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Further
ICE Is Still Killing People. Susan Is Still Concerned.
For starters, a record-breaking mortality rate of 11 people fatally shot, over 20 other deaths in custody, over 70,000 mostly harmless people in concentration-camp-like detention, and a "systemic failure" of accountability. A new report by Physicians for Human Rights and Berkeley's Human Rights Center just added more: At least 412 incidents of "misuse" of brutal crowd-control tactics - teargas, pepper spray, "less-lethal kinetic impact projectiles" from rubber bullets to stun grenades - resulting in over 200 "lasting and traumatic injuries" including blindings, brain trauma, fractures often to journalists, elderly people, children.
As Maine goes, so goes the nation. Monday's murder of 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero came after ICE's relatively brief, grotesquely named Operation Catch of the Day last year that saw the arrest of over 500 people, most with no criminal records. Originally from Bucaramanga, Colombia, Guerrero was legally authorized to be here, worked two jobs, had a Social Security card and was going to a delivery job. After some initial confusion/lies, the regime said he was not the intended target of the endlessly inept, homicidal ICE goons; nor were any wearing body cameras that Congress had appropriated $20 million for.
The same lethal incompetence marked last week's murder in Houston TX of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three who'd spent 35 years building homes and raising his U.S. citizen kids, all of whom he helped get through college. He was shot and killed by ICE agents who said he "weaponized" his vehicle; it took about 5 minutes for Araujo's three passengers, who'd witnessed it all and were quickly detained for it, to refute the claim. So did video footage of the deadly encounter. Again, the goons had the wrong guy - and outdated address info - and none were wearing body cameras Congress generously allocated for them.
On Pool Street in Biddeford, a small southern mill city of about 22,000 with a long immigrant history, marauding ICE agents in an SUV rammed the small white Kia Guerrero was driving to work shortly after 7 a.m. Video shows Guerrero, evidently fearful after armed men rammed him, turning his car around and trying to drive away. ICE agents fired what witnesses said were up to seven shots, and at least four smashed through his windshield - though law enforcement guidelines clearly prohibit firing at a moving vehicle unless there is an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm, and call for police to (duh) just move away.
A neighbor said he heard a “pop, pop, pop,” looked out his window and saw the car still slowly moving until the SUV hit it again. After the Kia came to a stop, witnesses said Guerrero, bleeding from his head, was pulled from his car; several heard him say, "I tried to stop." Gruesome video shows ICE thugs handcuffing him on the ground, where his soon-lifeless body lay for five hours. Horrified witnesses said goons "yelled" at his young daughter, still in Bluey pajamas, trying to smell some nearby flowers. "I watched a wife fall to her knees looking at her husband’s dead body," said one. "I watched a little girl with a pink backpack crying because she’s never going to see her father again.”
One upset neighbor said an ICE agent claimed, "He tried to run me over." But here, as elsewhere, ICE has "lost the benefit of the doubt," and the city erupted in grief and rage. By mid-day, hundreds of pissed Mainers had marched, chanting "Whose Streets, Our Streets," to rally in Mechanics Park with signs: "Crush ICE," "Due Process For All," "Immigrants Make Biddeford Great," "Extrajudicial Killings Are A War Crime, and "Is This the America We Want?" Sadie Dilboy said Guerrero often came to her laundromat, giving his daughter quarters to buy vending-machine candy: "He was such a good person. He was always cleaning up.” A worker at Applebee’s, where Guerrero often picked up orders, would always ask if we needed anything: "He was always a good smile to see,” thus clearly "one of those dangerous criminal aliens who have turned America into a living hell."
Later, a crowd of protesters swarmed the local office of Susan Collins with fierce chants of "Vote her out!." One prominent sign, speaking for us all, proclaimed, "Get the Fuck Out." Collins, forever on the wrong and bloody side of history and drunken rapists, was the deciding vote last month to approve the extra, mind-boggling $75 billion in ICE funding, though most Mainers want to see it abolished. Last year, after the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, she voted against both language seeking to curtail further violence and funding for mandatory body cameras, which most thugs are clearly not wearing anyway.
In the wake of yet another senseless murder on America's streets in broad daylight, a presumably very concerned Collins urged "a full and impartial investigation." She did not condemn ICE’s actions, nor did she voice sympathy for the man whose life was just snuffed out. Her staff later cited her vote for a few measures - optional body cameras, more oversight of concentration camps, a paltry $2 million for "de-escalation training" - for better ICE "accountability." As local police blocked her office door, they also noted ICE's "work goes far beyond immigration enforcement to help protect our country" - from brown-skinned delivery drivers, taco makers, contractors, landscapers, nurses, abuelas and kids with cancer. So fuck Susan Collins.
GOP gubernatorial nominee Bobby Charles cravenly echoed her: "Maine deserves the truth about what happened." He also urged there be ”no getting ahead of the facts - let facts, not politics, drive our conclusions," adding, "Federal agents put their lives on the line every day...If an agent's life was threatened, he had every right under the law to protect himself" - presumably from brown delivery drivers, contractors, sick kids et al. So fuck him too. He wants facts? Being here legally and driving to work should not cause death by rogue morons looking for someone else. Guerrero lay in the street for five hours. His government didn't bother to name him for almost a day, but his neighbors did. We hope his daughter gets the therapy she'll need.
The largest, darkest question: "How many more people 'not the target' will die before someone in Washington decides the answer to a wrong-vehicle stop cannot be seven rounds through a windshield?" Tuesday, ICE told their goons to suspend most vehicle stops around the country; they declined to disclose "law enforcement tactics" but said they're "always evaluating our procedures to (keep) criminals off our streets," in which case they should probably remove all their own sociopaths. But they likely won't. The outrage was nationwide - "ICE murdered a 26-year-old in front of his wife & daughter. It’s just pure evil" - and global. Colombian President Gustavo Petro: "He was killed because he was believed to be an inferior being with no rights."
Hopefully, his death will impact the electoral chances of Susan Collins, who funded it. Happily, Maine Dems were unshy about voicing their rage at her abetting ICE violence that’s gone on too long. Gov. Janet Mills: “This has to end.” Senate candidate Dr. Nirav Shah, who urged support for immigrants through the Maine Solidarity Fund, blasted Collins for approving billions more for ICE to "terrorize our communities...She gave them a blank check to kill. Maybe sit this one out.” In an angry video, Rep. Chellie Pingree asked ICE, "Why are you in Maine?" given "every report we hear is somebody picked up who's legally here. It's time to get ICE off our streets."
Troy Jackson, a top Senate contender to replace Graham Platner and the only one polls show beating Collins (though several come close) attended a Portland protest Monday, charging "our immigrant communities are under attack" by a rogue ICE that must be abolished. Advocates also argued, "Our communities are hurting." Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition head Mufalo Chita: "We are furious, and we will not allow this death to be treated as routine or inevitable." Crystal Cron of Presente!, on another family "shattered by state violence": “To say we are heartbroken does not convey the depth of the exhaustion, terror, or grief we are feeling."
Maine authorities have struggled to get information from the feds, unsurprising given they just, finally turned over to Minnesota investigators evidence from the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. It took over 12 hours, till Monday night, for ICE to name their victim and say, in fascist gobbledygook, "an illegal alien" tried to "flee" during "a targeted surveillance" and a goon, "fearing for public safety," "discharged his weapon.” Notably, there was no claim of a driver "weaponizing" his vehicle, leaving national law enforcement "stunned" as to why anyone fired: “If you want to arrest someone, this is a good example of how to do everything wrong."
Murdering brown people in cold blood for no reason is likewise a good example of how to topple democratic governance and the rule of law. “Does the senseless murder of this man make any of our lives better in any way?" asked Kelli Brennan of the Maine State Nurses Association. Critics argue every member of Congress who voted for more money for ICE or DHS has blood on their hands; so do their supporters. During last spring's shutdown, Susan Collins, that act's deciding vote, whined it wasn't "fair" to those thugs to have a "cloud of uncertainty" over whether they'd be paid. “They are keeping us safe,” she mewled. Fuck Susan Collins and the incomparable real-world damage she's done. Vote like your life and many others depend on it, because they do. Fundraiser here.
Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and his daughterPhoto from Facebook
All the Feelings: Nothing Is Fixed In Its Place
On this Fourth of July, wrote John Pavlovitz, "Most of us were pulled between the despair of what this nation has become (or always has been) and the hope of what we might still be," leaving us "not knowing quite where to stand." We are "told today by the men who would humiliate us," he adds, "that America was founded in a spirit of innocence, that its leaders never did anything wrong, and that patriotism means insisting on our own blamelessness and assigning all evil to others" - this, in a country founded in genocide that blithely went on to institutionalize slavery and racism, then took to rampaging imperialism.
Despite the right's longtime myths about American "exceptionalism," for decades the arc of our political history has bent toward liberalism and the egalitarian ideals of its founding. No more. The last ten years, and especially the last two, have seen us hurtling backwards, obviously in large part due to the toxic rise of Trump, who "didn't invent America’s oldest prejudices (but) exploited them, legitimized them, rewarded them (and) transformed grievance into political identity." Writes Congressional candidate Fred Wellman, "The level of racism and bigotry this pathetic small man spits out daily could fill an algae-filled pool."
Last week saw some of what it's wrought. Death by firing squad - really - is on the rise: Idaho just became the first state to adopt it as its primary method of state murder, which can inflict "prolonged and agonising death," and it's the seventh state to include it in grisly execution rosters. SCOTUS hacks just stripped legal protections from over half a million Haitians and almost as many Syrians, prompting hateful vampire Megyn Kelly to spew, "Get out. Go home. Go back to fucking Haiti. We know our country’s better than yours (because) we filled it with our work ethic and culture and values. You being here only dilutes it for us."
MAGA ghouls emitted more vicious racist bilge after SCOTUS barely struck down Trump's "BLATANTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL" move to strip birthright citizenship from U.S-born kids of non-citizens despite a 14th Amendment clearly stating anyone born here, even with dark skin, is a citizen. It was widely deemed a win for the rule of law, but it was also "one step away" from a scary "birthright precipice" that saw four judges construct 100 pages of legal arguments "to write immigrants’ children out of the Constitution and still call it jurisprudence." The ruling was "very nice," wrote Jonathan Last, like "it's nice when a person walking past you doesn't pull out a gun and shoot you...(The) majority followed the Constitution. Yay."
Still, the right freaked out, raving it was "a betrayal of the republic (that) cheapens the sacred value of American citizenship." Sample rants: "We are supposed to be a country, not an orphanage," "Any woman illegal alien who is capable of having a child needs to be rounded up and ejected," the "obvious lesson" of traitor Amy Barrett upholding "birth tourism of China's communist party" is to stop nominating female justices, "Mass deportations. Round every illegal up. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it," and, "If you see a pregnant foreigner, contact ICE immediately - the future of our country depends on it.”
They want to ban foreign-born pregnant women, ban all female foreigners, do pregnancy screenings for those women, "require sterilization of all foreign visitors before entry," dissolve the Union. Todd Blanche will fight (imaginary) "birth tourism." J.D. Vance says his faith is why "we don't like low-wage foreigners stealing" jobs: "We want normal Americans to be able to live a dignified life, and I think that's a very Christian concept." Texas Rep.Troy Nehls wants a 10-year moratorium on immigration - "We gotta put a big bedsheet over the Statue of Liberty," maybe with cut-out eye holes and pointy hat? - "because we’re not letting anybody in."
As usual, a not-at-all-unhinged Stephen Miller won the Mein Kampf Award by arguing the ruling “requires you to suicide your civilization.” After proposing the case serve as a litmus test for all future judges, he warned - under a Fox chyron blaring “Birth Tourism Is A Ticking Bomb” - that it offers "a direct line into American cash (for) the rest of that child’s life (as mothers) send welfare checks back home to support a whole family." "They can just come into the country, have a baby in a hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?" he howled. "And that baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18, and sit in judgment of...me?“
That baby won't be the only one. In The Empire Loses the Ball, a terrific piece about the World Cup, Troy Nahumko describes colonial powers who've "spent centuries confusing dominance with superiority," Africa's "arrival" this year as a force to be reckoned with, and soccer's contempt for and inexorable repudiation of racial hierarchy. "There comes a time when the people who used to draw the maps no longer get to decide what the world looks like," he writes. "The World Cup has become that moment." And Stephen Miller, "a man who has made the question of human belonging his life’s organizing principle," has been or will be made to confront it.
As part of his racist rant, Miller denigrated people "from third world nations (that) on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, medicine, air travel." Hold my beer, says Nahumko: The wheel emerged in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, writing in Sumer and Egypt, algebra in ninth-century Uzbekistan, agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, the "numerical system Miller uses to count the families he splits up and deports" in India. "That is the birthright Miller calls worthless," he writes. "On the pitches where he would have their descendants excluded, (they) are eliminating European football powers in front of the watching world."
The beautiful game "rolled downhill" from "a damp little island" through oil towns in Algeria, fishing villages in Senegal, barrios, favelas, refugee camps "where the goalposts are flip-flops." "We come from the red earth," said Paraguay’s coach after they beat Germany. "We learned to play football barefoot." Europe long bragged about a diversity that "won trophies for France," but proved "less popular in Dakar than in Paris." This year, nine of ten "shithole countries" - Morocco, South Africa, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cape Verde, Egypt, DRC, Algeria - advanced. The final will be in New Jersey, "across the river from where millions of immigrants arrived and received the protection of an amendment Stephen Miller would now like to declare worthless."
Cockroach-like, Miller has also declared "divine providence“ the reign of a moronic narcissist con man who, says a report from House Democrats, hijacked and twisted a landmark 250th anniversary into ”a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,“ packed with pay-to-play schemes through a DOGE-run, wire-fraud-committing shadow corporation, all ”in service of the President’s ego, political ideology and pet projects.“ The resulting grift and incompetence is now everywhere, from the trashed “Reflecting Lakes” with “criminally-made algae” to the post-rapture-like State Fair where Fox bobbleheads yammered about non-existent “crowds,” there were no chairs, shade or AC in the steamy heat, but if desperate you could find relief in the baptism pool.
Meanwhile, the "festivities" lurched on. Speaking at Mt. Rushmore, amidst millions going hungry, losing health care or voting for Democrat Socialists in primaries, Trump back-tracked to the 1950s and blamed it all on "godless communists" who are "finally making their move," also "illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work,“ who he'll "send into exile." Saturday, in a still-broiling D.C, officials cancelled the parade due to "heat," aka rumors nobody would show, but Patriot Front Nazis turned up to march, wave Confederate flags and chant "Reclaim America," evidently for racist morons with socks on their patriotic faces in 100-degree temps.
That night, back at the Great American Shitshow on the Mall, looming thunderstorms prompted chaos and a mass evacuation; it was close to midnight by the time limp crowds snaked again through security lines and Trump ranted, “You can be a communist or a patriot - you cannot be both.” He bragged he’s taking America’s “Golden Age” to “new levels” and he’d insisted the show go on “so it was even more spectacular (than) it would have been as normalized.” Then they set off 850,000 fireworks - experts had urged viewers wear N95 masks - which made so much smoke it was all people could see. Some said it looked like war footage or the,end of the world; Trump dozed off.
Sunday morning, D.C. officials issued a Code Red Air Quality Alert for the most polluted air of any major city on the planet; some observers wondered if Trump had hired his pool guy for the fireworks. The pool itself, thick with algae and guarded by soldiers, fencing, signs and security cameras, was now also littered with menacing black husks of spent fireworks. "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?" asked Frederick Douglass, who bared the hypocrisies of this nation's founding. "To him, your celebration is a sham; your national greatness, swelling vanity...your prayers and hymns, mere bombast, (a) thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."
"Stand out - someone has to," historian Timothy Snyder urges today. "Whenever you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken." For the Fourth of July, who better than New York City's Zohran Mamdani to take on that task, to sit at George Washington's desk among new Americans, "take measure of who we are as a nation," see "an opportunity to begin anew," and join with the city's immigrants, peasants, serfs, those "treated as less than, for whom power was something that someone else had " - to come together in "the work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals." The core of our exceptionalism: Nothing is fixed in its place." Our "special power": "To determine what America means." For the Black woman in this image, for all of us: Not this, please.
A lone tense Black woman rides the D.C. subway surrounded by masked Nazis in an "image that indicts an era."Photo by Cheney Orr/REUTERS/TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Show Trial: A Punishment For Solidarity Itself
Faced with mounting losses in other endeavors - wars, pools, polls - more regime lackeys are also getting testy. Newly back from having a baby but still hyper-toxic, Press Barbie went on Hannity to shriek about “deranged leftists desecrating our federal monuments” with algae: “Only the Democrats could hate beautifying our Capitol.” Of six people arrested for “vandalism” - more than for raping minors - many are “longtime donors to the Democrat Party,” who “completely destroyed our country,” also to “Barack Hussein Obama” and, gasp, ACTBlue. With fear-mongering truly all they’ve got, Hannity joined in on Dem “radicals...You’ve got Mr. Nazi Tattoo Platner, and six-gender, God-is-non-binary Talarico, and Pocahontas, and Mamdani...”
Amidst a “rolling coup“ in an increasingly fascist America, where threats from the left have always loomed larger than on the right and today’s despots cling frantically to a power they somehow know is illegitimate, it’s little wonder principled citizens protesting vulnerable brown people being locked up in concentration camps have become ”the new Red Scare.“ It’s helpful to remember that everything earlier autocrats did - Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet - was legal; they just changed the rules to do it. ”This is Soviet shit,“ wrote one observer, summoning the terror of Stalin’s staged show trials in the 1930s to eliminate most of Lenin’s staff and other ”saboteurs,“ from Bukharin to, via pickaxe, Trotsky exiled in Mexico; in the end, only ”Stalin the Executioner“ remained.
The “legal,” in Trump’s case, was last year’s menacing national security directive “NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which explicitly declared a fictional Antifa - in fact any American who opposes fascism, supports the rule of law and uses their First Amendment rights to defend it - a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION” and “SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER,” whether “it exists or not.” Prairieland, the first case successfully brought under NSPM-7, tests the state’s ability to quell dissent by perceived “enemies,” and could shape a future playbook for using the Antifa label - and “creative and highly theoretical claims by the state” - as “a catchall designation to criminalize activists writ large.”
The surreal sentences inflicted this week on eight mostly non-violent Prairieland activists came three months after their convictions on terrorism and other charges stemming from last year's July 4 protest at the for-profit Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. The action began as a noise demonstration, a typically safe, festive event where fireworks are set off "to remind people inside they are not forgotten." That day, it devolved into vandalism - of cars, a guard shack, a security camera - by several protesters. Some brought guns - a red flag to many activists, but common in open-carry Texas where queer or trans people can face armed counter-protesters. When one cop drew his weapon, a protester in the nearby woods shot him in the shoulder.
At trial, eight defendants - Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Benjamin Hanil Song, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada - were convicted of rioting and explosive charges, and "providing material support to terrorists." They are much like protesters anywhere: teachers, engineers, tattoo artists, animal-lovers, anti-ICE advocates, parents, straight, queer, trans, vegan. Some had organized the action together, some produced anarchist zines and belonged to a book club named for anarchist Emma Goldman, who 99 years ago this month was arrested on conspiracy charges for organizing against the First World War draft; some were members of a Socialist gun club; some weren't even at the protest.
From the outset, the regime played hardball. The DOJ called them “members of a North Texas Antifa cell“; the indictment said Antifa "is a militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribed to a revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology.” They were held on multimillion-dollar bonds in squalid jail cells, denied medical care, frequently strip-searched; two trans women were held - unsafely, illegally - in men's facilities. State agents ransacked homes, detained children, used flash-bang grenades to intimidate, went after anyone in their political orbit, often unearthing new charges. It was, one defendant said, "a nightmare made real...seeing the prosecution jump from lie to lie," abuse to abuse.
The case became a sinister "laboratory" where constitutionally protected free speech and civil disobedience became "rioting" and solidarity became "conspiracy." Fireworks were “explosives," a home where friends gathered a "staging area," black clothing and the use of encrypted Signal a way "to aid and abet those engaged in illegal acts." A home printer became "a printing press" producing "insurrectionary materials" - anti-fascist zines, handouts of "8 Things You Can Do To Stop ICE," packets of vegetable seeds, poems, patches, bumper stickers of swastikas X-ed out and “Zines Are Not A Crime." A teacher had home-made first aid kits he used to bring to school in case of a shooting; feds used their presence as evidence protesters had planned violence.
The shocking sentencing hearings were held by two judges, one each appointed by Bush and Trump, in two Fort Worth courtrooms. They were inexplicably scheduled even before either judge heard long-filed motions to overturn convictions in a trial, lawyers argued, "saturated with evidence designed to evoke fear, political bias, and guilt by association" and widely deemed "untethered from credible evidence or witness testimony." Prosecutors folded into the case people who didn't help plan the protest, weren't there, or left when police asked them to. An attorney for Hill cited no evidence they believed in violence; Hill was so conscientious they stayed after the fireworks went off to pick up trash left behind; she still got a 50-year sentence.
The case ostensibly centered on the alleged attempted murder of the cop shot in the shoulder. Marine Corps reservist Benjamin "Champagne" Song said they were in the woods and fired "a warning shot" to distract the cop when he drew his gun on another protester; citing Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Song said, “I never want to see good people, standing for what they believe in, gunned down." Song charges the state is imposing "collective punishment, guilt by association" on other activists, and the facts of the shooting remain unclear; feds first said there were multiple shooters and rounds fired, then said they have no medical records from the hospital where the cop was reportedly quickly released. Still, Song was given a 100-year sentence.
Batten, Evetts, Hill, Morris, and Soto each got 50 years for rioting, providing support to terrorists, and conspiracy to use an explosive ie: attending a loud protest. Said Soto, trying to laugh, "I guess they didn't like my book club." Rueda was sentenced to 70 years for also conspiring to "conceal documents" by asking her husband Sanchez-Estrada, not at the protest, to remove a box of zines from their house. "Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society," said one advocate. "We don’t need a constitutional right to possess only what the government likes." Sanchez-Estrada got a 30-year sentence for moving the box. "I am a father, a husband, a teacher, a poet," he told the judge. "I am many things, Your Honor, but I am not a terrorist."
Many observers noted all the sentences were far harsher than those handed down to Jan. 6 rioters - who were then pardoned - or even the longest sentences for murder or rape - this, though prosecutors offered almost no evidence of the alleged crimes. And despite their obsession with the lethal threat posed by imaginary Antifa forces, even the judges questioned the need to mention "antifa" to jurors, who in turn seemed to reject Judge Reed O’Connor's narrative of "an ambush" and "assault on democracy" by acquitting everyone but Song of attempted murder. One legal expert said that fortuitous rejection underscored how easily prosecutors can fashion or twist the law to create a "conspiracy"; said one attorney, “People should be scared."
In total, 22 people have been charged in connection with the Prairieland protest. Five others took plea deals, another five have state charges pending, three more were indicted last month. Regime lackeys have gleefully touted their rare victory, with a hyperbolic DOJ press release blaring, "Leader of Antifa Cell Members Sentenced to 100 Years in Prison for Terrorist Attack on ICE Facility." After the trial, Pam Bondi gloated they'd taken down "Antifa" - repeated 16 times - to "finally halt their violence on America's streets." After sentencing, Todd Blanche celebrated the regime's "swift and uncompromising justice." Of villainous Antifa, he crowed, "Their violent extremism has no place in our country," presumably because only the fascist kind does.
As young activists mull lives stolen - and tenuously bank on appeals or pardons - their family, friends, supporters voice horror at “the absolute travesty” of the lies that led to their convictions and sentences. “We’ve fallen so far so fast it’s nose-bleed inducing,” said one. Another insisted, "The outcome of this trial is not the end. It is the beginning." Autumn Hill’s wife Lydia Koza said she is "livid in the face of this grotesque distortion of anything that could ever have called itself due process...There is no ‘appropriate’ sentence for a wholly fictitious crime." On their loved ones "being thrown away for the rest of their lives," one noted the regime's own actions "have proved the righteousness of their actions...This sentencing is a punishment for solidarity itself."
Finally, from Flying Penguin, a grim reminder the Prairieland fates mirror that of too many in a nation and world whose history is rife with 'other righteous "crimes": BLM protesters, Black Panthers, AIM activists, civil rights marchers, union workers, “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” To wit: "Today’s news is Andrew Jackson, ordering Congress to criminalize antislavery speech. Today’s news is Stalin’s Article 58, where ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was a crime that meant whatever it needed to. Today's news is the McCarthy-era ruling that upheld the conviction of Americans for organizing and teaching political theory.Today's news is South Africa’s 1967 Terrorism Act, making terrorism anything that endangers 'law and order.' Today’s news is Trump and a white police state." Warns Sanchez-Estrada, "People need to be aware - it’s not just the defendants on trial.”
Defendants clockwise from top left: Estrada-Sanchez; Song and Gibson; Hill and Koza; Batten; Sanchez; Elizabeth and Ines Soto; Morris and Hill Composite Image from Dallas-Fort Worth Support Committee
White Trash Losers 'R Us
And so to a pricey Iran "deal” maybe (or not) ending an inept illegal war that fails on all fronts - military, political, economic, moral - and strengthens Iran’s hand as a regional power. Where are we, asks retired Major General Paul Eaton after "a war with no plan, no strategy, no achievable objective, no definition of what victory even looked like, and no plan for day 2." His response: "Thirteen dead. Years of lost readiness. Higher prices in every American home. All to arrive back at the starting line, weaker than when we left it." Meanwhile, the cost of his fucking ballroom that nobody asked for has soared 50% to $600 million, more than half to be paid by us, not imaginary "generous American patriots."
In another weekend fail, symbolic but gratifying, hundreds of real patriots gathered - and thousands watched a livestream - to see the vile name stripped from the Kennedy Center after US District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled it illegal. Alas, the crowd waited all day and night in humid heat - bearing flags, "You're No JFK" signs, hope to see "a horrible scar" vanquished - only for Friday's midnight deadline to come and go as workers built endless scaffolding and Center lackeys filed last-ditch appeals. Rumors flew, chants grew - "TAKE IT DOWN," "Rest in Shame," "Tear down that wall," "More Cow Bell" - as drag queen Tara Hoot blew bubbles and Rep. Joyce Beatty declared, to cheers, "We cannot be silenced."
The approach of midnight brought breathless countdowns - "30 minutes!“ "Five minutes!" "No pressure - you’re doing great!” - then angry charges of "a cover-up in real time" when it passed. People sang This Land is Your Land, thunderstorms halted work (and extended the deadline), and when a miraculous double rainbow emerged, people huddled under awnings to sing God Bless America and give thanks: "And the angels sang...Mother Nature Understands The Assignment...Just think what She'll do when he leaves the White House...Well-played, universe." One worker in a lift could have quickly done the job; instead, 13 hours later, the final scaffolding went up - to hang a tarp, met with boos, to hide a snowflake's shame.
Around 4 a.m, the Center later told the judge, the 18 odious letters of “The Donald J. Trump and" had been removed. For the public, it's hard to tell: The tarp's still up. To Andrew Flanagan, it confirms "how deeply insecure & pathetic" is the guy who's usually a "big redaction fan" - for the Epstein files, Mueller report, Jan. 6 transcripts, any form of accountability. "Nothing says 'stable genius' like illegally slapping your name on a cultural landmark, then hiding your name getting ripped off behind a bedsheet like a toddler who broke a vase," he wrote, adding, "Sheet was probably stolen from a hotel." Still, the action offered a modest "preview of Independence Day," what one resident called "this little splash of hope in the rain."
Not so his vaunted, likely illegal, American-flag-blue do-over of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool: Because everything he touches dies or stinks, it has joined the Resistance by swiftly reverting to its previous brackish green. After the "expert builder" removed a state-of-the-art filtration system installed by Barack Hussein Obama, used a darker paint that draws heat and algae, boasted its"CLEAN, BEAUTIFUL WATER” would "SPARKLE magnificently...for 100 years," and insisted the rogue algae was just a “residual part of the normal startup process," the $1.5 million job that became a no-bid $14.2 million has in mere days proved an algae-beset bust. Now National Park workers are frantically dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into it. Is it great yet?
There was also Paige, the four-ton elephant bedecked with a "Unity Drives Victory" banner the Texas GOP brought into its annual convention in Houston, a promised "larger-than-life surprise" who abundantly peed at the feet of the faithful just as Greg Abbott finished his keynote speech - what Dems called a "perfect metaphor for the Texas Republican Party." While it's unclear how much Dear Leader is to blame for that fiasco, he's totally, shamelessly, smirkingly responsible for the simultaneous atrocity unfolding on the White House Lawn: An impossibly base, blood-spattered cage fight, "crass display of toxic hyper machismo," and "bar fight making millions for the Epstein class" that "flaunted the absolute worst of America."
UFC Freedom 250, the besmirching of a staid White House lawn long reserved for dignified welcomes to foreign leaders, careful displays of statesmanship and the occasional Easter egg roll, began in May with the construction of a massive, hulking, $60 million cage called "the Claw." For weeks, up to 900 workers from seven federal agencies, including DHS and FAA, labored on our dime to build a gaudy monstrosity for 14 mixed martial arts fighters to beat and pummel each other bloody - at a "House that has hosted Churchill, Mandela, the Apollo astronauts...(that) sits at the center of the constitutional republic a generation of Americans bled for in places whose names their grandchildren cannot pronounce."
Trump "sees everything and everyone in terms of dominance or submission," notes Robert Reich. Choosing to mark his fucking big boy birthday by wrapping it in the pretext of the country's 250th anniversary and planning what's been likened to a "human cockfighting" spectacle on the White House Lawn, Reich adds, is "seeking to project an America like the winner of a cage match" - cheap, crude, violent, and so brazenly tasteless that even Republicans who once freaked out at Michelle Obama's vegetable garden there joined the vast 84% of Americans who denounced the event. Implausibly, impressively, the damning consensus reached Fox News viewers. "Tacky as hell," declared one. "Trump is a white trash president."
He is also history's most corrupt president, so no surprise his "gift to Americans" proved, per a failed lawsuit, "a volcano of corruption" and a “private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments," with Trump at its greedy core. He invested heavily in UFC owner TKO; his World Liberty Financial crypto business, earning billions on paper, was an “official sponsor"; so was Truth Social - "Download Truth Social today!"- and TrumpCoins.com - "Limited quantities available now!" Melding corporate and political grift, fighters were "paid" crypto bonuses, ads and logos were everywhere, fights in a Bud-Light-adorned ring had to be watched with a subscription to Paramount Plus, sponsorships cost up to $1.5 million per person.
The flagrant profiteering and Hunger Games optics were so "tone-deaf to the struggles of the American people” even some UFC fighters objected. "I don’t give a fuck to fight in front of some fucking billionaires and rich people," said one; added middleweight champion Sean Strickland, "To go hang out with people on the Epstein list? I'm good, dog.” (He was reportedly banned for criticizing Israel and the Epstein cover-up; he turned up anyway that night and was later escorted out by security for causing "disorder.") All in all, in a "celebration of American strength and exceptionalism" featuring guys clearly not quite princes among men, it was less than surprising things regularly descended into cruder, meaner, more vicious territory.
Bantamweight Sean O’Malley, "a nasty little shit" in all red, white and blue, the color scheme for everything in sight - has publicly defended cheating on his wife because rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate said it was okay: "If I get a little puss on the side - I got status, so I can." After he beat Canada’s Aiemann Zahabi to raucous chants of "U-S-A!" he thanked his fans, offered a tribute to UFC's Dana White - "Dana’s a fucking gangster," and threw up several straight-armed "Sieg Heils" to Trump. The team of four accommodating announcers - who rapturously praised the event's "unbelievable" energy, spirit, patriotism that gave them "goosebumps...How special is it to be here?" - called them "salutes to the troops."
Like all the fighters, O'Malley had earlier walked through the lofty Lincoln Memorial to a scuffling weigh-in where thugs jousted - "Don't act like a fucking animal" - and a press conference. Like the others, he later dressed in an opulent White House "locker room," aka the historic Indian Treaty Room, and made his cinematic way to the Claw flanked by an honor guard - a veteran, first responder or Medal of Honor recipient - cleverly obliging every service member to salute as he walked past. Lincoln, Eisenhower, Paul Krugman weep at the "unspeakably vulgar" debasement. The ancient philosopher Seneca, on the rise and fall of a Roman Empire that also boasted extreme inequality and gladiatorial games: "The way to ruin is rapid."
Sean O'Malley walks from the White House to his fight with an Honor GuardPhoto by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Before the actual bloodshed, there were weeks of other grotesqueries: Screaming promos - "Are you ready?!" - with an AI, shirtless, oiled, ripped fantasy Trump next to other oiled guys grappling; a $1-million-a-plate fundraising "candlelight dinner," probs akin to this one, at Trump's D.C. golf club; a barbed, garbled panel of all 14 fighters, adding more insult to injury to the Lincoln Memorial. The big bellicose day started with Trump and White marching (or waddling) out to their own color guard, a flyover by the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds, and the incongruous sight of Nitro Circus motocross riders on dirt bikes flying through jumps and spins in front of the White House. Best comment: "OMG ffs we just want health care."
Despite a hilariously sinister weather forecast - lightning, downpours, wind gusts, possible swarms of mosquitoes in the heat - fights were only delayed an hour, with no rain. The waiting crowd, less than a predicted 4,000 ringside and 80,000 at the Ellipse watching on huge screens, were treated to a Department of War (sic) recruitment video touting "peace through strength," songs from American Pie to Sex on Fire, "ring girls" in sexy "patriotic motifs," UFC fights projected onto iconic buildings - including rapist Conor McGregor on the Washington Monument - and protesters chanting, “Whose house? Our house!" alongside a makeshift cage filled with puppets of regime lackeys "to show them behind bars where they belong."
Ultimately, all seven fights ended in knockouts or TKOs, many brutal. Former lightweight champion Ilia Topuria, in his first fight since he and his ex-wife reached a settlement after she accused him of domestic abuse, lost to Justin Gaethje in a TKO that left Topuria's face so bloodied a doctor nearly stopped the bout; the crowd chanted "U-S-A!" and “Let them fight!”, he did, and Topuria was later found to have suffered orbital fractures in both eyes. Lightweight Michael Chandler, 40, was "destroyed" by upstart Brazilian Mauricio Ruffy in Round 1. Fans urged Chandler to "Retire, please"; through a translator, Ruffy asked his girlfriend to marry him "since we're right here at the White House," and urged fans to, "Give your life to Jesus."
The fights, and the graphic accounts of their pummeling, were savage: "Ruffy stung Chandler with a spinning heel kick, hurt him with an uppercut and whipped a horrific body shot into his midsection, ripping a nasty liver punch...Chandler shoots for a takedown, but Ruffy sprawls. OH! Another spinning heel kick! Down goes Chandler!" Etc. Later, at a post-fight press conference with most of the fighters - except Topuria, in the hospital - Dana White celebrated an event with "no political agenda." “I believe that if you are an American, no matter where you sit politically, tonight was just a proud night,” he said. "Hopefully, we created some unity in the country and the world, and brought in some new fans."
Diego Lopes celebrates defeating Steve Garcia in their featherweight bout. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Still, all the disingenuous violence paled before the barbarism of heavyweight Josh Hokit, a self described “100% transphobic" who called a Black fighter "a human gorilla," tried to sic ICE on his Mexican mother, and theatrically staggered wasted into the weigh-in pretending to puke from a night of drinking because "a giant black man wants to knock me out." After taking down aforementioned black man Derrick Lewis, Hokit offered Trump ringside a gaudy pendant and a shout-out "for having the balls to put something like this on." Then he giddily proclaimed himself "the beast that's ready to feast," thanked "my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” and added, " Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?"
The crowd gave a modest, sickening roar. The president said nothing in response, nor has he yet, because the "short-fingered vulgarian" is not celebrating a birthday or a nation's anniversary so much as he is "flipping off all of it, and all of us, by desecrating every American temple that presidential authority touches." "The bar has been on the ground for so long we have stopped noticing we are crawling," writes Tom Wellborn of "what the man in the cage chose to do with the microphone at the White House." Hokit spoke with "the full confidence of a man in a room that told him his worst instincts were welcome," and where "the culture of the room tells you cruelty is the entry fee."
Hokit "read the room," he goes on, "with attention to what the environment rewards and what it punishes, and what the environment rewarded was the ugliest thing a person could say. He knew the environment would punish nothing, because the man whose birthday it was has built his entire career on the same calculation...The president got another night of the only thing he has ever wanted - the performance of dominance in a room full of people who will never tell him no." But that night, people also gathered in another room on another planet, where Robert De Niro welcomed "all of you who couldn't get tickets to the White House cage fights," urged them to say not just no but "Shut the fuck up," the sane response to an insane historic moment, and they did.
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