politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42033604

Sat 17 Jan 2026 08.00 EST

Two protesters have been blinded by so-called “less-lethal” munitions deployed by federal officers during an anti-ICE protest last week in Santa Ana, California, according to reports.

Widely seen video recorded at the Santa Ana protest showed a homeland security agent shoot Kaden Rummler, 21, in the face with a less-lethal munition at a distance of only a few feet. Doctors found glass shards and plastic fragments in his skull and a fragment of metal lodged just shy of his carotid artery.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42034557

Wed 21 Jan 2026 21.24 EST

When she arrived, Stenvik said the father’s car was still running and the father and son had already been apprehended. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, the superintendent said in a statement.

Stenvik said another adult living in the home was outside during the encounter and had pleaded to take care of Liam so the boy could avoid detention, but was denied. Liam’s older brother, a middle schooler, came home 20 minutes later to find his father and brother missing, Stenvik said. Two school principals from the district also arrived at the home to offer support.

Marc Prokosch, an attorney representing the family, said the family has an active asylum case and shared paperwork showing the father and son had arrived to the US at a port of entry, meaning an official crossing point.

“The family did everything they were supposed to in accordance with how the rules have been set out,” he said. “They did not come here illegally. They are not criminals.” He said there was no order of deportation against them and he believes the father and son have remained together in detention.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42034383

Wed 21 Jan 2026 16.08 EST

The tactics of the federal force, too, have grown more aggressive and indiscriminate. Armed officers have appeared at schools, daycares, churches and mosques. Masked agents are stopping residents at traffic lights, or on their walk to the grocery store, demanding – at gunpoint – that they prove their citizenship.

The agents are targeting not only undocumented immigrants, but also those with legal immigration status and valid visas, US citizens and tribal citizens. On Tuesday, a group of local law enforcement officers said even their agents were being pulled over, reporting that off-duty police officers of color had been stopped and questioned at gunpoint by the administration’s immigration force.

[Democracy Now] speak[s] with activist, civil rights attorney and ordained minister Nekima Levy Armstrong about her role in a protest at a St. Paul church on Sunday, where one of the pastors, David Easterwood, also leads a local ICE field office in the Twin Cities area. “I believe that if someone professes to represent the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to preach it, that they should not be allowing ICE agents to drag people out of their homes,” Levy Armstrong tells Democracy Now! She spoke from an undisclosed location after Trump officials vowed to investigate and possibly arrest the demonstrators.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/4RbKe

The annual assessment, which has been prepared since 2020, purports to offer a holistic assessment to threats to the Western Hemisphere. These assessments have consistently focused on what you imagine: southern border security, the drug trade, immigration, and critical infrastructure protection in the United States.

But this year’s assessment, marked “For Official Use Only” and not yet released to the public, identifies violent extremism on the part of American citizens as the priority and greatest threat.

One phrase in particular stands out to me as new: potential terrorism based upon “class-based or economic grievances.” (The term has not appeared in any previous assessment.)

Archive link: https://archive.ph/7zdMu

Trump has said acquiring Greenland is critical to U.S. national security and recently threatened a trade war with Europe. The Associated Press reported that “President Donald Trump’s pledge to provoke a sweeping tariff fight with Europe to get his way in taking control of Greenland has left many of America’s closest allies warning of a rupture with Washington capable of shuttering the NATO alliance that had once seemed unshakable.” On January 21, Trump for the first time ruled out using force to acquire Greenland, saying at the World Economic Forum in Davos that “I don't have to use force, I don't want to use force, I won't use force.” Trump later further softened his position, posting on Truth Social that he would not enact tariffs and that he had agreed with the head of NATO on a “framework of a future deal” on Arctic security. [CBS News, 1/21/26; The Associated Press, 1/20/26, 1/21/26]

Trump has repeatedly brushed off NATO allies who have offered diplomatic solutions meant to address his alleged security concerns but do not include U.S. annexation of Greenland. As The New York Times noted, Trump “has shown no interest so far in looking for diplomatic offramps, or the kind of defense partnerships that NATO has long fostered. Every time the Europeans offer solutions — everything short of outright American ownership of the Danish territory — Mr. Trump turns them aside.” [The New York Times, 1/19/26]

Even some Republicans have criticized Trump’s actions involving Greenland. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) condemned Trump’s tariff threat, criticizing the “advisors who are actively pushing for coercive action to seize” Greenland and calling the move “beyond stupid.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) called Trump’s tariffs “unnecessary, punitive, and a profound mistake,” adding, “They will push our core European allies further away while doing nothing to advance U.S. national security.” [Time, 1/19/26]

Trump's decision to green-light the sale of Nvidia H200 GPUs to China isn't sitting well with some of his Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives. These GOP politicians have proposed a bill that would give Congress final say over the export of AI chips to China and other countries of concern.

Introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R‑FL) in December, the "AI Overwatch Act" would give the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which Mast chairs, and the Senate Banking Committee at least 30 days to review and, if necessary, block the export of sensitive AI chips to adversary nations.

On Wednesday, the Foreign Affairs Committee voted overwhelmingly to advance the measure to the House of Representatives with a favorable recommendation.

"When the United States considers selling a C-130 or a fighter jet, or an engine that goes on one of those airframes, or ordnance that goes on the wing of a jet, or the avionics that go in a cockpit, or anything that has military use, it goes through a process known as the foreign military sales process," Mast said during a Foreign Affairs Committee meeting on Wednesday.

In the midst of whining about how much he wanted to own Greenland, Donald Trump forgot what the territory was called.

La actividad de control de la agencia federal de inmigración está aumentando en todo Estados Unidos, incluído Seattle.

El Departamento de Policía de Seattle informó haber respondido a informes sobre agentes del Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por sus siglas en inglés) armados y enmascarados que arrestaron a tres hombres el 7 de enero al norte de Seattle.

In other words, to remove the president using the impeachment process, the forces of sanity would need to muster a two-thirds majority in the Senate. To remove the president under the 25th Amendment, they would need to do it in both houses.

Don’t kid yourself, folks: There is no magic bullet here. There is no constitutional magic bullet. There is no investigative or prosecutorial magic bullet—no Robert Mueller or Jack Smith. There is no combination of protests and elections or lobbying that can make this problem go away quickly.

There is, instead, a long hard slog ahead of us—a long hard slog of elections, advocacy, protest, litigation, and people fighting for their rights.

And there is a long hard slog ahead of Europe too in handling the disaster the United States has unleashed on the world. Because that is what managing a deranged person is like.

... This was long before George Conway wrote his famous Atlantic article about Trump’s malignant narcissism. Trump’s mental health was not a subject it was considered appropriate to discuss—at least not in a serious way, and I’m not a clinician, and Lawfare is not a medical or psychological journal. And yet, even then—eight months before he was elected the first time—there was “the small matter of Trump’s—there’s no polite way to say this—evident clinical symptoms. I’m not a psychologist qualified to make a diagnosis, but it simply has to be significant that it’s hard to have a serious conversation about Trump without using words like egomania, grandiosity, or narcissism.”

There was no escaping it. He was deranged—grandiose, egomaniacal, narcissistic, the sort of man who would get obsessed with acquiring Greenland and blow up America’s most sacred international commitments to get it done. The sort of man who would respond to not getting the Nobel Peace Prize by declaring he was no longer solely interested in peace. The sort of man who would take the medal from its rightful winner and feel no shame at the theft.

... The rise of neoclassical economics at the beginning of the twentieth century portrayed economic theory as objective. “Pure economics” emerged as the new label for what until then had been known as “political economy.” This astute rebranding reimagined an economy that was somehow beyond power relations. Economists became the gatekeepers of infallible models on par with those used by the hard sciences — like, say, quantum mechanics — and too sophisticated for most citizens to understand. This coincided with the rise of allegedly politically independent economic institutions such as central banks, which began removing key policy decisions from democratic scrutiny.

The tidying of the economic discourse placed any suggestion of a more human, more commonsensical political project out of bounds. Even well-meaning progressives limit themselves to pointing the finger at exceptional corporate greed or the out-of-control rise of the financial sector. These critiques go nowhere because they ignore the problems within the basic structure. Neoclassical economists have peddled the market society as one in which everyone, if rational and virtuous enough, can thrive. They claim that social hierarchies are reflections of individual merit, meaning that those who aren’t at the top don’t deserve to be. It is an argument that supports those in power very well.

According to this perspective, the profits of saver-entrepreneurs are the result of their virtuous behavior, enabling them to sign workers’ paychecks, which sounds good. The message is so persuasive that today almost everyone has internalized it: if we try hard enough, each of us can become a rich investor. Those who cannot make it can blame only themselves...

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/156674

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archive article: https://archive.ph/OfSwJ#selection-519.0-519.68

The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything. They’re a projection of power.