E-ICE (ICE crimes are documented everywhere; their purpose and violence are inexcusable)
A word about violence
I am reminded of the French Revolution when the “good guys” the revolutionaries, cut off the heads of the “bad guys” the aristocracy, in what was called the “reign of terror.” Bloody awful. The American Revolution consisted of many battles for a period of years and resulted in many deaths on both the British and American sides.
Now we have in true American fashion the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” For some Americans Trump is the “good guy” who is going to save America. For others of us, Trump and his cohorts if not the personification of evil, are definitely the “bad guys” who are trying to destroy the United States of America and democracy although they claim the opposite.
The unfortunate tradition of violence was brought to new depths of depravity in WWII. I won’t say by the Germans, but by the Third Reich. Now Trump and Co. practice cruelty and violence, whether in support of the Gaza genocide or by stripping Americans of rights and driving them toward and into poverty or by arresting, imprisoning, and deporting many recent immigrants. Those who resist have basically used nonviolent strategies and tactics. Nonviolence as a concept and a way of protest and revolution did not exist in coherent theory, policy. and action until the 20th century, with major credit to Gandhi.
The Nazi Brown Shirts, later the Gestapo, who considered themselves supposedly above the law as a terrorist police force, are seen as a precursor of ICE. Recently someone commented to me that she does not like to mention other national groups like the French or Germans or the British treatment of the Irish when referring to the genocide in Gaza as if it were somehow their fault. Any references should include the US. Violence and genocide are no stranger to the GOOD OLD USA lest we forget our shameful history. Hitler actually commented that he learned a lot of his techniques from the treatment by the US of native peoples.
Historical Evidence Overview (Google AI)
Yes, historical evidence and scholarly analysis indicate that Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials studied and were inspired by US policies toward Native Americans and Black Americans, especially regarding racial law and the concept of territorial conquest.
Key points regarding this influence:
“Lebensraum” and Manifest Destiny: Hitler explicitly viewed the American westward expansion under “Manifest Destiny” as a successful model for Germany’s own quest for Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe. He often referred to the peoples of Eastern Europe as his “redskins” and saw the clearing of “natives” to make room for “racially pure” settlers as a precedent.
Quotes on Extermination: According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Toland, Hitler told his inner circle that his concept of concentration camps and the practicality of genocide owed much to his studies of U.S. and English history. He reportedly praised the efficiency of America’s extermination of “red savages” by starvation and uneven combat, and noted how the U.S. government forced Native Americans onto reservations where their populations rapidly declined due to disease and starvation.
Legal Discrimination: Nazi lawyers and scholars, including in the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws, closely studied American race laws, such as Jim Crow laws, anti-miscegenation laws, and race-based immigration restrictions, as models for disenfranchising and discriminating against Jewish citizens.
Popular Culture: Hitler was an avid reader and lifelong fan of the German novelist Karl May’s Western adventure novels, which heavily featured the “Indian wars” and a “noble savage” archetype. He recommended these books to his generals for tactical inspiration and saw them as an example of a “racially pure” (Aryan) people conquering a continent.
In essence, the user’s assertion aligns with significant historical evidence that Hitler drew parallels and practical inspiration from the US historical treatment of its indigenous populations as a blueprint for his own genocidal and expansionist ambitions.
Senator Wyden on the new trillion dollar defense bill
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who voted no on the defense spending bill, said, “I cannot support a bill that increases military spending by tens of billions of dollars and fails to include guardrails against Donald Trump and Hegseth’s authoritarian abuses.”
From Hannah Arendt
“The ‘apocalyptic’ chess game between the superpowers that is, between those that move on the highest plane of our civilization, is being played according to the rule ‘if either “wins” it is the end of both’; it is a game that bears no resemblance to whatever war games preceded it. Its ‘rational’ goal is deterrence, not victory, and the arms race, no longer a preparation for war, can now be justified only on the grounds that more and more deterrence is the best guarantee of peace. To the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer.” — Hannah Arendt, On Violence
There are now organizations like ICAN that before Trump and his cartel took over have taken huge steps internationally to ban nuclear weapons. But the Trumpites see only the military as a solution, when in reality it is the greatest threat to world peace. ICAN built the following UN treaty:
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)
The TPNW was adopted at the United Nations by a majority of nations in July 2017 and entered into force on January 22, 2021. It is the first globally applicable treaty to categorically prohibit nuclear weapons and provides a framework for their verifiable and irreversible elimination.
Trump has removed the US from many international arms treaties just as he has removed US participation in prevention of climate change at the recent COP international UN conference about climate change and continued to promote the greatest polluter in the world, CO2, caused by fossil fuel that also drives the military with over 1000 military bases worldwide.
So what is next?
What new authoriarian or fascist tripe will be thrown at us by Trump and his administration? As the poet William Blake once said: “Enough! Or too much.” My AI interprets that as: “the power of imagination and challenging conventional morality.” Robert Reich in his most recent Coffee Klatch on Saturday, 12/27/2025 explores the idea that Trump’s excesses and authoritarian dictates have exposed the conventional morality we have been living under, accepting the status quo around racism, women’s oppression and rights, healthcare, housing, and other oppressive systems for so many Americans.
As the population if the United States has become more diverse and has many more shades of color, the white supremacists have lost their hold while at the same time they are losing their unilateral hemogeny in the world (collapse of empire) and are trying desperately to hold on.
Trump and his cartel think the solution is a superior military that has put us on the edge of more war, especially in Latin America and particularly Venezuela which has two strikes against it. One, it is a socialist country and therefore the opposite of capitalism’s greed in its idiology. Second, and not without significance even though the Trump administration denies it, Venezuela has the greatest reserve of oil in the world. Much of that oil is offshore, but still belongs to Venezuela.
Why is the oil so important? It sustains the military industrial complex and is essential for that hyper-military system that has those 1000 or so military bases worldwide. Those jets and other oil uses from US military bases alone are the greatest CO2 (fossil fuel) sources in the world. You say so what? But if you understand the climate crisis you know that they are destroying the planet with their use of fossil fuel. Yet Trump encourages fracking and major use of fossil fuels and supports the corporations that use them. That, of course, is in direct conflict with those of us who want to save the planet.
The gas and oil companies who economically control our government along with domination from other corporations, most especially including the weapons’ industry, which again is tied into the hyper-military.
So how are all those corporations, internationally those multinational corporations and the financial groups that support them going to make money?They desperately cling to their old and destructive ways. But that creates jobs, they say. But statistics have proved that turning to a green basis for the economy can create just as many if not more jobs. That scares them. Instead of changing their ways because they might lose their power and their money, they continue on the road to destruction instead if using their time and money for new innovations that could help save the planet.
US industry has lost its innovative edge. Daily I see that this or that country worldwide has created a new tool to deal with the climate crisis, and China is ahead of the US in the war against climate change. Instead the US is stagnated, caught in a MEGA web that serves no one except the rich while convincing too many Americans who are Trump supporters that there is no genocide in Palestine. Recent examples I have seen online include the Netherlands inventing a tubing they put in the ocean that collects plastic that they then process the plastic to prevent pollution. Other nations have built large areas of solar panels on flat land dedicated to solar power. In Morocco they have developed an inexpensive small solar panel that can be placed on their balconies. There are many more examples but you will not find them described in the mainstream corporate media.
“In the end there is no democracy without informed citizens, no justice without a language critical of injustice, and no change without a broad-based movement of collective resistance.”
—Henry Giroux
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The perpetuation of the fiction of widespread antisemitism, which of course exists but which is not fostered or condoned by these institutions, coupled with the refusal to say out loud what is being live streamed to the world, has shattered what little moral authority these institutions and liberals had left. It gives credibility to Trump’s effort to cripple and destroy all institutions that sustain a liberal democracy.
Trump’s Useful Idiots – by Mr. Fish
by Chris Hedges/ Original to ScheerPost/ May 27, 2025
The media, universities, the Democratic Party and liberals, by embracing the fiction of “rampant antisemitism,” laid the groundwork for their own demise. Columbia and Princeton, where I have taught, and Harvard, which I attended, are not incubators of hatred towards Jews. The New York Times, where I worked for fifteen years and which Trump calls “an enemy of the people,” is slavishly subservient to the Zionist narrative. What these institutions have in common is not antisemitism, but liberalism. And liberalism, with its creed of pluralism and inclusiveness, is slated by our authoritarian regime for obliteration.
The conflation of outrage over the genocide with antisemitism is a sleazy tactic to silence protest and placate Zionist donors, the billionaire class and advertisers. These liberal institutions, weaponizing antisemitism, aggressively silenced and expelled critics, banned student groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, allowed police to make hundreds of arrests of peaceful protests on campuses, purged professors and groveled before Congress. Use the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ and you are fired or excoriated.
Zionist Jews, in this fictional narrative, are the oppressed. Jews who protest the genocide are slandered as Hamas stooges and punished. Good Jews. Bad Jews. One group deserves protection. The other deserves to be thrown to the wolves. This odious bifurcation exposes the charade.
In April 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, along with two board members and a law professor, testified before the House of Representative education committee. They accepted the premise that antisemitism was a significant problem at Columbia and other higher education institutions.
When Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University David Greenwald and others told the committee that they believed “from the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada” were antisemitic statements, Shafik agreed. She threw students and faculty under the bus, including long-time professor Joseph Massad.
The day after the hearings, Shafik suspended all the students at the Columbia protests and called in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), who arrested at least 108 students.
“I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” Shafik wrote in her letter to the police.
NYPD Chief John Chell, however, told the press, “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
“What disciplinary action has been taken against that professor?” Representative Elise Stefanik asked in the hearing about Columbia law Professor Katherine Franke.
Shafik volunteered that Franke, who is Jewish and whose position at the law school where she had taught for 25 years was terminated, and other professors, were being investigated. In an apparent reference to visiting Columbia Professor Mohamed Abdou, she claimed he was “terminated” and promised he “will never teach at Columbia again.” Professor Abdou is suing Columbia for defamation, discrimination, harassment and financial and professional loss.
The Center for Constitutional Rights wrote of the betrayal of Franke:
In an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy, Columbia University has entered into an “agreement” with Katherine Franke to leave her teaching position after an esteemed 25-year career. The move — “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” according to Franke’s statement — stems from her advocacy for students who speak out in support of Palestinian rights.
Her ostensible offense was a comment expressing concern about Columbia’s failure to address harassment of Palestinians and their allies by Israeli students who come to campus straight from military service — after Israeli students sprayed Palestinian rights protestors with a toxic chemical. For this, she was investigated for harassment and found to be in violation of Columbia’s policies. The actual cause of her forced departure is the crackdown on dissent at Columbia resulting from historic protests opposing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Franke’s fate was sealed when former Columbia president Minouche Shafik threw her under the bus during her cowardly appearance before Congress.
You can see my [Hedges] interview with Franke here.
Despite her capitulation to the Zionist lobby, Shark resigned a little more than a year after assuming her position as head of the university.
The crackdown at Columbia continues, with an estimated 80 people arrested and over 65 students suspended following a protest in the library in the first week of May. Former television journalist and Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman condemned the protest, stating, “Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies…Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.”
Of course, appeasement does not work. This witch hunt, whether under the Biden or Trump administration, was never grounded in good faith. It was about decapitating Israel’s critics and marginalizing the liberal class and the left. It is sustained by lies and slander, which these institutions continue to embrace.
Watching these liberal institutions, who are hostile to the left, be smeared by Trump for harboring “Marxist lunatics,” “radical leftists,” and “communists,” exposes another failing of the liberal class. It was the left that could have saved these institutions or at least given them the fortitude, not to mention analysis, to take a principled stand. The left at least calls apartheid apartheid and genocide genocide.
Media outlets regularly publish articles and OpEds uncritically accepting claims made by Zionist students and faculty. They fail to clarify the distinction between being Jewish and being Zionist. They demonize student protesters. They never bothered reporting with any depth or honesty from the student encampments where Jews, Muslims and Christians made common cause. They routinely mischaracterize anti-Zionist, anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian liberation slogans and policy demands as hate speech, antisemitic, or contributing to Jewish students feeling unsafe.
The New York Times, in a decision worthy of George Orwell, instructed its reporters to eschew words such “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” “slaughter,” “massacre,” “carnage,” “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” when writing about Palestine, according to an internal memo obtained by The Intercept. It discourages the very use of the word “Palestine” in routine text and headlines.
In December 2023, Democratic Governor of New York Kathy Hochul sent a letter to university and college presidents who failed to condemn and address “antisemitism,” and calls for the “genocide of any group.” She warned that they would be subjected to “aggressive enforcement action” by New York State. The following year, in late August, Hochul repeated these warnings during a virtual meeting with 200 university and college leaders.
Hochul made clear in October 2024 that she considered pro-Palestine slogans to be explicit calls for genocide of Jews.
“There are laws on the books – human rights laws, state and federal laws – that I will enforce if you allow for the discrimination of our students on campus, even calling for the genocide of the Jewish people which is what is meant by ‘From the river to the sea,’ by the way,” she said at a memorial event at the Temple Israel Center in White Plains. “Those are not innocent sounding words. They’re filled with hate.”
The Governor successfully pressured City University of New York (CUNY) to remove a job posting for a Palestinian studies professorship at Hunter College which referenced “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in his new book “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” leads efforts by the Democratic Party — which has a dismal 27 percent approval rating in a recent NBC News poll — to denounce those protesting the genocide as carrying out a “blood libel” against Jews.
“Whatever one’s view of how the war in Gaza was conducted, it is not and has never been the policy of the Israeli government to exterminate the Palestinian people,” he writes, ignoring hundreds of calls by Israeli officials to wipe Palestinians from the face of the earth during 19 months of saturation bombing and enforced starvation.
The grisly truth, openly acknowledged by Israeli officials, is far different.
“We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us,” gloats Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed…it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world,” Israeli Knesset member Zvi Sukkot, told Israel’s Channel 12 on May 16.
The perpetuation of the fiction of widespread antisemitism, which of course exists but which is not fostered or condoned by these institutions, coupled with the refusal to say out loud what is being live streamed to the world, has shattered what little moral authority these institutions and liberals had left. It gives credibility to Trump’s effort to cripple and destroy all institutions that sustain a liberal democracy.
Trump surrounds himself with neo-Nazi sympathizers such as Elon Musk, and Christian fascists who condemn Jews for crucifying Christ. But antisemitism by the right gets a free pass since these “good” antisemites cheer on Israel’s settler colonial project of extermination, one these neo-Nazis and Christian fascists would like to replicate on Brown and Black in the name of the great replacement theory. Trump trumpets the fiction of “white genocide” in South Africa. He signed an executive order in February that fast-tracked immigration to the U.S. for Afrikaners — white South Africans.
Harvard, which is attempting to save itself from the wrecking ball of the Trump administration, was as complicit in this witch hunt as everyone else, flagellating itself for not being more repressive towards campus critics of the genocide.
The university’s former president Claudine Gay condemned the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which demands the right of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, as bearing “specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel.”
Harvard substantially tightened its regulations regarding student protests, in January 2024, and increased the police presence on its campus. It barred 13 students from graduating, citing alleged policy violations linked to their participation in a protest encampment, despite an earlier agreement to avoid punitive measures. It placed more than 20 students on “involuntary leave” and in some cases evicted students from their housing.
The capitulations and crackdowns on pro-Palestine activism, academic freedom, freedom of speech, suspensions, expulsions and firings, since Oct. 7, 2023, have not spared U.S. colleges and universities from further attacks.
Since Trump took office, at least $11 billion in federal research grants and contracts have been cut or frozen nationwide according to NPR. This includes Harvard ($3 billion), Columbia ($400 million), University of Pennsylvania ($175 million) and Brandeis ($6-7.5 million annually).
On May 22, the Trump administration intensified its attacks on Harvard by terminating its ability to enroll international students that make up around 27 percent of the student body.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Kristi Noem, DHS Secretary wrote on X, when posting screenshots of the letter she sent to Harvard revoking foreign student enrollment. “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
Harvard, like Columbia, the media, the Democratic Party and the liberal class, misread power. By refusing to acknowledge or name the genocide in Gaza, and persecuting those who do, they provided the bullets to their executioners.
They are paying the price for their stupidity and cowardice.
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