Trump's Tyranny
“Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.”
The words are those of Renee Good’s wife Becca. They cut to our heart – our humanity. She was shot in the face by an ICE agent, who then muttered: “Fuckin’ bitch.” The murder of this 37-year-old mom as she tried to drive around the ICE guys who stopped her is national news, of course. Almost everyone has seen at least one of the many videos of the incident and, you might say, the national dialogue about virtually anything else has been put on hold.
We have a habit in this country of looking at the monsters of history through a telescope, convinced they are a world away. When we see the heavy boots of the state — the raids, the cages, the Department of Homeland Security’s shadow falling over the vulnerable — we cry that it looks like the Gestapo. We say we are “becoming” Nazi Germany.
But there is a far more terrifying truth: Hitler didn’t build his hell from scratch. He didn’t have to. He looked across the Atlantic, and he saw us.
See, the road to the Holocaust did not begin in Berlin. It passed through lecture halls, grant committees, and the Ivy league institutions of America.
Long before 2026, America had already proven that they believe some lives are worth less than others through eugenics programs, laws targeting Native Americans, and Jim Crow laws. In the early 1900s, Yale stood at the center of American eugenics, helping seed the ideology that led to the executions of millions of people.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sounded more like a populist leader than a former central banker during his address at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20. Bemoaning the "fading" of the rules-based order, Carney delivered a surprisingly blunt speech. "The old order is not coming back," he declared. "We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition." In this new reality, he warned, quoting Thucydides, "the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must."
One’s morning ritual has become something unpleasant over the past year. Opening up the computer homepage after breakfast invariably brings up the image of the Orangeman who unfortunately is otherwise known as the president of the United States of America. The person in question, who goes by the name Donald J Trump, is invariably scowling, radiating hatred, and raising his tiny fist to express his willingness to pummel anyone who has offended him in thought, word or deed. The accompanying article usually describes how he is ready to fire someone in the government or punish a journalist for failure to bow and scrape when they are dealing with the imperial presence of the self-described “Man of Peace.” Occasionally, when on a roll, Trump threatens to kill either an “enemy” or even an entire group or nation full of people if they offend him. He justifies his savagery by his assertion that he possesses some kind of high level but indiscernible personal “morality” which permits him to claim that “I can do whatever I want!”
After sweeping the Golden Globes and other awards, One Battle After Another has 13 Oscar nominations. Given the film’s clear relevance, if it does end up a winner, those who created it will probably do more than thank their agents, publicists, partners, and pets. They’ll likely talk about the times we’re living in, as every creative artist or public figure should, given the stakes. We hope they’ll present the film as a cautionary tale, not an endorsement of violent resistance.
It’s easy to see why One Battle has been so successful. It’s gripping, funny, and wonderfully acted. It’s a satire of political madness, left and right. But parts of it also feel real in ways that most movie satires or political thrillers don’t. Although it was completed before Donald Trump’s reelection, its images of vicious immigration raids and out-of-control police now echo America’s daily reality.
Ilse Koch loved to dress up in odd, fancy costumes while she pranced through the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald, Poland., in the early 1940s
As the wife of the Kommandant, she reportedly loved walking bare-breasted between lines of male inmates, ordering the death of any who might look at her in a way that displeased her. It was further said she loved fancy tattoos, and would kill those whose decorations she liked so she could strip their skins to use as lampshades and book covers.
Such stories have been widely questioned. But American Col. Richard Denson described this “Witch of Buchenwald” at one of her trials---where she was sentenced to life in prison---as "no woman in the usual sense but a creature from some other tortured world."[3]
Some MAGAs today deny the obvious parallels between Trump and the Nazis.
But when Vice President JD Vance called Donald “America’s Hitler” he may have meant it as wishful thinking.
We never shared a shift report in the early hours of the morning. If we passed each other in a hallway or stood in line for coffee in wrinkled, mismatched scrubs, I wouldn’t have known who you were.
But I knew you.
I knew you by the ache in your feet after twelve hours on the floor. I knew you by the weight you carried in your pocket and your heart. I grieve for you because you knew the cost of caring.
You knew the “nursing bladder” and the missed lunches. You knew the feeling of driving home in silence because the radio was too much noise after twelve hours of alarms and never having a break.
You knew the unique isolation of being surrounded by people all day but feeling entirely alone with the burden of their lives at the end of the day. Holding hands, holding breaths, holding the line between hope and loss, then being expected to clock out and return to the world as if nothing followed you home.
The history of American power is, in many ways, the history of reinventing rules—or designing new ones—to fit US strategic interests.
This may sound harsh, but it is a necessary realization, particularly in light of US President Donald Trump’s latest political invention: the so-called Board of Peace.
President Trump has a long history of inflammatory rhetoric targeting Muslims. Ever since he won the presidential election in in 2016, his first Executive Order was a total Muslim ban to America, which struck the car as illegal. For the last three months, Trump has been targeting US Rep. Ilhan Omar and the entire Somali American community and using them as punching bags. Yesterday, he called Somali Americans very low. Really? Trump should be the last person to talk shit about Somali Americans. I explain why.
Trump has a four-year degree from the University of Pennsylvania. His grades and transcripts are secret. Reason is, he graduated with half-ass grades from college.
Michael Cohen, once Trump's personal attorney, gave a testimony to Congress where he revealed that, under the direction of President Trump, he had sent letters to Trump’s high schools, colleges, and the College Board (creator of the SAT), threatening them with legal action and jail time if they ever released Trump’s academic records. Ever wonder why? If he got straight As, he does not keep it secret. Think about it for a minute. All what he is doing is trying to save face and avoid being ridiculed.
This video, from Substack "Kathy" should be required viewing. Please log onto Substack to view. https://substack.com/@parislychee/note/c-204980477
Jesus Christ. This is Israel to the fucking ‘T’. Palestine is the laboratory. Now it's home in the good ol’ fucking USofA.
A leaked video from an ICE detention site shows fifty human beings jammed into a single cell with no beds, no bathrooms, nothing. Some of them are U.S. citizens.
"They hit his face. They beat him until he can no longer stand."
"They have been here more than ten days without bathing and enduring hunger."
"Look how they have us here. Look at what kind of immigration they have us under, people who are legal, people who are not legal, people who are losing their families, they are kidnapping us."
ICE is only supposed to use cells like this for short-term processing, not to run secret long-term holding sites in the shadows.
The footage was recorded inside the ICE Baltimore Field Office at 31 Hopkins Plaza in Baltimore, Maryland.