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A Grim Scenario
There may be a grim scenario lurking way back in the most remote recesses of many Americans’ minds. People under illegal attack by government personnel have only so much patience. The President and his appointees claim that the manner in which Immigration Control and Enforcement personnel as well as the Department of Justice are dealing with civilians is perfectly legal. I suppose the Nazi regime back during the Second World War considered concentration camps and gas chambers to be perfectly legal too, according to their laws at the time.
A point is reached in such situations where citizens are willing to put their lives on the line, even knowing that many will not survive. This was the case when Jews confined to the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943 fought back. Few of those fighters survived.
Might a governor activate their State’s National Guard, defying the President, in order to oppose the armed personnel of the Federal Government’s ICE agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security? Who will the Guardsmen obey? Are we fully confident that they will not actually start shooting at one another?
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| Minneapolis street scene as ICE personnel, seeking 'illegals,' turn their weapons on protesters. If anything going on there is 'illegal,' it is the behavior and actions of ICE's masked enforcers. Tracing the blame for this will take you directly to those appointed by the pathetic wannabe tyrant in the White House, and those who were either sufficiently ignorant or gullible to have voted for him. |
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Who will control the many individuals, including the most recent victim of ICE’s lawbreaking violence, who are legally entitled to carry weapons because of the supposed blessings of the Second Amendment? When the limit of their patience with the Federal Government’s violation of their rights is reached, will some passionate civilians use their weapons against ICE personnel, even knowing that they are likely to die in doing so, as the fighters in the Warsaw ghetto did?
In 1860, no one expected that a tragic confrontation was about to unfold resulting in the deaths of about 700,000 Americans who would fight for ideas in which they believed. But that is what happened. That is the grim scenario Americans should fear.
But it need not be.
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Time is growing short though, and the nation cannot afford the luxury of waiting for the next election to stop this grim scenario from continuing on its path to becoming a reality. Today’s Minneapolis might be your town’s future tomorrow.
Congress must immediately tightly close the purse strings it controls and remove from the nation’s budget funding for the Department of Homeland Security, cutting off funds used to support the immigration control and enforcement activities that are at this very moment recklessly and dangerously trampling upon the cherished and historic rights of Americans. Even already existing budgeted funding for the DHS should be cancelled and recovered so long as its ICE personnel are harassing and attacking American citizens, violating their rights.
How this is being allowed to happen is very well explained by Professor Timothy Snyder, recognized worldwide as an expert on tyranny, whose ‘Thinking About …’ remarks of January 25 follow. They are words that you ought to think about yourself and forward to others, asking them to do the same.
"Lies and Lawlessness - Timothy Snyder – January 25, 2026
It is not just the moral horror. It is the political logic.
People are dying in American concentration camps, unseen. And people are being executed on American streets, seen by all of us.
This is enough. The radical is the pragmatic.
The president should be impeached and convicted, as should everyone responsible for these outrages. ICE should be disbanded. So should the Department of Homeland Security. The other agencies within it should be redistributed across other departments. And the people who have killed should be investigated and brought before judges and juries.
But we have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves. The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny.
It is the logic of lies and of lawlessness.
In a constitutional regime, such as ours, the law applies everywhere and at all times. In a republic, such as ours, it applies to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for openings, for cracks to pry open.
One of these is the border. The country stops at the border. And so the law stops at the border.
And so for the tyrant an obvious move is to extend the border so that is everywhere, to turn the whole country as a border area, where no rules apply.
Stalin did this with border zones and deportations in the 1930s that preceded the Great Terror. Hitler did it with immigration raids in 1938 that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them across the border.
And just what is Trump doing now? By his own admission, as well as by the admission of cabinet members, he is using ICE, nominally a border authority, to enforce his own whims on an American state of his choosing.
It is not legal to attack a city because its policies work. It is not legal to threaten a state to gain information about its voters. The border becomes the pretext to undo the law everywhere, at all times, and against anyone. It is the crack that can be opened.
The wedge is the lie.
The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice. One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.
And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves.
People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law. They are violating it.
It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”
The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in 'On Tyranny' I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.
This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.
Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.
Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come.
But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.
Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.
The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.”
Wow! Now, take a breath!
We must take that ‘second chance’ with which Professor Snyder concludes his comments. It is preferable to the grim scenario mentioned above, which as I point out ‘need not be.’ Snyder’s message, to resist the lies and lawnessness, is directed at you. It must be carried out.
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The President seems to be somewhat backing off on his support of the DHS’s illegal activities, but that seems to be no more than an effort on his part to repair the damage that has been done to the Republican Party by his earlier positions.
While he is at least talking to Minnesota’s governor and Minneapolis’ mayor, instead of attacking them, most of the evil-doers he put into power still are there.
Real sincerity on Trump’s part can only be accomplished by his getting rid of presidential advisor Stephen Miller, Attorney General Bondi, DHS Secretary Noem, those who advise her, and his insipid press secretary who seems to think everyone else is as gullible as she appears. That is unlikely to happen.
Trump seems to think Greg Bongino's (who supposedly was in charge of the border) ‘taking the fall’ for them all is sufficient. It isn’t.
Even though it appears that some ICE personnel have been transferred out of Minnesota, taking them out of the reach of that State’s authoriities, they still are operating there, despite court orders. The best I can add is that the crisis there is now ‘in flux.’
And by the way, when was the last time you heard anything about the ‘Epstein Papers,’ successfully absented from Congressional and public attention because of what is happening in Minnesota?
JL
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More on the Sources of Information on Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered local daily ‘paper’ newspaper (now becoming the South Florida Sun Sentinel) and what appears in my daily email; that includes the views of many contributors, including the New York Times and other respected journals.
Be aware that when I open that email, I first quickly glance at and screen out those sent to my very old former email address and those considered ‘promotional’ by Gmail’s system as no more than advertisements or requests for donations.
Besides these sources, I also utilize the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want.
Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so. Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
After such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the other results of my search. Unlike the anonymous AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated, giving them a greater credibility than any AI summary.
I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information: yourself or something else (Artificial Intelligence), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. At least when I read a column by Timothy Snyder, for example, I know from where it comes, and to some extent, what to expect.
Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence.
JL
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