American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

It was poe called Andy.

[Tero]

Trump and GOP have taken CA and Minnestota as examples since 2016

“Oh, Minnesota,” Trump told the crowd, dropping into the just-you-and-me-talking mode that has always been one of his greatest assets as a politician. “You know what’s going on. You know what I’m talking about. Do you know what I’m talking about? Be politically correct. Just nod — quietly nod. The whole world knows what’s happening in Minnesota.”

"What was happening in Minnesota then was a slow-burning tension surrounding the state’s Somali community, its second-largest immigrant population."

"Minnesota had been a haven for refugees since after World War II, when it was an early destination for Holocaust survivors in the United States, and especially since the late 1970s, when it began taking in thousands of South Vietnamese and Hmong people on the wrong side of America’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia."
"At an October 2015 listening session in the small city of St. Cloud, where tensions had run particularly high, the state’s Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, addressed the Somali community. “This is Minnesota, and you have every right to be here,” he said. The state, he said, was “not like it was 30, 50 years ago,” when its population was nearly entirely white — and bigots who had a problem with that should “find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota. It’s not going to be again.”

"Trump’s message, a year later, was that, in fact, it could be that again. If elected, he promised, his administration would “not admit any refugees without the support of the local community where they are being placed — the least they could do for you. You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota.”

"The speech crystallized one of the core themes of Trump’s politics, which has become the overwhelming argument of his second term: that the country’s foundational idea of a civic nation — one whose people are bound by a shared commitment to principles rather than ancestry or cultural identity — is a sort of liberal swindle. In Trump’s America, shared prosperity requires exclusion: a policing, by force if necessary, of the boundaries of who gets to call themselves American based in large part on where they come from."

"Nevertheless, Minnesota is still a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections, and for over half a century, it has more clearly than perhaps any other state embodied the civic ideal that Trump seems intent on overturning. On the ground in Minneapolis, this is very overtly what the city’s residents who are tracking and confronting federal agents see themselves fighting for."

"This owed something to history — the state’s civil society was shaped in the 19th century by Yankee antislavery Republicans and later immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany, all deeply moralistic political cultures — and something to politics: The most powerful force in Minnesota politics for decades has been the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, a midcentury left-liberal fusion organization shaped in its early years by a cohort of cerebral amateurs, several of them young political science professors."
"But as race has become a ubiquitous lens for social science analysis, Minnesota has come in for a harder look. For a quarter-century now, researchers, drawing on data from around the world, have noted a clear correlation between the generosity of a country’s welfare state and the homogeneity of its population — a finding that invites a new reading of the idea of moralistic government as just another form of self-interest.

"A particular criticism of Minnesota, which rocketed to the foreground following George Floyd’s killing, is that Minnesota’s proud progressivism on race was itself a counterintuitive product of the state’s lack of diversity and pervasive segregation. Beneath its rhetorical commitments, the state possesses some of the country’s most severe racial disparities across a wide range of metrics, from unemployment to homeownership to incarceration to educational attainment."

"The fraud scandal in Minnesota, in which dozens of members of the state’s Somali community are implicated in stealing over $1 billion from the state’s much-vaunted social services system, has struck bone because it fits so neatly within this line of argument: that liberals’ civic commitments are not just empty and unproductive but also a cover for looting the state by the very people liberals are most preoccupied with protecting."

"But whatever its misgivings, Minnesota is still Walz’s state more than Trump’s. Much of the political particularity that nurtured Minnesota’s civic culture is gone now. But the state brushed off Trump’s appeal in 2016 and, for good measure, elected Ilhan Omar, the country’s first Somali congresswoman. Predictions that Trump would win the state in 2020 and 2024, after Floyd’s murder and its consequences, proved wrong, too."

"This has been true nationally, too. The response to Trump’s first year back in office has made clear that ambivalence and opposition are not the same thing. It is hard to think of a federal action that has become more unpopular more quickly than Trump’s immigration raids."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/maga ... p-ice.html

[Tero]

There is no honorable way out to offer to trump. And Ukraine now sidelined thanks to trump

President Stubb has written an article for the January issue of Foreign Affairs magazine entitled "The West's Last Chance."

The thirteen-page article explores the world order and its future – and ends with an ominous conclusion.

– This is our last chance.

Stubb refined his thesis on world order while working as a professor at the EU University in Florence. According to his assessment, the world is threatened with disorder unless the direction is changed.

– For the global West, the question mark, the wild card, in all of this is whether the United States wants to preserve the multilateral world order that the country has been instrumental in building and from which it has benefited greatly, Stubb estimates.

The Finnish President predicts a difficult path ahead, as the United States has already withdrawn from the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, and numerous UN organizations.

So far, the Trump administration has remained within regional cooperation structures, such as the defense alliance NATO.
Foreign and security policy sources estimate that the project has a moderate chance of success. Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans do not support their president's obsession with buying Greenland.

If extremes were to be taken, Congress would hardly approve the annexation of Greenland as the 51st state of the United States or any other administrative territory.

Sources emphasize that they intend to speak constructively to the Americans. They are trying to find an honorable way out for Trump, even though there may not be one.

Trump has already lost his respect in European NATO countries.

Europe will be represented at Davos by, among others, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz , French President Emmanuel Macron , British Prime Minister Keir Starmer , and President Stubb.

Originally, Davos was supposed to focus on Ukraine's peace efforts, and the fate of the Ukrainians should not be left on the sidelines.

https://www.iltalehti.fi/politiikka/a/3 ... 1a2d33a85c

[Tero]

White women voters now active

"This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen — who had to leave the United States in 2024, after the Department of Justice accused her of working for a Russian propaganda operation, but was allowed back in by the Trump administration — wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”

"One reason Renee Good’s death was such a shock is that we’re not used to seeing law enforcement violence against middle-class white mothers. The citizenry has broadly recoiled; her killing, in addition to being a human tragedy, has been a public relations disaster for the administration."

"I have more ICE whistles in my house than I can count, because my neighbors are constantly handing them out, most recently at my daughter’s dance recital. Similar bourgeois mobilizations are happening all over the country. CNN reported that Renee Good served on the board of her son’s charter school, which provided links to guides about opposing ICE. ICE watches are being organized in churches and neighborhood associations. In many ways they are manifestations of local civic health."
"They’re also a problem for the right. These activists both document ICE’s brutality and are often subject to it, demonstrating the casual violence that Trump’s paramilitary forces are bringing to American communities. Just this week, a woman named Patty O’Keefe described agents surrounding a car she was in, spraying chemical irritants through the vents, breaking the windows and dragging her out. She was thrown in the back of an ICE vehicle, where she said the driver taunted her: “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” After eight hours in detention, she said, she was released without charges.

"To defend such treatment of activists — many of them women — right-wingers need to cast them as enemies of the state. The editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, wrote a column headlined, “The Anti-ICE insurgency,” describing Good almost as a suicidal militant. “She went out of her way to confront ICE and created the predicate for the tragedy, which has been used to propagandize against ICE and mobilize more people to do what she did,” he wrote. “Insurgencies feed off their martyrs.” His language seems designed to rationalize ICE agents storming through Midwestern streets kitted out as if they’re headed into battle in Falluja."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opin ... women.html

[Brian Peacock]

Shoot them in the face, and then issue calumniating screeds through friendly mouthpieces calling them insurgents and terrorists. People really should stop buying into the gaslighting and treating this as some sort of disputable interpretation of events. It's a fabrication. It's propaganda. This is how propaganda works. You don't debunk it - you resist and oppose it or else it becomes 'normal'.

[Tero]

The new trumpian US attacks EU. And it's not working. Except a bit with the economy, as the US economy will drag down anything connected to it.

"As I wrote yesterday, Donald Trump and his team clearly went to Davos determined to demean and insult their hosts. It was, one might say, a novel approach to diplomacy: “You’re pathetic, your societies and economies are falling apart, now give us Greenland.”

"And it worked about as well as you’d expect. Trump may have imagined that the Europeans would cower in the face of his wrath. Instead, they humiliated him. He dropped his latest tariff threats in return for a “framework” that gave the United States essentially nothing it didn’t already have — and left behind a Europe that is finally united in resistance to his bullying."

"First, Trump and company are wedded to the belief that nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants have destroyed European society, that Europe’s cities are hellscapes of rampant crime and social disorder — the trans-Atlantic version of what they believe about New York. In reality, while Europe has had some problems assimilating immigrants, the continent remains incredibly safe by U.S. standards."
"Second, MAGA types are sure that Europe is an economic disaster area.

"I wrote about this last month, arguing that while Europe lags in information technology, this does not mean that the European economy is failing to deliver what matters: higher living standards for its people."

"Finally, Trump and company believed that Europe is weak, that European leaders would never stand up to U.S. bullying. And Europe’s initial response to Trump’s trade war — an attempt to appease and flatter him, hoping that it would all go away — surely reinforced Trumpian contempt."
"And when Trump threatened to put tariffs on the exports of nations that have sent troops to Greenland, Europe didn’t cower in submission — it got ready to strike back at U.S. businesses.

"Trump then confirmed the old adage that bullies are also cowards. Brave Sir Donald ran away, ran away, ran away."
"But Europe has learned a lesson. Appeasing a bully doesn’t work, especially when, as anyone watching Trump’s Davos rant could see, that bully is experiencing rapid cognitive decline. But standing up to him does work.

"The question now is whether and when enough influential people here at home will learn the same lesson."

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-0-europe-1

[Tero]

MS NOW, cable TV, covers the news that CBS won't both at threads
https://www.threads.com/@msnownews?
and at Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/msnowevents.bsky.social

[Tero]

https://www.threads.com/@underthedeskne ... 6Zx&slof=1

They pepper sprayed the fuck out of that man’s face from close range. Then 8 dudes jumped him, THEY took his legally owned / has the right to carry in public weapon from its holster and tossed it aside. And then shot him in the head while his arms were behind his back and he was on his knees. And then shot several more times. And then clapped over his dead body. And now are lying about it - and also agents involved fled the scene. That’s not what innocent people do.

[JimC]

Are they wearing brown shirts?

[Svartalf]

no, but they should

[Brian Peacock]

Shoot them in the face, and then issue calumniating screeds through friendly mouthpieces calling them insurgents and terrorists. People really should stop buying into the gaslighting and treating this as some sort of disputable interpretation of events. It's a fabrication. It's propaganda. This is how propaganda works. You don't debunk it - you resist and oppose it or else it becomes 'normal'.

[Tero]

I have asked elsewhere what Minnesota authorities could do. For example, a curfew in the evening. The situation is so chaotic that something should be done to reduce the time the public and ICE have to interact together. The answer was that federal forces in the execution of their duties would be free to act without regard to state prohibitions.

[Sean Hayden]

Isn't the interaction the point? I don't think Minnesotans are interested in dividing their time with ICE. If the feds are going to continue to act like this (eg profiling, arresting citizens, taking kids, etc) then they don't want them there. The feds are behaving like predators, and I think Minnesotans have correctly determined the solution is to keep eyes on them and warn others. The message is simple: predatory behavior carries real costs.

If we have fair elections the Republicans are toast, and we can thank these brave Minnesotans for a lot of that.