TGIF [DOT 23/1/26]

23/1/26 MegMegMcGee 21

Hi gang, hope everyone’s week went alright…

Ugh. Ready?

Tens of millions of Americans brace for winter weather blast
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/22/nx-s1-5684985/winter-snowstorm-ice-snow-threat

New ICE policy allows officers to enter homes without a judge’s warrant. Here’s what experts say
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/22/politics/ice-memo-warrantless-entry-what-we-know

That’s nuts!

White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-ice-protest-arrest-altered-image

Ugh, making me root for Jamie Dimon

Trump Sues JPMorgan for $5 Billion for Closing His Bank Accounts
https://www.wsj.com/finance/president-trump-sues-jpmorgan-for-5-billion-for-closing-his-bank-accounts-17892253?st=w3R5a3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

‘I ain’t goin nowhere’: Gullah Geechee people fight off developers with a historic referendum
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/jan/22/gullah-geechee-georgia-development-referendum

All MAGA is going to be left with is Jelly Roll and Morgan Wallen

Have a super day!

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21 Comments

  1. …still waiting for this part to make it into the news I don’t have to go looking for

    Most of the people I saw saying a general strike couldn't just be spun up out of nowhere were right. I don't think any other place could pull this off right now. The Twin Cities built a citywide support system on every front in like 6 weeks, they are doing the ridiculous backwards in heels.

    — Bree (@mostlybree.kitrocha.com) 2026-01-23T01:30:50.611Z

    …but…like

    Judge William Young ends his order protecting noncitizen students targeted for deportation for their activism or speech with this quotation.It’s by Ronald Reagan, who appointed him to the bench four decades ago.

    — Adam Klasfeld (@klasfeldreports.com) 2026-01-23T01:49:32.867Z

    …irony reaching previously untapped latent potential…don’t have it in me right now to get into the passive eugenics thing but the US…is no longer part of the WHO…& someone allegedly claiming to be in the department of health straight up said more or less “we’re looking forward to seeing what rampant measles infection looks like as it vectors through the population now we’re below herd immunity rates for the vaccinations that could have had that just not happen at all – that’s literally why we’re doing it & we think it’s super-great”…but…irony of ironies…sometimes it gets so dense it’s hard to choke down some of what you hear

    Literally

    — The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) 2026-01-22T22:49:33.849Z

    …so…I have a certain amount of time for the people responding “in kind”, I guess

    from the top rope

    — shauna (@goldengateblond.bsky.social) 2026-01-23T06:50:04.858Z

    …but…like…I forget how long ago I wondered aloud if, really, in the face of it, places I’ve lived could respond the way we’ve seen minnesota manage to…&…well…keep finding new ways to be impressed about that kind of “in kind” response?

    National media should really be covering the fact thay every major school, museum, and arts institution in the Twin Cities, and hundreds of local businesses are closed tomorrow to protest federal occupation. Nothing like this at this scale has happened anywhere in America anytime in living memory.

    — Thomas Leeper (@thosjleeper.bsky.social) 2026-01-22T20:25:05.930Z

    I guess this post escaped containment, so here's the local media with the partial, constantly updated list of closures.bringmethenews.com/minnesota-li…

    — Thomas Leeper (@thosjleeper.bsky.social) 2026-01-22T21:02:59.609Z

    • *Technically* we’re shut don schools-wise, because of the bitter fucking cold…

      Buuuut maybe it’s because Mother Nature Agrees with the Strike/Shutdown?

      There *is* 163-4+ years of KARMA this state owes a bunch of BIPOC folks, for injustices done–so a Great Spirit or two teaming up to shut a few things down *would* be reasonably appropriate!😉

      And also a bit of a reminder, that 5 and a half years ago, we DID start forming those “Neighborhood Watch” groups, the *last* time we had an invasion of outsiders & “cops” who started shit in our neighborhoods.

      Lots of the “infrastructure” had also been re-tapped just a couple months ago, during the Government Shutdown…

      So it was a bit more “shifting gears” to fit the situation to protecting one another, food distribution, abd ICE Watch, than slapping together a *whole* new one here😉💖💪

      The crowds at the march today have been making me giggle, though, when I think about Trumpty-Dumpty’s first inauguration “Crowd Size” whinging, annnd the “We NEED to have it *inside* for the second!😉😂🤣

      https://www.wusa9.com/article/weather/weather-impact/donald-trump-second-inauguration-fourth-coldest-on-record-how/65-301db61d-8d58-4c52-99e2-5d08d686198d

  2. …ok…I know it’s friday & you’re meant to get a kind of early weekend before I start in with the block quotes…but…I am morbidly fascinated by this one?

    Leave the fascism debate behind
    Better ideas are more important than dire warnings about Trump as dictator.

    …it’s in WaPo…it’s megan mcardle…I know, I know…but

    Since Donald Trump entered the American political fray, his opponents have been debating what kind of threat he poses to democracy, and what to do about it. In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg declared that debate over in a column headlined “The Resistance Libs Were Right.”

    The obvious question is: About what?

    …well…ok…& I’ll get to what she seems inclined to say about that…but…imho…although I didn’t carry it through…she put the link to that piece in that reference…& that begs a couple of questions I’d have that seem more obvious to me to need answers she doesn’t address…does she think anyone reading her thing clicked through or remembers reading the other thing? …&…did she? …because here’s her opening thrust

    Were they right to label him a fascist? That depends on what you mean by the term. As the Justice Department prosecutes Trump’s enemies, the military stages smash-and-grab raids on foreign countries and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents storm through U.S. cities, it’s hard to deny that the resistance libs were correct about some important things: Trump’s authoritarian instincts, bellicose contempt for norms and fundamental disrespect for America’s democratic traditions. Those character flaws have been given much freer rein in his second term, making the fears of an emerging dictatorship look somewhat more reasonable.
    But when ordinary people hear “Trump is a fascist,” they aren’t primed for an academic debate over when right-wing populism shades over into fascism; they hear you saying that Trump is either an adherent of the political ideology known as fascism or a dictator whose practices are fascist, even if he eschews the name. Those stronger claims are less convincing. In the first case, because Trumpism looks more like a personal grift than a coherent ideology, and in the second, because for all Trump’s assaults on American institutions, he is not a dictator and is running out of time to become one.

    …again…some links amongst that…not entirely clear how those might go to support her thesis but they do seem to support the case she’s setting up a stall to counter-argue…but…the other thing by the other lady this “responds to”?

    For the last decade there’s been a debate, among people who don’t like Donald Trump, about whether he’s a fascist.

    The argument that he isn’t often hinges on two things. First, when Trump first came to power, he lacked a street-fighting force like Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, even if he was able to muster a violent rabble on Jan. 6. “Trump didn’t proceed to unleash an army of paramilitary supporters in an American Kristallnacht or take dramatic action to remake the American state in his image,” wrote the leftists Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis in “Did It Happen Here?,” a 2024 anthology examining the fascism question.

    Second, Trump didn’t pursue campaigns of imperial expansion, which some scholars view as intrinsic to fascism. “For all of Trump’s hostility towards countries he perceives as enemies of the U.S., notably Iran, there is no indication that he sought a war with any foreign power, still less that he has been consumed by a desire for foreign conquest and the creation of an American empire,” wrote Richard J. Evans in his 2021 essay “Why Trump Isn’t a Fascist.”

    It’s striking how much the arguments that Trump is not a fascist have suffered in just the first few days of this year, in which we’ve plunged to new depths of national madness.

    …mcardle’s whole “he hasn’t done the thing, really…& he’s too far behind the curve to get there compared to notable examples of specimen timelines for the thing…so…don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater & make out claiming this still isn’t fascism & has some people on the bandwagon who should stay in the game so they can keep the good bits…like…republicans who aren’t blocking the agenda…or democrats keeping ICE on a funding upswing”…or…whatever

    An increasingly unpopular regime is rapidly radicalizing and testing how far it can go down the road toward autocracy. If people had predicted back in 2024 precisely what Trump’s return to the White House was going to look like, I suspect they’d have been accused of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. But the shrillest of Resistance libs have always understood Trump better than those who make a show of their dispassion. As the heterodox writer Leighton Woodhouse put it on X, “The hysterical pussy hats were right.”

    Of course they were. From the moment he descended his golden escalator, Trump’s message, the emotional core of his movement, has been textbook fascism. In his 2004 book “The Anatomy of Fascism,” the eminent historian Robert O. Paxton described the “mobilizing passions” that form fascism’s foundation. Among them are a “sense of overwhelming crisis” that renders traditional solutions obsolete; a belief that one’s own group has been victimized, justifying almost any action in redress; “dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict and alien influences”; and the need for a strong male leader with instincts more powerful than mere “abstract and universal reason.”

    …FFS…the other day (think it was) lutnick was out there on camera saying “the state of emergency is that we’re trying to avoid this rising to the status of an emergency”…& there has never been a “president” so quick to call upon emergency powers to induce an emergency crisis to be doing something unprecedented about to make worse

    None of this means that America is destined to become a fully fascist country. For now, we are trapped in the space between the liberal democracy most Americans grew up in and the dark, belligerent authoritarian state that our government seeks to impose. The important thing isn’t really the name we give to this political development, but our ability to see what’s happening clearly and make sense of its likely trajectory.

    On the last page of “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Paxton offers a warning. “We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular ‘march’ on some capital to take root,” he writes. “Seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national ‘enemies’ is enough.”

    The Resistance Libs Were Right

    …&…genuinely…if you’re megan…how do you read that & conclude that what you should do is write a thing that…claims to pick up what that one put down…& then start off trying to say it was wrong about it being less important what you call what we’re looking at than it is not to deny it by saying it’s important that it’s still possible to not call it something specific & thus those resistance libs are still wrong to be resisting the people not-stopping it who should be encouraged to continue not-seeing it as a thing that requires any profound or lasting change of the sort that might change the rules of what keeps you gainfully employed in or around the “business of politics”…& spins that all the way up to arguing…more or less verbatim…that…akshully…deciding to tolerate lawlessness at the highest levels of the federal government is totally an anodyne decision & it’s frankly unhelpful to claim it isn’t?

    …&…like…I genuinely don’t have warm fuzzy feelings about “re-education” in the classical despotic authoritarian model…but…damn?

    …maybe just a little light enforced-mandatory-remedial-catch-up-classes?

    …like…they let you out as soon as you can prove you hear *yourself* & have a basic grounding in logic & reading comprehension in at least your first language

    …how bad could that be, really…it’s not like it’s a life sentence for anyone that isn’t basically a walking public health risk?

    • …someone summed up the list of places signed up to that board as “countries that would welcome the tate brothers & fight attempts to extradite them”…&…I can’t spot the lie?

    • Absolutely. That’s why they’re not trying that bullshit here or in places like Texas, even though the number of immigrants in both those states dwarfs the number in Minnesota. Honestly, we’ve also got “stand your ground” which allows you to open fire if “you feel threatened.” So a bunch of masked and armed goons charging at you would fit that definition.

      Most of the observers now feel like provoking an armed attack is the goal. That’s why they’re doing such outrageous, over-the-top shit. They want to create an incident that will allow Orange to declare martial law and send in troops. Troops have already been mobilized at Fort Bragg with the intention of sending them to Minnesota.

      They want a civil war. They’re losing on all fronts and they’re going to get kicked out in the midterms unless they can declare Trump king. That’s what we’re staring at now.

  7. Of course the ai altered image of her makes her crying, fatter, and darker skinned. Of course it does. Because just crying wouldn’t be enough, they have to be even more racist and sexist.

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