#Gaza Is Still Here https://www.thenation.com/?post_type=article&p=585598

Despite a “ #ceasefire ,” #Israel’s #killing has not ended. Neither has the determination of the Palestinian people to survive.

First they came for the immigrants... then they came for everyone. 💲 💰 🏦 💰

#Poetry of #Reality
#MartinNiemoller / #MartinNiemöller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niemöller

ex-#Nazi #Pastor #Peace #Germany #German

🔽 #AltText also below 🔽

(Pic 1) #Nazi #Swastika #symbol made from 4 T shapes of the word #Trump inversely
(Pic 2) #Government = both #giving and #killing, doing #war
(Pic 3) #Protest #sign (First they came for the #immigrants...)

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker

Editor’s Note: My apologies to The New Yorker for publishing the entire article, which is under their copyright. I believe this is very important reporting for people to read, and consider. –DrWeb

Annals of Communications

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post

The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.

By Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”

I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”

The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.)

In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”

It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration.

During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.

Video From The New Yorker Swift Justice: A Taliban Courtroom in Session

Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.

I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.

But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth.

Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.

Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”)

At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.

The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.

Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.

“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”

Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)

Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa.

These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.

The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”

Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”

As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”

Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”

At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”

Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.

There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.”

My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper.

“Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦

Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post | The New Yorker

…Lawyers from the section are traditionally on the ground within days, if not hours, after a high-profile #killing by #police.

The #DOJ has said there is no basis for a #CivilRights probe into the #ReneeGood #shooting. It has opened an investigation into #AlexPretti’s killing, but officials have downplayed its scope.

“I don't want the takeaway to be that there's some massive civil rights investigation that's happening,” DAG #ToddBlanche told reporters Friday.

#Trump #law #murder #UseOfForce

See also:

On Killing Remotely by Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Phelps, 2021

The Psychology of Killing with Drones

A "can't-miss for anyone interested in current military affairs," On Killing Remotely reveals and explores the costs—to individual soldiers and to society—of the way we wage war today (Kirkus Reviews, starred).

#books
#nonfiction
#war
#killing
#psychology
#drones

On Killing by Dave Grossman, 2014

The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

A controversial psychological examination of how soldiers' willingness to kill has been encouraged and exploited to the detriment of civilian society. "An illuminating account of how soldiers learn to kill and how they live with the experience of having killed.

#books
#nonfiction
#psychology
#killing
#war

The new American melting pot.
Two Hispanic Americans killing a white person trying to prevent them from harassing or deporting other Hispanic people, on the orders of Stephen Miller, a Jewish American whose ancestors fled from persecution in Eastern Europe is a uniquely grotesque expression of the American melting pot in action.
It sounds like a plot from a very bad movie. But it’s America today. Reality.
#miller #ice #dhs #murder #hispanic #killing #america #usa #jewish #jew #deportation

Saturday, January 31, 2026 #Congo A rainfall-triggered #landslide caused multiple artisanal mine pits to collapse at the Rubaya coltan mining area in North Kivu province, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, on January 28, 2026, #killing more than 200 people. watchers.news/2026/01/31/l...

Landslide-triggered mine colla...

#Family members of two #men from #Trinidad who were #killed in a #U.S. #strike on an #alleged #drug-smuggling #boat in October #sued the U.S. #government Tuesday, #accusing it of #wrongful #death and #extrajudicial #killing.
These #premeditated and #intentional killings #lack any #plausible #legal #justification, the #lawsuit says. Thus, they were simply #murders

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/first-wrongful-death-lawsuit-filed-trump-administration-drug-boat-stri-rcna256022

The #MissKitty research missed by a #face #mask and a #body #camera. The bitches got nothing. Nothing at all. They got the right to let the #Republicans have everything they were asking for and then an #extension #for the #killing so that they could do what? Beg? I'm fucking serious.

ICE killing in Minneapolis marks a dangerous new chapter for America – Las Vegas Sun News

January 31, 2026

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EDITORIAL:

ICE killing in Minneapolis marks a dangerous new chapter for America

Friday, Jan. 30, 2026 | 2 a.m.

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The killing of Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street over the weekend should end any remaining illusions about where Donald Trump’s second-term presidency is headed. This was not an isolated tragedy, not a “confusing situation,” not the regrettable outcome of a tense encounter. The killings of Renee Nicole Good and Pretti in Minneapolis are an inflection point — the moment when the authoritarian impulses Trump has long telegraphed crossed fully from rhetoric into bloodshed.

Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse who cared for veterans at the VA, and a concealed-carry license holder. He was standing in the street, exercising his constitutional rights to speak and assemble freely as part of a peaceful protest. He attempted to help a female protester get to her feet after she was thrown to the ground by federal agents.Within seconds, he was shot dead from behind, killed by his own government even though he posed no threat and was defenseless at the time.

Almost immediately, Trump administration officials rushed to the microphones to smear Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin.” But video evidence and even Customs and Border Protection’s own preliminary review reveal the lie being spread by Trump’s minions to manipulate the American people, distort the truth and consolidate power in Trump.

This pattern should be chillingly familiar. During his first campaign, Trump demonstrated that he was willing to violate the law and lie repeatedly to manipulate the public about his business acumen, his wealth and his relationships with everyone from Russian oligarchs to an adult film star.

Now, in his second term, the message is unmistakable: Laws, court orders, constitutional rights and even the lives of the American people, are expendable if they interfere with his pursuit of power and impunity.

Pretti’s killing did not happen in a vacuum. In January alone, at least eight people have died in encounters with federal immigration officials or while in ICE custody. In several of those cases, eyewitness accounts and recordings directly contradict the official narratives issued by the administration. At least two of the dead were U.S. citizens who asked only to exercise their constitutional rights to move, assemble and speak freely; to lawfully carry a firearm; and, if accused of wrongdoing, to receive due process.

Instead, they were met with what can only be described as summary executions by a federal force that increasingly resembles a private army loyal to Trump alone.

Moreover, the Trump administration has shown an alarming comfort with lying about the circumstances surrounding the death of Americans at the hands of ICE.

Consider the facts in Pretti’s case. The Department of Homeland Security initially claimed he “approached officers with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun,” neglecting to mention that the weapon was holstered and he never reached for it. The government’s own preliminary review concedes there was no brandishing — only a refusal to move while filming agents, followed by an attempt to help a woman up, then being swarmed by federal agents and then gunfire. In fact, it was federal agents who removed Pretti’s gun from its holster prior to shooting the unarmed and incapacitated man multiple times in the back, ending his life.

The same script played out earlier this month with the killing of Good, a Minneapolis mother of three shot in her car by a federal agent. Her last words to the man who killed her as she tried to drive away from the scene: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Hardly the sentiments of a terrorist.

She, too, was instantly labeled a “violent rioter” and “domestic terrorist.” Trump himself claimed she ran over an officer. Video evidence shows that she had the wheels of her car turned away from the federal agent who shot her, undermining the administration’s certainty and raising profound questions about the use of lethal force.

And then there is the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban immigrant who died in ICE custody in El Paso, Texas. ICE claimed suicide. A witness described a chokehold. An autopsy found injuries consistent with a chokehold and potentially with homicide. Once again, the official story collapses under scrutiny.

Trump administration officials have suggested that because Pretti carried a holstered weapon and filmed agents, that his killing was “legally justified.” By this standard, law enforcement should have opened fire on the thousands of Jan. 6 attackers who killed and maimed Capitol police, or Kyle Rittenhouse, or the armed militiamen who invaded the Michigan statehouse, or the armed demonstrators intimidating voters in Arizona.

For those who voted for Trump, take note. The danger that was once reserved for immigrants, people of color or LGBTQ Americans is now at your doorstep. This is not Barack Obama or Joe Biden ordering masked federal agents into the streets without training. It is not a Democratic administration asserting that it is “legally justified” for the federal government to shoot anyone who lawfully carries a gun near a protest. It is Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which controls every branch of the federal government.

Nor should we forget that as Trump proclaims support for the protesters in Iran and says the state shouldn’t kill them, his administration is killing protesters in the U.S. because they oppose his policies.

Worse still, as conservative commentator Joe Rogan pointed out last week, it appears that one of Trump’s primary motivations for sending ICE into the streets is simply to distract from an even larger national scandal: the Epstein files.

Despite a federal law mandating the release of the files by Dec. 19, Trump’s Justice Department has released only about 1% of the files thus far. At its current pace, the department won’t release all the files until 2030.

Last week, Rogan implied that ICE’s massive ongoing operations are designed to distract from Trump’s potential involvement in a child-sex trafficking ring. It’s an immigration crackdown weaponized to divert attention from one of the few scandals that could stand in the way of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.

We don’t know if Rogan is correct or not, because like everyone else, we haven’t seen the files. What we do know is that regardless of the motivation, Trump and his minions are trashing the Constitution and killing American citizens with no cause or legitimate justification.

Authoritarianism does not arrive all at once. It advances in steps, each normalized by fear, propaganda and the vilification of the dead. The killings in Minneapolis mark the moment when the line was crossed, when the erosion of rights turned unmistakably lethal. If Americans do not recognize them as such, the next inflection point may come even closer to home.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: ICE killing in Minneapolis marks a dangerous new chapter for America – Las Vegas Sun News

@moin Wenn ich JD Vance richtig verstanden habe, dann kann das kein Mord sein, da die Täter bei ICE eine Karte "Du bist präventiv begnadigt" in der Tasche haben.

Mit anderen Worten: Sie scheinen durch die aktuelle Regierung zu diesen Taten autorisiert zu sein. Damit hätten sie Auftraggeber, die die wirklich Verantwortlichen wären.

Ich warte auf die Ergebnisse der ersten Gerichtsverfahren gespannt.

#ICE #Trump #Vance #Killing

If somebody doesn't promise it, I am going to be more than a problem. I'm not out here playing with y'all. Where did that guy go telling me that I'm a quitter? Right, he's a quitter. #MissKitty for #President 2028 End #Homelessness #Stop #killing people. #Homelessness is a #policy decision.

Trump is only ever motivated by selfishness… so…

Two #US sources familiar with the discussions said #Trump wanted to create conditions for "regime change" after a crackdown crushed a nationwide #protest movement earlier this month, #killing thousands of people.

#Iran #warmongering #law #Congress #geopolitics

@cxiao Similar topic going on in Cambodia: "witnessed the murder of a man who had his throat cut by a compound manager after he was caught trying to escape" -- "police visited their compounds regularly, including to remove dead bodies, but without taking any action against the managers" -- "Many people died" -- "murder, rape and torture" -- "evidence pointing towards state complicity or deliberate inaction" -- "Cambodian authorities appear to be doing nothing to help"

That's what Amnesty International is writing:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/cambodia-growing-humanitarian-crisis-as-escaped-scamming-compound-survivors-tell-of-murder-rape-and-torture/

I feel

e x t r e m e l y s t r o n g c o n t e m p t

towards the Cambodian Hun Sen/Hun Manet regime when I am seeing this.

#cambodia #scambodia #hunsen #contempt #hunmanet #murder #abduction #complicity #corruption #khmer #dictatorship #police #killing #crisis #humanitariancrisis #amnesty #amnestyinternational #scamcompound #concentrationcamp #deathcamp #slavery

@AssociatedPress @asia-AssociatedPress Similar topic in Cambodia: " witnessed the murder of a man who had his throat cut by a compound manager after he was caught trying to escape" -- "police visited their compounds regularly, including to remove dead bodies, but without taking any action against the managers" -- "Many people died" -- "murder, rape and torture" -- "evidence pointing towards state complicity or deliberate inaction" -- "Cambodian authorities appear to be doing nothing to help"

That's what Amnesty International is writing:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/cambodia-growing-humanitarian-crisis-as-escaped-scamming-compound-survivors-tell-of-murder-rape-and-torture/

I feel

e x t r e m e l y s t r o n g c o n t e m p t

towards the Cambodian Hun Sen/Hun Manet regime when I am seeing this.

#cambodia #scambodia #hunsen #contempt #hunmanet #murder #abduction #complicity #corruption #khmer #dictatorship #police #killing #crisis #humanitariancrisis #amnesty #amnestyinternational #scamcompound #concentrationcamp #deathcamp #slavery

@davidho.bsky.social Similar topic of concentration camps for profit in Cambodia: " witnessed the murder of a man who had his throat cut by a compound manager after he was caught trying to escape" -- "police visited their compounds regularly, including to remove dead bodies, but without taking any action against the managers" -- "Many people died" -- "murder, rape and torture" -- "evidence pointing towards state complicity or deliberate inaction" -- "Cambodian authorities appear to be doing nothing to help"

That's what Amnesty International is writing:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/cambodia-growing-humanitarian-crisis-as-escaped-scamming-compound-survivors-tell-of-murder-rape-and-torture/

I feel

e x t r e m e l y s t r o n g c o n t e m p t

towards the Cambodian Hun Sen/Hun Manet regime when I am seeing this.

#cambodia #scambodia #hunsen #contempt #hunmanet #murder #abduction #complicity #corruption #khmer #dictatorship #police #killing #crisis #humanitariancrisis #amnesty #amnestyinternational #scamcompound #concentrationcamp #deathcamp #slavery

@cxiao Similar topic in Cambodia: " witnessed the murder of a man who had his throat cut by a compound manager after he was caught trying to escape" -- "police visited their compounds regularly, including to remove dead bodies, but without taking any action against the managers" -- "Many people died" -- "murder, rape and torture" -- "evidence pointing towards state complicity or deliberate inaction" -- "Cambodian authorities appear to be doing nothing to help"

That's what Amnesty International is writing:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/cambodia-growing-humanitarian-crisis-as-escaped-scamming-compound-survivors-tell-of-murder-rape-and-torture/

I feel

e x t r e m e l y s t r o n g c o n t e m p t

towards the Cambodian Hun Sen/Hun Manet regime when I am seeing this.

#cambodia #scambodia #hunsen #contempt #hunmanet #murder #abduction #complicity #corruption #khmer #dictatorship #police #killing #crisis #humanitariancrisis #amnesty #amnestyinternational #scamcompound #concentrationcamp #deathcamp #slavery

@cxiao Similar topic in Cambodia: "witnessed the murder of a man who had his throat cut by a compound manager after he was caught trying to escape" -- "police visited their compounds regularly, including to remove dead bodies, but without taking any action against the managers" -- "Many people died" -- "murder, rape and torture" -- "evidence pointing towards state complicity or deliberate inaction" -- "Cambodian authorities appear to be doing nothing to help"

That's what Amnesty International is writing:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/cambodia-growing-humanitarian-crisis-as-escaped-scamming-compound-survivors-tell-of-murder-rape-and-torture/

I feel

e x t r e m e l y s t r o n g c o n t e m p t

towards the Cambodian Hun Sen/Hun Manet regime when I am seeing this.

#cambodia #scambodia #hunsen #contempt #hunmanet #murder #abduction #complicity #corruption #khmer #dictatorship #police #killing #crisis #humanitariancrisis #amnesty #amnestyinternational #scamcompound #concentrationcamp #deathcamp #slavery

@Obscure_Rebel " witnessed the murder of a man who had his throat cut by a compound manager after he was caught trying to escape" -- "police visited their compounds regularly, including to remove dead bodies, but without taking any action against the managers" -- "Many people died" -- "murder, rape and torture" -- "evidence pointing towards state complicity or deliberate inaction" -- "Cambodian authorities appear to be doing nothing to help"

That's what Amnesty International is writing:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/cambodia-growing-humanitarian-crisis-as-escaped-scamming-compound-survivors-tell-of-murder-rape-and-torture/

I feel

e x t r e m e l y s t r o n g c o n t e m p t

towards the Cambodian Hun Sen/Hun Manet regime when I am seeing this.

#cambodia #scambodia #hunsen #contempt #hunmanet #murder #abduction #complicity #corruption #khmer #dictatorship #police #killing #crisis #humanitariancrisis #amnesty #amnestyinternational #scamcompound #concentrationcamp #deathcamp #slavery