Dismantle ICE, or GTFO.

ICE must go

Donald Trump and the goon squad we call ICE are getting very comfortable with turning people into political prisoners. ICE has been harassing, menacing, and brutalizing immigrants for years. They respond to any attempt to question their authority with violence. But now, they're doing it to elected officials too. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Representative LaMonica McIver, US Senator Alex Padilla, and now New York City Comptroller Brad Lander have all been detained and even arrested in recent weeks for daring to ask ICE to follow the law.

ICE must be dismantled. Both its officials and rank-and-file brownshirts must be fired. ICE has proven itself to be incompatible with a system of democratic self-government based on the due process of laws. Whatever the hell you think this country needs to do to enforce its immigration laws, it cannot be ICE. The organization cannot be allowed to continue to exist.

Democrats, of course, had the chance to dismantle ICE during the Biden administration. But they did not. Biden and the larger forces running the Democratic Party not only allowed ICE to continue brutalizing immigrants; they shouted down anybody who advocated that ICE should be destroyed. The Democrats' fear of being tagged as supporting "defund the police," or being called "soft" on immigration, led them to defend a domestic gestapo force that seems to have literally no respect for the law and uses violence as a first option.

It is perhaps too early to start thinking about the 2028 Democratic primary. It is perhaps naïve to think we'll even be allowed to have a 2028 Democratic primary, let alone to win a free and fair general election. But know this: I will not support any Democrat who supports ICE. Its actions have radicalized me into a single-issue voter. Dismantle ICE, or GTFO.

The Bad and The Ugly

Artificial intelligence chatbots require huge amounts of power. Generating that power hurts our environment. Increasingly, people like Elon Musk are colonizing Black communities to build the environmentally disastrous complexes needed by AI. I guess I finally know why there are so few Black people in the future imagined by the Terminator movies: The white folks who built Skynet poisoned us all first.
In a decision rebuking the Trump administration for canceling NIH funding for any research related to the Black or LGBTQ communities, US District Judge William Young said: "I've never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I've sat on this bench now for 40 years. I've never seen government racial discrimination like this." Judge Young was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1985.
Speaking of NIH funding, this report details a way that Trump is getting cowardly universities to obey in advance and further cut back on their research grants: He's threatening schools with lawsuits under the False Claims Act, a Civil War statute that makes it a crime to defraud the government.
Trump continues to try to replace the civil service with political appointees. I honestly have no idea why his attempts to do this are not more well known, and more unpopular. He is trying to make every federal functionary a patronage position. It is literally a blueprint for corruption and graft.
The American Bar Association has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over his intimidation and harassment of law firms. As Sam Seaborn might say, "let's ignore the fact that you're late to the party and embrace the fact that you showed up at all."

Inspired Takes

I have to include this piece, written by the excellent Jodi Kantor, about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. I don't like the piece, because it's more about how Barrett would like people to see her than it is about what she really is. But that is the price of getting access to a Supreme Court justice.
This piece, by Jay Willis of Balls and Strikes, is about what Amy Coney Barrett really is. He writes, "Barrett, as if compelled to disprove the Times profile's thesis as quickly and dramatically as possible, decided that Roberts did not go far enough [in his anti-trans decision]." Jay, it should be noted, did not get special access to a Supreme Court justice.
In case you're wondering why I spent a few hundred words on dismantling ICE, instead of a few thousand, it's because Jack Mirkinson already did that work for me in The Nation.

Worst Argument of the Week

In the Supreme Court's disastrous decision in US v. Skrmetti, the anti-trans case in which the court upheld a Tennessee law aimed at eradicating transgender kids, the court cited The New York Times seven times. The citations were to articles, printed in the Times, popularizing bunk science and spreading misinformation about the trans community.

The Times is, sneakily, one of the most anti-trans organizations in the country. The "paper of record" regularly prints and promotes barely disguised bigotry against trans people. The paper's political "analysis" and editorials often encourage Democrats to abandon the trans community in the party's desperate and always failing quest to recapture the white working class. Trans people are a punching bag to the Times, and it's so obvious that conservatives like Sam Alito, who usually despise the publication, giddily cited it as an authority on the issue.

Erin Reed, in her always-must-read column Erin in the Morning, reports that since the anti-trans decision, the Times has published at least six articles "dancing on the graves" of the trans kids the Times helped destroy. M. Gessen right now stands alone on their pages in defending the rights and dignity of trans youth.

People should know who their friends are, and know who their enemies are. If you are a friend to the trans community, The New York Times is your enemy.

Children hold signs and transgender pride flags as supporters of transgender rights rally by the Supreme Court, December 4, 2024, in Washington, DC.

What I Wrote

Somewhat obviously, I wrote a full breakdown of the Supreme Court's anti-trans decision. It's the kind of decision that will be overturned by history. In 50 years, or 100 years, people will look back on it and not understand how the Supreme Court could be so bigoted and wrong.

In News Unrelated to the Ongoing Chaos

I'm ashamed to admit that I still don't know what to do with Juneteenth. As many of you know, I happen to be Black. I feel somewhat compelled to "celebrate" this day, and even more compelled to celebrate the fact that Black people made it a national holiday.

But, as many of you know, I'm also old. In dog years, I'm at the age of "Wait, is that a new trick? I don't know about that." Juneteenth was never celebrated by my family as I was growing up (I'm a Northern Black and the holiday was more of a Southern Black thing), so I don't really have any history or traditions to fall back on. It's always hard to make "new" history, and for me it's particularly hard to get into celebration mode because Juneteenth sits smack in the middle of Supreme Court decision season. I'm locked in right now, and with this court, I feel anything but "forever free."

I want my kids to have positive, Black associations with the holiday, though. I'm already well known in my family as the Halloween curmudgeon, and I don't want to add to my rap sheet.

My solution was to play spades with my children. I know Black people who don't know how to play spades, and I always feel sorry for them.