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.
I have to say, while I am not a Free Speech Abolutist, I am very confused.
I didn't know you could abstractly have press conferences. I always assumed all events that happened in this universe happened at locations that were legally controlled by specific people, and when you gave press conferences you specifically invited members of the press, not general passerbys.
Meanwhile, um...like, if a family member has been accused of a crime, or was the victim of a crime, do not show up to surprise the other person's family members. Like, either way. If you want to reach out for some good reason, after thinking long and hard about it, that's what lawyers are for, or at maximum some sort of impersonal contact they can not engage with, like a phone call, or, better, a letter. Do not show up at their frickin press conference.
I think it's worth reminding people that the Republicans are setting precedent after precedent that would, in their minds, be _absolutely disastrous_ to let Dems have.
They don't expect to ever give up power.
I'm going to be honest here: While I knew this country was going to descend into outright fascism, because I paid attention and _knew_ what Trump had tried to do the last time he was in office, and had been stopped by the 'sane people' around him that he would not have this time...
...but I really did not expect concentration camps in the first three months, or open threats to jail people for dissent.
They're really trying to speed-run this, aren't they?
Meanwhile, David Brooks is still an idiot, and can't resist adding this: Many have allowed themselves to become shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: Your voices don’t matter. Through admissions policies that favor rich kids, the elite universities have contributed to a diploma divide. If the same affluent families come out on top generation after generation, then no one should be surprised if the losers flip over the table.
I'm not even particularly a fan of 'progessivism', really, but I'm pretty certain they have been essentially the one meaningful voice _against_ legacy admissions at universities. Or, you know, stopping 'the same affluent families coming out on top generation after generation', via things like, uh, taxes.
It really amazing how good conservatives are at conflating 'The wealth often have very milquetoast liberal-sounding values' with 'This means the left must like the wealthy more than the right'. It's that whole 'teams' thing that people keep blathering about instead of actual policy.
Does messing up on finance paperwork really matter that much?
It matters if it harms someone's else. That's called fraud.
The question is to what extent any of this does.
You may notice that we are still talking about 'unproven things people wrote in blogs' and 'letters that people in the Trump administration wrote', things which, it should be pointed out, have absolutely no requirement to be anywhere near the truth, and are very much hedging that these supposed misstatements 'might' have provided a benefit to her.
Also, it's worth mentioning that mortgage documents from 1984 and even 2000 are extremely outside the status of limitations, so that loan co-signing with her father is fairly irrelevant. (In addition to being a rather obvious mistake because that is utterly irrelevant to getting a loan and no one would do that on purpose.)
I am not sure if what these law firms did is a smart thing. It sorta depends if they can get it in _his_ head as an agreement between equals or near equals. Considering how much Trump has fought lawyers in his life, he might actually see them as a threat and consider them equal enough that he will stop. Maybe?
Yeah, it kinda is interesting that a lot of people have focused on a really specific 'This is being done without a trial' and 'Trump is threatening to expand this to citizens' (Failing to notice that without a trial where you can prove you're a citizen, there's no distinction between citizen and non-citizen.), without noticing the other stuff this violates.
It is a violation of the US Convention against Torture, as the US government itself has decided, and I just pointed out. But those laws are state-level things and it would be, hypothetically, possible to argue people cannot be charged under US law with them. (Just taken to the Hague, but we'd never allow that.)
And it is also involuntary servitude. A thing which we do have laws about. That prison has forced labor. Which is involuntary servitude. (The difference between slavery and involuntary servitude is slavery also regards the person as property, whereas involuntary servitude is not and they can hypothetically retain some rights.) And I quote our constitution about involuntary servitude:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
You may notice a key phrase in that sentence, 'duly convicted'. We are very used to prison labor, sorta ignore how horrific it is and how it is, literally, involuntary servitude, and we had to write an exception inside the anti-slavery law to allow it. But...that exception is pretty specific. You have to be duly convicted of a crime.
Now, is this involuntary servitude happening under 'US jurisdiction', which I will point out the amendment makes _very clear_ is not merely 'within the US borders' because it lists both of those things? Yes, they are. Because we have a law saying so: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1596 (That is the slavery/involuntary servitude/human trafficking part of the code.)
18 U.S. Code § 1596 - Additional jurisdiction in certain trafficking offenses
(a) In General.—In addition to any domestic or extra-territorial jurisdiction otherwise provided by law, the courts of the United States have extra-territorial jurisdiction over any offense (or any attempt or conspiracy to commit an offense) under section 1581, 1583, 1584, 1589, 1590, or 1591 if—
(1) an alleged offender is a national of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence (as those terms are defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101)); or
If you traffic people, and are a US citizen or US national, the US explicitly asserts jurisdiction over the offense and can charge you with a crime even if you do it completely outside the US.
And _that_ makes the 13th amendment apply to all this:
18 U.S. Code § 1590 - Trafficking with respect to peonage, slavery, involuntary servitude, or forced labor
(a) Whoever knowingly recruits, harbors, transports, provides, or obtains by any means, any person for labor or services in violation of this chapter shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If death results from the violation of this section, or if the violation includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or the attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, the defendant shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or life, or both.
Before anyone tries to get into details if the 13th applies, trying to argue that jurisdiction over a crime is not the same as jurisdiction over where the crime is happening...note that isn't actually important. The law still exists, regardless. It is just as criminal even if the 13th amendment doesn't apply and this behavior could _hypothetically_ be legal.
People in ICE, all of who are presumably US citizens, transported people to a location (Called a prison, but prisons are used for law enforcement purposes. This is more properly called a 'camp'.) where they are going to be forced to work, for free. Without being duly convicted of a crime. That is transporting someone into illegal and unconstitutional involuntary servitude.
Everyone who participated in this should be arrested and charged criminally with hundreds of crime, one for each person.
Yes, we all remember the made-up story that Republicans tried to make happen but the Democrats did not actually do, and yet how you still seem to believe it actually happened.
A lot of people here are focused on the fact this is happening without a trial, which is bad, and not on the fact the US cannot legally send people to a prison in El Salvador _even with a trial_. And I don't mean because of some obscure jurisdiction issues or something. I mean, straight up, if a man killed someone in El Salvador, fled to the US, we caught him, and we agreed with every part of that, we could not legally hand him back. Or, rather, if we tried, we'd fail in the extradition court.
Because we signed the UN Convention Against Torture: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-against-torture-and-other-cruel-inhuman-or-degrading
Article 3
1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.
That is a treaty signed by the President and both Houses of Congress, which makes it US law. I know that's not really phrased how US law is, but it really is US law. (Treaties are kinda like the constitution. Parts of them tell the government to enact legislation, like the constitution says 'Make a court system' and this treaty says 'You must outlaw torture under your jurisdiction', which requires a bunch of laws, and other parts, like this, are more akin to the 1st amendment, which merely forbids the government from doing something and hence needs no enabling legislation to function.)
Who do you think the competent authorities would be here? Who do we think should issue determinations about other countries? I would like to propose...the United States State Department! The State Department in 2023 (The most recent report) said this about El Salvador: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/528267_EL-SALVADOR-2023-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf
c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and Other Related Abuses
The law prohibited such practices, but there were credible reports that government officials employed them.
Human rights organizations and media outlets reported complaints of abuse United States Department of State • Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and mistreatment of detainees by prison guards. On July 14, a coalition of human rights organizations at an Interamerican Human Rights Commission public audience stated they collectively interviewed more than 100 released detainees, many of whom reported systemic abuse in the prison system, including beatings by guards and the use of electric shocks. The coalition alleged the treatment of prisoners constituted torture.
I could quote some more of the document that lays out specific instances, but it's rather horrible. I don't think I need to document anything else here, I think at this point I just rest my case, the US government itself made it for me. They themselves believe there is a high risk of torture and abuse in Salvadorian prisons.
There's an open question if we can deport someone to El Salvador if we _don't_ think they'll end up in prison, that maybe is okay, but we certainly can't rendition people directly to those prisons!
And once they’ve established they can do it to a legal resident, American citizens won’t be far behind.
Point of order: They've already done this. There are American citizens that they have renditioned to CECOT already. (BTW: The word is REDENTIONED, not deported. Deportation ends with someone being free, just in another country.)
What's that, you say? You haven't heard about that?
If they are renditioned without trial, and without their names being made public, then how the hell would you know?
If your first response is 'The Trump administration would not do that?', first, where have you been, and second, without a trial, nothing is stopping them from doing that 'by accident'.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/story/2018-04-27/ice-held-an-american-man-in-custody-for-1273-days The errors reveal flaws in the way ICE identifies people for deportation, including its reliance on databases that are incomplete and plagued by mistakes. The wrongful arrests also highlight a presumption that pervades U.S. immigration agencies and courts that those born outside the United States are not here legally unless electronic records show otherwise. And when mistakes are not quickly remedied, citizens are forced into an immigration court system where they must fight to prove they should not be removed from the country, often without the help of an attorney.
Hey, you know what we don't have anymore for those people? Those pesky trials.
It is almost certain that at least one person that the Trump administration has renditioned to the torture prison in El Salvador is a US citizen. By 'accident' in the sense they probably didn't intent to do it deliberately, but by blatant reckless negligence, you know, the way ICE has always operated.
Hey, this is a fun article to read, and note he's only in court because he was first detained in 2023 and in the courts already, otherwise he probably would have been shipped out already: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/man-detained-ice-claims-citizenship-rcna198012
Notice the extremely stupid thing being decided here, specifically US law allows minors who are immigrants and their parents become citizens to become citizens, but only if _both_ parents do it, unless the minors are 'out of wedlock', which is just a staggeringly stupid way of understanding things. And the US government already decided he was a citizen, until it decided, years later, he wasn't.
The funniest part of this is the 'UN Conventions on Torture stop of from deporting someone who will probably end up in a Salvadorian prison' that a judge decided is just blithely stated in the article that was written March 27th, 2025, and the article just continues, ignoring the, uh, extremely obvious conclusion about some other news story that fact creates. Really feel like that should make the news more often.
The claim is this was inspired by the far right. That he’s consuming far right media and is a member. Checking his political views seems a good way to judge that.
Checking his political views would require actually checking his political views, not pretending 'Guy didn't like either of the past two presidents' means he is some politically-neutral actor. As I pointed out, _I_ don't like either of the last two presidents either, but if I were to commit an act of political terrorism, it would be pretty accurate to describe me as 'pretty far to the left', and that is not disproven because of some post where I criticized Biden! It is possible to dislike both parties from the same direction.
And here's the thing: We are not going to find out his 'politics' are wrong. We might find out that part of them are _weird_ or maybe even incoherent enough we can't position him at all, I will admit it might be possible he's not actually on the far right. But there's always the warning 'You'll change your tune if his politics are on the left' and they _never are_, the left absolutely doesn't do this, and at some point we need to recognize the reality of that.
We also need to realize that the reason this sort of thing is happening is the general violent stew that the far-right has made, of integrating violence as a proposed logical result of politics, and even the incoherent people likely got violence from there even if their politics are nonsense.
As that article pointed out: People on the left do commit political violence. But you know who the left doesn't violently attack? Not in modern politics? Politicians. Law enforcement, yes, politicians, no. (This is probably because, at some level, the left actually respects elections and the will of the people. Whereas they do not respect cops.)
I think the closest thing is that guy who was going to assassinate Kavanaugh and, it's interesting to note that not only was he mostly apolitical and seemed to pick that assassination as a way to 'do some good' before committing suicide, he _literally decided not to through with it_, calling 911 to turn himself in after he broke into Kavanaugh's house.
With lone wolves, especially dysfunctional mentally ill lone wolves, it’s a lot harder. The claim is they’re inspired by the ideology but the counter argument is people who want to commit violence are attracted to violent ideologies.
Those are not two distinct arguments. The ideology not only sets up the anger, it gives them permission to use that anger.
For example the various school shooters are inspired by the previous school shooters.
'School shooting' is not an ideology. Previous school shootings can be understood as a promise that their violence will get them fame. It doesn't really have much to do with the ideology behind the actual shooting. (Although sometimes their ideology points them at a school.)
Signing a document that says you intended to change your residency pretty obviously can't _actually_ change your residency.
Moreover, this entire thing seems incredibly vague. If you actually parse the article, it seems to say that she signed a document giving power-of-attorney to Thompson-Hairston saying that (What? Since when do power-of-attorney documents include where you intend to live?) and Thompson-Hairston, the _actual resident_, signed the mortgage documents, and also signed some 'other document' saying they both intended to live there.
I'm going to need a lot more information to parse that one out. For example, what this oddball power-of-attorney said, why would it have someone's residence on it? And also...I don't really see how lying on your power-of-attorney can be illegal? Also, what is this 'other document' that is supposedly important? I can sign a document saying anything, it doesn't make it legally actionable.
The situation here, as presented by Newsweek, makes very little sense. Is this even Letitia James' mortgage at all?
But, regardless, this cannot actually impact Letitia James' actual residence for the purpose of her office. You can't just sign documents saying you reside somewhere and magically legally reside there...imagine the tax nonsense if you could. In fact, let's quote New York residency requirements:
Furthermore, your New York domicile does not change until you can demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that you have abandoned your New York domicile and established a new domicile outside New York State. This means shifting the focus of your life to the new location. It is not enough simply to file a certificate of domicile or register to vote in the new location. All aspects of a person’s life are considered in determining whether a person’s domicile has changed. - https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/file/nonresident-faqs.htm#income
(And that's just a 'domicile', you can be a residence even if you are not domiciled there if you spend part of over 184 days in a year in NY. But it appears you are always a residence if you have a domicile, even if you don't spent that much there.)
I'm starting to think I need to write something about how fascism works, because these last two comments of Saul's are very instructive and somewhat easy to miss what they say.
The confusion I'm seeing a lot is where people think of this as _extortion_, which it's not, it's just 'bullying'. A normal extortion racket would have the extorted person agree to pay the extortion, and have some reasonable belief they had solved the problem for some span of time.
But the Trump administration doesn't care about results, just like a bully does not care about lunch money. They care about demonstrating power dynamics. We all sort of understand how bullies think, and we know Trump is a bully, but we sorta lose track of that in the overt fascism...except fascism is the same thing. Or, maybe you can regard bullying as a very VERY scaled down version of fascism, what happens when you take someone with almost no power but the same mindset.
Fascists see everything as hierarchies and power dynamics. You have to stop thinking like it has any sort of goals, and realize it is entirely about perceived power imbalances (Which has almost nothing to do with actual power in any real sense.) and how they think over people perceive power imbalances, and how they can affect that.
Columbia is the person who was ordered to hand over their lunch money, caved and did so, and realized they would be forced to hand over more and more money. That was a very wrong move. It marked them as lower in the hierarchy of Trump.
Other colleges have refused, and in doing so, have challenged him. This means either he is either going to back down and hope we forget about it or just pretending he won. Or he will see that other people think he is weak and attack some more.
I am not sure if what these law firms did is a smart thing. It sorta depends if they can get it in _his_ head as an agreement between equals or near equals. Considering how much Trump has fought lawyers in his life, he might actually see them as a threat and consider them equal enough that he will stop. Maybe?
I would be surprised if he even managed to get $150B.
I think we have a pretty serious problem in how media in this country functions: It just repeats things that people on the right say while doing absolutely no verification at all.
(For the record, doing the same thing with people on the left would also be a problem, but doesn't seem to happen.)
This is all government stuff. When it became clear that DOGE was actually an incompetent mess that had no idea what they were doing, the media should have just stopped repeating things they said. Just, period, stopped.
If the government want to show evidence of something, they are the government. None of these agreements are secret, the budget itself is not secret (Which is something that should have been pointed out by the media also when these idiots started talking about fraud.) It is entirely reasonable to say 'Show me the exact details of what you did'.
Instead, the media reported on a website, and then they think it is their job to track down stuff on that website and _disprove_ it.
NO! They are the government, and they are pretty well-shown to be liars at this point. They should be providing actual documentation! Do not report how much you have disproven, do not accept _any_ of it. The headlines should be 'DOGE claims giant savings, refuses to document a single dime of it, huge parts of the vague information they did provide are demonstrably false'.
This lone wolf stuff has been a problem for decades.
Calling "far-right fanatics that were feed a steady diet of far-right nonsense that constantly plays of violence and 'second amendment remedies' to fix imaginary harms, who _do_ slip over the very thin line into actual violence' a term like 'lone wolves' is pretty much the entirety of the problem.
There is an entire infrastructure, with media, celebrities, organized groups, etc,of bubbling anger at extremely vague things, including 'white people not being in charge'. They talk, near constantly, about how violence will eventually be the solution. And they are treated as normal and essentially embraced by the Republicans. Sometimes they get a little _too_ antisemitic or neoNa.zi and the right used to have slightly distant itself from one person or another, but that has stopped recently, which had made things get much, much worse.
The 'lone wolves' are a logical and deliberate result of that environment. Fascism actually loving having violent actors like this running around threatening people who step out of line or who are not the 'right sort of people', it means it doesn't have to openly do it itself and it can distance itself from it. Until violence against them is so normalized it can do it themselves.
Or just read: https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terrorism-amid-polarization-and-protest
Which points out another interesting thing. While left-wing domestic terrorism is increasing (Although it is still pretty far from the right-wing), people really should scroll to Figure 7 to realize what left-wing domestic terrorism means there.
The reliance by violent far-right perpetrators on weapons such as guns, explosives, and incendiaries is consistent with their larger share of fatal attacks in 2021. These attacks often targeted people directly, particularly government personnel and private individuals. Meanwhile, violent far-left perpetrators primarily used melee weapons and incendiaries to cause property damage, particularly against government and police buildings and businesses. These data indicate that while both violent far-right and violent far-left actors committed a historically large number of terrorist attacks in 2021, violent far-right actors were more likely to pursue their motives with lethal intent.
It's weird, when you think about it, how we never call some rando in a BLM crowd that hurled a Molotov at an brick Federal building, causing no real damage, a 'lone wolf'. That's the BLM movement itself being violent.
Yet somehow a right-wing guy who threw one at a occupied residence with the obvious intent of murdering the people inside is. There's nothing behind that, no siree, he just decided to do that entirely by himself!
Um, no. Literally none of what other people do is relevant to if a specific person committed a crime.
And, again, there is no 'justice' here. He is not accused of a crime. Stop defending some sort of hypothetical criminal charges. You do get that this government is overtly fascist, right? They are literally deporting other people to foreign torture camps right now without a trial. They are revoking the visa of a woman they _admit_ merely wrote an entirely reasonable op-ed, and had absolutely nothing do with any protests and said nothing antisemitic, under this exact provision.
You might want to ask yourself: Wait, the fascist government clearly wants to go after foreigners and people protesting Palestine, is entirely possible this situation is a 'Things Germans were told about Jews leading up to fascism and have I been lied to' setup, that some of the things you 'know' here might be broad generalizations about isolated incidents that are used to further a political agency of outright evil against a specific group, like foreigners.
I think I'll write an article about that, something like 'Hey, now that it's clear the right has been leading us to overt fascism for years, maybe people want to re-evaluate some of the stuff that media has been saying about certain outgroups during that time'.
The ACA does not define a lot of stuff. It leaves a huge chunk of the rules that insurance companies have to follow to the executive branch. Exactly like this law does with foreign policy, also set by the executive. You really hit the nail on the head there.
However, rules that government has about health insurance and how not to beat the law are published the government itself. These are called 'regulations'. It's a whole giant metaphorical book (Really it's online) that lays out, in _excruciating_ detail, exactly what health insurance companies had to do to comply with the ACA. These regulations are something that executive agencies do, a system create a created by a set of laws that do a lot of things, but the important thing I should mention is that they take years to change, have notification and enactment periods, etc, etc, etc. There's never a surprise.
Now, let's go back to what we were talking about, which was the foreign policy of the US. It's hard to notice this, but there isn't a giant book of that. In fact, not only is some of it secret, some of it is literally classified. A good chunk of that is considered, constitutionally, outside of anyone's control besides the president...the courts probably cannot even _demand_ to know it.
And, thus, people cannot be ordered to follow it. The courts are not going to accept 'You must attempt to subvert US foreign policy goals, a thing that exists mostly inside the president's head, and in a bunch of secret places, and even when formally stated, is not actually specific enough for any individual to understand what actions they are allowed to do' as law that anyone is allowed to be held to, unlike 'You must not break these Federal regulations that were enacted and publish pursuant to a law telling the executive to make these regulations', which it will enforce.
And also that's not even what the law say, even if that does seem to be what the Trump administration is arguing. The law seems to allow deportation if you have have a foreign policy impact at all, which is wildly broader.
Also, and I feel this bears mentioning: The President had an advisor do a Na.zi salute at the inauguration. It actually isn't clear that one of the US's foreign policy goals _is_ still to reduce antisemitism. I say that mostly as joke pointing out the hypocrisy, but to be honest, this is why this does not make any sense and isn't something that would be allowed by a court. US Foreign policy exists entirely within, and at the whim of, Trump's brain. Other people cannot know it except as he states is. Which he usually does by communicating with the State Department in ways that are not particularly visible to the public.
people have been asking for this for years. now they’re getting it.
Oh, good, it's the fun trick of 'Making random insinuations that the other side does this but not actually stating what they are because it turns out the claims are incredibly weak'.
Wait, wait, I stand corrected, the president thinks we can deport citizens now.
Although I'm not sure if they'd be deportable under _this_ law, or if laws are even things that might still exist in any manner or we just operate by the whim of the president.
BTW, am I misremembering, or did an immigrant do something that resembled Na.zi salute twice at the presidential inauguration? The president of Belarus said about that, and I quote, 'They cannot say anything to justify it. This is an open Na.zi salute, the Americans and Mr. Musk have simply taken this too far.'
That feels like it might actually qualify as 'adverse foreign policy consequences', having the American people in general being accused of openly be Na.zis by a foreign leader! Clearly that gesture has damaged how Belarus sees us! Even if this 'Mr. Musk' did it _completely accidentally_ (I dunno, someone should check if he does this sort of stuff all the time), it still had adverse foreign policy consequences.
Although I'm not sure if those consequences would qualify as 'serious'. But it's certainly more serious than some antisemitic said by random protestors at a protest.
Did anything ever happen with that Mr. Musk guy?
*check notes*
Oh, he's apparently a citizen now. I guess the US government can't do anything about him.
When does this end up in front of an Immigration Judge?
Luckily, it appears this one _will_ in up in front of a judge. Who will likely slap it down.
Judges have actually questioned the constitutionality of this part of immigration law, on two separate grounds. The first is the obvious 'The government is not supposed to make laws restricting freedom of speech', but there's actually a more important objection!
Specifically, that law is literally unknowable, you cannot know what behavior is disallowed under it, and thus it cannot be valid law. This is, hilariously, a level _above_ the first amendment, above constitutionality. You can't pass laws that do not clearly explain what people cannot do, that people cannot read and understand what behavior is barred.
US foreign policy is not only gigantic, it's _not entirely public_. And it's not specifically 'US foreign policy' anyway, it's 'potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United State'. You can be deported under it because some other country objected to something you did in a way that caused foreign policy implications for the US.
In other words, this law appears to requires an immigrant to somehow _determine the entire foreign policy of the entire planet_. How on earth is anyone supposed to know how every random country in the world is going to react to everything they say? Hell, even if they did try to research that, again, foreign policy is not a list of regulations people can follow.
Moreover, that itself has strange first amendment implications, as now other countries can punish people in the US for their speech by using US law. All Russia, for example, has to do is say 'We do not like what that immigrant in the US said about Putin, thus we are less likely to agree to a ceasefire with Ukraine', and that allows the US government to somehow punish that immigrant by deporting them? What?
The US government can't punish people for their speech because the US government doesn't like it, so the idea that US government can punish people for their speech because _other countries_ do not like that speech is just flatly absurd.
The only reason this law is still on the books is that literally no one has ever been deported under _just_ it. It's been included on reasons before, but never by itself, and I'm not sure the _speech_ part (The part that requires the Sec of State to personally sign off on it.) ever has been used.
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.
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I have to say, while I am not a Free Speech Abolutist, I am very confused.
I didn't know you could abstractly have press conferences. I always assumed all events that happened in this universe happened at locations that were legally controlled by specific people, and when you gave press conferences you specifically invited members of the press, not general passerbys.
Meanwhile, um...like, if a family member has been accused of a crime, or was the victim of a crime, do not show up to surprise the other person's family members. Like, either way. If you want to reach out for some good reason, after thinking long and hard about it, that's what lawyers are for, or at maximum some sort of impersonal contact they can not engage with, like a phone call, or, better, a letter. Do not show up at their frickin press conference.
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I think it's worth reminding people that the Republicans are setting precedent after precedent that would, in their minds, be _absolutely disastrous_ to let Dems have.
They don't expect to ever give up power.
I'm going to be honest here: While I knew this country was going to descend into outright fascism, because I paid attention and _knew_ what Trump had tried to do the last time he was in office, and had been stopped by the 'sane people' around him that he would not have this time...
...but I really did not expect concentration camps in the first three months, or open threats to jail people for dissent.
They're really trying to speed-run this, aren't they?
Meanwhile, David Brooks is still an idiot, and can't resist adding this: Many have allowed themselves to become shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: Your voices don’t matter. Through admissions policies that favor rich kids, the elite universities have contributed to a diploma divide. If the same affluent families come out on top generation after generation, then no one should be surprised if the losers flip over the table.
I'm not even particularly a fan of 'progessivism', really, but I'm pretty certain they have been essentially the one meaningful voice _against_ legacy admissions at universities. Or, you know, stopping 'the same affluent families coming out on top generation after generation', via things like, uh, taxes.
It really amazing how good conservatives are at conflating 'The wealth often have very milquetoast liberal-sounding values' with 'This means the left must like the wealthy more than the right'. It's that whole 'teams' thing that people keep blathering about instead of actual policy.
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It matters if it harms someone's else. That's called fraud.
The question is to what extent any of this does.
You may notice that we are still talking about 'unproven things people wrote in blogs' and 'letters that people in the Trump administration wrote', things which, it should be pointed out, have absolutely no requirement to be anywhere near the truth, and are very much hedging that these supposed misstatements 'might' have provided a benefit to her.
Also, it's worth mentioning that mortgage documents from 1984 and even 2000 are extremely outside the status of limitations, so that loan co-signing with her father is fairly irrelevant. (In addition to being a rather obvious mistake because that is utterly irrelevant to getting a loan and no one would do that on purpose.)
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I am not sure if what these law firms did is a smart thing. It sorta depends if they can get it in _his_ head as an agreement between equals or near equals. Considering how much Trump has fought lawyers in his life, he might actually see them as a threat and consider them equal enough that he will stop. Maybe?
Well, that was answered quickly:
https://www.nj.com/politics/2025/04/law-firms-sold-their-souls-to-trump-now-hes-rubbing-their-noses-in-it.html
On “The Lawless Lying Duplicitous Bastards of Abrego Garcia”
Yeah, it kinda is interesting that a lot of people have focused on a really specific 'This is being done without a trial' and 'Trump is threatening to expand this to citizens' (Failing to notice that without a trial where you can prove you're a citizen, there's no distinction between citizen and non-citizen.), without noticing the other stuff this violates.
It is a violation of the US Convention against Torture, as the US government itself has decided, and I just pointed out. But those laws are state-level things and it would be, hypothetically, possible to argue people cannot be charged under US law with them. (Just taken to the Hague, but we'd never allow that.)
And it is also involuntary servitude. A thing which we do have laws about. That prison has forced labor. Which is involuntary servitude. (The difference between slavery and involuntary servitude is slavery also regards the person as property, whereas involuntary servitude is not and they can hypothetically retain some rights.) And I quote our constitution about involuntary servitude:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
You may notice a key phrase in that sentence, 'duly convicted'. We are very used to prison labor, sorta ignore how horrific it is and how it is, literally, involuntary servitude, and we had to write an exception inside the anti-slavery law to allow it. But...that exception is pretty specific. You have to be duly convicted of a crime.
Now, is this involuntary servitude happening under 'US jurisdiction', which I will point out the amendment makes _very clear_ is not merely 'within the US borders' because it lists both of those things? Yes, they are. Because we have a law saying so: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1596 (That is the slavery/involuntary servitude/human trafficking part of the code.)
18 U.S. Code § 1596 - Additional jurisdiction in certain trafficking offenses
(a) In General.—In addition to any domestic or extra-territorial jurisdiction otherwise provided by law, the courts of the United States have extra-territorial jurisdiction over any offense (or any attempt or conspiracy to commit an offense) under section 1581, 1583, 1584, 1589, 1590, or 1591 if—
(1) an alleged offender is a national of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence (as those terms are defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101)); or
If you traffic people, and are a US citizen or US national, the US explicitly asserts jurisdiction over the offense and can charge you with a crime even if you do it completely outside the US.
And _that_ makes the 13th amendment apply to all this:
18 U.S. Code § 1590 - Trafficking with respect to peonage, slavery, involuntary servitude, or forced labor
(a) Whoever knowingly recruits, harbors, transports, provides, or obtains by any means, any person for labor or services in violation of this chapter shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If death results from the violation of this section, or if the violation includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or the attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, the defendant shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or life, or both.
Before anyone tries to get into details if the 13th applies, trying to argue that jurisdiction over a crime is not the same as jurisdiction over where the crime is happening...note that isn't actually important. The law still exists, regardless. It is just as criminal even if the 13th amendment doesn't apply and this behavior could _hypothetically_ be legal.
People in ICE, all of who are presumably US citizens, transported people to a location (Called a prison, but prisons are used for law enforcement purposes. This is more properly called a 'camp'.) where they are going to be forced to work, for free. Without being duly convicted of a crime. That is transporting someone into illegal and unconstitutional involuntary servitude.
Everyone who participated in this should be arrested and charged criminally with hundreds of crime, one for each person.
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Yes, we all remember the made-up story that Republicans tried to make happen but the Democrats did not actually do, and yet how you still seem to believe it actually happened.
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A lot of people here are focused on the fact this is happening without a trial, which is bad, and not on the fact the US cannot legally send people to a prison in El Salvador _even with a trial_. And I don't mean because of some obscure jurisdiction issues or something. I mean, straight up, if a man killed someone in El Salvador, fled to the US, we caught him, and we agreed with every part of that, we could not legally hand him back. Or, rather, if we tried, we'd fail in the extradition court.
Because we signed the UN Convention Against Torture: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-against-torture-and-other-cruel-inhuman-or-degrading
Article 3
1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.
That is a treaty signed by the President and both Houses of Congress, which makes it US law. I know that's not really phrased how US law is, but it really is US law. (Treaties are kinda like the constitution. Parts of them tell the government to enact legislation, like the constitution says 'Make a court system' and this treaty says 'You must outlaw torture under your jurisdiction', which requires a bunch of laws, and other parts, like this, are more akin to the 1st amendment, which merely forbids the government from doing something and hence needs no enabling legislation to function.)
Who do you think the competent authorities would be here? Who do we think should issue determinations about other countries? I would like to propose...the United States State Department! The State Department in 2023 (The most recent report) said this about El Salvador: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/528267_EL-SALVADOR-2023-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf
c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and Other Related Abuses
The law prohibited such practices, but there were credible reports that government officials employed them.
Human rights organizations and media outlets reported complaints of abuse United States Department of State • Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and mistreatment of detainees by prison guards. On July 14, a coalition of human rights organizations at an Interamerican Human Rights Commission public audience stated they collectively interviewed more than 100 released detainees, many of whom reported systemic abuse in the prison system, including beatings by guards and the use of electric shocks. The coalition alleged the treatment of prisoners constituted torture.
I could quote some more of the document that lays out specific instances, but it's rather horrible. I don't think I need to document anything else here, I think at this point I just rest my case, the US government itself made it for me. They themselves believe there is a high risk of torture and abuse in Salvadorian prisons.
There's an open question if we can deport someone to El Salvador if we _don't_ think they'll end up in prison, that maybe is okay, but we certainly can't rendition people directly to those prisons!
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Point of order: They've already done this. There are American citizens that they have renditioned to CECOT already. (BTW: The word is REDENTIONED, not deported. Deportation ends with someone being free, just in another country.)
What's that, you say? You haven't heard about that?
If they are renditioned without trial, and without their names being made public, then how the hell would you know?
If your first response is 'The Trump administration would not do that?', first, where have you been, and second, without a trial, nothing is stopping them from doing that 'by accident'.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/story/2018-04-27/ice-held-an-american-man-in-custody-for-1273-days
The errors reveal flaws in the way ICE identifies people for deportation, including its reliance on databases that are incomplete and plagued by mistakes. The wrongful arrests also highlight a presumption that pervades U.S. immigration agencies and courts that those born outside the United States are not here legally unless electronic records show otherwise. And when mistakes are not quickly remedied, citizens are forced into an immigration court system where they must fight to prove they should not be removed from the country, often without the help of an attorney.
Hey, you know what we don't have anymore for those people? Those pesky trials.
It is almost certain that at least one person that the Trump administration has renditioned to the torture prison in El Salvador is a US citizen. By 'accident' in the sense they probably didn't intent to do it deliberately, but by blatant reckless negligence, you know, the way ICE has always operated.
Hey, this is a fun article to read, and note he's only in court because he was first detained in 2023 and in the courts already, otherwise he probably would have been shipped out already: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/man-detained-ice-claims-citizenship-rcna198012
Notice the extremely stupid thing being decided here, specifically US law allows minors who are immigrants and their parents become citizens to become citizens, but only if _both_ parents do it, unless the minors are 'out of wedlock', which is just a staggeringly stupid way of understanding things. And the US government already decided he was a citizen, until it decided, years later, he wasn't.
The funniest part of this is the 'UN Conventions on Torture stop of from deporting someone who will probably end up in a Salvadorian prison' that a judge decided is just blithely stated in the article that was written March 27th, 2025, and the article just continues, ignoring the, uh, extremely obvious conclusion about some other news story that fact creates. Really feel like that should make the news more often.
On “Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s Residence Attacked, Suspect Arrested”
Checking his political views would require actually checking his political views, not pretending 'Guy didn't like either of the past two presidents' means he is some politically-neutral actor. As I pointed out, _I_ don't like either of the last two presidents either, but if I were to commit an act of political terrorism, it would be pretty accurate to describe me as 'pretty far to the left', and that is not disproven because of some post where I criticized Biden! It is possible to dislike both parties from the same direction.
And here's the thing: We are not going to find out his 'politics' are wrong. We might find out that part of them are _weird_ or maybe even incoherent enough we can't position him at all, I will admit it might be possible he's not actually on the far right. But there's always the warning 'You'll change your tune if his politics are on the left' and they _never are_, the left absolutely doesn't do this, and at some point we need to recognize the reality of that.
We also need to realize that the reason this sort of thing is happening is the general violent stew that the far-right has made, of integrating violence as a proposed logical result of politics, and even the incoherent people likely got violence from there even if their politics are nonsense.
As that article pointed out: People on the left do commit political violence. But you know who the left doesn't violently attack? Not in modern politics? Politicians. Law enforcement, yes, politicians, no. (This is probably because, at some level, the left actually respects elections and the will of the people. Whereas they do not respect cops.)
I think the closest thing is that guy who was going to assassinate Kavanaugh and, it's interesting to note that not only was he mostly apolitical and seemed to pick that assassination as a way to 'do some good' before committing suicide, he _literally decided not to through with it_, calling 911 to turn himself in after he broke into Kavanaugh's house.
Those are not two distinct arguments. The ideology not only sets up the anger, it gives them permission to use that anger.
'School shooting' is not an ideology. Previous school shootings can be understood as a promise that their violence will get them fame. It doesn't really have much to do with the ideology behind the actual shooting. (Although sometimes their ideology points them at a school.)
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
Uh, this sounds like nonsense.
Signing a document that says you intended to change your residency pretty obviously can't _actually_ change your residency.
Moreover, this entire thing seems incredibly vague. If you actually parse the article, it seems to say that she signed a document giving power-of-attorney to Thompson-Hairston saying that (What? Since when do power-of-attorney documents include where you intend to live?) and Thompson-Hairston, the _actual resident_, signed the mortgage documents, and also signed some 'other document' saying they both intended to live there.
I'm going to need a lot more information to parse that one out. For example, what this oddball power-of-attorney said, why would it have someone's residence on it? And also...I don't really see how lying on your power-of-attorney can be illegal? Also, what is this 'other document' that is supposedly important? I can sign a document saying anything, it doesn't make it legally actionable.
The situation here, as presented by Newsweek, makes very little sense. Is this even Letitia James' mortgage at all?
But, regardless, this cannot actually impact Letitia James' actual residence for the purpose of her office. You can't just sign documents saying you reside somewhere and magically legally reside there...imagine the tax nonsense if you could. In fact, let's quote New York residency requirements:
Furthermore, your New York domicile does not change until you can demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that you have abandoned your New York domicile and established a new domicile outside New York State. This means shifting the focus of your life to the new location. It is not enough simply to file a certificate of domicile or register to vote in the new location. All aspects of a person’s life are considered in determining whether a person’s domicile has changed. - https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/file/nonresident-faqs.htm#income
(And that's just a 'domicile', you can be a residence even if you are not domiciled there if you spend part of over 184 days in a year in NY. But it appears you are always a residence if you have a domicile, even if you don't spent that much there.)
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I'm starting to think I need to write something about how fascism works, because these last two comments of Saul's are very instructive and somewhat easy to miss what they say.
The confusion I'm seeing a lot is where people think of this as _extortion_, which it's not, it's just 'bullying'. A normal extortion racket would have the extorted person agree to pay the extortion, and have some reasonable belief they had solved the problem for some span of time.
But the Trump administration doesn't care about results, just like a bully does not care about lunch money. They care about demonstrating power dynamics. We all sort of understand how bullies think, and we know Trump is a bully, but we sorta lose track of that in the overt fascism...except fascism is the same thing. Or, maybe you can regard bullying as a very VERY scaled down version of fascism, what happens when you take someone with almost no power but the same mindset.
Fascists see everything as hierarchies and power dynamics. You have to stop thinking like it has any sort of goals, and realize it is entirely about perceived power imbalances (Which has almost nothing to do with actual power in any real sense.) and how they think over people perceive power imbalances, and how they can affect that.
Columbia is the person who was ordered to hand over their lunch money, caved and did so, and realized they would be forced to hand over more and more money. That was a very wrong move. It marked them as lower in the hierarchy of Trump.
Other colleges have refused, and in doing so, have challenged him. This means either he is either going to back down and hope we forget about it or just pretending he won. Or he will see that other people think he is weak and attack some more.
I am not sure if what these law firms did is a smart thing. It sorta depends if they can get it in _his_ head as an agreement between equals or near equals. Considering how much Trump has fought lawyers in his life, he might actually see them as a threat and consider them equal enough that he will stop. Maybe?
On “From the NY Times: DOGE Savings “85 percent less than its objective””
I think we have a pretty serious problem in how media in this country functions: It just repeats things that people on the right say while doing absolutely no verification at all.
(For the record, doing the same thing with people on the left would also be a problem, but doesn't seem to happen.)
This is all government stuff. When it became clear that DOGE was actually an incompetent mess that had no idea what they were doing, the media should have just stopped repeating things they said. Just, period, stopped.
If the government want to show evidence of something, they are the government. None of these agreements are secret, the budget itself is not secret (Which is something that should have been pointed out by the media also when these idiots started talking about fraud.) It is entirely reasonable to say 'Show me the exact details of what you did'.
Instead, the media reported on a website, and then they think it is their job to track down stuff on that website and _disprove_ it.
NO! They are the government, and they are pretty well-shown to be liars at this point. They should be providing actual documentation! Do not report how much you have disproven, do not accept _any_ of it. The headlines should be 'DOGE claims giant savings, refuses to document a single dime of it, huge parts of the vague information they did provide are demonstrably false'.
On “Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s Residence Attacked, Suspect Arrested”
Why is a 'registered socialist' still on Twitter?
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Calling "far-right fanatics that were feed a steady diet of far-right nonsense that constantly plays of violence and 'second amendment remedies' to fix imaginary harms, who _do_ slip over the very thin line into actual violence' a term like 'lone wolves' is pretty much the entirety of the problem.
There is an entire infrastructure, with media, celebrities, organized groups, etc,of bubbling anger at extremely vague things, including 'white people not being in charge'. They talk, near constantly, about how violence will eventually be the solution. And they are treated as normal and essentially embraced by the Republicans. Sometimes they get a little _too_ antisemitic or neoNa.zi and the right used to have slightly distant itself from one person or another, but that has stopped recently, which had made things get much, much worse.
The 'lone wolves' are a logical and deliberate result of that environment. Fascism actually loving having violent actors like this running around threatening people who step out of line or who are not the 'right sort of people', it means it doesn't have to openly do it itself and it can distance itself from it. Until violence against them is so normalized it can do it themselves.
Or just read: https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terrorism-amid-polarization-and-protest
Which points out another interesting thing. While left-wing domestic terrorism is increasing (Although it is still pretty far from the right-wing), people really should scroll to Figure 7 to realize what left-wing domestic terrorism means there.
The reliance by violent far-right perpetrators on weapons such as guns, explosives, and incendiaries is consistent with their larger share of fatal attacks in 2021. These attacks often targeted people directly, particularly government personnel and private individuals. Meanwhile, violent far-left perpetrators primarily used melee weapons and incendiaries to cause property damage, particularly against government and police buildings and businesses. These data indicate that while both violent far-right and violent far-left actors committed a historically large number of terrorist attacks in 2021, violent far-right actors were more likely to pursue their motives with lethal intent.
It's weird, when you think about it, how we never call some rando in a BLM crowd that hurled a Molotov at an brick Federal building, causing no real damage, a 'lone wolf'. That's the BLM movement itself being violent.
Yet somehow a right-wing guy who threw one at a occupied residence with the obvious intent of murdering the people inside is. There's nothing behind that, no siree, he just decided to do that entirely by himself!
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/7/2025”
Um, no. Literally none of what other people do is relevant to if a specific person committed a crime.
And, again, there is no 'justice' here. He is not accused of a crime. Stop defending some sort of hypothetical criminal charges. You do get that this government is overtly fascist, right? They are literally deporting other people to foreign torture camps right now without a trial. They are revoking the visa of a woman they _admit_ merely wrote an entirely reasonable op-ed, and had absolutely nothing do with any protests and said nothing antisemitic, under this exact provision.
You might want to ask yourself: Wait, the fascist government clearly wants to go after foreigners and people protesting Palestine, is entirely possible this situation is a 'Things Germans were told about Jews leading up to fascism and have I been lied to' setup, that some of the things you 'know' here might be broad generalizations about isolated incidents that are used to further a political agency of outright evil against a specific group, like foreigners.
I think I'll write an article about that, something like 'Hey, now that it's clear the right has been leading us to overt fascism for years, maybe people want to re-evaluate some of the stuff that media has been saying about certain outgroups during that time'.
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That was just the immigration judge saying it wasn't her job to question the determination.
That always was going to be the outcome there.
There's another court case, apparently, challenging the law itself. Which is the correct thing to challenge.
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The ACA does not define a lot of stuff. It leaves a huge chunk of the rules that insurance companies have to follow to the executive branch. Exactly like this law does with foreign policy, also set by the executive. You really hit the nail on the head there.
However, rules that government has about health insurance and how not to beat the law are published the government itself. These are called 'regulations'. It's a whole giant metaphorical book (Really it's online) that lays out, in _excruciating_ detail, exactly what health insurance companies had to do to comply with the ACA. These regulations are something that executive agencies do, a system create a created by a set of laws that do a lot of things, but the important thing I should mention is that they take years to change, have notification and enactment periods, etc, etc, etc. There's never a surprise.
Now, let's go back to what we were talking about, which was the foreign policy of the US. It's hard to notice this, but there isn't a giant book of that. In fact, not only is some of it secret, some of it is literally classified. A good chunk of that is considered, constitutionally, outside of anyone's control besides the president...the courts probably cannot even _demand_ to know it.
And, thus, people cannot be ordered to follow it. The courts are not going to accept 'You must attempt to subvert US foreign policy goals, a thing that exists mostly inside the president's head, and in a bunch of secret places, and even when formally stated, is not actually specific enough for any individual to understand what actions they are allowed to do' as law that anyone is allowed to be held to, unlike 'You must not break these Federal regulations that were enacted and publish pursuant to a law telling the executive to make these regulations', which it will enforce.
And also that's not even what the law say, even if that does seem to be what the Trump administration is arguing. The law seems to allow deportation if you have have a foreign policy impact at all, which is wildly broader.
Also, and I feel this bears mentioning: The President had an advisor do a Na.zi salute at the inauguration. It actually isn't clear that one of the US's foreign policy goals _is_ still to reduce antisemitism. I say that mostly as joke pointing out the hypocrisy, but to be honest, this is why this does not make any sense and isn't something that would be allowed by a court. US Foreign policy exists entirely within, and at the whim of, Trump's brain. Other people cannot know it except as he states is. Which he usually does by communicating with the State Department in ways that are not particularly visible to the public.
Oh, good, it's the fun trick of 'Making random insinuations that the other side does this but not actually stating what they are because it turns out the claims are incredibly weak'.
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Wait, wait, I stand corrected, the president thinks we can deport citizens now.
Although I'm not sure if they'd be deportable under _this_ law, or if laws are even things that might still exist in any manner or we just operate by the whim of the president.
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BTW, am I misremembering, or did an immigrant do something that resembled Na.zi salute twice at the presidential inauguration? The president of Belarus said about that, and I quote, 'They cannot say anything to justify it. This is an open Na.zi salute, the Americans and Mr. Musk have simply taken this too far.'
That feels like it might actually qualify as 'adverse foreign policy consequences', having the American people in general being accused of openly be Na.zis by a foreign leader! Clearly that gesture has damaged how Belarus sees us! Even if this 'Mr. Musk' did it _completely accidentally_ (I dunno, someone should check if he does this sort of stuff all the time), it still had adverse foreign policy consequences.
Although I'm not sure if those consequences would qualify as 'serious'. But it's certainly more serious than some antisemitic said by random protestors at a protest.
Did anything ever happen with that Mr. Musk guy?
*check notes*
Oh, he's apparently a citizen now. I guess the US government can't do anything about him.
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Luckily, it appears this one _will_ in up in front of a judge. Who will likely slap it down.
Judges have actually questioned the constitutionality of this part of immigration law, on two separate grounds. The first is the obvious 'The government is not supposed to make laws restricting freedom of speech', but there's actually a more important objection!
Specifically, that law is literally unknowable, you cannot know what behavior is disallowed under it, and thus it cannot be valid law. This is, hilariously, a level _above_ the first amendment, above constitutionality. You can't pass laws that do not clearly explain what people cannot do, that people cannot read and understand what behavior is barred.
US foreign policy is not only gigantic, it's _not entirely public_. And it's not specifically 'US foreign policy' anyway, it's 'potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United State'. You can be deported under it because some other country objected to something you did in a way that caused foreign policy implications for the US.
In other words, this law appears to requires an immigrant to somehow _determine the entire foreign policy of the entire planet_. How on earth is anyone supposed to know how every random country in the world is going to react to everything they say? Hell, even if they did try to research that, again, foreign policy is not a list of regulations people can follow.
Moreover, that itself has strange first amendment implications, as now other countries can punish people in the US for their speech by using US law. All Russia, for example, has to do is say 'We do not like what that immigrant in the US said about Putin, thus we are less likely to agree to a ceasefire with Ukraine', and that allows the US government to somehow punish that immigrant by deporting them? What?
The US government can't punish people for their speech because the US government doesn't like it, so the idea that US government can punish people for their speech because _other countries_ do not like that speech is just flatly absurd.
The only reason this law is still on the books is that literally no one has ever been deported under _just_ it. It's been included on reasons before, but never by itself, and I'm not sure the _speech_ part (The part that requires the Sec of State to personally sign off on it.) ever has been used.
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Everyone understands the Trump administration could just ask and get him back.
The question is what happens when they claim they cannot.
On “Martin Niemöller, and Who First They Came For”
BTW, in case people do not understand how much fascism is wrapped up in gender politics, I present this absurd article:
https://www.21cir.com/alexander-dugin-ukrainians-are-collective-transgenders/