The Wall Street Journal editorial (‘Time for ICE To Pause
in Minneapolis’, Jan. 26, p. A16 ) at least made a decent half way effort
to hold the Trump cabal and their paramilitary invasion accountable. However,
too many on the left delivered too many kudos (like in one Morning Joe segment
from Wednesday) before really reading it.
They focused on the editorial complaints such as:
“The Saturday shooting of Alex Pretti, as he lay on the ground
surrounded by ICE agents (see photo at top), is the worst incident to date in what
is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump presidency.”
Of course, those of us with IQs over room temperature always
knew such a debacle would unfold given the orange Traitor had barked endlessly about
retribution and mass deportations during the ’24 campaign. We also knew or sensed he'd use a misbegotten
bill (‘Big Beautiful Bill’ or along those lines) to overfund the ICE bunch to
transform it into a paramilitary terror group. One which wouldn’t just remain
at the southern border but be deployed
across key blue state cities – like LA, Chicago and Minneapolis) to raise havoc
and intimidate citizens.
Indeed, Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, interviewed Wednesday night
on ALL In, excoriated the nonsense the influx was about immigration. As he
told host Chris Hayes (both standing out in the Minneapolis cold):
“These ICE agents in Minneapolis make up nearly 12 percent of
the 4,000 agents in Minnesota. This being a city where barely 1 percent are immigrants. This isn’t about immigration but rather
destroying federalism, the concept of the founders which allotted separate
power to the states. This is being done through federal terror using ICE and
raiding homes, spreading chaos as they challenge free speech rights.”
In fact, AG Ellison hit the nail on the head, and I always
suspected the real mission in blue cities was to smash state power, intimidate
state leaders (as well as their citizens) to kowtow to Trump’s renegade DHS – headed by
doggie butcher Kristi Noem.
The primary, immediate objection I have with the Wall Street Journal editorial - after drawing
attention to Trump’s moral and political failures - was in then writing this loathsome, qualifying claptrap:
“Videos aren’t always definitive but this is how it looks to
us. Pretti attempted foolishly to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by
the agents.”
Say WHAT? He “foolishly attempted to assist” a pepper-sprayed
woman?!
That was not “foolish” esteemed WSJ nabobs, but the natural response of a HUMAN (unlike Trump) seeing a fellow citizen who’d been sprayed with toxins then knocked to the fucking ground. You get it? This was the natural response of a guy who’d worked as a VA ICU nurse!
The initial take is then doubled down on two paragraphs later, i.e.
"Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents, but that warranted arrest, not a death sentence."
Uh, excuse me. Helping a fellow human smashed to ground after being pepper-sprayed is not "interfering" with lawless agents but assisting a fellow citizen. But this is how numb too many, including the esteemed WSJ editors, have become to the vile felon resident's excesses, including slaughtering hundreds of fishermen on small boats for 'drug running'. When the imp already pardoned former Honduran president Juan Hernandez - one of the biggest cocaine runners - who'd already dispatched 400 tons directly into the U.S. See e.g.
So give me a damned break about what is or is not "warranted". In the nation I live in, helping a fellow human is always warranted especially after they've been poisoned and throttled, thrown to the ground. The "Morning Joe" segment, indeed, made clear what transpired, that Pretti was just being a Good Samaritan, as advocated in the Bible:
Joe: Alex Pretti was killed for being a Good Samaritan
Earlier in the day, this 2-legged cockroach had traveled to neighboring Iowa, talking up efforts to “de-escalate a little bit” on Fox News. But he then targeted MN Rep. Ilhan Omar just hours after she was attacked by a deranged ape using (then unknown) spray from a syringe. The demented orange fungal fucker actually yapped to ABC News: "She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”
The roach then stoked the
darkest fears about immigrants, warning a crowd of MAGA supporters they would “blow
up our shopping centers, blow up our farms, kill people.”
“Hardened, vicious, horrible criminals,” the Traitor felon added, vilifying those who have been arrested. Clearly, this cockroach merely projecting what he himself was, his own vile identity. A hardened, vicious criminal who'd been catapulted into power by 77 million imbeciles. And who remains unchecked by Reep lapdogs in the Senate and House. For example, Republicans in the hard-right House Freedom Caucus endorsed a call for the roach and convicted felon to make use of the Insurrection Act, a 200-year-old law allowing deployment of regular military to suppress civil disorder.
“The left wants total war,” Representative Andy Ogles, a
Tennessee Republican, bellowed in a
social media post calling for the use of the Insurrection Act, after Dems had threatened to impeach Kristi Noem. “Republicans cannot afford to ignore them.” Ogles added.
Ogles, of course, is an
inbred idiot and Trump butt licker. So are most of the Reeps who remain, as
Rachel Maddow recently put it: “sniveling sinkholes of cowardice”. Why? Because
these lily-livered leeches refuse to fight for the Constitution and especially its Bill of Rights, opting instead
to follow Trump’s every marching order to wreck this nation with violence.
Including the support of his personal Gestapo, the ICE goon squad.
So Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, again, was totally correct when he told Chris Hayed none of this ICE invasion in Minnesota is about controlling immigration. It is straight out about directing an invading paramilitary force to stamp out federalism and state power in blue states and cities, making them serfs of Trump and his traitor regime. This is why the WSJ's word about needing a "pause" in ICE occupation is not enough, nor Border czar Tom Holman's offer a possible "drawdown" (if the rhetoric stops). But the "rhetoric constitutes free speech expression so it ain't gonna stop. What is needed is a total withdrawal of the invading forces so Minneapolis can return to something resembling peace.
This is why all Americans who are true patriots need to stand up for those in Minneapolis now fighting on the literal front lines for our Republic. As Ben Franklin put it when asked what form of government we have: "A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it."
The main problem with the WSJ editorial? Not a word, no mention of the $22 billion two companies (Palantir and Deloitte) have reaped from Trump's ongoing ICE crackdown - especially in Minneapolis. I had to find this out from an article in The Financial Times. And equally reprehensible, the editors advocating in so many words we withdraw from our humanity in the service of a tyrant, a traitor, a convicted felon and his paramilitary fascist invaders who seek to destroy what's left of this Republic. And as Chris Hayes said last night, if it can happen to Minneapolis it can happen to any other blue state city.
See Also:
by Phil Rockstroh | January 28, 2026 - 5:51am | permalink
— from Phil Rockstroh's Substack
So it has come to this: ICE Gestapo agents claim, without a judge’s order, they are permitted to enter houses at their fascist whim. Are they taking lessons from the Israeli Defense Forces now?
Moreover, the present criminal class of MAGA authoritarians are at liberty to transport the officialdom killer out the reach of accountability and prosecution — yet, under the runaway death train of authoritarian rule, lower rung thugs (e.g., ICE brownshirts) will not be safe from their own fascist overlords e.g., the mass execution of Brownshirt rabble by the Third Reich Blackshirt elite in an episode that history records as The Night Of The Long Knives.
Once state-sanctioned murder becomes a viable option for authoritarians, it grows, at an exponential rate, from option to feature. Chances augur, once you don a pair of jackboots, literally or psychologically, you will die in said jackboots.
And:
And:
by Henry Giroux | January 30, 2026 - 5:56am | permalink
The United States is under siege, not by a foreign enemy, but by the Trump administration, which has transformed governance itself into a form of domestic terrorism in the service of a white supremacist state.
By domestic terrorism, I mean the use of state-sanctioned intimidation, disappearance, and violence against civilian populations in order to discipline dissent, enforce racial hierarchy, and normalize fear as a mode of governance. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles, dressed in battlefield gear and operating beyond any recognizable legal authority, now stalk the streets, abducting, brutalizing, and in some cases killing people. Citizens and non-citizens alike are rendered disposable. Reason and the rule of law have collapsed, replaced by the naked exercise of state violence in defense of an apartheid politics.
And:
by Wim Laven | January 29, 2026 - 6:10am | permalink
Good people cannot make the needed change.
Good people can make the needed change.
The contradiction is intentional. The first sentence is singular. The second is plural.
Individually, most people are not stupid. Collectively, people often are. As George Carlin put it, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
On our own, we recognize problems and imagine solutions. Together, we often convince ourselves that change is impossible—inevitable, unchangeable, just the way things are. Group membership can dull critical reflection. Institutional belonging routinely rewards conformity. Alone, we can hesitate, question, and refuse. In groups—especially bureaucratic ones—we deflect blame or scapegoat. We adopt the language, the practices, the script. We stop asking whether something should be done and focus instead on how efficiently it is being done. Fiscal, not moral, economy—“self-deport today and receive a $2,600 stipend,” DHS says, claiming it will save the taxpayer $13,000 per person.
by Thom Hartmann | January 27, 2026 - 6:30am | permalink
Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.
But that’s not their real message.
» article continues...And:
by Mitchell Zimmerman | January 28, 2026 - 6:05am | permalink
Do Americans who engage in lawful and peaceful protest enjoy the protection of the United States Constitution? Not any more, the Trump regime says in authorizing the shameless misconduct and lethal violence ICE agents are perpetrating against citizens in Minnesota.
ICE has invaded the state of Minnesota to show America that nothing can restrain Trump’s army of thugs. Not the Constitution. Not the laws which make it a crime to commit assault and murder. Not public opinion. And not thousands of citizens exercising their rights.
Although far from the first instance of ICE brutality, the slaying of Renee Nicole Good shocked the nation as a clear case of murder in cold blood.
And:
by Steven Harper | January 28, 2026 - 6:22am | permalink
I was born and raised in Minnesota. One of my childhood homes in south Minneapolis is less than a mile from the scene of Saturday’s brutal Border Patrol killing. The victim was 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a US citizen born in Illinois and a registered ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital.
Pretti’s crime: He was “Minnesota nice.”
Before proceeding further, please watch this New York Times video.
But be warned, the footage is violent, graphic, and disturbing:
And:
by Amanda Marcotte | January 29, 2026 - 6:37am | permalink
After weeks of the Department of Homeland Security terrorizing the people of Minneapolis by sending armed goons into the community under the guise of “immigration enforcement,” the political blowback against the operation is clearly bothering Donald Trump. The shooting deaths of two peaceful locals who were protesting the invasion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents has led the White House to attempt to create the appearance of backing off. On Monday night, “commander at large” Gregory Bovino was pushed out of his role, even though his abuse of the city clearly came at the express wishes of Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
But as Salon’s Jason Kyle Howard noted, the president has not backed down in any meaningful way in his crusade to treat blue cities as an enemy to be conquered. The ICE invasion came after the president abandoned his plan to assault cities with the National Guard. He hasn’t given up the strategy of using militarized abuse of liberal communities as sadistic propaganda to feed the MAGA base. This reprieve for Minneapolis should be understood as a temporary regrouping while the White House schemes about which city is next on their list and how they will mount their attack.
And:
by Will Bunch | January 29, 2026 - 6:18am | permalink
One of the many remarkable and lasting ideas the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed into the national conversation was the concept of something he called “negative peace.”
Although the phrase began appearing in the writings of the civil rights leader in the late 1950s, King made the idea famous in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” where he was locked up for fighting segregation in Alabama’s largest city. He was annoyed by a letter from eight local white clergymen, titled a “Call for Unity,” that begged King to end a civil disobedience crusade for racial integration and seek progress through negotiations and the courts.
When an aide smuggled the newspaper into King’s cell, he began furiously scribbling his response in the margins of the ad before writing more on any scrap of paper he could find. His key passage argues that the white moderate was a greater threat to Black freedom than the KKK, because he was someone “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” and who wants African Americans to wait for a “more convenient season.”
And:Donald Trump
by Thom Hartmann | January 29, 2026 - 6:50am | permalink
Over on Threads last night, sierracascadia posted:
“CNN BREAKING: Kristin Holmes reports Stephen Miller is saying ‘there may have been a breach of protocol’ and Noem is blabbering about how she was in touch with Trump and Miller for her talking points. Miller is saying that he got his information CBP trying to shove it down to Bovino! This fucking clown show guys. They are all going down.”
Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating the replacement of Nazi-cosplayer Greg Bovino and eager puppy-killer and adulterer Kristi Noem with Tom Homan, who merely takes $50,000 bribes in burger bags and is therefore presumably more reasonable. Blue collar versus white collar, and all that.
But, wait a minute. Slow down. It’s way too premature to toast the dawn of a new era.
Opinion | Trump Is the Jan. 6 President - The New York Times
Excerpt:
It was a day that should live in infamy. Instead, it was the day President Trump’s second term began to take shape.
Five years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, hoping to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. After the sun set that day, Congress reconvened to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The rioters lost, and so did Mr. Trump, who had summoned them to Washington and urged them to march to the Capitol. The Trump era seemed to have ended in one of the most disgracefully anti-American acts in the nation’s history.
That day was indeed a turning point, but not the one it first seemed to be. It was a turning point toward a version of Mr. Trump who is even more lawless than the one who governed the country in his first term. It heralded a culture of political unaccountability, in which people who violently attacked Congress and beat police officers escaped without lasting consequence. The politicians and pundits who had egged on the attack with their lies escaped, as well. The aftermath of Jan. 6 made the Republican Party even more feckless, beholden to one man and willing to pervert reality to serve his interests. Once Mr. Trump won election again in 2024, despite his role in encouraging the riot and his many distortions about it, it emboldened him to govern in defiance of the Constitution, without regard for the truth and with malice toward those who stand up to his abuses.
Tragically, America is still living in a political era that began on Jan. 6, 2021. Recognizing as much is necessary to bring this era to an end before it has many more anniversaries.
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