Donald Trump and maga Republicans intend to destroy the equal protection clause provided in the 14th Amendment

Echo opinion published in the New York Times by Jamelle Bouie 

Stephen Miller’s 🤢Latest Low: Nazism 101: 
"You can’t change the masses. They will always be the same: dumb, gluttonous and forgetful.”― Joseph Goebbels

The latest front in evil 👹Stephen Miller’s personal and political war on the 14th Amendment, which began last January with Donald Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship, centers on the equal protection clause.

In 1982, in Plyler v. Doe, a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court held that it was a violation of the equal protection clause for states to deny to undocumented children the free public education they provide to legal immigrants’ children, who are themselves citizens. As Justice William Brennan wrote in his opinion for the court, “The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens.”

Miller, whose crusade against immigration knows no bounds, wants Republican-led states to test the court’s commitment to its precedent. My newsroom colleague Lauren McGaughy has the report:


Stephen Miller raised the idea of ending public education funding for undocumented children in a closed-door meeting with Texas lawmakers in Washington last week, a move that would challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Steven Miller doppelganger: Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) Hitler's Nazi Minister of Propaganda.

Miller, who is Trump’s hard-line immigration terror adviser, and a Joseph Goebbels doppelganger, cited gridlock in Congress as he encouraged the state lawmakers to pass conservative legislation on immigration and other issues that are crucial to Republicans, hoping such action would spur on other red states and federal lawmakers.

The effect of this change, if it were to become law, would be to mark about a million children as members of a subordinate class — a lower caste excluded from mainstream society. Here, again, is Brennan: “By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation.”

Miller’s push to weaken the equal protection clause raises an important question: Why is he, and the "maga" right more generally, so intent on whittling down the 14th Amendment to essentially nothing❓

To answer this, we can’t just look at the origins of the amendment — we have to see it in its larger political context. Before the 14th Amendment was a question of law and legal interpretation, it was a political text meant to bring about a particular vision of American society.

It seems obvious to say, but it’s worth emphasizing anyway: The 14th Amendment is tied directly to the 13th. The 13th Amendment states that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It then adds, in section 2, that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Today, as a matter of legal interpretation, we read the 13th quite narrowly; it simply ends slavery. But the authors and ratifiers of the 13th Amendment saw it more expansively. To them, it was the foundation for the society they hoped to build. 

Like Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts said in a March 1864, floor speech in support of the amendment:

"Every word spoken, every line written, every act performed, that keeps the breath of life in slavery for a moment, is against the existence of democratic institutions, against the dignity of the toiling millions, against the liberty, the peace, the honor, the renown and the life of the nation. In the lights of to-day that flash upon us from camp and battlefield, the loyal eye, heart, and brain of America sees and feels and realizes that the death of slavery is the life of the nation❗ The loyal voice of patriotism pronounces, in clear accents, that American slavery must die that the American Republic may live❗"​​​​​​​​​​​​​

To that end, the 13th Amendment was meant to outlaw hereditary caste as much as it was meant to end chattel slavery.

The anti-subordination aims of the 13th Amendment are why, almost immediately after ratifying it, Republicans in Congress leveraged their newfound authority under Section 2 to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which established birthright citizenship, guaranteed equal rights, nullified the “Black Codes” — laws passed by the former rebel states to reimpose the conditions of slavery — and empowered the federal government to prosecute violations of civil rights.


President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee unionist whose contempt for slaveholders was outweighed only by his hostility to Black Americans, vetoed the bill as both undesirable and beyond the scope of federal power. “In all our history, in all our experience as a people living under Federal and State law, no such system as that contemplated by the details of this bill has ever before been proposed or adopted,” Johnson wrote. “They establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race.”

The Republican-led Congress overrode Johnson’s veto. It then began work on a new amendment, meant to embed in the Constitution the provisions and protections of the 1866 law, as well as write its vision of a free and equal society into the Constitution itself.

The resulting 14th Amendment, properly understood, is additive to the 13th. It flows from the vision of Gettysburg and Appomattox, of the Republican Party before, during and after the war: a society of equals, entitled to a broad set of rights and able to pursue their own visions of the good as far as their capabilities would take them.

A straightforward reading of the most important part of the amendment, Section 1, makes this clear. It says, in short: "There will be a national American citizenship. That this citizenship will, except in very select cases, be established by birth. That all such citizens will be entitled to the 'privileges and immunities' of American citizenship, and that — citizen or no — everybody on American soil is to receive the due process of law and the equal protection of the laws."

As Representative John Bingham of Ohio, one of the chief architects of the amendment, would write soon after ratification, Let it be “borne in mind that this is the government of men representing every people and kindred and tongue under the whole heavens, and that in the inception of our national struggle for representative government, in 1776, the declaration of the people was not that all white men are created equal, but that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with the rights of life and liberty.”

The Supreme Court would eventually trim and limit this vision, eventually going, in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, as far as to permit the kind of subordination that the 14th Amendment was explicitly written to forbid. Indeed, this was part of the transformation of this amendment into a merely legal document — of removing its political content and treating it as a bare set of narrow requirements. The court would do the same to both the 13th and 15th Amendments, robbing them of their power to transform the American republic. And it did so as part of a larger political project: to reconcile the white citizens of the United States, to give the white South the power to manage its own “affairs,” and to support a national project of imperial domination. As a promise of equality for all who live under the flag, the 14th Amendment had to be written out of the constitutional order.

Both Miller and the "maga" right are engaged in the same kind of work as their political forebears. It is no wonder, then, that they want to gut the 14th Amendment, which was revitalized by the struggles of Black Americans and other groups throughout the 20th century. Theirs is a project of subordination at home and abroad; of the re-inscription of caste and the recreation of tiered citizenship based on race and nationality. And now, as then, the 14th Amendment stands in the way.

In other words, their project of constitutional change is in the service of a distinct political vision. Opponents should take note. It is not enough, as important as it is, to attack the legal basis of Miller’s efforts or debunk "maga’s" historical arguments. One must also bring a positive political vision to bear against their fantasy of reimposing rigid lines of caste, class and hierarchy.

The good news is that the 14th Amendment, and the larger Reconstruction story, is an important resource about an alternative vision — about an egalitarian society for all who claim this nation as their own.

What I Wrote: In this column,  Jamelle Bouie argued that whether at home or abroad, Donald Trump's pathological narcissism leaves him unable to see that his opponents have agency. As the aphorism goes, the enemy gets a vote, too.

Every presidential administration takes on the character of its principal, and this one is no different. Like Trump, the White House does not in fact seem to understand that other people have agency, too. It sees itself the same way the president sees himself: as the protagonist of the universe, with everyone else acting either as a supporting character or a nonplayable one — extras with no will of their own.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end the racism campaign supported by Trumpzi evilism

Ongoing presence of racism led by Donald Trump is evil.

Echo opinion letter published in The Central Oregonian newspaper:

We like to believe that bigotry is a product of ignorance and that if we educate people enough, they will become immune to bigotry.  But bigotry is more often a common code of hate to which no community is immune. Trumpzism and bigotry are evilisms.

Oh my❗ 🤢On the morning of February 6th, I was shown the hideous video meme on Trump’s Truth (Fake ❗) Social, showing the faces of Michelle and Barack Obama imposed on ape bodies. 

I was deeply saddened 😥 to see the racist Donald Trump, president of the U.S. creating such despicable bigotry. 

 “Fruit never falls far from the tree.” Remember Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was arrested in 1927 for participating in a violent KuKluxKlan (KKK) rally in New York City. Remember the 1973, federal lawsuit brought against Donald Trump and his company for racial discrimination at Trump housing developments in New York City. He would not sell or lease properties to people of “color.” Trump is a racist, pure and simple. When I saw Trump’s first evil red MAGA hat, I immediately read: Make America White Again.

Having grown through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, I never imagined that racism would publicly raise its head again in the United States. Remember the firehoses, the attack dogs, the beatings and the murders against people who only wanted to be treated as equals? The only difference was the color of their skin. 

Remember, white supremacists George Wallace and Bull Connor were called “racist pigs.” It appears we still have some “racist pigs” living amongst us.  Remember, Hitler justified the Holocaust by claiming Jews looked different, were inferior and were the cause of the world’s problems. It’s called racism. If you have noticed the faces behind the ICE masks, they are all white. Many of them are recruited from the convicted felon Nazi insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6, whom Trump pardoned. Ninety-five percent of the people detained by ICE have no criminal records 😢and are in our country legally seeking citizenship. Notice their commonality: they have dark skin, and perhaps they speak with an accent. Pure racism.  We have a movement in our country called “White Nationalism.” That sounds similar to “Aryan Nation,” doesn’t it? Much of this is based upon the pseudo-science “Race Science,” which maintains that the “white” race is superior. Adolf Hitler’s Nazis did EXACTLY the same thing❗

From Walt Bolton  in Prineville, Oregon

Donald Trump and maga Republicans use Americn tax money to fund evil ICE operations to punish American citizens

Why the Department of Homeland Security Disaster in Minneapolis Was Predictable.

Donald Trump has created his own personal Gestapo*❗

For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies.

By Jonathan Blitzer published in The New Yorker.

When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, in 2002, one lawmaker bragged that the United States was finally “meeting the enemy’s agility with our agility.” 

At the time, the issue of who the enemy was didn’t cause much political disagreement in Washington; it was generally understood to be Al Qaeda, or groups like it. Early skeptics questioned the wisdom of giving a single federal department a monumental budget as well as broad policing and surveillance powers, but caution was largely cast aside. Agencies within the department, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), which includes Border Patrol, received lavish bipartisan support. Twenty-four years later, their mission and their conduct have exceeded the worst imaginings of even their sharpest critics. With Donald Trump in the White House, and a servile Republican majority in Congress, ICE and Border Patrol are turning into the President’s personal army, targeting immigrants, Democrats, and, as the recent events in Minnesota have shown, just about anyone who crosses their path.

The situation is no less shocking for having been at least partly predictable. For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constitutional constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies when they conduct searches and make arrests; in instances of abuse, oversight has tended to be far more lax, leading to a culture of freewheeling unaccountability. The consequences were on display from the start of D.H.S.’s incursion into Minneapolis, which began in December, under the name Operation Metro Surge. On January 7th, Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer and an Army veteran, shot and killed Ms. Renee Good, a mother of three. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, was killed when two C.B.P. agents fired at least ten shots at him, including six while he was lying motionless on the ground. Witness accounts and phone videos make clear that neither Good nor Pretti, both of whom were U.S. citizens, posed any immediate danger to the agents. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of D.H.S., said that they had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” She was following the White House line. Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the President, told agents after Good’s killing, “You have immunity.” Pretti, he later wrote on X, was 🤥“an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

These lies 🤥were the basis of the government’s legal response, prompting half a dozen federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Minneapolis field office to resign. State and local authorities, blocked from conducting their own inquiries, were accused by the Justice Department of conspiring to oppose Trump. Shortly after Mr. Pretti’s killing (murder❗😢), Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz, offering three “common sense solutions” to end the federal siege. One of them was to turn over the state’s voter rolls. “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it cannot achieve through the courts?” a district-court judge asked Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers.

In the face of mounting national outrage, the Administration came as close as it could to admitting fault without actually doing so. The President demoted Greg Bovino, the commanding agent in charge of the roving patrols that have besieged Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis. The night before, according to the Times, Noem had to defend herself in a two-hour meeting at the White House. Miller wasn’t there—“he knows just how and when to disappear,” a former colleague once said. But he has since acknowledged that the two agents involved in the Mr. Pretti shooting “may not have been following” protocol.

The idea that this response would be enough to temper the political fallout from 🤢Operation Metro Surge💢 is a sign of the unbridled impunity that reigns in the White House. 

Three thousand federal agents remain in Minnesota. A parallel operation, run by Citizenship and Immigration Services—the D.H.S. agency responsible for administering the legal-immigration system—has targeted fifty-six hundred refugees in the state for potential “fraud.” The federal government had previously granted these people legal status. But, more than a hundred of them, according to a lawsuit by the International Refugee Assistance Project, were arrested by ICE and sent to jails in Texas, where they were re-interviewed, as though the legal process they’d already gone through meant nothing.

No other aspect of Trump’s crackdown has shown any sign of changing, either. D.H.S. agents in masks and unmarked vehicles have been abducting immigrants with legal status and detaining and harassing citizens who look or sound as though they might not be U.S.-born. A recent ICE memo, obtained by the Associated Press, stated that agents can now enter people’s homes to make arrests without a warrant from a judge. The agency has always relied on administrative warrants, signed by its own officials, to carry out deportation orders. But, this authorization marks a radical departure from legal precedent, and a clear affront to the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches.

On Wednesday, a federal judge issued an injunction to block the refugee arrests in Minnesota, but whether D.H.S. will comply is anyone’s guess. According to a recent ruling from the chief federal district-court judge in the state, ICE violated nearly a hundred court orders in January alone—and that was just orders relating to Operation Metro Surge. The Administration has ignored other federal injunctions, going back to March of last year, and it has serially lied about aspects of its operations in court, bringing rebukes from judges across the country. “After nearly thirty-five years of experience with federal law enforcement,” one of them, a Trump appointee on Long Island, wrote, “I have never encountered anything like this.”

Tom Homan, the Administration’s “border czar,” has been dispatched to Minneapolis to oversee the situation. His current title is itself revealing. The White House is bringing the border to the rest of the country. Politically, in light of the institutional history of D.H.S., this gives the Administration broader license to claim that it’s facing down foreign threats; practically, agents on the ground are engaging in exceptionally aggressive forms of policing.

Last year, at the Administration’s behest, Congress tripled ICE’s budget, making it the most heavily funded law-enforcement body in the country. After the killings in Minnesota, Democrats have threatened to block further funding unless the Administration agrees to impose modest restraints on agents’ conduct, such as forcing them to remove their masks and raising the legal bar for the use of warrants. These are rearguard actions that are long overdue. 

On Thursday afternoon, Senate Democrats reached a deal with Donald Trump to forestall a government shutdown while they negotiate the details. The inevitable retrenchment came hours later: Bondi issued orders to arrest four people for disrupting a church service in Minneapolis. Two of them were anti-ice activists; the others were journalists reporting the story. ♦

Published in the print edition with the headline “Out of Control.”

*Gestapo:  

The secret police of Nazi Germany, formed in 1933, and operating until 1945, that enforced government rule through terror and repression, with the authority to arrest individuals and organizations suspected of opposing the Nazi regime without judicial oversight. The organization's primary function was to identify and suppress threats to the state, a mission that included significant involvement in the Holocaust.

Donald Trump and his maga Republican cabinet live in a culture of lies

Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself New York Times opinion by Ezra

Last February, a year ago, I wrote an essay about the Trump administration’s strategy of “muzzle velocity.” Muzzle velocity, in its literal sense, describes the ferocious speed of a bullet at the moment it exits the front end of a gun. The term came from an interview that Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, gave in 2019. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” Bannon said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Trump world has an affection for analogies that🤢 glorify the combination of violence and speed. 

After Trump’s second Inaugural Address, Taylor Budowich, then one of the White House’s deputy chiefs of staff, tweeted, “Now, comes SHOCK AND AWE.” “Shock and awe” refers to the bombing campaign that launched America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was an awesome demonstration of initial force that belied a catastrophic absence of information, planning and wisdom. It was the belief that an immediate show of dominance would lead to a society’s submission rather than its revolt. Both Bannon and Budowich’s metaphors have proved more grimly apt than they intended.


The strategy of the Trump administration over the last year has been to move so fast, to do so much, that the opposition could never find its footing. This was Bannon’s insight, and it was real: Attention is limited. The media, the opposition, the electorate — they can only focus on so much. Overwhelm their capacity for attention and you overwhelm their capacity to think, organize and oppose.

But what you are doing to the opposition you are also doing to yourself. “It is a strategy that forces you into overreach,” I wrote last year. “To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself.” And that is what happened. Clearly, the Trump administration is overwhelmed — by its own violence, its own cruelty, its own lies, its own chaos.

There is nothing unusual about a presidency being overwhelmed by crises. What is unusual about the Trump administration is that it has created those crises itself. The Trump administration chose to create a regime of ever-shifting tariffs; it chose to threaten to take Greenland through force or through tariffs; it chose to investigate its political enemies, leading up to its effort to intimidate Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve; it chose to alienate our closest allies, encouraging both Canada and Britain to seek closer ties with China; it chose to stage quasi-invasions of blue cities, setting the scene for the horrifying killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And that’s just a partial accounting of the disasters and diminishments of the last few weeks and months.
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Muzzle velocity was built on the idea that the Trump administration had reserves of attention and focus that the rest of us did not. The reality is just the opposite. The White House has demands on its attention and focus that the rest of us do not. We are not responsible for managing or controlling everything from the labor market to A.I. policy to immigration enforcement and vaccine approvals. We will not be blamed for a measles outbreak or a recession. But the president will.

That is why most White Houses pay such close attention to policy processes and chain of command: These are all ways of filtering the torrent of information and decisions in order to conserve the focus and attention of the president and his top aides. Well-managed White Houses — and personally disciplined presidents — are ruthless in their pursuit of prioritization. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Vanity Fair in 2012. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

But this White House — and this president — have treated freneticism as a virtue and discipline as a vice. Instead of seeking to limit the number of crises and conflicts that they need to remain on top of, members of the Trump administration, from their first day, sought to multiply them. They spent their initial months in office ripping the wiring out of the federal government, including gutting internal teams, like the National Security Council, that are meant to help process information on behalf of the president. They have treated caution and restraint as an admission of weakness.

In January Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff who, in practice, acts as Trump’s prime minister, delivered a message to ICE agents: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony,” he said. That message was part of a broader effort to change the culture at ICE and the Border Patrol, Caitlin Dickerson, a journalist at The Atlantic who covers immigration, told me:

I was talking to one former ICE official who told me that you would always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a potentially violent and dangerous one. 

Usually, the (reasonable) concern was that officers would be too unwilling to use their gun, because they worried about potential repercussions. And there were all these layers of investigation that would take place after a shooting. His fear when he was in ICE for 30 years was that he wouldn’t use his gun in a moment when he needed to.

And now it’s almost as if the opposite fear is true. We’ve seen in ICE people losing their jobs, high-level officials losing their jobs because they’re not delivering enough deportations, they’re not being aggressive enough. I think Miller is just underscoring that argument that you’re not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive and, in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.

It is hard not to see a straight line from that change in culture to the tragic killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, on the streets of Minneapolis.

Every organization comes to resemble its leader. Trump himself is easily distracted, desirous of flattery rather than counsel, impressed by crude displays of dominance and violence and obsessed with social media and cable news — and so too is his White House. The sycophancy among Trump’s aides is so crude as to be indistinguishable from mockery. 

(Evil Nazi) Stephen Miller, speaking to a New York magazine reporter about Trump’s health, said, “The headline of your story should be ‘The Superhuman President.’” When Miller says this, does he realize he is making his boss look ridiculous❓ Does he intend it❓

But it’s not just (evil Nazi) Miller. Trump’s cabinet meetings take the form of totalitarian kitsch. Here is Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrapping up remarks in December:  (My personal observation about Donald Trump's farcical cabinet meetings is to call them seances.) If you were to ask me what I’m grateful for, whether it’s a Thanksgiving, it’s a Christmas, a Hanukkah, a New Year’s, anytime of year the fact that this president, after four years serving in office, he could have just left it in the rearview mirror and went on to really enjoy retirement, but he is willing to take a bullet for all of you tuning in at home, because he believes in his flag, our freedom, our liberties and to save the greatest country in the history of the world. So I’m grateful this holiday season for you, Mr. President. 🤢

The joke of Trump’s cabinet meetings is that no one is joking. These meetings are not just a performance; they are a culture. Trump’s favor is won through demonstrations of loyalty rather than competence. The president wants parades, not process, and that is what he gets.

The irony of Trump’s second term is that he was much better served by the advisers in his first term, who understood that part of their job was to protect him — and the rest of us — from his worst impulses. In 2020, when Trump reportedly responded to the George Floyd protesters by asking the military to “just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something,” his advisers weren’t protecting only us when they refused. They were also protecting him.

Trump’s second White House was built to ensure that no one would ever tell Trump no again. He wanted a culture of lies and sycophancy, and he got one. “I hear stories from my predecessors,” Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, told Vanity Fair in December, “about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or cost lives. I don’t have that.”

Trump’s aides flatter him and lie to us. They indulge his constant distraction and so they too are constantly distracted. They are dominated by him and so they seek to dominate us. What they believe to be their strengths are their weaknesses. You can see it in their metaphors. The shock and awe bombing campaign was the prelude to catastrophe, not to victory. And so it is here.

This is a presidency that is, by any measure, failing. Trump is unpopular; his brutality and his tariffs have turned immigration and affordability, once among of his strongest issues, into liabilities. Trump’s opposition is increasingly united and mobilized; Democrats are besting Republicans in elections all across the country and disciplined, brave, beautiful protest movements have emerged in the cities ICE has sought to occupy. I cannot do better here than to quote Adam Serwer’s dispatch from Minnesota:


Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

We are watching an administration that is not only retreating in key areas — dropping its demand for all of Greenland, sending Greg Bovino back to Border Patrol’s El Centro region, meekly backing off its trade war with China — but finding itself cornered by its own cruelty and lies. Miller’s slander of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” could not stand even the barest contact with the video of Pretti trying to protect a nearby woman or the quiet heroism of his daily life.

Trump appears to be trying to course correct, but he has neither the discipline nor the personnel to truly change his presidency’s direction. This administration is a reflection of who the president is and what he wants. This White House is not beset by crises. This White House is the crisis.

Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” 

Can somebody who knows JD Vance please read this essay to him? Vance is a Roman Catholic convert who needs a spiritual refresh

You can tell a lot about someone by what they leave behind.
Echo essay published by Katy McGrady in Substack.

Underlining the Parable of the Good Samaritan
The Ulma Family of Poland are saints for our time.

What family photos were framed on the wall❓

What items were left on a nightstand❓ What stories do people tell about them❓ What passages are highlighted in their Bible❓ 

Wictoria and Jozef Ulman had a single word written in the margins of their family Bible, in the Gospel of Luke, right beside the parable of the Good Samaritan, which they had underlined: Yes❗

That tells us almost everything we need to know about the Ulmas, and what legacy they left behind: the Gospel was real to them.

This Polish farm family, with six children and one on the way, knew the Gospel mandate to care for the tossed down, cast aside, and hurt was not just an abstract idea for preachers at the pulpit. They knew they were called to care for the marginalized themselves, in their real life circumstances, and so when the Szali and Goldman families came to find shelter as the Nazis were rounding up the Jews in 1942, the Ulmas opened their home. 

Their farm became a shelter, and for nearly two years, this Polish Catholic family and these Eastern European Jews lived and worked together, living the parable of the Good Samaritan.

It would’ve been very easy for the Ulmas to say, “we have little kids, we can’t hide you here.” It would’ve been entirely understandable for the Ulmas to say, “we can’t afford to feed you” or “we don’t want to die too.” I’m not sure anyone would’ve blamed Jozef or Wictoria for being fearful or cautious in the face of the evils of the day.

But,  they did not cower. They did not hesitate.

In an interview with Paulina Guzic for OSV, (Our Sunday Visitor) the postulator of the Ulma canonization cause said this:

“It is sometimes said that they behaved downright irresponsibly by taking in all these Jews. After all, they risked their lives, the lives of their children. And Wiktoria was soon expecting the birth of this next, seventh child. Well, it’s precisely the opposite. In their lives you can see a deep desire to live. They very much wanted to live … constantly discovering the Lord God, the beauty of everyday life, the beauty of life.”

They were eventually sold out by a policeman who knew their whereabouts, bringing the German police to their front door, leading to their brutal execution in the front yard. 17 people total, including the six Ulma children, were shot and killed in a matter of minutes, all so the Nazis could make an example of them. 

Eyewitness accounts include the horrific details that as the adults were shot and killed, the children stood by screaming and crying. 

Not knowing what to do with these children in the aftermath, the police decided to shoot and kill them too. When asked about it later, Eilert Dieken, the German commander, responded: So that you would not have any problems with them.

The Ulmas, in the face of unspeakable evil, believed the mandate of the Gospel: they were moved with compassion, they attended to their neighbor, they treated others with mercy, and were killed for it.

The Ulma family was beatified together in 2023. This is the first time an entire family, including a child who was being born at the time of his mother’s martyrdom, were all raised to the altars together.

A monument to their heroism and sanctity stands in Markowa with these words:

Saving the lives of others they laid down their own lives. Hiding eight elder brothers in faith, they were killed with them. May their sacrifice be a call for respect and love to every human being! They were the sons and daughters of this land; they will remain in our hearts.

In light of everything happening in our country and world, in the face of remarkable injustice, visible violence, horrific destruction, and deep division, I can’t help but ask the Ulma family for their intercession.
Can I too say “Yes❗” to the command of the parable of the Good Samaritan? Am I willing to help those who have been tossed down, cast aside, and rounded up?

At the heart of the Good Samaritan parable is someone beaten down, and someone passing by sees the injustice, hurt, pain, and suffering, and decides to help.

As videos of the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, January 24, 2026, circulated, what happened mere moments before his death is notable: he was trying to help a woman tossed down on the ice.

Political commentary and vastly varied opinions about what’s happening with immigration enforcement and protesting aside, it’s evident that a man was killed — after a confusing scrum and in the midst of a tense situation — after his last earthly act was to try and help someone stand back up.

Archbishop Bernard Hebda’s statement after yet another tragedy in his Archdiocese is poignant:

“Following January 24, 2026, Saturday’s tragic shooting in Minneapolis, I ask all people of good will to join me today in prayer for Alex Jeffrey Pretti, for his parents, and for his loved ones.

The loss of another life amidst the tensions that have gripped Minnesota should prompt all of us to ask what we can do to restore the Lord’s peace. While we rightly thirst for God’s justice and hunger for his peace, this will be not be achieved until we are able to rid our hearts of the hatreds and prejudices that prevent us from seeing each other as brothers and sisters created in the image and likeness of God. That is as true for our undocumented neighbors as it is for our elected officials and for the men and women who have the unenviable responsibility of enforcing our laws. They all need our humble prayers.”

Perhaps the only way to see the image and likeness of God in another is to first and foremost remember we’re all called to be a good samaritan: to help others up when they’ve been pushed down, to offer shelter when we have room, and to see the goodness of God in even the most heartbreaking moments.

As Archbishop Coakley, president of the USCCB said in his statement:

“As a nation we must come together in dialogue, turning away from dehumanizing rhetoric and acts which threaten human life. In this spirit, in unity with Pope Leo, it is important to proclaim, ‘Peace is built on respect for people!’”

A priest I know and respect in the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, who is also a chaplain in the Minnesota National Guard, gave a very short and powerful homily yesterday. It’s worth watching in full.

Yesterday, at the Angelus address at noon above St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo spoke about the timing and place of Jesus’s mission. When John the Baptist was arrested, he could’ve perhaps been tempted to think “not the right time.” As his cousin is imprisoned, he could’ve perhaps assumed “not the right place.”

And yet… “it was precisely in this dark situation that Jesus began to bring the light of the Good News: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near’.”

If these moments seems like they are heavy, or dark, or hopeless, or terrifying, the courage of the Ulmas can remind us that the Gospel is real, and the Gospel, proclaimed by you, is needed most, right now.

“In our lives, both individually and as a Church, interior struggles or circumstances we deem unfavorable can lead us to believe that it is not the right time to proclaim the Gospel, to make a decision, to make a choice, or to change a situation. 

In this way, however, we risk becoming paralyzed by indecision or imprisoned by excessive prudence, whereas the Gospel calls us to dare to trust. God is at work at all times; every moment is “God’s time,” even when we do not feel ready or when the situation seems unfavorable.”

We must dare to trust. In justice and healing, in mercy and forgiveness. We must dare to hope, that God is not (nor will he ever be) finished. We must dare to believe, that God is working, even still, even when it’d be far easier to close the door, ignore the news, or try and pretend it’s all just going to be fine.

 

And as Pope Leo said, our God is one who “…enters fully into the complexity of human situations and relationships.”

This is not a moment for ceaseless news commentary. It’s not just a moment for video analysis or hand wringing. It’s a moment for Gospel proclamation, because only then can the Gospel serve “…as a leaven of fraternity and peace among all individuals, cultures, religions and peoples.”

And what does the Gospel proclaim❓ What should we write Yes❗ to in the margins of our Bible❓

He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn and cared for him. -Luke 10:34

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must reject evilism spewed by Tucker Carlson and antisemite Nick Fuentes

"Tucker Carlson is fog," writes John Mac Ghlionn in this interesting political analysis published in the Boston Globe.

John Mac Ghlionn contributes regularly to US News & World Report, Spectator World, and The Hill.

Tucker Carlson recently chose to interview the evil Nazi

Nick Fuentes, a man loathed by most of the American left and by a substantial share of the American right. Fuentes is widely understood, across ideological lines, as toxic. 

Fuentes has spoken admiringly of figures like💢 Hitler and Stalin, flirted openly with antisemitic ✡️conspiracy theories, rejected the legitimacy of liberal democracy, argued that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, and spoken approvingly of political violence and ethnic nationalism. None of this is ambiguous. None of it requires interpretation. Fuentes has said disgraceful things. Full stop.💢❗

But, politically speaking, the evil Fuentes is a much easier problem for Republicans to handle than Carlson is. 

Fuentes is an threatening evil flare 🔥in the night sky. 

Evil, crude, and easy to track. Everyone knows where he stands. He doesn’t pretend to be a loyal party man. He has withheld support when it suited him, including refusing to back Trump in 2024. He attacks Trump directly, in plain language, without deflecting blame onto lower-level figures.

So, it allows the maga Republicans to say, “That’s not us,” 🤥and (sort of❓) mean it.🙄 Fuentes functions, in this sense, as a kind of ideological quarantine zone. He is visible, legible, and — crucially — containable.  (Except that Fuentes continues to attract attention making him dangerous. "Evil is as evil does". His evilism is like an evil magnet that catches metal nails.) 

Carlson is weirdly different. Not because he is “worse” in the moral-ranking sense people enjoy arguing about online, but because he is more structurally dangerous to the GOP. 

Fuentes is outside the house, shouting. Carlson is inside the house, rearranging furniture, insisting he is only “asking questions” while he does it.

Before going further, I should be explicit about where this criticism comes from.

I write this as a conservative who regularly watches Carlson — his YouTube clips, his long-form interviews, his podcasts. This is not the view of a drive-by critic or a partisan adversary. It comes from sustained exposure. And that exposure has become increasingly frustrating. 

Carlson says one thing and then does another. (Ugh❗ "who  knew"❓) He gestures toward restraint and then indulges provocation. He flirts with accountability and then retreats into ambiguity. When viewers notice the contradiction, he waves it away — cackles, shrugs, insists they’re imagining things. What he sells as misunderstanding is, in fact, gaslighting, and any attentive viewer can see it.👀

There’s an old principle here. The better enemy is often the one you can see. The threat you can name. The real trouble is the fog that rolls in quietly and convinces you it’s just “weather.”

Carlson is fog.

He is the kind of “dissident” who wants insider access and outsider swagger, Establishment proximity and anti-Establishment theatrics. He throws stones from behind the wall and then acts surprised when people notice his name etched into them.

This isn’t an abstract concern. In late December, more than a dozen senior staffers left the Heritage Foundation to join a new group founded by former vice president Mike Pence. Their exit followed internal turmoil sparked by the growing influence of right-wing media figures pushing antisemitic and extremist narratives. Carlson became a central flashpoint because he occupies a uniquely powerful position within conservative media — powerful enough to force institutions to choose sides.

The rupture was not really about Carlson alone. It was about what he represented, and what defending — or refusing to defend — him signaled. Editors, donors, board members, and allied organizations faced an uncomfortable choice: Was Carlson still an asset to be shielded or a liability to be contained? The fracture followed those answers. Some closed ranks around him, viewing criticism as Establishment overreach. Others stepped back from him, driven less by ideological disagreement than by their instinct for institutional survival.

The Heritage Foundation bombshell came shortly after Turning Point USA’s annual youth conference — intended as a unifying celebration honoring Charlie Kirk — devolved into a public brawl over the future of Trump’s movement. Ben Shapiro used the stage to deliver a scathing attack on Carlson and his allies, calling them “grifters and charlatans” trafficking in conspiracy theories and falsehoods. 

Carlson took the stage soon after and fired back, escalating the confrontation before thousands of young conservative activists. That moment mattered because it revealed real fault lines in the conservative coalition. Internal division creates opportunity, especially for figures like Carlson, who thrive on provocation and plausible deniability.

The pattern was evident in Carlson’s recent trip to Qatar, when he headlined the Doha Forum, interviewed Qatar’s prime minister, and then announced he was buying property in Qatar “to make a statement,” insisting he’s “an American and a free man” who will live wherever he wants. That’s a remarkable posture for a man whose brand is built on warning Americans about hostile ideologies, foreign money, and the slow-motion sabotage of the West.

Qatar is not some harmless foreign backdrop for a trolling gesture. Rather, Qatar is a hostile regime that has long operated as a banker, broker, and diplomatic shield for Islamist terror networks, including Hamas and Hezbollah. It hosts Hamas’s political leadership, funds aligned groups, and functions as a key back channel in conflicts that have spilled Western blood. Whatever one thinks about Israel, Gaza, or Middle Eastern politics more broadly, Qatar sits at the center of the reality being ignored.

The problem becomes clearer in Carlson’s treatment of Israel and Jews. This is not a defense of Israel or of Christian Zionism, both of which are legitimate subjects for debate and criticism. The issue is Carlson’s insistence on having it both ways. He regularly says he “likes Israel” even as he repeatedly singles it out for scorn, derides Christian Zionism, and peppers his commentary with remarks about Jews that are clearly designed to provoke. 

In the eulogy for Charlie Kirk, Carlson likened Kirk to Jesus and invoked shadowy “people in power” conspiring in lamplit rooms, “eating hummus,” to silence truth-tellers. 

The implication was unambiguous, even if it went unnamed. When challenged, Carlson retreats behind the claim that he isn’t antisemitic  ✡️. It’s a familiar routine: push the line, gauge the reaction, deny intent.

Fuentes, by contrast, dispenses with pretense. He calls himself an antisemite ✡️ and means it. 🤢 His views are abhorrent, 💢but they are unmistakable. He doesn’t hide behind irony or implication. Republicans don’t have to guess where he stands. With Carlson, they are invited to 

pretend there is nothing to see. This is why Fuentes is useful as a foil and why Carlson is the real bellwether. The test isn’t whether conservatives denounce a 27-year-old shock merchant. That part is easy. The real test is whether conservatives will confront Carlson’s far more consequential pattern of deception and evasion.

This is what makes Carlson dangerous in a way Fuentes isn’t. Fuentes doesn’t have institutional leverage. He can’t tilt committee staffers. He can’t normalize a new foreign-policy fashion among influencers who actually shape the party’s mood. He can’t blur the line between “America First” and “Qatar First” while still being treated, by many, as a serious man.

Tucker Carlson can. He has a second kind of leverage, too: family adjacency to real power. His son, Buckley, works for Vice President JD Vance.

That doesn’t mean Carlson dictates policy through his son. It means Carlson’s ecosystem overlaps with the governing ecosystem. The “outsider” is not outside. He is in the wiring. He is close enough to touch the current.

And what does Carlson do with that position? He almost never fires cleanly at the top. He rarely, if ever, says “Trump is wrong, and here is why.” Instead, he attacks the perimeter: appointees, advisers, agencies, “neocons,” “globalists,” nameless operators — anyone who can be blamed without forcing a direct break with the one man whose coalition he still wants to influence.

It’s how you remain “inside” and “against” at the same time. It’s how you get to market yourself as a martyr while still dining at court.

I have grown disillusioned with the right — fed up with evasions, with the Epstein nonanswers, with the reflexive closing of ranks whenever accountability might cost something. This isn’t the opposition talking; it’s disappointment from someone who once believed Trump could actually Make America Great Again. I was wrong. The second term has been more erratic, not less. The promised draining of the swamp never happened; power simply reorganized itself. Tucker Carlson didn’t oppose the marshy makeover. He learned how to thrive within it. And that is why he poses a greater danger to Republicans than Fuentes.

Liberals may be tempted to dismiss this as a family quarrel on the right. That is a mistake. Trump is already a volatile leader, and he still has three years left in office. Internal divisions within his coalition are widening, not narrowing. As Trump's political opposition pressure mounts, he lashes out more frequently, targets more erratically, and governs more impulsively.

Republicans will not win in the midterms in 2026 — and continue to govern after 2028 — when they  continue to blindly support Donald Trump like lemmings heading off a cliff.  Fuentes is an evil marginal figure who is easy to reject, but Carlson is ambitious, he aspires to be a powerful media figure who presents himself as a truth-teller while slowly expanding what the wrongminded Republican party is willing to accept, excuse, and blindly defend.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans taking American democracy into political dark ages: Germany 1933 Redux

Echo opinion published in The New York Times: Donald Trump has wielded power as no previous president has, often in open defiance of the law. His evil actions have raised a chilling question.

Is America Losing Our Democracy❓

To the Editor of The New York Times:

As a refugee from Nazi Germany, I noticed that there is one indicator of authoritarianism that you did not mention: the use of masked agents grabbing people off the streets and from their workplaces, invading their homes in the wee hours and “disappearing*” them without hearings or even allowing them to contact their relatives. 

I believe that the danger⚠️ of this tactic outstrips all the other evil Trumpzi executive over-reaches❗

From Martin Oppenheimer in Franklin Township, New Jersey
The writer is a professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers University

*The Holocaust was Nazi Germany's deliberate murder of approximately six million European Jews and at least five million prisoners of war. "Disappearing" peoplel is a serious human rights crime against humanity:  Hundreds of thousands of people have vanished during conflicts or periods of repression in at least 85 countries around the world.

These enforced disappearances are secret abductions by a state or a political party, or their proxies, with a refusal to acknowledge the person’s whereabouts and condition. The abducted person becomes a ghost, invisible, never heard from again.

Enforced disappearances as an international human rights crime can be traced back to the Nuremberg trials in Germany following World War II.

Donald Trump's defense enabler Pete Hegseth extended his loyalty to the cult master to becoming his executioner

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Frank Kendall.

Pete Hegseth is now the Heinrich Himmler* of the Trumpzi administration. 

While there may be little sorrow over the deaths of (proven) drug dealers somewhere in the ocean, Americans should all be concerned about how our military is being used by the Trump administration, and what that implies for the future of our country.

Over the past several weeks Donald Trump and his defense enabler and executioner Pete Hegseth have ordered American forces to kill at least 64 people whom the administration alleged were moving drugs headed for the United States. This campaign seems to be expanding and may soon include strikes into sovereign states such as Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico.  Donald Trump has unilaterally justified these actions by asserting to Congress that we are effectively at war — a noninternational armed conflict, as he calls it — with drug trafficking organizations.

Our military leaders are trained to evaluate the legality of orders they are given. As part of their professional education, the American values of respect for and compliance with the law are reinforced throughout military officers’ careers. They all understand that they have a duty to challenge any order they believe may be illegal — and disobey any order they know to be illegal.

The order to preemptively execute alleged drug traffickers at sea has never been considered a legal act before. The Justice Department informed Congress that it considers the strikes to be lawful and not to require congressional authorization under the War Powers Resolution. But many legal experts believe these strikes to be illegal; on Friday Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for human rights, said they violate international human rights law. Nevertheless, our military continues to carry out these strikes against vessels, intentionally killing people who, as far as can be determined, are not engaged in any violent, hostile act against the United States, have no perceived intent to engage in hostile acts against the United States, do not appear to be armed to carry out any attack and could be apprehended easily instead of killed summarily.

What happened to the requirement to disobey an unlawful order❓

There is a protocol for what members of our military should do when faced with this type of situation. If an officer is concerned about the legality of an order, he or she turns to the unit’s organizational legal authority for a legal opinion. If needed, there is a legal chain of command that can provide higher levels of legal authority, too. That chain starts with military judge advocates within all major commands, rises from there to that Military Department’s judge advocate generals, the general counsel of the Department of Defense, and then the White House Office of General Counsel and the attorney general of the United States.

In the course of Donald Trump’s second term, there has been a concerted and successful effort to put compliant and supportive lawyers in positions of legal authority within the administration and within the military chain of command. This is true in the White House, in the Justice Department and in the Department of Defense. Pete Hegseth has been very direct about this. One of his first actions as defense secretary, along with firing several senior leaders he viewed as too woke, was to fire some of the Military Department’s most senior judge advocate generals. He has openly bragged about prioritizing “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

Today I believe we can say with confidence that the legal chain of command for the military, at least at its senior echelons, has been populated with lawyers who will not say no to virtually anything Mr. Trump or Mr. Hegseth directs them to do.

This puts our military leaders in an untenable position. While they may question the legality of an order, once the department’s legal authority has ruled that the order is lawful, disobeying it becomes a criminal offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They could be court-martialed for disobedience; to defend themselves, they must prove the order was illegal. Facing this situation, a few officers may, as a matter of conscience, still say no. But while I have enormous respect for the professionalism and integrity of our senior military leaders, I’m afraid they will be the exception. Most officers would almost certainly obey the order.

One of those exceptions may be Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, where the attacks on suspected drug vessels and their crews are occurring, who said last month that he was stepping down. We still don’t know the circumstances of his departure, but I have never seen a four-star officer leave a major command after what will be only one year, and after having served only one of the three years needed for retirement at his highest grade. Like many other events associated with the Trump administration, this is not normal❗

This all leaves us with two critical questions: What other illegal orders will Donald Trump or his executioner Hegseth give that would involve the use of lethal force by our military❓ And is there any use of force that Donald Trump's  handpicked legal authorities (aka "SS" squads) would find unlawful❓❗

During his first term, Donald Trump proposed sending military forces to Portland, Oregon, to respond with lethal force to protests. General Mark Milley, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had the character and the courage to push back on this proposal. Importantly, General Milley was supported by the senior lawyer in the room at the time. 

In this administration, if the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs pushes back, we can be confident that the lawyers in the room will support the president.

Frank Kendall was the secretary of the Air Force for the Biden administration.

*Heinrich Luitpold Himmler - Nazi- (b. 7 October 1900 – d. 23 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician and military leader. He was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron; SS), a leading member of the Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful people in Nazi Germany. He was also one of the main architects of the Holocaust.

After serving in a reserve battalion during World War I without seeing combat, Himmler went on to join the Nazi Party in 1923. In 1925, he joined the SS, which was initially a small paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party that served as a bodyguard unit for Adolf Hitler. Himmler rose steadily through the SS's ranks to become Reichsführer-SS by 1929. Under Himmler's leadership, the SS grew from a 290-man battalion into one of the most powerful institutions in Nazi Germany.