“President Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for immigrants, particularly the non-white variety from south of our border. His statements that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’, coupled with Fox News reports on Hispanic-appearing migrants who commit crimes, leave little doubt about what he and his allies think of (non-white) immigrants and their contributions to this country. So it didn’t surprise me that he recently began to follow through on his own and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leadership’s earlier intentions (as far back as 2018) to detain immigrants — including unaccompanied children — at military posts. Earlier this month, the first deportation flight carried a few men from the American mainland to our naval base and Global War on Terror offshore prison site in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” (02/20/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Liberals hate socialists for the same reason socialists hate liberals: because socialists are the thing liberals pretend to be. Socialists stand for truth, justice, peace and equality while liberals only pretend to stand for these things, and they both know it. Liberals know their favorite political party supports war, militarism, oligarchy and inequality and is rife with power-serving corruption, and socialists know it too, so they can critique these dynamics in ways that have the unpleasant sting of truth. Liberals don’t mind it when some dopey right winger criticizes their ideological faction, because the rightist has no idea what they’re looking at and offers up the dumbest and least relevant criticisms imaginable. When a socialist critiques that same faction they do it in ways the liberal knows are true, and it causes the liberal to experience cognitive dissonance.” (02/20/25)
“Ken Burns makes some good movies. I don’t call them documentaries anymore because they’re riddled with errors and he doesn’t seem to have any interest in correcting the record, just hammering the checks. ‘Ty Cobb was a racist everyone in baseball hated,’ is the gist of what was said in ‘Baseball,’ but it wasn’t true, as Charles Leerhsen showed in his brilliant, ‘Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty.’ Burns didn’t answer Leerhsen about where he got his false information from, or whether or not he’d tried to actually verify any of the claims he’d made in his film – being Ken Burns means never having to say you’re sorry. This indifference toward truth, not to mention reality, is just one reason the entire PBS/NPR infrastructure is not just unnecessary, but needs to be destroyed.” (02/20/25)
“Democrats and the Left are terrified of the threat to democracy posed by the Trump administration and by his assault on needed government programs. But so far, the public doesn’t seem to care all that much. U.S. President Donald Trump’s approval rating is at 49%, three points higher than his disapproval rating, (according to fivethirtyeight.com). Former President Joe Biden’s end of term approval rating was only 37%. Build a worker political movement outside the Democratic Party: a movement, an association, an organization by and for working people. Flailing away at every perceived Trump transgression isn’t working any better now than it did during the Harris campaign. The Center for Working Class Politics demonstrated that focusing on Trump and the threat to democracy was the least effective message for Pennsylvania voters, while a bold populist message was the strongest.” (02/20/25)
“The hard left [sic] of the Democratic Party is trying to force Gov. Kathy Hochul to fire Mayor Eric Adams because it thinks he might help the Trump administration remove illegal [sic] migrant criminals who are menacing New Yorkers. How dare he! Forget that Adams is New York’s democratically elected mayor. Forget that most New Yorkers want illegal [sic] alien gangbangers out of our city. The self-described ‘party of democracy’ wants, yet again, to kill democracy to save it. The mere fact that Adams sat on the curvy couch of ‘Fox & Friends’ with border czar Tom Homan last week sent his Trump-deranged fellow Democrats into a tizzy. They’re apoplectic that he’s agreed to allow ICE to reopen its office on Rikers Island that was closed in 2015 by his despised predecessor, Bill de Blasio.” (02/19/25)
“With an annual budget rapidly approaching $1 trillion, the Pentagon already gets more discretionary tax dollars than any other agency. Now congressional Republicans are proposing to hike that figure by anywhere from $100 billion to $150 billion, while slashing funding for programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs that help keep Americans on their feet. Lawmakers have it backwards: We need to invest more in those programs and less in the Pentagon, which simply can’t account for how it’s spending our money. We have to curb our endless spending on the military, and put that money back into our real needs, like creating jobs, educating students, protecting our planet, and much more. Late last year, the Pentagon failed its mandatory audit, yet again. This isn’t the first time this has happened, either; in fact, the Pentagon has failed every audit it’s ever undergone.” (02/20/25)
“Last week, the American Conservative published an article by Scott Greer on Nashville as a city showing the way forward beyond wokeness. ‘What might replace woke as the dominant cultural form isn’t some return to tradition. It’s the culture and lifestyle embodied by Nashville,’ Greer writes. ‘Normal Americans just want to focus on the mundane and have a good time. Country serves as the soundtrack and Nashville as the vacation spot.’ Scott makes the all too common mistake of confusing the Nashville MSA with Nashville proper, but superficially, what he identifies as making Nashville palatable to people who want to live here is accurate. On top of the relative stability and lack of political drama, country music gives it a shine absent other places like Dallas, Atlanta, or Charlotte. But what I want to point out is that this arrangement is much more fragile than Greer or others might think.” (02/20/25)
“The past month has generated something close to despair in anyone who cares about effective governance as a force in people’s lives. Haphazard firings, rapid dismantling of vital government agencies, devaluing of basic science, and commandeering of government IT systems are all part of a power grab that threatens to turn our democracy into a cult of personality. It’s hard to imagine anything positive coming out of this. And yet. On Tuesday, the new leaders of the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division both released statements saying that they would continue to follow the 2023 merger guidelines, and not seek to make any changes to them, at least in the near future. Those guidelines reflect the understanding of antitrust statutes and jurisprudence as envisioned by Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the predecessors at those agencies.” (02/20/25)
“On my first day as secretary of Transportation, we witnessed the midair collision in Washington, D.C., that took 67 lives. While the investigation is ongoing, the tragedy highlighted the urgent need to modernize our air traffic systems — and to move past the broken promises and political inertia of the past. The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) unsustainable software systems that we’ve inherited are symptomatic of the endemic problems that plagued the Biden administration: a bloated bureaucracy that pushed overregulation instead of innovation, and radical DEI instead of merit. As a result, innovation stagnated and safety was sacrificed. Unlike my predecessors, I won’t run from difficult problems; I will fix them.” (02/19/25)
“The president, through his attorney general, has the power to determine prosecutorial priorities — such as the deportation of illegal [sic] aliens over the prosecution of a mayor who he believes could help him implement that policy. Danielle Sassoon (who once was a student researcher for me and is a friend) had the right to refuse to play a role in dropping the prosecution of Adams, who she understandably believes is guilty of serious crimes that were neutrally investigated for years before Trump assumed office. She, like any public official, has the prerogative to resign or be fired rather than agree to file a motion she believes is wrong. In her resignation letter, Sassoon said her decision was a matter of ethics because she believed that the decision to drop the charges was part of a quid pro quo.” (02/19/25)
