CARTOON: POLICING YOUR MIND -- Israeli Censorship Enforcer (ICE) Goons Tell You What You Can & Cannot Think
As in all fascist regimes, the corruption, brutality and blunt force dismantling of legal, civic and moral norms will accelerate unless people resist. The first line is found in speaking truth.
Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (5/14/25)
With every day and every news cycle, the reality of the American fascist regime becomes starker, more threatening and harms more and more people. From brutal home invasions based on bad intelligence to children left abandoned in the street as their parent is hauled away, to people protesting such grotesque official behavior being arrested by unidentified agents and and hustled off in unmarked cars, there is a new brutal reality in this country.
As Adam Sewer noted in his 2021 book, law enforcement is not the point in Trump’s America, The Cruelty Is The Point.
Through a bizarrely chaotic discipline of overwhelming the system, media and the public, the oligarchy’s Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is rapidly bolting into place, crippling necessary government services and oversight and suppressing all the basic assumptions of the American system, beginning with our freedom under the Bill of Rights.
With every protester or immigrant illegally hauled away, the wrench cranks the bolts tighter.
Shredding the curtain
As Trump family wealth has increased by $2.9 billion since taking office and the self-obsessed Orange One accepts a ‘gift’ of a $400 million airliner from a corrupt Middle East government, the corruption of government no longer behind any curtain of shame or deniability, it is all in ‘plane’ sight for all to see. At least with Trump, he is arrogantly, flagrantly and honestly open about his dishonesty.
What we are seeing now is the logical, predictable obscenity of the tragicomedy collapse of late-stage capitalism.
As in all fascist regimes, the corruption, brutality and blunt force dismantling of legal, civic and moral norms will accelerate unless people resist. The first line in that defense is found in speaking truth to corrupt power and speaking for the first wave of victims. As history of totalitarianism clearly shows, the criminality of what is happening to them will not be limited to them.
Resist
Persist
Don’t be complicit!
The Trumpian Nightmare Must End Before It Gets Worse — We are nearly four months into the Trump administration, but sometimes it feels like the orange man has been president forever. This is because Donald Trump’s second term is a nightmare that keeps getting worse and worse. First, you have the chaos that Trump has unleashed around the world with his uninformed and simplistic views on international trade and trade policy and threats to Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Mexico; then his all-out assault on civil society and the very fundamental principles of U.S. democracy; and then the daily and exhausting bullshit that comes out of his ignorant mouth, which he uses as a diversion to distract citizens and the media alike from his actions. But it is the horrible combination of lawlessness and incompetence, fear and cruelty of Trump 2.0 that creates the feeling that time has stopped. … Link to story
RESISTANCE: Clergy At Newark ICE Detention Facility Lock Arms, Block The Gates
Clergy members link arms outside Newark ICE facility / Photo by Michael Dempsey / NJ Advance
“We will continue to show up. Think of the names of all the people who have been disappeared from your community...We'll be here as long as it takes until people start to realize that this is not acceptable."
By Abby Zimet
Common Dreams (5/13/25)
Three days after ICE goons arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for doing his job and exercising his First Amendment right to protest the regime's illegal disappearing of his constituents, about 50 faith leaders gathered at the same facility Monday to link their arms, block the entrance, demand information on conditions inside and declare, "This is not acceptable" - after which they too were set upon by goons. One minister: "This is the enactment of a police state."
In February, ICE was awarded a contract with the GEO Group to operate its formerly shuttered, 1,100-bed Delaney Hall, in an industrial area outside Newark, as a for-profit detention center for immigrants facing deportation. Despite widespread opposition and a still-pending lawsuit by the city over compliance with multiple permits, ICE began delivering detainees there on May 1. Last Friday, three New Jersey members of Congress went to the site and, acting on their legal right to conduct Congressional oversight, sought a tour of the facility. Because the current regime no longer cares about anyone's legal rights, they were banned.
They were joined by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, also acting on his legal right to protect his constituents, and also banned. After a scuffle with ICE and police thugs, he was arrested, held for five hours and charged with trespassing. According to New Jersey acting Barbie Attorney Alina Habba, Baraka was "repeatedly told" he had to leave; according to Baraka, that's bullshit. The House members there - Reps. LaMonica McIver, Bonnie Coleman, Rob Menendez - said the thugs had escalated the situation and the claim was "a lie," "absurd," "scary," and another effort of a regime "lying at all levels (to) intimidate people in this country."
Official lies & smears
Given that effort is ongoing, ICE’s parent agency Homeland Security issued a statement charging House members "stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility" despite its barbed-wire-topped entrance. Calling the presence of the lawmakers "a cheap political stunt," they also charged they had put law enforcement, staff and detainees "at risk," with a spokesperson hysterically shrieking, "Who do they want released from Delaney Hall? The child rapists, murderers, drug traffickers, MS-13 gang members or known terrorists?" even though none of the detainees have been convicted, or often even charged, with any crimes.
The members of Faith in New Jersey, Faith in Action, Pax Christi and other clergy who came Monday in solidarity to Delaney cited that "immigration narrative that's been very criminalizing" as part of their protest. Right-wing media coverage of their presence confirmed the charge: A Fox News headline proclaimed Agitators Clash With Police As Clergy Members Descend - armed, they might have added, with their liturgical stoles reading, "Side With Love." Other headlines called the gathering "an interfaith prayer service" and described them linking arms, standing shoulder to shoulder, praying for detainees and singing Which Side Are You On?
2-minute video
Spread across the entrance, they also demanded transparency from officials, seeking the names of detainees, the conditions - beds, food, medical care - and who's profiting from them. Said one, "A lot of human rights violations are happening across the U.S., and this one is not going to be any different." At around 5 p.m., as employees began driving out the gate, things again escalated. In a surreal scene, beefy police and ICE agents started shoving and muscling protesters away; skirmishes broke out as they resisted, entreated, chanted, yelled, then finally struggled back together, re-linked arms and began singing, "We Shall Not Be Moved."
At least two people were arrested; dystopian videos showed a phalanx of police manhandling one woman in a hijab and hauling her away as others struggled to stop them. But those who remained were steadfast. "We will continue to show up," said one. "Think of the names of all the people who have been disappeared from your community...We'll be here as long as it takes until people start to realize that this is not acceptable." "I'm here because my Universalist faith tells me to love the Hell out of this world," said the Rev. Anya Sammler of the Universalist Unitarian Congregation in Montclair. “And what we are seeing in this world is Hell."
Common Dreams work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
WEAPONIZING ANTISEMITISM: ICE & Suppression Of Free Speech & Decency
“I call ICE the Israeli Censorship Enforcers because those ideas obviously relate to Israel/Palestine and they are considered anti-semitic ideas. What does anti-semitic constitute in this case? It's the IHRA* definition that is being weaponized by governments from the Trump administration to Germany to conflate anti-Zionism — which could take the form of just outrage and opposition to the Israeli genocide that claimed the lives of a dozen more children last night as Israel bombed tents of people in a safe zone — to opposition to Israel as an ethno-supremicist state that has to warehouse non-Jews as surplus humanity. That is considered anti-semitism according, apparently, to ICE because it's what ICE is arresting all of these students around the country for.”
* International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
— Max Blumenthal: Judging Freedom: ICE & Suppression Free Speech & Decency (4/17/25)
COWARDLY GHOULS: Israeli Fascist Troops Beat & Starved This Teenage Boy To Death
By Owen Jones
1-minute, 30-second video
Is something good — finally — happening?
Multiple Western Press Outlets Have Suddenly Pivoted Hard Against Israel
“So if you’re still supporting Israel after all this time, my advice to you is to make a change while you still can. There’s still time to be the first among scoundrels in the mad rat race to avoid being the last to start acting like you always opposed the Gaza holocaust.”
[Editor’s Note: Continue to call Congress, speak out, protest, boycott and divest. Do anything you can to oppose and shame the US and Israeli genociders. Looks clear the resistance is — finally — having an effect. — M. Taylor]
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter (5/12/25)
Link to story and 6-minute audio
Candidates FIGHT Over Who Loves Israel More!
“I turned myself into a pretzel making the argument that there is no cognitive dissonance in saying free speech is paramount to a free society and should be protected at all costs, but also if you criticize Israel you should have your tongue cut out! I did that! I made that argument! Me! You're welcome!”
The Jimmy Dore Show (5/11/25)
3-minute video
Trump's Brutal Immigration Agenda Has No Precedent
Trump’s mixture of racism and hunger for power is setting him on a historical collision course.
By Matt Shuman
HuffPost (4/30/25)
From the early days of state-based immigration policies to the explicitly racist Chinese exclusion laws of the 19th century, the systematic deportations of Mexican Americans in the mid-20th century to the hypercriminalization of immigration policy in recent decades, the United States has long been preoccupied with who should be included in our national story, who should be expelled from it, and what muscles the federal government should flex to achieve each goal.
But after 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term in office — a few short weeks marked by an increasingly aggressive authoritarian power grab and the racist dehumanization of migrants — even some experienced academics are struggling to express what has happened.
Alongside the administration’s attacks on individual legal rights, it’s also gone after the legal process itself, attacking legal aid funding for unaccompanied migrant children, singling out immigration attorneys in an executive order, and pursuing a retribution campaign to target several large law firms whose employees often take on immigration cases pro bono.
“The cruelty with which they’re pursuing expulsion of immigrants is shocking even to me,” said Mae Ngai, an acclaimed historian at Columbia University who’s spent decades studying the origins of America’s immigration enforcement regime, including the creation of the concept of “illegal aliens” itself.
“The principle of checks and balances ... that idea seems to have been thrown out the window,” said Emily Ryo, a scholar of immigration enforcement and the legal system at Duke Law School. She described what she saw as the administration’s embrace of “this view of unfettered executive power that appears to be crossing over onto more blatant disregard for the existing legal system that’s in place — in rolling defiance of court rulings and court orders.”
“We may see a future where Trump decides to back down, so as not to burn the Constitution,” said Jeremy Slack, chair of the sociology and anthropology department at the University of Texas, El Paso, who’s spent years surveying migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border about their experiences. “I’m not super optimistic about that.”
In conversations with HuffPost this month, scholars of immigration history and enforcement in the United States — historians, sociologists, legal theorists — rang alarm bells over what many described as generational abuses of power by Trump.
Tools of fascist abuse
They made clear that the tools at Trump’s disposal — dehumanization, surveillance, detention, expulsion — have long been a part of presidents’ arsenals. But they also distinguished what has made these past 100 days so extraordinary: Trump’s aggressive seizure of power, and his disregard for anything that might restrain him.
“It’s important to understand that we’ve never had a president who uses power, and instruments of power, in this way,” said Benny Andrés, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who last year co-edited a special issue of the journal California History marking Border Patrol’s 100th anniversary.
“No one has flaunted the traditions or authority like he has. He is purposefully stressing the system.” …
OUCH! He did it to you again…
SCREWED: Trump's First Trade Deal Screws U.S. Auto Workers
“The truth is that those making these policy decisions don't actually care about what's good for working people in this country. They care about what's financially advantageous for them, and I'm also going to guess that someone in the White House really likes Land Rovers.”
Status Coup (5/10/25)
Status Coup reporter Ashley Bishop reports on President Trump's trade deal with the United Kingdom and how it will harm the U.S. auto industry and its workers.
10-minute video
The Real Face Of The West
“This is the apex of the postmodernist disease. This could be a thousand-page book. The apex of postmodernist disease has led to the normalization of genocide and this is the real face of the collective west — it's what's happening in Gaza.
“Nothing beats what's happening. Nothing. Nothing.”
— Pepe Escobar, geopolitical analyst/journalist
"“I call ICE the Israeli Censorship Enforcers because those ideas obviously relate to Israel/Palestine and they are considered anti-semitic ideas."
The perfect explanation for the ICE acronym! You've got to wonder if the US wasn't overrun by Zy0nists would we be having so many ICE abductions today. They're at the heart of the world's current troubles. Censorship--ZyOnists. Locking up foreign students for their right to protest--Zy0nists. Genocide in Gaza and bombing in Lebanon and Syria--Zy0nists. More reasons to #BoycottIsrael and #FreePalestine
I'm glad you're supporting Owen Jones. Aside from a few naive missteps and a few strange professional bedfellows, his work speaks for itself. He deserves it.