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spenlo's avatar

Also Pam Bondi whose letter gives conditions for I.C.E. removal in Minnesota including handing over voter rolls, that Minnesota cease to be a "sanctuary" state and work hand in hand with DHS. The third requirement is giving over a list of all SNAP recipients. I'm sure that further demands would arrive in due course. I.C.E. is Trump's tool for an authoritarian state and has to be defunded, if if it means shutting down the government. There is also a call for a general strike.

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Jan 26
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spenlo's avatar

Many people have described this weekend as an inflection point. I think we have to wait and see. I.C.E. is still filled with people who are unqualified and filled with rage and Congress needs to put controls in place. Hopefully, there will be other changes, but I don’t trust DJT to do what is right. He is all about vengance and retribution.

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Jan 27
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spenlo's avatar

Inflection point is not my framing, but one I've heard. Personally, I think Congress could do things to contain what is going on, but I am personally skeptical that this will occur in the near term, or perhaps in my lifetime. The Trump administration has shown us the weak point in our Constitution and the flaws of relying on precedents and norms. It is difficult to predict how the future will develop under these circumstance. I think there is general agreement that we can't return to how things operated in the past. I am horrified at present on an online discussion with the Peace Board's plan for ruling Gaza. It is all profit oriented, of course, with Trump in charge. Trump's goals always involve gaining power and wealth. Will this continue in the future?

Lyn Wall's avatar

Demand the immediate resignation of Stephen Miller

Josie's avatar

Unfortunately, Miller seems to be the brains behind anything Trump does or says. He's one miserable SOB. Has no empathy, like his boss, quick to judge without actually thinking how his words can harm, let's face it, Miller doesn't really give a crap for the American people. Just wants the power.

E. A. Bare's avatar

It is indeed he that is the root and source of the problem, but congress has zero say so over him, and right now he is the rights favorite lib owner, Stephen Miller is going nowher.

Lyn Wall's avatar

I'm sure you're right, but let's not negotiate for them! Include that in the demands even if it's unenforceable.

Elissa MacLachlan's avatar

Noem is small potatoes and easily sacrificed to the cause. Let's go after Vance and Miller, impeach and deranged them first. Decapitation. Trump is an evil screen, they are the ones amplify the toxins

TriTorch's avatar

This is all divide and conquer 101, the mechanism to achieve the WEF's 2030 goals of looting and destroying the USA in a blaze of hatred against one another so that we will own nothing (they will steel it all) and be happy (or else), and the enlightenment will be disintegrated (no more Constitution to stand in their way);

Ten Ways the 1% Are Manipulating You Right Now and Turning Us Against One Another, by Unknown

1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.

2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.

3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.

4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.

5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.

6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.

7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.

8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.

9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.

10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable.

Barbara Bocca's avatar

You've stated the facts of our situation!

Solution is what we need!

TriTorch's avatar

You got it Barbara:

The solution is to get local, get self-dependent, get the common unity back in community by building webs of resilience with your neighbors, get control of your school boards, mayors and sherrif's office, and town councils (the last places we still hold all of the cards), get a garden in your lawn no matter how small, a single tomato plant is better than nothing, get a well (water is your most important resource hands down), get ready, get moving, get doing, and, if so inclined, get God.

Detailed:

Don't build a bigger fence to keep our your neighbor, build a bigger table.

The only winning move is not to play their sick game. They thrive on our energy and fear, angst, doubt, and dread they stir in us. The one thing these emotional vampires hate the most is for their manipulation and terrorism to get ignored. Cut down your TV & internet usage by 97%, go local, and all of their terror goes away meanwhile we become stronger as they flail around in angst. Here’s how:

Civilization, goes and old maxim, is never more than three meals away from barbarism—once the food deliveries stop, so does law and order. Therefore, the baseline of preparedness is as follows:

Put all your support behind your local farmers, then become your own. A garden in every lawn should be standard. You can no longer trust anything from a corporation, so cutting out reliance on a retailer is a good place to start thinking about your resiliency. ‘Incorporated’ City water isn’t viable either for its quality or reliability, so wells must be dug (there is no resource more important in your life than clean water, hands down).

Beyond that, begin ending your dependence on their enslavement protocol Federal Notes by creating local currencies and discovering the lost art of bartering, and again start - these cannot be emphasized enough - stitching together webs of alliances with your neighbors for resiliency, defense, and resource sharing (they might grow what you do not and vice versa)—put the “common unity” back in community, and get control of those town councils, mayor and sherrif offices, and school boards (the few places we still hold all of the cards) and get your kids out of them. Finally: stop eating, listening to, and watching things that are bad for your mind, body, and spirit, and, if so inclined, spend a good chunk of your time on your knees each day.

Above all: Fear not. Live your life. Find your happiness. Turn your back on those who would gleefully turn it into misery. Win the game by refusing to play theirs.

All of the above is a recipe for success and if everuone did this, we would take the world back in a groundswell. Let's get to work building a future worth living in, together, because if we do not, Harari & Co will ensure we will not have one:

----

WEF Fellow Yuval Harari, NYTimes Interview: thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.” … The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. “If a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us because they need us,” he said, citing army service and factory work.

Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. “You’re totally expendable,” he told the audience. … “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.” —Archived Uneditable Source (worth reading in full): https://archive.is/rWLoO

spenlo's avatar

Hello TriTorch, we meet again in agreement.

TriTorch's avatar

Hello spleno, nice to meet again.

William Dickinson's avatar

Impeach the whole damn regime. Our government is a terrorist, criminal organization. Domestic enemy number one. Time to flush them down the toilet after putting them all in straight jackets.

Anton Kleinschmidt's avatar

The only thing for a civilised country to do is to get rid of the source of all the problems. Noem is a bit player. Hegseth is a bit player. Bondi is a bit player. Without Trump they are nothing. Therefor impeach Trump.

Allen B from MD's avatar

You need more than impeachment, or they come back. You need CONVICTION by the United States Senate.

E. A. Bare's avatar

She absolutely should be impeached, and if she is I am certain trump will throw her under the bus. If it looks like she will be impeached in the house she will resign before there can be any kind of meaningful investigation and you will get Tom Homan as acting secretary, trump wont bother to go to the senate for approval he just leave him acting. As others here have pointed out the problem here is Stephen Miller he is coordinating and driving this depraved push to deport millions of people.

Allen B from MD's avatar

Cosplay Action Kristi may be able to evade the Federal justice system, but not the State of Minnesota. Her callous lying to "stay on message" is both disgusting and disturbing. We have always assumed regularity, meaning giving the officer the benefit of the doubt, in confrontations with citizens. No more. Cosplay Kristi didn't have any of the facts on the ground before she began smearing both Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Our eyes don't lie sweetie, but you sure do. We need to get government officials we can trust, not a bunch of @$$-kissing acolytes who do the "Dear Leader's" bidding without any sense of remorse.

Do y'all remember The statement made by army attorney Joseph Welch to Wisconsin Senator McCarthy?

"The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy's career: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?""

Overnight, McCarthy's immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.

We can only hope the same for Action Cosplay Noem, "Gestapo wannabe" Bovino, "Lie as easily as I breathe" Blanche, "Bug eyes" Patel, Pamela Jo "Bullshit" Bondi, and Tom "Shrek" Homan.

BTW, Tom, where's the $50,000 you are on tape taking in an FBI sting? Ka$h got your cash?

Set Your Table!'s avatar

OF COURSE. But dont we need to start with Pam Bondi first.

Dale K. Nichols's avatar

Eleven Shots Heard Round the World

It rang out loud on an ICE filled street

Midst the Minneapolis chill

Then ten more in rapid succession

That rendered its victim still

The agents scattered—they knew what they done

Some tried to walk away

An unarmed man at the time of the shooting

Who’d happened to get in the way

Cell phone images—multiple views

Showed the unmistakably truth

That Alex Pretti paid with his life

To suffer his final abuse

The face of a struggling democracy

For billions of people to see

Eleven shots heard round the world

That will live in infamy

Poor Choices

When people make poor choices, you see

Bad things are bound to happen

When they exercise First Amendment rights

To demonstrate their passion

They must realize when they take to the streets

That they might not make it home

Says Greg Bovino of Border Patrol

Who answers to Kristi Noem

When people make poor choices, you see

Bad things are bound to happen

When they choose as their leader a would-be King

Who’s a loose and deadly cannon

They can forfeit their hard-won freedoms and rights

And live their lives in fear

Mistakenly thinking those sorts of things

Could never happen here

When people make poor choices, you see

Bad things are bound to happen

When they go to the polls and give up control

Unleashing the wrath of the Kraken

They have no one to blame but themselves

When everything falls apart

Choices matter—the things that result

That should have been stopped from the start

P.S. - If this type of content resonates with you, please consider subscribing to our “Never Trump Poetry Substack” free of charge. Subscribers receive email notifications of my twice-daily pro-democracy poems, together with audio narrations and insightful commentary from my editor, Michael Broder. Thank you.

Pam Ponsart's avatar

Impeach, Convict and Remove F47 and the entire regime now 🇺🇸

William MacKenzie's avatar

Noem isn't the problem. Trump is. She's just an extension of his callousness. Get rid of her and you just get another Trump acolyte.

Kim Sherwood's avatar

Not enough!! I'm sorry but the lame-ass Congress who barely pushed back on trump's Cabinet picks the first time around (thus we ended up with Noem) will likely do the same for whoever he selects to replace her--if impeachment even happens.

All of those sycophants who rubber-stamped everyone from hegseth down told trump all he needed to know: that they would not push back on him one iota. So even if Noem is impeached, at this point, I don't expect them to suddenly find their spines and actually do their job to investigate the next yes-man he puts up.

The whole regime has to go--but the ass-kissers in Congress are way past time for doing their jobs. We're in a world of hurt...

Jean's avatar

DEMAND body cams !!

Estevan's avatar

Against all enemies foreign & DOMESTIC!

We the People are going to have to harden up & crack down on domestic enemies. Big time!

Where is the bravery?

Where is the patriotism?

Where is the loyalty?

Where is the honor?

Revolution is the solution.

Are you free Americans or fascist slaves?

Cole O's avatar

She deserve more than impeachment. We must hold them accountable or we will end up right back here in a few decades.