Gestapo USA

The Trump administration is organising an international summit focused on countering the left-wing movement Antifa and other groups, three sources familiar with the matter said.

The effort highlights the shift in the US government’s counterterrorism priorities over the past year.

The conference, tentatively planned for June or July, will convene officials from various nations to discuss strategies for battling Antifa and encourage intelligence sharing, said the sources, who requested anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

US President Donald Trump has portrayed Antifa as a severe threat to the US.

Counterterrorism experts argue it does not exist as an organised entity, though people claiming affinity to Antifa have been involved in armed attacks in the US.

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The Right is selling a vision of classical education that promises to build character and nurture wonder. Liberals are stuck aiming for higher test scores and employability. Public education defenders need our own inspiring take on the meaning of school.

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What might a lofty and inclusive vision for K-12 look like? It would make sense to start by asking what matters to students, who are feeling less and less motivated to come to school at all. Those who have spent time with today’s young people know that they are much more than the illiterate cell-phone addicts we see caricatured in media portrayals. They deserve to reach for something more rousing than standardized definitions of “proficiency,” which have been forced on them with little regard for their agency or interiority. They deserve to read a gripping novel in its entirety, not because it will help them get into college but because their time on earth is precious and good stories can spark joy.

They deserve to come together for rich dialogue and deep deliberation simply because they are human beings, with beating hearts, and searching minds, and yes, souls that long for meaning.

The unavoidable conclusion that must be drawn from the speech delivered on Wednesday night by Donald Trump is that the American president is a political criminal. If one grants that there exists a moral boundary, even in the realm of imperialist geopolitics, between the generally sinister pursuit of capitalist great power interests and fascist bestiality, the leaders of the US government have passed over it. The names of Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Rubio and Miller will live in perpetual infamy alongside those of the Nazi ringleaders of the Third Reich: Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Von Ribbentrop and Goebbels. The judgment of history will be merciless.

But that judgment will be delivered not only against individuals, but also, and more profoundly, against the social class that raised them to power and in whose interest they have committed their monstrous crimes against the people of Iran. Herein lies the significance of Trump’s Wednesday night rant. It exposed the irreversible political and moral putrefaction of the American ruling class.

Trump is not the first president to commit crimes. His predecessors have ordered the invasions of countries, the overthrow of governments, and the torture and assassination of individuals identified as opponents of American interests. But some attempt was made by previous administrations to provide at least some legal and democratic justification, however threadbare, cynical, deceitful and hypocritical, for their actions. The contempt for domestic and international law—and, along with it, the repudiation of any adherence to democratic principles—could not be openly embraced as the bases of state policies. When criminal acts were exposed, they were excused, with formal expressions of regret, as unfortunate departures from official enforcement of legal norms.

That stage has passed. Trump’s speech was remarkable for its lack of disguise. He chose words that exposed with unvarnished bluntness the deliberately genocidal aims of American actions. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” he declared. He threatened that the United States would strike “each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.” He boasted of the decapitation of the leadership—“They’re all dead”—and then added, with the coarse self-assurance of a Mafia don, “We have all the cards. They have none.”

Trump threatened the destruction of the material foundations of social life for an entire country, explaining that Iran’s oil sector had thus far been spared only because its destruction “would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.”

What found expression in these remarks was not simply the pathology of an individual, but the essential character of a social layer that has become habituated to criminality and no longer feels compelled to apologize for it.

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https://archive.is/lMP4h

By the time of Broadnax’s trial in 2009, “gangsta rap” had effectively ceased to exist. It had fragmented into regional versions, from trap music in the south-east to drill in Chicago. Yet it was still powerfully invoked at the sentencing stage of Broadnax’s trial. Meanwhile, the number of cases recorded in the Rap on Trial database continues to grow. Since 2010 there has been an uptick, fueled by social media, which offers detectives an easy route to surveil rappers through their posted videos. “Prosecutors definitely don’t care what the music is labeled or depicted as,” Nielson said. “If the lyrics suit their purposes, they will use them.”

the defense secretary is never going to be able to wash the blood from his hands. The 45-year-old, one of the strongest backers of the war on Iran, has said he wants “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” to the be the hallmark of the US military, and he’s been making good on that promise. Under his watch, a defense department program aimed at reducing civilian harm has been dismantled, and experts who provide guidance on keeping military operations in line with international law have been fired. And, of course, a school full of little girls has been bombed.

Hegseth doesn’t just have a dangerous disregard for rules of engagement, which he’s called “stupid”; he’s brought a disturbing level of bloodlust to his so-called Department of War. The pundit-turned-politician seems to take great delight in violence, imbuing it with a religious righteousness. On Wednesday, for example, Hegseth prayed for violence (as you do) during a Christian worship service held at the Pentagon. “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said in the prayer service. “Give them wisdom in every decision … and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

A recent string of revelations about abuses by the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps presents an opportunity to rein in the military’s presence and power in public schools.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8046952

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/37346

Immigrant communities across the United States have been facing an escalating wave of attacks. In response, from Los Angeles to Chicago and beyond, tens of thousands have taken to the streets, organized rapid-response networks, and refused to let their neighbors, coworkers, and friends be taken away. Nowhere has this been clearer than in Minneapolis, where thousands mobilized in the dead of winter to block ICE operations, forcing ICE to scale back its operations. As Trump’s attack on immigrants continues, we have to go on the offensive to fight not only against the violent detentions and deportations, but also challenge the very system that maintains immigrants in precarity.

Our fight has immediate, concrete demands: abolish ICE, end deportations and detention centers, and reunite families that have been torn apart. At the center of this struggle, however, we have to put the fight for full rights for all immigrants, including full democratic rights and citizenship for all.

The fight for full rights for all immigrants is the civil rights struggle of our time. Just as the Civil Rights movement wasn’t satisfied with simply softening the edges of Jim Crow and fought for the full equality of Black Americans, our fight can’t settle for moderating the worst expressions of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda or maintaining the tiered system that keeps immigrants excluded from the social and political fabric of the country that they live, work, and build their lives in. Immigrants deserve more than the bare minimum of not being persecuted or terrorized; they deserve the same rights and opportunities as everyone else living in the United States. Winning those rights would place the entire working class in a stronger position to defend itself and fight for better conditions for all.

Immigrants Are Essential

The attacks on immigrants has been one of the core pillars of the second Trump administration. From describing migrants as criminals and invaders to pushing mass deportations and expanding immigration enforcement, Donald Trump has run a campaign to vilify immigrants with the hopes of sowing distrust and discontent among one another. Immigrants are routinely blamed for economic hardship, crime, and social instability, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This narrative is not only false; it is dangerous. It fuels policies that separate families, criminalize communities, and justify the expansion of agencies like ICE that terrorize immigrant neighborhoods and anyone who stands in solidarity with them.

The reality is that immigrants are not a burden on the United States, but are essential to its economy and social fabric. Nearly 48 million immigrants live in the United States out of a population of roughly 335 million. In 2023 alone, immigrants generated about $1.7 trillion in economic activity and paid roughly $652 billion in local, state, and federal taxes.

Undocumented immigrants—estimated to number between 11 and 14 million people, or roughly 3 to 4 percent of the total population—are denied even the most basic rights and protections. Yet they remain deeply embedded in the country’s economy and communities. In 2023, undocumented immigrants held approximately $299 billion in spending power and contributed close to $90 billion in taxes.

Behind these numbers are the workers who keep the country running. Immigrants pick the food that ends up on American tables, build homes, care for the elderly, stock warehouses, drive trucks, and clean offices long after the workday ends. Entire industries—from agriculture to logistics to care work—depend on immigrant labor.

Yet despite their indispensable role in society, immigrants continue to face relentless attacks and are continued to be denied basic civil and democratic rights.

Minneapolis Showed the Way

Trump’s targeting of immigrants has not gone unchallenged. The brutality of his attacks has sparked an outpouring of resistance across the country. In Los Angeles last summer, people mobilized in force to fight against the deployment of the National Guard. In Chicago, workers and community members fought against similar deployments to protect their neighbors.

In Minneapolis, we saw thousands mobilized to defend their neighbors when immigration enforcement operations threatened to tear families apart. Despite crippling cold, community members organized protests and rapid-response networks to prevent ICE from taking people from their homes and workplaces, showing the power of a people mobilizing together from below. Under pressure from community defense efforts, labor action, student walkouts, mutual aid networks, and sustained protests, immigration enforcement agents were forced to withdraw from the area.

But the danger has not disappeared. Despite pulling back its operations in many places, ICE still remains and has gone on the offensive again on new fronts. Hundreds of agents remain in Minnesota, for one, and the broader deportation apparatus is still intact, with the agency planning for new and bigger detention facilities. Thousands of immigrants taken during these operations are still missing, either in detention or deported, and separated from their families and communities. Meanwhile, the federal government continues to redirect enforcement elsewhere, leaving immigrant communities across the country vulnerable to new waves of raids and arrests.

At the same time, Democratic leaders have offered little relief. Politicians who claim to support immigrant communities have largely cooperated with the federal enforcement system or failed to challenge it in any meaningful way. In Minnesota, Democrats such as Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, despite symbolic words of solidarity, have done little to actually support immigrants. Indeed, while Walz’s state forces arrested people protesting ICE operations, Frey vetoed an eviction moratorium that would’ve protected immigrants who had lost income because they sheltered in place during the raids.

Across the country, Democrats and Republican are working together to increase the collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement. At the same time that Trump is terrorizing immigrants with deportations, furthermore, he and the bipartisan regime have also made clear the economy needs to keep exploiting their labor. While the bipartisan regime continues to fund the expansion of ICE detention centers, the H-2A visa program is being amended to meet labor shortages in agriculture. Indeed, despite all their attacks on immigrant rights, both parties are united in finding ways to guarantee the continuation of a cheap labor force.

This reality points to a clear conclusion: managing or moderating the harshest expressions of Trump’s immigration agenda is not enough. We have to challenge and dismantle the very system it stands on.

Abolish ICE & Full Democratic and Civil Rights for All

Central to Trump’s attacks on immigrants has been the deputization of ICE to carry out his program. ICE is one of the central instruments used to criminalize immigrants and fracture communities. It also has become an extension of Executive Branch’s authoritarian policies, with a budget that is larger than the military budget of entire nations. Ending detention centers, shutting down the deportation pipeline, and dismantling ICE would represent a decisive step toward protecting immigrant families. Just as urgently, those who have already been taken must be returned to their communities. Families must be reunited, and those unjustly detained must be released.

We can’t stop there. To bring an end to the deportations and so that every immigrant can live with dignity and equal rights, we have to put the fight for full rights for all immigrants at the very center of our struggle.

At its core, this is has to be a fight for basic democratic freedoms. Indeed, Trump’s attacks are only the latest and most vicious chapter in a long and ongoing assault on immigrants. Even before Trump, millions of immigrants have lived as a permanent underclass within the country that they help build every day. They are denied the right to vote, barred from numerous public benefits, face severe limits to their rights to organize and are constantly excluded from full participation in the political and social life of their schools, workplaces, and communities. The fear of retaliation is a constant presence that shapes their daily existence. Trump has used that fear as a weapon, but the system that maintains immigrants as second-class citizens in the country not only predates him, but will also outlast him, unless we fight to dismantle it.

This is why the fight for full rights for all immigrants must include the right to assembly and free speech. Immigrants face constant threats to these rights everyday. Workers who speak out against exploitation risk retaliation not only from employers but also from immigration authorities. The ability to organize, protest, and demand better conditions is undermined when millions of people live under the constant threat of detention or deportation.

And it must include the demand for citizenship for all. This is not something Congress or either of the two parties will hand down — it can only be won through massive struggle, the kind that builds in every workplace, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, until it becomes a national force. The level of mobilization required is not unlike that of the Civil Rights movement: coordinated, from below, and unrelenting.

In the history of the United States, a central demand of the colonial elite in their struggle for independence from Britain was the principle of “no taxation without representation.” Yet today that basic right is denied to millions. Immigrants contribute billions of dollars in taxes while being denied the most basic political rights. They work, raise children, build communities, and participate fully in the country’s social and economic life, yet they remain excluded from the democratic process.

Winning full citizenship rights would not only address this injustice—it would strengthen the entire working class. This is precisely why the labor movement must be at the center of this fight.

The Labor Movement Must Be at the Center of This Fight

The fight for immigrant rights cannot be separated from the fight for workers’ rights. Unions represent millions of workers, including large numbers of immigrants, and they have the power to challenge the system of raids, deportations, and intimidation that keeps immigrant workers vulnerable. When immigrant workers are denied rights, employers use that vulnerability to drive down wages, weaken organizing, and divide the working class.

Those divisions are not abstract—they play out inside workplaces every day. Employers constantly create layers within the same workplace—between drivers and warehouse workers (like at UPS), full-time and part-time staff, permanent employees and temporary workers, and union and non-union workers. Race and immigration status are often used to reinforce these divisions, with immigrant and racialized workers disproportionately pushed into the lowest-paid, most precarious positions. These divisions are tools used by employers to weaken solidarity, justify unequal pay and conditions, and make it harder for workers to organize collectively. When workers are separated into different tiers, it becomes easier for companies to pit one group against another while keeping wages low and working conditions poor for everyone. The fight for full rights for all immigrants is intrinsically tied to our right to work and unionize.

Our unions, thus, have to be at the forefront of the struggle for full rights for all immigrants. Leaders of major unions have to use their platforms to demand the abolition of ICE, an end to deportations, and full democratic rights and citizenship for all immigrants.

But instead, figures such as Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers, who even speaks of working-class unity on both sides of the border, and Sean O’Brien, the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have either upheld Trump’s attacks, such as defending his tariffs, or stayed conspicuously silent as Trump has reversed immigration protections or as ICE has raided workplaces and torn families apart. It is a glaring contradiction, especially these policies continue to separate the struggles of U.S. workers from that of immigrants and the working class around the world. This silence only reinforces the divisions that employers and politicians rely on to weaken workers’ power.

Indeed, for Fain, who has been championing a general strike in 2028, the fight for immigrants rights needs to be the center of the campaign. Any aspirations of “shutting it all down” will remain hollow as long as millions of immigrant workers are excluded from that project. There is no working-class unity worthy of the name that leaves immigrants behind. In that, it is urgent that Fain calls and puts the vast resources of the UAW towards organizing that fight, complete with assemblies and open meetings to defend immigrants from ICE and openly demanding full rights for all.

Similarly, O’Brien continues to tout his desire to unionize Amazon, but any real attempts to do so must account for the tens of thousands of immigrant workers who are constantly under threat. On the contrary, the Teamsters leader has not only brokered and overseen a UPS contract that maintained the structural divide between warehouse workers and drivers, but has also backed Trump’s new DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, who is going to oversee further attacks on immigrant workers, and did nothing to protect Haitian and Venezuelan workers at Amazon who lost TPS protections and were consequently fired because of it. The struggle to unionize the logistics giant is inseparable from the fight for full rights for all immigrants.

When unions stand up for immigrant rights—including the demand to abolish ICE and win full civil rights for all—they strengthen the power of the entire working class.

The events in Minneapolis showed us that possibility. When immigration enforcement threatened members of the community, divisions within our class melted away. Workers from different sectors showed up for one another. People mobilized in droves to defend their neighbors regardless of their immigration status. It showed that unity across the working class can flourish if we prepare along these lines. At the height of the backlash against the ICE surge in Minneapolis, furthermore, an assembly of hundreds of workers and community members not only voted for a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on May Day, but also resolved to form strike committees across workplaces to make it real.

The experience in Minneapolis points toward what we need nationwide. The fight for immigrant rights must become a fight taken up by unions, community organizations, students, and social movements together. It requires consciously rejecting the divisions that are imposed in our workplaces and across society. Everything that we win will come from organizing and strengthening this fight from below: workers, students, and communities linking their struggles, building the committees and assemblies that can coordinate action across neighborhoods, cities, and industries.

When workers — immigrant and non-immigrant alike — stand together to demand the abolition of ICE, an end to deportations, and full right for all, including the right to citizenship, they challenge the system that keeps the working class fragmented and weak. Building that kind of unity will not come from politicians or cautious statements by union leaderships. It will come from organizing and fighting from the ground up, in every workplace, school and neighborhood, building the kind of power that no raid, no detention center, and no deportation machine can withstand.

From Left Voice, we put our pages to the service of this struggle. We invite you to write, share your experiences, and contribute analysis that can help sharpen and expand this fight. We encourage artists, and creators to produce visuals and media that can bring these demands to life across social media and beyond. Take this discussion into your unions, workplaces, schools to expand on the fight for immigrant rights.

The post The Movement to Abolish ICE Must Fight for Full Rights for All Immigrants appeared first on Left Voice.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8069603

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/37915

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Dan Caine (R) provide updates on the continued military operations in Iran during a press briefing on the Iran war at the Pentagon on March 19, 2026, in Arlington, Virginia. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

A judge last week struck down the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists seeking “unauthorized” information, siding with the New York Times in its lawsuit against the government. In response, the Pentagon on Monday added some meaningless window dressing and essentially reissued the same restrictions. The administration pledged to “immediately” appeal the decision on the original policy, and on Tuesday, the Times filed a motion to compel the administration to comply with the judge’s order.

As alarming as the Pentagon’s antics are, the Times’ lawsuit is not the only case about whether reporters have the right to ask questions. It’s not even the only one in the news this week.

In 2017, police in Laredo, Texas, arrested citizen journalist Patricia Villarreal under an obscure and never previously used law making it a felony to ask government employees for nonpublic information for personal benefit. Her supposed crime was asking a police officer about two local tragedies — a suicide and a deadly car wreck.

Her arrest was widely ridiculed, and a judge quickly threw out the charges. When Villarreal sued over her arrest and mistreatment by officers, the legal question wasn’t whether the charges against her were permissible but whether they were so obviously bogus that she could overcome qualified immunity, the unjust and expansive legal shield that protects government employees from liability for all but the most blatant violations. That issue went to the Supreme Court twice, but on Monday, the Court declined to review a federal appellate court’s ruling that the officers were shielded from liability.

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FBI Raid on WaPo Reporter’s Home Was Based on Sham Pretext](https://theintercept.com/2026/01/15/fbi-raid-washington-post-journalist/)

No matter what our severely compromised Supreme Court thinks, the local cops who arrested Villarreal were embarrassingly ignorant of the Constitution. But they were also ahead of their time: The Department of Justice is making the same claims that turned the Laredo police into a First Amendment laughingstock — that reporters simply asking questions to the government is criminal — to federal district Judge Paul Friedman.

Most discussion of the Pentagon’s restrictions has focused on their conditions for reporters to receive press credentials, which the Pentagon says can be revoked if reporters publish “unauthorized” information. That policy is wildly unconstitutional on its own, and every mainstream outlet gave up their press passes rather than sign on, leaving war coverage inside the Pentagon to the likes of Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s LindellTV streaming service.

But the Pentagon’s legal filings imply that reporters who don’t follow the rules risk more than their press passes. On March 12, the DOJ filed a brief to clarify its lawyers’ earlier comments in a discussion with Friedman at a hearing of “whether asking a question was a criminal act.” The government argued that although journalists may lawfully ask questions of “authorized” Pentagon personnel, “a journalist does solicit the commission of a criminal act, and that solicitation is not protected by the First Amendment, when he or she solicits … non-public information from individuals who are legally obligated not to disclose that information.”

There you have it. What was once a fringe, failed legal theory concocted by some local cops in one Texas border city is now the official position of the federal government’s lawyers, which it felt compelled to put in writing in case anyone wasn’t sure where it stood after the hearing. Both the rogue cops and the DOJ’s lawyers contend that journalists merely asking questions to government officials constitutes unlawful solicitation.

“These Pentagon policies remind us that people in power will stop literally at nothing to control the story.”

As JT Morris, supervising senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (which represents Villarreal) told me in an email last week, the First Amendment “unquestionably protects our right to ask questions, whether it’s a citizen asking police about a local crime or the New York Times asking Pentagon officials about matters of national security. Officials can always respond, ‘no comment.’ But they cannot jail Americans for asking.”

The government’s argument would have turned countless Pulitzer-winning national security reporters into criminals. As Friedman put it in his ruling, the “role of a journalist is to solicit information. … [A] journalist asking questions is not a crime!” (You can tell a judge is miffed when scholarly language fails and they resort to exclamation points.)

The DOJ’s “concession” in its clarification brief (and later in its revised policy) — that journalists can direct questions to authorized spokespeople — makes no difference. That the administration even felt the need to state something so obvious, presumably because they thought it would make them sound more reasonable, signals the extent to which they’ve threatened the First Amendment.

Reporters carry their belongings from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15, 2025, after news outlets including the New York Times, AP, AFP and Fox News declined to sign new restrictive Pentagon media rules and were stripped of their press credentials. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Government agencies have long routed journalists’ inquiries to PR flacks and instructed non-public-facing staffers not to answer reporters’ questions. That’s unconstitutional in its own right; earlier this month, the Village of Key Biscayne, Florida, became the latest government agency to settle a lawsuit over its employee gag rule. But until this administration, the government at least placed the burden on its own employees to comply with restrictions on talking to reporters.

Now, the government expects journalists to make themselves a party to its censorship directives, and ignore Supreme Court precedent that they can print any government information they lawfully obtain, even if it shouldn’t have been released. “A contrary rule … would force upon the media the onerous obligation of sifting through government press releases, reports, and pronouncements to prune out material arguably unlawful for publication,” the Court reasoned.

Journalist Kathryn Foxhall, who has for years sounded the alarm about “censorship by PIO,” including in collaboration with the Society of Professional Journalists, says the press has failed to meaningfully oppose these policies. “The media have done little to fight the ever-tightening rules at federal agencies and elsewhere banning reporters from buildings and prohibiting employees from speaking to journalists without the authorities’ oversight. With amazing negligence journalists just assume whatever reporters get is the whole story, even in the face of the many thousands of gagged staff people. Now these Pentagon policies remind us that people in power will stop literally at nothing to control the story,” she told me.

The Pentagon’s position that newsgathering is a prosecutable offense is not just theoretical. Although the DOJ’s brief didn’t explicitly reference it, just like the officers in Laredo, federal prosecutors have their own archaic and constitutionally dubious law on the books to sane-wash their nonsense arguments — the Espionage Act of 1917. Read literally, that law (Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently introduced a much-needed bill to reform it) arguably prohibits reporters and anyone else from obtaining or attempting to obtain national defense information.

But reading it that way to go after journalists would be unconstitutional and politically toxic, which is why past administrations have refrained. Had the Supreme Court denied the Laredo officers’ qualified immunity in Villarreal’s case, it would have signaled that arguments for expansive interpretations of arcane laws to criminalize routine reporting are a nonstarter.

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The Court ducked the issue despite being fully aware that the present administration is looking for any excuse to punish reporters that dare to undermine its narratives. They’ve already claimed Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson — whose home they raided, seizing terabytes of data — violated the Espionage Act by obtaining leaked information. The Trump administration is barging through the door the Biden administration left wide open, when, despite warnings from First Amendment advocates, it extracted a plea deal from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Espionage Act charges for obtaining and publishing government records, including about Iraq war crimes.

The DOJ’s adoption of the Laredo police’s discredited theory is an extension of the Assange and Natanson cases; the claim that publishing leaked documents is criminal has evolved into a theory that merely asking questions is, too. The administration lost in court this time, but it said it will appeal, and may be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s cowardice in the Laredo case.

If this administration succeeds in chipping away at constitutional protections for journalistic practices as basic as asking questions, reporters who wish to do anything more than regime stenography may risk imprisonment just by doing their jobs. In her dissent to the Villarreal ruling, Justice Sotomayor put it well: “Tolerating retaliation against journalists, or efforts to criminalize routine reporting practices, threatens to silence ‘one of the very agencies the Framers of our Constitution thoughtfully and deliberately selected to improve our society and keep it free.’”

The post Pentagon Wants It to Be Illegal for Reporters to Ask “Unauthorized” Questions appeared first on The Intercept.

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In Texas’s largest public school district, in Houston, the immigrant student population plummeted by nearly 4,000 students, or a decrease of 22 percent, this school year. In Maine, absences at some schools hit 25 to 30 percent during a week of heavy ICE presence in January. In Minnesota, up to 40 percent of students stayed home during the agency’s violent operations in the Twin Cities.

The “dumb/smart” video is cringeworthy now, especially since Vance is clearly using kindergarten vocabulary so that Trump, who is seated behind the Resolute Desk next to him, will understand the flattery. But it will look much worse in the future, once all doubt that this war is a massive failure has been removed and the vice president is asked if he still has faith in Trump’s towering intellect.

Plenty of political commentators have noted that, by defending Trump’s war with Iran, Vance looks like a grasping phony, which could hurt his presidential ambitions in 2028. But it’s even worse than that for the vice president. Clips like this underscore that he is weak and, frankly, emasculated — eager to debase himself on camera for crumbs of approval from a president whose political and physical strength both seem to be rapidly waning. This is bad news for Vance, who has built his political brand by trying to appeal to the wannabe alpha-male crowd of the “manosphere,” a loose conglomerate of both secular and Christian right content creators whose bro poses and sexist politics helped propel Trump into the White House in 2024.

Vance is one of Earth's biggest losers.