Comparing today’s authoritarian countries

Social science methodological disputes from 56 years ago sound like about as dry as subject as one could imagine. I suppose it is possible to imagine something drier, though nothing comes immediately to mind.

Still, such discussions are a part of the academic enterprise, even if they induce more than their share of involuntary eyerolling.

I’m bringing this up because I just came across a reference to a political science paper from 1970 by Giovanni Sartori of the University of Florence. It has to do with comparing historical and political phenomena across time and among different countries. (1)

Sartori (1924-2017) was a leading Italian political scientist who was well known for his work in comparative politics. We have been hearing a lot in recent about comparative politics in discussing democratic and authoritarian regimes and how democracies die. The best-known prototype for that process is, of course, how Hitler and the Nazis established their Third Reich by destroying the democratic constitutional order of the Weimar Republic.

But political science and politics are not physics or chemistry, even though “chemistry” plays a big role in politics. Classifications of regime types is a well-known political science practice. But it is not as straightforward as distinguishing between iron and gold, or between protons and neutrons. And, as physical scientists are very aware, even such physical classifications are not as precise as many people might imagine. The famous physics question of whether a proton is a wave or a particle is a reminder.

The V-Dem Institute produces a classification of regime types that is widely used by academics and journalists that rates nations into four categories: liberal democracies, electoral democracies, electoral autocracies, and closed autocracies. In their 2025 report, the USA counts as a liberal democracy, the UK as an electoral democracy, Hungary, Russia and Ukraine as electoral autocracies, China and North Korea as closed autocracies. (2)

During the Cold War, there was a dominant narrative in the US and other Western countries of a division between the Free World and the Communist World. Or at least between the Free World and everybody else. The definition of the Free World was, uh, generous. It included Suharto’s Indonesia, the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), and Pinochet’s Chile, among others for whom that designation was questionable. Certainly not every “Free World” nation would qualify for today’s V-Dem rating of “liberal democracy.”

The Cold War designations were successors of the Second World War classifications in which the alliance of the US, Britain, the USSR, and China was formerly called the United Nations, though it is normally referred to as “the Allies,” as it was also during the war. The other side was called the Axis, or the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, although their formal alliance was called the Tripartite Pact. Soon after the war, the term “totalitarianism” became fashionable in the West as a way to refer to commonalities between fascism and Communism. The term “authoritarianism” was established in political science by the famous postwar Studies in Prejudice project lead by Max Horheimer, previously the director of the Institute for Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School. They used the world “authoritarianism” as basically a synonym for fascism. These days the term is commonly used to refer to countries that V-Dem would presumably call electoral autocracies and closed autocracies.

But the lumping of fascism and Communism together was always problematic at a theoretical and practical level. One could argue that both were dictatorships and therefore essentially the same. We call also argue that all the countries in the world have governments, so they are all also basically the same. Both arguments are about equally meaningful, aka, not much help.

Fascism and Communism in the early half of the 20th century considered each other as diametrical opposites. But they did come out of very different traditions, fascism being a lineal successor to the antidemocracy trends of the 19th century espoused by theorists like Franz von Baader, Juan Donnsos Cortés, Thomas Carlyle, and Friedrich Schelling (in his later work).

Democracy, Fascism, Socialism

Socialism, aka, social democracy grew out of the radical democratic tradition of the French Revolution and utopian projects like those of Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Senri de Saint-Simon. The famous 1848 pamphlet from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, had very limited circulation during the 1848 democratic and national revolutions in Europe. And the broad trend of which Marxism was a part was known aas social democracy and socialism. Politics being what it is, there were numerous variations on what the correct doctrine of that movement should be. But 19th century social democracy was generally focused on creating parliamentary republics. And the leading advocates in Europe for what V-Dem today would classify as liberal democracy were the Social Democratic parties, including the Labour Party in Britain.

The political philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) wrote a book while living in Austria called The War Against the West which was published first in English in 1938, though he had finished it before 1938 and the annexation of Austria by Germany. The book’s focus was analyzing the political content of Nazi political statements and propaganda positions directly s based on their own speeches and publications. One of the features he elaborates is that the centrality of Nazi hostility to Communism was justified theoretically by describing it as the inevitable product of democracy.

The Communist doctrine promoted by the USSR in those days saw fascism as something distinct from Communism and also from liberal democracy. The Soviet-led Communist International officially defined fascism in 1935 as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” based on the Italian and German versions of that time. (The year 1935 was the turning point at which Germany became the senior partner in their cooperation with Fascist Italy.)

Marxist theory generally saw parliamentary democracy as a particular form of rule by the capitalist class, one that did offer genuine freedom and influence to the larger population but still subject to major limitations imposed by the capitalist economic system and class structure. The social-democratic version of this vision assumed that the governmental form of socialism would be a parliamentary democracy.

There have been literally millions of pages written since 1848, including many analyses and polemics about where a full socialist or communist society would have a “state” in the sense of states in capitalist countries at all.

To add an additional wrinkle, Hitler’s Nazi Party was modeled on Mussolini’s Fascist Party. But the shortened of “Nazi” was used for the NSDAP, which stood for National Socialist German Workers Party. Hitler had added the word “Socialist” to the name in the early 1920s because the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the Communist Party were the leading parties for urban working-class voters and he hoped sticking “Socialist” in the name would help attract some of them. That wasn’t particularly successful, and German politics up until 1933 was marked by bitter hostility between the Nazis on the one hand and the Socialists and Communists on the other. But this hasn’t stopped today’s Trumpistas in the US from saying, “The Nazis had ‘socialist’ in their name so they were leftwingers like you, libtards, not us rightwingers!” In any contest for the Dumbest Trope In Politics, this has to rank very high on the list.

But to sum up: Nazism and other forms of fascism were and are explicitly anti-democracy. Just as much so as billionaire techlord Peter Thiel, who declared already back in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” (2) Thiel dated democracy’s fall from capitalist grace, moaning, “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.” As a good “libertarian,” his mighty mind perceived that the problems were wimmin and welfare loafers: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Wimmin and minorities just spoil everything, now don’t they?!

There really is, to put it politely, a contradiction between capitalism and democracy. The malign influence of anti-democracy billionaires like Thiel himself is dramatic proof of that. But the notion that freedom is identical with capitalism is dystopian. The classical socialists wanted to democratize the economy via democratic government taking ownership and/or effective control over major industries and financial institutions, aka, the “means of production.”

After the Communists came to power in Russia in 1917 and what had been the Russian Empire became the Soviet Union, the abolished competitive elections with two or more political parties. This pattern was also followed in the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and the People’s Republics in eastern Europe including Yugoslavia. They did not function as liberal democracies, though their ideologies argued they were practicing a higher form of democracy. In other words, they formally claimed to be part of the democratic tradition.

It’s notable in this regard that Mikail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union who considered himself a Communist up until his death in 2022, had made a major move to establish contested elections along social-democratic lines in his last years in power.

Comparison of today’s authoritarian systems to earlier ones

Which brings us back to the challenge that Giovanni Sartori was addressing in 1970, comparing types of regimes. In making such comparisons, we have to get along without the mathematical certainties of physical science. As he put it, “My sympathy goes, instead, to the ‘conscious thinker,’ the man who realizes the limitations of not having a thermometer and still manages to say a great deal simply by saying hot and cold, warmer and cooler.” And he notes that “the pre-1950 vocabulary of politics was not devised for worldwide, cross-area travelling.” (His essay also addresses the challenges for political science in trying to be scientifically neutral and value-free, very much a contested concept in the field at the time.)

The point that Sartori was making in at some length in academic language is that it is valuable and necessary to look at meaningful similarities in political processes in various countries over time to come up with meaningful insights about similarities in political processes across different countries. To use the V-Dem terms of today, we can meaningfully compare political concepts, structures, and processes between, say, the United States and Great Britain even though one is a kingdom with a hereditary monarchy as the head of state of a parliamentary democracy and the other is not.

Using computer statistical analysis to process quantitative data was in a comparative stone-age in 1970, when it really did take a whole room, maybe a fairly big room, to get the kind of computing power and speed that we hold in our hands with today with our smart phones. What Sartori was stressing is a problem that persists, which is that to use quantitative data to better understand political phenomena requires having a meaningful conceptual framework in which to understand the results of statistical analysis. It’s an everyday matter in politics to discuss what observed and measured empirical trends mean. For instance, we know that in the 2024 Presidential elections a higher percentage of Latino voters shifted to vote for Trump. And that today the polls and some scattered election results indicate that Latino votes are shifting away from Trump. But, despite the confident interpretations of the data that political consultants are inclined to give to their clients when designing campaign messages and strategies require applying some kind of conceptual framework and classification to the raw empirical data.

Sartori quotes the economist Joseph Spengler: "[T]he introduction of quantitative methods in economics did not result in striking discoveries" To which Sartori expands: “While formal economic theory is by now highly isomorphic with algebra, mathematical economics has added little to the predictive power of the discipline and one often has the impression that we are employing guns to kill mosquitos.”

When it comes to comparing types of political regimes, or comparing past regimes to current ones, there is no quantitative measure that will give us the kind of definitive answer we might expect in a chemical analysis or a medical diagnosis. But when today we see far-right parties take Viktor Orban’s regime as a model for an authoritarian government, that doesn’t mean that they all want to adopt Hungarian as their own national languages. But we can still make meaningful comparisons between, say, Vladimir Putin’s methods of controlling wealthy oligarchs by means of bribery and threat and the occasional accident of unfavored oligarchs falling out of high windows and Orban’s approach which doesn’t so prominently feature oligarchical suicides.

Put another way, two people having an identical height doesn’t tell us whether one is a man and the other is a woman. Just as two people being identical twins doesn’t mean that both are the same height. (I’m fond of that last example because when I met two identical twins for the first time when I was five years old or so, the only way I could tell them apart was that one was slightly taller than the other.)

Sartori makes this comment which is very important in approaching classifications and comparisons of political systems:

While classifying must abide by logical rules, logic has nothing to do with the usefulness of a classificatory system. Botanists, mineralogists and zoologists have not created their taxonomical trees as a matter of mere logical unfolding; that is, they have not imposed their "classes" upon their animals, any more than their animals (flowers or minerals) have imposed themselves upon their classifiers.

Bottom line: Yes, it’s perfectly valid to compare Trump’s Gestapo to its German and Italian models.

Here’s an entirely appropriate case of classification of a particular political phenomena: (4)

Notes:

(1) Sartori, Giovanni (1970): Concept Misinformation in Compartive Politics. American Political Science Science Review 64:4. <https://www.la.utexas.edu/users/chenry/core/Course%20Materials/Sartori/0.pdf>

(2) V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2025, 14. <https://www.v-dem.net/documents/61/v-dem-dr__2025_lowres_v2.pdf>

(3) Thiel, Peter (2009): The Education of a Libertarian. Cato Unbound 04/13/2009. <https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/> (Accessed : 2026-10-02).

(4) The F-Word | Folk Protest Song Against Trump, MAGA, and Fascism. The Resistance YouTube channel 09/20/2025. > (Accessed: 2026-10-02).

Xenophobic ideology

Judith Kohlenberger is a sociologist at the Wirtschaftsuniversität in Vienna who heads the Research Institute for Refugee and Migration Management (FORM) (Forschungsinstitut für Migrations- und Fluchtforschung und -management). She has been making numerous public and media appearances recently to discuss her reality-based version of immigration issues.

In Europe in the US and some other countries, malicious demagoguery and general hate-mongering against immigrants from far-right parties whose commitment to democracy is dubious, are similar to claims that are all too familiar to Americans who hear the Trump cult’s anti-immigration rhetoric. Like the Trump regime’s version, this xenophobic agitation aims to undermine confidence in democratic political systems.

Kohlenberger recently posted on Facebook (01/31/2026: my translations from German): (1) 

Demographic change is not only one of the greatest but also one of the most ideologically contested challenges of our time. This was also shown by the exchange [I had] with the British demographer Dr. Paul Morland, known for his thoroughly provocative theses. As a migration researcher, I am of course particularly interested in the fact that the "theory" of the Great Replacement, invented on the drawing board of the extreme right (in quotation marks, because it is anything but a scientifically sound theory), was able to enter the political and social mainstream within a very short time. [my emphasis]

The Great Replacement Theory is one of the more prominent of the poisonous conspiracist narratives in the far-right gutter – which these days reaches into the White House:

[It is] in the United States and certain other Western countries whose populations are mostly white, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging, in one of its versions, that left-leaning domestic or international elites, on their own initiative or under the direction of Jewish co-conspirators, are attempting to replace white citizens with nonwhite (i.e., Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Arab) immigrants. The immigrants’ increased presence in white countries, as the theory goes, in combination with their higher birth rates as compared with those of whites, will enable new nonwhite majorities in those countries to take control of national political and economic institutions, to dilute or destroy their host countries’ distinctive cultures and societies, and eventually to eliminate the host countries’ white populations. Some adherents of replacement theory have characterized these predicted changes as “white genocide.” [my emphasis] (2)

Trump himself pimps this sleazy theory. From 2024:

When former President Donald Trump told millions of Americans during Tuesday's presidential debate that "our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," he was not just repeating a baseless claim intended to undermine the results of the upcoming 2024 election. 

He was also echoing the latest iteration of a once-fringe racist conspiracy theory that has now become mainstream in the Republican Party. The conspiracy — known as the "great replacement" — claims there is a plan to bring nonwhite immigrants into the United States and other Western countries to replace white voters to achieve a political agenda. [my emphasis] (3)

The current buildup by the Trump regime to deploy ICE/CBP Gestapo hooligans to intimidate voters from going into polling places to vote this year. Kohlenberger:

Behind this [Great Replacement Theory] is a recipe that is as simple as it is dangerous: "They" are becoming more and more, while "we" are becoming fewer and fewer. At the same time, it will not be possible to maintain our labor markets, our social and pension systems without migration, as all demographic forecasts show us. A resource-oriented migration debate and a non-völkisch, dynamic understanding of belonging ([in which] "those" who come, become part of the "we") is therefore not only a humanitarian imperative of humanity, but [is] also economically without alternative in the long term. 

After all, relying solely on measures to boost the birth rate of the native population to such an extent that they could stop or reverse the demographic transition is [a concept] oblivious to the future - even a migration-averse country like Hungary has recognized this and has begun to recruit seasonal workers (many of whom will probably stay permanently) on a large scale. Radical isolationism can only lead to insignificance of one’s own country. [my emphasis]

Spain recently decided to normalize the status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants including asylum seekers living there. Xenophobia can be contagious. So can obvious pragmatism and realism in the context of the rule of law: (4)

 

Notes: (1)  

 (2) Duignan, Brian (2025): "replacement theory". Encyclopedia Britannica 08/232025. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/replacement-theory> (Accessed: 2026-08-02).

(3) Joffe-Block, Jude & Yousef, Odette (2024): How Trump is relying on a racist conspiracy theory to question election results. NPR 09/13/2024. <https://www.npr.org/2024/09/13/g-s1-22583/trump-great-replacement-conspiracy-theory> (Accessed: 2026-08-02).

(4) Spain approves plan to grant legal status to thousands of migrants lacking right to stay. Euronews YouTube channel 01/27/2026. <https://youtu.be/LNEisoZLIH8?si=F89eFEIx5XnbEzsl> (Accessed: 2026-10-02).

“Looking Forward, Not Backward was the original sin of the Obama administration”

The title is a quote from the irreplaceable Charlie Pierce. (1) It’s a piece where he emphasizes the need for reforms at the federal level to address some of the real weaknesses of the current governmental system that Trump and his Project 2025 cronies and various comic-book-villainous characters like Goebbels Mini-Me Stephen Miller and Gestapo Barbie Kristi Noem have successfully exploited.

I‘m glad to hear “Miller and Noem’s dirty lies” mentioned specifically in Bruce Springsteen’s very timely protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis.” Because that means that 20, 30, 40 years from now there will be people who hear that song for the first time the way people today still hear Woody Guthrie songs from the 1940s and early Rolling Stones hits from the early 1960s. And some of them will wonder, who the heck were Miller and Noem? And when they look them up, they will discover what odious characters the two of them were.

Pierce quotes current Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who in today’s terms is a centrist Democrats in the tradition of Joe Biden, who kept confidently predicting that Trumpism would soon lose its hold on the Republican base by saying, “The fever will break.” It didn’t. Among the many cult members, it’s raging more than ever.

He refers to Shapiro scolding the Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner for vowing to enforce the law even against federal agents who commit crimes in his jurisdiction. And he warns the Trump Gestapo foot-soldiers that their black masks won’t hide them: “If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities.”

Shapiro tsk-tsked Krasner for saying something like that which might discourage some Trump cultist who will never vote for a Democrat from voting for a Democratic candidate. Shapiro said that referring to the Trump Gestapo in terms that make a comparison to Nazis is just, just, shocking and terrible and “unacceptable. ... It is abhorrent and it is wrong, period, hard stop, end of sentence.”

Moderation and justice

Which brings to mind Martin Luther King’s famous complaint in 1963 about segregation supporters who pretend to be “white moderates” that is worth quoting here at some length:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice… Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. ... [W]e who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you [the correspondent he was addressing] assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? ... I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. [my emphasis] (2)

Which brings me back to Pierce’s post. He goes on to quote another Democratic Presidential hopeful, Kentucky’s Gov. Andy Beshear who also makes a Mugwump comment similar to Shapiro’s. To which Pierce lets loose:

Assuming it even happens, the process of recovery is not going to be discreet. It’s not going to be painless or easy. It is going to be loud and necessarily bloody. Arms will need to be twisted. Careers will need to be ended. Indictments ought to fly, thick and fast. The republic is going to need radical surgery because the malignancy is everywhere. That is the reality of the next several elections. Any Democratic politician who is not prepared to be merciless is unworthy of support.

I’ve been following Pierce for years and I feel confident in saying that when he refers to the future when Democrats finally start restoring democracy and Constitutional rule of law it’s “going to be loud and necessarily bloody,” he is not suggesting that the Democratic Party formed an armed partisan militia to stage street battles with the Trump Gestapo.

I mean, just try to picture Chuck Schumer, his glasses perched on the end of his nose, declaring, “We are considering forming a partisan militia to combat Trump’s black-clad masked hooligans who are out on the streets lawlessly terrorizing, brutalizing, kidnapping and murdering innocent people. And if Trump doesn’t quickly respond to the strongly worded letter that I’m sending him today, then we will continue to consider it!”

So, no, that ain’t happening. And that’s not what Pierce is talking about. He's talking about the Trumpista violence that we actually saw at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And to the deadly reality of what the ICE/CPB armed hooligans are actually doing in American cities. And to the armed intervention in the 2026 elections that Trump and Steve Bannon are explicitly threatening. Bannon: “Let’s put you on notice again: ICE is going to be around the polls in the 2026 midterm elections.” (3)

Pierce continues:

Looking Forward, Not Backward was the original sin of the Obama administration. Because of it, the Republican party found a way to elect a dangerous president whose crimes in office dwarfed those of the previous two dangerous Republicans presidents combined. I sincerely hope that’s not Beshear’s game plan, because I don’t want to think about what unpunished crimes the current criminal Republican president might inspire in the next one.

That now infamous phrase of Obama’s was specifically in reference to the fact that he had no intention of having or even allowing the Justice Department to conduct a professional criminal investigation of crimes committing by Cheney-Bush Administration officials during the Iraq War and in the run-up to it, e.g., the torture program, false claims and “weapons of mass destruction.” Obamas and his Attorney General Eric Holder applied that same approach to the illegal behavior of wealthy elites that led to the financial crash of 2008.

The rule of law requires that the law applies to all, including the President. Especially including the President. Something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission could be very useful in remedying the awful effects of the current lawless Trump regime. But it is no substitution for prosecutions of serious crimes committed. Including, of course, the murderers of Renee Good and Alex Pritti.

Michael Tomasky takes a jaded but engaged look at the current American political situation, in which a lawless President threatens and practices crassly political prosecutions with no reasonable legal basis. That is also a violation of the rule of law. These are no squishy concepts.

Why is there no law preventing a president from using his government to pursue such obviously baseless revenge lawsuits? Because no one imagined a president would behave so sleazily. Or they thought that, if one did, surely Congress, regardless of party loyalty, would step up and assert its constitutional authority and make an unequivocal statement about what is right and wrong in a democratic society. Yeah. Right.

So this is where we stand, as we begin this second year of the second Trump presidency. Three more years of this. It’s getting harder and harder to see how we survive it, but if we do, Congress is going to have to pass a bunch of laws that were never thought necessary until we elected a gangster as president. [my emphasis] (4)

Notes:

(1) Pierce, Charlie (2026): The Next Democratic President Better Be Merciless. Esquire Politics 02/04/2026. <https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a70246850/josh-shapiro-andy-beshear-president> (Accessed: 2026-06-02).

(2) "Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]" (04/16/1963). African Studies Center–University of Pennsylvania. <https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

(3) Leingang, Rachel (2026): Steve Bannon calls for immigration agents at polling sites during midterms. The Guardian 02/04/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/04/steve-bannon-ice-immigration-agents-polling-sites-midterm-elections> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

(4) Tomasky, Michael (2026): Why We Already Know Year Two of Trump 2.0 Will Be Worse Than the First. New Republic 01/30/2026. <https://newrepublic.com/post/205966/trump-gabbard-irs-suit-corruption> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

Memories of the Trump crime family (Woody Guthrie style)

David Cay Johnston likes to remind us that Donald Trump is the third-generation head of a four-generation crime family, as he puts it.

Delila Paz here gives us a reminder of the second-generation head, Trump’s father Fred Trump, with an expanded version of lyrics that Woody Guthrie wrote down about him.

Woody wrote down lots of lyrics to songs for which Guthrie researchers have little or no idea of what kind of music he was thinking of using to express them. This is one of them.

The song’s Wikipedia entry gives the lyrics as follows:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project

It also cites these lines from “an unreleased variant” opf Woody’s well-know "Ain't Got No Home”:

Beach Haven is Trump's Tower
Where no Black folks come to roam
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

Notes:

(1) Delila of The Last Internationale - Woody Guthrie's "Old Man Trump". The Last Internationale YoTube channel 01/29/2026. (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

(2) Old Man Trump. Wikipedia 01/18/2026. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Old_Man_Trump&oldid=1333496646> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

Another attack on Iran to go after their “nuclear”?

Peace President Trump is building up to another military attack on Iran.

It also gives us yet another reminder that Trump’s disjointed statements are exactly what is not needed if the US wants other countries including adversaries to understand the diplomatic signals they are trying to send.

I see that our Opus Dei Vice President JD Vance is picking up Trump’s quirky grammar in which adjectives are used as nouns. This is example is from Thursday's Haaretz in which he uses “military” as a noun. Which is not quite as bad as Trump’s habit, because “military” is also a noun, as in “the American military” or “send in the military.”
But what kind of signal is it to say that “military is the only option”? Military what? Military espionage? Military intervention? Military invasion?

The Peace President himself said this a few days ago about Iran:

That country is a mess right now because of us. We went in, we wiped out their nuclear. Peace in the Middle East. If I didn't take out their nuclear, think of it. If we didn't take out that nuclear, we wouldn't have peace in the Middle East, because the Arab countries could have never done that. They were very, very afraid of Iran. [my emphasis] (1)

Does this mean the US destroyed nuclear facilities of some kind? That the CIA assassinated all Iran nuclear scientists? That a couple of Iranian missiles that could carry nuclear warheads were destroyed? In any case, any claim that US military strikes have obliterated all traces of Iranian nuclear weapons development would be very hard to believe.

Notably, Trump is also saying that Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should be “very worried.” Is he threatening to assassinate or kidnap Khamenei personally? How does such a threat make any diplomatic sense just as a new round of intense diplomacy is beginning?

As Laura Rozen recently reported:

“Trump lost Georgia in 2020,” Sen. Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, posted on Twitter. “But today he continued his sore loser’s crusade, with an FBI raid (!) on a Georgia election office.

“From Minnesota to Georgia, we’re watching the President unravel, weaponizing federal law enforcement for personal power and revenge,” Ossoff continued. “We must stop him.” [my emphasis] (2)

Notes:

(1) 'Total obliteration': Trump mocks Iran's failed nuclear 'restart'. Türkiye Today 02/05/2026. <https://www.turkiyetoday.com/region/total-obliteration-trump-mocks-irans-failed-nuclear-restart-3214058?s=1> (Accessed: 2026-05-02).

(2) Rozen, Laura (2026): ‘We’re watching the President unravel.” Trump is spiraling. Diplomatic 01/30/2026. <https://diplomatic.substack.com/p/trump-is-spiraling> (Accessed: 2026-02-02).

Reports on new Epstein scandal revelation (Trigger warning: nothing explicit in this post but the whole subject is grotesque)

The “ick” factor on everything about the Jeffrey Epstein scandals is very high. And the more of the Epstein files that become public, the more grotesque the whole thing becomes.

I’m not imbedding the Kyle Kulinski YouTube video in this post that is linked and referenced in the footnotes. (1) The material is not only disturbing. But Kyle on his own show is addressing a younger audience including “bros” who don’t restrict themselves to safe-for-the-office language. But he’s a good reporter and makes it clear when he’s speculating and when he’s reporting on facts and credible allegations. (For those with long memories, this was also an issue during the McCarthy period in which people were often falsely accused of being Communists and/or committing espionage.)

It’s also worth remembering that raw files collected by law enforcement have to be treated with particular caution. Government files of allegations are not in themselves direct evidence. Law enforcement has to follow up on those stories to evaluate their credibility and develop supporting evidence to see if they are usable in legal proceedings. The things for which Jeffrey Epstein was convicted and imprisoned are bad enough to see that he was a disgrace of a human being.

But the network of wealthy and powerful people that Epstein built up that we know about from well-reported and -documented material, is really staggering. Kyle makes that point emphatically in this video.

If somebody had written this “Epstein story” up as a novel, readers would probably assume that it was an obsessive Marxist or anarchist who has a disturbing fixation on pornographic fantasies.

I don’t know if the very wealthy are more susceptible to perverse sexual practices than anyone else. But they do have more opportunities to indulge them and not wind up in jail.

Here is a report from Democracy Now! on the recent Epstein releases that I am embedding: (2)

That report also mentions the careless handling of the names of victims and witnesses by Trump officials in the recently redacted documents.

One last comment here: a number of commentators have used the term “Epstein class” to describe his very wealthy clients and supporters. I would prefer that commentators not use that particular term, but it could be understood to have antisemitic vibes, like “Rothchild” or “George Soros” are often used by rightwingers.

Fintan O’Toole wrote last July, speculating about why Trump finds the Epstein story such a sensitive point:

For Trump, the great problem of the Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. It is a hybrid of fevered conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. It lives at once in a gothic horror movie he has helped to script and in the all-too-tangible world of untrammeled power and merciless exploitation he actually inhabits. It provokes both wild surmises and entirely rational questions. This is a combustible mix that Trump does not know how to control. (3) [my emphasis]

O’Toole makes this comment about the symbolism of Jeffrey Epstein as a symbol for degenerate wealthy predators:

The undead Epstein continues to stalk the land partly because of the overlap of his true story with [the far-right conspiracist fantasy] QAnon’s wild imaginings and partly because his vampiric activities dramatize much larger realities. He embodies the monstrously exploitative operations of both patriarchy and social class. As with Dracula, the superrich overlord is the predator and the girls from working-class families are the prey. Many of Epstein’s victims lived in financially precarious households in West Palm Beach — as the Justice Department put it, they were “typically from single-mother households and difficult financial circumstances. ”The two or three hundred dollars they were each offered to perform massages on middle-aged men was a lot of money for these girls and their families. To cross the bridge into Palm Beach was to enter a different world of extravagant opulence. This is a tale of two Americas, and of the awful things one of them can do to the other.

Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs. [my emphasis]

He adds that the scandalous image of Jeffrey Epstein “is the tangible substance that gives credibility to [the Trump cult’s] darkest visions of how the world works.” Trump’s current poll numbers indicate that his support is down to as low as level as it’s ever likely to go. In American society, there seems to be a solid base of one-quarter to one-third of the population who are distinctly attracted to the politics of authoritarianism.

That authoritarian core is unlikely to be won over a direct rejection of Trump as their Great Leader. But Trump’s involvement with Epstein and his handling of the files make it harder for him to increase his support.

Notes:

(1) The Epstein Files Just Changed The World Forever-The Kyle Kulinski Show. Secular Talk YouTube channel 02/03/2026. <https://youtu.be/GZa938jzqc4?si=mrKyqAfg5wuUd0rU> (Accessed: 2026-03-02).

(2) “Billionaire Boys Club": What the Latest Epstein Files Reveal About Elite Impunity. Democracy Now! YouTube channel. <https://youtu.be/xA8eLHP7lsM?si=XfzZbelTn9-H8jF4> (Accessed: 2026-03-02).

(3) O’Toole, Fintan (2025): ‘A Guy Who Never Dies’. New York Review Online 08/12/2025. <https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/08/12/a-guy-who-never-dies/> (Accessed: 2026-03-02).

Are some victims of the Trump Gestapo more sympathetic than others?

Naomi Bethune takes a look at the phenomenon we’vc seen with public reactions to the Trump Gestapo’s murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both white people, seems to be stronger and more widespread than the deaths of people of color at the hands of the ICE/CPB goons. (1)

She’s not the first to comment on this. Yes, it does reflect the functional racial hierarchies of American societies with all the racially discriminatory and antidemocratic implications that go with them.

But how should we understand this particular round of this familiar phenomenon?

The white-nationalist factor is real and very important in the politics of the Republican Party and the Trump cult, which at this point are two sides of the same coin. Our Opus Dei Vice President JD Vance’s attempt to give this attitude a quasi-respectable defense presumably fell flat with anyone not already devoted to the white-supremacist faith:

Vice President JD Vance has added a flatly segregationist twist to his broadly unlikable personality, arguing that it’s “totally reasonable and acceptable” for Americans to not want to live next to people who speak a different language or come from “a totally different culture.”

On a New York Post podcast released Oct. 29, Vance seemed to forget that people can hear what he’s saying when he speaks out loud and that America is, fundamentally, a nation of immigrants.

“It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next door neighbors and say, I want to live next to people who I have something in common with,” Vance said, granting me and other normal Americans permission to never, ever live next to someone as ghoulishly dreadful as JD Vance. (2)

This is indeed a segregationist position and attitude. And white racism is certainly not exclusively a problem of Trump cultists and Republicans. But it is key to the politics of today’s Republican Party.

The language of “different culture” is common to xenophobic politics in Europe and America – and other parts of the Western Hemisphere, as well – as a not-especially-subtitle synonym for race. In earlier times in the US, people from “different” cultures like Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans were not considered “white” in the normative sense of the majority “culture.” Vance himself has identified himself as a “Scots-Irish hillbilly” – one who just happens to be part of Tech Bro billionaire Peter Thiel’s stable of sponsored politicians.

Some white racists use “Scots-Irish” as a white-supremacist concept. But Scots-Irish is an legitimate historical identifier for many people, especially in the American South. When the English in the 18th century decided to try to push their colonial project west of the Appalachians, they imported large numbers of ethnic Scots from Ireland, where Britain used them as settlers to keep the Irish under control.

But, in retail politics, this sort of white-supremacist posturing is concentrated in the Republican Party in the United States. That particular alignment was largely solidified by the politics of St. Ronald Reagan and continues to this day.

That doesn’t mean the Democrats have no shortcomings when it comes to equal rights. The failure of the Democratic majority in the US Senate to pass a badly-needed strengthening of the Voting Rights Act in 2022 is an excellent example (of a bad practice). They arranged the vote so that technically voting it down was a matter of not suspending the reactionary and undemocratic Senate filibuster rule for the vote, with Arizona Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin casting the decisive vote for the anti-civil-rights position. But we had a Democratic-controlled House, Senate and Presidency – and they failed to pass that Voting Rights Act.

And then the Democrats professed to be surprised and chagrined when Trump in 2024 increased his voting support among African-Americans and Latinos. That’s what happen when your party talks a good game but just doesn’t deliver.

The Trumpified Republican Party, on the other hand, is delivering systematic state-terror actions by the Trump Gestapo targeted (for the moment) on Latinos. A significant number of Latino Trump voters seem to have recognized that reality by the end of 2025.

As a practical political and propaganda matter, the murders of Renne Good and Alex Pritti – two youngish, photogenic white people who seem to have been really decent people - will affect people who are open to supporting the Trump cult in a way that the murder of non-white victims will not. They will inevitably have a degree of identification with those victims that they do not have for Latino or Black victims. It shouldn’t be that way, but it unfortunately still is in the US of 2026.

Bethune leads off her argument in a surprising way:

For example, on New Year’s Eve, Brian Palacios, an off-duty ICE agent, shot and killed 43-year-old Keith Porter outside his apartment complex in Los Angeles. Porter’s family and advocates swear that he was firing an assault-style rifle into the air to celebrate the new year, not in an effort to hurt anyone. Tricia McLaughlin, chief spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claimed that Porter fired at Palacios, who in turn shot back in self-defense. According to Porter’s attorney, multiple neighbors said they did not hear the agent identify himself. Shortly after the arrival of the LAPD, Porter was declared dead.

This sounds like it could have been an unjustified killing and hopefully it will be properly investigated. But having lived in California for most of my life, I don’t recall it being common for city-dwellers to fire off assault weapons like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. The fact that the killer in this case was an off-duty ICE agent should certainly raise eyebrows, because ICE has such a lawless reputation.

But the murders of Good and Pritti not only had white people as the victims. (Pritti had a gun, legally, which he did not pull or fire into the air.) And those were extremely well-documented. When such murders are caught on film or photos, that lets the public form much more informed opinions. As in this famous example: (3)

Notes:

1) Bethune, Naomi (2026): Responses to ICE Violence Reveal a Racial Double Standard. The American Prospect 01/30/2026. <https://prospect.org/2026/01/30/ice-violence-racial-double-standard-black-latino-asian-immigrants/> (Accessed: 2026-01-02).

(2) Huppe, R. (2025): Vance seems to think segregation is 'acceptable' if neighbors don't speak English. USA Today 10/29/2025. <https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/10/29/jd-vance-immigrants-neighbors-language-racist/86966480007/> (Accessed: 2026-01-02).

(3) [Jack] Ruby shoots [Lee Harvey] Oswald (11/27/1963). Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ruby_shoots_Oswald.jpg> (Accessed: 2026-01-02).

State of the Russia-Ukraine War

Peace President Trump seems to have given up on any kind of meaningful peace agreement in the Russia-Ukraine War, even for a ceasefire that has a prospect for being stable for any long period of time. Trump 2.0 has so far been unable to conduct any kind of serious diplomacy aimed at ending that war. He himself seems to be too chaotic and too focused on making diplomatic deals that provide personal profit for himself, his family, and his cronies. In diplomacy, a ceasefire is generally considered to be easier to achieve than a peace agreement. And even a ceasefire isn’t on the horizon at this point.

Trump’s ludicrous, crassly corrupt “Board of Peace” for Gaza is a prime illustration of what Trumpista diplomacy is about. “Trump's Board of Peace at this point is a shady club consisting of opportunists and people with vested interests.” (1)

At this point, Ukraine has a strong national interest to keep fighting to minimize their territorial losses in the current war. Since the European allies are in the position of regarding Russia as a longterm threat, so they have a strong incentive to help Ukraine in its current war, to show European “credibility” (the most overused term in US foreign policy), to weaken Russia (though diplomatic norms require denying that), and to focus their publics on the urgency of building up European defenses to operate as independently of possible of a now-unfriendly US.

Deutsche Welle English reports on the current situation on the war. (2) If you’re feeling nostalgic for Cold War-era hype, one of the panelists here repeats the zombie trope that any kind of “appeasement” automatically and inevitably leads to more war.

Trump’s territorial threat against Greenland/Denmark has added new urgency to the Europeans’ need to show Russia that they could mount a credible defense against any possible Russian attack on current NATO members. I’m not at all convinced about the maximalist pessimism that anti-Russia hawks promote, that Russia is a relentless expansionist power that is eager to absorb the former areas of the Soviet Union or at least make vassal states of them.

It’s notable that Russia has now been fighting the current Ukraine war (since 2022) for longer that they fought Nazi Germany from 1941-1945. And even if Ukraine were to completely collapse tomorrow, Russia would surely be hesitant to absorb the whole country right away. Ukraine would be facing enormous reconstruction needs even if the war stopped tomorrow. Absorbing former parts of Soviet Union, like the current nations of Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan (and that’s not even a complete list) would be a big additional lift. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are part of that list, and they are currently NATO members. The current European defense configuration would create an enormous incentive for NATO members other than the US to directly fight an invasion of any of those three countries.

Lithuania’s “Suwałki Gap,” (3) the main land connection for the main territory of Russia to Kaliningrad, which is also part of Russia itself, would be a potential target of any Russian move to seize territory of any current NATO country. Of course, the only country that has recently seriously threatened to seize territory that is part of a NATO member is the US, i.e., Trump’s threats of military aggression against Denmark over Greenland.

I dislike the term “hybrid war” which has been used in recent years to cover everything from long-standing international propaganda operations to immigration to cyber attacks to routine testing of a country’s air defense by brief violations of a country’s airspace. War is war, and expanding the term to cover anything that may annoy another country is a prescription for trouble. Cyber-attacks, of course, can target military defenses directly, so it’s not as though countries can afford to not take them seriously.

Given that some European far-right parties like the AfD in Germany have been adopting “antiwar” rhetoric to support their own brand of political Putinism, joined by some left parties and activists, most of whom presumably aren’t committed to a militarist and/or authoritarian ideology. Private weapons manufacturers are operating on a profit motive which is not always identical to the national interest of particular countries or to the need for a more peaceful world. Military buildups, especially ones being done on the basis of the sudden outbreak of the current “new world order” need to be monitored, audited, and critically evaluated.

For those who take a left perspective, it’s worth noting that today’s Russia does not claim to be promoting anti-imperialism as a principle. By traditional left perspectives, today’s Russia is vcry much a capitalist, imperialist power. But that is very different from the position of Russophobes who see some kind of hostile Russian soul at work in the country’s foreign policy will find it hard to make sense of events involving it.

When it comes to things like this, people should try to be able to walk and talk at the same time. Attributing some kind of mystical inherent national tendencies to a country like Russia can lead to a lot of sloppy thinking.

John Mearsheimer in this interview talks about the current peace-not-in-sight situation for Russia-Ukraine. He also discusses the recklessness of the Trump regime’s current noises about a regime-change effort in Iran. Such a move will not turn out well for the US. Or for Israel. At the end, he talks about why the “Golden Dome” fantasy of making the US invulnerable to nuclear attacks is still just as much poppycock as it was during Reagan’s Star Wars fantasies in the 1980s. (4)

A recent study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) gives the following figures for Russian casualties in the 2022-2025 years of the war:

Assessing casualties and fatalities in wartime is difficult and imprecise, and various sides have incentives to inflate or shrink the numbers for political purposes. According to CSIS estimates, Russian forces suffered nearly 1.2 million battlefield casualties, which include killed, wounded, and missing, between February 2022 and December 2025, as highlighted in Figure 2.15 There were roughly 415,000 Russian casualties in 2025 alone, with an average of nearly 35,000 casualties per month. In addition, there were roughly 275,000 to 325,000 Russian battlefield fatalities between February 2022 and December 2025. (5)

And they add:

Russian battlefield casualties and fatalities are significantly greater than Ukrainian casualties and fatalities—with a ratio of roughly 2.5:1 or 2:1. Ukrainian forces likely suffered somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including killed, wounded, and missing, and between 100,000 and 140,000 fatalities between February 2022 and December 2025.

Nikolay Mitrokhin writing for Osteuropa as of January 28 uses a higher number for Ukrainian deaths:

Russia is continuing air strikes on power plants and substations throughout Ukraine. The goal is to paralyze Ukrainian industry and to drive the population to the West or to push them to protest against the [Ukrainian] political leadership. That leadership counts on the [Ukrainian] army being able to withstand the [Russian] attacks on the front, which Russia has taken up with new intensity, and that Moscow will run out of funds to continue the war in the coming months.

Then the Kremlin might abandon its war goal of taking the parts of the Donbass still held by Ukraine or forcing their surrender as part of a ceasefire agreement. Russia’s army has certainly been weakened by high losses. But about 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have also lost their lives in four years of war. [my emphasis] (6)

This has been largely a war of attrition, like much of the First World War, and the conventional expectation would be that the defenders of territory versus the attackers would experience lower casualties.

Still, it appears that Russia still has the advantage with a larger population and a larger economy. The chances of Ukraine being able to militarily push the Russians out of their country any time soon look very dim, especially with the Trump 2.0 regime having largely abandoned any serious diplomacy to end the war. For those who assume that conquering all of Ukraine is the immediate aim for Russia, the fact that they have not yet done so is often taken as a sign that Russia is at significant disadvantage. But the evidence that complete conquest is their immediate goal is pretty thin.

Seth Jones and Riley McCabe in their CSIS Brief stress Russia’s economic troubles as a key weakness of the Russian side. This is a point that financier and high-profile Putin critic Bill Browder also stresses. But he doesn’t sound optimistic that Russia is about to throw in the towel on the war. (7) Although he’s right about Russia’s economic dependency on oil sales.

Notes:

(1) Rozovsky, Lisa (2026): Despite Trump's Grandiose Plans, His Gaza Board of Peace Deflated to Its Natural Proportions. Haaretz 01/233/2026. Full link: <https://www.haaretz.com/gaza/2026-01-23/ty-article/.premium/despite-trumps-grandiose-plans-his-gaza-board-of-peace-deflated-to-normal-proportions/0000019b-e6d9-d069-a7fb-e6dda59a0000?gift=06585d60c4d449329c654d48eb974b23> (Accessed: 2026-29-01).

(2) Fighting and Negotiating: How Strong Is Russia Really? DW News YouTube channel 01/29/2026. <https://youtu.be/DHA44ury_xY?si=muWEf-R4Kq3dc6D2> (Accessed: 2026-29-01).

(3) Loan, Kim Son (2025): Nato’s Achilles heel? The Suwałki Gap, and Lithuania’s fears of a Russian attack. EU Observer 05/24/2025. <https://euobserver.com/32751/natos-achilles-heel-the-suwalki-gap-and-lithuanias-fears-of-a-russian-attack/> (Accessed: 2026-29-01).

(4) Prof John Mearsheimer: Element of DESPERATION for PUTIN. Daniel Davis-Deep Dive YouTube channel 01/29-2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/QIhC3XBEFWU?si=RK8C3yy6f9iqy-_6> (Accessed: 2026-29-01). The title of the video strikes me as a bit odd for the actual content.

(5) Jones, Seth & McCabe, Riley (2026): Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine. CSIS 01/27/2026. <https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine#h2-the-issue> (Accessed: 2026-29-01).

(6) Mitzrokhi, Nikoly (2026): Zermürbung durch Kälte: Russlands Krieg gegen die Ukraine: die 199. bis 200. Kriegswoche. Osteuropa 28.01.2026. <https://zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/blog/zermuerbung-durch-kaelte/> (Accessed: 2026-29-01). My translation to English. Paragraph break added.

(7) Putin Has No Interest In Ending This War - Sir Bill Browder. Times News YouTube channel 01/29/2026. <https://youtu.be/uy8OulfibRY?si=okVfIZYA0AGf91QR> (Accessed: 2026-29-01).

Today's protest song, from The Boss: "Streets of Minenneapolis"

Source: Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio). Bruce Springsteen YouTube channel 01/28/2026. <https://youtu.be/wWKSoxG1K7w?si=xjEyhSob7UCZHz6S> (Accessed: 2026-28-01).

ICE/CPB terror continues but lots of Americans are seeing how bad it is

You know the White House is feeling some pressure when Trump’s Goebbels mini-me Stephen Miller is grudgingly saying that mistakes may have been made in the Trump Gestapo’s execution of Alex Pretti in Minnesota:

Top White House aide Stephen Miller said Tuesday that officials were evaluating why Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis “may not have been following” proper protocol before the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti — a remarkable acknowledgment of possible wrongdoing from one of the Trump administration’s most influential and hardline operators on immigration enforcement.

In a statement to CNN, Miller said the White House had “provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors.”

“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” he said. [my emphasis] (1)

“Possible” wrongdoing, my ass. The Gestapo killers were doing exactly what Trump and Goebbels-Mini-Me Miller sent them there to do: terrorize and brutalize people in Minnesota. As Miller himself said, the Trump regime “provided clear guidance” to the Gestapo militia.

The English family group, the Marsh Family, has been doing brilliant parodies of familiar songs, including some excellent protest songs. They just released this tribute to the murder victims taken out by ICE/CPB: (2)

I also want to call attention to this video which discusses in a serious way what a “civil war” in the US might look like under current conditions. (3)

The podcaster Kyle Kulinski recently used the term “soft civil war” to describe the current situation. I wouldn’t use that particular term, partly because I’m not sure that anything that deserves the name “civil war” could be “soft.” As I’ve mentioned before, if this escalates to open clashes between federal and state/local authorities where the local police are enforcing laws banning murder, kidnapping, and assault against federal employees like ICE and CPB violating them.

Having immersed myself at various times in the history and historical ideologies around the US Civil War of 1861-65, I don’t like the “states rights” vibe of that scenario. But it’s part of the American system and the rule of law that federal officials of all kind are required to obey the law, and if they murder someone in Minnesota or any other state, the state officials are obligated to stop them if they see the crime in progress or arrest and charge them if they’ve committed a crime.

Which brings me to some of the criticism I’ve heard of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for not being more active in doing just that, e.g., not calling out the National Guard earlier to defend against Trump Gestapo criminals. I’m not ready to agree with that criticism because Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other mayors have to contend with is that there have been up to four thousand Gestapo goons in the Minneapolis area that are willing to act lawlessly. And if actual shooting breaks out between state and federal officials, the state officials know that the Trump Gestapo is willing to act violently and illegally, and that the Trump regime has declared (falsely) that Gestapo criminals have “absolute immunity” (J.D Vance).

And the Trump regime is also clearly looking for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act to further violently suppress critics of Trump and his de facto partisan militia, i.e., ICE/CPB. So Walz and Frey are facing a very difficult situation and they both seem to take stopping the ICE/CPB crimes seriously.

Heather Cox Richardson, the historian who makes regular commentaries on current affairs, is coming from what I would call a left-liberal perspective. But she maintains a serious-mom tone in giving well-informed commentary and analysis. Her commentary is very accessible to “normies,” in other words, i.e., people who aren’t political junkies like some of us are. In this presentation, she takes a look at the current situation after the murder of Alex Pretti. (4)

Notes:

(1) Homes, Kristen (2026): Top White House aide Stephen Miller acknowledges possible breach of protocol before Alex Pretti’s shooting. CNN Politics 0182782026. <https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/stephen-miller-alex-pretti-trump> (Accessed: 2026-28-01).

(2) "Minnesota" - Marsh Family adaptation of "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)". Marsh Family YouTube channel 01/2/2026. <https://youtu.be/BRHxXHZmVAM?si=9mmdgD6rIrAvG9c5>

(3) Minnesota, ICE and the makings of a US civil war-The Take. Al Jazeera English YouTunbe channel 01/26/2026. <https://youtu.be/Yd9gaiNUBuY?si=XSWInNJe8FUg9RN9> (Accessed: 2026-27-01).

(4) Politics Chat, January 27, 2026. Heather Cox Richardson YouTube channel 01/28/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/cSC-pn63Taw?si=y6RzGXcLNg6Nhj8G> (Accessed: 2026-27-01).

The Trump Gestapo’s murder of Alex Pretti

I posted yesterday about the need for state and local officials in Minnesota to do what they can to push back against criminal, violent, murderous behavior by federal agencies. And they seem to be doing so. The murder of Alex Pretti on Jan. 24 by lawless federal thugs has further dramatized the seriousness of the Trump regime’s war on American democracy.

I would recommend this video by the determinedly level-headed Heather Cox Richardson, the now-well-know historian who comments regularly on current affairs. (1) As she mentions, there was some confusion in the early reports I heard as to whether these were ICE or Border Patrol agents. I'm not sure it makes any practical difference in their willingness to act lawlessly. Maybe a more generic term for both, e.g., "Gestapo" would be more useful.

A reminder: CBP is the agency who checks the passports of passengers arriving in the US from overseas flights.

The historian Rick Perlstein, who has extensively researched the Radical Right in American and in particular its role in the Republican Party, has posted on Facebook on the 24th about the summary execution of Alex Pretti:

Someone asked what I would do were I the governor of Minnesota. I would hope I'd be like Lincoln: with utter honestly with himself as to the stakes, once coming to the realization that there was going to be no way out but war, using all his powers of persuasion to communicate that there will be sacrifice, and deploying every ounce of political capital to mobilized the most resources possible to win--including building new state capacity at historic scale. The analogy is not quite right, of course. because this CAN'T be a clash of arms. But my notional ideal governor/commander-in-chief, in this civic war, has to understand that there is no peace to be had with these lawless brigands outside of direct confrontation. He also has to be 100% on the real. No bullshit (if often strategic and tactical deception, aimed at the enemy).

I also hope he would have the strategic acumen and the discipline to stage confrontations (or avoid confrontations) at a time and place maximally advantageous to the side of liberty. And he would also be working with GREAT determination and creativity (hopefully commanding a capable and valorous staff that can extend his reach) to build a coalition of governors coordinating their action to credibly threaten the crippling of the enemy's political viability, for instance by talking seriously about withholding taxes and refusing to answer to illegitimate demands and [participate] in illegal programs ... serious.non-cooperation. (This is the part that would be most like war.) [my emphasis] (2)

Commentators find themselves tip-toing around the question of political violence. Understandably so. Let me clarify that: commentators, politicians, elected officials and activists who actually care about democracy and the rule of law – which are two sides of the same coin – don’t want to be reckless or encourage others to be reckless. However, that kind of restraint does not apply to the Trump Gestapo and its supporters. And when we think about who the supporters of this are – the people who celebrated the murder of Renee Good because to them she was just a f*****g bitch (in her killer’s words), the people including federal officials defending the Gestapo killer(s) who fired ten bullets into Alex Pretti for no good reason – who are they?

Just ask yourself how many Republican members of Congress, how many Republican state legislators, how many Republican mayors and city councilmembers, how many Republican Party officials have you heard unequivocally condemning the Trump Gestapo killings, beatings, kidnapping, and warrantless arrests and the brutal and illegal conditions in the prisons and concentration camps here and abroad to which the Trump regime is sending so many people? How many reporters or commentators on FOX News or OAN or some of the other hyper-partisan Republican propaganda networks and podcasts are doing so?

Republicans support the Trump/DHS Gestapo and its violent acts. And the exceptions seem at the moment to be few and far between. The more violent ones don’t have to rely on private “Patriot Militia”-type groups to commit violent crimes right now. They can get hired by ICE or the Border Control to commit illegal violence with the President’s Administration insisting that they have “absolute immunity” to do so, to quote our-oh-so-Christian Opus Dei Vice President J.D. Vance.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz made a point of saying after yesterday’s murder that what is going on “is a campaign of organized brutality against the people of our state.” And he also took a well-deserved dig at the “Second Amendment” blowhards by noting that the murder victim was “a lawful firearm concealed permit carrier, something that I’ve lectured to by Republicans for decades that it’s not only your right, it’s your duty.”

The Second Amendment itself states plainly that it is about the right of states to maintain state militias. The particular original context was that slave states wanted to make sure they could use state militia as slave patrols. Today’s National Guards are state militias. And the Supreme Court has even upheld the idea that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to “keep and bear“ at least some kinds of firearms. In reality, the only groups that maintain substantial private armed groups that could conceivably be considered a militia are criminal gangs, private security companies, or demented rightwing “patriot militia” types (who aren’t yet working for ICE or CPB) of the Cliven Bundy type. There are some local groups who identify themselves as “antifa” who are willing to slug it out with far-right groups. But they are relatively limited, and I haven’t heard of any of them going to work for ICE or CPB.

Liberals and leftists rightly criticized the Obama Administration’s deliberately permissive attitude toward organized local rightwing groups who were even targeting local cops and Highway Patrol. It took repeated armed confrontations with the Bundy thugs for Obama’s Justice Department to start treating them like criminals. “In 2009, [federal official Darly Johnson] wrote an internal Homeland Security report warning that right-wing extremism was on the rise in the US. When the report leaked, the political backlash was immediate and the report was retracted” by the Obama Administration. (3) 

As Gov. Walz reminded us, the “Second Amendment” enthusiasts talk about the need for people to have guns to use to fight government tyranny. But for most of them, “tyranny” is any law that protects the rights of non-white citizens or immigrants or non-heteronormative people or requires antisocial white people to obey the law like everyone else (except the Trump Gestapo) is expected to do.

The Milwaukee Independent this past November published a commentary on this rightwing schtick:

They have armed themselves to the teeth, wrapping violence in the U.S. flag and sanctifying the rifle as a symbol of “freedom.” They said guns were the only thing standing between liberty and dictatorship. That armed patriots would rise up if the government ever turned on its own people.

Now the government under Donald Trump has done exactly that, and these so-called defenders of liberty are nowhere to be found.

What we are witnessing today is not theoretical tyranny. It is real. The federal government, under the Trump regime, has used militarized federal forces and ICE agents like a personal Gestapo. Peaceful demonstrators have been assaulted, journalists detained, and ordinary citizens abducted from streets into unmarked vehicles.

Trump’s allies have celebrated this as “law and order,” while local mayors and governors begged federal agents to leave their cities alone. Instead of resisting authoritarian overreach, Second Amendment conservatives are cheering it on.

This isn’t about policy disagreements or partisan divides. It’s about the raw hypocrisy of a movement that built its identity on the claim that guns were a sacred safeguard against tyranny, yet stands silent as the state’s guns are turned on its own people.

These men and women who once fantasized about “watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants” are now content to let that tree wither under the weight of fascism, because the tyrant happens to be one of their own. [my emphasis] (4)

It’s worth recalling the just last year, a man was arrested for disguising himself as a police officer and murdering former Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman:

“Vance Boelter planned and carried out a night of terror that shook Minnesota to its core,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson. “He carried out targeted political assassinations the likes of which have never been seen in Minnesota. We grieve with the Hortman family and continue to pray for the recovery of the Hoffmans. Today, a grand jury indicted Boelter with the most serious of federal charges for these heinous political assassinations. Let me be clear: Boelter will see justice.”

According to court documents, after extensive research and planning, Boelter embarked on a murderous rampage targeting Minnesota’s elected officials and their families. On June 14, 2025, the defendant disguised himself as a member of law enforcement and traveled to the homes of Democratic elected officials with the intent to intimidate and murder. Early that morning, the defendant traveled to the Hoffmans home in Champlin, Minnesota. By posing as a police officer, Boelter compelled the Hoffmans to answer their door. He then repeatedly shot Senator Hoffman and Yvette Hoffman and he attempted to shoot their daughter, Hope Hoffman.

Boelter then traveled to the homes of two other Minnesota elected officials, only to find that no one at those locations was home. He next drove to the home of Speaker Emerita and Representative Melissa Hortman. There, Boelter repeatedly shot, and killed, Representative Hortman and her husband, Mark. Following a two-day manhunt, law enforcement arrested the defendant near his family residence in Green Isle, Minnesota. [my emphasis] (5)

If this fake “police officer” had tried to force his way into their homes and one of the Hortmanns or Hoffmans had shot and killed him, presumably that would have been legal in Minnesota and maybe all US states. In fact, Republicans and “ammosexual” gun fetishists have been successfully pushing for years in states like Florida to make it easier to murder someone and have it not be considered a crime.

It’s also worth recalling the question from a distressed mother who along with her three young daughters were terrorized last year by the Trump Gestapo in the middle of the night: “What if I would have been armed?” As MS Now reports:

Last week [April 2025], federal immigration agents executed a warrant on a home in Oklahoma City that authorities say is owned by a notorious human smuggling suspect. In the dark, about 20 men stormed into the house with guns drawn, according to a report from KFOR-TV. They swarmed the house, but what they found was not the owners, but new renting tenants, a mother and her three daughters, U.S. citizens freshly arrived from Maryland. The mother described details of the raid as horrifying: a woman and her children forced out into the night, their home ransacked, their property seized. …

The mother, whom NBC affiliate KFOR in Oklahoma City gives the pseudonym Marisa, expressed her fear and outrage at the situation and noted that the outcome could have been much worse: “What if I would have been armed? ... You’re breaking in. What am I supposed to think? My initial thought was we were being robbed — that my daughters, being females, were being kidnapped. You have guns pointed in our faces.”

What if they had been armed, indeed? After all, many, many Americans are armed. According to the Pew Research Center, 4 in 10 U.S. adults live in households with guns. And we have been taught to regard those weapons as a right, particularly one that enables us to defend ourselves, our loved ones and our homes. [my emphasis] (6)

There’s no serious question at this point whether such actions are meant to deliberately terrify local communities, both citizens and noncitizens.

That’s what they are, acts of state terrorism, in good-old-fashioned Gestapo style. You know, the “knock on the door in the middle of the night”?

Only in that Oklahoma case the Trump Gestapo didn’t bother to knock. They just busted down the door in the middle of the night and rushed in with guns drawn.

I assume here, too, if the mother had fired at the Gestapo goons doing a home invasion, it would have been a legal act of self-defense. But it’s also very obvious that they would have almost certainly have murdered her on the spot, and maybe her three daughters, too.

Which brings me to the Minneapolis murder victim and his gun. He presumably had a gun with him for self-defense. But the Gestapo thugs murdered him anyway, shooting him ten times according the last news report I hear. Even though he never drew his gun on them.

I don’t mean this at all as a criticism of the murdered man. From what we know, he had no reason to expect that he would be gassed in the face for trying to help the woman the Gestapo had assaulted to get up off the ground. He was an ICU nurse, he might have been able to give her some immediate assistance had she been injured. This may sound banal. But in practice, the reality for any weapon someone is using for self-defense – a gun, a knife, pepper spray, a metal bar, whatever – has to be in the person’s hand at the moment they need it. And they have to know how to use whatever weapon it is.

In other words, Alex Pretti’s gun did not protect him in that moment. And the Gestapo and the Trump regime are using his legal possession of a gun that he did not draw out of his waistband as their alibi for executing him.

Again, this is not in any way a justification for the Gestapo murder or a reason to blame the victim for his own murder. It’s an observation about one of the practical realities of the world in which the Trump Gestapo is operating.

Notes:

(1) The Killing of Alex Pretti. Heather Cox Richardson YouTube channel 01/24/2026. (Accessed: 2026-25-01).

(2)



(3) Daryl Johnson. Exploring Hate PBS Exploring Hate website n/d. <https://www.pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/author/daryl-johnson/> (Accessed: 2026-25-01).

(4) Sobieski, Mitchel (2025): Why the Political ‘Arguments Used By Conservatives to Twist the Second Amendment Are a Public Fraud. Milwaukee Independent 11/04/2025. <https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/explainers/political-arguments-used-conservatives-twist-second-amendment-public-fraud/> (Accessed: 2026-25-01).

(5) Vance Boelter Indicted for the Murders of Melissa and Mark Hortman … US Attorney’s Office District of Minnesota 07/15/2025. <https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/vance-boelter-indicted-murders-melissa-and-mark-hortman-shootings-john-and-yvette-0> (Accessed: 2026-25-01).

(6) Elrod, Alan (2025): It’s only a matter of time before an ICE raid goes terribly wrong. MS Now 05/02/2025. <https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/it-s-only-a-matter-of-time-before-an-ice-raid-goes-terribly-wrong/ar-AA1E4xaa?ocid=winp-st> (Accessed: 2026-25-01). <

American Revolution semiquincentennial and the rule of law

This year is the official 250th anniversary (semiquincentennial, i.e., half of 500) of the beginning of the American Revolution, which is understood to have formally begun with the signing of the Declaration of Independence by leading colonial figures in 1776.

We can expect plenty of attempts by Trump and his cult to make public commemorations of the event tributes to Donald Trump, the greatest national leader in all of world history. I will not be surprised if he literally describes himself that way. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it!”

To warm up for it, it’s worth remembering that facts matter. So when Trump gives us new versions of his 2019 classic celebration of the Revolution, that’s worth keep in mind, i.e.:

Trump praised the Americans’ military efforts in the war against Great Britain. “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory,” he said. (1)

It was 1903 when the Wright brothers successfully tested the first engine-powered aircraft.

Also, for what it’s worth, the phrase “the rockets’ red glare” phrase that everyone knows from the national anthem The Star-Spangled Banner was referring to the experience of the War of 1812 against Great Britain.

I dread my inevitable first encounter this year with the old segregationist trope that the Founders were setting up a republic, which they saw as something totally different from democracy which they allegedly saw as evil and awful. This is an old segregationist trope used to argue against human and civil rights and equal citizenship for African-Americans. As a historical claim, it can technically be describes as horse-poop.

But for people who want to think about more than ditsy fairy tales from an orange wanna-be dictator, there are some substantive matters worth reflecting on that go back to the founding ideals of the Republic.

Trump’s current deployment of the ICE Gestapo to terrorize various cities, currently notably including Minneapolis, has raised a new round of consideration of the meaning of rule of law and the functioning of federalism in the US Constitutional structure.

This is a good, brief Breaking Points report on what happens when the federal government sends out a bunch of masked thugs to terrorize cities. Ryan Grim says in it, “Watching ICE going around brutalizing people on an hourly basis, has done more, I think, to lift the public opinion of local police forces than anything in decades.” (2)

At some point, if this keeps up, local cops will have to start enforcing the laws against kidnapping, battery, illegal entry and even murder against ICE agents acting outside the law. Since most of the ICE goons seem to have very limited training, they will likely find it tough going when well-trained actual police come to arrest them.

In American history, it has often been the case that the federal government had to intervene when states and localities fail to enforce the law, both the Executive branch through the Justice Department and through the courts.

At the moment, we have the situation of professional urban police forces watching masked goons with no badges, with no clear identification as any kind of law enforcement, heavily armed, often driving around in vehicles with illegally concealed license tags, who are beating, gassing, kidnapping, and even killing people with impunity.

Law enforcement agencies are required to obey the law themselves and to enforce the law – including against government agencies breaking it. For all the practical complications involved, municipal police forces need to actively enforce the law against ICE Gestapo criminals.

There’s some real irony in the idea of the Minneapolis police needing to step up to enforce the law against violent and murderous federal agency lawbreakers. George Floyd was murdered in 2020 by a Minneapolis police office, choked to death by one officer while three others helped hold Floyd down during the murder. Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter, and the three accomplices were convicted of violating the victim’s civil rights.

It would be a good way for the Minneapolis PD to further restore their reputation by taking the lead in restraining the ICE criminals. It would also be defending the rule of law. The general strike in the city this past week posting ICE was a great development!

Keith Ellison

Minnesota’s state attorney general since 2019, Keith Ellison has been working on rule-of-law for the police, including acting as the lead prosector against George Floyd. His page at the website of the National Association of Attorneys General states:

Attorney General Ellison was the lead prosecutor of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He led the team that successfully convicted four former police officers of second-degree murder or second-degree manslaughter, demonstrating that no one is above the law, and no one is beneath it. He is a national thought leader in the effort to advance constitutional policing that builds community trust and helps bring about true public safety for all people and communities. [my emphasis] (3)

Notes:

(1) Haynes, Suyin (2019): President Trump Said Revolutionary War Troops ‘Took Over the Airports’ in His Fourth of July Speech. Time 07/05/2019. <https://time.com/5620936/donald-trump-revolutionary-war-airports/> (Accessed: 2026-24-01).

(2) MN Cops REVOLT As ICE Harasses Officers. Breaking Points YouTube channel 01/21/2026. <https://youtu.be/b8iXtb28wCI?si=S0QraegB6LphHQR_> (Accessed: 2026-23-01).

(3) Keith Ellison-Minnesota Attorney General. National Association of Attorneys General n/d. <https://www.naag.org/attorney-general/keith-ellison/> (Accessed: 2026-24-01).