, and Hitler knew he could murder and get away with it.

We’re not the only ones watching to see what happens in this moment. Trump is watching too.

Here are the signs I’m paying attention to. You could respond to any single one of them by saying: “We’ve seen this before and it came to nothing.” But this time they are all happening at once. [3]

The lockstep support Trump’s worst outrages have been receiving from Republicans in Congress is starting to crack. No elected Republican I’m aware of is openly denouncing what the regime is doing in Minnesota, calling ICE’s murders by their proper name, or pointing out that the violence in Minneapolis is almost entirely instigated by ICE rather than the protesters. But a number are publicly saying that there is something to explain here. They are calling for a real investigation rather than a cover-up, and seem open to the possibility that the answers will not be pleasant.

Some are challenging the wisdom of the regime’s immigration strategy. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt observed that “Nobody likes the feds coming to their states.” Kentucky Rep. James Comer suggested that it’s unwise to launch an immigration crack-down without the state and local governments’ support. He believes that cities will be so much better after undocumented immigrants have been expelled that the voters in places like Minneapolis will be envious. (Try it and see, I say. I think it’s Comer who will be surprised.)

None of this is rebellion. But it’s also not reflexive repetition of regime propaganda. That’s a change.

The mainstream media has begun reporting the truth with much less hedging. The Washington Post editorial board begins its call for congressional action to rein Trump in with “The unjust killing of Alex Pretti …”. The injustice of the killing is treated as a fact we can all see, not a contention made by “Democrats” or “critics” or “activists”. The New York Times analyzed the regime’s response like this:

Detained 5-year-old Liam Ramos

Even as videos emerged that contradicted the government’s account, the Trump administration was in a race to control the narrative around the killing of Mr. Pretti, a registered nurse with no criminal record who was pinned down when immigration agents opened fire and killed him. The rush to blame Mr. Pretti and exonerate the immigration agents — even while officials were still gathering the facts — deviates entirely from the way law enforcement investigations are normally carried out.

Videos taken by eye-witnesses don’t “appear” to contradict the government’s account, they do contradict it. The contradiction is not something Democrats “contend” or critics “charge”. The NYT is testifying in its own voice rather than striking a listen-to-both-sides pose. This is a change. They seem to be taking seriously the point made on social media by Katie Mack:

A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.

On the other side, Fox News is doubling down, headlining “The far-left network that helped put Alex Pretti in harm’s way, then made him a martyr”. Fox’s crack investigative reporters have discovered that the resistance in Minneapolis is organized, uses messaging apps to communicate, and keeps a database of ICE sightings — all things that resistance organizers will proudly tell you themselves. But Fox sees something sinister in this. Meanwhile, The Atlantic covers the same set of facts with an air of admiration rather than fear. No one is trying to hide how organized the resistance is. Training for ICE observers is widely advertised.

No doubt you will hear similar rhetoric from your MAGA contacts, and maybe you will be frustrated that nothing seems to break through their silo of Trump-think. But this kind of propaganda plays differently when the mainstream media is telling a clear opposing story rather than hemming and hawing, as it so often has before.

ICE victim Rene Good. [4]

Democrats in the Senate look ready to take a stand. Counting on Chuck Schumer has been a risky strategy in the past, but he’s saying the right things now. In particular, he’s balking at passing funding for DHS without additional riders that control ICE’s abuses.

Senate Democrats will not allow the current DHS funding bill to move forward. … People should be safe from abuse by their own government. Senate Republicans must work with Democrats to advance the other five funding bills while we work to rewrite the DHS bill. This is the best course of action, and the American people are on our side.

It remains to be seen how principled and effective Senate Democrats can be, and whether the restrictions they put on ICE will be meaningful. At a minimum they can make Republicans defend ICE masking its agents, asking US citizens for their papers, breaking into homes without judicial warrants, and avoiding investigations when they kill someone. If a partial government shutdown results, I think Schumer is right that the American people will stand with Democrats as they try to bring a rogue agency under lawful control.

I think the House passing DHS funding last week was an incredibly negative moment for the Democratic Party. If all Democrats had voted with the handful of Republicans in opposition, the bill would not have passed. Results like these are demoralizing: What’s the point of voting for Democrats if they won’t take a stand when they have the chance?

Those Democrats who support DHS funding to avoid seeming like they are against “law enforcement” are boosting the regime’s propaganda. The whole point of blocking DHS funding is that ICE is not enforcing laws, it’s breaking laws.

Clergy of many faiths came to Minneapolis Friday to participate in the resistance.

The religious left has grabbed the momentum away from the religious right. I have a somewhat biased point of view here: The senior minister of my church (First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Bedford, Massachusetts) answered an interfaith call for clergy to come to Minneapolis for Friday’s protests and general strike. By Sunday, he was back to report on his experiences.

The Religion News Service reports that hundreds of ministers answered the call. Many of them participated in the organized activities that Fox News found so suspicious: ride-alongs with ICE observers, blowing whistles to tell the community about an ICE presence, packing food to deliver to non-White families that are afraid to leave their homes (independent of their legal status, since ICE doesn’t seem to care). Here’s one experience:

ICE agents surrounded one of the women from the minivan and instructed the pastors to get back. [Rev. Dan] Brockway [an American Baptist minister from upstate New York] standing behind the other faith leaders, began livestreaming the encounter to his church’s Facebook page.

Ultimately, the encounter was brief: The woman, who the pastors said appeared to be pregnant, had citizenship papers with her. She showed them to the officers — something activists have argued doesn’t always dissuade federal immigration agents, who have detained U.S. citizens on multiple occasions. But in less than two minutes, the agents left the scene.

The woman, the pastors said, was shaken. It was impossible to tell whether the presence of clergy had staved off a potential detention, but the pastors said the woman thanked them profusely before leaving.

The faith leaders — none of whom had previously encountered ICE — said they, too, were left unsettled.

“I’m becoming radicalized,” [Rev. James] Galasinski [a UU minister also from New York] said, his voice rising. “I’m seeing our nation become more and more fascist before my eyes — I saw it. I saw it. I mean, demanding papers? I never thought I would live in a country like this.”

When those ministers go home, their congregations will be radicalizing also.

The religious left is also turning up the heat in other ways, most notably by repeating the teachings of Jesus, which MAGA Christianity has completely turned its back on.

The resistance in Minneapolis is inspiring. This may in fact be the most encouraging development of all. It’s one thing to turn out large crowds of people for one-day demonstrations like No Kings. That’s happened before, all the way back to the Women’s March in 2017.

But what’s happening in Minneapolis is on another level entirely: It’s not just the mass rallies, impressive as they are. Ordinary people are getting together with their neighbors to plan activities and carry them out. They’re watching the streets for ICE raids, taking videos of arrests, watching schools so that non-White children don’t vanish without a trace, delivering food and medicine to families afraid to leave their homes, and in general looking after their at-risk neighbors.

The Atlantic reports:

But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting.

Fox News reporters see a vast and threatening “Antifa” conspiracy here, while the Murdoch-owned New York Post looks for funding networks they can trace back to George Soros or some other Elder of Zion.

But the tactics and practices of ICE resistance have been developing all year, from Los Angeles to Portland to Chicago. Protesters are getting trained in the same way that Martin Luther King’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s movements trained people in non-violence. The discipline and forbearance they have shown in the face of outrageous provocation is remarkable.

What’s happening here is that ordinary American people are defending their neighborhoods and defending their neighbors. They are coming together in cells of folks who are learning to trust one another and work together.

The regime wants Americans to feel isolated and fearful, to sit in their social media silos and beg for Big Brother’s protection from Antifa or Venezuelan gangsters or whatever other bogeyman they are projecting this week. But the resistance movement is teaching people to trust one another and rely on one another. It is teaching people to love their neighbors and defend “the least of these” against bullying from those in power.

That’s been a radicalizing message for thousands of years, and it’s getting out again.

[1] Though, as A. R. Moxon points out: If non-violence repeatedly fails, eventually violence comes. The discipline the people of Minneapolis have shown during this armed occupation is awe-inspiring. But no one’s patience is infinite.

[2] In 2015, Trump dismissed John McCain’s status as a war hero. “He’s not a war hero,” said Trump. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Surely, we were told, that insult to our veterans was too much for voters to tolerate.

[3] The public response to January 6 was similar, with one difference: The focus then was whether Trump would leave office, and he did. After Biden’s inauguration, Trump seemed to be finished. Many wondered why they should beat a dead horse. Today, the horse is very much alive and threatens us all.

[4] The Renee Good shooting looks worse and worse the more we find out about it. An autopsy paid for by the family showed that Good suffered three wounds, only one of which was fatal. The fatal shot “struck her on the left side of her head near her temple then exited on the right side of her head”, suggesting that it came from the side.

Quite likely that’s Jonathan Ross’ third shot, the one through the driver’s open window. According to the NYT analysis of multiple video angles, that shot came after Good’s SUV had clearly missed Ross and was pulling away. In other words, he had absolutely no self-defense reason to take that shot. It was murder.

Now, my last two paragraphs are speculative, and responsible people should wait for a full forensic investigation before drawing that conclusion. But we seem unlikely to get that investigation anytime soon, because Trump’s corrupt FBI has concluded that there is nothing to investigate, and is blocking state and local police from examining the evidence.

January 26, 2026 – 11:37 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (5)

Tagged , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

You already know what I’m writing about today: Minneapolis and the second video-taped murder by federal agents. I’ve had to wrestle with how to discuss this. It would be easy to vanish into rage or fear or hopelessness. But I’ve decided not to do that.

I know we’ve all been disappointed in the past when something seemed to be a turning point and then turned out not to be. But this is a new opportunity for the nation to recognize what is happening and change course. There have been a number of hopeful signs in the last few days: the impressive non-violence of the Minneapolis resistance, a shift in mainstream media coverage, new resolve on the part of Senate Democrats coupled with wavering on the part of elected Republicans, the continuing decline in Trump’s poll numbers, and so on. The fact that these are all happening at the same time is encouraging.

I am reminded of a line from a Paul Simon song: “I would not give you false hope on this strange and mournful day.” It would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion that it’s all going to be OK now. And yet, something is happening. It may all eventually come to nothing, but right now it’s still something.

This week’s featured post “Turning Point or Tipping Point?” tries to balance the precariousness of this moment with its hopefulness. It’s a tricky piece to write, so I’m uncertain when it will come out — probably sometime between 10 and 11 EST.

The weekly summary will not have a lot else in it, because Minneapolis has been eating my attention. It should appear sometime around noon.

January 26, 2026 – 8:53 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

All We Have

All we have are whistles. They have guns.

– Francisco Segovia, executive director COPAL

This week’s featured post is “Greenland: It’s getting serious“. There is also an Expand Your Vocabulary post explaining “the Dual State”.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Typically, I use “assault” metaphorically. But in Minneapolis the assault has become literal.
  • Climate change. The EPA will report only on the cost to industry of implementing new standards, not on the money or lives saved.
  • War. Venezuela already seems like ancient history. Now Trump is starting a trade war with Europe in order to claim Greenland.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Minneapolis

In a sane world, the administration would look at videos of the Renee Good shooting — which clearly show Jonathan Ross killing her for no good reason — and say, “We’ve got to tone this down.” But of course, we haven’t been living in a sane world for nearly a year now. So ICE surged additional troops into Minneapolis in an attempt to bring the city to heel. There are now something like 3000 federal agents in Minneapolis, which Mayor Frey says is about five times the size of the municipal police force. More and more, the stories that come out of the city sound like reports of a military occupation rather than law enforcement.

NPR has witnessed multiple instances where people with legal status or U.S. citizenship have been questioned about their immigration status. Everyone NPR witnessed in the last week were people of color. We have also witnessed people being picked up by immigration agents off the streets.In one neighborhood, immigration officers crashed into a car of a U.S. citizen who refused to pull over. ICE officers ultimately let him go after running his license plate. In the same area, immigration agents dragged a woman out of her car. She said she was on her way to the doctor when she encountered the agents. The agents says she did not follow the commands to move. We witnessed how demonstrators blocked the federal agents from leaving the area and banged on their vehicles. In return, officers sprayed the large group with pepper spray and tear gas and left after throwing flash-bangs.

Meanwhile, DOJ reports that it is not investigating Ross, but is investigating the governor of Minnesota and the Mayor of Minneapolis for “actively encouraging” protesters “to go out on the street and impede ICE.” Previously, we learned that DOJ is investigating Good’s widow, prompting six career prosecutors to resign. Governor Walz summed up:

The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.

CNN collects nearly three minutes of videos of ICE abusing protesters. Also: racially profiling a US citizen, grabbing a woman’s phone for no reason, yanking a disabled woman out of her car as she was on her way to a doctor’s appointment, and using flashbangs and tear gas against protesters.

Mainstream media is not paying nearly enough attention to the role gender plays in these confrontations. ICE agents, with their masks and body armor and extreme weapons, are cosplaying hypermasculinity. They are trying to dominate and intimidate, and they get angry when people (especially women) fail to be impressed. Andi Zeisler writes in Salon:

It’s fair to assume, for instance, that Ross was looking to intimidate both Renee Good and her wife (who was outside the car, directing Renee in making a three-point turn). Neither woman gives him that satisfaction: Renee speaks to him calmly and clearly; she’s not gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles but has one hand on it. Rebecca more closely matches Ross’ energy. He has a phone in his hand; she has one in hers. She’s not scared of Ross either, instead poking fun at his obvious desire to intimidate.

Hence Ross walks in front of Good’s SUV and reaches for his gun long before she starts to roll forward. I think he was planning to point the gun in Good’s face and see if that finally scared her into submission. Her driving away was thwarting that plan. He felt a flash of rage and his gun was already drawn, so he shot.

As the various justifications for Ross’ actions dissolve under scrutiny, ICE supporters are falling back on blaming the victim for antagonizing Ross. Fox News columnist David Marcus made Good the exemplar of a class of uppity women:

According to a recent poll, only 24% of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18-44, that number leaps to an astounding 61%. … The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many. 

We see these self-important White women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee. Let’s be clear, this is happening because we let it happen.

We? Are American men failing to keep their women sufficiently intimidated? It’s true, I guess. In 40 years of marriage, I don’t think I ever saw my wife cringe in fear of me.

And here is my warning: If we do not enforce the law, if we simply allow these cosplaying would-be revolutionaries to do whatever they want, including hitting cops with cars, Renee Good will not be the last to needlessly die. This madness needs to end, and it needs to end right now.

Let’s be clear: The “madness” Marcus refers to isn’t ICE agents killing people for no reason beyond offended pride. No, he insists that will continue until women learn their lesson. This agent agrees, asking a woman who is legally following his vehicle: “Have you not learned from the last couple of days?”

Border Czar Tom Homan repeated the threat on Meet the Press:

I’ve said, from March, if the hateful rhetoric doesn’t decline, there’s going to be bloodshed. I’ve seen this movie before. And unfortunately, I was right. And there’s been a lot of bloodshed. … We need to let [the investigation] play out. But while we’re doing that, we’ve got to stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It’s just ridiculous. And it’s just going to infuriate people more, which means there’s going to be more incidents like this because the hateful rhetoric is not only continuing, now has tripled down and doubled down.

So I get that it upsets Homan to hear his people called murderers. But I have a suggestion for that: Get them to stop murdering people.

I know that’s radical, but think about it: What if Jonathan Ross had never drawn his gun? What bad thing was he preventing by doing that? What if he hadn’t stood in front of her vehicle to begin with?

and Greenland

That’s the subject of the featured post.

but take a minute to learn a new idea: the Dual State

That’s the subject of this week’s Expand Your Vocabulary post.

and you also might be interested in …

The Justice Department has stopped releasing Epstein files. The last new documents came out on December 23.

The “Great HealthCare Plan” Trump has been promising for a decade came out. It’s a title page and one page of explanation. Nothing in it is going to make a significant different in your life.

This week’s measles outbreak is in South Carolina.

No vaccine is 100% effective, but the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine comes close. Two doses, usually given around age 1 and then again around age 4, are 97% effective at preventing measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for MMR in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.

Another story that is all but getting lost in the avalanche of news: Venezuelan oil has started coming under US control. We sold the first batch for $500 million, and put a bunch of the money in a Qatari bank. You might think Congress would need to be involved in deals this large, what with the constitutional power-of-the-purse and all. But no, of course not.

I worry that Democrats are repeating a mistake. Lately I’ve once again been seeing the slogan “Abolish ICE”, which reminds me a lot of “Defund the Police”.

I supported the strategy behind “Defund the Police” — namely, to empower more appropriate agencies with more appropriate specialists to respond to 911 calls that don’t involve violence. Instead of men and women with guns, we might send social workers, mental health workers, and so on, as the situation warranted. This would have the effect of lowering funding for the armed police.

It was a good idea and still is. But politically, the slogan was a disaster, because it allowed Republicans to smear Democrats as wanting to let criminals run wild, which was never the idea.

Same thing here. If we start demanding that Democratic candidates pledge to abolish ICE, that will come back to haunt us in general elections. Republicans will say that Democrats want to open our borders and let people in without any vetting or process. (They already say that.)

Under Trump, ICE has become a monster that needs to be slain. The outrageous budget it got in the Big Beautiful Bill needs to be scaled back. The thuggish agents it has recruited need to be let go. Possibly it should be cut up into smaller agencies with more targeted tasks. But border protection is a legitimate mission that some agency needs to take on.

I’m not sure how to put that into a slogan. But “Abolish ICE” isn’t it. When your opponents decide to lie about you, they shouldn’t be able to point to your own slogan for support.

The week’s most pathetic story was Donald Trump accepting María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize medal.

Trump has long campaigned to get a Nobel Peace Prize, which President Obama won in 2009. He said many times this year that he deserved the medal for (in his fantasy world) ending eight wars.

Trump holds leverage over Machado. Her opposition party won the 2024 election in Venezuela, but Nicolás Maduro remained in office anyway until US troops kidnapped Maduro three weeks ago. Rather than try to install Machado or her party’s winning candidate Edmundo González in the presidency, or even push for swift elections that her party might win again, Trump has backed Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez. He said of Machado:

I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.

Others have speculated that Trump was still miffed at Machado for winning the Peace Prize he had convinced himself he deserved. So Thursday, Machado attempted to appease Trump’s jealousy by presenting him with her Nobel medal. It probably won’t work, but it was worth a try.

The sad thing here is that Trump accepted the gift. This fits the portrait I painted last month in “Three Days in the Life of a Pathetic Man“. This is a man who frames fake Time covers and still won’t admit that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Trump is president and a billionaire and the godlike idol of millions of MAGA sheep, replacing Jesus in the hearts of many who call themselves “Christians”. For almost anyone else, that would be enough. And yet his own heart is such a yawning abyss that he must have Machado’s Nobel medal so that he can pretend he deserves it.

As I said in the December article: Trump used to make me mad, but he doesn’t any more. He just seems pathetic.

The Internet has been ruthless, spreading manufactured images of Trump accepting other awards he never earned, like the TriWizard Cup.

Josh Marshall explains the wider effects of firing the government’s inspectors general and corrupting the Justice Department: It isn’t just that corrupt government actors don’t get prosecuted, but that they can escape public notice entirely.

There’s a natural trajectory: reporting builds a record, and then the record is the basis of an investigation. Then the progress of the investigation becomes the focus of more reporting and public disclosure. If you can decapitate the investigatory agencies, the whole ecosystem of investigation and accountability becomes like a car that can’t ever get out of second gear. You assume that axing the investigators just means no one will be criminally accountable. Actually it means much more than that: the whole system of public accountability and disclosure breaks down.

Also Josh Marshall: The corruption of the Supreme Court makes it much harder for a Democratic Project 2029 to outline the reforms necessary to safeguard democracy against the next would-be autocrat, because there’s no predicting what new pseudo-constitutional doctrines the Court will invent to strike reforms down. That’s why reforming the Court needs to be front-and-center in any set of reforms. Democratic planners have been slow to realize this, and it’s throwing a monkey-wrench into any kind of planning process.

The point is that the corruption of the Supreme Court is actually beginning to slow, disincentivize, detour policy work. It could not be more critical that people across the Democratic world — policy, law, electoral politics — have this realization. There’s no reason to accept a situation in which democratic self-government is only allowed now for Republicans.

and let’s close with something spooky

We all realize that we share certain features with other members of our families, but not to this extent. Canadian artist Ulric Collette has a project called “Genetic Portraits“, where he presents two relatives as left/right halves of a single face. Mother/son, sister/brother, and so on. The results are striking testimony to the heritability of facial features. This one is a grandmother/granddaughter pair.

January 19, 2026 – 11:45 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (9)

Greenland: It’s getting serious

What started as a punch line is turning into a trade war with our allies.

When President Trump began fantasizing about annexing Greenland back in 2019, the suggestion was hard to take seriously. Maybe he’d been playing Risk, where Greenland-to-Iceland is the sole invasion path between North America and Europe. Or he’d been fooled by the Mercator projection map of the world, which exaggerates land masses near the poles and makes Greenland appear to be about the size of South America.

However he got to this strange idea, it had to be a joke. Governments buying and selling inhabited lands was commonplace in the age of monarchies. But slavery ended, and the idea of selling people wholesale vanished soon after.

Unsurprisingly, Denmark refused to consider the offer.

Danish PM Mette Frederiksen described the suggestion as “absurd” and said she hoped Mr Trump was not being serious.

He was serious enough to cancel a planned trip to Denmark in response. But nothing happened right away, and the next year Trump lost the 2020 election and had to leave office.

Most of us forgot, so when he began talking about Greenland again last year, it seemed to come out of nowhere. But he hadn’t even taken office yet when Don Jr. went to Greenland to drum up support. One Danish broadcaster claimed Trump bribed poor people to express their desire to join America.

Several sources said a portion of the people who appeared in a video by Trump’s campaign team that was recorded at a restaurant in the capital city of Nuuk, and pictures on social media, are homeless and socially disadvantaged, according to DR.

By March, J.D. Vance and his wife were scoping out Greenlanders’ support for becoming part of the US. Greenland’s prime minister described the trip as “aggressive“.

Last week, Stephen Miller brushed off a question about whether the US might take Greenland by force, saying “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” But if Trump thought he could bluff his way into Greenland, European powers have called that bluff.

The White House has been describing talks between the US, Greenland, and Denmark as “technical talks on the acquisition of Greenland” — as if the sale were a done deal, pending a little haggling about price. But Denmark and Greenland think they have agreed to no such thing.

Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, said the agreement at Wednesday’s meeting had in fact been “to launch a high-level working group to explore if a common way forward can be found to address the American security concerns in relation to Greenland.”

This week, countries began moving troops around.

Before the talks began Wednesday, Denmark announced it would increase its military presence in Greenland. Several European partners — including France, Germany, the U.K., Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands — started sending symbolic numbers of troops or promised to do so in the following days.

Ostensibly, the European troops are there to address Trump’s stated concern about defending Greenland against Russia and China. But they also make another point: Maybe somebody will fight the US over the future of Greenland.

The idea isn’t that a dozen or two French or German soldiers can fend off a concerted US attack. But they draw a line in the snow: Trump isn’t going to take Greenland without killing some of America’s most loyal allies.

The US did something similar during the Cold War, when it stationed troops in West Berlin. Berlin was entirely surrounded by Soviet-occupied East Germany, so it could not be defended by the troops we had stationed there. But their presence meant that the Soviet Union could not take Berlin without starting a war with the United States.

Having been denied his fantasy of a bloodless Anschluss, Trump upped the ante, saying on Truth Social that the European countries “are playing this very dangerous game”, and “have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable”.

So he announced 10% tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland, rising to 25% on June 1, and “payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”.

Presumably that’s an additional tariff, because Americans already pay 15% tariffs on goods from the EU.

The tariff move seems to have goaded European leaders into action. For some while, they have been trying to humor Trump, flattering him rather than criticizing him, and making relatively small concessions in hopes that some other shiny object would draw his attention. The EU signed a trade deal with the US in August that allowed the US to impose 15% tariffs on most European imports while having no tariffs in the other direction. But having seen how long that arrangement has lasted, they are discussing retaliation rather than further appeasement.

It’s hard to see how they could do anything else. Trump’s trade demands last summer were about money, but this crosses over into principle.

A second EU diplomat said the situation was seen as very serious: “There was a clear and broad understanding that Europe and the EU cannot start reneging on key principles in the international order, such as territorial integrity.”

Making the conflict even more mysterious is that Trump’s stated rationales for wanting Greenland don’t add up. He claims that Russia and/or China want Greenland, and that only the US (not Denmark) is able to defend the island.

But of course, the US is already obligated to defend Greenland through the NATO treaty. We already have bases in Greenland. Greenland and Denmark have expressed willingness to allow a greater US military presence, as well as openness to deals for exploiting Greenland’s mineral resources. So what do we gain by making Greenland a US territory?

I hope the Supreme Court is watching. If anyone needs more evidence that Trump’s use of tariffs has nothing to do with the intention behind the law he is using — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — this is it. Paul Krugman writes:

A tariff to promote territorial expansion is clearly illegal, under any sane interpretation of U.S. trade law. This is on the Supreme Court, which is obviously dithering while the world burns

Remember the dancing frogs of Portland? Well, Greenland defenders have their own absurdists. Numerous music videos depict an inter-species Greenland defense force. Also check out this one and this one.

January 19, 2026 – 10:39 am Categories: Articles | Comments (6)

Tagged , , , |

Expand your vocabulary: the Dual State

[I haven’t done an Expand Your Vocabulary post in several years, but “the Dual State” merits one. We should all become fluent in its use.]

It’s commonplace these days to compare the Trump regime’s behavior to what the Nazis did in Germany in the early-to-mid 1930s. (Comparisons to the Final Solution Germany of the 1940s are still over the top. We are not fighting a world war while maintaining a network of death camps.) But here’s a Nazi-era idea that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. Aziz Huq was telling us about it in The Atlantic back in March, referencing a book Ernst Fraenkel wrote after escaping Germany in 1938. (You can read it online for free.)

As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. … In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime.

The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one.

This week in the NYT, David French applied this idea to what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.

It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”

But the prerogative state is always sitting there on the other side of the veil, and you never know when you might cross over into it.

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price.

For the vast majority of Americans, everyday life goes on: You do your job, come home to your family, do your chores, run your errands, watch your favorite TV shows — nothing significant has changed in the year since Trump regained the presidency. It’s easy to imagine that nothing will change, and that the people who try to get you alarmed are all suffering from the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” you hear so much about.

Meanwhile, the prerogative state grows. Maybe it hasn’t arrived in your city yet. Maybe the friends you know who are affected by it did something to draw its attention. But your life goes on normally, until it doesn’t.

January 19, 2026 – 9:25 am Categories: Expand Your Vocabulary | Comments (15)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s been another week where there’s too much news. In the wake of ICE’s murder of Rene Good, the regime has increased its pressure on Minneapolis, cracking down on protesters who disapprove of government agents shooting people in the streets. Is Trump about to invoke the Insurrection Act or not? Simultaneously, we are about to enter a trade war with our NATO allies over Trump’s effort to coerce Denmark into selling Greenland. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court seems likely to rule soon on the legality of Trump’s tariffs. And it’s tempting to ignore stories of equal outrage but less consequence, like Trump strong-arming María Corina Machado into giving him her Nobel Prize medal.

And oh, by the way, happy MLK Day! I might have liked to do a calm reflection on Dr. King’s place in history — that’s what a holiday like this is for, after all. But history is moving forward too fast. Who can afford the time to look back?

So anyway, the featured post will examine the Greenland situation, and I’ll leave the other topics for the weekly summary. The Greenland post should be out before 10 EST, and I’ll try to get the summary done by noon.

January 19, 2026 – 8:26 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Two Options

They’re telling you to believe them and not your eyes. … So the message from this administration is clear: only they determine the truth, and when their forces come to your city, obey or die. And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey.

– Stephen Colbert

This week’s featured post is “Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. A woman got in ICE’s way, so they killed her. Then the top people in the regime smeared her. See the featured post.
  • Climate change. Trump renounced the Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty and pulled the US out of 66 international groups that combat climate change. The groups “advance globalist agendas over US priorities”.
  • War. With the regime so enthused by its Mission-Accomplished moment in Venezuela, we all wait to see where they’ll strike next: Cuba, Colombia, Greenland?

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about ICE killing Renee Good

See the featured post. One thing I didn’t get into that post: Border Czar Tom Homan is working to intimidate protesters, now that one of them is dead.

“The hateful rhetoric has caused a lot of this violence,” Homan said in a Sunday interview on “Fox News Sunday” with host Jacqui Heinrich. “So I said way back in March if the hateful rhetoric doesn’t decrease, there will be bloodshed, and, unfortunately, I was right, and it’s not over. There will be more bloodshed unless we decrease the hateful rhetoric.”

Homan added that “I don’t want to see anybody die,” asking Minnesota leaders to “work with us” despite allegations from Frey and Walz that federal officials have not collaborated with them in investigating the incident.

If everyone would just do what he tells them, nobody would have to die. Lots of thugs say things like that.

The day after Renee Good’s death, ICE agents shot two people in Portland, Oregon. ICE claims they had “ties” to the Tren de Aragua criminal group, whatever that means.

DHS said the duo “weaponized their vehicle against Border Patrol” and the agent fired at them in self-defense.

That seems to be what ICE says whenever they shoot somebody in a car. Maybe sometimes it’s true, but there have definitely been times where evidence shows they lied. There is no independent video of the Portland incident, but two eye-witnesses fail to support the ICE narrative.

One witness in the Portland shooting said he heard five gunshots fired in the parking lot of a Southeast Portland medical office after federal officers boxed in a Toyota truck that had pulled into the lot Thursday afternoon.

The man had been seeking care at the office near Adventist Health hospital when he said he saw the officers follow the truck into the lot at 10201 S.E. Main St. and approach it.

One officer pounded on the truck’s window and the driver appeared scared, the man said. The driver then backed up and moved forward, striking a car behind him at least twice, before turning and speeding off, he said.

About five shots rang out from the contingent of officers as the truck raced away, he said.

Back in October, Pro Publica wrote about the dangers of rapidly expanding ICE’s size and mission while simultaneously scrapping all independent oversight.

Check out the Marsh Family’s updating of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

and Venezuela

We’re still waiting for things to shake out on the ground. So far, the US isn’t occupying Venezuela, but Trump is acting as if he had the country completely pacified. Maduro is in US custody and facing trial, but his VP is now in charge and the rest of Maduro’s government remains in place. How cooperative they will be is still not clear.

If the point was to seize Venezuela’s oil, the Trump regime doesn’t seem to have thought it out very well. The country’s oil infrastructure is in bad shape, and US oil companies haven’t expressed much interest in fixing it. The CEO of ExxonMobil called the Venezuelan oil industry “uninvestable”.

Meanwhile, the tactical success of the Maduro operation has emboldened the regime. Trump has threatened to cut off the supply of oil Cuba has been getting from Venezuela, warning them to “make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE”. As usual, Trump’s threats contain no specific demands, so it’s not clear what Cuba is supposed to do.

And the pressure on Greenland has ramped up again, with Trump saying that “one way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.”

Once again, it’s not clear what Trump specifically wants — and in particular, what he wants that he can’t get from Greenland as a territory of our NATO ally Denmark. Trump claims to be worried about Russia or China taking over Greenland, but it’s not clear why we can’t defend as part of NATO.

Jake Tapper tried to get Stephen Miller to rule out taking Greenland by force, and Miller sidestepped.

The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There’s no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you’re asking of a military operation. Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.

and Iran

Anti-government demonstrations rage on in Iran.

The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group raised its toll to 192, while HRANA, a rights group based in Washington, said it had confirmed the deaths of nearly 500 protesters and almost 50 security personnel.

and you also might be interested in …

Anybody who stands in Trump’s way is going to have the Justice Department go after them sooner or later. Now it appears to be the turn of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

In a highly unusual move, Powell disclosed that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) served the agency with subpoenas and threatened a criminal indictment over testimony he gave to a Senate committee about renovations to Federal Reserve buildings.

Calling the probe “unprecedented”, Powell said he believed it was opened due to Donald Trump’s anger over the Fed’s refusal to cut interest rates despite repeated public pressure from the president.

So Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has its own chatbot, Grok, which offers this amazing free-market feature: If you give it a picture of a person and ask it to give you an image of the same person naked, it will. Wired reports:

Paid tools that “strip” clothes from photos have been available on the darker corners of the internet for years. Elon Musk’s X is now removing barriers to entry—and making the results public.

So you might publicly or privately undress a celebrity like Taylor Swift, your colleague at work, your colleague’s 13-year-old daughter, or anybody else.

But wait, it gets worse:

Grok’s website and app, which are are separate from X, include sophisticated video generation that is not available on X and is being used to produce extremely graphic, sometimes violent, sexual imagery of adults that is vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X. It may also have been used to create sexualized videos of apparent minors.

Is that a problem? Well, Elon’s people came up with this solution: They took the image-generating engine out of Grok’s free version. So if you want sexualized images of your pretty niece, you’ll have to upgrade to the paid subscription.

If you think this is an occasion for regulation, two governments agree with you: Malaysia and Indonesia, which aren’t the countries we usually count on to lead the world. Why hasn’t Europe acted? Well, maybe because X is an American company, and the Trump regime has threatened reprisals against attempts to regulate the US tech lords.

Financial Times found an interesting way to strike back without breaking its own policies against pornography: It used Grok to produce clown-face images of X executives.

I’m waiting for some curmudgeon to do this research: Prove that computer-generated deepfakes are hurting the economy by causing young men to lose their visual imaginations. That’ll get some action. “In my day, if you wanted to picture your teacher naked, you had to work at it.”

Ah, the romantic MAGA movement: As the ACA subsidies go away, people are getting married so that they can afford health insurance.

“I find myself in the middle of some sort of rom-com plot,” he says. “For me to be able to see my doctor to tend to my autoimmune disease, I had to marry my best friend — it’s like some weird twisted plot of Will and Grace.”

and let’s close with something too, too cute

After a week like this one, we can all use some baby animals.

January 12, 2026 – 11:55 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis

Is there any hope of finding a common reality?

Wednesday in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot American mother Renee Good three times, killing her. There is so much to be upset about here, it’s hard to pick a focus. So I’ll start by listing a few and justify them later.

Those things are all true and objectionable, but most of them are being well discussed elsewhere. This morning, I want to take a step back and look at something else: the ability of right-wing media to keep telling a story conflicting with widely available evidence, and the apparent belief inside the MAGA news bubble that objective reality does not exist; what you think happened is simply a matter of who you choose to believe and what evidence you choose to examine.

To me, analyzing the videos of this shooting should resemble what happens in instant-replay review during a sporting event. A questionable play has happened, and then the refs examine the available video. Typically, one or two camera angles aren’t definitive: Looking at them, you can still imagine outcomes favorable to either team. But then you get the angle that makes everything clear. (Here’s the ball, here’s the goal line. It either did or didn’t cross. Or: Here’s the shooter when the clock hits zero. The ball either is or isn’t out of his hand.) Once you’ve seen the definitive angle, the other angles don’t matter any more. You don’t go back to a previous shot and say, “Sure, but in this one the other conclusion still seems possible.”

In this case, there are several decisive moments and angles, all consistent with each other. Like this one, which is a still from a bystander video analyzed in detail by the New York Times:

Ross is the agent behind the agent by Good’s door. His feet are clearly visible to the left of the vehicle, while the front wheels are steering right. (The orientation of the wheels is hard to see in this shot, but clearer when you see the continuous video.) So two conclusions are obvious: (1) Good was not trying to run Ross over, as Noem claimed. Her wheels were pointed away from him. (2) Ross was not in any danger of being run over.

Trump posted a different video along with his claim that “Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” It is a distant video that lets you imagine that anything could have happened — exactly the kind that the football refs would ignore. And in fact, Ross was not harmed, something that is obvious from video of him walking up and down the street seconds later. (It’s possible he was brushed as the car went by, but nothing more.)

Still, you might imagine that Ross believed he was in danger, even though he wasn’t. That conceivably might justify a self-defense claim for his first shot. (The bullet hole is on the left side of the windshield, consistent with him standing close to the left front wheel, and not directly in front.)

But there are two problems with that justification: First, he’s in front of the car because he moved there. Moving into danger so that you can use that danger as an excuse to kill someone does not usually fly in court.

But even more damning: He shoots twice more. His second shot is through the open window in the driver’s door, and his third comes from behind as Good is trying to drive away. In other words: the SUV has already missed him. Shooting as your alleged assailant runs away is not self defense.

You could also imagine that Ross got scared, panicked, and fired three times before he realized he was safe. Even if true, that’s not much of an excuse. At the very least, a guy with responses this bad should never again have a job where he carries a gun. And if I were a prosecutor, I would see what degree of murder I could make stick.

So far I’ve just been drawing clear conclusions from objective evidence. But now I’ll say what I believe in my heart really happened: ICE’s stated mission is to round up deportable immigrants, but that’s not the whole story. Another part of its mission is to intimidate American citizens, particularly citizens in majority-Democratic cities who might be inclined to protest against Trump’s policies. Intimidation is why they wear masks. (They claim it’s to avoid reprisals, but that excuse doesn’t hold water. Local police and FBI agents also investigate dangerous gangs, but they don’t wear masks. Why are ICE agents more cowardly?) And if you watch ICE behavior, it’s clear what rules of engagement the agents been given: If somebody isn’t sufficiently intimidated, escalate the confrontation until they are.

Renee Good’s primary offense was not being intimidated. When agents gave her conflicting orders, she didn’t freeze, she started to drive away. This made Ross angry, and so he killed her, with “fucking bitch” as her epitaph.

Other ICE agents know this. That’s why they are using Good’s death to further intimidate potential protesters. Here, an agent warns a woman sitting in her car not to “make a bad decision and ruin your life”. Nice life you’ve got there; be a shame if anything happened to it.

What has truly amazed me, though, is not that liars will lie. I never trusted Noem or Vance or Trump or ICE, so seeing them gaslight the country is not the least bit shocking. (A columnist for National Catholic Reporter had a different reaction to Vance: “The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith.”)

What amazes me is the number of people who simply repeat what the regime tells them, either not looking at the evidence or (even worse) looking at it and seeing what they have been told to see.

Friday evening, my church organized a vigil for Good. We stood on our town common and quietly held candles with a few signs. According to a reporter for the local online news, 77 people (some church members and some not) attended, which is not bad for a hastily organized event in a small town.

When I came home from the vigil, I saw the Facebook comments on an article that announced it. (122 at last count.) Many of the commenters repeated the regime gaslighting: Why were we holding a vigil for a woman who tried to kill a federal officer? When others disputed this characterization and pointed to the videos proving otherwise, they were answered by vague references to other videos that supposedly support the regime gaslighting. (Like this one: It does not support the regime, but apparently they looked at it and thought it did.)

I wonder what DHS expects its sheep to see in a video it posted yesterday. It shows the street the shooting happened on, during the three minutes before the shooting. There’s a snowy middle-class residential neighborhood, a lot of honking cars moving slowly, pretty much what you’d expect from the videos already out. Absolutely none of the “violent rioters” a DHS official had mentioned.

Maybe the point of such a video is just that it exists. I could point to a brick and claim that it proves I’m right about something. And if you’re sufficiently sheeplike, you might say, “It must be true. He showed me proof.”

I find all this disturbing on a deep level. Apparently, many of our fellow citizens are living in a world where there is no objective reality. There is just disagreement, and some people are powerful enough to make their version of events stick.

A second disturbing feature in the comments I saw was the claim that Good was responsible for her own death, because she didn’t obey ICE agents’ commands. First off, I’m not sure what authority ICE agents have to give commands to US citizens. But suppose they can. The penalty for civil disobedience is not summary execution. Apparently, a number of Americans think it should be.

January 12, 2026 – 9:21 am Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Normally, I’m pretty well armored against the news. I watch bad things happen week after week and do my best to summarize them without letting them ruin my mood. This week was tougher. I had been softened up a little last week by the attack on Venezuela and the Trump administration’s complete disregard for Congress and its laws. And then on Wednesday, an ICE agent murdered a woman who had the audacity not to obey his commands. Our government’s instant response, without waiting for evidence to emerge, was to smear the victim as a “domestic terrorist” who bore full responsibility for her own death.

The right-wing media machine played its assigned role perfectly, repeating Noem, Trump, and Vance’s baseless claims that this video or that one backed up their self-justifying narrative. (They didn’t.) Better angles that showed what really happened were ignored.

And here’s the crushing fact: For some significant portion of the population, it worked. They’re out there repeating the regime’s narrative as if it were established fact.

So anyway, other people have covered the basic facts of the shooting reasonably well. But I feel like I have to comment on our nation’s epistemological crisis: The regime can deny things that are clearly shown on video, and make its sheep see what they are told to see. I find that deeply disturbing.

That’s the gist of the featured post: “Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis” should be out shortly.

That still leaves a lot for the weekly summary: Venezuela, Iran, the exaggerated “scandal” of Minnesota fraud, Grok, and a few other things. That may take me until 1 or so EST.

January 12, 2026 – 8:33 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (6)