Now, so much of it seems to be things like this, little gotchas taken from the Right-Wing-o-sphere that serve as a sort of bait for the folks here who are less inclined to hang out in the Right-Wing-o-sphere.
You have a pretty good point there. No one can actually believe 'Harvard had bodies stolen from it' is actually relevant, in any manner, to this discussion. It's inane to discuss, and probably is best to ignore.
As I've joked serious-seriously, you could write a plausible time-travel story where the concentration of more and wealth in less and less hands, the complicit media refused to explain where the problems are but continue to 'blame literally anyone else, like immigrants', and of course blaming Hillary because she got elected in 2016 results in politics becoming completely broken, or even more broken, by 2020.
So in 2020, or maybe 2024, a charismatic and extremely intelligent fascist leader gets elected, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. He does not make anywhere near the same mistakes as Trump, he works tirelessly but competently to erode all safeguards in the system. The constitution is continued to be slowly eroded under the guise of 'terrorism', and 'protestor' is treated functionally the same, and the elections are not even slightly free, but all that happens slowly by the _end_ of his term, not spending an entire term doing nothing because he was managed like a toddler, and then doing a bunch of really dumb stuff instantly in his second term.
And by 2050, the US has managed to competently and slowly oppress a large chunk of the rest of the world...possibly not outright conquering, but via puppet governments and threats.
...and the time travelers ask themselves 'How we derail this?' and look around, and, hey say, Donald Trump (Who in the original timeline tried to become Mayor of NYC under fascism and flamed out spectatularly.) is a giant idiot, what happens if we get Obama to piss him off and run in 2016?
It doesn't actually matter if he folds. The ships from China are still sailling empty because they are unsure what tariffs are going to be paid when they get here. There's going to be a month period of shortages, which coincidentally will time itself perfectly with student loan repayment.
Meanwhile, countries are pulling focus to other places, prices are going to rise here because they cannot trust us to buy their goods. Those places may make them less profit, but it is a known consistent profit and they don't have to worry about the random vagaries of the whim of the US president.
Meanwhile meanwhile, a lot of small businesses that rely on cheap goods from China to stay in business, have already decided to shut down, and more of them will fold, before all this gets fixed. Which will work great for concentrating wealth even more in the super rich, but isn't going to help the actual economy much.
None of us have any idea how much actual damage will happen, but it could indeed be a full-on economic calamity. Or not. Who knows.
I'm not really talking at the individual level. Obviously people have had payments paused generally don't want them to resume, although they mostly understand that they will.
My point is that governments, and this government especially, needs enough people, enough powerful people, to conclude that it is not best for this government to be burn to the ground.
It is somewhat amazing watching just how incoherent this version of fascism is, about how it does target its enemies with laser-like precision, as fascism should, but then seems very unclear about how it shouldn't harm the Real American Volk who are supposed to be on its side, and just sort of scatter shots harm towards everyone!
This is because of how incoherent conservative politics was that led into this, which decided things like 'people who went to college' and 'young people asking for jobs that paid enough to live on' and 'women saying things' were the enemies. A revolving door of enemies that probably included every single person at some point in time, whatever was the most politically useful enemies to have at any given moment.
And then it elect someone like Trump, who doesn't understand basic economics of any sort and cannot be reasoned with even by his own party. And who takes all the enemy list seriously, and doesn't have a problem with having 90% of the US population be enemies!
People, fascist people, I don't know why I have to explain this to you, but the law is supposed to bind but not protect out-groups, and you got that right, but it is supposed to protect but not bind the in-groups, and you're failing at the protect part!
We had about a half dozen countries created and/or changed when Brittan pulled out of the Middle East.
And those countries that ethnically cleansed an area to exist were criticized for it and generally stopped, or continued to criticized for it.
I don’t see why it’s “moral” to insist that none of them be Jewish.
The problem with an ethnostate isn't that it exists, the problem with an ethnostate is _what it does to people of other ethnicities who already exist in it_.
No one cares if countries are 'ethnostates' if they only have one ethnicity in them. In fact, no one even bothers to classify them as such. Ethnostates are generally considered as such by how they treat their minority populations.
And, in Israel's case, it's not just the people in actual Israel, it's the fact it clearly wants _all_ Palestine's territory, so it's not only how it treats non-Jewish people within Israel, but how it (currently) treats non-Jewish people within (what it clearly plans to be future) Israel.
Did I say anything about what is and isn't anti-semitic?
Why, I don't believe I did!
Indeed, what I appear to have said is that 'This obviously lying site is spreading very debunked and harmful lies as it say that someone's behavior is antisemitic.'
I think the best quote from that article is this one:
If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives?
It is somehow incredibly self-aware and non-self-aware at the same time . Yes, National Review in 2016, what _would_ Trump becoming popular say about conservatives?
Sometimes it's easy to believe the Trump Administration cannot be stupider, and then it goes and drags out something like this and you remember who you're talking about.
We can, perhaps, argue about student loans in some other universe, if we should collect them or not, it was an interesting argument before the election.
But...we do understand the economy is about to collapse, right? I'm not kidding about that. Prices about to leap, shortages are going to happen, things are about to get pretty bad as high China tariffs and the 10% on everyone else go into effect. The half-empty ships are already on the way. Things are about To Happen come June 1st.
But don't worry as prices skyrocket and businesses start failing, the Federal government is _also_ going to resume taking loan repayments from your bank account!
This is just...astonishingly implausible, and I don't really have any other words for it, despite 'implausible' not really being applicably to things literally happening in actual real life.
I could say inconceivable, but that feels like a Princess Bride joke.
I can't even figure out the words for this sort of behavior. It is extremely hard to come up with any sort of coherent understanding of the Trump administration besides 'fascism that is determined to saw their own legs off and throw themselves into lava'.
Hey, look, it's the 'Palestinians beheaded babies' hoax on that very page.
I again remind people that was exactly one fatality that could qualify as a baby on Oct 7, 11-month old Mila Cohen, and that was shot in her mother's arms from a distance. Even if you think that was purposeful, I think we can agree that is not 'beheading'. This is incredibly well documented, this isn't up for debate, we have literally the list of Israeli casualties and there is one deceased baby on it, period.
Meanwhile, there are, however, quite a lot of pictures of Palestinian babies that could, indeed, be called 'beheaded by Israeli strikes', and pretending there are not such things while pushing a well-debunked false claim is astonishing.
Are there literally any actual factual standards you will apply to the sites feeding you 'news' about anti-semitism?
Some conservatives believe due process still matters: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/attorney-general-bondis-claim-that-courts-have-ruled-that-abrego-garcia-is-a-member-of-ms-13/
...people have the strangest bedfellows these days.
I could argue it does slightly reflect badly on their _competence_, indeed, they admitted they had poor controls over some of that and no real oversight. And created a policy afterward.
But being incompetent in oversight of a specific thing to stop people from stealing from you isn't the same as 'lacks moral authority'. It's not even Harvard 'being bad at their job'...they aren't a body bank, pretending such things existed. They're a school, their job is education, and schools are often pretty bad at security, and often do end up having wake-up calls when people steal from them.
This case is just somewhat icky because of what was stolen, but that doesn't reflect on Harvard's moral authority unless you think it's immoral for Harvard to have bodies at all. (Which would be a distinctly minority view...most people understand why medical school have cadavers.)
JFK Jr. is also going to start trying to control medications and bodily autonomy of autistic people, literally talking about imprisoning them, and is threatening to cut off ADHD medication. Very eugenic-y things.
Also same about trans healthcare, but somehow that's completely unrelated and fine to a bunch of people here. It's surely not the exact same tendency.
Again, you cannot _possible_ believe that 'arrested for standing Hispanically in a Home Depot parking lot', and two people nearby included gang members, can even _possibly_ be an indication of gang membership that would withstand any legal test.
You are not that stupid.
As for the protective order: His wife is literally advocating for his return.
He also was never actually charged with a crime. We do not punish people for having protective orders against them, because _getting a protective order does not require due process_.
If they want to charge him with assault, they can. Of course, it would be a pretty stupid case as the only witness is his wife, who, duh, they can't legally compel to testify against him.
A reminder of where we are: The habeas filings have all followed the Supreme Court’s 5-4 order in Trump v. J.G.G. on April 7 holding that AEA challenges had to be brought in habeas actions — and vacating the prior classwide order, brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, blocking AEA proclamation-based removals nationwide.
As such, a habeas petition was filed by lawyers from the ACLU on behalf of two petitioners and a “putative class” in the Northern District of Texas on April 16. As with the other recent filings, the aim was for this to protect anyone from AEA proclamation-removal within the district. That is the putative, or proposed, class.
I.e., this is the ACLU following along with the nonsense idea that 'The government can rendition these people without a trial as long as they are warned they are going to be renditioned and do not manage to contact a lawyer and get a habaes petition filed fast enough, and no we won't be specific about the time limitation there or whether or not they can even contact a lawyer'.
The ACLU apparently took that as a challenge, and it appears that _enough_ people in the government take issue with this enough to be leaking information and that a flight was imminent from Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas. Today. On Saturday. So they filed a TRO Friday evening, it got appealed up the chain fast enough, and the Supreme Court had to step in at fricking one in the morning.
'We can send individuals off to be tortured with no due process, and no way to ever give them due process, unless, and only unless, some lawyer learns we're going to do that and manages to get a response from the actual literal Supreme Court faster than we can get a plane off the ground.'
Starting to think we need two sorts of open threads. Normal open threads, and threads for 'current legal status of gulag rendition', which keeps changing so fast no one can really write an article on it.
Anyway, hours after _this_ was posted, the Surpreme Court, at one in the morning on a Saturday, issued a blanket TRO saying the administration cannot rendition anyone from the Northern Distract of Texas under the AEA. This, notable, does not have anything to do with Abrego Garcia, it's because the ACLU filed a blanket habeas for _everyone_ who is going to renditioned. (You know, those people who got the forms the other day.)
This is in addition to the one TRO that already existed within the Southern District of Texas stopping the same thing. (Which I think is the one in the article? And also the one that is currently being looked into for contempt because they did not turn the planes around as the judge ordered.)
It is worth pointing out that the Trump Administration is almost out of jurisdiction shopping. This is the jurisdiction _they wanted_ and they can't even get favorable results from it.
It is completely absurd that no one will issue a nation-wide injunction about this.
There’s a drip drip drip of new information that, if not calculated, is unfortunate enough to suspect that it was calculated.
No, they are much too stupid to do that, just like they are much too stupid to bring him back, have a immigration trial, and deport him.
Meanwhile, the fact his rendition (1) to El Salvador was against court order, which has resulted in legal proceeding moving a lot faster than they would have otherwise, so if this was calculated, it was calculated by...idiots, okay, I guess I changed my mind, it certainly could have been calculated by the Trump administration.
1) Again: Not deportation. Deportation results in you being free in the county you are deported to.
There's a specific term for transferring custody of prisoners between governments, and it is not deportation, it's 'rendition'. Extradition is rendition. Prisoners swaps are rendition. (Although those usually result in the person being freed immediately.) The Bush administrations' illegal renditions were renditions.
The difference is important, because deportation is generally considered to be a lot less harm. You're free at the end of it, just...not here. We can use very lax immigration courts for it, we have looser standards and things that are not actually crimes that people are held to, etc.
Whereas rendition results in an imprisoned person at the end, and thus people have a lot more rights. We can deport people for things we could _never_ extradite them for.
No, he was arrested the first time in 2019 with a group of people at a Home Depot, 2 of whom were (apparently) MS 13 members. ... He was legally in the country subject to that order when he was picked up the second time in March, this time loitering outside of an IKEA, and again with a group of people that (apparently) included MS 13 members.
I honestly do not know how to phrase this, because my first five tries were very direct personal attacks, but let me try: It is literally impossible for you to seriously believe 'A bunch of Hispanic undocumented immigrants loitering outside of a Home Depot and an IKEA' is anything over than 'undocumented immigrants looking for work'. And they were almost certainly stranding 'near' each other because _that is where the undocumented workers trying to get hired were standing that day_.
You KNOW this a deliberate misrepresentation of a very common situation. Every American who has ever gone to Home Depot and looked at 'Bunch of Hispanic guys standing over to the side' understands exactly what is going on. That isn't some gang loitering, that isn't some social club, that isn't a group of friends, it's where you go to hire cheap and almost certainly undocumented labor. They might literally have met ten minutes earlier.
But you don't like illegal immigration, so you have decided to pretend it must be something else.
So the whole 'this is a torture prison that the United States has repeatedly found is a torture prison and barred people from being an extradited to, under the UN convention against torture' has just slipped right past you?
Along with the 'people are not deported to foreign prisons, that is not how deportation works. Deportation results in you being free at the end'
The problem here is not merely the goddamn lack of due process. The problem is that this guy has been renditioned to a foreign gulag in a way that is utterly illegal under American law and there is no possible way to reach that outcome even _under_ due process.
I don't think that that should be argued that way.
I think it is, and should be, perfectly legal to remove people like that.
However, the media should still cover it as an abomination. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it isn't something we should have elected representatives casually do without criticism.
A lot of people seem to fall into a weird hole thinking that legality and acceptable behavior should be the same thing. They are not. There are things that is entirely legal for elected people to do that should be seriously criticized, not because they are illegal, but because they are things that elected officials should not do!
And talking about legality obscures that fact because they can just point to the fact those things are not actually illegal.
Oh, and as for tasing to enforce compliance, I don't think that should be legal, period. And I would ask people who have a problem with it _here_ why they think it's okay in other circumstances.
So, yes, that sounds plausible, but also...no. It's not _just_ that.
There are a lot of people who have been greatly injured by the government, or at least think they have. That is not a political position, and it happens to people all over the political spectrum. Sometimes these people become political, and it's somewhat normal. Other times people become radicalized. And that can happen a lot of different ways.
But there is a very specific category out there created by politics, and that is the far right violence-hole, for lack of a better term. The Proud Boys, the 3%ers, all sorts of internet forums that threat violence as a normal and inevitable outcome. The people who propose 'second amendment remedies', who will happy tell you if anything bad happens to you from the government, you should start attempting to 'overthrow' them.
This is not the only political group that has done this. The Anarchists, for example, historically were really good at it about a century ago. There were all sorts of far left groups running around in the seventies.
But currently there is exactly one group like that.
And before anyone tries to BSDI, I feel I should point at the current political environment, at who the government is currently harming, and that almost all actual political violence that is happening is _still_ being done by the right. If there ever was a time for the actual political violence, it would be against 'send people without trial to foreign gulags', but...nope. And the amount of LGBTQ people throwing bricks at cops for harassing queer people in the bathroom is, sadly, still zero.
That's because most of this country is _extremely_ reluctant to start political violence, and the rest draw the line at some levels of property damage. But there is one very small group of people who are promote it constantly, who promote shooting and killing government officials, and sometimes people who are generally incoherent or apolitical but angry, justified or not, find those groups and latch on to that bit. It doesn't so much matter what _their_ politics are.
As far as I can tell, the Republicans have a “whatabout” for every single “precedent” that the Democrats claim are being set.
There's a thing the left says 'It's always projection'. The right always wants to do very illegal things, so it just builds entire structures that lie and say that is what the left is doing.
So when they do it, they can point at the lies.
Republicans held an entire investigation that deliberately mislead people that an ill-conceived IRS setup that investigated a huge influx of politically-named charities, on _both sides_. Republicans did this by literally ordering investigation into _just_ the charities on the right that were looked into. And by 'looked into', I mean 'Asked a few more questions', not 'rejected', or 'audited', or anything. They just said 'Hey, this preclearance you want us to issue needs a few questions answered'.
And now, we have President Trump openly calling for the IRS to revoke (Not investigate, just outright revoke), the tax exempt status of Harvard explicitly for political reason.
I'm sure this is claimed as an escalation by people _who believe the original lies_, but those lies are, in fact, lies.
Same with 'Bill Clinton might have hypothetically said something about the investigation of Hillary to Loretta Lynch on the tarmac', and how merely the slightly appearance of that required investigation. Do you remember that?
That wasn't even 'a lie', that was just complete nonsense from top to bottom, creating allegations out of thin air.
But now we have...I don't even need to pick an example of how the DOJ works now, where it's basically a direct appendage of the White House instead of having any separation at all.
I'm sure that all started with Democrats, with that meeting on the tarmac, somehow.
Over and over and over, Republicans just outright lied about crap, and the media went along with it, and not only did that help them then, it means, somehow, when Republicans actually wander into outright fascism, it means the Democrats did it first because a speaker got protested at a campus somewhere and that's _sorta_ like the US deporting people for their political views, right?
I’m pretty sure that we’re *ALL* members of the press. When the First Amendment was written, “the press” was just a guy who had one. That’s it.
You might consider yourself a member of the press, but when a private citizen, or even a company, calls a press conference, the press is whoever they want it to be.
We can talk about rights if it's some government agency. Indeed, the Universal Life Church, in addition to ordaining ministers, will give out 'Press Passes' that they say are as good as any newspaper for legally getting access to government press events, although that's very 'three decades ago' as the rules changed as bloggers started issuing their own to themselves.
But that's not what happened here. This appears to have been a private event and thus the people invited are whoever the people holding it want invited.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
You have a pretty good point there. No one can actually believe 'Harvard had bodies stolen from it' is actually relevant, in any manner, to this discussion. It's inane to discuss, and probably is best to ignore.
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
As I've joked serious-seriously, you could write a plausible time-travel story where the concentration of more and wealth in less and less hands, the complicit media refused to explain where the problems are but continue to 'blame literally anyone else, like immigrants', and of course blaming Hillary because she got elected in 2016 results in politics becoming completely broken, or even more broken, by 2020.
So in 2020, or maybe 2024, a charismatic and extremely intelligent fascist leader gets elected, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. He does not make anywhere near the same mistakes as Trump, he works tirelessly but competently to erode all safeguards in the system. The constitution is continued to be slowly eroded under the guise of 'terrorism', and 'protestor' is treated functionally the same, and the elections are not even slightly free, but all that happens slowly by the _end_ of his term, not spending an entire term doing nothing because he was managed like a toddler, and then doing a bunch of really dumb stuff instantly in his second term.
And by 2050, the US has managed to competently and slowly oppress a large chunk of the rest of the world...possibly not outright conquering, but via puppet governments and threats.
...and the time travelers ask themselves 'How we derail this?' and look around, and, hey say, Donald Trump (Who in the original timeline tried to become Mayor of NYC under fascism and flamed out spectatularly.) is a giant idiot, what happens if we get Obama to piss him off and run in 2016?
This might be the good timeline, people.
"
It doesn't actually matter if he folds. The ships from China are still sailling empty because they are unsure what tariffs are going to be paid when they get here. There's going to be a month period of shortages, which coincidentally will time itself perfectly with student loan repayment.
Meanwhile, countries are pulling focus to other places, prices are going to rise here because they cannot trust us to buy their goods. Those places may make them less profit, but it is a known consistent profit and they don't have to worry about the random vagaries of the whim of the US president.
Meanwhile meanwhile, a lot of small businesses that rely on cheap goods from China to stay in business, have already decided to shut down, and more of them will fold, before all this gets fixed. Which will work great for concentrating wealth even more in the super rich, but isn't going to help the actual economy much.
None of us have any idea how much actual damage will happen, but it could indeed be a full-on economic calamity. Or not. Who knows.
"
I'm not really talking at the individual level. Obviously people have had payments paused generally don't want them to resume, although they mostly understand that they will.
My point is that governments, and this government especially, needs enough people, enough powerful people, to conclude that it is not best for this government to be burn to the ground.
It is somewhat amazing watching just how incoherent this version of fascism is, about how it does target its enemies with laser-like precision, as fascism should, but then seems very unclear about how it shouldn't harm the Real American Volk who are supposed to be on its side, and just sort of scatter shots harm towards everyone!
This is because of how incoherent conservative politics was that led into this, which decided things like 'people who went to college' and 'young people asking for jobs that paid enough to live on' and 'women saying things' were the enemies. A revolving door of enemies that probably included every single person at some point in time, whatever was the most politically useful enemies to have at any given moment.
And then it elect someone like Trump, who doesn't understand basic economics of any sort and cannot be reasoned with even by his own party. And who takes all the enemy list seriously, and doesn't have a problem with having 90% of the US population be enemies!
People, fascist people, I don't know why I have to explain this to you, but the law is supposed to bind but not protect out-groups, and you got that right, but it is supposed to protect but not bind the in-groups, and you're failing at the protect part!
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
And those countries that ethnically cleansed an area to exist were criticized for it and generally stopped, or continued to criticized for it.
The problem with an ethnostate isn't that it exists, the problem with an ethnostate is _what it does to people of other ethnicities who already exist in it_.
No one cares if countries are 'ethnostates' if they only have one ethnicity in them. In fact, no one even bothers to classify them as such. Ethnostates are generally considered as such by how they treat their minority populations.
And, in Israel's case, it's not just the people in actual Israel, it's the fact it clearly wants _all_ Palestine's territory, so it's not only how it treats non-Jewish people within Israel, but how it (currently) treats non-Jewish people within (what it clearly plans to be future) Israel.
"
Did I say anything about what is and isn't anti-semitic?
Why, I don't believe I did!
Indeed, what I appear to have said is that 'This obviously lying site is spreading very debunked and harmful lies as it say that someone's behavior is antisemitic.'
On “Back When Patriots Opposed Kings”
I think the best quote from that article is this one:
It is somehow incredibly self-aware and non-self-aware at the same time . Yes, National Review in 2016, what _would_ Trump becoming popular say about conservatives?
LOL.
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
Sometimes it's easy to believe the Trump Administration cannot be stupider, and then it goes and drags out something like this and you remember who you're talking about.
We can, perhaps, argue about student loans in some other universe, if we should collect them or not, it was an interesting argument before the election.
But...we do understand the economy is about to collapse, right? I'm not kidding about that. Prices about to leap, shortages are going to happen, things are about to get pretty bad as high China tariffs and the 10% on everyone else go into effect. The half-empty ships are already on the way. Things are about To Happen come June 1st.
But don't worry as prices skyrocket and businesses start failing, the Federal government is _also_ going to resume taking loan repayments from your bank account!
This is just...astonishingly implausible, and I don't really have any other words for it, despite 'implausible' not really being applicably to things literally happening in actual real life.
I could say inconceivable, but that feels like a Princess Bride joke.
I can't even figure out the words for this sort of behavior. It is extremely hard to come up with any sort of coherent understanding of the Trump administration besides 'fascism that is determined to saw their own legs off and throw themselves into lava'.
On “The Lawless Lying Duplicitous Bastards of Abrego Garcia”
Yes, Jaybird, it's 'Trutherism' to point out untrue things you said.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
Hey, look, it's the 'Palestinians beheaded babies' hoax on that very page.
I again remind people that was exactly one fatality that could qualify as a baby on Oct 7, 11-month old Mila Cohen, and that was shot in her mother's arms from a distance. Even if you think that was purposeful, I think we can agree that is not 'beheading'. This is incredibly well documented, this isn't up for debate, we have literally the list of Israeli casualties and there is one deceased baby on it, period.
Meanwhile, there are, however, quite a lot of pictures of Palestinian babies that could, indeed, be called 'beheaded by Israeli strikes', and pretending there are not such things while pushing a well-debunked false claim is astonishing.
Are there literally any actual factual standards you will apply to the sites feeding you 'news' about anti-semitism?
On “Back When Patriots Opposed Kings”
Some conservatives believe due process still matters: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/attorney-general-bondis-claim-that-courts-have-ruled-that-abrego-garcia-is-a-member-of-ms-13/
...people have the strangest bedfellows these days.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
I could argue it does slightly reflect badly on their _competence_, indeed, they admitted they had poor controls over some of that and no real oversight. And created a policy afterward.
But being incompetent in oversight of a specific thing to stop people from stealing from you isn't the same as 'lacks moral authority'. It's not even Harvard 'being bad at their job'...they aren't a body bank, pretending such things existed. They're a school, their job is education, and schools are often pretty bad at security, and often do end up having wake-up calls when people steal from them.
This case is just somewhat icky because of what was stolen, but that doesn't reflect on Harvard's moral authority unless you think it's immoral for Harvard to have bodies at all. (Which would be a distinctly minority view...most people understand why medical school have cadavers.)
"
JFK Jr. is also going to start trying to control medications and bodily autonomy of autistic people, literally talking about imprisoning them, and is threatening to cut off ADHD medication. Very eugenic-y things.
Also same about trans healthcare, but somehow that's completely unrelated and fine to a bunch of people here. It's surely not the exact same tendency.
"
..the guy stole bodies _from_ Harvard, sold them to others, and was fired for doing so when Harvard learned of it.
What a weird thing to think harms Harvard's moral authority.
"
Personally, I don't think the US should go up against the Pentagon, I hear the military they control is the best in the world.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
Again, you cannot _possible_ believe that 'arrested for standing Hispanically in a Home Depot parking lot', and two people nearby included gang members, can even _possibly_ be an indication of gang membership that would withstand any legal test.
You are not that stupid.
As for the protective order: His wife is literally advocating for his return.
He also was never actually charged with a crime. We do not punish people for having protective orders against them, because _getting a protective order does not require due process_.
If they want to charge him with assault, they can. Of course, it would be a pretty stupid case as the only witness is his wife, who, duh, they can't legally compel to testify against him.
On “4th Circuit Court on Abrego Garcia: Read It For Yourself”
A reminder of where we are:
The habeas filings have all followed the Supreme Court’s 5-4 order in Trump v. J.G.G. on April 7 holding that AEA challenges had to be brought in habeas actions — and vacating the prior classwide order, brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, blocking AEA proclamation-based removals nationwide.
As such, a habeas petition was filed by lawyers from the ACLU on behalf of two petitioners and a “putative class” in the Northern District of Texas on April 16. As with the other recent filings, the aim was for this to protect anyone from AEA proclamation-removal within the district. That is the putative, or proposed, class.
I.e., this is the ACLU following along with the nonsense idea that 'The government can rendition these people without a trial as long as they are warned they are going to be renditioned and do not manage to contact a lawyer and get a habaes petition filed fast enough, and no we won't be specific about the time limitation there or whether or not they can even contact a lawyer'.
The ACLU apparently took that as a challenge, and it appears that _enough_ people in the government take issue with this enough to be leaking information and that a flight was imminent from Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas. Today. On Saturday. So they filed a TRO Friday evening, it got appealed up the chain fast enough, and the Supreme Court had to step in at fricking one in the morning.
'We can send individuals off to be tortured with no due process, and no way to ever give them due process, unless, and only unless, some lawyer learns we're going to do that and manages to get a response from the actual literal Supreme Court faster than we can get a plane off the ground.'
...and yet the ACLU pulled it off.
This is an INSANE way to run a legal system.
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Starting to think we need two sorts of open threads. Normal open threads, and threads for 'current legal status of gulag rendition', which keeps changing so fast no one can really write an article on it.
Anyway, hours after _this_ was posted, the Surpreme Court, at one in the morning on a Saturday, issued a blanket TRO saying the administration cannot rendition anyone from the Northern Distract of Texas under the AEA. This, notable, does not have anything to do with Abrego Garcia, it's because the ACLU filed a blanket habeas for _everyone_ who is going to renditioned. (You know, those people who got the forms the other day.)
https://www.lawdork.com/p/supreme-court-aea-april-late-night-order
This is in addition to the one TRO that already existed within the Southern District of Texas stopping the same thing. (Which I think is the one in the article? And also the one that is currently being looked into for contempt because they did not turn the planes around as the judge ordered.)
It is worth pointing out that the Trump Administration is almost out of jurisdiction shopping. This is the jurisdiction _they wanted_ and they can't even get favorable results from it.
It is completely absurd that no one will issue a nation-wide injunction about this.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
There’s a drip drip drip of new information that, if not calculated, is unfortunate enough to suspect that it was calculated.
No, they are much too stupid to do that, just like they are much too stupid to bring him back, have a immigration trial, and deport him.
Meanwhile, the fact his rendition (1) to El Salvador was against court order, which has resulted in legal proceeding moving a lot faster than they would have otherwise, so if this was calculated, it was calculated by...idiots, okay, I guess I changed my mind, it certainly could have been calculated by the Trump administration.
1) Again: Not deportation. Deportation results in you being free in the county you are deported to.
There's a specific term for transferring custody of prisoners between governments, and it is not deportation, it's 'rendition'. Extradition is rendition. Prisoners swaps are rendition. (Although those usually result in the person being freed immediately.) The Bush administrations' illegal renditions were renditions.
The difference is important, because deportation is generally considered to be a lot less harm. You're free at the end of it, just...not here. We can use very lax immigration courts for it, we have looser standards and things that are not actually crimes that people are held to, etc.
Whereas rendition results in an imprisoned person at the end, and thus people have a lot more rights. We can deport people for things we could _never_ extradite them for.
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No, he was arrested the first time in 2019 with a group of people at a Home Depot, 2 of whom were (apparently) MS 13 members. ... He was legally in the country subject to that order when he was picked up the second time in March, this time loitering outside of an IKEA, and again with a group of people that (apparently) included MS 13 members.
I honestly do not know how to phrase this, because my first five tries were very direct personal attacks, but let me try: It is literally impossible for you to seriously believe 'A bunch of Hispanic undocumented immigrants loitering outside of a Home Depot and an IKEA' is anything over than 'undocumented immigrants looking for work'. And they were almost certainly stranding 'near' each other because _that is where the undocumented workers trying to get hired were standing that day_.
You KNOW this a deliberate misrepresentation of a very common situation. Every American who has ever gone to Home Depot and looked at 'Bunch of Hispanic guys standing over to the side' understands exactly what is going on. That isn't some gang loitering, that isn't some social club, that isn't a group of friends, it's where you go to hire cheap and almost certainly undocumented labor. They might literally have met ten minutes earlier.
But you don't like illegal immigration, so you have decided to pretend it must be something else.
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So the whole 'this is a torture prison that the United States has repeatedly found is a torture prison and barred people from being an extradited to, under the UN convention against torture' has just slipped right past you?
Along with the 'people are not deported to foreign prisons, that is not how deportation works. Deportation results in you being free at the end'
The problem here is not merely the goddamn lack of due process. The problem is that this guy has been renditioned to a foreign gulag in a way that is utterly illegal under American law and there is no possible way to reach that outcome even _under_ due process.
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I don't think that that should be argued that way.
I think it is, and should be, perfectly legal to remove people like that.
However, the media should still cover it as an abomination. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it isn't something we should have elected representatives casually do without criticism.
A lot of people seem to fall into a weird hole thinking that legality and acceptable behavior should be the same thing. They are not. There are things that is entirely legal for elected people to do that should be seriously criticized, not because they are illegal, but because they are things that elected officials should not do!
And talking about legality obscures that fact because they can just point to the fact those things are not actually illegal.
Oh, and as for tasing to enforce compliance, I don't think that should be legal, period. And I would ask people who have a problem with it _here_ why they think it's okay in other circumstances.
On “Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s Residence Attacked, Suspect Arrested”
So, yes, that sounds plausible, but also...no. It's not _just_ that.
There are a lot of people who have been greatly injured by the government, or at least think they have. That is not a political position, and it happens to people all over the political spectrum. Sometimes these people become political, and it's somewhat normal. Other times people become radicalized. And that can happen a lot of different ways.
But there is a very specific category out there created by politics, and that is the far right violence-hole, for lack of a better term. The Proud Boys, the 3%ers, all sorts of internet forums that threat violence as a normal and inevitable outcome. The people who propose 'second amendment remedies', who will happy tell you if anything bad happens to you from the government, you should start attempting to 'overthrow' them.
This is not the only political group that has done this. The Anarchists, for example, historically were really good at it about a century ago. There were all sorts of far left groups running around in the seventies.
But currently there is exactly one group like that.
And before anyone tries to BSDI, I feel I should point at the current political environment, at who the government is currently harming, and that almost all actual political violence that is happening is _still_ being done by the right. If there ever was a time for the actual political violence, it would be against 'send people without trial to foreign gulags', but...nope. And the amount of LGBTQ people throwing bricks at cops for harassing queer people in the bathroom is, sadly, still zero.
That's because most of this country is _extremely_ reluctant to start political violence, and the rest draw the line at some levels of property damage. But there is one very small group of people who are promote it constantly, who promote shooting and killing government officials, and sometimes people who are generally incoherent or apolitical but angry, justified or not, find those groups and latch on to that bit. It doesn't so much matter what _their_ politics are.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
There's a thing the left says 'It's always projection'. The right always wants to do very illegal things, so it just builds entire structures that lie and say that is what the left is doing.
So when they do it, they can point at the lies.
Republicans held an entire investigation that deliberately mislead people that an ill-conceived IRS setup that investigated a huge influx of politically-named charities, on _both sides_. Republicans did this by literally ordering investigation into _just_ the charities on the right that were looked into. And by 'looked into', I mean 'Asked a few more questions', not 'rejected', or 'audited', or anything. They just said 'Hey, this preclearance you want us to issue needs a few questions answered'.
And now, we have President Trump openly calling for the IRS to revoke (Not investigate, just outright revoke), the tax exempt status of Harvard explicitly for political reason.
I'm sure this is claimed as an escalation by people _who believe the original lies_, but those lies are, in fact, lies.
Same with 'Bill Clinton might have hypothetically said something about the investigation of Hillary to Loretta Lynch on the tarmac', and how merely the slightly appearance of that required investigation. Do you remember that?
That wasn't even 'a lie', that was just complete nonsense from top to bottom, creating allegations out of thin air.
But now we have...I don't even need to pick an example of how the DOJ works now, where it's basically a direct appendage of the White House instead of having any separation at all.
I'm sure that all started with Democrats, with that meeting on the tarmac, somehow.
Over and over and over, Republicans just outright lied about crap, and the media went along with it, and not only did that help them then, it means, somehow, when Republicans actually wander into outright fascism, it means the Democrats did it first because a speaker got protested at a campus somewhere and that's _sorta_ like the US deporting people for their political views, right?
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I’m pretty sure that we’re *ALL* members of the press. When the First Amendment was written, “the press” was just a guy who had one. That’s it.
You might consider yourself a member of the press, but when a private citizen, or even a company, calls a press conference, the press is whoever they want it to be.
We can talk about rights if it's some government agency. Indeed, the Universal Life Church, in addition to ordaining ministers, will give out 'Press Passes' that they say are as good as any newspaper for legally getting access to government press events, although that's very 'three decades ago' as the rules changed as bloggers started issuing their own to themselves.
But that's not what happened here. This appears to have been a private event and thus the people invited are whoever the people holding it want invited.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.