The Weekly Sift

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on February 23.

Our response should not be “This response to Bad Bunny’s inclusion shows how divided we are, how can we stop this polarization?” Our response should be uncooperative: “The response to Bad Bunny’s inclusion shows just how racist our society is. Racists are angry about the halftime show? Good! Everything about our society should make racists feel alienated. How do we make racists feel even more alienated from even more of society?

– A. R. Moxon, The Reframe

This week’s featured posts are “Non-Cooperation” and “Dying in Broad Daylight: The Washington Post“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. This week he threatened to “nationalize” vote-counting in 15 states, and continued the violent occupation of Minneapolis.
• Climate change. Trump’s war against renewable energy is having results: Last year, for every new dollar committed to renewable energy projects, three dollars were rolled back.
• Gaza. The ceasefire is holding more or less, but it can’t hold forever if Gazans’ lives don’t start improving.
• Ukraine. The question is less who is winning than who will crack first. Russia’s economy is in serious trouble, and Ukraine is running out of soldiers.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about election interference

In the wake of the regime’s seizure of Georgia’s 2020 ballots and election records, and Trump threatening to “nationalize” the midterm elections rather than let states run them (as the Constitution mandates), it’s hard to decide how alarmed to be. Trump may daydream about counting the ballots himself and proclaiming his lackeys the winners, but what can he actually get away with?

Hakeem Jeffries sounds very confident: “What Donald Trump wants to do is try and nationalize the election – translation: steal it. And we’re not going to let it happen. This is going to be a free and fair election. [It] is going to be conducted like every other election where states and localities have the ability to administer the laws.”

Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias gets down into the weeds a little and has a more nuanced take on the situation. He starts with the strange fact that the warrant for the Georgia seizure came from a Missouri prosecutor, Thomas Albus, rather than from any Georgia prosecutor. It turns out that Albus has been named a “special assistant” to the attorney general. That gives him national scope, and might allow him to seize ballots anywhere in the country.

But Elias thinks seizing ballots in an ongoing election might be more difficult.

It is one thing to seize old ballots; it is quite another to imagine federal agents seizing ballots from county offices on election night or the day after. And that’s only the beginning of the chaos he could unleash. States and counties have limited supplies of voting machines and tabulators, and Trump has already threatened to unilaterally decertify certain machines. A federal prosecutor willing to abuse his power would be a potent tool in achieving Trump’s stated goals. The same is true of mail-in ballots and other forms of voting that Trump seeks to outlaw or disrupt.

But Albus would need cooperation from other prosecutors, FBI agents, and local judges. While Albus might be willing to corruptly serve his boss, others might not be.

Vox interviewed the Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser, who has a similar opinion.

There is a very high risk that the administration will use every tool at its disposal to get voting machines or ballots in the course of an upcoming election. But I don’t think there is a high risk that they will succeed. I think every magistrate judge in the country would understand the difference between a search warrant to seize materials for an election that happened five years ago and a search warrant to seize election materials from an election in progress. I understand why people are worried. But it’s not remotely the same.

The Vox article also addresses the worry that ICE will create chaos in Democratic cities in swing states — maybe Atlanta or Philadelphia or Milwaukee. The point would be to lower voter turnout and shift the state Republican. However, it’s just as likely that a heavy ICE presence would energize Democratic voters rather than deter them. Weiser concludes:

There is clearly an effort afoot to interfere in our elections and that is something that people should be alarmed about. But this can be thwarted. And it must be.

and Minneapolis (still)

If you think the regime has changed its tactics in Minneapolis, think again. Watch this video, for example. A woman is following an unmarked ICE vehicle when agents jump out with guns drawn on her. The quickness with which agents draw their guns tells you everything you need to know. Has there been a single incident in Minneapolis in which an agent drawing a gun was an appropriate response? I think not.

More senseless gun-drawing and tear-gassing is recorded here. And then there’s this incident:

Four days after ICE arrested a Rochester man who is the recipient of a kidney transplant, federal authorities still have not given him the life-saving medications he needs to prevent his body from rejecting the donated kidney, according to the man’s wife.

There hasn’t been a headline-grabbing ICE murder in the last couple of weeks. But that doesn’t mean anything has fundamentally changed.

Speaking of murder, Trump explains to NBC’s Tony Llamas how unfair it is to judge his immigration crackdown by the completely unjustified killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti: “two people out of tens of thousands, and you get bad publicity”.

Has anybody in history ever been treated more unfairly than Donald Trump? I mean, I get that two people are dead and their families will never see them again, but Trump has had to suffer through bad publicity. How can you not sympathize with him?

Yesterday I spoke to my minister, who was part of the clergy demonstrations in Minneapolis two weeks ago. He described a church in Minneapolis that invited families who are afraid to leave their homes to sign up online to have groceries delivered to them. They expected to get maybe a dozen responses, but instead they got hundreds. And they mobilized volunteers to deliver the food.

Fox News loves to describe the resistance in Minnesota as “a national network of socialist, communist and Marxist-Leninist cells in the United States” who are funded by “foreign adversaries“. But it’s neighbors helping neighbors, using free online tools (like Sign-Up Genius) to organize themselves.

Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis” was the most-downloaded song in the country last week.

Law Dork discusses a remarkable court transcript in Minnesota. You may have heard one quote from it, where the administration’s lawyer fantasizes about being held in contempt so that she can get some sleep.

The larger story is that lawyers and prosecutors have been resigning from the Minnesota office because the administration’s policies challenge them ethically. Simultaneously, ICE is arresting so many people for no reason that it’s hard to process all the court orders releasing them. So they remain in custody for no reason.

The judge, understandably, disapproves. “What you cannot do is detain first and sort out lawful authority later.”

and Trump’s racism

As anyone with a shred of objectivity knows, Donald Trump has been racist his whole life. NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie sums up:

For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career — from his embrace of birtherism to his hatred of birthright citizenship — cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism.

Thursday night, he ended all legitimate doubt by posting a one-minute video that included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, a common racist trope. After expressions of outrage even from friendly Republicans like South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the post was removed. But Trump insisted that he would not apologize because “I didn’t make a mistake.” He claimed he hadn’t watched the video all the way through, and so had missed the Obamas-as-apes part. Of course, reposting to millions of people videos you haven’t watched all the way to the end is not a “mistake”, and the people who do watch it to the end don’t deserve an apology.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced the “fake outrage” the video provoked. Obviously, no one could be genuinely offended by the President of the United States promoting a centuries-old slander that casts your people as subhuman.

A federal judge blocked Kristi Noem’s attempt to end temporary protected status for over 350K Haitians living in the US. The judge points out that Noem has attempted to block all 12 of the TPS designations that have come up for renewal during her tenure. The law establishing TPS had very specific condition for ending TPS status, and Noem has completely ignored them.

Notice, this has nothing to do with “illegal” immigration. TPS recipients come here legally, work, and play significant roles in some communities. These are the same people that J. D. Vance slandered as eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.

and the Washington Post

That’s covered in one of the featured posts.

but I want to introduce you to somebody

The other featured post links to The Reframe, a Substack written by A. R. Moxon.

and the Kennedy Center

The Epstein survivors have released a new ad calling on Pam Bondi: “It’s time for the truth”.

When the Trump administration gets beat, it turns vindictive. We’ve seen that spiteful side in their unending persecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who they were forced to return to his family after illegally sending him to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Now we’re seeing the same hate unleashed against the family of Liam Ramos, the five-year-old whose detention became national news. A week ago Saturday, a federal judge ordered Liam and his father released from the concentration camp in Texas where they had been held since January 20. His ruling was scalding.

But of course, the regime can’t let that stand. So Wednesday they petitioned to expedite deportation hearings on Liam’s father, who came to the border legally, requested asylum from persecution in his home country of Ecuador, and is cooperating with the legal asylum process. Friday, a federal judge granted a continuance, slowing the process down. The reports I’ve seen so far don’t say for how long.

J. D. Vance got booed during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan. But if you were watching live in the US, you didn’t hear it; the rest of the world did. Best response is from Keith Oregel: “Imagine getting booed for being a fascist in Italy.”

We’ve seen newspapers go into a death-spiral before. But who thought it could happen to The Washington Post?

Maybe you’ve seen this pattern with your own local newspaper: It has financial problems, so it lays off staff. Then the paper shrinks and has less to offer, so its readership declines, creating new financial problems. So the cycle repeats: more layoffs, less coverage, fewer readers, less revenue.

When that happens to a small-town paper (as it has, many, many times in the last 20 years or so), it’s tragic for the community the paper serves, but the rest of us barely notice. Now, however, it’s happening to one of the most storied, most influential newspapers in the United States: The Washington Post.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When the Graham family sold The Post, it looked for someone who had both the will and the resources to do right by one of the crown jewels of American journalism. And at the time, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos looked like the right choice. In The New Yorker, Post veteran Ruth Marcus described the moment like this:

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

For a while, Bezos and The Post had favorable winds. The controversies of the first Trump administration drove the public’s interest in political coverage, and The Post rode that wave to build its online readership. Then the Biden administration set out to be boring (as good government often is) and largely succeeded. The Post began losing money, and even Trump’s return hasn’t turned that around.

Then Bezos stepped away from his white knight role and began interfering in the newsroom. He cancelled the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute, shifted The Post’s stable of columnists sharply to the Right, and began currying favor with Donald Trump, who has the power to give or take billions from Amazon’s bottom line. Bezos’ most blatant and most corrupt move is playing out right now: He gave First Lady Melania Trump $40 million for the rights to make the Melania propaganda vehicle, and spent another $35 million promoting it. Yahoo reports that the film’s $7 million opening weekend was larger than expected [1] and high for a documentary, but

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the film ends up making the $75 million back.

From the beginning, it was obvious that giving Melania $40 million could not be justified economically. It was a bribe.

Bezos appeared to miss one of the key factors about The Post’s potential audience: It appeals to people who want sound, fact-based coverage. But in the Trump era, those people are mostly liberals. Like Elon Musk before him, by bowing to Trump he was alienating most of his market base.

On the flip side, The Post hasn’t been able to bow sufficiently low to attract many MAGA readers.

So Wednesday, Bezos ordered a massive layoff, about 1/3 of The Post’s workforce. The sports department is gone, and the Books section, along with big chunks of its international coverage. (For example, the Ukraine bureau and the Middle East bureau.) The Metro section shrinks from around 40 staff members (already well below its peak) to maybe 12.

NPR analyzes:

Now the Post appears poised to appeal primarily to readers interested in issues about the U.S. government, with an emphasis on national security and American politics. … Several former editors said it appeared the paper was seeking to compete more with such specialized publications as Politico and Punchbowl rather than The New York Times.

Here’s how I think about it: Historically, the Post has been the local newspaper of a company town: the town is D. C. and the company is the US government. That made the Post interesting to a national audience, in addition to the people who wanted to keep up with the Redskins or know what was happening on the National Mall. The recent layoffs look like a decision to stop being a local newspaper in any but the most superficial sense. But simultaneously, Bezos’ decision to position the Post as a MAGA-friendly billionaire-favoring news outlet is alienating its mostly non-MAGA national base. Besides, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal already own that market.

The rest of the mainstream press has been mourning for what the Washington Post used to be, and blaming Bezos for failing to come up with a solution other than entering the doom-loop of diminishing quality and diminishing returns. Many have referenced the scene in Citizen Kane where Kane says he doesn’t care how much money his newspaper loses, because he can go on losing at this rate for sixty years.

Bezos is far richer than Kane (or William Randolph Hearst, the model for Kane). The Post’s losses are just a rounding error on Bezos’ net worth. He could go on losing at this rate forever.

However, it’s a bit unfair to blame him for refusing the Charles Foster Kane role. We, the news-consuming public, have no real claim on the Bezos fortune. [2]

For that reason, one of the most interesting takes on the Post’s situation is from Josh Marshall, who has shepherded Talking Points Memo from a one-man blog to a profitable news site. The necessities of business leave him little room for being sentimental about journalism. “Making payroll,” he says, “is a brutal taskmaster.”

He sees the Bezos/Post saga as one more example of the “billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle” (previously observed when Chris Hughes bought The New Republic in 2012). The billionaire comes in as a hero, ready to spend what it takes to turn around the flagging fortunes of some iconic news source. Why doesn’t that work? In a prophetic post last July, Marshall observed:

The super rich don’t like losing money, even if it’s at scales that are essentially meaningless to them. … Why did things go wrong when Bezos got involved and started making big changes [at the Post]? A big part of the answer is the consultants, the particular ones a guy like Bezos would gravitate toward. In short, he gravitated toward the ones who speak billionaire. Which is to say, the language of leverage, commercial paper, efficiencies, disruption, innovation, the big idea, etc. Why would he go to those people? Because that’s his social world. To the extent Bezos has peers they live in that world, work with those consultants, think in that way. … They have these ideas because, like Bezos, they are heavily plugged into the tech business, its assumptions, its business models. Critically, they are hyper-focused on scale and efficiencies — two things which can be positives but are mostly neither here nor there in terms of the challenges facing most news publications.

Marshall takes a both-sides-are-wrong attitude towards the Post. The business model of the 20th-century metro newspaper is dead, but Bezos is

defaulting to what was probably the biggest error of the first two decades of the 21st century on the business side of the journalism business: the idea that the dynamics, business concepts and mores of the tech world were applicable to the news business. They’re mostly not.

Bezos will probably bring in a new batch of non-journalist consultants when The Post’s decline continues, and so the doom loop will continue, until Bezos either closes the doors or sells to someone who understands what The Post can be in the current era.

[1] Possibly because military commanders pressured their subordinates to see the movie. Viewership dropped considerably in its second week.

[2] I will leave aside whether multi-billionaires like Bezos should face higher taxes, or whether the antitrust laws should apply to online monopolies like Amazon. I strongly support both propositions, but that’s a different conversation.

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. Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets. No one is forcing you to lie to yourself, even as your bosses continue to lie to the American people.

– Keith Wilson, Mayor of Portland, Oregon

This week’s featured post is “Did We Win?” about the situation with ICE in Minneapolis.

Ongoing stories

Once again, I’m dropping the ball on climate change and various wars to focus on the battle for democracy here in the United States. I hope things seem less urgent next week.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was still talking about ICE

ICE and the resistance against it is the focus of this week’s featured post, but there’s a lot I couldn’t get to there.

The five-year-old in the bunny hat is back home. Liam Ramos and his father were both released from a Texas detention center Sunday and flown back to Minneapolis. They had been in ICE custody since January 20. The release was ordered by a federal judge on Saturday.

US district judge Fred Biery said in his ruling on Saturday that “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”.

The regime claimed that when they took Liam’s father they had no choice but to take him too, because otherwise the child would have been “abandoned”. The superintendent of his school district disputes this, claiming that “another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let them take care of the small child, but was refused”.

But here’s the piece often left out of the story. Not only did ICE have no reason to take Liam, they had no reason to take his father either. He had entered the country legally, by turning himself in at the border and asking for asylum, claiming that he faced persecution back in Ecuador. His lawyer says:

These are not illegal aliens. They were following all the established protocols, pursuing their claim for asylum, showing up for their court hearings, and posed no safety, no flight risk and never should have been detained.

The judge’s order says it best:

the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment. 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.

One of the zombie lies about anti-Trump protests is that the protesters aren’t actual concerned citizens, they’re professional agitators paid by George Soros or some similar conspiracy-theory villain. (When the protesters are Black, which they mostly aren’t this time but were during the George Floyd demonstrations, the paid-by-Soros story plugs into a longstanding antisemitic/racist narrative: Jews are organizing and bankrolling Blacks to overturn White Christian society. This story has the advantage of validating stereotypes in both directions: Blacks wouldn’t be smart enough to organize on their own, without some scheming Jew behind it all.) I’m not sure exactly when this conspiracy theory got started, but it was certainly spreading at the time of the Women’s March in 2017.

If you think about this theory for more than two seconds, you’ll see how easy it would be to infiltrate and expose the whole operation, if it were actually happening: Soros is supposedly recruiting tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. Somehow he’s reaching out to them and convincing them to join. How hard would it be to cosy up to some left-wing acquaintance and get yourself recruited into Antifa, or whoever is supposed to be carrying this out? Then you could record everything, keep track of who paid you and how, and write a big expose’ for the right-wing media. You could be the Whittaker Chambers of the 21st century.

So after nine years, where is that story? Where are the names named and the receipts published? (And where’s my check, George?)

Anyway, the story never dies despite the complete lack of evidence, so I doubt that my two-seconds-of-thought is going to dissuade anybody. So the proper response is probably ridicule. With that in mind, check out this article from the humor site McSweeney’s: “I Am the Payroll Accountant for Professional Protestors in Minnesota, and I Am Swamped“. It’s a collection of memos about being sure accounting has your right name (rather than Fight D. Power), and reminding protesters to fill out their timesheets and come to the office to pick up their checks.

Fox News continues to try to make the Minnesota resistance sound sinister. Friday, they published an “analysis” by a former CIA agent identifying the “insurgency” tactics being used in Minnesota.

“All of the evidence I’ve seen indicates to me that the insurgency is funded by foreign adversaries who want to see violence and Americans fighting each other,” said de la Torre, now founder of Tower Strategies, an advisory firm based in Washington, D.C.

If you’re looking for what that evidence might be, though, the article won’t help you. The analysis is de la Torre’s personal hobby horse. If you want to believe him, you can. But if you’re skeptical, nothing here is even slightly convincing.

I’m particularly amused by the “funded” part. The resistance uses whistles, cell phones people have already, and free internet tools like Facebook and YouTube and Signal and Google Sheets. How much “funding” does that require? (Yesterday, somebody at my church was collecting money to buy handwarmers for the people who have been standing by our local road holding protest signs during the current cold snap. I suspect the involvement of the Chinese Communist Party, or maybe just a handful of my friends.)

A week ago Thursday, a group of white-haired protesters blocked the entrance to an ICE facility in Williston Vermont. Suspecting an operation by sleeper agents from Iran, I asked a friend in Vermont if she knew any of the people involved. She did, and would have gone herself if she hadn’t been involved in a different resistance activity.

The day a drone takes out an ICE SUV, talk to me about “funding”. Nothing we’ve seen so far requires “funding”.

Paul Krugman looks at the same level of organization and sees an American “color revolution”, like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or the Rose Revolution in Georgia.

and the Epstein files

DoJ released over three million pages of Epstein files Friday, only a month and a half after the deadline in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That’s barely more than half the six million files prosecutors were talking about previously, but Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche insists this is the last release.

Once again, DoJ is claiming they have no evidence on which to prosecute anyone other then Epstein himself (who is dead) and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell (who is already in prison). And that may true, as far as it goes. But if these documents aren’t enough to get convictions, it seems like there ought to be plenty to predicate investigations. Who might be called in and questioned? Are there other records that could be gotten through search warrants?

Despite the extra time taken to produce the documents, identities of the victims were not protected. Worse:

The Justice Department published dozens of unredacted nude images on its website, showing young women or possibly teenagers whose photos were contained in files related to the wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

I don’t think we’ve heard the end of this yet.

and election tampering

There are two ways to look at the FBI seizing Georgia’s 2020 election ballots and records Wednesday. Either this is

• one more Trump attempt to prove that Joe Biden didn’t kick his butt in the 2020 election, which he lost by 7 million votes
• the opening salvo in Trump’s attempt to rig this fall’s midterm elections

Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, explains the first view:

I think the FBI is doing the president’s bidding and trying to create a criminal case against Georgia. And by carrying out this farce of an investigation, they’re just trying to placate his delusions. It’s all a power grab. They can’t come to grips with the fact that they lost. They really have this unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia and using lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”

and the second:

I think they’re using Georgia as a blueprint to see what they can get away with elsewhere, because if they’re allowed to seize election materials here, what would stop them from doing it in other states during the midterms?

David French imagines a variety of ways Trump could rig the election without controlling the count. For example, imagine ICE continues to racially profile non-Whites as potentially illegal immigrants, and continues to temporarily detain even legal residents and citizens in brutal conditions. Then ICE opens an operation near polling places in blue cities, so that non-Whites are afraid to show up.

Court orders might try to stop this, but the regime already ignores court orders.

and Don Lemon

Ex-CNN host Don Lemon, who was let go by CNN in 2023 and has since started his own YouTube channel (with over a million subscribers), was arrested Friday under two federal statutes, for covering a protest in St. Paul on January 18. I haven’t done extensive research, but as far as I know this is unprecedented in the United States. Journalists are sometimes charged with trespassing when they follow protesters into some place they shouldn’t be, but even those charges are usually dismissed. This looks like part of the regime’s continuing effort to intimidate, co-opt, and otherwise control the press.

Let’s start at the beginning: There’s a Southern Baptist church in St. Paul with a pastor David Easterwood, whose weekday job has him leading the St. Paul ICE field office. On January 18, 30 or 40 protesters disrupted the church’s Sunday service by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good”. None of the accounts mention violence by the protesters, but congregants reported being frightened. One woman broke her arm when she fell while rushing to get out.

By the time police arrived, the protesters had moved outside the church. I don’t know if the church went on to complete its planned service, but it could have. In the accounts, I can’t see any mention of people being arrested at the scene by St. Paul police.

Then the regime’s “Justice” Department got involved. There is a federal FACE Act (Freedom of ACcess to Entrances), which was passed in 1994 to prevent anti-abortion protesters from blocking the entrances of clinics. It also applies to churches:

Whoever … by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship … shall be subject to the penalties provided [elsewhere in the statute]. … The term “intimidate” means to place a person in reasonable apprehension of bodily harm to him- or herself or to another.

Penalties for a first offense without violence are up to a $10,000 fine and six months in jail. However, the law also says

Nothing in this section shall be construed … to prohibit any expressive conduct (including peaceful picketing or other peaceful demonstration) protected from legal prohibition by the First Amendment to the Constitution

So arresting protesters or the leaders of the protesters is already a bit of a stretch, and the case against them relies on proving that the protesters intended to inspire a “reasonable apprehension of bodily harm” in the congregants. In other words, it’s not enough that a woman was frightened enough to break her arm leaving church. Her fear has to be reasonable, and the protesters had to intend to inspire that fear.

No way there will ever be a conviction here. A second charge is even more speculative: violating the Conspiracy Against Rights law, which was passed after the Civil War as an anti-Klan measure. People violate CAR

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same

That can get you up to ten years in prison.

This is an even bigger stretch, because the intention to intimidate can’t just be a vague idea: Two or more people had to agree on a plan to do it. So OK, arresting protesters on these charges is more harassment than an actual threat of conviction. But the regime took it a step further: They arrested two independent journalists — Don Lemon and Georgia Fort — for covering the protest.

Lemon was live-streaming, so whatever he did is there in the video. (Clips of it were shown during his show.) I haven’t watched it, but apparently he did not participate in the demonstration. He didn’t, for example, do any slogan-chanting. He just followed the protesters in and interviewed people.

and you also might be interested in …

Paul Krugman writes about Trump’s hostility towards Canada.

Supreme Court arguments on Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship will begin on April Fools Day.

Another factoid that I am absolutely not making up: DHS Secretary Noem‘s full name is Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem. So if you want to refer to her by her initials, in an FDR or JFK style, it’s KLAN. We seem to be living in a bad novel.

Heather Cox Richardson called out something Stephen Miller posted on social media:

Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein. Put another way: the easier your immigration policy makes it for newcomers to vote the more discerning your immigration policy must be.

Miller, in this post, does not say explicitly that it’s a mistake to give a foreign laboring class full rights. But we know from his other statements that he’s against it. He’s against birthright citizenship and a clear path to citizenship for immigrants. Being the “first and only” civilization to do this, in his mind, is foolish. The previous day he had denounced Sherrod Brown for proposing to “Protect Ohio’s Haitian community” by preserving their TPS legal status.

Under what definition are Haitian illegal migrants flown here by the Biden Administration an “Ohio community”? Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.

Richardson points out how “History is doing that rhyming thing again.” Miller’s hierarchical view of society, with a laboring class that can never aspire to anything higher, echoes arguments pre-Civil-War Southerners made for slavery and the subordination of women.

The hierarchical system Miller embraces echoes the system championed by those like [South Carolina Senator James Henry] Hammond, who imagined themselves the nation’s true leaders who had the right to rule. They were not bound by the law, and they rejected the idea that those unwilling to recognize their superiority should have either economic or political power.

These are not the principles America was built on.

and let’s close with something that should have happened

Sadly, the ICE-chasing-a-rolling-finger video is AI-generated. Somewhere, there is a better world where this really happened.