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I don’t particularly want to get serious on a Saturday night, but the bellends in Dover have p***ed me off. Watching a bunch of numpties in balaclavas block roads, intimidate people and then lecture everyone else about who is supposedly threatening British values is just f***ing ridiculous. The hypocrisy would be funny if the whole thing wasn’t so ugly.
Half my ancestors were Litvak Jews. Around 90–95% of that community was murdered by the Nazis. Britain was one of the places people could flee to, and the fact that this country offered refuge from persecution is something we ought to be proud of.
So watching masked men complain that Muslim women shouldn’t be allowed to cover their faces is f***ing absurd. Complaining that Muslims are “intimidating” while standing in the road in balaclavas intimidating strangers isn’t patriotism. It’s hypocrisy.
And underneath all of this is the oldest trick going: persuade people with very little that their problems are caused by people with even less. Fill their feeds with rage about migrants, Muslims and refugees, and they’ll spend their time punching down instead of looking up.
These guys aren’t rebels. They’re sheep. They are a dream come true for extremely rich and powerful people who would much rather have ordinary people raging at penniless migrants than asking awkward questions about wealth, tax, power and who is actually running the country.
If they genuinely think Britain’s problems are being caused by the people arriving here with virtually nothing, they haven’t seen through the system.
I was reading this piece from Michael Rosen on Facebook this morning about the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, a confrontation that took place on October 4th 1936. Oswald Mosely and his British Union of Fascists had planned a march through London's East End and area with a significant Jewish population. In response, Jews and their allies fought open battles with the fascists and drove them back.
Rosen points out that there were different currents and views within the group that fought the fascists that day, including Jewish organizations and included in his comments a warning from the Jewish Chronicle urging the Jewish community not to attend or protest the march. But the general consensus was to confront the fascists and stop them.
I am familiar with the event and have read a little about it but found the video above really interesting as it deals with the wider class issues, the various radical groups that were involved and what was happening in Europe at the time. It's also important as the BUF picked immigrants and in this case, Jews, many of them victims of the pogroms and violence they faced in Easter Europe. In times of economic crisis the state, its security apparatus including fascist and nationalist organizations, direct the anger at the "other" among us.
I was at a similar protest when I was in London in the 1980's and it was the right wing anti-immigrant forces directing their hatred toward Bangladeshi's. The area where the Cable Street battle took place has since been populated by East Indians, Bangladeshi's and other ethnic groups.
With the absence of a working class alternative and a unifying force in society that can direct the anger at the social and economic crises people are facing at the state and its security apparatus, there are people that will be drawn to the racist anti-immigrant position.
Immigrants that have saved Britains precious NHS from the privateers ax are now being blamed for destroying it. Behind the most innocuous statements on the cost of immigration are the fascists elements and the British state. Immigration does need to be addressed but from the perspective of the working class both at home and abroad. The capitalist state cannot solve a crisis of its own making. The flow of people from the Middle East and North Africa in to Europe and the UK is a product of colonialism and the continuing support of US imperialism's wars in the region from the British government.
It's insanity people telling immigrants to "go back where they came from" when they have no homes to go back to.
I see that the Board of Deputies are organising an event for the 90th anniversary of the 'Battle of Cable Street'. Obviously, anyone can organise what they want to commemorate what they want, when they want (within the confines of the law etc etc). In 2026, there are people walking about, living their lives who stand in various traditions. We aren't prisoners of them (if we don't want them to be) but they exist in our minds, our memories and in our political acts. We 'negotiate' them. That's to say, we work out how we stand now in relation to those past traditions.
As I understand it, the group that I'm part of who are organising commemorations of Cable Street owes its origins to the Jewish People's Council which was the prime mover of the resistance to Mosley and the fascists. Within that Council were many strands of opinion, as Dave Rosenberg has shown in his book 'Battle for the East End'.
However, opposed to organising a demonstration on that day was a group of people who said, no, don't demonstrate. This is not hearsay or rumour. There was a note in the Jewish Chronicle telling people not to go and I've posted it here.
Now, I don't know for sure which people now, in 2026, belong to that tradition, but I'd say that whoever is organising commemorative events, part of that history is to acknowledge, who was there, who wasn't there, who was in favour of it, and who was against it - actively against it in some cases.
I would hope (but don't know) that the Board of Deputies event would acknowledge what the official 'line' seems to have been towards people going on the demonstration that day. Perhaps they'll acknowledge who said that kind of thing and why, and whether it put people off going, off taking part.
As people will know, my parents were there and it was an important part of their personal, social and political education - and through them, mine too. They felt that they belonged to that tradition, all their lives, even after they left the Communist Party in 1957.
Third Way, a prominent Democratic lobby group in Washington, has a new multi-million dollar effort to “combat extremism” on the “far-left,” an internal staff email leaked to me reveals.
“[E]xtreme far-left voices gaining purchase over the past year … represent a sharp break from a traditional left wing in American politics,” the July 23 email says. This break, the email continues, has led to the rise of a faction that is both “radical” and “illiberal” — figures like Zohran Mamdani — pursuing a government like authoritarian Cuba.
“When some folks hear ‘socialism’ they think of Scandinavia, but what the activists behind the DSA are advocating for is closer to Cuba,” the email says, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America.
The irony is that Third Way, sharply critical of the Trump administration, is echoing it perfectly. In fact, the email was sent just days before the release of a State Department report alleging Cuban influence on the American left, mentioning such frightening subversives as Ben Cohen (founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, as I reported at the time.
Also, earlier that month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio led an international summit on “political terrorism” also targeting the left, even introducing a new term: “Far-Left Terrorism.”
It’s not a war against Trump or MAGA or the Republicans in 2028. It’s not against disinformation or foreign influence; that was yesterday’s panic. It’s not against anti-semitism, or the impact of social media, or guns. It’s not even against violence in general.
It’s a war against other Democrats (socialists specifically), and what Third Way labels far-left “extremism.” That sure sounds more like the FBI and homeland security than a “center left … organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas,” as it describes itself
This isn’t just someone running their mouth in an email, either. The author, senior vice president of Third Way, Lanae Erickson, is announcing an organized and sustained effort to defeat the supposed new extremist threat.
As the email says, “we are launching a strategy to drive awareness of these threats to the party, including adding to our team by hiring a Director of Anti-Extremism to help us make the case against these noxious ideas and recruit many others to do the same.”
The goal, the email continues, is to “create a counterweight to the forces pushing more Democrats to embrace extreme and illiberal ideas.”
Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, alluded to the plan last week.
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” Cowan told the New York Times, describing a $15 million effort to discredit democratic socialism between now and 2028. This week, Third Way posted a job announcement for a director to head its “Anti-Extremism” project, corroborating the email.
Screenshot of new Third Way job announcement
Beyond the Washington rhetoric, Third Way is saying that if your political views aren’t vanilla, you’re an “extremist.” That’s national security’s polite word for terrorist, once a reference to Muslim Americans and would-be revolutionaries but now applied to any American citizen who dares to venture away from Party talking points.
What is worse, it used to be the case that when the government or the administration, whether Obama or Bush, used the word “extremist” they were always careful to include a qualifier: “violent extremism.” That meant that physical violence (actual or intended) was necessary to get one labeled a terrorist.
Back during the Obama years, there was “countering violent extremism.” Then from Trump’s first term to Biden, there was “domestic violent extremism.” The FBI’s threat categories carried it too — “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism.” They are all imperfect and ugly labels, but the “violent” qualifier at least maintained a pretense that there was a threat of physical harm. And pretended that the threat label wasn’t questioning free speech or association.
Now it’s just “extremism” — one word. Third Way is joining the Trump administration in dropping the violence qualifier. It’s enough to just have the wrong beliefs; wrong, that is, in the eyes of the Party apparatus in Washington.
When I asked Third Way this week how it defines this “extremism,” spokesperson Kate DeGruyter said that the effort “is aimed at the DSA itself, not at liberal Democrats” — though it wasn’t clear how they define “liberal Democrats.” Asked who gave Third Way the $15 million for this project, DeGruyter’s only response was: “This a new effort and we are in the process of fundraising.”
Before Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan primary to run for Senate as a Democrat, Cowan, the Third Way president, issued an open letter and op-ed directly targeting him as a member of DSA despite his never having been a member of the organization and explicitly describing himself as a “capitalist.” (Third Way tells me it now supports El-Sayed, presumably because he’s since won.)
Three members of Congress are DSA members or describe themselves as democratic socialists — Senator Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib — along with the mayor of the country's largest city, Zohran Mamdani. You may have heard of them.
The Times reported that Third Way’s new campaign would go after both self-described democratic socialists and candidates like El-Sayed, whom Cowan at the time accused of running a DSA-style campaign without the membership card. So because DSA is too narrow, Third Way has done exactly as the FBI would do: it has expanded the definition of the threat category. The war is against members of DSA and people who espouse DSA positions or use DSA tactics, or just socialists, or just “far-left extreme voices and forces,” as Third Way says, or even more broadly people with “politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric.”
Politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric? That sounds like me and half the people I know. I call top bunk at the Third Way reeducation camp!
Third Way is all but an arm of the Democratic Party. It’s run by former administration officials — Cowan was chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton — and exists to supply the party’s leadership with the language that leads to the talking points that become the way elected Democrats describe the country and their own voters.
As for what this all looks like in practice, Third Way provided a preview this week in its remarks on Francesca Hong’s campaign for Democratic candidate to be Governor of Wisconsin.
“She’s not a real person,” Yemisii Egbewole, a Senior Fellow at Third Way and former Biden White House official, told Mark Halperin. She added an implication of mental illness, saying Hong is “deeply unsettled, and she should really work through in therapy some of her own beliefs.”
The goal, with the “extremist” label, is thus to make anyone who doesn’t conform with the vanilla politics of Washington seem not just idiotic but insane. It’s a real-life One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and if your beliefs aren’t something you’d see on cable news, the nurse would like to see you.
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Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens beforethey commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.
It is one of the first cases where presidential national security memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. The directive, Rosen, also said, directs federal investigators “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.”
Rosen was asked at the press conference how the Justice Department defines Antifa, and basically had no answer. “What is Antifa goes beyond, goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he replied. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might wanna ask them that question.”
And as to whether anyone was actually hurt, here too Rosen stumbled. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” said, sounding like a kid who hadn’t done the homework being called on in class.
In other words, the federal government is prosecuting a group it cannot even define.
The Trump administration’s war on its opponents finds its solid form in the war on Antifa. Because President Trump “designated” Antifa as a terrorist group, “counterterrorism” rules apply. Think of the modern day FBI objective as preventing another 9/11: that is, following the doctrine of the past two decades, which is to stop an attack before it happened.
Though they don’t say it explicitly, Task Force Vanguard is in the business of pre-crime. Under NSPM-7, the feds require no crime to actually have been committed. They only need “indicators.” The indicators are broad enough to sweep in millions of Americans: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” as I’ve previously reported.
Antifa as an indicator is absurd. At protests I’ve covered over the past couple of years, when I asked people what they thought of Antifa, the answer I heard again and again — from moms, from grandpas — was “I’m Antifa!” Some of the protestors were being playful, some were being defiant. But what they didn’t mean was that they were part of some organization as Washington imagines it. When I asked them why Antifa, the answer was universal. They are anti-fascist, which in non-national security terms is what they thought the word simply meant.
That confusion has produced mishaps that would be funny if the stakes weren’t what they are — like the time federal law enforcement was convinced it had identified the “leader of Antifa,” who turned out to be some random guy in Portland, as I reported.
U.S. Attorney Rosen announced at his press conference:
“Today, a federal indictment was unsealed charging 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state. The defendants are members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota… These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did. They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations.”
“Conspiracy” sounds to me like an awful lot like civil disobedience or free speech. Note, for instance, that the most vivid piece of evidence Rosen actually presented to reporters was a video of one defendant, Kyle Wagner, using violent rhetoric — speech — which sits awkwardly beside Rosen’s insistence that nobody was being charged “for what they said.”
NSPM-7 was signed in September 2025, three days after Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. It directs the government to disrupt networks supposedly “animated” by beliefs that include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism on migration.” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation memo — titled “Ending Political Violence Against ICE” — pointed that apparatus squarely at people accused of impeding immigration enforcement. Joint Task Force Vanguard is now the enforcement arm with a much broader target.
In its zeal to arrest and convict its political opponents, the Trump administration has so far been unsuccessful. In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly announced that ICE had survived “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in north Minneapolis, suggesting protestors were directly threatening law enforcement officers. What she described as federal officers “ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat them with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” forcing one officer to fire “a defensive shot,” ended up being two Venezuelan DoorDash drivers with no violent records.
Then the video surfaced. City surveillance footage showed a scuffle lasting about 12 seconds, with no snow-shovel beating; a shovel sat on the ground the entire time. Authorities had the footage within hours of the shooting. Prosecutors didn’t bother to watch it until weeks after they’d charged the men and put an agent’s sworn account in front of a judge. In February, Rosen’s own office moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning they can never be refiled — citing evidence “materially inconsistent” with the affidavit. A federal judge agreed. Two ICE agents were placed on administrative leave for apparently lying under oath.
Minneapolis’s police chief offered the epitaph: the agents “hung themselves.”
This was no one-off. The local CBS affiliate in Minneapolis combed throughcourt filings and found at least 18 Minnesotans whose assault-on-an-officer cases were dropped, with a judge dismissing charges for 15 of them. The sworn affidavits of a single ICE agent turned up in roughly ten of the dismissed cases. In one case Rosen himself moved to drop charges, the defendant said federal agents had shackled him to a hospital bed for days without access to his phone.
Another case collapsed after a judge found that Bondi had publicly named arrested protesters in a social-media post — violating the court’s sealing order and, the judge wrote, “likely” several Justice Department policies.
And the pattern isn’t confined to Minnesota. In Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” prosecutors charged the “Broadview Six” — a group that included a Democratic congressional candidate and a Democratic candidate for the state legislature — with conspiring to “impede” an ICE officer outside a detention facility. A federal judge tossed the case over prosecutorial misconduct, including allegations of jury tampering and misleading the court.
Of 22 prosecutions in the Chicago area under the federal impeding-an-officer statute, 16 have been dismissed or never reached indictment, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally cited by CNN.
In Los Angeles, the government has lost all five such cases that reached trial — five straight acquittals.
None of this is slowing down the White House. “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network,” the White House announced with the Minnesota arrests. The release details federal cases against “Antifa” individuals in states including Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, California, and Indiana.
Rosen closed by calling political violence “a national scourge in our times.” Not gas prices. Not rent. Not the cost of healthcare. Or childcare. That’s what you get when the imperatives of “national security” are allowed to set a society’s priorities — especially once “national security” has been redefined to mean almost anything the government wants it to.
Subscribe if you saw Antifa hanging out with bigfoot
It is important to recognize that the removal of Bovino, and Noem from Minneapolis is a product of the heroic resistance the people of that city have shown in the face of the assault by Trump’s neo-fascist ICE thugs. It is a small victory. But Tom Holman is no step forward as the author explains below. Admin
"Border Czar" Tom Holman
Holman, Bovino, Noem Three Peas in the Same Pod
By Mary Scully
To calm down the volatile situation created by ICE storm troopers in Minneapolis, Trump sidelined Homeland Security head Kristi Noem and removed Gregory Bovino from his role as head of the Minnesota operation. He also shut down Bovino's social media account where he portrayed immigrants as thugs and boasted of his crimes against them. To replace Bovino, Trump sent in Tom Homan, the former head of ICE whom Trump calls his 'border czar', to assume command of ICE in Minneapolis. It's an act that brings to mind the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Like the scorpion, Homan has a malevolent character and history that will bring no security to immigrants but perhaps some solace to the local politicians.
Homan has been with ICE since it was created in 2003 and was brought into federal immigration control in 2013 by then president Obama. He was brought in because as The Washington Post reported in 2017, "Thomas Homan deports people. And he's really good at it." The Obama White House even honored Homan in 2015 with some kind of award for deporting undocumented immigrants. Over his two terms, Obama deported at least 3 million immigrants--more than any other president in US history according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.
Homan's whole white supremacist schtick is the deportation of immigrants. It must be emphasized that it is a wretchedly anti-working class policy because immigrants with means have always been able to immigrate to the US without impediment. It was Homan who cooked up and formally proposed the policy of family separation, of tearing children from their parents and warehousing them in inhumane detention centers to deter people from crossing the border. In that policy, there was no accountability and parents lost contact with where their children were. In other words, Homan is a psychopath.
Homan did well under Obama. He is also the kind of psychopath that ideally suits the ethos of the Trump administration. Trump is a felon with a history of raping young girls. That's why it was no problem to hire a rapist to direct the 'Melania' documentary or to elevate the political status of Homan who in 2024 was caught in an FBI contracts-for-cash sting when he accepted a bag with $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen. He anticipated raking in millions by accepting bribes from border security companies in exchange for government contracts. The FBI sting was a part of investigating the allegations. In 2025, after Trump was elected, his Department of Justice closed down the investigation citing insufficient evidence.
The 'border czar' was not sent to Minneapolis because Trump is reconsidering mass deportations or planning on toning down the assaults on immigrants. It's a temporizing gesture to calm down politicians and make it look like he's retreating somewhat. But Homan will not stop ICE agents from violating immigrant rights or flouting the Bill of Rights and continuing to hunt them down like wild animals. He will probably stop them from killing protesters.
Immigrants are not safe under the tenure of Tom Homan. They will only be safe when ICE is shut down and the Bill of Rights is enforced. That may take a revolution.
There is one important point I want to make. Do not limit your criticism or blame solely to the degenerate serial sexual abuser and felon Donald Trump. This is a crisis of the system. It has been ongoing no matter which Wall Street party is in power. The US Congress is as guilty as Trump or the fascistic Noem for this murder and many before it including the millions that have died due to US capitalism's predatory wars. There was a general strike in Minneapolis in 1934. It would be a historic moment for US workers and the world for the second one to occur and call on all US cities to follow suit.
If you are in a union and are not in a political battle for the transformation of these organisations that our ancestors built, a transformation to remove the class collaborationist clique that has captured the leadership, you are failing your membership and the working class as a whole. You are failing your children and grandchildren.
Any local union leadership that claims to be in opposition to the status quo must call for a unity with all workers at home and abroad, unity with our communities, the unorganised and immigrants, undocumented or not. Working people have the power, we have the ability to confront this big business offensive and build a better world that every worker regardless of background desires.
Excellent report from Ken Klippenstein on the No Kings Rallies. While the organizers and forces that set this ball in motion, former Congressional Staffers linked to the Democratic Party, confining the rallies to the defense of the First amendment and against "Kingly Rule" will not be easy. There is tremendous anger in America that has percolated beneath the surface of US society for a long time, especially since the crash of 2008. The failure of the Democratic Party to provide a serious alternative to its Republican cohort is a major factor in the rise of Trump and the right. The heads of organized labor as junior partners of the Democratic Party machine are equally guilty.
The turnout will have a huge effect on the mood and inspire further protests and as is usually the case, there will be efforts to direct the movement in to electoral support for the Democrats up ahead but this will not be an easy sell. It's one thing to tap in to the anger people feel at the present state of affairs and bring them in to the streets but it's another to control the direction the movement will take in the long run.
While the major media focused on crowd size and potential violence that never materialized, the “No Kings” protests this weekend had another message: millions of Americans reject the entire framework of the national security state.
Protesters I talked to expressed opposition to more than just the president and Trumpism, but the entire national security apparatus, including the FBI, ICE, homeland security, the National Guard and the military. Unlike the protests during Trump’s first term, this one doesn’t see a savior in the FBI or even the Democratic Party, instead putting their faith in ordinary people like themselves. Seven million-plus Americans gathered with homemade signs and costumes rejecting the relentless threat mongering about some domestic terrorism “enemy from within.”
I interviewed dozens of protesters at the demonstration around the leafy capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, and the major theme that came across was their utter mockery of the government’s warnings about Antifa and domestic terrorists in general.
Madison protester talks to me about her opposition to the National Guard deployments (she was fine with my Hawaiian shirt though)
“It’s a boogeyman,” one protester said of Antifa, reflecting the general consensus.
“This is all fantasy,” another protester said.
In light of Trump’s official designation of Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” when I asked protesters about Antifa, I expected nervous throat clearing and self-censorship. Instead, people just laughed. Many even embraced the term, saying that if Antifa means anti-fascism, then they’re Antifa.
Even the silly costumes, as many explained to me, were a rejection of the fear people felt that the federal government was trying to spread about anything from Antifa to immigration.
“What, are they gonna arrest the unicorn?” one protester joked. “There’s some frogs, there’s some lobsters…that’s kind of what we were going for — whimsical fun.”
Unicorns are more common than you might’ve thought
ICE is frog-marching immigrants and protesters around, sot he protesters responded with a frog march of their own to show how absurd it all is.
Far from the paranoia and fear that I thought Trump’s designation of Antifa as terrorists would engender, I saw protesters of all ages, from teenagers to the elderly, embrace the word. My personal favorites were a sign worn by a woman identifying herself as “Auntie-fa” and a man wearing a sign that read: “I am Antifa, come get me.”
“We’re Antifa bees,” one demonstrator, part of a group of women dressed as bees, told me. “Most people don’t even know what that means,” she said before another bee interjected: “We don’t even know what it means!”
It’s a fair point. What exactly is Antifa? For all the rhetoric about the threat to public safety, the federal government hasn’t offered a clear definition.
I attended the original No Kings protest in April (you can read my dispatch here) and not only was this larger, but the vibe was much different. Gone were the NATO flags and mass-produced signs decrying the DOGE cuts to federal agencies.
Particularly striking this time was seeing people who weren’t Republicans were pissed off at the federal government, especially those belonging to the national security apparatus.
“What happened to states rights?” a protester said of the National Guard deployments to states whose governors don’t want them. “We never needed it before … we definitely don’t need the military deployed now.”
“We didn’t ask for it,” another protester said of the Guard deployments. “You can’t really make real change except for at the state level.”
For as long as I could remember, states rights as a concept seemed little more than code for enforcing anti-abortion policies, discrimination and the like. That may be changing.
Even local law enforcement didn’t seem to buy the hype about the domestic terror threat posed by Antifa. Capitol and state police were standing around chatting amongst themselves, checking their phones. The only national security state overkill I saw was an MRAP-type vehicle parked in front of the capitol building. I didn’t see any federal personnel anywhere.
MRAP-type vehicle in front of Madison capitol building. Not impressed!
The increasingly nonpartisan skepticism of the feds isn’t just anecdote: poll after poll this year shows cratering approval especially among Democrats for institutions like ICE, the FBI, CIA, the police and even the military. The glib take would be that they just hate these agencies because Trump is in office; but during his first term, Democratic approval for agencies like the FBI soared. Remember Robert Mueller (or Daddy Mueller as many liberals called him?)
Mueller Time has long since passed. Gone is the liberal undercurrent that the FBI or uniformed military was going to save the country from Trump. Today they’re seen as tools of repression and enemies of free speech.
Source: Gallup
Source: Pew
The protest did have one thing in common with the one in April: frustration with the Democratic Party.
“They’re completely ineffective,” one woman said, laughing.
“It’s a joke,” another added.
“Their leadership needs to go,” said another.
Here too, their sentiments reflect polling that hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves. The Democratic Party’s approval rating is at its lowest in recorded history, with a majority of Democrats wanting its entire leadership to be replaced.
Source: Ipsos / Reuters poll
The Party is out of touch, beautifully depicted in an un-ironic “No Crown. #NoKings!” declaration on X by Nancy Pelosi, the 20-term incumbent who’s been in Congress since before I existed.
No Kings wasn’t just a protest against Donald Trump, as the mainstream media have lazily cast it. It was a demonstration against the national security neurosis he is trying (and failing) to excite. Not out of some partisan reflex to just support the Democrats and oppose Trump.
Americans in large part just do not believe that there’s an “enemy within.” And they’re right.
In my lastpostI said that if America has a king, it is the national security state (which laid the groundwork for what Trump is doing long before he entered politics). What I didn’t realize was how many Americans would refuse to bend the knee to that king as well. Good on them.
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