Who Can Believe This Government Anymore?

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The rush to lying after the execution of ICU nurse Alex Pretti a week ago made it clear that lying and cover-up have become the norm of the current administration. Just as happened after the murder of Renee Nicole Good two-and-a-half weeks earlier, top officials concocted false narratives of the Pretti killing as if that could turn all the video shot by bystanders into deep fakes.

Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who
Stephen Miller absolved himself of any
blame for the killing of Alex Pretti
saying that Border Control had not
followed protocol.

sets the arrest quotas for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), went straight to social media to call Mr. Pretti a “domestic terrorist who had tried to assassinate federal law enforcement”.

On Thursday came the startling discovery of videos of Alex Pretti in a confrontation
Alex Pretti

with federal agents 11 days before he was killed. He had allegedly kicked out the tail light of one of their vehicles and had been wrestled to the ground then, too. That he is revealed as someone more than a peaceful protester hardly justifies his killing, as hosts at Fox News are bound gleefully to contend.

Miller knew nothing of this, and knew nothing about Pretti when he tweeted three hours after the killing. His accusation was a total lie.

Nor did Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have any knowledge of the incident when she lied that Pretti had brandished a gun and appeared intent on inflicting “maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement”. No gun was brandished. Pretti had gone to the aid of a woman that a CBP agent had pushed to the ground, as seen in videos — an offense that brought seven officers to attack Pretti. In a video we hear an agent discovering Mr. Pretti was
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary,
tends to self-promote, often posing
as a cowgirl on horseback.

carrying a gun and see him removing it from the victim’s waistband only when Pretti was subdued flat on the ground. But Noem saw fit to hastily invent a lie to cover up yet another killing,

That was much the same as her claim after Renee Good was murdered that she had “weaponized” her vehicle and that ICE agent Jonathan Ross “defended his life”, refuted by video showing Ross out of the path of the car turning away from him, and that two of his three shots were point-blank from him standing alongside Good’s SUV. Yet Noem magnified the lie, saying “If you look at what the definition of domestic terrorism is, it completely fits the situation on the ground”.

Taking no responsibility for homicidal thugs on the forces let loose in an American city, Miller, Noem, and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino hurried to get in front of the truth, reflexively lying to 340 million Americans to make the victims deserving of their deaths.

the guilty are innocent

Donald Trump is of course the progenitor of lying as the government policy now emulated by all. In his first term The Washington Post memorably recorded over 30,000 false or misleading claims uttered by him. That database is still available .

The biggest of them is The Big Lie – his inexplicable (except by insanity) mania to construct an imaginary history that he won the 2020 election. All through the 2024 presidential campaign he had turned truth on its head calling those who stormed the Capitol “patriots” and “hostages” for being in prison. His fraud beyond comparison was to act on his lie by commuting sentences and pardoning over 1,500 charged for criminal acts that day accorded due process and and convicted in court proceedings, nullifying the largest investigation in the Justice Department’s history.

The Big Lie

Driven as he is by an illness so severe that he cannot tolerate losing anything, Trump now has FBI Director Kash Patel ordering his agents – those not already diverted from pursuing criminals to instead tracking down migrants – to find any and all in the Bureau who were involved in investigations against Trump. Especially emphasized is Arctic Frost, an FBI operation overseen by Special Counsel Jack Smith that probed the plotting by Mr. Trump and others to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Thus is Trump ordering Patel to spend taxpayer money to deploy government resources to work on his personal obsession.

Looking for any way to make The Big Lie true, just this week Trump had Patel’s FBI raid an election office in Atlanta’s Fulton County. Years later he is still looking for ways to flip Georgia’s vote. Georgia is where Trump had in a phone call begged Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to come up with fraudulent votes to overcome his narrow loss:

“So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

The FBI’s search warrant says they are looking for physical ballots, their envelopes, provisional ballots, ballot images, and voter rolls determined to build a false case. Trump wants a recount, notwithstanding Georgia conducted three recounts at the time — by machine, by hand, and by signature verification — all confirming Biden as the winner with remarkably matching results. Insanity on full display.

Davos

Inducing acute embarrassment for any American watching, Trump carried on about the 2020 election before the potentates assembled at the annual gathering at Davos, Switzerland.

”Think of it. When I won in a landslide, a giant landslide won, all seven swing states, won the popular vote, won everything…”

Lying in front of them all. No landslide. 1.5% more than Harris. But why would this international audience care? He didn’t stop. About Ukraine:

”It’s a war that should have never started, and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged. It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

This is his mental state, self convinced that “everybody now knows that”.

But mortifying for us to see was the account of a phone call with President of France Emmanuel Macron in which Trump insisted that the French president double drug prices so that U.S. pharmaceutical companies could reduce prices in the U.S.

”And I said, Emmanuel, you’re going to have to lift the price of that pill to $20, maybe $30. Think of that. That means it’s a doubling.”

And Macron replied, ‘No, no, no, Donald, I will not do that.’

”I said, ‘yes, you will a hundred per cent.’ He said ‘no, no, no, you’re asking me to double.’ I said, ‘Emmanuel, you’ve been taking advantage of the United States for thirty years with prescription drugs…I am a hundred per cent sure you’re going to.’

This went on back and forth for several minutes with Trump threatening to raise tariffs on French champagne and wines 100% until Macron finally relented, saying “‘No, no, Donald, I will do it. I will do it.’”.

Why mortifying? The indiscretion of revealing to a Davos audience typically composed of corporate CEO’s, diplomats, government officials the world over of this private conversation? No, no, no, that’s not it. It’s because the whole thing was fake. There never was such a phone call. There never was a Macron reduced to a whimper. Our buffoon was perpetrating a whopper of a lie defaming the president of France who, incidentally, does not control drug prices. And he this week repeated this hallucination in Thursday’s cabinet meeting. The Élysée Palace had to post a gif, a photo of Trump with “Fake News” plastered across his image.

Former Trump attorney Ty Cobb’s verdict? “I don’t think there’s anybody outside of the United States who believes that Trump is sane.”

opposites attack

Lying has permeated every corner of this government. As we explored a couple of weeks ago, on its fifth anniversary Trump released on the White House website a complete inversion of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. We called it “propaganda lies enforced as the new truth of our nation.” It is a compendium of lies. It has as prime example that it was the Capitol police guilty of attacking “peaceful protesters”, “deliberately escalating tensions” by aggressively firing “tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions” into the crowds. Odd that those same methods by ICE and CBP were protocol in Minneapolis.

In the inverted world where truth is unwelcome there is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calling his domain The Department of War, which doesn’t exist, and “investigating” members of Congress for telling the truth. With our military blowing boats out of the Caribbean and Pacific upon no proof that their occupants were ferrying drugs, and no justification for their murder even if they were, the group had the temerity to post a video reminding our soldiers, sailors, and airmen that…

“Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders.”

They are reciting law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, cited to all when they join the services. But Hegseth, all about aggressive lethality, wants that truth silenced.

Mr. Trump says the economy is great, but we all know prices are up. At Davos he says…

”grocery prices, energy prices, airfares, mortgage rates, rent and car payments are all coming down and they’re coming down fast. We inherited a mess, but we’ve done a hell of a job in 12 months.”

…all of it a lie. All prices other than gasoline have been rising; there was no mess, with the inflation rate already reduced the day he took office to the same rate as today. Again, a bewildered international audience wondering what has this to do with them?

And he took his drug price math abroad. Less a lie than revealing that our president didn’t even pass 5th grade arithmetic, Mr. Trump told them:

”Under my most favored nation policy for drug prices, the cost of prescription drugs is coming down by up to ninety per cent, depending on the way you calculate. You could also say five, six, seven, eight-hundred per cent.”

That he has gone on speaking this error several times tells us something more, that none of his aides in the White House, nor any of the sycophants in his cabinet, have dared to correct him that nothing can be reduced more than 100%.

numbers don’t lie?

In the week before the Pretti killing, Homeland Security issued a statement headed:

”ICE Continues to Remove the Worst of the Worst from Minneapolis Streets as DHS Law Enforcement Marks 3,000 Arrests During Operation Metro Surge“

As we see, Kristi Noem still has her department persist in the lie that ICE targets only the “worst of the worst”. She says…

”We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals”

…referring to the state’s governor and the city’s mayor. She claims in the last six weeks, DHS law enforcement arrested 3,000 “criminal” illegal aliens.

That leaves us wondering why there are so many criminals at large. The 3,000 in six seven-day weeks means an average of 71 a day. How could that many actual criminals be known of, located, and apprehended at this rate, and yet her claims go unchallenged. How is this not a lie when one thinks of the impossible coordination of 71 arrest teams and their protection teams organized and sent all over the city each single day?

Tom Homan has been brought in to replace Greg Bovino as commander of the immigration purge. Homan’s silent lie is his refusal to either admit taking a $50,000 bribe in an FBI sting or tell what became of this taxpayer money.

Trump says he has nothing to hide but he’s still ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to stall infinitely the release of the Epstein files. Breaking News: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche late yesterday announced the release of over three million pages of documents. That’s the other tack: swamp the opponents with too much irrelevance for their limited resources to handle any sooner than months.

On and on it goes. It has become more reliable to think that truth lies in the opposite of whatever this government says. We’ll borrow from another writer who came upon a suitable epithet in Psalm 10 that says it’s a government “full of curses and deceit and fraud”.

Trump Regime Indoctrinating Us with Nazi Propaganda

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The Trump administration has entered the propaganda phase that characterizes fascist governments. Government websites and advertisements are using phrasing derived from past fascist movements and jingoist nationalism.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruitment ads beckon us to “JOIN ICE TODAY” with the “Uncle Sam wants you” image dating from World War I and “DEFEND THE HOMELAND”. Homeland is a creepy “blood and soil” term that was commonplace in Nazi Germany and has now sunk in here since Bush created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 whereas we formerly simply said “America”.

The Labor Department tells us “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage — Remember who you are, American”. The phrasing is redolent of the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ — One People, One State, One Leader – used on propaganda posters in Germany at the time.

At Homeland Security it’s “PROTECT THE HOMELAND. DEFEND THE CULTURE.”

The White House posted a controversial graphic this week giving Greenland
Which way Greenland man?

two options: US or Russian-Chinese influence. The post was captioned on X with “Which way Greenland man?” which is a not so subtle reference to a notorious white supremacist book defending Hitler which is titled, “Which Way Western Man”.

A few days ago, Homeland Security (DHS) posted an ad promoting sign-ups for ICE with the tag line “We’ll have our home again”. That is a white supremacist anthem favored by the Proud Boys and sung by a male chorus in strident voice. The post had been viewed by when we checked 6.9 million times.

At a press conference in New York City that same day, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stood behind a podium with the legend “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS”.
This is said to be a gruesome Nazi slogan as some historians aver, although with some uncertainty. But it certainly aligns with Nazi policy which said if one Nazi soldier or official is killed, everyone in your town will be killed. In the 1942 massacre in Lidice, now in the Czech Republic, the Nazis murdered every male resident of the village in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking official of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the paramilitary corps commonly known as the SS. What does that tell you about the inclinations of Ms. Noem choosing to stand behind that threat?

and on the ground

We are witnessing acts of fascism performed daily:

as Noem’s masked troops, refusing to be identified, bludgeon the citizens of Minneapolis.

a Washington Post reporter’s home invaded by the FBI taking her Post-issued and personal computer, her phone, and Garmin GPS-enabled watch.

a third and fourth Congress member “investigated” for reminding the military that they must not obey an illegal order.

the chairman of the Federal Reserve investigated.

the Justice Department announcing it will take no action in the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good.

the new order

What all above says is that fascism is now the policy of the U.S. government. The regime has taken lessons from Mussolini and Hitler that propaganda is a crucial instrument for controlling the public and maintaining power. With the slogans above, the government is telling us how we had better start thinking, that we’d best heed their program of state-induced patriotism and understand that any objections to the state’s actions are per force unpatriotic.

The Renee Good killing offers an example. No less than the president immediately and improperly rendered his false account (“the woman violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer”) as did the vice president (“she accelerated in a way where she ran into the guy“), and Noem who spewed only lies (and called Good’s actions “domestic terrorism“), all of which is refuted by videos taken from multiple angles that show killer Jonathan Ross clear of the vehicle. To add to the lies, DHS is claiming he suffered internal bleeding to the torso.

The Trump, Vance, and Noem pronouncements are conclusive. The government says we are to accept their official false version. Just as we predicted in our write-up of the killing last week, there will be no federal investigation. Case closed. Evidence will not be released to Minnesota for it to conduct an investigation. Instead, the DOJ intends to investigate Good and her wife.

This is how fascism works. Information is controlled. As in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, the Trump administration‘s truth is the opposite of the truth we saw with our own eyes.

propaganda as truth

On its fifth anniversary Trump has formally released a complete inversion of the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the White House website.
White House Jan. 6 landing page.

Just as his ego cannot tolerate the proof of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, we now have an official version of that day which all must adhere to if they wish to do any business with the Trump administration.

Let’s stress this. This is not propaganda floating about the Internet. This is propaganda at the White House itself. Propaganda lies enforced as the new truth of our nation. OK with you?

Right off, the website presentation recites the tired right-wing trope that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi failed to provide for defense of the Capitol. A video by her documentarian daughter as they were driving somewhere on January 6 has the former House Speaker, in the website’s words,

“acknowledging responsibility… for not having the National Guard pre-deployed, despite intelligence warnings and President Trump’s offers of troops that were ignored”.

First, there is no record of Trump’s offer. Second, the Capitol Police chief asked for the Guard but was rebuffed by Trump’s own Pentagon generals who did not like the “optics” of troops on Capitol grounds.

Of the mob that assaulted the Capitol, the website says, “The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’” who were “denied due process” by a “weaponized Biden DOJ”. None were sent straight off to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem style. All were convicted in the due process of court cases.

Mr. Trump, who obviously oversaw every word on the page, twists himself into a risible contradiction: If many of his disciples were, as he says, “mere trespassers or peaceful protesters treated as insurrectionists” who were only there for “exercising their First Amendment rights”, why was there any need for Pelosi to provide for the defense of the Capitol?

Some items from the web page’s timeline — the paragraphs in quotes, our corrections in italics:

“President Trump invites patriotic Americans to Washington, DC on January 6 for a peaceful and historic protest against certifying the stolen 2020 election.”

In fact he tweeted in the early morning hours of December 19th after a tumultuous White House meeting in which declaring martial law was considered, ‘Big project in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!'”

“At the Ellipse, President Trump speaks to hundreds of thousands of supporters, detailing evidence of election fraud and urging the crowd to march to the Capitol to ‘peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard’. He stresses the need to fight for the country through strength and determination, explicitly calling for peaceful protest.”

It was a large crowd with the House Select Committee estimating approximately 53,000 attendees, but nothing approaching Trump’s pitiable grandiosity. The first quote is correct, says our transcript, but there is no further “explicitly calling for peaceful protest”. And he used the word “fight” repeatedly, most notably inciting the crowd with, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

“Capitol Police aggressively fire tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters, injuring many and deliberately escalating tensions”.

The Trump version has the Capitol Police attacking his supporters “turning a peaceful demonstration into chaos”, not the factual opposite, a curious example of Trump expecting us to distrust the miles of video footage we have watched. There is no mention that his people assaulted the police, armed with stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpole clubs. A comprehensive review of police officer bodycam footage found roughly 1,000 instances of assault against members of law enforcement, 140 of whom were injured.

“As events unfold, President Trump repeatedly calls for peace, tweeting support for law enforcement and releasing a video telling supporters ‘go home in peace…He consistently promotes non-violence despite the attack on attendees’.

This is a total lie, a disgraceful attempt to cover-up his infamous and willful dereliction of his duty as president. He ignored pleas from his inner circle, Congress members, and his family to call off the attackers. He finally asked them to go home over three hours into the battle.

“Unarmed Air Force veteran and Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt is fatally shot by Capitol Police …Three other Americans were also killed…Zero law enforcement officers lost their lives.”

Of the three, two died of heart attacks, one before the assault began, the other an organizer not seen at the event. The third died of an amphetamine overdose. “Zero law enforcement officers lost their lives” callously does not mention that USCP Officer Brian Sicknick died from two strokes eight hours after being pepper sprayed by a rioter, and four other police officers committed suicide in the days and months after the riot.

“After law enforcement clears the Capitol, Congress reconvenes late that night and certifies Joe Biden’s electoral votes — votes from battleground states marred by massive mail-in ballot fraud, hidden suitcases of ballots, exploding water pipes, voting machine irregularities, and unprecedented pandemic-era rule changes that bypassed state legislatures. 2020 is considered the greatest election theft in U.S. history, with widespread fraud deliberately ignored by courts, officials and the media.”

No fraud has ever come to light because there was none other than one or two votes here and there, often accidental. Voting machine irregularities were conspiracy nonsense: software from Hugo Chavez’s rigged Venezuela election, votes counted in Europe, etc. The courts heard 63 cases; Trump’s lawyers won only one of them. The election theft lives only in Trump’s diseased mind.

But Trump will go on insisting his is the truth, a mentally ill man obsessed with remaking the world as he wants it to be, as his narcissism demands it to be, unable to let anything go.

And for that to happen, he must be omnipotent, holding all the power over all of the government, answerable to no constitution nor the courts. That fits the definition of fascism, as defined by Mussolini himself:

“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”

Fascism centralizes the government in the dictator, who is the state. And that’s where we are.

A cult of personality is the unifying force of a fascist regime. Three government departments unfurled huge banners draped over sides of their buildings showing the enormous scowling face of Donald Trump. The dictator-style portraits are bigger facially than even those of Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin adorning the walls and buildings of their cities. Well, of course they are, only fitting for a megalomanic who must see himself as exalted beyond the other two.

Trump follows the same playbook as the Italian dictator when he says “I was right about everything”. Someone has schooled Trump in everything Benito, because Mussolini said the same. His slogan was “Mussolini ha sempre ragione” — Mussolini is always right.
Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in her Vanity Fair interview said Trump “operates [with] the view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing. Zero. Nothing.” He has said so himself. In an August cabinet meeting he proclaimed, “I have the right to do anything I wanna do. I’m the President of the United States“. In an interview with The Atlantic magazine he said, “I run the country and the world”. In an interview with The New York Times a week ago he said just “one thing” can curtail his desire for global supremacy: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

A Young Mother Murdered
and Nothing But Lies

< fascism|311||Americans don't know enough to recognize that this is fascism.>

If it wasn’t apparent already after the killing of the two ship[wrecked survivors in the Caribbean, it is clear now that we have a government bankrupt of morality and incapable of decency. The deliberate killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good
Renee Nicole Good

has left three children without their mother, yet the president, the vice-president and the head of national security immediately constructed an artifice of lies in the hope of making her deserving of her fate and absolving the ICE killer. Knowing that their false version would not stand up, they then shut out any Minneapolis or Minnesota investigation by denying them access to evidence. The administration’s duplicity demands that we adopt their version of what happened – the opposite of what we have all seen in the video.

Here’s what they said – more complete than you’ve seen and read in the regular media, which tends to extract sound bites, so that you can realize the breadth of the lying.

noem

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began the process, rushing to cameras in her cowgirl costume to hurriedly fabricate an account intended to preempt truth:

“Our ICE officers were out in an enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis. They were attempting to push out her vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them.”

It was all lies. The vehicle was not stuck. The road was clear. No one was pushing any vehicle. The woman never left her SUV. trump

The President inserted himself into what needed to be an impartial appraisal of what happened with still more falsehoods. It is entirely improper to pass judgment from any perch, much less the presidency, before there has been careful analysis of an incident, but Trump was again reliably irresponsible.

He posted the accompanying tweet.

The horrified woman screaming, “What have you done? What have you done?”, he wants to paint as a “professional agitator”. He then showed why there is so much talk of his ageing, delusionally creating his own reality claiming the woman “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer”. Nothing of the sort happened. Does he not realize we can see? “It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

After firing three shots to effect the cold-blooded murder, the ICE agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, walks briskly to where the SUV has crashed into another car, then walks equally rapidly back. As the woman who shouts “What have you done?” says “Shame!”, “Shame”, we hear him greet each with “Ha”, “Ha”. He shows no injury in the slightest. It’s fair to say that he was ordered to go to hospital in order for Noem to make the fake claim of injury so they could invent self-defense.

And Trump? That wasn’t just momentary brain fog. Subsequently interviewed by The New York Times he said,

“She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”

Noem, five hours later

Having flown to Minneapolis that same afternoon and now in her baseball cap with a Homeland Security badge, she repeated her claims of the auto stuck in the snow, ICE agents pushing it out, and a “mob of agitators” blocking them when the video shows just a few people in a residential neighborhood. She continued:

”ICE officers and agents approached the vehicle of the individual in question who was blocking the officers in with her vehicle and she had been stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day. ICE agents repeatedly ordered her to get out of the car and to stop obstructing law enforcement, but she refused to obey their commands. She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over. This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism. The ICE officer, fearing for his life, and the other officers around him and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training to save his own life and that of his colleagues.

She wasn’t there. There is no evidence in the video of Renee Good “stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day” so if she hasn’t simply made it up, she is recklessly repeating what self-interested ICE agents on scene have told her as if this is verified proof. She has Renee Good attempting to run over the shooter, which is not what we see in the video. Good waves for the ICE vehicle to go around her,

as the car before has just done, then starts to leave, first backing up a few feet to re-orient the car’s direction, then slowly moving forward, turning toward the right when the shooter, not in the car’s path, opens fire. Noem says it “appears as an attempt to kill…an act of domestic terrorism” by the driver, which should register as just how big a lie this government will resort to against the public it is meant to serve. In total refutation and most most wrenching to hear, in the instant before she is about to die she says to the agent about to pull her door open, we hear her say “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you”.

Having twisted events into a full inversion of true to false, Noem tries to make it self-defense, and that firing shots in a residential street is for “the safety” of that public.

Noem then asks us to pray for him and “the deceased family and her loved ones” and shifts to death threats against ICE agents and attempts around the nation to use vehicles to “ram” them that have “got to stop” in a statement that became a political speech against President Biden allowing terrorists to enter the country, against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor James Frey, and the state’s Medicare fraud.

vance

Like the president, Vice-President Vance sought to contaminate any measured review of what occurred so as to get the administration’s official distortion out in front. He objects to a perfectly factual CNN headline – “Outrage After ICE Officer Kills U.S. Citizen in Minneapolis”- as an example of how the “corporate media have put this attack” because…

”This was an attack on federal law enforcement, this was an attack on law and order, this was an attack on the American people.”

Reporting it as anything else, “puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day”.

”What that headline leaves out is the fact that that very ICE officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car six months ago, thirty-three stitches in his leg, so you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?”

What Vance leaves out is that that officer might have better been assigned to a form of duty not involving motorists. Vance implies that because the officer underwent that trauma it’s understandable and even justifiable that he should murder a driver as revenge, even someone who had nothing to do with that incident, and a Christian member of his preferred religion who participated in mission trips, was a poet who loved to sing, was a loving mother according to friends.

”What that headline leaves out is that that woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation in the United States of America. What that headline leaves out is that that woman is part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to doxx, to assault, and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job. If the media wants to tell the truth they ought to tell the truth, that a group of left-wing radicals have been working tirelessly, sometimes using domestic terror techniques to try to make it impossible for the President of the United States to do what the American people elected him to do, which is enforce our immigration laws. The President stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers…She was trying to ram this guy with her car. He shot back. He defended himself.”

Once again a claim that runs counter to the video. When the SUV moves forward, it is moving slowly until Renee Good is shot. It speeds up because she is shot. In a video filmed from behind the car that is turning away from him, we see the shooter clear of its path and firing at her.

Vance exhibits a manic, paranoid view that protesters are “left-wing radicals”, part of a “broader left-wing network…sometimes using domestic terror techniques”. He is willfully blind to the rising anger of Americans at the often brutal tactics of masked and unidentified ICE agents grabbing people off the street in their zeal to meet Stephen Miller’s 3,000 a day quota, pulling them from their houses, many of them American citizens, others undocumented immigrant families here for decades leading useful lives. Willfully blind, or does he think that is what America should be.

It seems he had not watched the video until later, backing off his remarks but only slightly.

”What I am certain of is that she violated the law. What I am certain of is that that officer had every reason to think that he was under very serious threat for injury or in fact his life. What I am certain of is that she accelerated in a way where she ran into the guy. I don’t know what was in her heart or what was in her head but I know that she violated the law and I know that officer was acting in self-defense.”

Again, the video shows how exaggerated are his “certainties”. Again, she accelerated after she was shot. And again, Ross shoes no sign of his having been hit.

“Look, if people want to say that we should have a legitimate debate about, you know, what she was really doing, right, was she panicking when she drove into this officer or was she actually trying to ram him, that’s a – that’s a reasonable conversation, or was she actually trying to ram him? …I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left, who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers.”

A tragedy of her own making. That’s what JD Vance thinks. Just what was it she did that deserved her death? And he is the widely leading favorite to be the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2028.

Vance would further say that Jonathan Ross “deserves a debt of gratitude” and that “nobody debates” that Good aimed her car at an officer”, that she must have been “brainwashed” or “radicalized to put herself in that situation”, that “the reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car and that guy acted in self-defense.”

Find any of that in the video?

the new america

This is our government now, a government in which the state is all, everything for the state, each day furthering the new fascist America, for that is fascism’s definition. Trump’s America sees as its right the freedom to kill at will and with no less than the president, the vice-president, and the head of national security shutting down objections. We are expected to concede to the government’s official version with no tolerance for dissent. Indeed, we may see dissent prosecuted as is happening with the free speech admonitions by six members of Congress against obeying illegal military orders. If Minnesota attempts an investigation, its U.S. attorney can exercise supremacy to bring the case up to federal court, there to exercise the freedom to dismiss and snuff the case. Vance says Ross has “absolute immunity”, almost true legally but surely true in reality. There will be no federal investigation. What Trump, Vance, and Noem have said is meant to be conclusive. Case closed. The Department of Justice under Pamela Bondi and the FBI she controls will certainly not pursue justice. Murder by the federal police is legitimate in the name of the fascist state.

Navy to Build “Golden Fleet” of Battleships. It Must Be 1941.

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In October’s piece about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the President lecturing the military’s top brass summoned from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, we mentioned Trump saying,

“I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way… your secretary likes it and I’m sort of open to it…I tell you, it’s something we’re seriously considering.”

We scoffed,

”This in the new age of drones and anti-ship missiles. Battleships are entirely outmoded, a realization that became apparent even toward the end of World War II.”

It was a mistake to discount what seemed only to be musings, because this is a president who gets whatever he wants, and uses our tax money to get it. Just days ago along came the startling announcement that,

”President Donald Trump has rolled out plans for new large surface combatants for the U.S. Navy.”

Yes, his battleships. The Navy’s ships of like designs are called a “class” and the new battleships are to be named — needless to say — the “Trump Class”:

“I look at different ships in the old pictures. I used to watch ‘Victory at Sea’. I love ‘Victory at Sea’. And I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them and, man, nothing was going to stop, there were 20 deep and they were in a straight line and there was nothing going to stop them.”

To the admirals at Quantico, he had said,

”And I’m not a fan of some of the ships you do… I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing aesthetically. They say, oh, it’s stealth. I say that’s not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.”

bygone era

The last of the battleships were built 80 years ago and the last of them of the Iowa-class
The USS Iowa.

were decommissioned in 1992. They had only survived that late because Reagan had brought them out of retirement in his build up
The Iowa’s firepower.

of the Navy, newly outfitted with anti-ship missiles, Tomahawk cruise missile launchers, and antimissile defense guns. “They were just about as mean and scary as you could be”, said Trump. They were indeed formidable in their day, nearly 900 feet long, bristling with nine 16-inch guns. This writer got a tour of the USS Iowa in the 1980’s.

size is the sizzle for him

Trump says the USS Defiant, as the first will be christened,…

“will be be the largest battleship in the history of our country, the largest battleship in the history of the world ever built.”

Well no, it won’t be. It is estimated to displace 30,000 to 40,000 tons in comparison to Iowa-class battleships displacing around 57,540 tons with a full load. And it was the Japanese who floated the biggest battleships ever — the Yamato and Musashi — 864 feet long displacing
Japan’s battleship Yamato spotted in trials off Bungo Strait (outside Sukumo Bay) on 20 October 1941.

72,800 tons fully loaded and with 18-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a warship. The Trump-class comes close in length, though, at 840 feet.

That’s more than twice the size of the largest surface combatant ships the Navy currently sails. The design arms the ships with nuclear-tipped and hypersonic missiles, electromagnetic rail-guns, and laser-directed energy weapons. They “will be the flagships of the American naval fleet”, says Trump, to be called unsurprisingly the “Golden Fleet”, an incongruous choice for the blue-water Navy. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan added,

“The USS Defiant battleship will inspire awe and reverence for the American flag whenever it pulls into a foreign port. It will be a source of pride for every American.”

Trump will also be directly involved in the design process, “because I’m a very aesthetic person”, he says.

lagging far behind

“We’re desperately in need of ships,” said Mr. Trump. Very true. Does he recall that he promised a 355-ship Navy when campaigning in 2016, a promise quickly forgotten? “Look, I accomplished the military,” Mr. Trump said obscurely at one point, but force expansion of the Navy did not happen. As if suddenly making good on his pledge, his administration spent some of its last days in office planning for that 355-ship goal, leaving the job to President Biden. Biden also did nothing. The Navy has only 292 ships in its fleet today.

reality

About the battleships, Trump says,

”We’re talking about ten, but we’re gonna start with two, and we’re going to quickly morph into ten, and ultimately we think its going to be anywhere from twenty to twenty-five.”

But as a CNBC headline read, “The ‘Trump-class’ battleship faces a large obstacle in its way: Reality”.

Start with cost. The workhorses of the fleet are the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers which cost about $2.7 billion apiece to build. Using their 9,000-ton displacement as a back-of-envelope gauge, there being no blueprints yet for the new class, the Trump battleships could cost upwards from $8 billion each, a significant drain on the defense budget when multiplied times 25.

Trump expects the Trump-class warship to be…

“the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”

A second reality says that the weaponry to make them so powerful is questionable. Both Russia and China boast operational hypersonic missiles while the U.S. is still in developmental stages. (Just days ago China claimed a successful launch and distant strike of a YJ-20 hypersonic off a Type-55 guided missile destroyer.)

The U.S. has successfully tested electromagnetic rail-guns, but gave up on their implementation. They were intended only for the Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyers about twenty years ago as the only combat ship that could deliver the needed electrical power to drive the gun. But spiraling costs cancelled the Zumwalt ships with only three built of the 32 planned, and the rail-gun remains a science experiment with the so far intractable problem that the barrel burns out after too few firings.

The “Golden Fleet” with its 25 at most Trump-class battleships runs counter to the Navy’s strategy of distributing firepower over a large number of ships (there are five dozen or so Arleigh-Burke destroyers, e.g.). Compared to a multitude of smaller, faster, maneuverable warships, experts have described the Defiant and its sister ships — almost as long as three football fields — as “bomb magnets”. They point out that the Yamato and Musashi saw little action before they were sunk by carrier-launched aircraft.

The U.S. has come to the way overdue realization that we build too few ships with too few shipyards. China with 200 times U.S. shipbuilding capacity has gone past the 350-ship mark at a sprint. Given their size and assumed complexity, the Trump ships will take too long to build and clog what shipyards we have.

anchors away

Mark Montgomery, a former rear admiral now a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy quoted in The Wall Street Journal declared the “Golden Fleet” plan “exactly what we don’t need”.

“We do not need ships that are not optimized to provide lethality against the Chinese threat. That is not what these are focused on. They are focused on the visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

Called a “prestige project” (viz. Phelan’s remarks above), the first ship might better be named the USS Vainglory. Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, commented in a discussion that, “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water…This ship will never sail.”

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Michael Ramirez.