Week of Militant Force
Trump Birthday Parade, Los Angeles Freedom Protests, Mug the Senator Event

MY note:
Although massive protests have overwhelmingly been peaceful, there are recorded incidents of vandalism by a few nitwits either dutifully provoked or simply taking destructive advantage.

It is counterintuitive to imagine any success in finding those dangerous members working for years at Home Depot in Los Angeles or at the Glenn Valley Foods plant in Nebraska. Still, that’s where Trump aide Stephen Miller directs ICE raids.

Jason Linkins seems to have it about right:

Key strategist:
Stephen Miller is a bitter punk, once rejected by a Hispanic high schooler and now the chief architect of the Final Solution. At this point it’s round em up and deport them to some other shithole prison where nobody knows what happens to them. Ya know, like Auschwitz.

Key foreboding:
An American version of Bloody Sunday is upon us. It’s inevitable in this current mood of half the country appalled by these ICE hooligans and the other half who want F15s to strafe their fellow Americans.

Key call:
Hang on. Resist. Persist. And VOTE!

So @Silkgengar manages to find one.

A communist struggles to explain why he brandishes an old Soviet symbol. It’s because communism is scientific. The expressions of a casual onlooker strikes me as …well… wonderful:

Key strategy:
And there it is. The Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is the MAGA regime’s attempt to replace the American government we’ve had since the 1930s with one that reflects the antidemocratic values of Project 2025.

Key problem:
The measure is unpopular. According to a new CBS News/YouGov poll, 60% of Americans think the bill will help wealthy people, while 54% think it will hurt poor people. Forty-seven percent think it will hurt the middle class, while only 31% think it will help the middle class. As Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles noted, it’s “[s]tunning how badly Trump and the Rs have lost the debate on what their reconciliation bill will do.”

Key necessity:
Miller’s post underscores the administration’s need to change the conversation around the measure, whose 1,000-plus pages lay out the MAGA vision for the United States.

Key tactic (quoting Maanvi Singh of *The Guardian*):
Singh noted federal agents carried out arrests in L.A. without judicial warrants and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been holding families in the basements of federal buildings, refusing them access to lawyers and family members. Agents in riot gear attacked protesters with tear gas and flash-bang grenades, turning peaceful protests into clashes.

The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

Elon Musk has uncovered solid evidence. It’s all over the internet, at least in right wing posts on social media.

driftglass begins with this:

driftglass works backwards, reviewing Jonathan’s sources. There are none.
So he checks what Elon has posted about his successful investigation. Nothing.
So he surveys anywhere the evidence or mention of the evidence might be credibly posted. Nope.

Turns out (with apologies to Gertrude Stein) There is no there there.
Just gullible folk who will believe any pro‑Trump assertion.

Key believers:
However, even though, as of this writing, this pack of lies has only been gestating for about eight hours, it has already found its way through the veins and capillaries of the Conservative media ecosystem and on to my local area social media, where it is being taken as gospel by area MAGA goofs.

Good work, driftglass.

Key resource:
“No one empties a room faster than Stephen,” Trump said. “He’s better than teargas.”

Secretary Noem explains that the Senator burst into the room, refused to identify himself, and lunged at her while screaming. He did all that, she says, as political theater.

tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors doesn’t have to try hard to find video of the entire incident. It is all over news and social media. AND video shows…

   No bursting
   No lunging
   No failure to identify

It also turns out that the political theater characterization carries more unintentional irony (a lot) than truth (none).

We are, after all, listening to Kristi Noem.

He insists the birthday part is pure coincidence.
After all, he couldn’t control on which day he was born.
Right?

A free citizenry is supposedly protected by the very first Constitutional Amendment when citizens peaceably assemble in protest.
It’s not a new idea. The 1^st Amendment has protected protest as free speech since 1791.

M. Bouffant at Web of Evil links to news sources across the political spectrum as mr Trump threatens that any exercise of that freedom will be met with what he calls very big force.

The fractured English, as well as the threat, comes directly from Trump.
Bigly.

On a separate note, I’m told forecasts in DC predict the weather will rain on Trump’s birthday parade with spectacular shows of lightning.
No word on what threats he has directed toward The Almighty.

Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit looks into it. Turns out the attendees were carefully screened. Any service person suspected of being insufficiently pro‑Trump was turned away.

Comrade Misfit links to the award-winning newsroom of Military.com for documentation.
And yeah, turns out she’s right.

That last, by the way, is not sarcasm. It is an actual post by an ardent Trump supporter.

There is a lot between first and last.

Key favorite (since I am writing from Missouri):
In another Congressional hearing, MAGA hack Josh Hawley of Missouri tried to make the case that his Lord and Master is being persecuted with excessive judicial injunctions (from judges of both parties) and presented a chart showing that Lord and Master has had far more injunctions against him than any other president. It would never occur to him in a million years that there just might be a good reason for this.

My instant hint (For those not yet having had Saturday’s morning coffee):
It’s so unfair. Al Capone was arrested so many more times than Eliot Ness!

Key political and moral necessity:
You need, in other words, to be prepared to fight on grounds of your opponents’ choosing.
 
That’s nobody’s idea of a good time.

Key crippling word: salience
But it’s also not possible if your theory of opposition politics is rooted in conceding tough fights, or ducking contentious issues, hoping more favorable ones will materialize. It’s not possible if you’re surrounded by advisers who tell you your top political aim should be to “reduce the salience” of issues like immigration.

You may prefer a thoughtfully provided complete transcript (PDF).

The most notable moment at the town hall meeting has a young women who has devoted her education to preparing for a teaching career. Now, having earned her PhD, she has decided to give up her dream.

She had been ready for a lifetime of low pay, and teaching in an underfunded environment, making do without basic teaching materials. But now the idea of education itself, the profession to which she has aspired, has become a political target.

Key educational standard:
Missouri has been running the pilot program for Project 2025 for at least a decade. We have been under the boot of a GOP supermajority for 22 years. Republicans have purposely defunded our public schools for so long that 33% of Missouri schools run a four-day week.

Key educational goal:
To curate failure — to say that public schools are broken and public school teachers are inept all in a push to privatize public schools. To dumb down the populace. To demonize a system that educates over 90% of kids in this state. To send taxpayer money to grifters who will line their pockets while opening the fly-by-night private schools operating out of the old Pizza Hut buildings dotting the heartland.
 
It’s a scam. It’s always been a scam.

Key definitions (quoting BBC):

B. H. Liddell Hart was a British soldier who retired with severe combat injuries in World War I. He learned from his direct contact with disastrous tactics. As a military theorist, he became a critic of the sort of frontal assault that characterized battle up to then. His thesis was that modern warfare had made indirect, very fast, well armored combat tactics essential to quick victory.

The Strategic Studies Book Club delves into his later urging that democratic states go beyond simply winning wars. Democracies must develop what he called a grand strategy of winning the peace.

In part, he suggested that authoritarian states could not, and would not, recognize peaceful persuasion. That is why appeasement would never work against an aggressive state.

However, they do recognize, and try to avoid, greater potential force.

Jesus has been fired from MAGA Christianity.

Key promise to God of remaining remnants:
We will still prominently display the Cross, of course, as this continues to be a powerful and lucrative branding tool with our customers, especially combined with the American Flag and the TRUMP name. We’ll also continue to lobby for your name to remain on our currency, for obvious reasons.
 
Rest assured, we will continue to selectively use the Scriptures (though heavily redacted), as they remain invaluable in our efforts to weaponize against the problematic communities, LGBT, people of color, women, non-Christians, immigrants, to name a few. Obviously, our clients love the Bible, just as long as they don’t have to read it.

Okay, just the first four. Whew!!
I wondered how we’d enforce laws against coveting.

Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson offers a spirited (yeah, it applies) defense of the old traditional mass as a form of linguistic diversity that attracts those with a longing for a connection with eternal Truth.

Key parallel:
He can’t understand Shakespeare because it’s being taught in the original Latin.

Key update:
I know. Painfully funny. Besides, we all know Shakespeare is best enjoyed in the original Klingon.

So I can sleep soundly, having been reminded of my advanced years.
Thanks ever so much, Frances.