The Weekly Sift

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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%.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.