secret police
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uber1: https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-7328
BELATED? NEGLECTED?
see SWAT dhs BORTAC ICE 3 MASKED IMMUNITY
see chad wolf
see portland
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AN 3 26
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AN 3 26
President Donald Trump recently fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on the grounds that doing so will improve her department — but a Republican national security expert argued Sunday that the problems are much deeper than that.
“The switch is cosmetic: The problem with DHS isn’t Noem or [Trump’s nominee GOP Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne] Mullin or whoever else will run it,” explained Paul Rosenzweig, who served as deputy assistant secretary for policy of the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush (2005-2009) and currently cybersecurity at the George Washington University Law School. “The problem is with the agency itself.”
While some of the problems are longstanding, such as issues with FEMA or the TSA, Trump has made them worse, Rosenzweig opined.
“Under Donald Trump, ICE and Border Patrol have become rogue agencies, accused of unnecessary violence and disregard for the rule of law,” Rosenzweig argued. “In January alone, ICE violated more court orders than most federal agencies violate in their entire existence, according to a federal judge in Minnesota. ICE has also adopted what appears to be a blatantly unconstitutional search policy.”
He added, “Meanwhile, more than 40 people have died in ICE custody since the start of Trump’s second term. The answer to such abuses is not reform; it is wholesale disassembly and restructuring.”
From there Rosenzweig suggested several new policies to overhaul the Homeland Security Department. These include returning “its focus to the original objective—foreign counterterrorism—which remains a serious concern. Retain those portions of DHS that serve a counterterrorism function—CBP officers at ports of entry, TSA screeners at airports, Border Patrol agents at the nation’s land borders—and return the other components to more appropriate federal departments.”
From there, “most of the rest of DHS should be disaggregated. Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil are so infrequent that FEMA can, and should, go back to being an independent agency. Likewise, immigration adjudication (currently housed in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) can be returned to the Department of Justice. The home of the few agencies whose functions are decidedly mixed—such as the Coast Guard—should be decided on a case-by-case basis, but whatever the outcome, joint task forces that coordinate response activities should be developed.”
Rosenzweig argued that the “most important” change would be to “eliminate the possibility of the creation of a federalized interior police force. Border Patrol can be limited to the border, and Homeland Security Investigations can be retargeted toward their traditional function of sophisticated transnational commercial crimes. Meanwhile, the single gravest militarized threat—ICE—should be reined in and restructured under new leadership, so that it focuses on its core mission of genuine civil-process interior enforcement.”
As Rosenzweig noted, the Senate did not seriously propose any reforms along these lines, instead treating the problems with Homeland Security as an issue primarily of Noem’s bad leadership. For example, Trump’s decision to fire Noem was based on the ex-Cabinet officer inaccurately claiming the president authorized her $220 million ad campaign.
“I was stunned when Noem answered categorically that the president approved every single bit of it,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told Fox News at the time. “Later that day, I got a call from President Trump. He was mad as a mamma wasp. He said, ‘Kennedy, I hope you understand that I had nothing to do with this.’ I said, ‘I do believe you, Mr. President.'”
He added, “He was not happy. It was clear to me after that conversation that the secretary’s time at the department was limited. To be blunt, she was dead as fried chicken.”
Noem was also grilled by House members for her alleged affair with a special government employee she hired to work for her, former lobbyist Corey Lewandowski.
"Secretary Noem, at any time during your tenure…have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski?" U.S. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) asked Noem during a hearing earlier this month.
Noem told Sydney Kamlager-Dove, "That is garbage and it is offensive that you have brought that up.”
Kamlager-Dove replied, "It is about your judgment and decision-making.”
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NO LNX
Republicans' new agenda could make America's 250th birthday her last
:{D. Earl Stephens February 11, 2026
As the repulsive Trump regime makes America a far more dangerous, inhumane place by the hour, I have a common-sense solution that would make us far safer immediately:
Ban guns.
Make it so only our military can carry weapons on their bases or in a theater of battle.
That’s it.
Picture it: an America with no guns.
Our children would be safe in school. Our neighborhoods would be positively dreamy. Life expectancy would rise, and America might just get a shred of respect from the rest of the world, which looks at us these days as the complete maniacs we most certainly have become.
But you think I’m the one who has completely lost his mind.
Never happen, Earl. Guns are here to stay.
You know, it wasn’t so long ago, that some sort of meaty gun control actually looked doable. Back then, when America was at least semi-sane, gun control was my No. 1 issue.
I railed about it. I marched for it. I joined gun-control groups, and put some of my limited treasure in furthering this noble cause.
Hadn’t we seen enough of our children brutally slaughtered in all those classrooms?
Enough Already is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I used to tell people at the time that I was a reasonable man, and because I was a reasonable man, I would entertain compromise on this vital issue.
Since I wanted ALL guns banned — every damn one of them — and you wanted all guns legal — every damn one of them — we could meet somewhere in the middle.
We could adopt common-sense legislation. Both sides might not be completely happy, but we would be safer.
Guns kill people. No guns, no deaths. Fewer guns, fewer deaths.
Well, we all know what happened.
America’s biggest killer, BIG MONEY, got involved, started threatening lawmakers at a gunpoint, and they all but surrendered on the issue.
Oh sure, a few things got done to make us minimally safer, but there have never been more guns in America than there is right now. There are so damn many of them that it has become impossible to count them all, much less track them.
Most experts have it in the 500 million range.
I look at that astonishing number and wonder why I come bouncing in here with hope about anything sometimes …
The guy who wants no guns, is living in a country with more guns than people.
Tell me again how great we are …
And because this is America, and the only thing we know for certain these days is that things can always get worse …
They have.
On the year of Lady Liberty’s 250th birthday, we have unnamed, armed, roving government agents marauding through our streets. They are caging and murdering us with absolute impunity.
Land of the free?
You are kidding me, right?
Since ICE has been unleashed by its fish-lipped, dead-eyed, puppy-killing leader, Kristi Noem, there have been 16 shootings by on-duty, unidentified federal agents patrolling U.S. cities and towns during the past year. This includes, of course, the cold-blooded murders of Minnesota protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
There have been beatings, gassings, and human beings being disappeared in concentration camps. It has all blown past appalling, and into the dark realm of the unimaginable.
ICE needs to go, because short of getting rid of guns in America, the elimination of a federal agency that treats people like targets on some shooting range or Noem treats a puppy, would be a step toward decency.
But since eliminating ICE completely is close to an impossibility unless and until Democrats take back the White House, the party of good and decency should do everything it can to pull the fangs from these grotesque agents’ masked, dirty mouthes.
This starts by putting demands on Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) before it gets a drop of OUR money.
The following is a list of the 10 guardrails on ICE that Democratic leadership presented to Trump’s grotesque Republicans before DHS funding expires Friday:
Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
They ended their proposal this way:
These reforms should apply to all federal activity, whether funded by FY26 appropriations, the OBBBA or any other act.
Furthermore, there are steps that the Trump administration has the power to take right now to show good faith, including fully ramping down the surge in Minnesota and removing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem from her position.
These are common sense solutions that protect constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement.
Short of eliminating ICE altogether, I fully endorse this proposal.
Now we see just how serious Democratic Senate and House Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are about standing behind their words.
I have been hard on both of these men, and think Democrats are overdue for new leadership. But I also know Republicans are horrid, disgusting people, who will continue doing everything in their seemingly unlimited power to back a lawless regime that by words and deeds is intent on incinerating our Democracy, and the notion that all men (and women) are created equal.
Democrats must hold the line here.
If you somehow still aren’t convinced about the danger we are in right now, consider that on this date in 1936 — exactly 90 years ago — Nazi Germany passed a law investing the Gestapo secret police with absolute authority exempt from any legal review.
Here’s a word from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Gestapo. The parallels to ICE are absolutely chilling:
The Gestapo’s mission was to “investigate and combat all attempts to threaten the state.” In the Nazi view, threats to the state encompassed a wide variety of behaviors. These behaviors included everything from organized political opposition to individual critical remarks about the Nazis. The government even defined belonging to certain categories or groups of people as threatening. To combat this wide array of potential threats, the Nazi dictatorship gave the Gestapo enormous power.
One way in which the Gestapo carried out its mission was by enforcing new Nazi laws. Some of these laws broadly defined criticism of the regime as a security threat. For example, a December 1934 law made it illegal to criticize the Nazi Party or the Nazi regime. Telling a joke about Hitler could be categorized as a “malicious attack against the state or the Party.” It could then result in an arrest by the Gestapo, trial before a special court, and even imprisonment in a concentration camp.
But the Gestapo went much further than monitoring individual behaviors. They implemented Nazi ideology, which defined entire groups of people as racial or political enemies. Membership in the Communist Party or a Jewish background was enough to make someone a threat to the state and subject to Gestapo attention.
The Nazi regime gave Gestapo agents a great deal of power to decide the fate of the people they arrested.
The Gestapo had the final word.
Nobody in America can say they haven’t been warned.
Nobody in our government should ever be allowed to murder Americans and say, “they were just following orders.”
If Republicans continue to get their gruesome way, America’s 250th birthday will be her last.
We must fight for her, and US with everything we have.
That starts with putting guardrails on murdering ICE right now — unless you want to tell me a country with 500 million guns can’t be wrong …
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.
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an 1 26
Nebraska mom Jamie Bonkiewicz filmed her interaction with Secret Service agents who came to her door because of a tweet.
"The Secret Service came to my door today because of a tweet. No threats. No violence. Just words. That’s where we are now," she wrote on X in a thread about the ordeal.
"For anyone doubting me. Here they are," Bonkiewicz said, posting a photo of a local police officer and the federal agent as she stood with her screen door open.
She was asked about the comments she made online, and she made it clear, "I want to see their trials."
He then asked if she goes to protests, which she refused to answer.
"Why do you want to know that?" Bonkiewicz asked.
"I'm just curious," he responded. "For certain questionnaires, we have to ask."
He asked if there were weapons in the house and she said there were not. Bonkiewicz was also asked if she "traveled to any Democratic functions or rallies."
"I just answered you," she said about the question he'd previously asked.
"Anything else you want to tell me? Any statements at all?" the agent asked.
Her husband, who was filming the incident, asked what is considered crossing the line on social media.
"Something like this, a veiled threat," he said, shrugging. "Is it a threatening nature? Now that I know you didn't mean anything by it, it's basically a non-issue."
He asked her again what she meant by the comment, and she made it clear she was talking about officials having Nuremberg-style tribunals for those who enabled unlawful behavior.
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// jdv yale law grad absolute immunity?
an 1 26
Top aide to President Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, spoke to Fox News on Tuesday, and one legal expert says he may have just made things worse for the administration.
According to Evan Bernick, associate professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, both Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are creating a paper trail that will not work out well for them.
DHS posted the interview with Miller in which he tells Fox: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.”
Bernick commented, "I encourage the administration to continue to leave a paper trail for future lawsuits — which are inevitable, because following this advice will lead to civil rights violations."
Qualified immunity, as explained by the Legal Defense Fund, personally protects government officials, including cops, when they're sued.
"The doctrine holds that officials who violate other people’s constitutional rights can only be held responsible if there exists a previous court decision, with very similar facts, that resulted in other officials being held accountable. Qualified immunity has been used in many cases to protect officials who have engaged in a variety of misconduct, including fatal shootings, police brutality, stealing, sexual misconduct, and more."
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AN 11 25
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) tells the New Republic that “we have all three key ingredients of a strongman state: a rubber-stamp Congress acceding to the president’s desires; a Supreme Court enhancing the president’s powers; and a power-hungry president … disregarding the laws and the checks and balances of our Constitution.”
In this environment, President Donald Trump is using 10 rules out of the “authoritarian playbook” to collapse U.S. democracy.
“The first rule … is to fire the government’s referees,” said Merkley, which Trump began when he fired 17 inspectors general and members of federal oversight commissions and regulatory boards without cause. The second rule is then to “pack your government with loyalists."
“The Senate is supposed to block confirmation of unqualified individuals,” but Merkley said that’s where that “rubber stamp” in the Republican majority comes in handy.
A third rule is to grab the power over the funding of programs from Congress so a single man can decide which programs to fund and at what level. Once you’ve grabbed the funding levers you can pursue the “fourth rule in the authoritarian playbook” by going after centers of power.
“Trump is doing exactly that when he withholds research grants from universities or security clearances from law firms unless they restructure to his will,” Merkley said.
The fifth rule involves an autocrat pushing his influence over the press, which Trump is doing with “lawsuits and his power over broadcast licenses and corporate mergers to pressure newspapers and networks over the content of their reports and broadcasts, and even which late-night comedians they employ.” Merkley said Trump’s already destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and defunded PBS, NPR, and even Voice of America, which was created specifically to counter disinformation from authoritarian regimes around the world.
Rule No. 6 is to disregard due process. “Democracies don’t have secret police,” said Merkley. “But now, unidentified masked federal agents are arresting people off the street … terrorizing communities, zip-tying children, and disappearing people overseas without a fair trial.”
Rule No. 7 — attack and diminish dissent by weaponizing the Department of Justice — is hot on the heels of that with Trump publicly naming enemies and pushing the DOJ to pursue them: James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, John Bolton.
Soon comes Rule No 8, which involves the “use the military to suppress domestic dissent.”
“Trump is activating Title 10 of the U.S. Code, section 12406, to federalize the National Guard and send them into American cities,” said Merkley. “… A district judge ruled against Trump’s effort to federalize and deploy Oregon National Guard members in Portland … but Trump may yet succeed, because some judges … are arguing that the courts should defer to the president’s discretion.”
“A ninth rule is to use the power of the government to spread propaganda,” said Merkley, which Trump is already doing with “banners with the president’s face hanging off federal buildings; video announcements at airports featuring Homeland Security Secretary Noem blaming Democrats for the government shutdown; federal websites spreading the president’s political messages,” all in violation of the Hatch Act and other rules.
A tenth rule in the authoritarian playbook — and the most dangerous rule of all, said Merkley — is to rig future elections. Trump is already trying to consolidate states’ voter registration files into a national database to make them easier to manipulate in the next election, and he’s gerrymandering states’ congressional districts to increase Republican power in the House of Representatives, possibly with the blessing of the Supreme Court in upcoming months.
It will take “strong citizen resistance” in the autocrat’s first year to derail his effort. After that, the struggle gets considerably harder, if not impossible.
“Let’s ring the alarm bells loud and clear and pass the election test in November 2026 with flying colors,” Merkley said.
Read the full New Republic report at this link.
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an 10 25
In a sharply worded ruling delivered Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Young — a Ronald Reagan appointee — criticized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for their use of masks during operations, equating the practice to a tool of intimidation rather than protection.
In his ruling, he wrote that “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” and added that “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”
Young ruled that the Trump administration infringed on the First Amendment rights of foreign students.
At the very start of his opinion, the judge reproduced an anonymous postcard he had received, followed by his written reply:
“TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS... WHAT DO YOU HAVE?”
“Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States — you and me — have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case," he wrote in response to the threat.
The ruling comes amid growing debate over immigration enforcement tactics, the role of transparency in law enforcement, and the balance between security and civil liberties.
Critics of ICE’s methods have long raised concerns about accountability when agents’ faces are obscured during raids or other enforcement actions. Supporters of covert tactics argue that masking helps protect agents’ safety and prevents retaliation or harassment. Judge Young’s ruling signals a judicial pushback against the latter rationale, at least in this particular case.
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see BORTAC
Operation Whistle Pig
In 2017, Jeffrey Rambo, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent working for the National Targeting Center, investigated Watkins, other journalists including Martha Mendoza, and NGOs while on an assignment to combat forced labor in the Congo. The operation was called "Whistle Pig" and in addition to its own database trawling[46] it got the CBP’s Counter Network Division to provide information about Watkins' mother and brother and links to their public profiles, as well as details of Watkin's domestic and international travel. Rambo met Watkins under the fictitious name Jack Bentley, but Watkins obtained his real name from a credit card receipt. Watkins perceived Rambo's approach as a threat.[47]
In 2021, Watkins said: “I’m deeply troubled at the lengths CBP and DHS personnel apparently went to try and identify journalistic sources and dig into my personal life.”[48] A few days later, CBP launched an investigation.[49]
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wiki 7 22
The National Targeting Center (NTC) is a division of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). It is based in Sterling, Virginia.[1] The NTC observes air traffic and trade activities,[2] gathers and vets intelligence, and is empowered to send e-mails requesting that U.S. citizens be detained and questioned.[3]
The National Targeting Center includes several divisions, including: NTC-Cargo, NTC-Passenger, Counter-Network, and National Targeting Center – Investigations (NTC-I). The latter was established in 2013.[4]
The NTC was initially established in 2001; its original name was Office of Border Security.[5]
In 2017, the NTC approached journalists "as part of a broader effort to get reporters to write about forced labor around the world as a national security issue." The journalists included Ali Watkins and Martha Mendoza.[6]
In 2021, CBP launched an investigation of the NTC's targeting of journalists, members of Congress, and others.[7]
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an 1120
This is disturbing': DOJ claims armed feds are allowed to inspect state vote-counting locations
November 05, 2020
As ongoing vote tabulation in several key battleground states continues to slowly narrow President Donald Trump's path to reelection, the New York Times reported late Wednesday that the Justice Department has told federal prosecutors that U.S. law permits...
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c de v
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/expert-on-the-radical-right-warns-that-vigilantes-are-preparing-to-launch-a-coup
in the Age of Trump, Portland, Oregon, is no longer just another city. Now it is a symbol and almost a Rorschach test for the country’s deep and explosive political divides.
For Trumpists, Republicans and members of the far right, Portland is all that is wrong with “the Left” and “Liberals,” a chaotic nightmare zone where Black Lives Matter, antifa and other“enemies”are running amok while they attack “patriotism” and “real American values.”
To TrumpWorld, Portland and other Democratic-led big cities (which of course is virtually all of them) are hives of scum and villainy, overrun by criminals and “rioters,” which must be conquered by Trump’s enforcersand armed vigilante supporters.
Trump’s “law and order” politics, and its inherent racism and violence, are believed by many to be his path back to the White House. In this view, Portland and other “Democrat cities” and communities are targets of opportunity for the Trump regime.
writing at Washington Monthly, David Atkins explains Trump’s mindset:
He sees the violence as politically beneficial, a useful cudgel against Democratic nominee Joe Biden — even though the violence is happening while Trump himself is president, not Biden.
Trump’s election theme is that Americans won’t be safe in a Biden presidency. The opposite is true. Americans won’t be safe as long as a white supremacist president is leading a movement of bigots to incite a civil war, and attempting to ensure that the majority of Americans with cosmopolitan, egalitarian values remain politically disenfranchised and under the thumb of those who fear and despise them.
Trump’s campaign of racial authoritarianism and stochastic terrorism, as well as overt threats of “law and order,” resulted in a group of his supporters driving into Portland last weekend, armed with mace and paintball guns, to seek out confrontations with Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist protesters. During one such encounter, a member of the right-wing militia group Patriot Prayer, Aaron Danielson,was shot and killed. On Thursday night, the apparent shooter,Michael Reinoehl, was himself shot and killed by U.S. marshals in Olympia, Washington.
Despite this lamentable violence — for which Trump and the right must bear ultimate responsibility — for progressives and other people of conscience Portland is a symbol of resistance and hope. As part of the nationwide people’s uprising sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters have been outside the Portland federal courthouse for more than 100 days.
The protests were largely peaceful until Trump and acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf deployed federal police forces to the city in July. Their presence, as designed, escalated the tension and led to increasing levels of property damage and incidents of violence.
Previewing Trump’s plan for other parts of the nation, these federal shock troops made journalists and reporters a special focus of their violence. They also kidnapped protesters and other “enemies” of Donald Trump’s regime off the street as though they were operating in a banana republic.
Much of the mainstream American news media’s coverage of the recent events in Portland lacks meaningful context. Writing at Medium, a Portland press collective describes one such example of this “parachute journalism”:
One night last week, during one of the smaller demonstrations, a tall white man in a clean ballistic helmet and brand-new plate carrier emblazoned with “PRESS” strolled through the crowd in front of the Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. He stopped by a gaggle of other journalists, most out-of-towners. “I’ve only been around for the last week,” he said, “but the protests in Portland feel a lot more performative than the ones I’ve seen in other cities. Less genuine.” A local journalist mentioned having been present for over 50 nights of the protests, starting in early June. “Yeah, I can only speak for what I’ve seen this week,” said Clean Helmet. “I’m flying back to DC tomorrow.” … Clean Helmet was on the ground in Portland, by his own description, for less than a week. This means that he was present for approximately 1/10th of Portland’s BLM protests, thus far. I’m sure he got some great footage.
The Parachutes (as we have come to know them) come with money, and zero community connections. Their goal is the clip that can make the nightly news. They want a story that will dominate the news cycle. They do not know what is happening in Portland, and they do not care. They are coming to a city with a vibrant, scrappy community of street-level journalists. By and large, they do not want the context that those journalists can provide. And soon they will come to a city near you. When the Feds and the Parachutes come to your town, you’ll want everyone to understand the context there, too. And they are coming. Clean Helmet is already back in DC, and on to the next assignment.
The important context which “the Parachutes” usually omit includes the way Portland is depicted as a liberal oasis in America’s popular imagination. In reality, Portland is a very race and class-segregated city. As historian and activist Walidah Imarisha and others have richly documented, the Oregon territory passed laws in 1844 explicitly excluding Black people from the region under punishment of whippings and other violence. The state of Oregon formally included white supremacy in its constitution, explicitly banning nonwhites.
To this day, Oregon remains a redoubt of white supremacy, where white supremacists and other right-wing extremists have a large presence in the state and surrounding region. Portland itself has a long and ongoing history of right-wing violence.
Alexander Reid Ross is a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. His most recent book is “Against the Fascist Creep.” Ross has also completed new research which documents more than 500 incidents in which white vigilantes and other right-wing extremists have confronted Black Lives Matter protests. This includes hundreds of acts of intimidation and other threats as well as dozens of examples in which right-wing extremists have assaulted or attacked Black Lives Matter protesters.
In this conversation Ross shares his firsthand experiences with the recent George Floyd protests in Portland. He also provides some context for those events and the police and federal response. Ross also details the long history of right-wing paramilitaries and political street gangs in Portland and their relationship with local police and other law enforcement.
Reid warns that Portland, the right-wing vigilante killings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the hundreds of other attacks by right-wing extremists on Black Lives Matter protesters is just a preview of the massive violence that Donald Trump and his movement may unleash before and after Election Day — perhaps including the arrest or imprisonment of prominent Democrats, journalists, and others deemed to be enemies of the state.
Q: After almost four years of Trump and his regime’s authoritarian, neofascist behavior, some voices in the mainstream American news media now use that correct and appropriate language to describe the reality of the situation. Why was there so much fear and denial about the obvious? Even when they use the correct terminology, the coverage is largely superficial and avoids serious discussion of the dire implications.
You must also take into account that many so-called left-leaning voices have also been interfering with bringing that truth to light. There were writers at the Guardian, for example, who were trying to sound the alarm about the dangers of right-wing extremism and fascism in America, but they were derided by their peers across the political spectrum.
I also believe that publications such as the Washington Post and the New York Times saw themselves as being aloof from questions of the mob and political violence in America. There is a tendency among elite voices to want to say that, “We’re above political violence here in America and we resolve our differences through conversation. Therefore, let’s give everyone a hearing and let’s debate these issues, regardless of how extreme they may be. That is what a democratic country should act like.”
In a sense, they put their faith completely in some abstract idea of “democracy” instead of taking the temperature of what is really happening on the ground.
You live in Portland. How is your experience different from the narrative being offered by the mainstream American news media and other outside observers?
We in Portland have been dealing with right-wing extremists and police abuse for a long time. Portland has experience with the likes of right-wing extremist groups such as Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys. This is not new to us.
I would go out to protests and see how the political violence is not a result of the breakdown in the monopoly of violence held by the police. The political violence was a result of the Proud Boys and the police effectively acting as two different elements of the same side. It wasn’t that the police had lost the monopoly of violence. It was the police were shooting us in order to allow the Proud Boys to march through the city without proper permits.
Most mainstream news media coverage of the protests which have taken place here in Portland, recently and before, totally fail to acknowledge or even fathom the police involvement in the rise of the far right in this community. That failure has cascaded to the point that we are now at a point where the press is painting the current crisis as some type of grudge match between the feds and the anarchists. In fact, the protest movement is a very diverse group of people — especially by Portland standards — who are coming out night after night and making extraordinarily clear demands and being absolutely brutalized in the streets every night.
What too many reporters in many cases are trying to do is figure out how to resolve the situation, rather than understanding it and properly explaining to the public what is really happening and the context for it. By doing so, too many reporters are creating false equivalencies regarding the various forces at play here in Portland.
What does Portland exemplify, in terms of the protests and the Trump’s regime’s reaction?
It is an example of Donald Trump attempting to rise to the level of a right-wing political strongman. Donald Trump is using classic authoritarian tactics that one does not often see in a healthy democracy. Donald Trump is deliberately undermining the Constitution by using federal law to circumvent local governments’ control over their police forces.
Trump and William Barr’s de facto secret police are literally disappearing people off the streets of Portland and in other parts of the country where the Democratic Party is in power. How do you explain what is happening to people who do not live in those communities? Who are not being targeted by Trump and his henchmen?
The specific federal forces involved are BORTAC — the Border Patrol Tactical Unit — and the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and others, under the coordination of the Department of Homeland Security. BORTAC have been in Portland shooting at people and launching tear gas. BORTAC is not trained for crowd or riot control. They are trained to engage in raids against migrants and to separate children from their mothers. That is what BORTAC does. They pride themselves on being the most militarized branch and group of the U.S. law enforcement community. BORTAC members are extreme Trump supporters. What is happening in Portland and other parts of the country is the border closing in on the citizens of the United States.
BORTAC is loyal to Donald Trump and that’s why he is using them. He’s not using them because they’re the most skilled and adept at riot and crowd control management. That also explains why there are so many incidents of people being shot in the face and otherwise abused here in Portland and other places where BORTAC and other such forces are being deployed by the Trump administration.They don’t know what they’re doing at all.
BORTAC is being used because Trump feels that they are his most loyal forces. That is fully in keeping with the tactics of authoritarian leaders who cultivate secret police whose main function is to serve as the government leader’s private force, one that operates outside of any restraints such as internal review.
The [former] Chilean dictatorship is explicitly supported by Trump’s own supporters, who wear T-shirts that say, “Right-wing death squad” and “Pinochet did nothing wrong.”The American mainstream news media is far too charitable with its narrative that “Trump is playing to his base.”
During the recent protests in Portland, were there moments where you feared that the federal forces were going to start shooting the crowd with lethal rounds?
The fear is very real and it’s constant. The federal forces have assault rifles. They are loaded with live rounds. There are protesters who were throwing fireworks and things of that sort at the courthouse. What if one of the feds has an itchy trigger finger? What if a firework explodes and they then open fire on an entire group of unarmed people?
Trump and their defenders and other apologists will just say, “Well, these poor agents have been overworked for 60 days and look at all the things that have been thrown at them” and so on and so forth. We know what the narrative will be. All a person can do when protesting is to act accordingly and stay focused.
You have been documenting what are now almost 500 attacks, acts of intimidation, vehicular assaults, shootings and other threats by Trump supporters and other members of the right against Black Lives Matter protests. What do we know?
I have never seen this amount of anti-left vigilantism from the right. During the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, the Tea Party was huge, and they mobilized with events all over the country. There were also armed protests in opposition to Obamacare. But those right-wing protesters were not coming out to confront and intimidate a much smaller group of anti-racists. Of course, those anti-Obama Tea Party and anti-health-care type protesters were extremely racist and a breath away from being fascists, but there was not that same energy and menace that we are seeing today.
The idea of these right-wing protesters and militia types being “anti-government” — again, a narrative circulated by the mainstream American news media — is very uncritical, a total misnomer. They are really pro-government. They are entirely in favor of the United States government as controlled by Donald Trump. Their claim to be “libertarians” is a joke.
Those right-wing militias and others sympathetic to them are arming in opposition to Democrats, liberals and progressives.
Right-wing extremists and other terrorists, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, are also coordinating at times with the police.
They actually say that they are at the protests to “protect the police.” Think about that claim: They are “anti-government” vigilantes who promise that they are trying to protect the police. In essence, these right-wing militias and the like are American citizens who believe it is their role not to become police, but to guard the police. Such a claim is ludicrous. It is a paramilitary force. These right-wing forces are coordinating and positioning themselves to be able to launch a coup against American democracy and the Democratic Party, if the latter gains control of the presidency and government.
The closest parallel with what we are seeing with Trump’s movement would be the “massive resistance” by white people against racial integration in the South during the civil rights movement. I am of the opinion that the United States has not seen such a mobilization of violent, far-right forces to this extent since the 1960s.
Recently, a Trumpist and right-wing militia supporter traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin and involved himself in the protests there. He apparently shot three people, killing two of them. He crossed state lines illegally with a weapon he was not allowed to own. He was only a teenager, and was radicalized online into right-wing extremism. He is now being valorized by the right-wing media machine. Trump has defended this young man as a hero who was fighting against “criminals” and “looters.” This apparent killer now has hundreds of thousands of dollars pledged to his defense.
Trump has defended Kyle Rittenhouse with the claim he was firing in “self-defense.” In essence, Donald Trump supports the right-wing vigilante movement, which represents the disintegration of the rule of law.
We are witnessing an erosion of democratic norms in this country by Republicans. They accept breaking the law as being viable if it supports “traditional values” — meaning racism. As a practical matter, Donald Trump is spearheading the movement of the Republican Party into a full-on violent racist organization that encourages vigilantism.
In terms of engaging in the worst type of “both-sides-ism” and false equivalencies that helped Trump win and now keep power, the American mainstream news media is now advancing a “mutual combat” narrative in its coverage of Trump’s supporters and the violence in Portland last weekend. How does that narrative contradict what really happened in Portland?
The “mutual combat” framing is inane, legally a non-starter, and obviously supportive of the aggressive party, which is typically the Trump supporters. Their strategy is to provoke fights and then call for “law and order” intervention from a corrupt president.
Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibsonhas not been leading protests in Portland for a long time. He is a marginal figure, but the American news media has suddenly selected him and lifted him up for no apparent reason other than that he participated in an aggressive and bellicose Trump “caravan” last week during which right-wing vigilantes tried to run people over with their trucks, shot protesters and bystanders with paintball guns, and used pepper spray to attack people.
Should Black Lives Matter, antifascist and other human rights and social justice supporters stop protesting in order to deny Trump’s supporters and other right-wing hooligans a narrative that could hurt Joe Biden nd the the Democrats? In essence, should they make a tactical withdrawal to deny Trump a strategic victory, because of how events will likely be distorted by the media to his advantage?
I will not say what protesters should or shouldn’t do. I do not think what they choose to do or not do will matter much. What is significant is that the far right will deepen its insurgency against the left the more that Donald Trump falters and as he continues demanding “law and order.”
The left would be remiss to engage them on this level. The left is not in the streets to spark a civil war or escalate violent encounters to the point of breaking civil society into protracted sectarian warfare. The left is in the streets to make life better for ordinary people, and to present a version of the future that would be better and more prosperous for everyone. The more the left maintains its sanity against overwhelming odds, the more the right’s paranoia and hysteria will marginalize it in American society. This will create new spaces for progressive causes and movements.
What do you want to warn the American people about? What do you think happens next?
I am worried about crackdowns by Donald Trump and his forces against their direct enemies. This would involve dragging Democrats in front of kangaroo courts and starting to criminalize dissent such that the average American who has a bumper sticker or other affiliation with the Democratic Party or liberal or progressive causes becomes a target for Trump’s zealots. I worry that Trump will find some way to round up the leaders of the Democratic Party and put them in jail or execute them.
That is the future that right-wing conspiracists such as the QAnon people want. They are the crowd that Donald Trump is signaling to. I do not believe that there is much stopping Donald Trump from following through on his extreme impulses. At this point Donald Trump is desperate. If Trump wins again it will just be more fuel on the fire for his followers. The right wing will follow through on his cues and start attacking regular people, not just protesters, who they believe are Democrats.
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stokes violence then sez only he can stop THOSE PPL:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-signal-to-his-followers-is-clear-violence-and-chaos-are-my-only-hope/
no twt vid link
prez trump’s signal to his followers is clear: Violence and chaos are my only hope
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon August 31, 2020
President Trump was having a normal one on Sunday morning, tweeting and retweeting 89 times over the course of three and a half hours. Many of them were tweets of polling numbers from obscure firms showing him in the lead after the Republican convention. But most of the tweets and retweets were incitement to violence among his true believers and complaints about “Democrat cities,” an ongoing mantra which he seems to think is a slam dunk to get him re-elected.
He repeatedly insulted and mocked Joe Biden, of course, and Portland, Oregon Mayor Ted Wheeler will undoubtedly have to change his phone number after the president of the United States posted it on Twitter so his followers could call and demand his resignation.
He also showed support for one of his fans in Wisconsin:
[]
It was a manic tweet spree and one that couldn’t have show the president’s state of mind any more clearly. Biden has said Trump is “rooting for violence,” and I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue with that.
In fact, Trump’s surrogates are saying it right out loud. Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump whether she agreed with White House counselorKellyanne Conway’s assertion that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” Lara answered, “Well, I think it paints a very clear picture.” She might as well have said, “You go, boys!”
On CNN on Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., agreed with Trump that the shootings by a 17-year-old Trump fan last Tuesday night in Kenosha were understandable:[]
What the president did was he offered to surge manpower and resources so the violence could end. The governor did not accept that that day, that night tragically two people lost their lives because citizens took matters into their own hands. I’m not for vigilantism. I’m not sure that’s what was happening. People felt, because the governor — local officials were looking for help.The governor did not accept the help, and so there was not the resolve to end the rioting, and so people took matters into their own hands, and that’s what ended up happening. People die.
Johnson is confused about everything, as usual. Trump publicly berated Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers for failing to call in the National Guard hours after Evers had already done so, telling his followers that Evers wasn’t protecting the city. Johnson basically said that people felt they needed to take matters into their own hands because the president had lied to them and told them the governor wasn’t protecting them. Yet somehow he’s against vigilantism. Everything about that is a grotesque inversion of anything one could call “law and order.”
Trump was at it again later on Sunday, tweeting in response to a press conference by Wheeler, the Portland mayor. Trump called him a “dummy” and ranted on, saying, “He would like to blame me and the federal government for going in, but he hasn’t seen anything yet. We have only been there with a small group to defend our U.S. courthouse, because he couldn’t do it.”
Conway’s little gaffe in which she admitted that the White House and the Trump campaign believe street violence is good for them illuminates the president’s fanning of the flames. He has finally grasped that he cannot unilaterally sending in a bunch of federal cops, as he did in Washington to stage his photo-op last June. Instead, he’s not-very-subtly signaling to his gun-toting fans that they are going to have to take action on their own if they hope to scare people into voting for him. Leave the propaganda to him, just ramp up the chaos.
He tweeted that MAGA “protesters” who came to Portland in a caravan on Saturday night were “Great Patriots!” and later explained why their behavior was understandable:
The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wondered on Twitter whether “suburban voters look at these pictures and say, ‘yes, where I belong is in the same political coalition as men who crowd into pickup trucks w/guns, as in Bosnia 1998 or a Third World dictatorship?'” (Those huge flags flying behind them reminded me of men crowded “into pickup trucks w/guns,” as in news photographs of ISIS fighters.)
It’s a jarringly familiar sight, but it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in America before.
There was an actual shooting that night and someone died. It’s unclear what exactly happened. But it is very clear that this kind of confrontation is something that Trump and his henchmen are actively stoking for political gain.
As I wrote on Friday, this is hardly the first time Trump has deployed crude, racist fear-mongering. He’s been doing it for years, going all the way back to the full-page Central Park Five ad. If it isn’t marauding gangs of Black teenagers, it’s Muslim terrorists or Mexican rapists or left-wing anarchists. There’s always some bogeyman coming to get you.
The only thing he knows how to do is point a finger at “the other” and then promise people that he’s the only one who can save them. He feels confident that he’s got the troops to back him up, one way or the other. He gave an interview with Breitbart back in 2019 in which he made this explicit:
You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.
Yes, it would be very bad. The question is whether or not anyone will believe that Donald Trump is the man who can save America from all this mayhem he is creating. After all, he’s been promising to do that ever since he came down that elevator. Here he is at the 2016 Republican convention:
I guess that’s yet another promise he’ll fulfill after he makes America Great Again — Again.
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DHS Takes to the Streets
Four days after Floyd's murder, amid street protests in Oakland, California, an officer for the Federal Protective Service was gunned down and killed outside the federal building he was guarding. Cuccinelli called the killing of the DHS agency officer "an act of domestic terrorism," and pledged that the department would take an active role in response to the violence.
"We will stand behind our law-enforcement officers here in the department and all over America," he said.
Six weeks later, when two men were captured and charged in the Oakland assault, federal prosecutors detailed evidencethat the men were associated with a right-wing extremist group, the Boogaloo Boys, and that they had taken advantage of the chaos of the anti-racism protests to stage their assault. That fact was lost in the executive order Trump signed on June 26, expanding DHS authority to respond to "anarchists and left-wing extremists." Trump directed DHS to provide personnel to assist in the protection of "federal monuments, memorials, statues or property."
Within days, DHS officers were deployed to Portland, Oregon, where Black Lives Matter protests had continued into July, stoked by tensions that have raged for years between leftists and white extremists in the city. [pix]
The conflict escalated with the arrival of the federal officers, and while many protesters were peaceful, others in the crowd tossed fireworks at officers and pointed high-powered lasers at federal agents, temporarily blinding them. Agents clubbed protestors with batons, used tear gas to disperse the crowds, and forced protestors into unmarked vans to detain them for questioning. An unarmed 26-year-old protesterwho was holding a radio over his head suffered a fractured skull and brain injury when a DHS officer shot him in the forehead with a rubber bullet.
DHS compiled and distributed to law enforcement "intelligence reports" on journalists who were covering the clash in Portland, a practice Wolf halted after The Washington Post reported on it. Politico later reported that the intelligence-gathering on journalists occurred after Cuccinelli relaxed the civil liberties oversight process at the agency.
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ref
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-defendants-charged-murder-and-aiding-and-abetting-slaying-federal-protective-service
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
Two Defendants Charged with Murder and Aiding and Abetting in Slaying of Federal Protective Service Officer at Oakland Courthouse Building
Defendants Allegedly Opened Fire on Unsuspecting Officers Guarding Courthouse at Federal Building As Public Demonstrations Continued Only Blocks Away
At a press conference held this morning at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland, the Department of Justice announced that murder and attempted murder charges have been filed against Steven Carrillo, the alleged gunman in the May 29, 2020, drive-by shooting that resulted in the death of Protective Security Officer David Patrick Underwood and injuries to a second security officer. The Department of Justice also announced aiding and abetting charges against Robert Alvin Justus Jr., the driver of the vehicle from which Carrillo is alleged to have attacked the guards.
...
The charges against Carrillo and Justus were brought in two criminal complaints, one filed against each defendant. According to the complaints, at approximately 9:27 p.m., on May 29, 2020, a white Ford Econoline-style van parked directly across the street from the federal building in Oakland on Jefferson Street. The van was parked facing the guard post where Officer Underwood and his partner that evening stood guard to protect the building. The van was on the southeast corner in the spot closest to the intersection with an unobstructed view of the guard post. Shortly after the van parked, a man emerged from the driver’s seat and walked around the area conducting reconnaissance for approximately ten minutes. Then, at approximately 9:43 p.m., the exterior lights of the van turned on and the van moved north on Jefferson Street toward the guard post. The passenger-side sliding door opened, and Carrillo allegedly fired multiple rounds from a firearm toward the guard post, killing Officer Underwood and injuring his partner.
The incident set off an eight-day manhunt that came to a crescendo after a witness reported an abandoned white Ford van in Ben Lomond, Calif. The van reportedly contained what appeared to be ammunition, firearms, and bomb-making equipment and an effort apparently was made to alter the van’s appearance with spray paint and a wheel covering to disguise a missing hubcap. Nevertheless, evidence from the van, led deputies from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office to Carrillo’s residence inBen Lomond. There, Carrillo allegedly opened fire on the deputies when they arrived at his property, killing one deputy and injuring a second. During the attack there was also an explosion on the property.
The complaints describe a subsequent odyssey during which Carrillo was shot and fled the scene initially on foot, and then by carjacking a vehicle on a nearby highway. The chase came to an end when, still bleeding from his hip, Carrillo was taken into custody.
Additional evidence was recovered at Carrillo’s Ben Lomond residence included an AR-15-style short-barreled rifle fitted with a binary trigger that fired one round of 9mm ammunition at the pull of the trigger and another round at the release of the trigger. The rifle was fitted with a silencerthat suppressed the sound of gunfire from the rifle. In addition, Carrillo appears to have used his own blood to write various phrases on the hood of the car that he carjacked. The phrases relate to an extremist ideology that promotes inciting a violent uprising through use of militias.
Cell phone records from Carrillo’s phone identified Justus as a person with whom Carrillo may have been communicating in the days leading up to the drive-by shooting attack in Oakland. On June 11, while the FBI had Justus under surveillance, travelled to the Federal Building in San Francisco, met with the FBI, and was thereafter arrested for his involvement in the shooting, including hisrole as the driver of the vehicle.
The charges contained in the criminal complaints areallegations only. Carrillo and Justus are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt...
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an 820 note both ACTING
Trump administration’s top officials at the Department of Homeland Security—Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli—were illegally appointed to their positions, the Government Accountability Office said Friday.
The decision from the internal government watchdog states that the appointments were not in compliance with the Federal Vacancies Reform Act or Homeland Security Act.
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820
border Patrol Launches Militarized Raid of Borderlands Humanitarian Aid Camp
Ryan Devereaux
For the second time in two years, Border Patrol launched a raid against No More Deaths within days of the group releasing embarrassing information about the agency.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/bill-barr-has-done-this-before/
no lnx
Barr has done this before
Written by ProPublica July 31, 2020
As violent crime continued to climb in Chicago and other cities across the country, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was mobilizing to help: Dozens of federal agents would be sent to work with local police to combat gangs and illegal guns.
“Our message to gangs, gang leaders and gang members is this: When we throw the federal book at you, it will be a knockout blow,” Barr said.
That was in 1992, during Barr’s first stint leading the Justice Department, under former President George H.W. Bush.
If it sounds too recent or familiar to have happened nearly three decades ago, that’s because Barr, now attorney general under President Donald Trump, made a strikingly similar announcement on July 22.
Some of the details were different, of course. In 1992, Barr said the FBI was shifting about 300 agents from monitoring spies from the recently collapsed Soviet Union to taking on gangs and violent crime in American cities. Eighteen of the agents would be redeployed to Chicago.
This month, Barr stood next to Trump as he announced a Chicago “surge” of more than 100 agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other agencies, along with staffing increases in other cities where gun casualties were making headlines.
Residents of Chicago could be forgiven for concluding that they’ve heard this before, since, of course, they essentially have. Barr even acknowledged that federal law enforcement agencies have carried out such operations “for decades.” Every presidential administration in the last 30 years has announced it was sending more federal agents to Chicago to try to stem violent crime.
But this time the circumstances are different — the politics are shifting. After 3 ½ years of Trump’s inflammatory comments and tweets, some thinly coded and others overtly racist, his administration’s announcement is widely seen in Chicago as a political move to use the troubles of a majority-nonwhite city to fire up his supporters.
And it’s happening as a growing number of people are demanding that their governments send something into their communities other than more guys with guns.
Chicago has a long, ugly history of violence. As in other cities, violent crime surged in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, dropped and leveled off, then spiked again during the 1990s. But since then, as murder and shooting totals plummeted in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, Chicago’s numbers didn’t fall as far or as fast, and they’ve climbed again during several devastating stretches in the last 10 years.
The reasons have long been debated and are probably more complex than most would acknowledge. But politicians, law enforcement leaders and many residents have repeatedly blamed Chicago’s gang culture and open-air drug markets, then called for policing strategies to attack them.
The fact that most of the hardest-hit neighborhoods have also been shelled out by segregation, business closures and job losses — including thousands of layoffs from government agencies and shuttered schools — is well known. Yet the need for immediate responses to the bloodshed, rather than those that tackle the deeper problems, always seems to consume political and financial capital in Chicago.
In 1992, the city banned loitering by people deemed to be gang members until the measure was ruled unconstitutional. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley led an effort to sue gun manufacturers for creating a public nuisance in Chicago and other cities; the case was tossed out of court. Speed bumps and cul-de-sacs were built on dozens of side streets to thwart drive-by shootings, though as police and paramedics discovered, such obstacles also made it harder for them to respond to emergencies.
Far more common have been announcements that more police will be deployed in high-crime areas, often under the banner of a new task force, program or initiative. That’s where the feds often come in — literally.
Soon after Trump took office in 2017, he called Chicago a“war zone”and blamed local leaders for being “politically correct.” He also threatened, via Twitter, “I will send in the Feds!”
Rahm Emanuel, then Chicago’s mayor and a frequent Trump sparring partner, rejected the idea of troops in the city. “I’m against it, straight up,” he told reporters. But Emanuel added that he welcomed additional resources to fight gun crimes. Within two weeks, CNN reported that 20 more ATF agents were being sent to Chicago.
Since Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor last year, she has repeatedly blasted Trump for racism and disrespect for civil rights— even as she’s been attacked in Chicago for not yet delivering on promises to reform the Police Department and drive up investment in underserved neighborhoods.
On July 20, after another weekend of appalling violence in Chicago — dozens of people were reportedly wounded in shootings and at least 12 people killed — Trump suggested at a press conference that he was again ready to send in federal agents. Lightfoot responded with a letter that criticized his administration’s “incendiary rhetoric” as well as the tactics of Department of Homeland Security agents who had seized people off the street in Portland, Oregon.
Yet Lightfoot also said the city could use other kinds of federal help, including “more federal prosecution or investigatory resources” to pursue violent crime and gun cases. She added that the government could help Chicago invest in underserved neighborhoods. “The violence our city is confronting is symptomatic of a larger public health and economic crisis.”
Trump and Barr announced the latest “surge” of federal agents to Chicago that week,describing it as part of a national crime-reduction initiative called Operation Legend. The FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service and Homeland Security would together send dozens of investigators and agents to the city, with the U.S. attorney in Chicago, John Lausch Jr., overseeing the operation.
Underneath the politics and symbolism, the announcement signaled that federal and local officials were returning to their old strategy: send in more cops.
Shifting federal agents to cities under fire is “commonly done, and as a matter of fact, when I was the special agent-in-charge there, I asked for it,” said Jack Riley, who formerly served as the top agent in the DEA’s Chicago office. “It’s been called 20 different things in the past. [Operation Legend] is just the newest version of it.”
This federal surge may involve more agents than previous efforts, and Riley believes it could help tamp down violence in Chicago if it is carefully coordinated and sustained. Operations on the street should be carried out by agents who know the city, with those from out of town used in support roles. And as agents are conducting investigations and making arrests, the U.S. attorney’s office needs enough staff to prosecute the increased caseload, said Riley, who went on to serve as the No. 2 official in the DEA, overseeing global operations, before retiring.
“Are there going to be additional prosecutors?” he said. “That’s been an issue before.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago received a staffing boost in 2018, but no additional prosecutors are included in the latest operation. A spokesman for the office declined to comment.
Plus, the agent surge is only likely to last until fall, when the city’s usual spike in violence typically recedes along with the warm weather. So, like previous efforts, the surge is temporary.
If those earlier short-term operations worked to reduce gun violence, it’s hard for city residents to see as shootings spike again.
Over the last three years, the U.S. attorney’s office here has prosecuted more than 500 defendants on weapons charges, records show. Some of the defendants are traffickers or leaders of other criminal enterprises. But many tend to be lower-level players caught with illegal guns that have traded hands multiple times. Law enforcement officials argue that prosecutions for illegal possession help deter others. Still, the approach hasn’t shut down the gun marketplace, as firearms continue to flow into the city from suburbs and neighboring states.
So far Operation Legend appears to be following the playbook of those earlier initiatives. The first three arrests made as part of the Chicago surge were all for illegal gun possession, according to court filings.
On July 23, the day after the latest federal deployments were announced, Black Lives Matter Chicago and 10 other organizations sued Barr and other administration officials. The groups, seeing no reason to trust the Trump administration, asked for a federal court order to protect their right to protest in the event of any Portland-style tactics. In addition, they made what amounted to a defund-the-federal-police argument, claiming federal resources would be better spent on investing in their communities than flooding them with more law enforcement officers.
“We should take their money and use it to help people facing eviction, use those resources for people who need access to food,” Amika Tendaji, an organizer with Black Lives Matter, said in an interview. “The police haven’t been able to do anything [about the violence]. We need to actually address the root causes.”
More and more leaders are signing on to this approach. Over the last week, advocacy groups, churches and more than 30 state and local elected officials added their names to a letter urging Lightfoot and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart not to cooperate with the federal operation.
“Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated both his callous disregard for Black, indigenous, and immigrant lives, and his increasing inclination towards fascism and authoritarianism,” the letter said. “We grieve deeply the lives lost to gun violence in Chicago. … At the same time, we are clear that we cannot police ourselves out of this terrible situation.”
Chicago is now on a pace to record one of its highest annual murder totals in two decades. It’s hard to argue that the old strategies have worked.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/even-republicans-are-warning-trumps-dhs-is-turning-into-the-presidents-personal-militia/
chertoff ridge
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/nyu-fascism-expert-explains-the-next-moves-in-trumps-authoritarian-playbook-hes-a-fundamental-break-from-american-tradition/
At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there’s a poster which identifies “The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism.”
Here are the criteria:
- Powerful and continuing nationalism
- Disdain for human rights
- Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
- Rampant sexism
- Controlled mass media
- Obsession with national security
- Religion and government intertwined
- Corporate power protected
- Labor power suppressed
- Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
- Obsession with crime and punishment
- Rampant cronyism and corruption
This in too many ways is America in the Age of Trump.
Trump and his regime are engaged in a white supremacist counterrevolution against the civil rights movement, in which the human rights of nonwhite people are being revoked. This includes a recent effort to circumvent the Constitution by deeming that undocumented immigrants (overwhelmingly Black and brown people) should be erased from the population for purposes of congressional representation.
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Trump and his regime are criminalizing dissent. He has gone so far as to explicitly state that people who disagree with him are akin to Nazis and should be imprisoned or worse.
Trump and his regime have no respect for the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or democratic norms and principles more generally. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not respect the outcome of the 2020 election if he does not win.
Trump and his regime have unleashed a secret federal police force to gas, shoot, beat and illegally detain nonviolent protesters in Portland, Oregon, and potentially elsewhere.
In a predictable escalation, Trump — through Attorney General William Barr — has ordered that the regime’s thugs be deployed to other Democrat-led cities to enforce “law and order.” It is entirely plausible that Trump’s secret police will also be used to help him steal the presidential election.
Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, recently announced that the forces under his command may “proactively” arrest people for crimes they have not yet committed. Such dystopian logic mixes George Orwell’s “1984” with Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report.”
TrumpWorld also reflects the horrible surrealism of the film and novel “Children of Men” turned into a lived experience for America and the world. Writing at the New Statesman, Gavin Jacobson observes:
The way the film extrapolates from the here and now is the reason the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher thought “Children of Men” was unique. Writing in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Fisher understood the film as a true depiction of what he called “‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
“Children of Men” does not take place at the end of the world, which has already happened, but within its chilling coda, where, as Fisher writes, “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist”. There is no desire to create alternate ways of living, or to make the end of times less awful. …
The idea that we’re out of time is what makes “Children of Men” both a mirror and augur of the world, and the world to come. At the end of history, cut off from its past and pessimistic about the future, and facing slow death under rising tides, humanity has resigned itself to a somnambulant life. It is a life of finitude, routine and conformity; one without vision, spontaneity or surprise, where we no longer seek to live larger lives or even strive for our continued existence. We have become Nietzsche’s “last men”.
Facing the onslaught of neo-fascism, the American people remain stuck in a state of denial, learned helplessness and fear. Donald Trump and his movement have American democracy and civil society in a chokehold.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert in fascism and authoritarianism. She is the author of “Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945” and “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema” and other books.
Her opinion essays and other writing have been featured by CNN, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Atlantic. Ben-Ghiat’s new book is “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” to be published in November.
In this conversation she warns that Trump’s threats of violence against the American people — including against leading Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — are very real. Ben-Ghiat also explains that the American news media normalized Donald Trump because most journalists are unable to admit that the United States is a failing democracy.
Ben-Ghiat details how the American people (and America’s political elites) remain in denial about the realities of neo-fascism and autocracy, because to admit the truth would mean confronting the fact that they must take action against such forces — and have not done so.
You can also listen to my conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.
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Even Republicans are warning Trump’s DHS is turning into ‘the president’s personal militia’
President Donald Trump gave Democrats yet another reason to oppose his reelection when he bragged about using federal law enforcement officers against George Floyd protesters in Portland, Oregon and threatened…
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// surge chicago...portl mayor gassed, medics attacked
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/what-fascism-looks-like-trump-and-barr-to-deploy-more-federal-agents-to-u-s-cities
Trump and Attorney General William Barr announced Wednesday afternoon that the federal government is deploying U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents to Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, claiming the move is a response to criminal unrest.
“The FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals service, and Homeland Security will together be sending hundreds of skilled law enforcement officers to Chicago to help drive down violent crime,” the president said during prepared remarks at the White House. twt
trump and Barr both tied rises in violent crime in U.S. cities to recent protests for Black lives and against police brutality that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in May. Neither man provided any evidence to back up those claims.
[twt] The deployment announcement was largely panned by critics, who called the effort another sign of Trump’s authoritarian approach to the presidency.
“In case you were wondering, this is precisely what fascism looks like,” tweeted Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus.The deployment announcement was largely panned by critics, who called the effort another sign of Trump’s authoritarian approach to the presidency.
“In case you were wondering, this is precisely what fascism looks like,” tweeted Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus. twt
During Wednesday’s press conference on the expansion of the “Operation Legend” program, which began in Kansas City, Barr and acting secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf sought to distinguish the program from the ongoing clashes between DHS agents and protesters in Portland, Oregon.
But those assurances will have to do a lot to overcome the skepticism of local officials, especially as the number of agents expected to be deployed under the program is still unclear.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned on Tuesday that a Portland-style federal deployment would only make unrest in the city worse.
“What I understand at this point—and I caveat that—is that the Trump administration is not going to foolishly deploy unnamed agents to the streets of Chicago,” said Lightfoot.
According to the Associated Press:
DHS officers have already been dispatched to Portland, Oregon, and other localities to protect federal property and monuments as Trump has lambasted efforts by protesters to knock down Confederate statutes. Trump has linked the growing violence in the streets with protests over racial injustice, though criminal justice experts say the spike defies easy explanation, pointing to the unprecedented moment the country is living through—with a pandemicthat has killed more than 140,000 Americans, historic unemployment, stay-at-home orders, a mass reckoning over race and police brutality, intense stress and even the weather.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Wednesday led 116 of his colleagues in a letter (pdf) demanding Barr and Wolf answer their questions on the ongoing Portland deployment and any planned expansion of federal law enforcement programs in U.S. cities.
“This is not legitimate law enforcement under our Constitution but a shocking slide into authoritarianism and police state tactics,” the letter reads, adding that “these new tactics are an outrageous assault on the liberties of the people and the police powers and political sovereignty of the states.”
Trump and Barr’s announcement follows over a week of speculation that federal agents would enter U.S. cities despite local resistance.
Former DHS spokesperson David Lapan told PoliticoTuesday that he fears the ramifications of the president’s new move to use federal agents for domestic law enforcement.
“It’s overly militaristic, it’s being seen in partisan political terms, and it’s usurping the authorities of the local law enforcement and elected officials,” said Lapan.
Advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) tweeted that the DOJ’s use of federal agents for Trump’s political goals was a clear reason to impeach the attorney general.
“Turning federal forces against racial justice protestors is what abuse of power looks like,” CREW said. “Congress should waste no time in impeaching AG Barr before he goes further in carrying out President Trump’s racist agenda.”
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A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police. Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.
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2x? an 720
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/here-are-6-signs-trump-may-use-dhs-stormtroopers-to-stop-democrats-from-voting/
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aha/ doh let us recall that Charlottesville very fine ppl started over defence of reb statue, now Portland secret police continues/culminates?
trmp triples down, take $ from mil if rename forts?!
this is about metaphorical extension? long used in law? escaped AA slaves were contraband?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/1151617/
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authorized domestic surveillance to identify threats against monuments and statues in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting vandalism against federal memorials, according to a department memo obtained by Lawfare.
The document, issued by the DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis, described “Activities in Furtherance of Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, Statues and Combatting Recent Criminal Violence.”
The document says DHS personnel are “collecting and reporting on various activities in the context of elevated threats targeting monuments, memorials and statues.” It also provides legal guidance on the “expanded intelligence activities necessary to mitigate the significant threat to homeland security” posed by threats to statues.
Senior DHS official Ken Cuccinelli appeared to refer to intelligence gathering on protests during a Monday interview with CNN.
“We got intelligence about planned attacks on federal facilities,” he said in response to questions about the administration’s controversial deployment of federal authorities to Portland. “If we get the same kind of intelligence in other places about threats to other facilities or officers, we would respond the same way.”
But the memo “makes clear that the authorized intelligence activity covers significantly more than just planned attacks on federal personnel or facilities,” wrote Benjamin Wittes, a Lawfare editor, and Steve Vladeck, a national security law expert at the University of Texas School of Law. “It appears to also include planned vandalism of Confederate (and other historical) monuments and statues, whether federally owned or not.”...
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/this-has-to-stop-oregon-senators-unveil-amendment-to-bar-trump-from-sending-secret-police-into-us-cities/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trumps-acting-homeland-security-secretary-just-made-a-damning-admission-on-fox-news
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EB
Some time ago, Joe Biden said the presidentwould try stealing the 2020 presidential election. He didn’t say Donald Trump would steal it. Biden didn’t say the election was rigged against him. He said Trump would try, one way or another, and Biden said this as a warning. If you do not want a stolen presidency, you need to vote, and you need to vote in such overwhelming numbers that the election’s outcome won’t be in doubt.
Biden’s statement was a reminder. Democracy is fragile, but it is also strong—when enough citizens take responsibility for it. Though we face threats domestically (the president and his GOP confederates), internationally (Russian and Chinese spies and saboteurs) and impersonally (a pandemic that has killed over 143,000 Americans), we can face them together, and overcome them together, when armed with the right knowledge. Just knowing it’s possible to steal an election might be enough to stop it.
Of course, political knowledge usually comes by way of a Washington press corps that has one indisputable bias encumbering our need for political knowledge. That bias is for the east coast. If it happens here (my beloved New Haven, in my humble opinion, is indeed the center of the universe), no matter how trivial or irrelevant it is to the rest of the country, it’s national news. If it happens in St. Louis, say, it might be. It depends.
The president ordered federal agents last month to gas peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, in Washington, for a photo op with a Holy Bible he didn’t own in front of a Episcopalian church he didn’t attend. That was national news automatically. The same agents later went to Portland, Oregon. Late last week and over the weekend, they again gassed peaceful protesters. That wasn’t national news. The result is that most people this Monday morning have no idea the president’s secret police are real.
“Secret police” is not hyperbole. They were dressed in fatigues and heavily armed. They did not bear identifying features, such as names, badge numbers or indicators of which law enforcement entity they represented. A video online showed two of them refusing to answer basic questions—“Who are you?” “Where are you taking her?”—as they marched up to a protester, seized her, then loaded her into an unmarked vehicle without informing her of her rights. When apparent agents of the state do not identify themselves and do not declare the authority by which they are acting—“This is the Portland police and you are under arrest”—they are, by definition, secret police.
In truth, they were connected to the US Department of Homeland Security, specifically Border Patrol, and they were acting, DHS officials later said, under a provision of law passed after Sept. 11, 2001, giving the department the authority to “send in federal agents to help the Federal Protective Service when federal property is threatened,” according to the Times. Portlanders have been demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd for the last 50-some days. A tiny fraction vandalized some national monuments. That appears to be the reason for deploying federal agents.
Journalist Lindsey Smith has been documenting Portland’s protests. A slice of federal land, Terry Schrunk Plaza, has never been a focus of demonstrations (the focus was on racial injustice), though people have been beaten and arrested for coming near it, she said. Last night, Smith reported scenes involving a group of mothers who confronted federal agents, shouting “Leave our kids alone.” CBS News covered it. After cameras went off, however, federal agents gassed the mothers, Smith said. The Times reported Sunday that local, state and federal elected officials representing Oregon have called for an investigation of DHS’s actions and for federal agents to get out of their state.
The Washington Monthly’s David Atkins was right, I suspect, to suggest that Portland is a preview of Election Day. If graffiti is a pretext for crushing dissent, Covid-19 is a pretext for intimidating voters as they stand in line to vote. “We could end up seeing armed private contractors hired by the RNC and affiliated conservative organizations to intimidate Democratic-leaning voters, bolstered by camouflage-wearing taxpayer-funded rifle-toting border patrol agents aggressively checking papers of every voter in line in the guise of ‘securing against voter fraud’ on the president’s orders,” he wrote.
What can we do? Among other things, do what Joe Biden did when he said the president is going to try stealing the election. Talk about the likely use of “gestapo tactics” to achieve that end, so the citizenry might prevent it from happening. Talk about it so much that the east coast-oriented press corps must give it full attention. Talk about it so much that the Democratic lawmakers in the House feel they must act now. The secret police can’t stay secret when they are the center of a national debate.
—John Stoehr
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portland’s disturbing events show why federal law enforcement must not be allowed to ‘morph into’ a ‘Stasi-like’ secret police
The images coming out of Portland, Oregon in recent days have been disturbing: federal law enforcement agents, wearing military fatigues and driving unmarked vehicles, have detained nonviolent George Floyd protesters…
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whaT day did portland news break? was MS 13 cover/ctr, deflection?
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Ocasio-Cortez to introduce bill that will mandate identifying info on officer uniforms: US ‘should not have secret police’
Eoin Higgins / Common DreamsJuly 21, 2020
Citing increased fears of an authoritarian crackdown, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Eleanor Holmes Norton announced Monday they are introducing a bill this week requiring federal law enforcement officials to wear identification…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-why-the-white-house-is-sending-stormtroopers-into-portland/
In one of the most alarming developments of Trump’s presidency, dozens of federal agents in full camouflage seized protesters and threw them into unmarked cars, taking them to locations unknown without specifying a reason for arrest. It appears that at least some of the agents involved belonged to the US Customs and Border Protection (colloquially known as Border Patrol), an organization that obviously has no business whatsoever conducted counterinsurgency tactics against peaceful American protesters in Portland, Oregon. Neither the mayor of Portland nor the governor of Oregon wanted them there; in fact, they specifically requested that they leave. And now a U.S. Attorney for the State of Oregon is calling for an investigation into the arrests, even as the Acting head of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, is vowing to ramp up these actions both in Portland and reportedly elsewhere.
Needless to say, this is a chilling step toward police state authoritarian rule in the United States, one that was presaged by Attorney General Barr’s approval of an pre-curfew assault on protesters instigated in Lafayette Square to clear the way for a presidential campaign photo op. Few took it seriously when leftist organizers were warning that the border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being culturally and structurally converted into stormtroopers for the Trump regime, equally ready to be deployed against politically inconvenient American citizens as against undocumented immigrants seeking a better life. Those warnings should be heeded now.
We should not allow ourselves to become numb to this. It is helpful psychologically–even if tired and stale as a rhetorical device–to remind ourselves what the reactions would be if a Democrat were acting similarly. Imagine if President Obama had sent in in military-garbed federal stormtroopers to round up Tea Party protesters into unmarked cars, over the top of the objections of local governors and mayors. It’s unthinkable. It’s the sort of thing that drove bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories like Jade Helm, but that if any shred of them were true would instantly have embroiled the country in a civil war.
So why is Trump doing it?
many theories abound—none of them entirely convincing on their own, but all of them deeply disturbing. One explanation is that it’s a trial run for future police state actions, partly to push the window of the possible, partly to desensitize the public to further abuses, and partly to see precisely what they can get away with and what Americans will tolerate.
This is no doubt true to a certain extent, but the challenge is that it also carries enormous downside risk. If Trump doesn’t win re-election he has less than six months left in his presidency–hardly time enough for a deeply unpopular and divisive president to engineer a police state coup. And just as with the outrage in Lafayette Square, the mere action itself will likely make Trump even more unpopular with the few undecided voters who remain.
Another convergent explanation is that making a show of supposed toughness in conducting military counterinsurgency in Democratic-controlled cities that want no part of it will thrill Trump’s base. This is reasonable to assume, since Trump’s base takes no greater joy than in seeing authoritarian cruelty exercised against their political enemies. And it’s likely true, since Trump is obsessed with his base to the exclusion of all else beyond his own personal profit. But the problem is that almost everyone in the Trump campaign’s immediate orbit beyond the president himself knows that Trump must expand beyond his shrinking base to have any chance of winning re-election. The more Trump gives aging bigots dopamine hits, the more the rest of the country falls away from him. Camouflaged stormtroopers used against American citizens will almost certainly lose him more votes than he gains.
But there is a third explanation, simultaneously dumber and yet more convincing: the Fox News effect. Trump spends endless hours watching garbage cable television, specifically One America News (OAN) and Fox News. Judging from Trump’s tweets, his entire political universe revolves around Fox News–and, more recently, the even more bizarrely propagandistic OAN when even Fox News fails to adequately toe the line.
Ever since the beginning of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Fox News has been portraying liberal American cities as hellscapes of violence in which the police and the Trump Administration played the role of hero against rampaging hordes. Most Americans, of course, didn’t see it that way. But if you live entirely in the Fox News bubble, then this narrative is as self-evident a truth as the rising of the sun in the east. Most recently, Fox News has been describing Portland in particular, in the words of former Media Matters for America contributor Oliver Willis, as if it were Baghdad circa 2003. This is not the case, of course. Crime rates in Portland have been on a steady decline for decades, with the last month being no significant exception. In fact, the worst Acting HHS Secretary Wolf could point to was literally a few instances of graffiti. No kidding.
But if Fox News were the sum of your reality, you would believe that emergency action needed to be taken before the residents started to erect a Thunderdome and the services of Snake Plisskenwould be required. You would send in the troops despite the potential cost out of a belief that relieved Americans would be desperately grateful for your embrace of “law and order” (even if it were heavy on the “order” and light on the “law.”) You would do whatever it took to bring the situation to heel, and figure the public approval would follow from the new Pax Trumpiana. After all, Fox News declared it must be so.
This last scenario is admittedly ridiculous. But it’s also likely closest to the truth. While figures like Stephen Miller no doubt have a laser focus on instituting an authoritarian apartheid regime to save white supremacist Republican rule the demographic tsunami preparing to overwhelm them, they are not the president.Donald Trump is. Trump is a man of impulse, not of plans. His head is not set on the next 20 years of power, but on tomorrow’s cable news ratings. The constructed reality of Fox News is his reality. The rest of the authoritarian project follows from there.
And that more than anything else likely explains why the president is precipitating a constitutional crisis by sending stormtroopers into Portland.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/here-are-6-signs-trump-may-use-dhs-stormtroopers-to-stop-democrats-from-voting/
wa mo
Last night I wrote about Trump’s use of ICE and Border Patrol stormtroopers under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security to detain and intimidate peaceful protesters.In that piece I speculated that Trump was not only testing the waters of creating his own personal paramilitary domestic security force and attempting to please the most sadistic elements of his base, but also that he was taking the natural actions an executive might take if he actually believed the dystopian propaganda about America’s cities being promulgated every day on Fox News.
But there is another deeply alarming possibility to consider. This November will be the first since the expiration of a 1982 consent decree in which the Republican National Committee will be freed to conduct voter suppression and intimidation en masse. As Andy Kroll recently explained at Rolling Stone:
The result of the suit was a 1982 consent decree between the Democratic and Republican parties. Even though the RNC refused to admit wrong-doing in New Jersey, the group agreed to stop harassing and intimidating voters of color, including by deputizing off-duty law-enforcement officers and equipping those officers with guns or badges. Over the next three decades, Democrats marshaled enough evidence of ongoing Republican voter suppression to maintain the consent decree until 2018, when a federal judge lifted the order.
The 2020 presidential election will be the first in nearly 40 years when the RNC isn’t bound by the terms of the 1982 decree. Clark, the Trump campaign lawyer, told the group of Republicans at the private meeting last November that the end of the consent decree was “a huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” freeing the RNC to directly coordinate with campaigns and political committees on so-called Election Day operations. The RNC is sending millions of dollars to state Republican parties to vastly expand these measures, which include recruiting 50,000 poll observers to deploy in key precincts.
So consider the following facts:
1) The Republican National Committee under Trump is set to deploy tens of thousands of likely armed, unbadged goons to try to intimidate voters of color from exercising their right of suffrage;
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2) Both Border Patrol and ICE are functioning as largely unaccountable enforcers of the president’s personal whims and interpretations of law, detaining citizens for hours without explanation or formal charges, and operating in direct conflict with local mayors and governors;
3) Border Patrol and ICE both have stridently bigoted, conservative organizational cultures hostile to most people of color and more liberal, urban areas generally–and they are well aware that their powers will likely be curtailed under a possible future Democratic administration;
4) Trump continues to ramp up rhetoric against nonexistent “voter fraud” in liberal areas. His focus has primarily been on vote-by-mail as a result of the COVID pandemic, but imaginary in-person voter impersonation fraud among communities of color in Democratic-leaning cities has long been a Republican obsession. A senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign recently declared that Trump would win even California if voting were “fair,” showing just how deeply the conspiratorial thinking around this issue runs in top GOP circles.
5) Acting Department of Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf appears to have no constraints on his behavior or his overheated rhetoric, and that the Trump Administration is planning to scale up the use of border patrol agents as a conservative paramilitary nationwide.
6) Donald Trump and his campaign team know by now that absent some explosive scandal around Biden or other unpredictable event to change the fundamentals of the race, the president’s only path to victory lies not in persuading a majority of voters but in choosing his own electorate by suppressing the votes of the majority of Americans who despise him.
Put all of this together, and it opens the possibility of a terrifying abuse of power. We could end up seeing armed private contractors hired by the RNC and affiliated conservative organizations to intimidate Democratic-leaning voters, bolstered by camouflage-wearing taxpayer-funded rifle-toting border patrol agents aggressively checking papers of every voter in line in the guise of “securing against voter fraud” on the president’s orders. This would be happening during the most tense presidential election in our lifetimes during a raging pandemic, often in lines in which voters must wait 8 to 10 hours to vote due to restricted polling places in minority communities–also a blatant suppression attempt enabled by the Supreme Court’s voiding of many of the protections of the Voting Rights Act. The likelihood that these actions would be met with immediate enraged protest would be very high. Election Day violence unheard of since the Civil Rights era could ensue, which would give Trump an excuse to instigate further crackdowns across the country as election day continues. Federal agents could forseeably be sent in to attempt to stop the counting of mail-in ballots in the days following the election on presidential orders. No need for aBrooks Brothers Riot if you can just send in an armed federal paramilitary, instead.
Absent some form of preventive action by states, municipalities, the Democratic Party and left-affiliated organizations, there is very little to stop Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr and Acting DHS Secretary Wolf from attempting any or all of this.
And unlike in normal political circumstances where a party that loses an election can hope and expect to retool and win elections in the future, Republicans know that if they get wiped out in 2020, demographic realities mean it could be the last hurrah for this version of the GOP at a federal level. If Democrats were to follow up a landslide victory with efforts to secure a voting bill of rights, an elimination of gerrymandering and the filibuster, and a rebalancing of the Senate, the courts and the electoral college, the Republican Party would not be able to regain serious federal power in its current form without a realignment. Donald Trump himself would literally be in danger of going to jail. The Republican incentive in November would be to pull out allthe stops to prevent this from happening, especially in a census year.
Perhaps these fears are paranoid. But when left organizers warned that ICE and Border Patrol were being converted into an authoritarian paramilitary security force and demanded that they be disbanded and abolished, self-proclaimed serious people in politics tended to dismiss their concerns as so much overheated partisanship. One of the most important lessons of the Trump administration has been that whatever you fear they might do, expect them to do worse if they can get away with it.
Far better to be prepared for such eventualities and be ready to fight back with all available legal means on Election Day, than to be caught surprised by the next unthinkable transgression. If Trump and his cronies can create authoritarian chaos on Election Day to intimidate Democratic voters, they likely will. Portland was just the first step.
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see portland secret police, retaliation, threat to pull $
Oregon
State law passed in 1987: "Oregon Revised Statute 181.850, which prohibits law enforcement officers at the state, county or municipal level from enforcing federal immigration laws that target people based on their race or ethnic origin, when those individuals are not suspected of any criminal activities.[169][170]
- Beaverton city council passed a resolution in January 2017 stating, in part, "The City of Beaverton is committed to living its values as a welcoming city for all individuals ...regardless of a person's ... immigration status" and that they would abide by Oregon state law of not enforcing federal immigration laws.[171]
- Corvallis[172]
- Portland[173]
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