NUMBERS MATTER

 

I checked the numbers, and they're correct.

2nd Amendment Rights For Me But Not Thee.

From a comment by Dave Miller:

"Here's 'something to reflect on' also... 

The Trump Admin has stated, from numerous leaders, including the Sec of DHS Noem, FBI Director Patel and CPB Leader Bovino that they believe it is illegal for an American citizen to exercise his or her 2nd Amendment rights in and around a protest. An American citizen, they said, has no right to have a legally permitted gun in those areas."

 

I think it is fair to conclude that the Trump administration believes in 2nd Amendment rights for MAGA and only MAGA.

See below:

MINNESOTA NICE: MINNESOTA AWESOME!

 

Adam Serwer:

VIRTUE SIGNALING ALERT:

I live in Boston. 

My neighbors' heritages have been/are Asian Indian, Arab/Muslim, Central American, Hatian, African, South American, Asian, Italian, Irish, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Scandinavian and more. 

And they are all like me: Americans.

MAGA's Secret Fear

 

The people who have lost their ability to empathize, their humanity, their innate sense of common decency reject what is written above and so they say things like this: 

 

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” --Elon Musk, 2/25

"Jeffrey wins this years Darwin Award.... Another amateur agitator bites the dust... lesson - Don't bring guns to a protest and subsequently resist arrest unless you want to be shot by law enforcement."

"Your attempts at painting Jeffrey the Concealed Carry Protestor into some kind of Charlie Kirk won't be successful. All you'll reap, as with TDS, is more and more of the Erika Effect." 

 "Another amateur agitator bites the dust... lesson - Don't bring guns to a protest and subsequently resist arrest unless you want to be shot by law enforcement."

I know quite a few Americans who reject showing empathy and who think being a decent human being is "virtue signaling." 

I reject that claim. 

SOMETHING TO REFLECT ON

 

From Chris Hedges: 

"The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. 

It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang.

Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. 

The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color.

 We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us."

 Paul Krugman: 

"It has been clear for a long time, to anyone willing to see, that the people running the federal government — Trump, Miller, Noem, Bovino and more — are monsters. 

It has been equally obvious that ICE and the Border Patrol are now filled with sadistic thugs. Yet many people — almost the entire GOP, everyone serving in the Trump administration, some Democrats, a significant part of the media — were too cowardly to admit the obvious."

NYTimes letter to the editor:

"George Orwell warned in '1984' that power demands that citizens 'reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,' calling it the 'final, most essential command.' 

On Saturday, our own government asked the public to do just that when it told us that the man who was killed was intent on inflicting harm on the agents who beat and then ultimately killed him."

ICE has shot and killed another American.

"Federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident on Saturday morning, the city’s police chief said. The shooting prompted clashes between law enforcement and hundreds of protesters, as Minnesota officials renewed demands that the Trump administration end its immigration crackdown, which has now resulted in two deaths. 

Videos analyzed by The New York Times contradict the accounts of Homeland Security officials, who said that the man approached Border Patrol agents with a handgun and the intent to 'massacre' them. Footage of the encounter shows the man was holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him."

 

"But the stars burn on overhead, 

Unconscious of final ends, 

As I walk home to bed, 

Asking what judgment waits 

My person, all my friends,

And these United States." --W.H. Auden

TRUMP’s ICE THUGS THREATEN AMERICAN CITIZEN’S RIGHT.

FROM OCCUPY DEMOCRATS:

ICE agents are adding peaceful protestors — legally filming their violent actions — to a federal “domestic terrorist database.”

In what should chill every American to the bone, an ICE agent in Maine was caught on video doing the unthinkable: threatening a woman with placement in a “domestic terrorist database” for the crime of recording federal agents in public.

Yes — recording, an action that is a First Amendment right.

The video, posted by freelance reporter Nathan Bernard of the Maine Morning Star, shows an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement approaching a woman calmly filming their activity. She correctly notes that it’s not illegal to record law enforcement.

That’s when things turn dystopian. “Why are you taking my information down?” she asks.

“Because we have a nice little database,” the agent replies. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” 

Let that sink in.

The woman, who is a Passamaquoddy Native American, wasn’t interfering. Wasn’t threatening. Wasn’t protesting. She was holding up a phone. And for that, an armed federal agent casually suggested she’d be branded a terrorist.

Journalists and legal experts erupted.

Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald called it exactly what it is: a disgrace. Armed, masked federal agents roaming American streets, threatening citizens with secret databases for exercising constitutional rights. That’s not law enforcement — that’s intimidation. 

And it’s not an accident.

The incident aligns perfectly with a leaked joint memo from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security, first reported by Ken Klippenstein, which quietly expanded the definition of “domestic violent extremists” to include people who “leverage First Amendment–protected activity.” Including — you guessed it — recording law enforcement.

Former MSNBC reporter and Breaking Points host Krystal Ball summed it up with three perfect words: “This is insane.”

Meanwhile, the data tells an even darker story. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, real partisan political violence in America has surged — driven overwhelmingly by right-wing extremists and election deniers, not immigration protesters with smartphones.

Yet instead of targeting the actual threat, Trump’s government is building databases, blurring definitions, and pointing the terrorism label at citizens who dare to watch the watchers.

This isn’t about safety.

It’s about fear.

It’s about control.

And it’s about how fast a democracy can slide — when filming the government makes you the suspect.