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John Yoo’s Old Trash and the South Shore Apartment Invasion

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Since the invasion of an apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore on September 30, in the same week that Trump sent notice to Congress ostensibly authorizing his murderboat strikes in the Caribbean, I haven’t stopped thinking about this John Yoo opinion from October 2001.

It considers the legality of using military forces to combat terrorist threats inside the United States, with an extensive discussion about whether the Fourth Amendment would prevent the military from seizing and securing an entire apartment building — as CBP did in the September 30 raid — and detaining, searching, and interrogating everyone found inside.

The view that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations against terrorists makes eminent sense. Consider, for example, a case in which a military commander, authorized to use force domestically, received information that, although credible, did not amount to probable cause, that a terrorist group had concealed a weapon of mass destruction in an apartment building. In order to prevent a disaster in which hundreds or thousands of lives would be lost, the commander should be able to immediately seize and secure the entire building, evacuate and search the premises, and detain, search, and interrogate everyone found inside. If done by the police for ordinary law enforcement purposes, such actions most likely would be held to violate the Fourth Amendment. See Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U.S. 85 (1979) (Fourth Amendment violated by evidence search of all persons who are found on compact premises subject to search warrant, even when police have a reasonable belief that such persons are connected with drug trafficking and may be concealing contraband). To subject the military to the warrant and probable cause requirement that the courts impose on the police would make essential military operations such as this utterly impossible. If the military are to protect public interests of the highest order, the officer on the scene must be able to “exercise unquestioned command of the situation.” Michigan v. Summers, 452 U.S. 692, 703 (1981).34

34 In a case decided not long after the end of the Civil War, the Supreme Court of Illinois reached similar conclusions. See Johnson v. Jones, 44 III. 142 (1867), 1867 WL 5117. This was an action in trespass brought by an alleged Confederate sympathizer in Illinois who had been arrested and imprisoned in a military fortress, purportedly on the authority of President Lincoln’s orders. The court rejected the defense that the plaintiff had been arrested as a belligerent and held as a prisoner of war. It did, however, state that had the plaintiff been a belligerent, “the order of the President was wholly unnecessary to authorize the arrest. Any soldier has the right, in time of war, to arrest a belligerent engaged in acts of hostility toward the government, and lodge him in the nearest military prison, and to use such force as may be necessary for that purpose – even unto death.” 1867 WL at ‘5. Further, although the court also rejected the defense that the arrest was justified as an exercise of martial law, it also stated that “[i]f a commanding officer finds within his lines a person, whether citizen or alien, giving aid or information to the enemy, be can arrest and detain him so long as may be necessary for the security or success of his army. He can do this under the same necessity which will justify him, when an emergency requires it, in seizing or destroying the private property’ of a citizen.” Id. at *7. In terrorist wars, unlike conventional warfare, there are of course no battle lines, and the theater of operations may well be in heavily populated urban settings. We think, however, that the same principle applies, and that a military commander operating in such a theater has the same emergency powers of arrest and detention.

As far as I’m aware, the memo was only used as an interim thought piece in 2001.

Rather than using the memo to seize entire office buildings, I believe it served as a basis to seize entire data streams and scanning all of it to search for “terrorist” content.

But the example Yoo envisioned years ago is not far off what we saw on September 30.

While subsequent reporting suggests that the raid arose out of a tip that the slum landlord who owns the building gave to the FBI (meaning, they used CBP as a means to clear the building they had refused to pay to secure), in execution, a number of aspects of the raid looks just like what the raid Yoo envisioned two decades ago.

The raid took place in the middle of the night; a warranted search would mandate permissible hours — usually after dawn — when the search could be conducted.

The entire raid was predicated on the presence of (initially) two and in retrospect just a single Tren de Aragua member. But virtually every one was detained while law enforcement searched for active warrants, and 37 people were arrested. With the exception of a few apartments, the entire building was searched, and left in a mess.

Federal agents pounded on the door of his South Shore apartment about 2 a.m. Tuesday.

“I told them they must have the wrong apartment,” the man said.

But armed agents busted open many doors after arriving in U-Haul trucks to raid the 130-unit apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. They woke up residents to handcuff them with zip ties and led them into unmarked vans.

Rodrick Johnson, a U.S. citizen, said he heard “people dropping on the roof” before FBI agents kicked in his door. He was stuffed inside a van with his neighbors for what felt like several hours until agents told them the building was clear, he said.

“They didn’t tell me why I was being detained,” Johnson said. “They left people’s doors open, firearms, money, whatever, right there in the open.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said federal agencies arrested at least 37 people in the operation at the building, which they claimed is frequented by members of Venezulan gang Tren de Aragua. About 300 federal agents, some landing on the roof from helicopters, descended upon the building, according to NewsNation, which was invited along for the operation.

The report didn’t mention women and children appear to be among the detained, said Brandon Lee, a spokesman with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Organizers worry many people were taken without warrants.

“These were families with their children escorted out in the middle of the night,” Lee said. “This administration is using PR efforts to try to turn communities against their neighbors.”

Residents said the building had become home to Venezuelan migrants. The raid saw people’s apartments turned upside down, citizens held for hours and their neighbors taken away to unknown places. Belongings were stolen from apartments after the agents left the building open.

In other words, this raid looks just like what we would expect if Stephen Miller were applying already-dodgy John Yoo opinions targeting terrorists who really did launch a military style attack on the US, and applied it, instead, against a gang that Miller has lied persistently to turn into something greater than it is.

And if that doesn’t already terrify you, much of the rest of the opinion addresses the kinds of things Miller openly fever dreams about, such as the subjection of “loyal citizens, or persons who though believed to be disloyal have not acted overtly against the government, to deprivations that would under ordinary circumstances be illegal.”

State and federal court decisions reviewing the deployment of military force domestically by State Governors to quell civil disorder and to protect the public from violent attack have repeatedly noted that the constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights do not apply to military operations in the same way that they apply to peacetime law enforcement activities. Thus, the courts have explained that “[w]ar has exigencies that cannot readily be enumerated or described, which may render it necessary for a commanding officer to subject loyal citizens, or persons who though believed to be disloyal have not acted overtly against the government, to deprivations that would under ordinary circumstances be illegal.” Commonwealth ex rel. Wadsworth v. Shortall, 55 A. 952, 955 (Pa. 1903) (holding that in time of domestic disorder the shooting by a sentry of an approaching man who would not halt was not illegal). “[W]hatever force is requisite for the defense of the community or of individuals is also lawful. The principle runs through civil life, and has a twofold application in war – externally against the enemy, and internally as a justification for acts that are necessary for the common defense, however subversive they may be of rights which in the ordinary course of events are inviolable.” Hatfield, 81 S.E. at 537 (internal quotations omitted) (upholding the Governor’s seizure of a newspaper printing press during a time of domestic insurrection).35

Our view that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations receives support from federal court cases involving the destruction of property. In a line of cases arising from several wars, the federal courts have upheld the authority of the Government, acting under the imperative military necessity, to destroy property even when it belongs to United States citizens and even when the action occurs on American soil. Such destruction of property might constitute a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, the courts have held, even if such seizures might otherwise constitute “takings” under the Fifth Amendment, the exigent circumstances in which they occurred absolve the Government from liability. The cases articulate a general rule that “the government cannot be charged for injuries to, or destruction of, private property caused by military operations of armies in the field.” United States v. Pacific R.R. Co., 120 U.S. 227, 239 (1887)” Although these decisions arise under the Fifth Amendment rather than the Fourth, we think that they illuminate the Government’s ability to “search” and “seize” even innocent United States persons and their property for reasons of overriding military necessity. For if wartime necessity justifies the Government’s decision to destroy property, it certainly must also permit the Government to temporarily search and seize it.

35 See also Powers Mercantile Co., 7 F. Supp. at 868 (upholding the seizure of a factory to prevent a violent attack by a mob and noting that “[u]nder military rule, constitutional rights of individuals must give way to the necessities of the situation; and the deprivation of such rights, made necessary in order to restore the community to order under the law, cannot be made the basis for injunction or redress”); Swope, 28 P.2d at 7 (upholding the seizure and detention of a suspected fomenter of domestic insurrection by the “military arm of the government,” noting that “there is no limit [to the executive’s power to safeguard public order] but the necessities and exigency of the situation” and that “in this respect there is no difference between a public war and domestic insurrection”) (emphasis added) (quotations and citation omitted); In re Moyer, 85 P. 190, 193 (Colo. 1904) (“The arrest and detention of an insurrectionist, either actually engaged in acts of violence or in aiding and abetting other to commit such acts, violates none of his constitutional rights.”); In re Boyle, 57 P. 706, 707 (Idaho 1899) (upholding the seizure and detention of a suspected rebel during time of domestic disorder).

36 See also Heflebower v. United States, 21 Ct. Cl. 228, 237-38 (1886) (“There is a distinction to be drawn between property used for Government purposes and property destroyed for the public safety. . . . [I]f the taking, using, or occupying was in the nature of destruction for the general welfare or incident to the inevitable ravages of war, such as the march of troops, the conflict of armies, the destruction of supplies, and whether brought about by casualty or authority, and whether on hostile or national territory, the loss, in the absence of positive legislation, must be borne by him on whom it falls, and no obligation to pay can be imputed to the Government.”).

We don’t yet know the full extent of justification for the abuses CBP engaged in on September 30. While I don’t follow the Chicago docket as closely as many, I’ve seen no more than two people who might have been arrested in the raid, and that off a warrant in another state.

Which is to say, we don’t yet know precisely what CBP imagined they were doing in the apartment building. We only know that it looks like Stephen Miller adopted one of John Yoo’s discredited bad ideas and tested it in practice.

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Stephen Miller’s Trains Don’t Run on Time

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I was going to write a piece anticipating the showdown at SCOTUS over Stephen Miller’s invasion of Chicago, which may well determine the future of democracy in the US.

But as I was contemplating all the lies that Miller and his henchman have been caught telling in Chicago and Portland, two other stories came out that highlight how bad Miller is at execution. Both pertain to his effort, built on a edifice of lies, to rationalize a war in Venezuela based off a largely manufactured claim that Tren de Aragua is “invading the US” on behalf of Nicolás Maduro.

Chronologically, WaPo provides new details about the quid pro quo behind Marco Rubio’s deal to send planeloads of Venezuelans to a concentration camp in El Salvador: The US would have to send the people who had cooperated with DOJ to expose Nayib Bukele’s ties to MS-13, a gang that Trump purported to treat as a terrorist organization.

In the days before the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the president of that country demanded something for himself: the return of nine MS-13 gang leaders in U.S. custody.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13 phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation. But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.

To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.

[snip]

The deal would give Bukele possession of individuals who threatened to expose the alleged deals his government made with MS-13 to help achieve El Salvador’s historic drop in violence, officials said. For the Salvadoran president, a return of the informants was viewed as critical to preserving his tough-on-crime reputation. It was also a key step in hindering an ongoing U.S. investigation into his government’s relationship with MS-13, a gang famous for displays of excessive violence in the United States and elsewhere.

We’ve known from earlier reporting that Bukele’s ask was top level MS-13 members in US custody. We didn’t know they were informing against Bukele.

Note that this reported conversation with Bukele on March 13 was two days before the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and three before the men — most guilty of nothing more than sporting less incriminating tattoos than the Secretary of Defense — got shipped away in a rush.

One of the many things that remains unexplained about the story is the reason for the rush — the rush to get an agreement, the rush to put men on planes.

Even given the rush (and the narrowly averted government shutdown), that’s when things started falling apart, when the ACLU got notice of the deportations, got an order from James Boasberg enjoining the deportations, and so set Erez Reuveni on a path that would get him fired. Not long after, one of the Salvadorans that Rubio intended to deal to Bukele, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez (who is mentioned in the WaPo story, started challenging the dismissal of his case and subsequent deportation, ultimately leading Judge Joan Azrack to order parts of the docket unsealed.

Then there are the murderboats in the Caribbean — a series of wildly illegal strikes lacking any recognizable legal justification. The murderboats appear to be an attempt to draw Nicolás Maduro into a war — though the Atlantic describes the underlying motivation as something far more craven, little more than an attempt to “paint immigrants as a dangerous menace.”

Then there are the senior officials who see Venezuela as a means to project a tough-guy, defender-of-the-homeland image. Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace, according to one of the White House officials. Vice President J. D. Vance, though often inclined toward isolationism, has pushed the necessity of defending U.S. borders. And Hegseth, who prefers to be known as the war secretary, is seeking a means of projecting military strength in a region where Defense Department planners hope to reassert American primacy.

Donald Trump’s top aides have all decided to murder people in cold blood as a propaganda stunt.

Even before the most powerful military in the history of the world failed to fully execute its murderboat mission days ago, there were cracks in Miller’s murderboat propaganda campaign — not just the increasing demands for some kind of credible legal explanation, but also the resignation of SouthCom Commander Alvin Holsey. And even before all that, it became clear that Miller’s murderboat targets were not what he claimed they were: Venezuelans bringing fentanyl to the United States. The boats were too small. That’s not how fentanyl is trafficked to the US, most importantly, they weren’t all Venezuelans. Two were Trinis. Weeks ago, Colombian President Gustavo Petro started complaining that Colombians were being targeted.

And then the most powerful military in the history of the world failed its mission, operating in uncontested waters, to completely destroy a submersible it claims was shipping drugs to the United States.

The most powerful military in the history of the world failed to destroy a boat and as a result two very awkward targets — neither Venezuelan — survived.

And now, because of the slovenly execution of Miller’s attempt to gin up a war with Venezuela, Petro and Trump are ratcheting up a war of words over the earlier targeting of what Petro claims was a fishing boat in distress inside Colombian waters.

The slovenliness is so ingrained that the people writing Trump’s tweets can’t even spell Colombia properly.

Stephen Miller is incredibly powerful and so fascistic that Trump even hesitates to describe his ambition.

But he is also downright slovenly.

Stephen Miller is attempting to start a war to rationalize his domestic war. And he can’t even be fucked to dot his I-s and cross his T-s.

Update: We have always been at war against Eastasia.

The U.S. military has killed three men and destroyed another boat it suspected of running drugs in the Caribbean Sea, this one alleged to have been affiliated with a Colombian insurgency group, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Sunday.

It was the seventh boat known to have been attacked since early September as part of the Trump administration’s use of the military to kill people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were enemy soldiers in a war, rather than arresting them as criminals. The latest strike took place on Friday, and Mr. Hegseth said in a social media post on Sunday that it had targeted a vessel associated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group known as the E.L.N.

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How City of Chicago Beat Back Stephen Miller’s Shoddy Propaganda … So Far

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No one has confessed they were wrong that JB Pritzker’s late August messaging was enough to stave off an invasion.

Shortly after Pritzker had that press conference on August 27, Trump announced he was going to invade New Orleans instead of Chicago, implying that he wanted to be invited to invade.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he may deploy federal troops to New Orleans next, not Chicago, and is waiting for governors to ask for help — a shift in his rhetoric about moving into major U.S. cities uninvited.

“We are making a determination now: Do we go to Chicago? Or do we go to a place like New Orleans where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that has become quite – quite tough, quite bad?” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting alongside Poland’s new president.

“You have New Orleans, which has a crime problem. We’ll straighten that out in two weeks, easier than D.C.,” Trump said.

That was a walk-back of his declaration just 24 hours earlier that “we’re going in” to Chicago, a city he has long maligned for violent crime but has a Democratic governor who opposes Trump’s deployment of federal troops in his state.

That led to a wave of wishcasting that Pritzker’s strong words (particularly as compared to what Gavin Newsom had done) were enough to stave off invasion.

They weren’t.

The details in Illinois’ lawsuit that has, thus far, at least, halted the invasion by the National Guard, reveal that even as lefties were celebrating the effect of Pritzker’s firey rhetoric, ICE was laying the groundwork to create the excuse to send in troops.

On September 2, 2025—as President Trump was repeatedly threatening a troop deployment in Chicago—ICE’s Chicago Field Director Russell Hott and Assistant Field Director Jimmy Bahena met with Broadview’s Chief of Police, Thomas Mills.76 In that meeting, Director Hott informed Chief Mills and his staff that, beginning the next day, a large number of federal agents, including approximately 250 to 300 CBP agents, would begin arriving in Illinois to assist with a ramped-up immigration enforcement campaign in the Chicagoland area.77 Director Hott stated their goal was to make large numbers of immigration-related arrests and stated that the ICE facility in Broadview would be the primary processing location for the operation.78 Director Hott stated that the facility would operate continuously, seven days per week for approximately 45 continuous days.79

Director Hott also informed Chief Mills that ICE officials expected numerous protests, including potential property damage and assaults against law enforcement personnel, similar to what had occurred in Los Angeles earlier in the year. 80 ICE officials also expected there to be impacts on traffic and businesses in the immediate vicinity of ICE’s detention center, located at 1930 Beach Street in Broadview. 81 [my emphasis]

Broadview Police Chief Thomas Mills described in a declaration how the arrival of agents in tactical gear changed the tone of the crowd.

21. At around 10:00 a.m. that morning, 20-30 federal agents parked their vehicles in the parking lot on the opposite side of Beach Street and began to walk across the street toward the ICE facility. The agents were dressed in camouflage tactical gear and had masks covering their faces. September 12 was the first day that I recall seeing federal agents on scene dressed in that manner. It was a very noticeable shift in my mind.

22. As agents approached the ICE facility that day, September 12, the tone of the crowd of protestors changed. The crowd grew louder and began to press closer to the building. Broadview Police officers positioned ourselves on the public way, between the 1930 Beach Street building and the crowd, attempting to keep the crowd on the public way and off of ICE’s property. When the federal agents went into the building, the crowd calmed down, and Broadview Police officers relocated to the outer perimeter of the crowd.

For 44 days and counting, Stephen Miller’s goons have been trying to create a pretext to federalize law enforcement in Chicago.

Along the way, they’ve engaged in a whole bunch of propaganda: making false claims of assault to explain away ICE assaults, setting up dramatized attacks on an entire apartment building, deliberately creating “shitshows” that result in arrests that almost all get dismissed.

And at least thus far, it has not worked.

When Judge Amy Perry ruled against the National Guard deployment last week, she found that all three government affiants claiming there was unrest in Chicago that justified an invasion lacked credibility.

The Court therefore must make a credibility assessment as to which version of the facts should be believed. While the Court does not doubt that there have been acts of vandalism, civil disobedience, and even assaults on federal agents, the Court cannot conclude that Defendants’ declarations are reliable. Two of Defendants’ declarations refer to arrests made on September 27, 2025 of individuals who were carrying weapons and assaulting federal agents. See Doc. 62-2 at 19; Doc. 62-4 at 5. But neither declaration discloses that federal grand juries have refused to return an indictment against at least three of those individuals, which equates to a finding of a lack of probable cause that any crime occurred. See United States v. Ray Collins and Jocelyne Robledo, 25-cr-608, Doc. 26 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 7, 2025); United States v. Paul Ivery, 25-cr-609 (N.D. Ill.). In addition to demonstrating a potential lack of candor by these affiants, it also calls into question their ability to accurately assess the facts. Similar declarations were provided by these same individuals in Chicago Headline Club et. al. v. Noem, 25-cv-12173, Doc. 35-1, Doc. 35-9 (N.D. Ill.), a case which challenged the Constitutionality of ICE’s response to protestors at the Broadview ICE Processing Center. In issuing its TRO against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the court in that case found that the plaintiffs would likely be able to show that ICE’s actions have violated protestors’ First Amendment right to be free from retaliation while engaged in newsgathering, religious exercise, and protest, and Fourth Amendment rights to be free from excessive force. Id. at Doc. 43. Although this Court was not asked to make any such finding, it does note a troubling trend of Defendants’ declarants equating protests with riots and a lack of appreciation for the wide spectrum that exists between citizens who are observing, questioning, and criticizing their government, and those who are obstructing, assaulting, or doing violence.5 This indicates to the Court both bias and lack of objectivity. The lens through which we view the world changes our perception of the events around us. Law enforcement officers who go into an event expecting “a shitshow” are much more likely to experience one than those who go into the event prepared to de-escalate it. Ultimately, this Court must conclude that Defendants’ declarants’ perceptions are not reliable.6

Finally, the Court notes its concern about a third declaration submitted by Defendants, in which the declarant asserted that the FPS “requested federalized National Guard personnel to support protection of the Federal District Court on Friday, October 10, 2025.” Doc. 62-3. This purported fact was incendiary and seized upon by both parties at oral argument. It was also inaccurate, as the Court noted on the record. To their credit, Defendants have since submitted a corrected declaration, and the affiant has declared that they did not make the error willfully. Doc. 65-1. All of the parties have been moving quickly to compile factual records and legal arguments, and mistakes in such a context are inevitable. That said, Defendants only presented declarations from three affiants with first-hand knowledge of events in Illinois. And, as described above, all three contain unreliable information. [Links added]

One of the most persuasive things Illinois was able to do was to show that at the same time that ERO Field Director Russ Hott was submitting a sworn declaration claiming all manner of horribles, he was sending email saying something totally different to the local cops saying something totally different.

It’s not clear, in this day and age, whether definitively proving that Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino and Tricia McLaughlin are just making shit up will be enough. Certainly, the right wingers on SCOTUS have proven just as susceptible to the Fox News propaganda bubble as Trump himself.

But thus far, at least, truth has won out over fabrications.

Update: The 7th Circuit just declined to disrupt Judge Perry’s retraining order. The panel — which included Trump appointee Amy St. Eve — cited Perry’s credibility ruling this way:

After holding a hearing and assessing the preliminary record, the court granted in part plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order and enjoined the federalization and deployment of the National Guard for 14 days. The court withheld judgment on a preliminary injunction and did not extend its order to non–National Guard military forces or the President himself. The district court recognized the substantial deference due a President’s assessment of whether § 12406(2) or (3)’s factual predicates are satisfied, but it concluded nonetheless that, under its factual findings, the statutory requirements were not met. Where the declarations of the administration conflicted with the declarations of state and local law enforcement concerning conditions on the ground, the court made a credibility determination in plaintiffs’ favor. In particular, the court found that all three of the federal government’s declarations from those with firsthand knowledge were unreliable to the extent they omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence.

[snip]

Even giving great deference to the administration’s determinations, the district court’s contrary factual findings— which, at this expedited phase of the case, are necessarily preliminary and tentative—are not clearly erroneous. The submitted evidence consists almost entirely of two sets of competing declarations describing the events in Broadview. The district court provided substantial and specific reasons for crediting the plaintiffs’ declarations over the administration’s, and the record includes ample support for that decision. Given the record support, the findings are not clearly erroneous. See United States v. Nichols, 847 F.3d 851, 857 (7th Cir. 2017) (explaining that “where the district court’s factual findings are supported by the record, we will not disturb them” under clear-error review).

The opinion was more important for the way it defined rebellion (in part, because the same ruling will be the starting point for discussions of insurrection).

Although we substantially agree with the definition of rebellion set forth by the district court in Newsom, we emphasize that the critical analysis of a “rebellion” centers on the nature of the resistance to governmental authority. Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable daylight between protected speech and rebellion.

Applying our tentative understanding of “rebellion” to the district court’s factual findings, and even after affording great deference to the President’s evaluation of the circumstances, we see insufficient evidence of a rebellion or danger of rebellion in Illinois. The spirited, sustained, and occasionally violent actions of demonstrators in protest of the federal government’s immigration policies and actions, without more, does not give rise to a danger of rebellion against the government’s authority. The administration thus has not demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on this issue.

The panel allowed Trump to keep Guard deployed, sitting in Illinois doing nothing. But they cannot patrol the streets.

Update: Trump has appealed to SCOTUS. Amy Coney Barrett has ordered Illinois to respond by Monday evening, but did not immediately overturn the stay.

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How Kash Patel and Pam Bondi became Slaves to Stephen Miller

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When Pam Bondi and Kash Patel had Jim Comey charged two weeks ago, they may have signed their own arrest warrants.

The media focus, since the indictment, has been on the ominous chilling effect this would have on Trump’s opponents — though as always, journalists ignored the politicized prosecutions that have gone before.

The damage done to rule of law by replacing career prosecutors with Trump defense attorneys for the sole purpose of charging a political target is enormous. No doubt about it.

But charging former FBI Director Jim Comey on flimsy false statements charges crosses a rubicon in a different way, one that may be just as disastrous for American democracy.

Charging made it easy to charge top law enforcement officials — any former law enforcement officers — whom Trump ousted for political reasons.

Indeed, almost immediately after the Comey indictment, Kash turned towards manufacturing the very same basis — alleged lies to Congress — to charge Chris Wray, his immediate predecessor.

Kash released after action reports from January 6 to HJC which in turn shared them, complete with warnings that the documents were not for external dissemination, with John Solomon, who turned complaints including a heavy handed focus from the US Attorney’s office on misdemeanors into a story about “274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns after the violence started but with no clear safety gear,” which in turn led to conspiracy theories about “Fedsurrection,” which Donald Trump blew up in a lie-ridden post on Truth Social that explicitly drew a connection between Comey and Chris Wray.

 

Even when Kash tried to tamp down the conspiracy theories he had sown and his boss had accelerated, he still included several lies: that Wray lied, that this was about crowd control, that running to the scene of a terrorist attack in progress would violate FBI rules.

The FBI responded on Saturday to a report that 274 plainclothes agents were at the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, clarifying the role of bureau personnel while still blasting former Director Christopher Wray.

While the agents were on hand, they were sent in after the riot had begun to try to control the unruly crowd, officials told Fox News Digital. That is not the proper role of FBI agents, and Wray was not forthcoming about what happened when he testified numerous times on Capitol Hill, Director Kash Patel said.

“Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” Patel told Fox News Digital. “This was the failure of a corrupt leadership that lied to Congress and to the American people about what really happened.”

And so Kash, in a desperate bid to feed conspiracies like those that got him where he is, colluded (heh) in the framing of charges against a second FBI Director.

He did so, as Pam Bondi did, under a great deal of pressure to deliver.

The pressure against Bondi erupted in public, in the post Trump sent addressing her directly.

Two things suggest the text was meant to be private. It had far fewer lies than Trump’s public posts. And he also alluded to the pressure he was under — the 30 statements and posts complaining about “all talk, no action” — a testament to the impatience of his own mob. Other reports describe the pressure applied to Bondi in private.

The pressure on Kash — and its source — has been just as real. The lawsuit filed by top FBI agents describes how Stephen Miller demanded politicization at FBI to match that Emil Bove was pursuing at DOJ.

On or about January 27, 2025, Bove requested that Driscoll and Kissane “stay behind” following their daily morning briefing. At that “stay behind” meeting, Bove stated that he was receiving pressure from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to see “symmetrical action at the FBI as had been happening at DOJ.” Bove made clear that he and Miller wanted to see personnel action like reassignment, removals, and terminations at the FBI, similar to the firings and reassignments of senior attorneys at DOJ that had occurred since January 20, 2025.

It tracks how Patel and Dan Bongino attempted to protect the plaintiffs (both, of course, desperately want to be accepted within the fraternity of FBI officers), even defending Steve Jensen on Maria Bartiromo’s show.

125. Both Patel and Bongino lamented to Jensen that they were spending “a lot of political capital” to keep him in the ADIC position, a position that Jensen had not sought in the first place.

[snip]

I want the American public to realize what we did. That man was in a position where he literally fought back against the machine who was saying, “we want to politicize this event, we want to politicize this event.” And at the end of the day, remember, Maria, there’s a chain of command here. So you can fight back your chain of command to a certain degree before they fire you. And Steven Jensen and other folks were promoted because they embody what the American public demands of FBI agents.

The whole time, FBI’s leaders were terrified the White House would learn Jensen still had power.

143. Approximately two days into his leave, on July 16, 2025, at approximately 7:20 a.m., Jensen received a call from Bongino. Bongino began the call by sternly telling Jensen that he had to “use better judgment,” explaining that the SAC of the Philadelphia Field Office had sent out an email to various other SACs about the SAC Advisory Committee indicating that Jensen would assume the vice chair position that had been left vacant by the recent departure of the Richmond SAC. The SAC Advisory Committee is an organizational structure within the FBI that SACs from across the country rely on to channel communication and concerns to FBI leadership. It is not a formal organization and is, in effect, an additional duty for those who volunteer for the position. The Philadelphia SAC had asked Jensen to fill the vacancy left by the Richmond SAC and, apparently, Bongino had learned of an email announcing this.

144. During this phone call, Bongino warned him that if the White House learned that Jensen was on an advisory committee, it would be “problem” for Jensen.

After months of refusing to fire the Agents, Kash ultimately did, in August, explaining that his own job depended on doing so.

Patel explained that there was nothing he or Driscoll could do to stop these or any other firings, because “the FBI tried to put the President in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.” Driscoll indicated his belief that Patel’s reference to his superiors meant DOJ and the White House, and Patel did not deny it.

More recently, a story about Signal texts sent between a top Pete Hegseth aide and Stephen Miller’s included the commentary of the latter, Miller deputy Anthony Salisbury, describing that Kash’s firing of FBI agents who had taken a knee to deescalate during the George Floyd protests was “how Kash survives.”

In a separate exchange, Salisbury celebrated FBI Director Kash Patel’s decision to fire several agents who were photographed kneeling during a 2020 protest. He suggested Trump would approve of the action, then insulted Patel.

“This is how Kash survives,” Salisbury wrote. “He will do this stuff for the man but day to day giant douche canoe.”

To survive, Kash the giant douche canoe has to “do this stuff for the man.”

The pressure on Kash is particularly intense. The indictment of Comey, Kash’s more aggressive purges, his effort to perp walk Comey — they all come in the wake of the installation of former Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as babysitter for Kash and Dan Bongino, a constant threat that he would be fired.

[A]llies of President Trump and Patel’s harshest critics have begun to circulate word that contingency plans for Patel’s ouster are forming. They also claim his hopeful successor, Andrew Bailey, made clear that he would not leave his post as Missouri’s AG – or abandon his aspirations to run for state governor – only to serve as Patel’s number two.

Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, Bailey, who starts at the bureau on September 15, would be eligible to fill the FBI director post – should it become vacant – after he has been employed by the FBI for at least 90 days.

Multiple sources close to Trump acknowledged the president was not thrilled with some past episodes of Patel’s performance – including a public feud with AG Bondi over the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. One senior White House official involved in personnel decisions also framed Patel’s botched communications during the manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s assassin as something Patel likely wished he could do differently, if he could do it all over again. Trump did not call for any action to be taken in response to it, the person said.

Patel’s purported off-ramp, which the White House denies, would not involve his firing but a reassignment to another administration role, according to multiple people who described it.

Sure, the plan now is to make Kash an ambassador to some faraway country once Bailey can become Director in December, as if he were Don Jr’s inconvenient ex. But the only thing that keeps Kash from becoming what Comey and Wray are — FBI Directors that Trump chose to put or retain at the Bureau but then fell out of favor and so were ousted — is his continued ability to feed the insatiable viciousness of Trump, the Wormtongue who increasingly controls access to him Stephen Miller, and Trump’s rabid mob.

And when that moment comes, it will be child’s play for the next guy to prove his loyalty by charging Kash and/or Bondi, citing the precedent of Comey (and Wray, if he’s indicted by then).

I’ve already noted that, by charging Comey, Kash provided evidence that this statement to Mazie Hirono was false.

Senator Hirono (02:18:49):

Do you plan to investigate James Comey, who’s on your list?

Kash Patel (02:18:54):

I have no intentions of going backwards-

Kash has been doing Trump’s dirty work for so long there are a slew of other potential charges, starting with both January 6 and the stolen documents case.

The same is true of Pam Bondi, who got her start with Trump by taking campaign donations and then shuttering an investigation into Trump’s fraudulent university.

But like Kash, her slavering performance in front of Senate Judiciary Committee also provided fodder for charges on the same standard as Comey. Not only did she tell gratuitous lies — such as that Alex Padilla had stormed Kristi Noem’s press conference — but she made more material statements, such as that the decisions on the Tom Homan bribery investigation (which she seemed to attribute to Todd Blanche, who was confirmed a month after she was) predated her confirmation.

That’s is the thing about corruption. It is the price of admission and the reward for loyalty.

But it also a double-edged sword when you fall out of favor.

I don’t know whether Kash and Bondi are kidding themselves about what a bad precedent this is for their own future. I don’t know whether they believe their past loyalty — something Comey and Wray never performed — will exempt them from the treatment to which they’re subjecting Comey. But the thing about irrational, increasingly unfit authoritarians guarded by an even more ruthless henchman is that demands for loyalty only keep going up.

Ah, but look on the bright side, Kash, Bondi!

Disfavored Trump aides have not — yet — started falling out of windows, like they do in Vladimir Putin’s Russia!

Update: Here’s how a WSJ story on the politicization of DOJ ends.

Privately, Trump has acknowledged that he believes Blanche is a solid lawyer and Bondi appears great on TV, but has continued to complain to aides about the pace of the cases, even after the Comey indictment. Aides have reminded him about work in progress.

“She’s moving too slow,” Trump has said about Bondi, according to administration officials.

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The Crime Wave Is Coming from Inside the [White] House

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As most of you have noticed, I’ve been trying to do videos summarizing more of my work, because it’s far more accessible than what I do here. As with the Ball of Thread podcast I did last year, I’ve been doing this work with LOLGOP.

He and I are discussing how to keep this effort going long-term. So, in addition to sharing this latest video (which I think is one of our best), I wanted to set up a post for feedback on the videos and — just importantly — to put a tip jar for LOLGOP.

Please consider recognizing his work on these videos with a contribution here. 

Thank you! And thanks to LOLGOP for the hilarious editing of Jeanine Pirro boasting about the subway guy.

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White House Struggling to Deny Stephen Miller Murdered Boats of Fishermen

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There’s a telling part of the Guardian story reporting that Stephen Miller was in charge of the decision to blow some Venezuelan fishing boats up. The article starts by describing previously undisclosed bureaucratic maneuvers via which Miller created his own little National Security Council.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has played a leading role in directing US strikes against suspected Venezuelan drug boats, according to three people familiar with the situation. At times, his role has superseded that of Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser.

The strikes on the Venezuelan boats allegedly carrying narcotics, which the administration has claimed were necessary because interdiction did not work, have been orchestrated through the homeland security council (HSC), which Miller leads as the homeland security adviser.

Miller empowered the HSC earlier this year to become its own entity in Donald Trump’s second term, a notable departure from previous administrations where it was considered part of the national security council and ultimately reported to the national security adviser.

As a result, the HSC has taken the lead on engaging the Venezuelan boats, the people said, a situation evidenced by his top deputy, Tony Salisbury, and others being the gatekeepers to details about what boat to strike until they are about to occur.

That was the case for instance with the second Venezuelan boat hit with hellfire missiles on 15 September. While the White House was informed the Pentagon had identified the boat as a viable target more than four days before, many top White House officials only learned of the impending strike hours before it happened.

Then it provides the White House comment saying, oh yeah, that means the President did it.

A White House spokesperson said in a statement the strikes were directed by Trump, saying he oversaw all elements of foreign policy. “The entire administration is working together to execute the president’s directive with clear success,” the statement said.

This thing already had all the trappings of “Trump’s” Alien Enemies Act declaration, starting with the transparently false claims of intelligence. In that case, Trump said he’s not the one who signed it.

That also extends to the legal justification.

John Yoo (even John Yoo) publicly explained that you can’t just blow up people you claim are drug traffickers.

[T]he U.S. cannot wage war against any source of harm to Americans. Americans have died in car wrecks at an annual rate of about 40,000 in recent years; the nation does not wage war on auto companies. American law instead relies upon the criminal justice or civil tort systems to respond to broad, persistent social harms. In war, nations use extraordinary powers against other nations to prevent future attacks on their citizens and territory. Our military and intelligence agents seek to prevent foreign attacks that might happen in the future, not to punish past conduct. To perform that anticipatory and protective function, we accept that our military and intelligence forces must act on probabilities, not certainties, to prevent threats that might never be realized.

Law enforcement, by contrast, punishes perpetrators for crimes that have already occurred. The U.S. has long considered drug trafficking a matter for the criminal justice system. The difference in purpose dictates different tools. The FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration — not the U.S. armed forces — have prime responsibility for interdicting drug smuggling (although the military can play a supporting role). The FBI and DEA seek to disrupt the operations of drug cartels with the traditional tools of law enforcement: collecting evidence, arresting suspects and imprisoning the guilty only after a trial. Deadly force may be used only if necessary to defend the law enforcement agent, or another person, against an imminent threat to life.

As an official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, I was at my desk on Sept. 11, 2001. I advised that the U.S. could wage war against al-Qaeda without blurring the distinction between crime and war. After 9/11, the U.S. declared that it would wage war for the first time against an organization, rather than a nation. But the drug cartels alone do not present a similar challenge that rises to the level of war.

Crime is generally committed for personal gain or profit rather than a political goal. Drug cartels employ murder, kidnapping, robbery and destruction to create a distribution network, grab turf from other gangs, intimidate rivals or customers, and even retaliate against law enforcement. National security threats, such as terrorist groups, might resemble organized crime in some respects, but the Mafia and drug cartels are unconcerned with ideology and are primarily out to satisfy their greed.

Yoo effectively suggested (or rather, suggested, as ineffectively as he is wont) that if the Administration could just tie the trafficking to the Maduro regime, then blowing up fishing boats would be cool.

The use of military force against the cartels may plunge the U.S. into a war against Venezuela. But a conflict focused against the Maduro regime is not a broad, amorphous military campaign against the illegal drug trade, which would violate American law and the Constitution.

The White House has yet to provide compelling evidence in court or to Congress that drug cartels have become arms of the Venezuelan government. That showing is needed to justify not only the deportations (which were just overturned by the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit) but also the naval attacks in the South American seas.

If the administration does meet the high standards for war, it would open the door to another set of difficult problems: Every member, not just of the Venezuelan armed forces but also of the drug cartels, would become a legitimate military target; the U.S. could attack and even occupy Venezuelan territory; and all Venezuelans here would become enemy aliens.

But recognizing a state of armed conflict against Venezuela would prevent the misuse of the tools of war to fight the eternal social problem of crime.

That Yoo piece was September 23.

About a week later, DOD’s General Counsel attempted to explain this all to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senators on both sides of the aisle pressed the Pentagon’s top lawyer in a closed-door meeting to provide a better legal explanation for striking alleged Latin American drug boats in the Caribbean, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

In a classified Senate Armed Services Committee briefing Wednesday, the Pentagon general counsel, Earl Matthews, detailed the legal basis for the military’s attacks ordered by President Trump.

Matthews repeatedly referred to Trump’s designation of certain Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which he said granted the Defense Department unilateral authority to use military force against them, some of the people said. Matthews refused to provide a written justification for the strikes, which legal experts say is necessary for transparency and accountability.

Just a day after the closed-door briefing, Trump declared in a confidential notice to Congress that the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with the cartels. In the document, which was sent Thursday to Congress and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, the administration dubbed the cartels as “designated terrorist organizations” and said it “determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.”

But it didn’t work. In the most US Congress move ever, the SASC didn’t tell DOD to stop blowing up fishing boats, but did instruct them to come up with some better legal excuse for doing so.

Some of the Republican and Democratic lawmakers who attended Wednesday’s Armed Services Committee briefing expressed concern about the administration’s rationale and urged officials to devise a stronger legal case, some of the people familiar with the discussion said.

And that may be what precipitated the “notice” to Congress that, like all else, Trump had usurped their authority to declare war, too.

President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants,” the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week.

The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times. It adds new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale for why three U.S. military strikes the president ordered on boats in the Caribbean Sea last month, killing all 17 people aboard them, should be seen as lawful rather than murder.

Mr. Trump’s move to formally deem his campaign against drug cartels as an active armed conflict means he is cementing his claim to extraordinary wartime powers, legal specialists said. In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts.

[snip]

The Trump administration has called the strikes “self-defense” and asserted that the laws of war permitted it to kill, rather than arrest, the people on the boats because it said the targets were smuggling drugs for cartels it has designated as terrorists. The administration has also stressed that tens of thousands of Americans die annually from overdoses.

However, the focus of the administration’s attacks has been boats from Venezuela. The surge of overdose deaths in recent years has been driven by fentanyl, which drug trafficking experts say comes from Mexico, not South America.

Yeah, Miller wants to include Mexico in here (or at least including Mexico as a threat of invasion). But what’s to stop with Mexico, when you’ve already got an Executive Order claiming that China’s supply of fentanyl precursors is a national emergency.

This is an example of the kind of thing that’ll show in my upcoming post on Miller: He’s great at accruing bureaucratic power, simply usurping the National Security Council on his way to usurping most functions of Congress. But he’s really really bad about the details, about the actual facts, like making sure something is legal before you do it.

And thus far, the facts here say that Stephen Miller murdered a bunch of fishermen in callous blood.

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Stephen Miller Implies He Intended for Trump’s Nutjobs to Kill Democrats

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Less than a week after copying a Joseph Goebbels speech to mythologize Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller is trying to gin up outrage because Gavin Newsom’s trollish Xitter account called him, accurately, a fascist.

Because Stephen Miller’s expression of outrage about the use of inflammatory language — even the use of the word fascism — necessarily involved Miller projecting his own actions onto someone else, it led him to go on Hannity and confess he has been engaged in stochastic terrorism for years.

Hannity: Here with reaction, White House Deputy Chief for Policy, Homeland Security Advisor, our friend Stephen Miller. You know, it’s clear they don’t care. It’s clear the incendiary language will continue. Uh, it’s clear that in spite of threats against you, your children, your wife, that they’re not stopping going after you personally and by name.

Uh, uh, your reaction to it all?

Miller: Well, the Democrat [sic] Party has become a party that openly aids and encourages and foments violence. You know, we all live through the unspeakable tragedy of nearly two successful, of two nearly successful assassination attempts on President Trump. A bullet came with a centimeter of taking his life.

We watched in agony and horror as a crazed left wing terrorist murdered Charlie Kirk. Just while he’s giving a speech, having a debate on a college campus. We watched the United Healthcare CEO get gunned. Down. In cold. Blood. We saw just days ago a sniper try to take out ICE officers. And what do all of these killers and assassins have in common?

They’ve been radicalized by Democrat [sic] Party rhetoric that describes anyone who doesn’t share their warped, twisted worldview as fascist, worthy, by implication, of execution. They’re using this language to mark people. To put a target on them. And then on top of all of that, what else do they do? When Antifa, when these left-wing terrorists attack our law enforcement, Democrat [sic] judges won’t put them in jail.

Democrat-led police departments refuse to arrest them. Democrat [sic] mayors and governors refuse to pursue them, so when violence is openly occurring against the targets that they have named and identified, they will not arrest the violent agitators. And that’s why President Trump signed an executive order is called a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM, and that is when you change the formal national security policy of the country.

And so President Trump issued an NSPM last week that for the first time ever, establishes a national counterterrorism strategy to dismantle these radical left-wing terror groups, including, but not limited to Antifa. President Trump’s gonna find the members, he’s gonna find the funders, he’s gonna find the violent terrorists.

He’s gonna find everybody involved in these criminal conspiracies and one by one, Sean, we’re gonna dismantle them.

Hannity: Well, we’ve got to, and this rhetoric, I don’t care what people say. I, I hold people accountable for their actions, but you cannot convince me that this never-ending Nazi fascist, racist, you know, refrain of theirs is not impacting, especially people on the edge.

I’ll give you the last one.

Miller: It’s deliberate. Yes. I mean, so, you know, I asked the question why did. It was a rhetorical question, of course. Why did Gavin Newsom say Stephen Miller is a fascist? It is a message that his team is sending to all the crazies and lunatics out there, and we’re not gonna absolve the Democrats of responsibility anymore.

There’s a reason why all of these killers, all of these lunatics, all of these terrorists adopt the same language. They say they’re trying to kill the fascists. They’re trying to stop the fascists. This is deliberate. President Trump is saying that we as a nation are not gonna tolerate anymore and the Joint Terrorism Task Force at the FBI is gonna find these terrorists and we are gonna put the behind bars, Sean.

Hannity: Alright, Stephen Miller, you and your family, we pray for your safety.

Miller’s comments are riddled with lies.

  • Having law enforcement twice prevent attacks on Trump is not a tragedy, it’s a success
  • The ideology of most of the killers and attempted assassins Miller mentioned (Ryan Routh may be the big exception) are more ambiguous than Miller lets on — the commonalities to all of them are access to guns and mental health problems
  • To claim Democratic rhetoric (and not guns, online culture, or mental health problems) is the cause of this violence, Miller ignores a bunch of other attacks, like the two attacks by former Marines over the weekend, the far right Evergreen shooter, the conspiratorial views of the CDC terrorist, the ideologic mush of the Annunciation shooter, the right wing views of Melissa Hortman’s killer, the right wing views of those who tried to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and Gretchen Whitmer, the Jan6ers specifically incited by Donald Trump to attack the Cincinnati FBI and stalk Barack Obama’s house
  • It is false that cops or judges, whatever the ideology, are refusing to arrest actual assailants
  • Likewise, it is false that all the judges who’ve denied detention requests are Democratic appointees

This is a transparent attempt to exploit the Kirk killing to start criminalizing opposition to Trump and truthful description of Stephen Miller’s own actions.

But it is also a confession.

The man who wrote the speech that led thousands of Donald Trump’s followers to attack the Capitol, many violently, has been exploiting such dehumanizing language, including the word “fascist” for years. He has particularly used it to refer to rule of law, the moderation of extremist — including overtly Neo-Nazi — speech, and Black people.

He called Biden “fascist Dukakis” for wearing a KC helmet.

He called Meta’s moderation of speech on its platform fascist.

He called the Democratic Party fascist because Trump got fined for lying on loan applications.

He used it when DOJ — with no involvement from Biden — prosecuted Trump along with 1,500 other people who broke the law on January 6.

He called both Fani Willis and Tish James fascists because they applied the law to Trump like they did others.

He used it when the Federal government investigated racism at Tesla.

He called Alvin Bragg a fascist for treating Trump like any other criminal.

He used it in conjunction with the NAACP when they called for a boycott after Xitter started replatforming far right extremists.

He called DHS efforts against disinformation fascist.

He used the word fascist to describe a discussion of platform moderation in conjunction with Elon Musk’s plans for Xitter (which looks more ominous in retrospect).

There was a clear progression here: Miller started by claiming it was fascist to moderate the speech of explicit Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, but eventually he came to use it about Democrats generally, particularly the Black prosecutors who deigned to prosecute Trump for crimes others also get prosecuted for.

If Miller believes the word fascist inevitably leads to violent targeting, then he needs to be prosecuted himself for the violent threats that Trump’s prosecutors faced, or that immediately plagued Nina Jankowicz.

And while Miller generally stopped using the word fascist after Harris referenced John Kelly’s use of it to apply to Trump (as part of an effort to blame Democrats because a registered Republican who also considered targeting Biden shot at Trump), to this day — even in this speech — Miller uses dehumanizing language every chance he gets. He simply uses “Marxist” or “communist” or “radical” instead.

That’s not the most obvious case of Miller’s incitement of violence. Miller wrote the speech Trump delivered on January 6, which included these lines:

The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I’m concerned, single biggest problem. The fake news and the Big tech.

[snip]

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media.

[snip]

Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All he has to do, all this is, this is from the number one, or certainly one of the top, Constitutional lawyers in our country. He has the absolute right to do it. We’re supposed to protect our country, support our country, support our Constitution, and protect our constitution.

States want to revote. The states got defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify. They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.

And I actually, I just spoke to Mike. I said: “Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage.” And then we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot and we have to live with that for four more years. We’re just not going to let that happen.

[snip]

And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution.

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

[snip]

And you know what? If they do the wrong thing, we should never, ever forget that they did. Never forget. We should never ever forget.

[snip]

Or you will have a president, to put it another way, who was voted on by a bunch of stupid people who lost all of these states.

You will have an illegitimate president. That’s what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen.

According to the January 6 Report, much of the targeting of Mike Pence was not in the prompter, though Miller was involved in restoring attacks on Pence after Pence refused to obstruct the vote certification.

And the speech had precisely the same effect that Trump’s attacks on Nancy Pelosi and Gretchen Whitmer had or his false claims about the Mar-a-Lago search had on Ricky Shiffer or that his posting of Barack Obama’s address had on Tyler Taranto or that non-stop attacks on Anthony Fauci had on the CDC terrorist.

Thousands of people marched the Capitol. Hundreds of those assaulted law enforcement. Scores of people wandered the halls calling for the assassination of Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell.

And now Stephen Miller confesses that the use — his use — of dehumanizing language to target someone demonstrates intent? Now Stephen Miller describes precisely how such inflammatory language — the kind he used in the speech he cribbed from Goebbels and QAnon — used against Democrats?

The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.

They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

Yes, Stephen Miller used his Hannity appearance to spew lies, lies about what lies behind the non-stop wave of shootings in the United States, projection to blame Democrats when the commonalities start with guns and include mental health struggles.

But he also confessed.

Stephen Miller confessed that when he uses such dehumanizing language he is, “using this language to mark people. To put a target on them. … It is a message [he] is sending to all the crazies and lunatics out there” to go target the people he dehumanizes.

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The Shutdown Will Make Trump’s Theory of Government–ICE but No Healthcare–Visible

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Yesterday, at 5:46PM, the Senate rejected a cloture vote on the Democratic continuing resolution, which in addition to funding government, would extend healthcare support and prohibit impoundment. It was a party line vote.

Yesterday, at 6:41PM, the Senate rejected a cloture vote on the Republican continuing resolution. Three Democrats voted with 52 Republicans in favor:

  • Catherine Cortez Masto
  • John Fetterman
  • Angus King

Rand Paul voted with Democrats against.

And so, at midnight, nonessential functions of the Federal government started to shut down.

Both NYT and WaPo have pieces explaining that polarization is at the core of the shutdown. That’s facile. Three Democrats, certainly moderates, already did vote with Republicans. The six who voted to let Republicans vote for the continuing resolution (and in Jeanne Shaheen’s case, also for the CR) in March — Dick Durbin, Kirsten Gillibrand, Maggie Hassan, Gary Peters, Brian Schatz, as well as Chuck Schumer — could well cave now, though several of these (at least Durbin and Schatz) did so from an institutionalist view rather than a centrist one. The truly radical edges of Senate which are, with perhaps only Bernie as the exception, on the far right, have always been the ones to push for a shutdown in the past.

One reason we don’t know how things will go is that the conventional wisdom about shutdowns may — may — no longer apply. In my opinion, a lot will depend on what becomes visible because of the shutdown, a lot will depend on how far public opinion deviates, and in which direction, from beltway conventional wisdom.

Seeing Russ Vought

Start with Russ Vought. To my mind, too few Democrats have framed their primary message — that this is a fight to actually return to existing funding levels before the Big Ugly Bill stripped healthcare from millions of Americans and from rural hospitals — to include the power of the purse. That is, almost no one is being told that the issue, and one of two main differences in the competing continuing resolutions, pertains to protecting Congress’ power of the purse.

The SCOTUS shadow docket opinion permitting Vought to usurp that power as the case moves forward has raised the stakes of this for Democrats and, as this Politico article lays out, made it easier for them to explain the stakes.

Now the Supreme Court’s brief but potent ruling last Friday giving Trump the thumbs up to withhold $4 billion is serving as lighter fluid for Democrats’ escalating rage.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a senior appropriator, called the Supreme Court decision “an absurdity” and “a pile of garbage,” adding that the justices were in effect dabbling at “policymaking — not constitutional law.”

The battle to rein in Trump and White House budget director Russ Vought through a piece of must-pass legislation has been eclipsed by Democrats’ larger push to extend expanded Affordable Care Act tax credits that are due to expire at the end of the year.

But Democrats are seething about the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” opinion, arguing that Trump and the high court are ignoring the intent of the 1974 law designed to prevent presidents from withholding federal cash. And they see themselves as the last line of defense.

“He is unchecked at this point,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), another senior appropriator, said of Trump in an interview. “We have to check him. No one should have that kind of power.”

Angus King’s feckless explanation for why he voted with Republicans unintentionally makes the political case why.

[B]y shutting the government, we’re actually giving Donald Trump more power. And that was why I voted yes. I did not want to hand Donald Trump and Russell Vought and Stephen Miller additional power to decimate the federal government, to decimate the programs that are so important to so many people.

Here is what Donald Trump said just this afternoon: ‘We can do things during a shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them. He means the Democrats like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. We can do things medically in other ways, including benefits we can cut numbers of people out.’

Maya Angelou once said, ‘If someone tells you who they are, you should believe them.’ Donald Trump, in this quote, tells us what he plans to do if there’s a shutdown and it will not be good for the American people. This was a difficult vote, but in the end, I could not, in good conscience, vote to shut the government down and hand even greater power to the trio of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought. This was a vote of conscience on behalf of the State of Maine and the people of the United States.

It is absolutely true that Trump gets to decide which government functions are essential and non-essential. It is absolutely the case that ICE will be on the streets even while Courts will soon have to work at a slower pace, meaning it will be harder to get emergency orders preventing imminent harm, as the ACLU was able to do within hours of the March shutdown.

But King is failing basic civics if he thinks this shutdown gives Russ Vought any new power than he had yesterday, any more power than he was usurping yesterday, a point the American Prospect made yesterday.

That Supreme Court ruling involved $4 billion in foreign aid funding that the administration semi-formally tried to rescind; it doesn’t include the $410 billion that the White House has simply withheld from programs across the country. That represents close to half of all outlays in the fiscal year 2025 nondefense discretionary budget, which have simply vanished, perhaps permanently after the last day of the fiscal year, which is today. The Office of Management and Budget, as Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) has explained, has offered no explanation of how money is being spent or where withheld spending is going.

About 12 percent of the federal workforce has been terminated. Last week, we heard threats from OMB director Russ Vought that a shutdown will really allow the Office of Management and Budget to fire workers. A shutdown provides no actual legal authority to fire federal employees, but then again there was no legal authority to rescind or withhold appropriated spending without congressional approval, or put workers on extended administrative leave, as they did with the unauthorized buyout back in January.

As Daniel Schuman points out, Vought presented guidance to agencies in February that they should prepare for mass layoffs by today, September 30. Any allegedly shutdown-induced “mass layoff” should be seen as the continuation of an existing plan that has been public for seven months.

The larger point is that the government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government. Activities deemed “essential” by the president—stalking immigrants, lobbing missiles at Iran, etc.—have gone on, but activities purported to conflict with the president’s policies, regardless of whether they have been authorized by the lawmaking body of the United States, have been stopped, interrupted only by occasional federal courts telling the president that doing so is illegal, which the Supreme Court subsequently brushes aside.

The shutdown can certainly be used rhetorically to justify more firings, but they’re just the same firings with a different rationale, one that is no more legal or legitimate than before. Of course, “legal” and “legitimate” are loaded words given the rubber-stampers at the Supreme Court.

What changes with Trump’s promise that he’s going to start retaliating against Democrats — on top of the fact that 40% of the workers he will be targeting are Trump voters and on top of the fact that the policies he will target are the ones that help average Americans and so are popular — is that to use this as leverage, Trump has to claim credit.

Trump has to make visible all the damage he’s doing to the services government offers.

That doesn’t change the legal reality (that, with SCOTUS’ blessing, Trump is usurping the constitutional powers of Congress). It has the ability to change the politics. It’ll be DOGE all over again, where Elon Musk’s loud bragging about the damage he was doing made him an easy political target.

Now it’s Russ Vought’s turn to become the villain in the popular understanding.

Live by healthcare and die without it

Progressives have hated the Democratic focus on healthcare (and it didn’t even keep all 47 Democratic Senators on board).

But now everyone is stuck with those terms and it is time to exploit it. The longer this shutdown goes, the more obvious the initial effects of the Big Ugly bill in terms of rural hospital shutdowns and expiring subsidies for ACA premiums will become.

It makes it easy to demonstrate — as Tammy Duckworth did here — how badly Republican members of Congress are screwing over their own constituents.

It makes it easy for people to call up John Thune and Mike Rounds, or Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy, or Shelly Moore Capito and Jim Justice, Lummis, or John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, or Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, or Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith, or Lisa Murkowski (who voted with Democrats for the first cloture vote on the GOP continuing resolution) and Dan Sullivan and complain about how much they’re fucking them over.

And people in rural states or congressional districts can point to this table and asked their elected representatives why they’re fucking over farmers and ranchers.

It is slightly harder — but totally doable! — to turn right wing messaging back on them.

.

Every single Republican, starting from Trump’s Wormtongue, is claiming that the Americans who rely on ACA are “illegal.” It’s an atrocious claim, and those who do rely on ACA should easily be able to demonstrate how grotesque this is.

If you have a Republican member of Congress, either House or Senate, please take time to — as visibly as possible, whether on Xitter, a poster by their office, over a beer with your MAGAt brother, or at least in a call to their office — to push back on one of these claims. If you rely on ACA, post a picture of yourself with your military medals or your “I voted” sticker. You won’t convince them. You’ll raise the political price of this cynical bullshit.

Finally, if by some miracle Democrats do get enough leverage to force Republicans to negotiate , it could rupture the lockstep unity that Republicans have achieved this year, because right wingers don’t want healthcare subsidies in any case.

The year-end expiration of health insurance subsidies first created under the Affordable Care Act is already splitting the GOP, seeming to vindicate Democrats’ decision to predicate their shutdown messaging on extending the tax credits.

Republican leaders have been trying to punt the issue as they work to force Democratic senators to swallow a seven-week stopgap measure ahead of the midnight deadline, insisting they will not broach the subject while agencies are closed.

But top Democrats said they heard a different message Monday in their Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump, leaving the sitdown convinced he’s willing to negotiate on the expiring tax credits in the weeks ahead.

That is already raising alarms among conservative Republicans, who despise the 2010 Democratic health care law known as Obamacare and who would be more than happy to see a 2021 enhancement of the premium tax credits sunset cold turkey on Dec. 31.

“The right proposal is to let them expire,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said Tuesday. “It’s been a complete fraud. People don’t even know they have these policies. So the right thing is to let them expire.”

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a leader of the hard-right House GOP faction, urged party leaders not to cut an “11th hour” deal on “Covid-era inflationary subsidies” in an X post Sunday.

“We’ve never voted for them. We shouldn’t now,” he said. “Do. Not. Blink.”

But Trump — who has veered the GOP away from anti-entitlement rhetoric on programs like Social Security and Medicaid — has not publicly ruled out an extension of the expanded tax credits, which benefit about 20 million Americans. Instead, in recent days, he has kept his public comments focused on purported Democratic efforts to benefit undocumented immigrants, who are already barred from receiving the subsidies.

We’re all stuck with healthcare being the focus of this shutdown. And, like it or not, it provides a number of points of leverage, both for members of Congress but — just as importantly — for citizens to pressure their own members of Congress.

Building malaise

And all this happens on top of building malaise that has — finally!! — led some MAGAts to start souring on Donald Trump. WaPo unpacked some of the reasons why in this profile of two MAGA voters that explores why 25% of Trump voters are angry about his economy. Much of it stems from the way tariffs are making it impossible for these two to run their small businesses, a florist and a funeral parlor.

A quarter of conservative voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, polling shows, as tariffs upend business and lower-income Americans cut back their spending. And a recent outcry from MAGA voters and influencers over the Epstein files demonstrates the pressure Trump is under to deliver for his base — which the GOP needs to energize and turn out in the 2026 midterms and beyond.

Jessie said she planned to oppose her local congressman in next year’s GOP primary, upset by his stance on the Epstein files, and she wasn’t sure she could trust Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, who many believe will run to succeed Trump.

Carter, 37, who runs the local funeral home, also voted for Trump last year, believing he would be good for the economy. Now tariffs are pushing up prices for one of his suppliers, and Carter isn’t sure how long he can hold off raising his own rates. The tariffs, he said, “seemed unplanned and childish.”

“I’m not an economist,” he added. “Probably going to hurt before it gets better.”

“But we also really don’t have a suggestion on how to fix that,” Jessie interjected. “We don’t understand enough about it.”

But Epstein and Trump’s dangerous foreign policy is another.

But Carter felt sometimes that Trump was too focused on immigration. Jessie listened to influencers such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Tucker Carlson, who often aligned with Trump but sometimes voiced concerns: Was it really “America First” for Trump to bomb Iran? Why hadn’t the Trump administration released the full Epstein files? (Officials released some files this year, but critics called them underwhelming.)
Jessie and Carter were sitting in the living room one day in July when Jessie saw a reference on Facebook to Trump’s latest Truth Social post. Republicans and Democrats alike were pressing for more information on Epstein, and Trump was furious.

“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker,” Trump wrote.

“Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success,” the presidentcontinued, “because I don’t want their support anymore!”

Jessie turned to her husband.

“It’s gotta be fake,” she said.

For as long as the shutdown lasts, Democrats will be able to point to Mike Johnson’s efforts to delay the swearing in of Adelita Grijalva, who would have been the final signature on the discharge petition to force the government to release their files, as part of his effort to cover up for a sex trafficker.

And during the shutdown, there will continue to be disclosures, such as the recent news that Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Steve Bannon are all in the Epstein files. Todd Blanche asked Ghislaine Maxwell about Musk (who in any case denies he traveled to Epstein’s island), but did not ask about Thiel and Bannon, suggesting that Thiel’s funding of the sex trafficker may be among the things the Trump Administration is trying to hide. And Tara Palmeri just revealed that the deciding vote in the Senate against releasing the files, Lisa Murkowski, may implicate ties Murkowski has to Ghislaine’s spouse. Just today, WSJ described how many more banks were happy to do business with a convicted sex trafficker after Epstein was convicted.

Then there’s the Argentine bailout. While Treasury has not yet released guidelines on the bailout (it has, however, posted Scott Bessent’s positively craven speech to explain why Javier Milei warranted an Atlantic Council global citizenship award), when Bessent announced the bailout on Xitter, he described that Argentina was “a systemically important U.S. ally,” the kind of language that suggests he can orchestrate this bailout (ahead of an election in 25 days) even in spite of the shutdown.

This is the kind of story that can fester.

As Politico described, Republicans are already outraged that Trump is bailing out Argentina even as Argentina poaches America’s soybean markets (which I emphasized here).

[P]owerful agriculture groups and their Republican allies in Congress are also sounding alarms about the deal.

“Why would USA help bail out Argentina while they take American soybean producers’ biggest market??? We shld use leverage at every turn to help hurting farm economy Family farmers shld be top of mind in negotiations by representatives of USA,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said on X Thursday.

Grassley said farmers were “very upset” about Argentina “selling soybeans to China right after USA bail out.”

The American Soybean Association said Argentina, a major agricultural producer, sold 20 shiploads of soybeans to China around the same time Bessent announced the U.S. was exploring a financial package. The transaction was eased by Buenos Aires waiving taxes on its soybean exports. China has turned to other major soybean exporters, such as Argentina and Brazil amid a trade war with the U.S.

The White House directed POLITICO to Trump’s comments in the Oval Office on Thursday, where he said he’d use some of the windfall from tariffs to support U.S. farmers. The White House added that the administration believes an Argentine economic collapse would hurt U.S. farmers more by lowering the price of Argentine agricultural commodities. Treasury did not comment.

A person familiar with the discussions within the Trump administration about Argentina, indicated Milei’s star has dimmed in some corners in the administration. The person, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the administration’s evolving approach to Argentina, said this policy is being mainly pursued by Treasury and expressed concerns about Milei’s ability to actually lift his country out of its economic doldrums.

“Milei is done politically, his sister is corrupt, his finance minister is an insider trader, and they have pissed away $15 billion in IMF money and $15 billion in central bank reserves propping up a crap currency, and now Treasury wants American taxpayers to double down on stupid,” the person said. The person added that Milei “was a fraud. Came in, betrayed all the conservatives and libertarians that supported him … it’s all a wash.”

Democrats are not letting this one slide. Not only did Elizabeth Warren (predictably) start the pushback on it, but fourteen Democrats, including Schumer, wrote a letter to Bessent making a stink about about it.

American farmers are confronting unprecedented challenges under your sweeping and uncertain trade policies. Across-the-board tariffs are increasing the cost of critical inputs farmers need to produce a crop, like fertilizer and equipment, at the same time retaliatory tariffs are making U.S. agricultural products less competitive and putting key export markets at risk. Nearly 20 percent of U.S. farm production is typically sold to customers abroad. With those markets in jeopardy, farmers and businesses across the agricultural supply chain are now facing falling commodity prices and shrinking profit margins, while farm debt, bankruptcy rates, and distressed operations are rising across the country. Soybean producers have been particularly affected, as China – historically our largest agricultural export market – has purchased no U.S. soybeans since May and bought 51 percent less through July compared to the same period last year.

Despite the crisis facing our farmers, your attention appears to be elsewhere: last Monday, September 22, your Administration announced it “stands ready to do what is needed” to bail out Argentina amidst the country’s economic turmoil. Argentina’s President, Javier Milei, is notably one of your close personal friends and ideological allies and faces a crucial midterm election on October 26.

Immediately following your Administration’s announcement regarding potential U.S. financial support for Argentina, Argentina suspended export taxes on soybeans, corn, wheat, and other agricultural commodities. Argentina’s policy change had immediate consequences for American farmers. Argentine agricultural products are now significantly more competitive on global markets, and Chinese buyers have reportedly purchased up to 40 cargoes of soybeans from Argentina in just one week. Now, even after Argentina suspended its export duties, your Administration is moving full steam ahead with its plans to offer financial assistance to the tune of $20 billion – rewarding a country that has implemented policies that directly disadvantage American farmers in favor of our competitors.

It is unclear why you are choosing to use taxpayer dollars to bolster the reelection campaign of a foreign president while they take steps to undermine U.S. farmers. As the American Soybean Association put it last week: “U.S. soybean prices are falling; harvest is underway; and farmers read headlines not about securing a trade agreement with China, but that the U.S. government is extending $20 billion in economic support to Argentina.”

Rather than reversing course on tariffs or abandoning your plans to bail out Argentina, you are reportedly planning to provide American farmers with an aid package, nominally paid for with tariff revenues. Farmers want fair trade and steady markets, not tariff uncertainty and short-term aid payments. The best way to support American producers would be to end your chaotic tariff policies that are hamstringing farmers in the first place. Meanwhile, your Administration has failed to reach any trade deal with China that would restore market access for U.S. soybean farmers.

Even Ruben Gallego, who didn’t sign the letter, is willing to shittalk about it.

All that’s before anyone looks closely at Bessent’s own personal stake in this bailout, which Judd Legum explained.

Bessent’s announcement had massive economic benefits for one American: billionaire hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, who has placed large bets on the future of the Argentine economy. Citrone, the co-founder of Discovery Capital Management, is also a friend and former colleague of Bessent—a fact that has not been previously reported in American media outlets. Citrone, by his own account, helped make Bessent very wealthy.

Since Javier Milei, a right-wing populist, became president of Argentina in December 2023, Citrone has invested heavily in Argentina. Citrone has bought Argentine debt and purchased equity in numerous Argentine companies that are closely tied to the performance of the overall economy. Due to Argentina’s massive debt load and chaotic economic history — in 2023, Argentina’s inflation rate was over 200% — Citrone purchased Argentine bonds with an interest rate of nearly 20%. (Citrone has declined to detail exactly “how much of the $2.8 billion he manages is invested“ in Argentina.)

Citrone, who is also a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, is effectively betting on Milei’s right-wing economic program, which emphasizes deregulation and sharply reduced government spending. Citrone viewed “the probability of default as minuscule,” even though Argentina has defaulted on its debts many times in the past.

In the short term, this appeared to be a savvy investment. After taking office, Milei fired tens of thousands of government workers, cut spending on welfare and research, and achieved fiscal balance. Inflation was reduced to around 40%, which spurred economic growth and foreign investment. Argentina’s economic rebound contributed to Discovery Capital’s 52% return in 2024.

Then it all came crashing down.

[snip]

In early September, days before Bessent’s announcement, Citrone purchased more Argentine bonds.

Bessent’s personal and professional relationship with Citrone has spanned decades. In a May 14 appearance on the “Goldman Sachs Exchanges” podcast, Citrone revealed how he delivered a financial windfall for Bessent. They were both working for investor George Soros in 2013 when Citrone convinced Bessent and Soros to bet on the U.S. dollar against the Japanese yen.

[snip]

When Argentina’s economy began to falter in April, it was Citrone who “intervened before Scott Bessent…to advocate for an IMF agreement with Argentina,” CE Noticias Financieras reported. Bessent subsequently played a key role in convincing the IMF to extend a separate $20 billion currency stabilization package. (That package ultimately proved insufficient to stabilize the Argentine peso.)

As Legum describes, there’s also a tie with the much more visible CPAC.

As Gallego made clear: Donald Trump is paying for Argentines to have better healthcare than Americans even while Americans start to go without basic food support. It’s the kind of sell-out that will infuriate Trump’s base.

Finally, consider how a longer shutdown will work.

ICE is funded. Not only would Trump declare ICE essential in any case, many of their operations were funded by the very same Big Ugly bill that cut healthcare.

And so ICE goons will still be wandering the streets, kidnapping people’s grannies, hospitalizing journalists, with their butt cracks and beer bellies creating a spectacle that sours people on ICE. And that will be happening even as people start losing essential benefits.

Nothing will demonstrate more starkly Trump’s — Stephen Miller’s, really — promise of government. Miller wants government to do nothing but kidnap brown people, even as working white people lose their safety net and pay higher prices.

No one knows how this shutdown will go. It truly is unlike any shutdown that has gone before.

But it will serve to make the reality of Trump’s abuse of power visible in a way that has not fully happened yet.

Update: Corrected description of Palmeri’s find about Murkowski. 2nd Update: An now fixed the spelling of her last name.

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Butt Cracks and Beer Bellies: Is Trump Failing on Immigration because ICE Creates Negative Spectacle?

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Is the spectacular nature of Stephen Miller’s ICE goons — and the ease with which that can go viral — one of the reasons Miller’s core issue is weighing Trump down?

Greg Sargent has been focused on Trump’s collapse on immigration for months, encouraging Dems to attack on it. And G. Elliott Morris has been tracking the details of that in polling, which also goes back months.

A new report from Gallup out this week finds a significant increase in the public’s liberal attitudes on immigration. The highlights of their report are here:

  • 30% of Americans want immigration decreased, down from 55% a year ago
  • A record-high 79% of adults consider immigration good for the country
  • There’s been a meaningful decrease in support for building a border wall, mass deportation

But aside from Morris’ argument, in June that the inflection point was the Kilmar Abrego case, I’m not sure either has unpacked why immigration has become such a bad issue for Trump (though some of it stems from Latinos souring on Trump), a trend that has continued even as Abrego’s case has gotten far less attention.

I’ve been formulating this hypothesis in conjunction with two posts I’m writing, one about Stephen Miller’s strengths and (very considerable) weaknesses, and another about the pivot to crime that Miller is attempting in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. Stephen Miller is effectively running the government, Trump’s Wormtongue, his issue is immigration, but the issue is dragging Trump down.

Miller fancies himself as a propaganda genius and he certainly has had his successes. The speech he wrote for January 6 almost got Mike Pence killed, after all!

But something that has happened with immigration has undercut Miller’s normal propaganda success on his most cherished issue (in reality, as I’ll show, Miller has serially failed with immigration, but succeeded wildly last year).

I’ve written and spoken about the import of mob trolls to Trump’s political rise. Stephen Miller has been central in that use of trolling. Democrats have utterly failed to respond functionally, usually leaving them unable to reach broad swaths of disaffected Americans or counter extremist pro-Trump propaganda like Miller’s.

Miller’s propaganda strategy to boost ICE has played to some of that:

  • Non-stop DHS posts — almost all full of lies — that focus on the few spectacular cases of migrant crime in attempt to brand all migrants with the crimes of a few (ironically,  Alex Padilla was calling out this strategy when Kristi Noem’s goons assaulted him)
  • An attempt, which has largely flopped, to brand ICE squads in spectacle or to set up spectacular events (like the invasion of McArthur Park in Los Angeles, which looked ridiculous)
  • The use of troll mobs and right wing propagandist ride-alongs to eroticize ICE patrols in cities
  • The attempt to brand Democrats as pro-crime

As noted, several of these efforts have largely failed. The ICE spectacle, often featuring Kristi Noem as the figurehead, often look ridiculous and have repeatedly led to blowback (such as her staged visit to CECOT or a recent Chicago raid that resulted in the detention of two American citizens, along with some others). The attempt to eroticize ICE raids often looks pathetic.

Meanwhile, while Miller attempts to create spectacle to eroticize ICE goons, bystanders continue to capture his goons rolling around on the ground violently abusing people, and in this particular case, desperately losing his gun. They capture people shaming ICE agents. A latest video shows a food delivery guy riding away after 8 heavily armed men chased him for saying something. And those — not Miller’s fancy new trucks — are what go viral on social media.

Those viral posts are not the only reporting that makes Miller’s goons unpopular. There really is a lot of good individual reporting on the individual stories of people sucked up in the dragnet, the kind of persistence that enabled Abrego and the Venezuelan concentration camp deportees to reach broader political salience (and with it, political headaches for Trump). Legal reporting makes the larger system visible and magnifies outcomes. While journalism is hollowed out, both the rising outlets and traditional media are still telling this story well, often persisting with the stories of individuals sucked up in the ICE dragnets that emphasizes their humanity and reveals their legal outcome. And there are some exceptional journalists at outlets we’ve long given up on.

There are, to be sure, some wraparound policy issues that the Democratic Party needs to push better, focusing on the way that Miller’s ICE raids have contributed to housing market problems and food inflation, or visualizing what government could be spending all the money wasted on ICE, for example. There are some NGOs and, especially, policy work from CATO that should be magnified (this was actually something Pramala Jayapal did in a recent shadow hearing).

But all of it starts from the people — both private citizens and independent journalists — witnessing, filming, and posting ICE thugs. They not only create an inexcusably endless supply of new stories of abuse to expose, but they fill the social media space Miller would prefer to fill with staged ICE spectacle. Rather than eroticized violence, what gets seen is spectacle that makes his goons look fat, incompetent, and pathetic.

Butt cracks and beer bellies.

The spectacle Miller’s poorly-trained goons have created has filled the media space he would otherwise fill with staged brown person domination porn.

None of this solves the political problem of a fascist building power off the demonization of immigrants. But the unpopularity of it creates political opportunities.

So it’s worth mapping out what combination of mobile witness and compelling journalism has made that possible.

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Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor Denies Victims of Far Right Shooting Equal Protection

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There were two school shootings last Wednesday.

In the first, a 22-year old man raised in a white Republican family and pickled in gaming culture shot Charlie Kirk. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who admitted he prayed that the culprit would not be a member of his Mormon culture, claims Tyler Robinson has been radicalized by left culture, but thus far the only evidence he has presented is a claim that Tyler is in a relationship with his roommate, whom Cox describes as transitioning. Kash Patel’s latest Fox hit describes a message Robinson left that appears to reference Kirk’s hatred: “some hatred cannot be negotiated with.”

An hour later and one state away, 16-year old Desmond Holly shot up Evergreen High School, putting two of his classmates in the hospital before taking his own life. The ADL describes that Holly had an account on an online gore site where he had celebrated far right shootings and seemed to speak in advance of his attack.

Holly had an account on the gore forum WatchPeopleDie, where he had commented on posts about shootings in Parkland (2018),  Buffalo (2022) and at a Quebec City mosque (2017).

Holly appears to have joined the gore site on December 26, 2024, during the month window between the school shootings at Abundant Life Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, and Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee.

Holly is one of several mass attackers who have been active on the platform.

Groundbreaking research from ADL Center on Extremism in August 2025 revealed that Natalie Rupnow and Solomon Henderson, the perpetrators of the Madison and Nashville school shootings, also used the site. As an example, in August, a Moroccan teenager announced plans to livestream a mass stabbing and shared a manifesto on WatchPeopleDie, as well as X and 8kun.

Holly also collected tactical gear, adorned that gear with extremist symbols and posted content emulating former shooters such as Rupnow and the 1999 Columbine High School shooters. Like many attackers, Holly assembled his gear in a piecemeal fashion, drawing inspiration from the equipment used by previous mass shooters. For example, Holly posted a now-deleted TikTok video in which he modelled a tactical helmet and a gas mask; the post’s background music featured a Serbian folk song that Brenton Tarrant played while livestreaming the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings.

Underneath his post, Holly engaged with several comments in a manner that suggested he was close to committing his own attack. He liked one comment reading, “You got close to a full setup now man time to make a move 👍.” He also liked a comment reading, “Just need an gopro its gonan be cool an pov [sic],” and responded, “A GoPro, battery, ear protection, and maybe a patch.” Responding to another commenter, he wrote, “I’m planning on getting a camera instead.”

The Evergreen shooting, like the Annunciation school shooting — before which Robin Westman posted videos cheering school shooters in advance of her attack — was probably preventable.

In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, the assailant fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices, scrawled with antisemitic and racist language and threats against President Trump.

Or these tragic shootings would have been preventable had not the FBI reassigned key personnel to patrol the streets of DC, had not DHS put Thomas Fugate in charge of downsizing the office that used to try to prevent such things.

In response to the Kirk shooting, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, projecting tactics that Charlie Kirk himself used (like doxing), used those tactics to claim that Democrats are part of a domestic terror movement that he promises to take out.

“It is a vast domestic terror movement,” said Miller, speaking of left-wing political organizations.

“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he added. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

It’s easy to forget given how much damage Miller has done to this country, but in addition to Wormtongue or Deputy Chief of Staff, his primary title is Homeland Security Advisor.

His job is to keep Americans, all Americans — including the two kids killed and 21 people injured at Annunciation, the two kids injured at Evergreen, as well as his beloved political ally Charlie Kirk — safe. And yet his response to a wave of violence carried out by young people radicalized online is to try to address just one shooting, and to address it in the least effective way possible, by hunting down people who had nothing to do with the Kirk killing.

I get that Miller has chosen to stoke fascism rather than grieve. I get the danger to all of this.

But Miller’s screed did something else: it said that he doesn’t care about the 8 and 10 and 16 year olds who face radicalized people with guns in their schools, he won’t do the most obvious things to address those shootings.

And that, it seems, counsels an obvious response.

Stephen Miller has announced he will do nothing to address school shootings, generally. He will do nothing to address the radicalization happening in chat rooms, including chat rooms that would be freely accessible to law enforcement if they weren’t off terrorizing Latino grandmothers.

Stephen Miller has responded to the murder of someone he calls a friend not by doing the most common sense things to try to prevent further school shootings, all school shootings, but to do the exact opposite.

And every parent of children who attend schools should be furious about Miller’s abject refusal to do his job.

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