anuary 31, 2026 (Saturday)

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”

History is doing that rhyming thing again.

In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC), a wealthy enslaver, rose to explain to his northern colleagues why their objection to human enslavement was so badly misguided. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. Such workers needed few brains and little skill; they just had to be strong, docile, and loyal to their betters, who would organize their labor and then collect the profits from it, concentrating that wealth into their own hands to move society forward efficiently.

Hammond called such workers “the mud-sill of society and political government.” Much like the beams driven into the ground to support a stately home above, the mudsill supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” The South had pushed Black Americans into that mudsill role. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves,” he said. The North also had a mudsill class, he added: “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”

But Hammond warned that the North was making a terrible mistake. “Our slaves do not vote,” he said. “We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Hammond was very clear about what he believed the world should look like. Black Americans should always be subordinate to white men, of course, but white women, too, were subordinate. They were made “to breed,” as “toy for recreation,” or to bring men “wealth and position,” he had explained to his son in 1852. Hammond’s promising early political career had been nearly derailed when he admitted that for two years he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces, the daughters of the powerful Wade Hampton II (although he insisted he was being wronged because he should get credit for showing any restraint at all when faced with four such “lovely creatures”).

If women and Black people were at the bottom of society, southern white men were an “aristocracy” by virtue of their descent from “the ancient cavaliers of Virginia…a race of men without fear and without reproach,” “alike incapable of servility and selfishness.” By definition, whatever such leaders did was what was good for society, and any man who had not achieved that status was excluded because of his own failings or criminal inclinations.

The southern system, Hammond told the Senate, was “the best in the world…such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth,” and spreading it would benefit everyone.

The next year, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience at the Wisconsin state fair in Milwaukee that he rejected Hammond’s mudsill theory. Lincoln explained that Hammond’s “mud-sill theory” divided the world into permanent castes, arguing that men with money drove the economy and workers were stuck permanently at the bottom.

For his part, Lincoln embraced a different theory: It was workers, not wealthy men, who drove the economy. While men of wealth had little incentive to experiment and throw themselves into their work, men on the make were innovative and hardworking. Such men could—and should—rise. This “free labor” theory articulated the true meaning of American democracy for northerners and for the non-slave-holding southerners, who, as Lincoln reminded his listeners, made up a majority in the South. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,” he explained.

In the election of 1860, southern Democrats tried to get voters to back their worldview by promising they were reflecting God’s will and by using virulent racism, warning that Black Americans must be kept in their place or they would destroy American society.

But, in a nation of immigrants and men who had worked their way up from day laborers to become prominent men, Lincoln stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. He warned that if people started to make exceptions to the idea that all men are created equal, they would not stop. They would “transform this Government into a government of some other form.” “If that declaration is not the truth,” Lincoln said, “let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No! No!” he responded: “et us stand firmly by it then.”

Miller’s white nationalism is not the concept on which this nation was built. The United States of America was built on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the sweat and blood of almost 250 years of Americans, often those from marginalized communities, working to make those principles a reality.

The hierarchical system Miller embraces echoes the system championed by those like Hammond, who imagined themselves the nation’s true leaders who had the right to rule. They were not bound by the law, and they rejected the idea that those unwilling to recognize their superiority should have either economic or political power.

The horrors of the Epstein files show a group of powerful and wealthy men and women who sexually assaulted children and showed no concern either for their crimes or that they might have to answer to the law. The public still does not know the extent of the horrors or the human-trafficking business in which Epstein and others were engaged. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters yesterday that the Department of Justice was not releasing any item from the Epstein files that showed “death, physical abuse, or injury.”

“You the biggest problem with being friends with you?” Dr. Peter Attia wrote in an email to Epstein in response to an email with the subject line “Got a fresh shipment.” Attia answered his own question: “The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”

Trump echoed Hammond in a different way tonight on Air Force One as he traveled to Florida. Asked by a reporter how he would handle being on both sides of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, he suggested that taking the money of the American people into his own hands would enable him to use it for the public good. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he said. “We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.”

Another story tonight indicated the degree to which the president sees himself as part of a wealthy caste that is above the law. Sam Kessler, Rebecca Ballhous, Eliot Brown, and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster report showing that four days before Trump’s 2025 inauguration, men working for an Abu Dhabi royal signed a secret deal with the Trump family to buy 49% of their brand-new cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial. The investors would pay half immediately, sending $187 million to entities held by the Trump family and at least $31 million to entities held by Steve Witkoff, a co-founder of World Liberty Financial whom Trump had named U.S. envoy to the Middle East weeks earlier.

The deal was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates and oversees more than $1.3 trillion that includes the country’s largest wealth fund. Tahnoon has wanted access to U.S. AI technology, but the Biden administration blocked access out of concern it could end up in Chinese hands. The Trump administration, in striking contrast, has committed to allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy about half a million of the most advanced AI chips a year.

Federal agents acting for the Trump administration are trying to enforce the authority of those like Miller, tear-gassing, arresting, and killing American citizens. Thousands marched peacefully in Portland, Oregon, today but, as Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle recorded, “federal officers outside the ICE facility in Portland…indiscriminately threw loads of gas and flash bangs” at marchers, including children. Portland, Oregon, city councillor Mitch Green reported: “I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions.”

Tim Dickinson of The Contrarian wrote: “Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they’re doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps.”

And yet, in another echo of the 1850s, MAGA Republicans are reversing victim and offender, blaming the people under assault for the violence. Trump officials insist that community watch groups and protesters are engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Greg Jaffe and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times flagged that Representative Eli Crane (R-AZ) told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday that those people protecting their neighbors from the violence of federal agents want “revolution.” “They want to fundamentally remake and tear down the institutions and the culture of this country.”

In an order requiring the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, from detention, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery noted that in their crusade against undocumented immigrants, U.S. officials are ignoring the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “or some among us,” the judge wrote, “the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”

Judge Biery signed the order after saying he was putting “ a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.” Under his signature, he posted the now-famous image of the little boy detained in his blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, along with the notations for two biblical passages: “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,’” and “Jesus wept.”

Tonight, voters flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democratic in a special election. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and machinist, defeated right-wing Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s. Robert Downen of Texas Monthly noted that in the final days of the campaign, the Wambsganss campaign spent $310,000 while Rehmet spent nothing, and Daniel Nichanian of BoltsMag posted that overall, Wambsganss spent nearly $2.2 million more than Rehmet in the campaign. Both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported Wambsganss.

And yet, as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted, voters flipped a district that Trump won in 2024 by 17 points to Rehmet, electing him by a 14.4-point margin. After removing the minor-party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats. In Texas.

so let us get this straight, they tell us that 爱 will do all the shitty grind work so that humans won’t have to slave away like, well, slaves

and here they tell us that they need foreign sourced labour without associated rights, to do all the grind work

so either they’re talking a bunch of bullshit about 爱 and it can’t won’t never was intended to do the shitty work for the greater good

or it’s not really about needing the labour at all and it’s just about domination and subordination and supremacy and violence

or, actually, most likely, Old El Paso

fuck them

February 1, 2026 (Sunday)

On February 1, 1862, in the early days of the Civil War, the Atlantic Monthly published Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” summing up the cause of freedom for which the United States troops would soon be fighting. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” it began.
“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.”

Howe had written the poem on a visit to Washington, D.C., with her husband. Approaching the city, she had reflected sadly that there was little she could do for the United States. She couldn’t send her menfolk to war: her husband was too old to fight, her sons too young. And with a toddler, she didn’t even have enough time to volunteer to pack stores for the field hospitals. “I thought of the women of my acquaintance whose sons or husbands were fighting our great battle; the women themselves serving in the hospitals, or busying themselves with the work of the Sanitary Commission,” she recalled, and she worried there was nothing she could give to the cause.

One day she, her husband, and friends, toured the troop encampments surrounding the city. To amuse themselves on the way back to the hotel, they sang a song popular with the troops as they marched. It ended: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; his soul is marching on.” A friend challenged Howe to write more uplifting words for the soldiers’ song.

That night, Howe slept soundly. She woke before dawn and, lying in bed, began thinking about the tune she had heard the day before. She recalled: “s I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind…. With a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen…. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

Howe’s hymn captured the tension of Washington, D.C., during the war, and the soldiers’ camps strung in circles around the city to keep invaders from the U.S. capital.

“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.”

Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic went on to define the Civil War as a holy war for human freedom:

“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.”

The Battle Hymn became the anthem of the Union during the Civil War, and exactly three years after it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, on February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Joint Resolution of Congress passing the Thirteenth Amendment and sending it off to the states for ratification. The amendment provided that “either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It gave Congress power to enforce that amendment. This was the first amendment that gave power to the federal government rather than taking it away.

When the measure had passed the House the day before, the lawmakers and spectators had gone wild. “The members on the floor huzzaed in chorus with deafening and equally emphatic cheers of the throng in the galleries,” the New York Times reported. “The ladies in the dense assemblage waved their handkerchiefs, and again and again the applause was repeated, intermingled with clapping of hands and exclamations of ‘Hurrah for freedom,’ ‘Glory enough for one day,’ &c.

The audience were wildly excited, and the friends of the measure were jubilant.” Indiana congressman George Julian later recalled, “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy, while I was inexpressibly thankful for the privilege of recording my name on so glorious a page of the nation’s history.”

But the hopes of that moment had crumbled within a decade. Almost a century later, students from Bennett College, a women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, set out to bring them back to life. They organized to protest the F.W. Woolworth Company’s willingness to sell products to Black people but refusal to serve them food. On February 1, 1960, their male colleagues from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down on stools at Woolworth’s department store lunch counter in Greensboro. David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil were first-year students who wanted to find a way to combat the segregation under which Black Americans had lived since the 1880s.

So the men forced the issue by sitting down and ordering coffee and doughnuts. They sat quietly as the white waitress refused to serve them and the store manager ignored them. They came back the next day with a larger group. This time, television cameras covered the story. By February 3 there were 60 men and women sitting. By February 5 there were 50 white male counterprotesters.

By March the sit-in movement had spread across the South, to bus routes, museums, art galleries, and swimming pools. In July, after profits had dropped dramatically, the store manager of the Greensboro Woolworth’s asked four Black employees to put on street clothes and order food at the counter. They did, and they were served. Desegregation in public spaces had begun.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized February 1 as the first day of Black History Month, asking the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

On February 1, 2023, the family of Tyre Nichols laid their 29-year-old son to rest in Memphis, Tennessee. He was so severely beaten by police officers on January 7, allegedly for a traffic violation, that he died three days later.

On February 1, 2026, as the fiftieth observance of Black History Month begins, government officials under the administration of Donald J. Trump have just removed an exhibit on enslavement from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. The exhibit acknowledged nine people enslaved at the President’s House Site when President George Washington lived there. Curators intended the exhibit to examine “the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation,” but it conflicted with Trump’s March 2025 order that national historic sites should “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” In his order, Trump called out Independence National Historical Park for promoting “corrosive ideology,” teaching visitors that “America is purportedly racist.”

The administration is openly working to replace American multiculturalism with white nationalism, launching raids by federal agents to terrorize Brown and Black Americans as well as white Americans who reject MAGA ideology.

On Saturday, in Minneapolis, where federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol are attacking immigrants and those marching to end the violence of the federal agents, people entered a Target store to protest the retail chain’s cooperation with federal agents. In unison, they sang: “We the people stand together, we the people stand together….”

The words were set to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Thanks.

:)

February 2, 2026 (Monday)

It has been a very long time since we took the night off.

I hate to do it because there is so much to record, but it appears that if we wait for a slow day to take a rest there will be no days off at all.

So let’s take a breather and come back to it fresh tomorrow.

Thanks.

buffy said:

February 2, 2026 (Monday)

It has been a very long time since we took the night off.

I hate to do it because there is so much to record, but it appears that if we wait for a slow day to take a rest there will be no days off at all.

So let’s take a breather and come back to it fresh tomorrow.

Absolutely.
I’m knackered. I has been a big day.

February 3, 2026 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, the day before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes stopped that termination until a pending court case worked its way through the courts.

At stake first of all were the lives of about 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010, whom the termination of that status would render undocumented overnight. The impact on their lives would also affect their families, friends, and employers. Also at stake, though, is Trump administration officials’ rejection of both facts and the rule of law on which the United States was founded in order to advance their white nationalist ideology.

As Judge Reyes explains, Congress established Temporary Protective Status in 1990 to change previously haphazard executive decisions about whether to receive immigrants from disaster-stricken countries that left recipients unclear about their immigration status. In its place, Congress created “a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics.” It established criteria and a process for designating a country under TPS, accepting applications for immigration under TPS, and reviewing that designation periodically to determine if that designation should be extended. The system leaves to the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to evaluate those extensions.

And yet, the judge explains, Secretary Noem ignored the process and the criteria, instead relying on ideology. On December 1, 2025, Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Noem’s statements echo those of President Donald J. Trump, who referred to Haiti as a “sh*thole” country and tried to end TPS for people from Haiti beginning in 2017. During the 2024 campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats,” and “eating the pets” of people who live in Springfield, Ohio. He insisted he would revoke Haiti’s TPS designation and send immigrants “back to their country.”

Five Haitian TPS holders sued to stop the administration from ending their protected status, claiming Noem ignored the legal procedures because of her “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes says Noem did indeed ignore the law and that it “seems substantially likely” she did so because of her white nationalist ideology, noting that Noem has terminated all twelve TPS designations that have reached her desk.

But, as Reyes points out, the facts simply don’t match their ideology. TPS holders participate in the workforce at the exceptionally high rate of 94.6%. Far from being “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” the plaintiffs in the case challenging Noem’s decision are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a toxicology lab assistant, a college economics major, and a registered nurse.

When Noem claimed that it was “contrary to the national interest” to permit about 350,000 Haitian immigrants to stay in the country until it is safe to go back to Haiti, Reyes noted, she characterized them as criminals without any actual evidence. She also ignored the public’s interest in the fact that Haitian TPS holders pay $1.3 billion a year in taxes, and that through their work in sectors that are desperate for laborers, they add about $3.4 billion to the U.S. economy annually. They are deeply embedded in their communities, and tearing them out would shatter families and worksites.

“There is an old adage among lawyers,” Reyes wrote as she decided against the Trump administration. “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither…, she pounds X ( Twitter). Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

In the conflict between reality and white nationalist ideology, reality appears to be gaining ground. Americans do not like federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol terrorizing their streets, detaining children, and shooting American citizens. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers on Sunday, a new Fox News poll shows that Americans support Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot at higher percentages than they have since the survey began: 52% of the vote for Democrats to 46% for Republicans. That 52% for Democrats is the highest support recorded for either party; Democrats hit the poll’s previous high in October 2017 at 50%. Morris notes Democrats are “firmly in ‘wave’ territory” for November’s elections.

Republicans are trying to regain support by seeming to back off their extremism, although they are not backing far: not a single Republican showed up for a public forum held today in Washington, D.C., by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) and other Democrats on ICE violence. At the hearing, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot five times by federal agents, told her story; so did Aliya Rahman, another U.S. citizen detained by ICE; and so did the brothers of U.S. citizen Renee Good, killed by federal agents.

Representative Garcia showed a picture of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is a key instigator of the ICE attacks, and said: “There’s probably no single person in this government has done more damage…and more harm to people across this country, immigrants and U.S. citizens…than this man right here, and it’s our job…to hold him responsible for the crimes that are happening to United States citizens.” A new Data For Progress poll shows that 51% of American voters think Miller should be removed, while only 33% think he should not.

But lawmakers have at least had to adjust their actions to acknowledge the fury of American voters at the behavior of federal agents.

Today the House passed the budget to fund the government except for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was funded only for two more weeks to give Congress time to hash out terms for funding the department that Democrats will accept. Republicans had been clear they did not want to separate out DHS funding. Ultimately, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) had to accept the separation in order to prevent a long-term shutdown, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got enough Republicans to go along that the measure, without DHS funding, passed. Trump signed it later in the day.

As of yesterday, the head of the “Weaponization Working Group,” created in the Department of Justice on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office to punish the people Trump insisted had weaponized the legal system against him, has been removed. Right-wing lawyer Ed Martin had been a leader in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and had claimed those convicted for crimes relating to that attempt had been unfairly prosecuted. Once in power, he had turned the department’s resources toward prosecuting those Trump perceived to be enemies, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

So unpopular has it become to be associated with Trump that an attempt to distract from plummeting ticket sales and artists’ boycotts after he took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and put his name on it may be behind Trump’s Sunday night announcement he is closing the venue, claiming it needs two years of renovations.

As voters turn against the administration, Trump is openly working to rig the 2026 election to guarantee Republicans win.

On Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with 700 boxes of ballots, tabulation tapes, and other election-related material from the 2020 election. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted that the warrant came from Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Albus should not have had anything to do with a raid in Georgia, but Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bondi appears to have appointed Albus a special assistant to the attorney general, giving him the ability to operate across the nation. Elias points out that this gives Albus dramatic power over future elections.

The raid was significant not just because the FBI took the ballots Trump has complained about for years—ballots that have been counted three times—but also because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was there. The DNI has no law enforcement role in our system; she is supposed to coordinate and oversee the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. At first, officials tried to suggest she was there by chance, but yesterday William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that she met with some of the FBI agents who had conducted the raid. During the meeting, she reached Trump on her cell phone and he spoke to the agents himself.

David Laufman, who served in the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told the New York Times reporters: “It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will.”

Then, yesterday, Trump told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, who has gone back to podcasting, that he loses elections only because Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. This is bonkers. Voting by undocumented immigrants, or any noncitizens, is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016.

He said to Bongino: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked and the county votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots? You’re going to see some interesting things come in. But, you know, like the 2020 election. I won that election by so much.”

Although the Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states, at a bill signing in the Oval Office today, Trump doubled down on his call for Republicans to “nationalize” elections.

Neophyte said:

February 3, 2026 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, the day before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes stopped that termination until a pending court case worked its way through the courts.

At stake first of all were the lives of about 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010, whom the termination of that status would render undocumented overnight. The impact on their lives would also affect their families, friends, and employers. Also at stake, though, is Trump administration officials’ rejection of both facts and the rule of law on which the United States was founded in order to advance their white nationalist ideology.

As Judge Reyes explains, Congress established Temporary Protective Status in 1990 to change previously haphazard executive decisions about whether to receive immigrants from disaster-stricken countries that left recipients unclear about their immigration status. In its place, Congress created “a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics.” It established criteria and a process for designating a country under TPS, accepting applications for immigration under TPS, and reviewing that designation periodically to determine if that designation should be extended. The system leaves to the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to evaluate those extensions.

And yet, the judge explains, Secretary Noem ignored the process and the criteria, instead relying on ideology. On December 1, 2025, Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Noem’s statements echo those of President Donald J. Trump, who referred to Haiti as a “sh*thole” country and tried to end TPS for people from Haiti beginning in 2017. During the 2024 campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats,” and “eating the pets” of people who live in Springfield, Ohio. He insisted he would revoke Haiti’s TPS designation and send immigrants “back to their country.”

Five Haitian TPS holders sued to stop the administration from ending their protected status, claiming Noem ignored the legal procedures because of her “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes says Noem did indeed ignore the law and that it “seems substantially likely” she did so because of her white nationalist ideology, noting that Noem has terminated all twelve TPS designations that have reached her desk.

But, as Reyes points out, the facts simply don’t match their ideology. TPS holders participate in the workforce at the exceptionally high rate of 94.6%. Far from being “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” the plaintiffs in the case challenging Noem’s decision are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a toxicology lab assistant, a college economics major, and a registered nurse.

When Noem claimed that it was “contrary to the national interest” to permit about 350,000 Haitian immigrants to stay in the country until it is safe to go back to Haiti, Reyes noted, she characterized them as criminals without any actual evidence. She also ignored the public’s interest in the fact that Haitian TPS holders pay $1.3 billion a year in taxes, and that through their work in sectors that are desperate for laborers, they add about $3.4 billion to the U.S. economy annually. They are deeply embedded in their communities, and tearing them out would shatter families and worksites.

“There is an old adage among lawyers,” Reyes wrote as she decided against the Trump administration. “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither…, she pounds X ( Twitter). Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

In the conflict between reality and white nationalist ideology, reality appears to be gaining ground. Americans do not like federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol terrorizing their streets, detaining children, and shooting American citizens. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers on Sunday, a new Fox News poll shows that Americans support Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot at higher percentages than they have since the survey began: 52% of the vote for Democrats to 46% for Republicans. That 52% for Democrats is the highest support recorded for either party; Democrats hit the poll’s previous high in October 2017 at 50%. Morris notes Democrats are “firmly in ‘wave’ territory” for November’s elections.

Republicans are trying to regain support by seeming to back off their extremism, although they are not backing far: not a single Republican showed up for a public forum held today in Washington, D.C., by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) and other Democrats on ICE violence. At the hearing, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot five times by federal agents, told her story; so did Aliya Rahman, another U.S. citizen detained by ICE; and so did the brothers of U.S. citizen Renee Good, killed by federal agents.

Representative Garcia showed a picture of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is a key instigator of the ICE attacks, and said: “There’s probably no single person in this government has done more damage…and more harm to people across this country, immigrants and U.S. citizens…than this man right here, and it’s our job…to hold him responsible for the crimes that are happening to United States citizens.” A new Data For Progress poll shows that 51% of American voters think Miller should be removed, while only 33% think he should not.

But lawmakers have at least had to adjust their actions to acknowledge the fury of American voters at the behavior of federal agents.

Today the House passed the budget to fund the government except for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was funded only for two more weeks to give Congress time to hash out terms for funding the department that Democrats will accept. Republicans had been clear they did not want to separate out DHS funding. Ultimately, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) had to accept the separation in order to prevent a long-term shutdown, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got enough Republicans to go along that the measure, without DHS funding, passed. Trump signed it later in the day.

As of yesterday, the head of the “Weaponization Working Group,” created in the Department of Justice on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office to punish the people Trump insisted had weaponized the legal system against him, has been removed. Right-wing lawyer Ed Martin had been a leader in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and had claimed those convicted for crimes relating to that attempt had been unfairly prosecuted. Once in power, he had turned the department’s resources toward prosecuting those Trump perceived to be enemies, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

So unpopular has it become to be associated with Trump that an attempt to distract from plummeting ticket sales and artists’ boycotts after he took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and put his name on it may be behind Trump’s Sunday night announcement he is closing the venue, claiming it needs two years of renovations.

As voters turn against the administration, Trump is openly working to rig the 2026 election to guarantee Republicans win.

On Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with 700 boxes of ballots, tabulation tapes, and other election-related material from the 2020 election. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted that the warrant came from Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Albus should not have had anything to do with a raid in Georgia, but Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bondi appears to have appointed Albus a special assistant to the attorney general, giving him the ability to operate across the nation. Elias points out that this gives Albus dramatic power over future elections.

The raid was significant not just because the FBI took the ballots Trump has complained about for years—ballots that have been counted three times—but also because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was there. The DNI has no law enforcement role in our system; she is supposed to coordinate and oversee the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. At first, officials tried to suggest she was there by chance, but yesterday William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that she met with some of the FBI agents who had conducted the raid. During the meeting, she reached Trump on her cell phone and he spoke to the agents himself.

David Laufman, who served in the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told the New York Times reporters: “It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will.”

Then, yesterday, Trump told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, who has gone back to podcasting, that he loses elections only because Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. This is bonkers. Voting by undocumented immigrants, or any noncitizens, is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016.

He said to Bongino: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked and the county votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots? You’re going to see some interesting things come in. But, you know, like the 2020 election. I won that election by so much.”

Although the Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states, at a bill signing in the Oval Office today, Trump doubled down on his call for Republicans to “nationalize” elections.

And yet, the jud Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.

Slaves and murdering the natives seems forgotten

February 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.

Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.

On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.

Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.

Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”

And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.

Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.

The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.

For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.

But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.

MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.

In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.

It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.

In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.

Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.

In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by .” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.

This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.

At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.

In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.

When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.

Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.

Thanks.

Neophyte said:

February 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.

Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.

On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.

Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.

Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”

And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.

Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.

The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.

For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.

But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.

MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.

In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.

It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.

In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.

Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.

In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by .” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.

This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.

At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.

In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.

When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.

Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.

Shouldn’t a first world nation with massive resources be able to run elections properly and prevent most fraud.
You’d have to have a massive organised effort that would be easily noticeable to have millions ? of fake votes
The USA seems to delight in having weird versions of normal processes that do the exact opposite of what they want.

Cymek said:

Neophyte said:

February 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.

Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.

On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.

Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.

Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”

And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.

Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.

The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.

For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.

But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.

MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.

In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.

It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.

In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.

Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.

In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by .” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.

This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.

At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.

In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.

When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.

Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.

Shouldn’t a first world nation with massive resources be able to run elections properly and prevent most fraud.
You’d have to have a massive organised effort that would be easily noticeable to have millions ? of fake votes
The USA seems to delight in having weird versions of normal processes that do the exact opposite of what they want.

In the context of: A Chrsitian is to be judged on how he greets the foreigner

Cymek said:

Shouldn’t a first world nation with massive resources be able to run elections properly and prevent most fraud.
You’d have to have a massive organised effort that would be easily noticeable to have millions ? of fake votes
The USA seems to delight in having weird versions of normal processes that do the exact opposite of what they want.

sorry we don’t understand, those first worlds and massive resources belong to the 0.01% ownership class, the elections are just team sports shows to share figurehead time between them, it’s not fraud if it’s the natural order of things by design

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

Shouldn’t a first world nation with massive resources be able to run elections properly and prevent most fraud.
You’d have to have a massive organised effort that would be easily noticeable to have millions ? of fake votes
The USA seems to delight in having weird versions of normal processes that do the exact opposite of what they want.

sorry we don’t understand, those first worlds and massive resources belong to the 0.01% ownership class, the elections are just team sports shows to share figurehead time between them, it’s not fraud if it’s the natural order of things by design

It would seem so

Neophyte said:

February 4, 2026 (Wednesday)

Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

OK so those identifying to be democrat voters will be dragged off to internment camps and if they refuse they’ll be shot on the spot?

February 5, 2026 (Thursday)

The past two days have seen a growing struggle between Democrats, who are demanding accountability from the Trump administration, and Republicans trying to hide what the administration is up to.

Last night, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) published a letter he sent to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Ratcliffe. Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a careful, hardworking, and dogged member of Congress. When Wyden speaks, people listen. Ratcliffe was an attack dog for Trump during his first impeachment trial and had no experience with intelligence before Trump forced his nomination to become director of national intelligence through the Senate. Now he is Trump’s appointee to the directorship of the CIA.

Wyden’s letter to Ratcliffe said: “I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.” When Wired senior reporter Dell Cameron, who covers different forms of surveillance, commented, “I don’t like this,” Wyden reposted the comment.
Wyden has a long history of alerting the public in whatever way he can when something bad is going on that he cannot reveal because of its classified nature. This letter appears to be a way to alert the public while also notifying Ratcliffe that the CIA director will not be able in the future to deny that he received Wyden’s letter.

Also last night, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SC) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure that will appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is the department that contains Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Democrats insisted on stripping DHS funding out of the bills to fund the government for 2026 after ICE and Border Patrol agents began raining terror on the country.

Those demands are pretty straightforward, but if written into law as required for the release of funds, they would change behavior. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.

They want agents to be required to have a reasonable use of force policy and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards of any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.

They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.

As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.

Thune has said the demands are “very unrealistic and unserious,” and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the second-ranking Senate Republican, called them “radical and extreme” and a “far-left wish list.” But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) agreed that agents “need body cameras. They need to remove masks. They need proper training. They need to be conducting operations that are consistent with their mission.”

Trump’s determination to prove that he actually won the 2020 election continues to drive the administration. This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

The reality that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by about 2.9 million votes explains Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants voted in the election.

Trump also offered yet another explanation for the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid on a warehouse holding ballots and other election-related materials in Fulton County, Georgia, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Gabbard there.

Phil Stewart, Erin Banco, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico in what sources told the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked the voting machines there. The reporters say that Gabbard’s team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro hacked the election.

There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherents among Trump’s followers. Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, and Allison Gill, have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison in the U.S. after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to “cooperate” on this lie. In The Breakdown, Gill notes that while Trump has no role in elections, the Supreme Court has said that he must be given deference in the conduct of foreign affairs. He has relied on that deference to justify tariffs, immigration sweeps, attacks on small boats, and so on. It is not a stretch to think he is now trying to interfere with the 2026 election by claiming elections are part of foreign affairs.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Reuters reporters: “What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway. Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused.”

Tonight, Matt Berg of Crooked Media reported that the FBI has “summoned state election officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on ‘preparations’ for the midterms” on February 25. A top election official from one state told Berg that it’s the “strangest thing in the world.” The FBI official who sent the email, Kellie Hardiman, used the title “FBI Election Executive.” When Berg asked the FBI for an explanation, the spokesperson wrote: “Thank you for reaching out. The FBI has no comment.”

On Monday, Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had bottled up a May 2025 whistleblower complaint without transmitting it to congressional intelligence committees as required by law. Congress members learned about the complaint in November, but the government maintained it was too highly classified to be shared. This was deliberate obfuscation: the Gang of Eight, which is made up of the leaders from both parties in the House and Senate, and the leaders of the intelligence committees from both parties, was set up precisely so that Congress could always be informed of classified information.

Today Gabbard handed over the complaint, after heavily redacting it under claims of executive privilege—which means the president is involved.

The administration’s determination to hide the actions of its own members while exposing opponents has shown dramatically in the redactions in the Epstein files that have been released to date. Officials neglected to redact identifying information about survivors and even sexually explicit photographs of them, while blacking out the names of apparent friends and co-conspirators of the sex offender.

Trump’s name appears throughout the files, and in an attempt to center former president Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, in public discussion of the Epstein files, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) has subpoenaed Clinton and former first lady and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to testify under oath. He says he doesn’t have to do the same for Trump about his relationship with Epstein because Trump is answering questions for reporters.

Yesterday the Clintons agreed to testify. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton posted on social media: “For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath. They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction. So let’s stop the games. If you want this fight, , let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Forcing a former president to testify under threat of contempt establishes the precedent that Congress can force past presidents and their spouses and families to testify under threat of criminal charges. Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Sahil Kapur, and Ryan Nobles of NBC News reported that Democrats are taking note. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) told them: “We are absolutely going to have Donald Trump testify under oath.” Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who sits on the Oversight Committee, said that forcing Clinton to testify does indeed set a precedent. “nd we will follow it,” he said. “Donald Trump, all of his kids. Everybody.”

Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL)—who flusters Comer so badly Comer once cracked and told him he looked like a Smurf, a childish insult Moskowitz needled him over for months—said that after Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans will blame Comer for what comes next:

“The folks here are going to run with it everywhere. It will be crypto. It will be their business. It will be all the investments in the Middle East. It’ll be the Qatari plane…. It’s going to be the latest thing with the UAE. It’s going to be all of it…. They are giving a license to these new chairmen in January and that will be Comer’s legacy. So when Junior and Eric and their children… all here, they can thank James Comer for that.”

It seems likely Trump has already figured out that forcing Clinton to testify opens up some avenues he would rather leave closed. When asked about the Clintons’ testimony at the end of the month, he answered: “I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him.” Hillary was “a very capable woman.” “I hate to see it in many ways.”

Another court case might tear away some of the administration’s obfuscation, as well. Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg reported today that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang of the District of Maryland has denied the government’s request to block depositions of Elon Musk and two other former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a lawsuit charging Musk with unlawfully dismantling the agency.

Because Musk and the other two “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case,” Chuang said the testimony could go forward. While courts have generally said that “high-ranking government officials may not be deposed or called to testify about their reasons for taking official actions absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’” Chuang said it was not clear that Musk and the other two were, in fact, high-ranking government officials.

At the same time, the case appeared to meet the criteria for extraordinary circumstances. The government employees who brought the case argue that Musk personally dismantled USAID when he had no authority to do so. The judge noted that the government’s failure to produce documents that explained the decisions killing the agency, as required, suggested that the decisions had been made orally, so the testimony of Musk and the other two men is crucial to the case.

Finally, the last existing arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired today. The New START treaty of 2011 capped the number of nuclear warheads each country could maintain. Trump’s account on social media posted that instead of extending the terms of the existing treaty, “we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” Until that time, though, there is no longer a cap on nuclear weapons for the U.S. or Russia.

Gosh, that last paragraph is a real doozy innit 😕

Divine Angel said:

Gosh, that last paragraph is a real doozy innit 😕

it shows his intentions.

Like with bring back the bih block motors for the American car industry, drill baby drill and that climate chage and winmills are hoaxes.

He wants a new nuclear arms race too.

roughbarked said:

Divine Angel said:

Gosh, that last paragraph is a real doozy innit 😕

it shows his intentions.

Like with bring back the bih block motors for the American car industry, drill baby drill and that climate chage and winmills are hoaxes.

He wants a new nuclear arms race too.

how else can you ensure The Economy Must Grow and convince the slaves you need to build industrial capacity

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

Divine Angel said:

Gosh, that last paragraph is a real doozy innit 😕

it shows his intentions.

Like with bring back the bih block motors for the American car industry, drill baby drill and that climate chage and winmills are hoaxes.

He wants a new nuclear arms race too.

how else can you ensure The Economy Must Grow and convince the slaves you need to build industrial capacity

By being creative and accepting windmills.

Thanks.