This is un-American Liam Conejo Ramos

 

This week in Minnesota, ICE agents took a 5-year-old boy named Liam Conejo Ramos from his driveway after he came home from preschool.

 

Let that sink in: A 5-year-old boy. In his own driveway. After a day of preschool. According to school officials, agents pulled the child from his father's still-running vehicle, walked him to the door of his home, and made him knock—using a kindergartner as bait to see if anyone else was inside.

 

When another adult begged the agents to let them care for the child, they refused. Instead, they took Liam and his father. The boy's middle school-aged brother came home to find them both gone.

 

Liam is now being held in a detention center in Texas – 1,500 miles from home. His family has an active asylum case with no order of deportation. His preschool teacher says he "comes to class every day and brightens the room."

 

This child is five years old.

 

Armed federal agents are stalking school buses. Using children as bait. Separating families who are following legal asylum processes. Creating terror in American communities.

 

This is not normal. This is not American. And this cannot stand.

 

We can stop this; if we work together.

We Resist Together : Or

 We resist together, or we will each die alone.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/lies-and-lawlessness? Timothy Snyder, 

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.

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Man Killed in Minneapolis was holding a cell phone: Not a gun !

 Minneapolis Live Updates: Man Killed by Federal Agents Was Holding a Phone, Not a Gun

Videos analyzed by The New York Times appear to contradict federal accounts of the shooting. The man, an I.C.U. nurse, was an American citizen with no criminal record, the city police chief said.

New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us/minneapolis-shooting-ice

Videos on social media that were verified by The New York Times appear to contradict the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the fatal shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning.

The Department of Homeland Security said the episode began after a man “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun” and they tried to disarm him. The statement did not specify whether the gun was in the man’s hands or merely on his body.

Footage shows Mr. Pretti was clearly holding a phone, not a gun, before the agents took him to the ground and shot him. 

This is what the videos show, according to a Times analysis:

A small group of protesters stands in the street, speaking to a federal agent as whistles sound. Mr. Pretti appears to be filming the scene with his phone and directing traffic. Video

02

Mr. Pretti, wearing brown, is filming with his cellphone when agents approach then bring him to the ground.

An agent begins shoving the demonstrators, and squirts pepper spray at their faces. 

At this moment, Mr. Pretti has both hands clearly visible. One is holding his phone, while he holds the other up to protect himself from pepper spray. He moves to help one of the protesters who was sprayed, as other agents approach and pull him from behind.

Several agents tussle with Mr. Pretti before bringing him to his knees. He appears to resist as the agents grab his legs, push down on his back and strike him repeatedly.

The footage shows an agent approaching with empty hands and grabbing at Mr. Pretti as the others hold him down.

About eight seconds after he is pinned, agents yell that he has a gun, indicating that they may not have known he was armed until he was on the ground.

The same agent who approached with empty hands pulls a gun from among the group that appears to match the profile of a firearm DHS said belonged to Mr. Pretti. 

The agents appear to have him under their control, with his arms pinned near his head.

As the gun emerges from the melee, another agent aims his own firearm at Mr. Pretti’s back and appears to fire one shot at close range. He then appears to continue firing at Mr. Pretti, who collapses.

A third agent unholsters a weapon. Both agents appear to fire additional shots into Mr. Pretti as he lies motionless.

In total, at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds.

 

 

ICE Out of Minnesota

 

Today, Minnesota is shutting down in solidarity. 

It’s the nation’s first general strike in response to Trump’s thuggery. 

Across the state, businesses are closed. People are not shopping. Workers have stayed home or called in sick. Labor unions are encouraging work stoppages. Residents are helping one another. It’s an economic blackout. 

Organizers are calling it a “Day of Truth and Freedom.”

It could be a model for what the nation as a whole does in coming months, to repudiate the Trump dictatorship. 

Ana Marie Cox writing in yesterday’s TNR, noted that Minnesota is a natural leader for this kind of thing. “It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snow blowing an entire block’s driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency.”

Cox goes on to say: “People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don’t think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, ‘Just pay it back someday.’ Of course you will—everyone knows it. Some might find it remarkable that the generosity exists right alongside the stubborn interpersonal Midwestern micro-distance that can take years to thaw. But the caution of their relationships speaks to the universality of the principle: You don’t help people out because you like them. You just do.

That’s the predicate for the ground-level resistance, and widespread involvement of newly activated residents, to ICE’s occupation. It offers one reason why the mobilization in Minneapolis has cut across class and racial lines even more deeply than the response to George Floyd’s murder. 

As Cox says, “it’s more than eight minutes of murderous cruelty caught on a cell phone, it’s more than the assassination of Renee Nicole Good. ICE is an army of Derek Chauvins and Jonathan Rosses, released to wreak havoc on the city every day. The memory is keen, the trauma is immediate and sustained, and the strength underneath the response is the work of decades.”

The decency of Minnesotans is mirrored in a dozen other Minnesota mutual-aid traditions: Lutheran churches seeded what has become the largest refugee population per capita in the United States. Minnesota has had a labor organizing movement since before it became a state. Minnesota created the first high-risk pool in the country to insure “the uninsurable” in 1976.

Cox urges us to look around our own neck of the woods. Our own communities might need us to help seed a little resilience — now, before a crisis arrives to consume us and even if it’s not in a sub-Arctic clime. 

This is not a bad time to take groceries to a free fridge in your city. Or maybe: Find a chore to do for a neighbor now, before they need it. Or maybe: Get trained on Naloxone administration. Volunteer to walk dogs. Start a tool library. Learn some names.

Most importantly: Sign up for the ICE watch that’s happening near you. Because almost certainly, ICE is already there. What Trump is doing to Minneapolis is the template for what Trump wants to bring to your hometown next. How Minneapolis is responding should be our template too.

MAD King Donald

  

25th Amendment Time for Mad King Donald

Today on TAP: His narcissism has become psychotically megalomaniacal.

BY HAROLD MEYERSONJANUARY 20, 2026

 Act I, Scene 1, of King Lear not only introduces us to the aging monarch, but makes clear that he’s lost his marbles. Rather than subject a hugely important strategic decision—the coming division of his kingdom—to rational calculation, he instead requires his pending successors (his daughters) to tell him how much they love him. The sheer volume of their professed adoration—the more over the top, the better—becomes the sole criterion by which he makes policy. It’s the kind of scene we Americans hadn’t seen enacted very often in our own high governmental circles until Donald Trump’s second term as president, when he chose it as the model for his cabinet meetings, which consist of his secretaries telling him how great he is.

More from Harold Meyerson

In Shakespeare’s version, Lear, at least, has one councilor, Kent, who persists in telling him, on pain of banishment, that he’s making a huge mistake. No such councilor can be found in Trump’s circle, or in the Republican congressional caucuses, or, for that matter, in many major American institutions. Corporations, banks, white-shoe law firms, and numerous universities have prostrated themselves before Trump. While elites have disgraced themselves, it’s fallen to the people to take to the streets in opposition.

During the 2024 presidential race, it was Joe Biden’s mental acuity that became, very understandably, the object of public concern. Trump’s mental and psychological condition was widely understood to be a little off-kilter, but the conventional wisdom was that, well, that was just Trump being Trump.

Age, narcissism, and megalomania now determine Trump’s actions and, alarmingly, the domestic and foreign policy of the United States.

Today, which marks the first anniversary of Trump’s reassuming the duties of the presidency, it’s clear that the conventional wisdom was profoundly and disastrously wrong. Age, narcissism, and megalomania now determine Trump’s actions and, alarmingly, the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. When the consequences are confined to his ordering up monuments to his assumed greatness—stamping his face on coins, engraving his name on government buildings, sizing his ballroom to dwarf anything else in D.C.—they can be dismissed as relatively harmless outbursts of ridiculously overindulged self-love.

But when, as he told The New York Times earlier this month, he views the only constraints on his actions to be his own sense of propriety and morality, rather than the Constitution that presidents are sworn to preserve, protect, and defend, then we’ve been shuttled into a different form of government than the one we’ve assumed we’ve lived in for the past 250 years: a monarchy, at least as Trump himself sees it.

And now, like George III, against whom our Founders revolted, Trump is displaying symptoms of madness. His text to Norway’s prime minister, citing his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize as a reason he wants to seize Greenland, is in the grand tradition of mad old kings making immense policy decisions based on megalomania and whim. Just believing that he was in any sense qualified for the prize should itself have been evidence enough of his derangement. After a long life of proclaiming his fictions to be fact, and of indifference to the difference between the two, he may actually believe the lies that his fearful stooges tell him about himself. He surely feels wounded when anyone dares to tell him the truth about himself, as the Nobel Peace Prize committee unknowingly did when they gave the award to somebody else.

But his determination to seize Greenland—already disgraceful, deplorable, and altogether addled even before his Nobel deprivation message—has become proof positive of his narcissistic megalomania, now that he’s linked his determination to his wounded ego. In Duck Soup, Fredonian President Rufus T. Firefly (played by Groucho Marx) takes his country to war because he imagines that the ambassador of a neighboring country has insulted him, but Duck Soup is an absurdist comedy (and a great one, at that).

Breaking up NATO on Rufus T. Firefly grounds might not be impeachable, though Trump’s violations of the Constitution surely are. But they are clearly grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment to our Constitution to replace him. Section 4 of the amendment begins:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Should the president contest his ousting, the article further states, it then requires Congress to decide the question.

I have no illusions that JD Vance and the rest of Trump’s cabinet would ever proclaim that their emperor has no clothes, or that the Republican Congress would do the same. I have no illusions that JD Vance would be even remotely a decent American president, as he has shown himself to be as avid a promoter of neofascist policies as Trump himself—in his case, more by reasons of ideology than, as is the case with Trump, psychology. But we’ve reached a moment in which even his substitution for Trump might offer a smidgen of relief.

It won’t happen, of course. Like George III, Trump has passed into madness. The parallels with the real 1776 grow stronger by the day.

 

Honor M.L. King; Fight for Democracy

Martin Luther King Jr. Day arrives this year amid a deliberate effort to rewrite American history and a wholesale assault on civil rights in America. It has been one year since Donald Trump was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It felt cruel and grotesque that a man who represents so much of what Dr. King stood against could rise to power on a day meant to honor the struggle for racial justice and democracy. Over the last year, we have seen a devastating, sustained attack on nearly every facet of the civil rights architecture in America. We have seen the gutting of civil rights enforcement; high-profile purges of Black federal employees and a drive to functionally resegregate the federal workforce; the rewriting of history in official documents and even in Smithsonian museums; and vicious attacks on Black refugees from Haiti, Somalia, and other African countries.  As I write this email, we are awaiting a Supreme Court decision that could potentially gut the final remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act -- part of an overarching campaign to suppress Black voters and Black political power across the country. It is important to name what we are facing. This is a dedicated, organized campaign to eradicate civil rights, erase history, and enshrine white supremacy as a central governing principle. While the scale and speed of the onslaught are immense, the project itself is not new. Today’s MAGA movement is the modern heir to the racial authoritarian regime that has shaped American governance since the nation’s founding. When we look for inspiration and lessons, we often turn to struggles for democracy abroad. But the truth is that the United States has been engaged in an unfinished fight for democracy for most of its history. In a very real sense, this country did not begin to function as a democracy until civil rights organizers created the conditions for the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. That is why the first, and most important, lessons for today’s fight for democracy come from the civil rights movement here at home. In fact, many of the international movements we cite for inspiration trace their own lineage back to Dr. King and the Birmingham Bus Boycott, the Freedom Riders, and the Selma march. From successful economic campaigns like the Birmingham Bus Boycott, to the disciplined use of nonviolence, to the strategic leveraging of repression so that state violence backfired, to mass mobilization and noncooperation -- so many of the tactics and strategies we talk about today were forged by leaders like Dr. King, John Lewis, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, and countless unnamed organizers who refused to accept injustice as inevitable. The fight for racial justice in America has always been the fight for democracy in America; it’s crucial that we recognize them as inseparable. And as we honor Dr. King and his legacy, we do so not by sanitizing or reducing it, but by recognizing the fullness of his vision -- for racial justice, economic justice, and ending war and imperialism. So on this MLK Day, we ask you to do more than post a quote or take the day off. We ask you to learn and reflect on the legacy of Dr. King and the civil rights movement, and to recommit to the fight for a just, inclusive, and equitable democracy. We ask you to support organizations leading the fight today, such as our friends at the Transformative Justice Coalition and Black Voters Matter Fund, who are each organizing to protect and advance Black political power and voting rights in this crucial moment. And we ask you to commit to sustained, collective action in the months and years ahead. The arc of the moral universe does not bend on its own. It bends because people organize, resist, and refuse to comply with injustice -- again and again, even when the path is hard. Honoring Dr. King today means continuing that work. In solidarity, Leah Greenberg Co-Executive Director, Indivisible View video; MLK> https://www.democracynow.org/2026/1/19/mlk_day_special_dr_martin_luther

 

MLK and the Authoritarian State

 

Dr King and Our Authoritarian Crisis

Only when we refuse to accept the mythology around King and the Movement can we comprehend the legacy entrusted to us

WILLIAM J. BARBER, II AND JONATHAN WILSON-HARTGROVE JAN 18

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At memorial celebrations across the nation this weekend, Americans will cross arms, grasp hands, and sing, “We Shall Overcome.” Many will bow their heads in prayer for our country. Some – and more than many of us care to admit – will look down to consider a question that has haunted them since last Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which coincided with the inauguration of Donald Trump. 

Can America survive four years of authoritarian captivity?

Some of our fellow Americans spent the past year trying to dismiss this nagging question with the hope that things wouldn’t be as bad as it seemed they could be. But their hopes have been dashed. The White House is waging a propaganda campaign that openly lies about things everyone can see. Congress has funded a paramilitary force to occupy US cities and enforce the regime’s version of reality. Anyone who objects has been labeled a “domestic terrorist” and shown that they will be attacked, fired, defunded, arrested, or killed if they do not get out of the way. 

America has descended into a full-blown authoritarian crisis faster than almost anyone expected.

Still, millions of people have resisted – not just at mass protests in the streets, but by telling the truth as journalists, standing for the rule of law as lawyers and jurists, refusing to bow to the regime as universities and corporations, refusing to obey unlawful orders, and practicing hope as people of faith and conscience. 

We are in the midst of an authoritarian crisis and a majority of Americans are still resisting.

But for those who have not bowed, the question is often more pointed. We gather this weekend to remember Dr. King and the movement standing against authoritarians like Bull Conner, Jim Clark, and George Wallace in the South. As America marks its 250th anniversary, we recall the founders who reused to bow to a king. We remember the Union holding off the insurrection of the Confederates when, as Lincoln said, a great civil war tested whether this nation, “or any nation so conceived, can long endure.” 

But can America survive authoritarianism when it has the power of the federal government?

This is the unuttered question that many Americans who have not bowed to Trump bring with them to this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We know because this is the question people on the front lines have whispered to us in quiet moments over the past year. We know because we’ve had to wrestle with this question ourselves.

It is an important question because, when we face it honestly, it can pierce through the mythology that keeps us from receiving the tradition that made Dr. King and offers us a way out of the authoritarian crisis we face.

We deceive ourselves if we believe King was able to face down Southern racism because he had the full support of the federal government. The fact that we are living in a national security state that has labeled people who resist authoritarian extremism “domestic terrorists” can help us understand the context Dr. King was born into almost a century ago. Most people know Dr. King was surveilled by the FBI at the end of his life, but in his new book Martyrs to the Unspeakable, James W. Douglass reveals that King’s family and community were marked as a threat to national security a dozen years before Martin was born.