Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
VIDEO:
https://youtube.com/shorts/SGpigPzds_o?si=s-zEL9yGSTUmeDTg
The Joy Reid Show
Streamed live on October 6, 2025
VIDEO:
/ @reproductivefreedomforall Website: https://www.joyannreid.com
Substack: https://substack.com/@joyannreid
Facebook:
/ 61576759980854 Instagram:
/ joyreidshow TikTok:
/ thejoyreidshow Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/joyannreid.bsky.social
FOLLOW JOY ON SOCIAL:
Facebook:
/ joyreidofficial Instagram:
/ joyannreid TikTok:
/ joyreidofficial U.S. News
Using helicopters and chemical agents, immigration agents become increasingly aggressive in Chicago
Chicago and Illinois sue to stop Trump’s Guard deployment plan
by SOPHIA TAREEN
October 6, 2025
Associated Press
Activists, residents and leaders say increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest city.
“They are the ones that are making it a war zone,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Sunday on CNN. “They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone.”
More than 1,000 immigrants have been arrested since an immigration crackdown started last month in the Chicago area. The Trump administration has also vowed to deploy National Guard troops in its agenda to boost deportations.
But U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status and children have been among those detained in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounters which pop up daily across neighborhoods in the city of 2.7 million and its many suburbs.
Arriving by helicopter
Activists and residents were taking stock Sunday at an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side where the Department of Homeland Security said 37 immigrants were arrested recently in an operation that’s raised calls for investigation by Pritzker.
While federal agents have mostly focused on immigrant-heavy and Latino enclaves, the operation early Tuesday unfolded in the largely Black South Shore neighborhood that’s had a small influx of migrants resettled in Chicago while seeking asylum.
Agents used unmarked trucks and a helicopter to surround the five-story apartment building. NewsNation, which was invited to observe the operation, reported agents “rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters.” Agents then went door to door, woke up residents and used zip ties to restrain them.
RETRANSMITTING TO REMOVE REFERENCE TO PROTESTER BEING DETAINED. HE WAS WALKING WITH HIS HANDS BEHIND HIS BACK
Residents and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which canvassed the area, said those who were zip tied included children and U.S. citizens.
Rodrick Johnson, a U.S. citizen briefly detained, said agents broke through his door and placed him in zip ties.
“I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer,” the 67-year-old told the Chicago Sun-Times. “They never brought one.”
Dixon Romeo with Southside Together, an organization that’s also been helping residents, said doors were knocked off the hinges.
“Everyone we talked to didn’t feel safe,” he said. “This is not normal. It’s not OK. It’s not right.”
Pritzker, a two-term Democrat, directed state agencies to investigate claims that children were zip tied and detained separately from their parents, saying “military-style tactics” shouldn’t be used on children. Several Democratic members of the Illinois congressional delegation met near the site Sunday, calling for an end to immigration raids.
DHS officials said they were targeting connections to the Tren de Aragua gang. Without offering details on arrests or addressing how children were treated, DHS said “some of the targeted subjects are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes, and immigration violators.”
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Saturday posted heavily edited video clips of the operation to X showing agents blasting through doors, helicopters and adults in zip ties, but music played over most of the roughly 1 minute video.
Agency officials did not return a message left Sunday.
Brandon Lee, with ICIRR, said while some residents were placed on ankle monitors, others remained unaccounted for.
More tear gas and smoke bombs
Meanwhile, the use of chemical agents has become more frequent and visible in the past week. Used initially to manage protesters, agents used it this week on city streets and during immigration operations, according to ICIRR.
An emergency hotline to report immigrant agent sightings topped 800 calls on Friday, the same day activists said agents threw a cannister of a chemical near a school in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood. The activity in the northwest side neighborhood prompted nearby Funston Elementary School to hold recess indoors.
The same day Chicago Alderperson Jessie Fuentes was placed in handcuffs at a hospital. She said she asked agents to show a warrant for a person who’d broken his leg while chased by ICE agents who then transported him to the emergency room.
“ICE acted like an invading army in our neighborhoods,” said state Rep. Lilian Jiménez, a Democrat. “Helicopters hovered above our homes, terrifying families and disturbing the peace of our community. These shameful and lawless actions are not only a violation of constitutional rights but of our most basic liberty: the right to live free from persecution and fear.”
Immigration agents shot a woman they allege was armed and tried to run them over after agents were “boxed in by 10 cars.” She and another person were charged Sunday with forcibly assaulting, impeding and interfering with a federal law enforcement officer. However, activists said immigration agents caused the multi-vehicle crash and detained the woman, who is a U.S. citizen.
Noem has defended the aggressive tactics, calling the mission treacherous to agents and alleging threats on officers’ lives.
“It’s an extremely dangerous situation,” she said Sunday on the “Fox & Friends” weekend show.
Going to court
PHOTO: A gas canister erupts on the street in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago, on Saturday, Oct. 4, 2025, after protesters learned that U.S. Border Patrol shot a woman Saturday morning on Chicago’s Southwest Side. (Anthony Vazquez/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)
Leaders of a Chicago suburb that’s home to an immigration processing center have taken their fight against federal agents to court.
The village of Broadview has become a front line in the immigration operation. The center in the community of 8,000 people is where immigrants are processed for detention or deportation.
Protests outside have become tense with near daily arrests. Civil rights organizations have blasted aggressive tactics by agents, while village officials have launched three separate criminal investigations against federal agents.
City officials have demanded the federal government remove an 8-foot fence they say was “illegally” put up outside the facility. They filed a federal lawsuit Friday seek a temporary restraining order and the immediate removal of the fence they say blocks fire access.
“The fence also constitutes an immediate public safety hazard,” the lawsuit said.
Also pending is an expected ruling on alleged violations of a 2022 consent decree on how federal immigration agents can make arrests in six states including Illinois. While the order expired in May, attorneys have sought an extension and filed dozens of more alleged violations in the past month.
___
Associated Press writer Ali Swenson contributed to this story from New York.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/05/congress-members-rally-south-shore-apartment-ice-raid
Immigration News Chicago
After military-style raid on South Shore apartments, Congress members rally around residents
Federal agents landed a helicopter on a building Wednesday morning, arrested 37 people and left behind cracked windows and broken doors. Lawmakers seek a halt to all federal immigration enforcement in Chicago.
by Mary Norkol
October 6, 2025
Chicago Sun-Times
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-TimesPertissue Fisher is still recovering from being detained by federal immigration agents who burst into her South Shore apartment building and pulled her and other residents from their beds early Wednesday morning.
An agent put a gun in her face, she said. Another placed her in handcuffs tight enough to leave bruises.
Fisher and other victims of the raid are U.S. citizens, but they were still held for hours.
“I want answers. I have kids, I have grandkids, and if I would have [gotten] killed, who gonna answer for it? Nobody,” said Fisher, 54.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
At a Sunday news conference, the Congress members spoke alongside activists and residents touched by the raids. They urged unity and cooperation among Black residents and immigrants. Many of the residents detained from the South Shore building are Black.
“This is a part of what’s become and will be one of the most shameful periods in American history. But it’s not too late to wake up and to turn it around,” Garcia said. “This isn’t just about immigrants. This is about controlling every one of our communities, Black, Brown, poor, working-class.”
Agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrested 37 people in the raid, including some who “are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators,” according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
On Sunday, large slabs of plywood covered the doors of several units in the building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. Broken glass lay on the ground outside the building near busted-out windows. A cardboard sign reading “The fascists who did this have names and addresses” was posted on a fence outside.
The representatives are working to connect displaced families with mutual aid groups and legal and immigration resources, Ramirez said.
Resident Markus Bracey wasn’t detained, but he said he saw agents detain his neighbors. Bracey and nearly 30 others continue to live in the building, he said.
Federal agents “came from the roof, they came from the bottom, and they squeezed in so they couldn’t get away,” he said.
“The helicopter was on the roof. Every floor looks like this, or worse,” he said, gesturing to boarded-up units.
Ramirez and other members of the House of Representatives’ Homeland Security and Judiciary committees are working to identify “more accountability steps” after the South Shore raid and other combative immigration enforcement operations. She said representatives are considering legislative action and possible litigation related to the raid.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Time
“Everyone has to ask themselves, ‘What are the ways that I can be supporting people in this moment?’ And it doesn’t look the same,” Ramirez said. “But one thing we are clear on is that these ICE agents have been emboldened in covering their face[s]. They certainly can do whatever the heck they want with impunity.”
Meeting sought with ICE leader
Ana Guajardo, a community activist who works with immigrants, was at the news conference to push for the release of Laura Morillo, a mom of two who was detained by ICE while selling tamales outside a Home Depot store. She is being held in El Paso, Texas, Guajardo said, leaving her 18-year-old daughter Genesis to care for her younger sister.
“Laura was not a criminal,” Guajardo said. “She was an entrepreneur, a worker, a mother. She fed her children through sweat and tears working in this country for many years.
“That’s the message: ‘Free Laura,’” she said.
A search for Morillo in Cook County court records returned no results.
Ramirez and U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth have requested a meeting with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Field Office Director Russell Hott to discuss oversight of the Broadview processing facility that has become a de facto detention center and the center of anti-ICE protests.
Hott rescheduled the meeting, Ramirez said.
Genesis, 18, is the daughter of a tamale vendor who was arrested in late September in Back of the Yards. Her mother, Laura Morillo, is being held in a detention center in El Paso, Texas, while Genesis takes care of her younger sister.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
“We expect that meeting to happen as soon as possible, whether the government is shut down or not,” she said.
ICE wouldn’t confirm whether the meeting had been rescheduled and said the public and reporters wouldn’t be made aware of any future meetings ahead of time.
“Due to operational security, official meetings are scheduled directly between agencies and not provided to reporters prior to their occurrence,” an ICE spokesperson said in a statement.
Also Sunday, dozens of city leaders signed a letter in support of 26th Ward Ald. Jessie Fuentes, who was handcuffed and briefly detained at Humboldt Park Hospital. Video shows Fuentes asking officers for a signed judicial warrant for a man held in custody at the hospital before an agent forces her hands behind her back and handcuffs her.
Related
Woman shot by Border Patrol is charged; Brighton Park residents say feds antagonized the community
Illinois, Texas National Guard troop mobilization to Chicago to begin ‘immediately,’ last 60 days
“Showing a warrant before detention is not optional; it’s a cornerstone of constitutional law,” the letter reads. It was signed by 37 City Council members and Mayor Brandon Johnson, City Clerk Anna Valencia and city Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin. “And yet, ICE agents continue to ignore this requirement.”
Next Up In Immigration
Texas National Guard members arrive at Chicago-area military training facility
Broadview mayor signs executive order setting fixed protest hours outside ICE facility
Pentagon chief Hegseth more interested in pushups than talking with Illinois leaders, Pritzker says
Expert says threats of militarization and immigration enforcement fuel anxieties
Attorney for woman shot by Border Patrol claims agent said, 'Do something b----' before shooting
On what would have been Wadee Alfayoumi's 8th birthday, officials call for protections for immigrant children
Morning Edition
Judge refuses to block National Guard deployment
Plus: An attorney for a woman shot by U.S. Border Patrol disputes the feds’ claims, Mayor Brandon Johnson orders “ICE-free zones” and more.
October 7, 2025, 6:00am PDT
🔎 Below: Illinois sued to stop deployment of the National Guard but a judge refused the state’s plea. Troops could hit Chicago’s streets as soon as Tuesday.
🗞️ Plus: An attorney for a woman shot by U.S. Border Patrol disputes the feds’ claims, Mayor Brandon Johnson orders “ICE-free zones” and more news you need to know.
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times
State, city sue: National Guard troops could hit Chicago’s streets as soon as Tuesday after a federal judge refused a plea from Illinois’ attorneys to immediately block a deployment they called “illegal, dangerous and unconstitutional” in a highly anticipated lawsuit Monday.
Troops arriving: A federal judge said Monday she wouldn’t hear arguments over Illinois’ bid to block the deployment until Thursday, even after a lawyer for the Trump administration confirmed Texas troops were on their way.
READ MORE
✶✶✶✶
Candace Dane Chambers/Sun-Times
Video allegations: Body-camera video of a U.S. Border Patrol agent involved in the shooting of a woman who allegedly chased agents in Brighton Park Saturday shows an officer saying, “Do something, b----,” before pulling over and shooting the woman five times, her attorney said in federal court Monday.
Disputed details: The video appears to contradict the government’s allegation that Marimar Martinez, 30, drove toward officers before one of them opened fire on her Saturday morning on Kedzie Avenue near 39th Street, her attorney said at a detention hearing at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
Suspects freed: U.S. District Judge Heather McShain denied a request by the federal government to detain Martinez and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, 21, who was also arrested Saturday, pending trial. Martinez and Ruiz, who wore orange jumpsuits for the detention hearing, were charged Sunday with felony assault of a federal officer.
✶✶✶✶
Mayor Brandon Johnson holds up the executive order he signed Monday declaring city-owned properties “ICE-free zones.”
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Key context: It’s the latest of three executive orders Johnson has signed in what so far has been a failed attempt to stop or slow the deportation campaign that has sown fear and chaos in the Chicago area and at times triggered clashes between protesters and federal immigration agents.
More headlines:
CPD didn’t ‘stand down’ when federal agents requested help at Southwest Side protest, superintendent says
Democrats on two congressional committees demand investigation into ICE raid in South Shore
Broadview mayor signs executive order setting fixed protest hours outside ICE facility
The Israelization of the United States of America
Wajahat Ali
October 7, 2025
VIDEO:
Joy-Ann Reid and I bring the receipts, keep it real, and also spill the tea when it comes to Megyn Kelly, Van Jones, and JD Vance.
https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/th...
Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Battle for the Soul of America
The John Adams Institute
October 2, 2025
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2fpQqXi2rA
VIDEO:
The Supreme Court Case That Could Change Voting Rights for Generations
Fair Fight's Rights & Insights's Substack Hosts Emory Historian Dr. Carol Anderson and me
Joyce Vance, Rights & Insights, and Carol Anderson
October 7, 2025
Fair Fight’s Amir Badat hosted Dr. Carol Anderson and me for a livestream about the upcoming Supreme Court argument in Louisiana v. Callais, the gerrymandering case the Supreme Court will hear argument in on October 15. If you missed us live, you’ll want to tune in for Dr. Anderson’s insightful explanation of the historical context behind the effort to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. She is a national treasure.
Facing the political moment we are in with an understanding of the rule of law and our history is essential for finding the path forward. I’m grateful to Dr. Anderson and to Amir for expanding my store of knowledge and giving us all the opportunity to spend some time in community, even if it was on the internet, this afternoon.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/ice-raids-trump-citizens-democrats
United States
Policing and Repression
Borders and Immigration
Where Is Politicians’ Urgency Over Donald Trump’s ICE Raids?
by Branko Marcetic
October 9, 2025
Why aren’t more elected officials turning Donald Trump’s assault on the basic rights of both noncitizens and citizens into a major national scandal?
At the very beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, this magazine warned that his mass deportation plan wouldn’t just affect immigrants, but that it was a direct threat to the safety and civil liberties of all Americans. As cases piled up in the months that followed of US citizens being arrested, questioned, detained, and even deported from the country, we warned again that the operation was menacing law-abiding Americans and trampling their constitutional rights.
It’s now been nearly nine months, and it could not be clearer that the administration’s aggressive and indiscriminate approach to deportations, coupled with the impunity granted to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents to carry it out, is a profound danger to every US citizen.
The most recent incident took place last week in Chicago, where federal agents rappelled (needlessly) from helicopters into a residential building in the city’s lower-income South Shore neighborhood, indiscriminately broke down apartment doors, threw flash-bang grenades, and zip-tied and dragged out residents while ransacking their property. That includes several US citizens, children among them, who were detained for hours without access to a lawyer.
Yet there seems to be remarkably little urgency around this issue from the political class.
The Chicago raid is being bitterly criticized by officials in Illinois but not much beyond the state. The national attention it has drawn is mostly because of news reporting, and even that has not exactly placed it center stage. It’s an issue that, like the Kilmar Ábrego Garcia case, could become a throbbing political weak spot for the administration on what is meant to be its signature issue — if only someone would champion it.
The Chicago incident is not even remotely the first time this has happened. The New York Times recently counted, based on public records, at least fifteen US citizens who have been arrested and detained by ICE, a common pattern being that they were racially profiled, often physically assaulted, and that their protestations and even proof that they were citizens were simply ignored by agents. Capital & Main put together a tally of at least nine US citizens who faced similar profiling and physical assault while trying to go about their day in peace. CNN found that more than one hundred US citizen kids have effectively been made orphans through their parents’ deportation.
One man, a US Army veteran with two young kids, was arrested at his work and held for three days without access to a phone or a lawyer. In Alabama, a man of Mexican descent — who was repeatedly detained by ICE at construction sites he worked on after it entered without a warrant and dismissed his REAL ID — has filed a class-action lawsuit against the administration on behalf of others like him. In another instance, ICE agents repeatedly assaulted and then detained, for twelve hours, a seventy-nine-year-old US citizen whose car wash they were raiding — all for the crime of trying to show them the work authorization papers for his employees.
Last weekend in Chicago, Border Patrol agents shot a US citizen woman seven times for following them in her car. The judge in the case remarked that it “is a miracle to me that no one was more seriously injured.”
Miracles don’t tend to come in spades. It is only a matter of time before something even more, possibly irreversibly terrible happens to an American citizen.
Even under Barack Obama, there were numerous cases where US citizens were wrongly detained, unable to prove their citizenship, and ended up behind bars or even banished from their own country in years-long, Kafkaesque ordeals. The Trump administration’s refusal to release data about US citizens it has swept up doesn’t suggest things are better now.
Meanwhile, ICE agents’ lack of professionalism under Trump 2.0 only raises the risk of some kind of deadly clash or disastrous bureaucratic error. Agents are often masked and consistently refuse to show warrants or even identify themselves, making it impossible to tell the difference between an immigration enforcement operation and a kidnapping by common criminals. They have shown an alarming tendency to use unnecessary physical force against unarmed and often defenseless people, whether assaulting women much smaller than themselves, firing gleefully at priests, attacking journalists, and, at one point, taking a five-year-old, autistic girl who is a US citizen effectively hostage to try and lure her father out to be arrested. It is not clear whether ICE’s hires get adequate training for the job they’re tasked with, with several cases of panicking agents recklessly brandishing or wildly firing their guns after fumbling an arrest.
Why are there almost no elected officials turning this into a major public issue?
Needless to say, this is not what people voted for. Polls have shown again and again that when voters heard “mass deportation,” they more pictured the removal of violent criminals without documentation, and they still favored a path to legal residency for people who had been here for years and had no criminal record. At minimum, even accounting for the most hawkish of immigration hawks, no one’s definition of “mass deportation” involved US citizens having masked government agents kicking down their doors, destroying their property, and physically assaulting or abducting them, before they are potentially disappeared God knows where.
So again, the question is, why are there almost no elected officials turning this into a major public issue?
George W. Bush’s similarly civil-liberties-shredding “war on terror” had tremendous public backing for a while. Yet Democrats still turned its violation of Americans’ rights and assertion of despot-like powers into a major vulnerability for him. Bear in mind, neither Trump nor his deportation program has anything close to the support Bush and his “war” had.
While large majorities of Americans — anywhere between over 60 percent to as high as 95 percent — backed a slew of measures that sacrificed individual rights for safety in the early Bush years, Trump’s deportation policy is already remarkably unpopular. Trump has been underwater on his immigration policies for months now. A majority, albeit a slim one, of voters think Trump’s immigration enforcement actions have gone too far, even as they favor deporting undocumented people. Half of those polled think ICE’s tactics are “too forceful,” including most Democrats and a majority of independents. Meanwhile, polls have never shown a public appetite for deporting documented immigrants, so it’s hard to imagine there is any significant constituency that favors turning the deportation machine against US citizens.
It is hard to imagine these numbers getting better once more and more US voters come to understand that this deportation program is a direct threat to themselves and their families, let alone their core rights as Americans. Just think back to the Ábrego Garcia case, where a Maryland man was wrongly swept up in Trump’s expulsion of hundreds of supposed Venezuelan gang members to a black site in El Salvador. While centrist types like Matthew Yglesias advised timidity and cowardice on the issue, once Sen. Chris Van Hollen turned it into a public controversy, it not only proved deeply unpopular, but the administration was forced to back down and bring Ábrego Garcia back — and he isn’t even a US citizen. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has felt the need to put out a press release claiming, falsely, that “ICE does not arrest or detain US citizens” suggests the administration knows this practice would not go down well with most of the US public.
Ábrego Garcia is still fighting his deportation. But his case is a good model for what should happen again, only not just from a single US senator. The way politics and the news cycle unfortunately work is that unless an issue is taken up by a prominent official and there is an element of partisan conflict, it’s not likely to get a lot of play. Look at Trump’s friendship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a major scandal that’s been around for years but only became the biggest story in politics once Democrats took it up and it turned into a series of partisan standoffs. Americans need to understand how their rights are under threat from what increasingly looks like a rogue government organization, but they never adequately will unless members of Congress take it up as a cause.
Forcefully standing up for the rights of US citizens is the bare minimum we should expect from even the most craven elected officials at the national level.
This issue doesn’t even require a politician to take a particularly courageous stance on immigration, though that would be nice. It’s perfectly possible for moderate centrist types to keep calling for a “strong border” or maintain a conservative, even restrictionist position on immigration more generally while treating ICE’s attacks on US citizens as the major scandal that it is. If more centrists took up this line of attack, it would have a positive effect for everyone, citizen and noncitizen alike, caught in ICE’s brutal dragnet.
Such politicians should talk about this issue to the press every chance they get. They could hold press conferences with some of the US citizens who have been detained or assaulted, and incessantly demand the data that DHS won’t release of how many citizens have been arrested, or even if there are any being held in detention and where. One lawmaker who visited the “Alligator Alcatraz” heard a detainee say they were a US citizen — who is this person, and what has happened to them? A parade of lawmakers should regularly physically go down there and demand to get an audience with this individual, even if DHS ultimately refuses them entry.
They could produce videos for social media of ICE’s mistreatment of US citizens, complete with interviews and shocking footage of the assaults; bring it up at hearings and aggressively question testifying US officials about the dangers US citizens are facing and what they are going to do to stop it. These are all just a few basic ideas.
It doesn’t have to just be Democrats. Libertarian Republicans who have bucked the administration on matters of war and civil liberties should also be alarmed by the fact that there’s a massive force of armed federal agents attacking US citizens, breaking into their homes, and sometimes trying to wrongfully deport them from their own country.
Forcefully standing up for the rights of US citizens is the bare minimum we should expect from even the most craven elected officials at the national level. But right now, it’s almost as if none of it is even happening. The Trump DHS’s persistent mistreatment of the Americans it’s claiming to fight for is a major scandal that would quickly turn into a wider political sore for the administration and would likely also boost the career prospects of whichever politician made it their pet issue. It just needs someone to do it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU
"What's Past is Prologue…"
All,
On June 3, 2020 I said the following (see commentary and article below) about Senator Tom Cotton a rightwing Republican reactionary from Arkansas and very dangerous white supremacist politician and demagogue who wrote and actually had published in the New York Times the now infamous editorial advocating on behalf of the fascist idea of armed federal troops being sent to American cities by the government to shut down protestors and restore "law and order". Does this sound absurdly familiar to you at this point? I thought it did…
Stay tuned and stay vigilant because this maniac actually plans to run for President in 2024. So for anyone out there who thinks it "couldn't possibly get worse than Trump" GUESS AGAIN…
And oh yeah check out what Cotton has to say TODAY about slavery and its legacy as defined and perpetuated by the "founding fathers" and the subsequent history of the United States following its emergence in the late 18th century.
SEE HERE:
In the meantime don't forget to PASS THE WORD about the clear and present danger this country is actually in at this point in our history whether we choose to honestly acknowledge and deal with it or not. In any event it will continue to deal with all of us and the so-called "collateral damage" is and will be far more extensive, destructive, and long lasting than any of us could possibly imagine…
Kofi
“What’s Past is Prologue…”
June 16, 2020
The Panopticon Review
All,
MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT…
RE: TOM COTTON (R) Arkansas:
Don't let the uber-Goofy Howdy Doody/Alfred E Neuman/Aw-shucks-Yall whatever happened to Gary Cooper and John Wayne exterior fool you. This deeply toxic muthafucka from Arkansas is a straightup All American Fascist. Barney Fife Meets Joseph Goebbels. For Real. And I ain't kidding...
He even intends to run for President real soon perhaps as early as 2024. So be afraid. Be Very Afraid. And don't forget to fight and defeat him and everything he stands for like your life and everyone you care about depends upon it...Because it does...Stay tuned. Diligence and extensive knowledge of what exactly is going on in this country and why are the watchwords as the reactionary forces in this society (who even actually happen to be to the right of the Scumbag-in-Chief) go further into their very own 21st century American vernacular version of the enforced collapse of the Weimar Republic circa 1933. Don't believe me? GOOGLE IT...
Kofi
[NOTE: The following commentary and NYT editorial by Senator Tom Cotton was initially posted on June 3, 2020]
All,
BEWARE AND MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT: Senator Tom Cotton is and has been for a number of years now a deeply committed and very engaged ideological Fascist and rabid white supremacist and is in many ways just as dangerous and potentially even far more dangerous than one of his deranged idols (and yet another fascist!) Donald J. Trump. There is a long, detailed, and VERY disturbing paper trail on exactly who and what Cotton is and I would strongly suggest that if you are not aware of who he is and what his already notorious political history is that you google a number of revealing articles and essays about him and his heinous and even bizarre politics over the past decade. I warn you in advance that if you care at all about the rule of constitutional law, the rights of all citizens, the despicable and dictatorial role of far rightwing demagoguery in American politics, and democracy itself writ large then you must vigorously oppose this man and all that he represents and stands for. The following utterly reprehensible OP-ED from the New York Times is not only outrageous and a vicious insult to anyone who knows anything about contemporary American political history but an ominous sign that this country and its so-called elite political class led of course on the right by the raving maniacal example of the global menace, national cult leader, political psychopath, and arch criminal in the white house is rapidly driving us toward the official hegemony of American Fascism in reality and not merely in rhetorical terms alone. Stay tuned because we need to be super vigilant at this point because it's only going to get much worse very soon...Pass the word…
Kofi
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html
Opinion
Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops
The nation must restore order. The military stands ready.
June 3, 2020
New York Times
by Tom Cotton
Mr. Cotton, a Republican, is a United States senator from Arkansas.
[New York Times Editors’ Note, June 5, 2020]:
After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.
The basic arguments advanced by Senator Cotton — however objectionable people may find them — represent a newsworthy part of the current debate. But given the life-and-death importance of the topic, the senator’s influential position and the gravity of the steps he advocates, the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved. While Senator Cotton and his staff cooperated fully in our editing process, the Op-Ed should have been subject to further substantial revisions — as is frequently the case with such essays — or rejected.
For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece. The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged. The essay also includes a reference to a “constitutional duty” that was intended as a paraphrase; it should not have been rendered as a quotation.
Beyond those factual questions, the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate. Editors should have offered suggestions to address those problems. The headline — which was written by The Times, not Senator Cotton — was incendiary and should not have been used.
Finally, we failed to offer appropriate additional context — either in the text or the presentation — that could have helped readers place Senator Cotton’s views within a larger framework of debate.
This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.
New York City suffered the worst of the riots Monday night, as Mayor Bill de Blasio stood by while Midtown Manhattan descended into lawlessness. Bands of looters roved the streets, smashing and emptying hundreds of businesses. Some even drove exotic cars; the riots were carnivals for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements.
Outnumbered police officers, encumbered by feckless politicians, bore the brunt of the violence. In New York State, rioters ran over officers with cars on at least three occasions. In Las Vegas, an officer is in “grave” condition after being shot in the head by a rioter. In St. Louis, four police officers were shot as they attempted to disperse a mob throwing bricks and dumping gasoline; in a separate incident, a 77-year-old retired police captain was shot to death as he tried to stop looters from ransacking a pawnshop. This is “somebody’s granddaddy,” a bystander screamed at the scene.
Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.
Other views
Opinion | Michelle Goldberg
Michelle Goldberg: Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed
June 4, 2020
Opinion | The Editorial Board
In America, Protest Is Patriotic
June 2, 2020
Opinion | Jonathan Stevenson
Trump Was Wrong to Deploy Troops. Will the Military Push Back?
June 3, 2020
Opinion | Philip V. McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris
No More Money for the Police
May 30, 2020
Opinion | Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People.
May 29, 2020
But the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned violence. On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.
These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives. Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further.
One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law.
The White House, June 1, 2020. Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”
This venerable law, nearly as old as our republic itself, doesn’t amount to “martial law” or the end of democracy, as some excitable critics, ignorant of both the law and our history, have comically suggested. In fact, the federal government has a constitutional duty to the states to “protect each of them from domestic violence.” Throughout our history, presidents have exercised this authority on dozens of occasions to protect law-abiding citizens from disorder. Nor does it violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which constrains the military’s role in law enforcement but expressly excepts statutes such as the Insurrection Act.
After thousands of whites rioted in Oxford, Miss., in 1962 to prevent integration of the University of Mississippi, President John Kennedy sent U.S. troops to quell the violence. Credit: Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
Anti-integration protesters at the University of Mississippi awaiting the arrival of the first African-American student, James Meredith. Credit: Getty Images
For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson called out the military to disperse mobs that prevented school desegregation or threatened innocent lives and property. This happened in my own state. Gov. Orval Faubus, a racist Democrat, mobilized our National Guard in 1957 to obstruct desegregation at Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower federalized the Guard and called in the 101st Airborne in response. The failure to do so, he said, “would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy.”
More recently, President George H.W. Bush ordered the Army’s Seventh Infantry and 1,500 Marines to protect Los Angeles during race riots in 1992. He acknowledged his disgust at Rodney King’s treatment — “what I saw made me sick” — but he knew deadly rioting would only multiply the victims, of all races and from all walks of life.
Not surprisingly, public opinion is on the side of law enforcement and law and order, not insurrectionists. According to a recent poll, 58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans, would support cities’ calling in the military to “address protests and demonstrations” that are in “response to the death of George Floyd.” That opinion may not appear often in chic salons, but widespread support for it is fact nonetheless.
The American people aren’t blind to injustices in our society, but they know that the most basic responsibility of government is to maintain public order and safety. In normal times, local law enforcement can uphold public order. But in rare moments, like ours today, more is needed, even if many politicians prefer to wring their hands while the country burns.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Cotton (@sentomcotton) is a Republican senator from Arkansas
Letters to the Editor
Opinion
Outcry Over Tom Cotton’s Call for Troops to Quell Unrest
https://www.thenation.com/…/poli…/taibbi-cotton-free-speech/
Media Analysis
Politics
Twitter
Tom Cotton Is Not a Free Speech Martyr
Addicted to the culture-war story line, pundits keep whitewashing a dangerous call to unleash the military on American citizens.
by Jeet Heer
July 15, 2020
The Nation
Just as generals are sometimes guilty of fighting the last war, pundits frequently fight the last culture war. The world is on fire with global protests over police violence, the continued spread of Covid-19, and the ripple effects of the most severe economic crisis in nearly a century. But to judge by some of America’s best-known political columnists, the true danger is still political correctness destroying free speech, especially in the media.
The immediate occasion for these complaints was the resignation of James Bennet as New York Times opinion editor after a newsroom uprising against an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton published on June 3, which called for the use of military force to suppress “looters and rioters.” But the broader context for the renewed debate over political correctness is a series of newsroom revolts in many media outlets, ranging from The Intercept to Vogue to The Philadelphia Inquirer, all involving vocal complaints about racism leveled against either staff or (more commonly) management.
Ross Douthat in The New York Times complained about a “successor ideology” that threatens to bring about a “cultural revolution” and replace traditional liberal ideas of free speech. Douthat’s colleague Bret Stephens argued that “last week’s decision by this newspaper to disavow an Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton is a gift to the enemies of a free press—free in the sense of one that doesn’t quiver and cave in the face of an outrage mob.”
Bemoaning PC is, of course, old hat for Douthat and Stephens. They’ve both been doing it for decades. What is notable is that they were echoed at length by Matt Taibbi, a talented leftist journalist who is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Taibbi wrote a long essay arguing that “the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.”
One might question the characterization “upper-class social media addicts.” In general, the newsroom revolt is coming from working reporters, who are distinctly not upper class. Conversely, those resisting the uprising—notably, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who was reluctant to accept the need for Bennet to leave—are definitely in the plutocratic class.
Taibbi added, “The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation.”
Taibbi made many of the same arguments about the Cotton op-ed that Douthat and Stephens did, but in a more forceful manner. So his essay can stand as representative. Remarkably for someone who has written well in the past about the dangers of police violence, Taibbi contended that Cotton’s plan was being misrepresented and that it was a reasonable proposal that deserved to be debated.
According to Taibbi,
Cotton did not call for “military force against protesters in American cities.” He spoke of a “show of force,” to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It’s an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American history.
Like Douthat and Stephens, Taibbi is presenting a debate club theory of public discourse. The goal is to let all sides present their arguments in the marketplace of ideas and let the best argument win.
The premise is that life can work like a debate club. In real life, as we’ve seen in recent decades, bad actors committed to lying can manipulate the rules of free debate. Climate denial is one obvious example, a wholly manufactured body of thought that used the vulnerability of the media rules of balance to present itself as legitimate.
Donald Trump himself is a colorful example of how shameless lying can easily overwhelm the marketplace of ideas. The public lacks the time, energy, and patience to even keep track of untruths that are diligently fact-checked by the media. And of course not all the public even objects to being lied to.
Cotton’s dishonesty is slyer than Trump’s—but all the more dangerous for that reason. In his op-ed, Cotton put in enough provisos that even Taibbi was convinced the senator didn’t want to harm peaceful protesters. But those provisos were only in the argument Cotton presented for Times readers.
On Twitter, two days before the Times piece ran, Cotton responded to an earlier tweet in which he had suggested calling in the 101st Airborne Division, “And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”
The phrase “no quarter” is a military term of art. On a literal level, it means that no prisoners are to be taken and all enemy combatants are to be killed. Even on a more metaphorical level, it still means enemy combatants are to be treated with utmost harshness. The use of the phrase “no quarter” is especially ominous since it was preceded by “whatever it takes to restore order.”
Even in the most generous interpretation, Cotton is calling for American troops on American soil to use rules of engagement against American citizens that would permit massive causalities. And if we take Cotton literally (as perhaps we should given his military background and familiarity with technical terminology), then he was calling for war crimes.
Nor is it clear what Cotton means by “insurrectionists.” The phrase implies that the army would go after not just lawbreakers but also those guilty of ideological offenses. In his op-ed, Cotton conjures up the dangers of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa.” There is no evidence of any antifa involvement in violence during the protests.
Cotton is presenting a two-faced argument. On Twitter, we see the full violence of his proposal laid out. In his Times op-ed, a more restrained version of his argument is presented, one that effectively helps whitewash Cotton. In other words, publishing Cotton’s op-ed doesn’t help create a marketplace of ideas where issues are debated. Instead, it helps a dishonest political figure sell himself to a broader public. A far better procedure would have been for the Times to have published news articles examining Cotton’s ideas. In that format, his dishonesty would have been easier to grasp.
Stephens, Douthat, and Taibbi were all taken in by Cotton’s deception. They all treated the op-ed as if it summed up Cotton’s viewpoint, utterly ignoring the much more incendiary tweets. They were so obsessed with fighting a culture war that they let themselves become de facto apologists for a reactionary politician who used eliminationist rhetoric in advocating a military response to a political problem.
As with so many other arguments over political correctness, the controversy over Cotton’s op-ed involves treating ideas as if they exist only in the abstract and don’t have real-world consequences. That’s a beguiling conceit for a certain type of pundit, who can enjoy the play of ideas as a form of entertainment. In a debate club, it might be possible as a forensic exercise to argue over the merits of Cotton’s op-ed in its own terms, while ignoring his other political activities. But life is not a debate club.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent at The Nation and the author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014).
