Nice sentiments expressed here that I - a moderate independent who disdains Trump - largely agree with. But the sad reality is that the Democratic party is firmly in the grip of the Wokesters, the hardcore left-wing and very sanctimonious people who control Democratic nominating contests almost everywhere. How many prominent Democrats publicly acknowledge the need to reform ICE while also having a genuinely secure border? How many of them will admit that having masses of minimally educated, low-skilled unauthorized immigrants badly strains public assistance programs? Come on, fellow commenters: can anyone name any Democrat other than John Fetterman who would say these things in public?
The door is wide open for a moderate liberal to win the White House in 2028 along with having Democratic majorities in Congress. The one hope to save MAGA is for Democrats to nominate a symbol of the crazy Left - which they are very likely to do.
Sadly, instead of reevaluating their policies, many, if not most Democrats only want to change the messaging. Virginia Democrats made it all about the "affordability" shtick, but look at the insane bills they've filed and the truth is told.
I am sure the Left is thrilled. But she ran as a Moderate. Bait and switch. That is what makes the Democrats untrustworthy. I may not like what Trump is doing on immigration all the time, but if I am honest, he is doing what he campaigned on. Can I trust Dems to do that? No.
Better the devil you know...isn't that the old saying?
I think Liberal Patriot has done some of the best diagnostic work on the depth of the Democratic Party’s problem. This piece is no exception. The identification of the failures, including governance breakdowns, coalition shrinkage, demographic erosion, and the loss of constitutional language, is largely right. And credit is due for naming them clearly. Where I continue to part ways is on strategy.
Again and again, the solution seems to return to “better recruitment,” meaning more locally rooted and authentic candidates. That is not wrong, but it is not sufficient for a problem this deep, especially one Liberal Patriot itself has been documenting for months. What’s being described here is not mainly a candidate-quality problem. It is a platform and power problem.
The Democratic platform is not just a set of ideas. It is an infrastructure of donors, advocacy groups, NGOs, media incentives, and enforcement mechanisms. No matter how grounded a candidate is at entry, once they rise into national politics they are shaped and constrained by that system. Recruitment feeds the platform far more than it reforms it. Historically, platforms do not change through incremental recruitment. They change through extraordinary leadership.
What Democrats actually need, whether they are comfortable admitting it or not, is an FDR-type figure, someone able to break an existing coalition, override entrenched interests (including parts of their own party), centralize authority, and force real tradeoffs. That is what Roosevelt did. He did not finesse the New Deal through better candidates. He imposed a new governing logic on a system that had lost legitimacy.
The irony is that many of the same voices calling for reform would likely reject that kind of leadership today, especially given how Trump is framed. But strategy does not disappear because it is uncomfortable. If the diagnosis really is this deep, then the solution cannot stop at mid-power fixes like recruitment. Problem identification is not the same as strategy.
Until Democrats grapple honestly with how platforms change, how power is reorganized, and what kind of leadership is capable of doing that work, they will continue to name the right problems while offering solutions too weak to solve them.
The Democrats’ other major problem is that while the public recoils from heavy handed tactics. Shutting down illegal entry, ending bogus asylum claims, and deporting people here illegally will always win out over their litmus test of de facto open borders and nobody get deported. A good test for a current Democrat in office who wants to prove centrist bonafides is to cooperate with ICE and respect the administrative warrants that are allowed by an immigration law signed by Bill Clinton.
What Democrats actually need, whether they are comfortable admitting it or not, is an FDR-type figure, someone able to break an existing coalition, override entrenched interests (including parts of their own party), centralize authority, and force real tradeoffs.
Which is a fair description of what, why and how Trump took control of the GOP.
And it worked very well for Trump and the GOP. Remember, they were and in many quarters still are the party of unchecked immigration, like CATO, Americans for Prosperity, etc., or all the anti tariff crying and whining.
Would the description in the beginning of this diatribe be different had MN democrats actually tried to protect their citizens? Would this two criminals who died be alive. Yes I know criminals is a trigger word. Based on the rest of the country the answers would be yes.
As an independent, the Dems are just as culpable, maybe even more so, as the Repubs. Difference is, once again Trump is cleaning up Joe’s mess. One city out of hundreds is not the norm. It is a bad anomaly. It is what the country becomes if the Dems take control. Watching Chris Murphy with Shannon Breem made me sick. Throw in Swalwell and you see who the dictators will be. The Dems have no moderate capable of winning primaries. Spanberger? being the perfect example of the rat in a mouse’s clothing.
A good first step would be to stop with the hyperbole. There is no Constitutional right to interfere with law enforcement, harass, vandalize, or resist arrest. When agitators ( the appropriate term in most of these instances, rioter is more appropriate for others) break these laws then retreat into a group of people who are peacefully protesting, the result is that you make their assembly unlawful. Regardless of how loosely you define the term journalist, when you participate in an unlawful act to deprive people of their Constitutional right to worship, you don’t get to avoid responsibility because you filmed it. You don’t get to use them as a shield. Yes the administration’s rhetoric has been ridiculously hyperbolic, but it’s rich listening to people who continue to refer to J6 rioters as “insurrectionists” complain about “domestic terrorist”.
The solution to the mess in Minnesota is to cooperate and allow the federal government to enforce federal law. And especially to allow local law enforcement to conduct crowd control quickly arresting the agitators while allowing the entirely peaceful protesters to exercise their constitutional rights.
Nothing say that you have a weak argument and should not be taken seriously quite as strongly quite as tossing around “police state” and making Nazi references.
It's not hyperbole. Whether the Democrats should be frank about what's going on, and point out the accurate historical analogies, or whether it would be better to understate it and focus on other things is indeed a strategic matter--but as a factual matter, all of the following are true:
****
>>A poorly vetted, poorly trained paramilitary group of masked men with de facto legal immunity to do whatever they want have been terrorizing the people of Minneapolis, and this is being captured en masse on video, and being rightly criticized by the local police
>>The government is quite openly lying about what's happening in unprecedented fashion, and expecting no one to call them on it (Pretti wasn't rioting when he was shot, and there was absolutely zero basis for calling him a domestic terrorist, whereas we had J6 rioters shouting "Hang Mike Pence")
>>The Feds are arresting journalists for matters that would in normal times be, at worst, cause for a summons to court for civil proceedings--and are expecting people to ignore the effect this has on the mentality of a free press because Don Lemon isn't a very likable fellow (as if that has anything to do with it)
>>The Blackshirts (the most accurate historical compairson) were highly analogous to what ICE is now--a paramilitary group given immunity from the courts by a strongman head of state and not formally trained as officers of the law, that terrorized the local population of Italy under the pretext of rooting out Communists that were infiltrating the country.
>>The DOJ has been weaponized in a totally unprecedented fashion and is explicitly going after the head of state's personal enemies regardless of what the law says, to such a degree that they have brought cases against Letitia James, James Comey, Lisa Cook and now Jay Powell without being able to secure convictions and in most cases indictments (federal prosecutors not securing indictments==unheard of before 2025)
>>The President is using lawsuits, in tandem with his privileged position as head of state, to subdue law firms he doesn't like, media companies he doesn't like, and now (in the most absurd measure of all) go after a treasury he is in charge of
>>Said President, and his family, have pocketed over $1 billion in private wealth since January 2025, largely by using the influence of his office
>>There's a lot more that could be listed than what's above, too
****
'Hyperbole' is the exaggeration of a mundane reality to make it seem extreme; what we have been seeing since January 2025 are extreme departures from political precedent and extreme attacks on liberal democratic norms, happening literally every week. And the go-to framing tactic is to make the mere pointing out of these acts "an overreaction."
It's not TDS to say "The president spent last week talking about taking over Greenland and potentially starting a war between NATO allies to do it", even though such a thing sounds ridiculous. It *is* ridiculous--but it also happened. Literally last week. And it's been like that practically every week since January 2025. That's not TDS. That's reality.
Nothing say that you have a weak argument and should not be taken seriously quite as strongly quite as tossing around “police state” and making Nazi references.
That's a dodge, not an argument. And I'm not even talking about the Nazis, I'm talking about the Italian fascists. The historical analogies are uniquely valid at this point in time--the parallelism between these recent developments and the political configuration of the country to interwar Italy (arguably a few other post-WWI strong-men led states as well, but especially the actions of the fascists in Italy in the mid 1920s) is particularly robust. And indeed, the broader world we are looking at looks very much like the world we saw during the Interwar years, in geopolitical terms. If you insist those parallels don't exist, go ahead and explain why, or we'll have to assume you can't.
Two very different beasts. Fascism implemented the authoritarian program by colonizing the liberal democratic state's institutions, whereas the National Socialists overthrew them. The Fascist state still had a Congress (technically Parliament), elections, and the outward appearance of independent institutions like a press and a legal system. The trick it pulled was to subordinate or hollow out all of those liberal democratic institutions--and create new instruments of state repression--to the strongman head-of-state.
The biggest of these instruments was the Blackshirts, and what ICE has become since January 2025, and particularly in the case of Minneapolis, fits them to a T. They were a militia commissioned by the head of state that existed one layer of bureaucratic power above local police--almost like a division of the army, but less regulated. They were completely unrestrained by the law and completely under the strongman's control--they were tasked with subduing communist radicals and to a lesser degree Trade Unionists whose strikes ran afoul of new anti-labor laws, and they did so not in the manner of professional LEOs or soldiers, but in a violent, mafia-esque style that terrorized the local population. They were not trained like LEOs and the bulk of them were not recruited from the same ranks as LEOs traditionally were; they were mostly pissed off WWI vets and unsavory gang members. Nonetheless they did quite effectively what Mussolini asked them to do--they flushed out the communists and pacified the trade unions.
What ICE has become under Trump is robustly analogous. He has used the J6 pardons to bestow de facto legal immunity upon them and direct control over them. They exist over and above the local police force, and in places like Minneapolis where they have carried out their mafia-state style purge campaigns, the police are not fond of them or their tactics. They do not exhibit the discipline and training that distinguishes a cartel-like militia member from an official LEO, and the pretext they use for all their undisciplined violent repression is the fact that they are prosecuting some 'out' group. Back then it was the communists, as mentioned already; now it is 'the illegals'.
Now that's before you even get to the strongman himself, and the broadly parallel way both Mussolini and Trump became popular and got elected, and the way they subsequently almost unilaterally sidelined the guardrails of liberal democratic governance. Or the similar geopolitical milieu, in which fallout from a traumatic event (WWI:COVID) combined with new sensationalizing communication technologies (newspapers-radio:social media) warped liberal nationalist sentiments into illiberal nationalism.
It's not invective, or hyperbolic--it's just historical fact.
Why do people find ICE's actions "terrifying", but not the carnage that brought us to this moment? The deaths of 2 protesters and detainment of a Father and 5 year old are tragedies. They sparked marches, a government shut down and demands for wholesale reform. That is understandable. What is not understandable, is why no one marches or demands wholesale immigration reform, for the victims of completely preventable migrant violence and death.
A few hours from our home, a girl not yet old enough to visit the CVS feminine hygiene aisle, was raped and murdered by not 1 Biden migrant, but 2. When they tired of raping her tiny body , they murdered her and left her dead in a ditch, like garbage.
Not far from there, a pretty high school cheerleader resided in affordable housing with her Mother. When she rebuffed the advances of a Biden migrant who had just entered the country, he pushed his way into her modest apartment, raped and murdered her. Her single Mother finished the late shift and returned home to find her only child, dead in the bathtub, naked from the waste down.
Not far from that spot, the Christmas before last, a Mother and her 7 daughter were running Christmas errands a few weeks before Dec 25. A drunk illegal migrant hit their car, killing the 7 year old. The 3rd grader missed her school Christmas Party, and all the other Christmas festivities She was lying in a funereal home.
Closer to home, I often pass the spot where just 9 months go, an illegal migrant truck driver, killed 5 people, and sent another dozen to the hospital, in a 17 car pileup. The dead included a young Mother, her young child and her infant, along with 2 others.
The driver had prior moving violations, but was never deported. There are 200K other such "non domiciled " truck drivers in the US. Many have licenses purchased at fraudulent driving schools operated by others, awaiting adjudication of phony asylum claims.
Nor are situations rare. A similar wreck a few hours North of the other one, took 3 more lives, shortly thereafter. These are all within a few hours of my home. Widen the area and the tragedies spread.
Not long after the above, a similar migrant induced wreck caused a CA 5 year old girl to endure a 3 week coma, and a multitude of other serious injuries that has postponed Kindergarten, as she learns to walk, talk and eat again.
More recently, just a few weeks ago, an illegal migrant invaded a Georgia home and raped an 11 year old at knifepoint, multiple times, in multiple fashions, in front of her 10 year old sister. When arrested in CA a week later, the alleged attacker noted, he found the 11 year old "attractive".
These are but the tiniest samples of the now regular migrant crime and carnage Americans endure. News of the tragedies often purposefully lack Immigration status. We should not tolerate government actions that result in preventable death or child trauma. Neither should we tolerate them from people residing illegally within the US. We must find a way to end both.
Governor Spanberger ran as a moderate on the "affordability" shtick, but the Democrats in the General Assembly have submitted bills for 50 new taxes and increases on existing ones totaling $6.7B even though Governor Youngkin handed over a $2.7B surplus. When the bills hit her desk, we shall see just how "moderate" she really is.
"At the same time, the Resistance, no matter how vocal, cannot evolve into something more powerful—to become a genuine movement to save the Constitution—if others do not similarly see their rights and the integrity of American values at stake."
Save the Constitution? Virginia Democrats have submitted a slew of gun control bills, radical even for Democrats, aimed specifically at making gun ownership largely illegal and at best, unaffordable. Again, we'll soon see just how "moderate" Spanberger really is.
It was definitely lower quality than most articles here.
Maybe we can raise our score in the Financial Times' Democracy Index by locking up people on social media for wrongthink and opening the borders again? And perhaps include overturning the occasional election and referendum? I assume that would boost our score close to European levels?
Vassallo is right than this being an inflection point, but it's a much bigger one than Jan 6. The battle in Minneapolis is whether or not Democrats have to follow Federal laws they don't like. If Trump backs down, California and Oregon will be next, then every blue city and state. Then after that, every other Federal law they want to ignore.
Vassallo's advice to the Democrats, if I understand it, is 1. Demonstrate the effectiveness of Democrat government in cities and states, 2. Nominate more lower and middle class candidates and fewer upper class ones, and 3. Abandon identity politics.
All three solutions face practical difficulties. Democrat government of cities and states has not been effective, or there would not have been a multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota. When Gavin Newsom offers to make the nation just like California, most of the voters will reply that they're afraid he will.
The insidious feature of identity politics is the circular reasoning it encourages. "I lost the election because I am black and the voters are racist." How do you know the voters are racist? "Because I lost the election." For evidence of this, read the memoirs of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Barack Obama. When the Tea Party opposed his policies, Obama concluded that they are racist. How did he know that they were racist? Simple: They opposed his policies, ergo they are trying to bring back Jim Crow law.
Lots of the folk who publish in this column spend the majority of their effort trying to weave reasonable suggestions through the TDH thicket that appears to be the admission fee. So here’s the rules.
You MAY NOT say “deport illegals” without an allusion to the Third Reich.
You MAY NOT wonder about how we got somewhere between 20 to 40 million illegals here, the costs of which are being borne by citizens who don’t remember voting for this.
You MAY NOT suggest how we fix that other than legitimizing it.
Lost me at the first sentence. Minneapolis terrifying? Maybe I've led a more interesting life. Lunatic lefties fighting police reminds me a lot more of the summer of Floyd than it does the Jan 6 riots. Of the eight percent of Democrats broadly supportive it's only a tiny minority of them who think actually physically fighting ICE is a great way to go, and yet crazed extremists seem to wag the dog. Not a way to flip my vote.
The Trump administration should scale back ICE and change its immigration policies as follows: Individuals who have entered the US illegally, but haven't broken any other laws, should not be taken into custody by ICE. Those individuals should be advised that they will be required to leave, and utilize administrative and financial incentives to that end, with due process. But no harsh tactics or ICE for them. And allow for legitimate asylum claims, with quick adjudication.
As to illegal entrants, who have broken other US laws, they should be taken into custody and deported, with due process. Further, non-citizen Radical Islamists and their supporters, even those who have entered legally, should be deported, with due process.
You seem to think there is a non-ICE way to deport illegal aliens in sanctuary cities.
Also remember that Martha's Vineyard is a sanctuary city and when asked to take in 25 illegal immigrants, they had them gone via military evacuation in 24 hours. Liberal want open borders, but they want the illegal immigrants to live in low-income neighborhoods with the poors. Liberal neighborhoods are for rich white people.
"And allow for legitimate asylum claims, with quick adjudication." There is no "quick" for 15M hearings. And once the process drags on for years, they are essentially impossible to deport because "they're just here trying to work and raise families."
I'm thinking now that the Southern border is closed, with due credit to Trump, it will become more manageable to process asylum claims. Try to speed up the process.
Do you have any idea of the backlog (measured in YEARS) in the courts that are supposed to deal with illegals. Do you think that imbalance is an accident? Do you live in Marthas Vineyard? The rest of us do not.
I have reached the conclusion the only way out is offer non criminal migrants a $10K payment for self repatriation by the end of summer. Allow takers to apply for normal expedited immigration from their nation of origin, after a 5 year cooling off period.
Deportations are $14K a pop, before the tax payer subsidies are considered. This would likely spur a large number of people to humanely and voluntarily return home, allowing ICE to concentrate on criminals.
It would appear the only way with millions that would take a couple of decades to deport or adjudicate overwhelmingly lacking asylum claims. I could be wrong, as my husband would be happy to tell you I often am, but I see no other way to resolve the situation.
This sounds practical … if as you say it would cost less for the self repatriation. And we would have their identification .. and keep the border controlled, so that we knew if they tried to come back before the 5 years
I did a search for "sanctuary." Not one mention in the piece. Remember: there would be no ICE in blue cities if blue cities followed the law and informed federal authorities of illegal aliens in their jails and/or criminal justice systems.
Then there's the Sun Tzu angle: know yourself and know your enemy.
I believe that liberals need to realize that they have been in power for over a century, and that their faith in administrative government and government programs for everything has been shown to be a false faith. The Science: Administrative government cannot work because of the "knowledge problems." Administrators cannot know enough to administer successfully. Then there's "regulatory capture."
I believe that liberals need to understand the why of the Trump effect. I think it goes back at least to Nixon's Silent Majority. And after that Reagan Democrats, then the Tea Party, and now Trump's MAGA. I understand all this as a Rodney Dangerfield Effect: liberals don't give the ordinary middle class no respect.
Nice sentiments expressed here that I - a moderate independent who disdains Trump - largely agree with. But the sad reality is that the Democratic party is firmly in the grip of the Wokesters, the hardcore left-wing and very sanctimonious people who control Democratic nominating contests almost everywhere. How many prominent Democrats publicly acknowledge the need to reform ICE while also having a genuinely secure border? How many of them will admit that having masses of minimally educated, low-skilled unauthorized immigrants badly strains public assistance programs? Come on, fellow commenters: can anyone name any Democrat other than John Fetterman who would say these things in public?
The door is wide open for a moderate liberal to win the White House in 2028 along with having Democratic majorities in Congress. The one hope to save MAGA is for Democrats to nominate a symbol of the crazy Left - which they are very likely to do.
Sadly, instead of reevaluating their policies, many, if not most Democrats only want to change the messaging. Virginia Democrats made it all about the "affordability" shtick, but look at the insane bills they've filed and the truth is told.
Fooled once, shame on them. Fooled twice, shame on you.
My parents are affluent white liberals who live in Virginia. I promise you, they're loving every second of this.
I am sure the Left is thrilled. But she ran as a Moderate. Bait and switch. That is what makes the Democrats untrustworthy. I may not like what Trump is doing on immigration all the time, but if I am honest, he is doing what he campaigned on. Can I trust Dems to do that? No.
Better the devil you know...isn't that the old saying?
I think Liberal Patriot has done some of the best diagnostic work on the depth of the Democratic Party’s problem. This piece is no exception. The identification of the failures, including governance breakdowns, coalition shrinkage, demographic erosion, and the loss of constitutional language, is largely right. And credit is due for naming them clearly. Where I continue to part ways is on strategy.
Again and again, the solution seems to return to “better recruitment,” meaning more locally rooted and authentic candidates. That is not wrong, but it is not sufficient for a problem this deep, especially one Liberal Patriot itself has been documenting for months. What’s being described here is not mainly a candidate-quality problem. It is a platform and power problem.
The Democratic platform is not just a set of ideas. It is an infrastructure of donors, advocacy groups, NGOs, media incentives, and enforcement mechanisms. No matter how grounded a candidate is at entry, once they rise into national politics they are shaped and constrained by that system. Recruitment feeds the platform far more than it reforms it. Historically, platforms do not change through incremental recruitment. They change through extraordinary leadership.
What Democrats actually need, whether they are comfortable admitting it or not, is an FDR-type figure, someone able to break an existing coalition, override entrenched interests (including parts of their own party), centralize authority, and force real tradeoffs. That is what Roosevelt did. He did not finesse the New Deal through better candidates. He imposed a new governing logic on a system that had lost legitimacy.
The irony is that many of the same voices calling for reform would likely reject that kind of leadership today, especially given how Trump is framed. But strategy does not disappear because it is uncomfortable. If the diagnosis really is this deep, then the solution cannot stop at mid-power fixes like recruitment. Problem identification is not the same as strategy.
Until Democrats grapple honestly with how platforms change, how power is reorganized, and what kind of leadership is capable of doing that work, they will continue to name the right problems while offering solutions too weak to solve them.
The Democrats’ other major problem is that while the public recoils from heavy handed tactics. Shutting down illegal entry, ending bogus asylum claims, and deporting people here illegally will always win out over their litmus test of de facto open borders and nobody get deported. A good test for a current Democrat in office who wants to prove centrist bonafides is to cooperate with ICE and respect the administrative warrants that are allowed by an immigration law signed by Bill Clinton.
From your comment:
What Democrats actually need, whether they are comfortable admitting it or not, is an FDR-type figure, someone able to break an existing coalition, override entrenched interests (including parts of their own party), centralize authority, and force real tradeoffs.
Which is a fair description of what, why and how Trump took control of the GOP.
And it worked very well for Trump and the GOP. Remember, they were and in many quarters still are the party of unchecked immigration, like CATO, Americans for Prosperity, etc., or all the anti tariff crying and whining.
Isn’t that ironic.
Would the description in the beginning of this diatribe be different had MN democrats actually tried to protect their citizens? Would this two criminals who died be alive. Yes I know criminals is a trigger word. Based on the rest of the country the answers would be yes.
As an independent, the Dems are just as culpable, maybe even more so, as the Repubs. Difference is, once again Trump is cleaning up Joe’s mess. One city out of hundreds is not the norm. It is a bad anomaly. It is what the country becomes if the Dems take control. Watching Chris Murphy with Shannon Breem made me sick. Throw in Swalwell and you see who the dictators will be. The Dems have no moderate capable of winning primaries. Spanberger? being the perfect example of the rat in a mouse’s clothing.
A good first step would be to stop with the hyperbole. There is no Constitutional right to interfere with law enforcement, harass, vandalize, or resist arrest. When agitators ( the appropriate term in most of these instances, rioter is more appropriate for others) break these laws then retreat into a group of people who are peacefully protesting, the result is that you make their assembly unlawful. Regardless of how loosely you define the term journalist, when you participate in an unlawful act to deprive people of their Constitutional right to worship, you don’t get to avoid responsibility because you filmed it. You don’t get to use them as a shield. Yes the administration’s rhetoric has been ridiculously hyperbolic, but it’s rich listening to people who continue to refer to J6 rioters as “insurrectionists” complain about “domestic terrorist”.
The solution to the mess in Minnesota is to cooperate and allow the federal government to enforce federal law. And especially to allow local law enforcement to conduct crowd control quickly arresting the agitators while allowing the entirely peaceful protesters to exercise their constitutional rights.
Nothing say that you have a weak argument and should not be taken seriously quite as strongly quite as tossing around “police state” and making Nazi references.
It's not hyperbole. Whether the Democrats should be frank about what's going on, and point out the accurate historical analogies, or whether it would be better to understate it and focus on other things is indeed a strategic matter--but as a factual matter, all of the following are true:
****
>>A poorly vetted, poorly trained paramilitary group of masked men with de facto legal immunity to do whatever they want have been terrorizing the people of Minneapolis, and this is being captured en masse on video, and being rightly criticized by the local police
>>The government is quite openly lying about what's happening in unprecedented fashion, and expecting no one to call them on it (Pretti wasn't rioting when he was shot, and there was absolutely zero basis for calling him a domestic terrorist, whereas we had J6 rioters shouting "Hang Mike Pence")
>>The Feds are arresting journalists for matters that would in normal times be, at worst, cause for a summons to court for civil proceedings--and are expecting people to ignore the effect this has on the mentality of a free press because Don Lemon isn't a very likable fellow (as if that has anything to do with it)
>>The Blackshirts (the most accurate historical compairson) were highly analogous to what ICE is now--a paramilitary group given immunity from the courts by a strongman head of state and not formally trained as officers of the law, that terrorized the local population of Italy under the pretext of rooting out Communists that were infiltrating the country.
>>The DOJ has been weaponized in a totally unprecedented fashion and is explicitly going after the head of state's personal enemies regardless of what the law says, to such a degree that they have brought cases against Letitia James, James Comey, Lisa Cook and now Jay Powell without being able to secure convictions and in most cases indictments (federal prosecutors not securing indictments==unheard of before 2025)
>>The President is using lawsuits, in tandem with his privileged position as head of state, to subdue law firms he doesn't like, media companies he doesn't like, and now (in the most absurd measure of all) go after a treasury he is in charge of
>>Said President, and his family, have pocketed over $1 billion in private wealth since January 2025, largely by using the influence of his office
>>There's a lot more that could be listed than what's above, too
****
'Hyperbole' is the exaggeration of a mundane reality to make it seem extreme; what we have been seeing since January 2025 are extreme departures from political precedent and extreme attacks on liberal democratic norms, happening literally every week. And the go-to framing tactic is to make the mere pointing out of these acts "an overreaction."
It's not TDS to say "The president spent last week talking about taking over Greenland and potentially starting a war between NATO allies to do it", even though such a thing sounds ridiculous. It *is* ridiculous--but it also happened. Literally last week. And it's been like that practically every week since January 2025. That's not TDS. That's reality.
Nothing say that you have a weak argument and should not be taken seriously quite as strongly quite as tossing around “police state” and making Nazi references.
That's a dodge, not an argument. And I'm not even talking about the Nazis, I'm talking about the Italian fascists. The historical analogies are uniquely valid at this point in time--the parallelism between these recent developments and the political configuration of the country to interwar Italy (arguably a few other post-WWI strong-men led states as well, but especially the actions of the fascists in Italy in the mid 1920s) is particularly robust. And indeed, the broader world we are looking at looks very much like the world we saw during the Interwar years, in geopolitical terms. If you insist those parallels don't exist, go ahead and explain why, or we'll have to assume you can't.
Fascist / Nazi. Toe-may-toe / toe-mah-to. Hyperbolic invective isn’t an argument either.
Two very different beasts. Fascism implemented the authoritarian program by colonizing the liberal democratic state's institutions, whereas the National Socialists overthrew them. The Fascist state still had a Congress (technically Parliament), elections, and the outward appearance of independent institutions like a press and a legal system. The trick it pulled was to subordinate or hollow out all of those liberal democratic institutions--and create new instruments of state repression--to the strongman head-of-state.
The biggest of these instruments was the Blackshirts, and what ICE has become since January 2025, and particularly in the case of Minneapolis, fits them to a T. They were a militia commissioned by the head of state that existed one layer of bureaucratic power above local police--almost like a division of the army, but less regulated. They were completely unrestrained by the law and completely under the strongman's control--they were tasked with subduing communist radicals and to a lesser degree Trade Unionists whose strikes ran afoul of new anti-labor laws, and they did so not in the manner of professional LEOs or soldiers, but in a violent, mafia-esque style that terrorized the local population. They were not trained like LEOs and the bulk of them were not recruited from the same ranks as LEOs traditionally were; they were mostly pissed off WWI vets and unsavory gang members. Nonetheless they did quite effectively what Mussolini asked them to do--they flushed out the communists and pacified the trade unions.
What ICE has become under Trump is robustly analogous. He has used the J6 pardons to bestow de facto legal immunity upon them and direct control over them. They exist over and above the local police force, and in places like Minneapolis where they have carried out their mafia-state style purge campaigns, the police are not fond of them or their tactics. They do not exhibit the discipline and training that distinguishes a cartel-like militia member from an official LEO, and the pretext they use for all their undisciplined violent repression is the fact that they are prosecuting some 'out' group. Back then it was the communists, as mentioned already; now it is 'the illegals'.
Now that's before you even get to the strongman himself, and the broadly parallel way both Mussolini and Trump became popular and got elected, and the way they subsequently almost unilaterally sidelined the guardrails of liberal democratic governance. Or the similar geopolitical milieu, in which fallout from a traumatic event (WWI:COVID) combined with new sensationalizing communication technologies (newspapers-radio:social media) warped liberal nationalist sentiments into illiberal nationalism.
It's not invective, or hyperbolic--it's just historical fact.
TLDR hyperbole
Why do people find ICE's actions "terrifying", but not the carnage that brought us to this moment? The deaths of 2 protesters and detainment of a Father and 5 year old are tragedies. They sparked marches, a government shut down and demands for wholesale reform. That is understandable. What is not understandable, is why no one marches or demands wholesale immigration reform, for the victims of completely preventable migrant violence and death.
A few hours from our home, a girl not yet old enough to visit the CVS feminine hygiene aisle, was raped and murdered by not 1 Biden migrant, but 2. When they tired of raping her tiny body , they murdered her and left her dead in a ditch, like garbage.
Not far from there, a pretty high school cheerleader resided in affordable housing with her Mother. When she rebuffed the advances of a Biden migrant who had just entered the country, he pushed his way into her modest apartment, raped and murdered her. Her single Mother finished the late shift and returned home to find her only child, dead in the bathtub, naked from the waste down.
Not far from that spot, the Christmas before last, a Mother and her 7 daughter were running Christmas errands a few weeks before Dec 25. A drunk illegal migrant hit their car, killing the 7 year old. The 3rd grader missed her school Christmas Party, and all the other Christmas festivities She was lying in a funereal home.
Closer to home, I often pass the spot where just 9 months go, an illegal migrant truck driver, killed 5 people, and sent another dozen to the hospital, in a 17 car pileup. The dead included a young Mother, her young child and her infant, along with 2 others.
The driver had prior moving violations, but was never deported. There are 200K other such "non domiciled " truck drivers in the US. Many have licenses purchased at fraudulent driving schools operated by others, awaiting adjudication of phony asylum claims.
Nor are situations rare. A similar wreck a few hours North of the other one, took 3 more lives, shortly thereafter. These are all within a few hours of my home. Widen the area and the tragedies spread.
Not long after the above, a similar migrant induced wreck caused a CA 5 year old girl to endure a 3 week coma, and a multitude of other serious injuries that has postponed Kindergarten, as she learns to walk, talk and eat again.
More recently, just a few weeks ago, an illegal migrant invaded a Georgia home and raped an 11 year old at knifepoint, multiple times, in multiple fashions, in front of her 10 year old sister. When arrested in CA a week later, the alleged attacker noted, he found the 11 year old "attractive".
These are but the tiniest samples of the now regular migrant crime and carnage Americans endure. News of the tragedies often purposefully lack Immigration status. We should not tolerate government actions that result in preventable death or child trauma. Neither should we tolerate them from people residing illegally within the US. We must find a way to end both.
Governor Spanberger ran as a moderate on the "affordability" shtick, but the Democrats in the General Assembly have submitted bills for 50 new taxes and increases on existing ones totaling $6.7B even though Governor Youngkin handed over a $2.7B surplus. When the bills hit her desk, we shall see just how "moderate" she really is.
"At the same time, the Resistance, no matter how vocal, cannot evolve into something more powerful—to become a genuine movement to save the Constitution—if others do not similarly see their rights and the integrity of American values at stake."
Save the Constitution? Virginia Democrats have submitted a slew of gun control bills, radical even for Democrats, aimed specifically at making gun ownership largely illegal and at best, unaffordable. Again, we'll soon see just how "moderate" Spanberger really is.
Thanks for a daily dose of TDS.
It was definitely lower quality than most articles here.
Maybe we can raise our score in the Financial Times' Democracy Index by locking up people on social media for wrongthink and opening the borders again? And perhaps include overturning the occasional election and referendum? I assume that would boost our score close to European levels?
Vassallo is right than this being an inflection point, but it's a much bigger one than Jan 6. The battle in Minneapolis is whether or not Democrats have to follow Federal laws they don't like. If Trump backs down, California and Oregon will be next, then every blue city and state. Then after that, every other Federal law they want to ignore.
He's just getting started. Hasn't said fascist or Nazi once, though Tocquevillian has to count for something.
If only Kamala was in the WH to "preserve American democracy."
Vassallo's advice to the Democrats, if I understand it, is 1. Demonstrate the effectiveness of Democrat government in cities and states, 2. Nominate more lower and middle class candidates and fewer upper class ones, and 3. Abandon identity politics.
All three solutions face practical difficulties. Democrat government of cities and states has not been effective, or there would not have been a multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota. When Gavin Newsom offers to make the nation just like California, most of the voters will reply that they're afraid he will.
The insidious feature of identity politics is the circular reasoning it encourages. "I lost the election because I am black and the voters are racist." How do you know the voters are racist? "Because I lost the election." For evidence of this, read the memoirs of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Barack Obama. When the Tea Party opposed his policies, Obama concluded that they are racist. How did he know that they were racist? Simple: They opposed his policies, ergo they are trying to bring back Jim Crow law.
Lots of the folk who publish in this column spend the majority of their effort trying to weave reasonable suggestions through the TDH thicket that appears to be the admission fee. So here’s the rules.
You MAY NOT say “deport illegals” without an allusion to the Third Reich.
You MAY NOT wonder about how we got somewhere between 20 to 40 million illegals here, the costs of which are being borne by citizens who don’t remember voting for this.
You MAY NOT suggest how we fix that other than legitimizing it.
Those who don't know history are doomed to compare everything to Hitler.
Lost me at the first sentence. Minneapolis terrifying? Maybe I've led a more interesting life. Lunatic lefties fighting police reminds me a lot more of the summer of Floyd than it does the Jan 6 riots. Of the eight percent of Democrats broadly supportive it's only a tiny minority of them who think actually physically fighting ICE is a great way to go, and yet crazed extremists seem to wag the dog. Not a way to flip my vote.
The Trump administration should scale back ICE and change its immigration policies as follows: Individuals who have entered the US illegally, but haven't broken any other laws, should not be taken into custody by ICE. Those individuals should be advised that they will be required to leave, and utilize administrative and financial incentives to that end, with due process. But no harsh tactics or ICE for them. And allow for legitimate asylum claims, with quick adjudication.
As to illegal entrants, who have broken other US laws, they should be taken into custody and deported, with due process. Further, non-citizen Radical Islamists and their supporters, even those who have entered legally, should be deported, with due process.
You seem to think there is a non-ICE way to deport illegal aliens in sanctuary cities.
Also remember that Martha's Vineyard is a sanctuary city and when asked to take in 25 illegal immigrants, they had them gone via military evacuation in 24 hours. Liberal want open borders, but they want the illegal immigrants to live in low-income neighborhoods with the poors. Liberal neighborhoods are for rich white people.
"And allow for legitimate asylum claims, with quick adjudication." There is no "quick" for 15M hearings. And once the process drags on for years, they are essentially impossible to deport because "they're just here trying to work and raise families."
I'm thinking now that the Southern border is closed, with due credit to Trump, it will become more manageable to process asylum claims. Try to speed up the process.
Probably decades, and that was the intent. Especially if we fund NGOs that provide them attorneys.
“Illegally but haven’t broken any other laws”
How would you make that determination? Ask them?
Illegals ARE being paid to leave.
Do you have any idea of the backlog (measured in YEARS) in the courts that are supposed to deal with illegals. Do you think that imbalance is an accident? Do you live in Marthas Vineyard? The rest of us do not.
I have reached the conclusion the only way out is offer non criminal migrants a $10K payment for self repatriation by the end of summer. Allow takers to apply for normal expedited immigration from their nation of origin, after a 5 year cooling off period.
Deportations are $14K a pop, before the tax payer subsidies are considered. This would likely spur a large number of people to humanely and voluntarily return home, allowing ICE to concentrate on criminals.
It would appear the only way with millions that would take a couple of decades to deport or adjudicate overwhelmingly lacking asylum claims. I could be wrong, as my husband would be happy to tell you I often am, but I see no other way to resolve the situation.
This sounds practical … if as you say it would cost less for the self repatriation. And we would have their identification .. and keep the border controlled, so that we knew if they tried to come back before the 5 years
I did a search for "sanctuary." Not one mention in the piece. Remember: there would be no ICE in blue cities if blue cities followed the law and informed federal authorities of illegal aliens in their jails and/or criminal justice systems.
Then there's the Sun Tzu angle: know yourself and know your enemy.
I believe that liberals need to realize that they have been in power for over a century, and that their faith in administrative government and government programs for everything has been shown to be a false faith. The Science: Administrative government cannot work because of the "knowledge problems." Administrators cannot know enough to administer successfully. Then there's "regulatory capture."
I believe that liberals need to understand the why of the Trump effect. I think it goes back at least to Nixon's Silent Majority. And after that Reagan Democrats, then the Tea Party, and now Trump's MAGA. I understand all this as a Rodney Dangerfield Effect: liberals don't give the ordinary middle class no respect.