Minneapolis: on seeing for themselves

As the seige of Minneapolis continues (and I won't believe DHS head-crook Tom Homan's claim of withdrawal until the locals confirm it), there's mainstream media coverage of the murders of observers, of the arbitrary and violent cruelty of the ICE paramilitary against immigrants and others, of complaints from clergy and some politicians. But unsurprisingly, the media finds it harder to get at what ordinary citizens of the Twin Cities are feeling.

And then, every once in a while, at the end of a long story, there are tantalizing tidbits from the folks on the ground. The experience if being under seige by goons has been life-changing for at least a few:

Lindsey Gruttadaurio, 62, an insurance claims adjuster, had never been to a protest before. A centrist Democrat, she grew up in a military family, and often disagrees with progressives. But watching the ICE raids on the news motivated her, so on Jan. 23, she bundled up and went.

She immediately felt comfortable.

“It’s like a Lutheran potluck — just go and you’ll be fine,” she said.

“It was thrilling. There was a lot of cussing. It was fantastic, actually.”

The thrill, she said, came from being together with all those people and the power in that.

 “We’ve found our voice and it’s never going away now.

Owen Deneen, a nurse who was walking downtown in hospital scrubs at lunchtime on Friday, said it was as if “a natural disaster happened and it’s neighbor helping neighbor.”

He and his wife also went to the Jan. 23 protest, also his first. He said he felt “a mix of anger and resolution” during the demonstration.

When the couple broke away from the crowd to walk back toward their car, he said the temperature felt like it dropped by 15 degrees. They looked at each other and realized that it was because they had left “the closeness” of the crowd.

“It’s much colder when you’re alone,” he said. 

If it comes to this, I hope my neighbors will respond so bravely and openly. I think we might.

• • •

This clip is only a preview of a podcast behind a paywall, but Beinart's interview with Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, lead rabbi of Shir Tikvah, a “justice-seeking, song-filled” congregation in South Minneapolis is a granular account of what it is like to live under occupation. She finds herself in immediate proximity to where Renee Good and Alex Pritti were killed. 

No special rules for special people. How about no special people at all?

There was a moment when our TV reception wasn't working properly during the Stupor Bowl, so I didn't see this live. But I've seen it now:

Jeffrey Epstein's victims aren't going to let us forget ...

It's taken a lot to get me to pay attention to the "revelations" about the "Epstein class." (Good label for 'em, that.)

That entitled rich white men should feel that have a right to the bodies and bodily service of very young, usually poor, women is not news. That's how these guys get their self-esteem, especially the ones who are just hangers-on in proximity to truly creative and accomplished people. That's too many men, though certainly not all men.

Guess I'm just a jaded lesbian feminist. These men are profoundly uninteresting, dim-witted slaves to their banal desires.

• • • 

Dan Pfeiffer, a Democratic communications guru, applauds how Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff explains why the Epstein files matter: 

... The release of millions of pages from the Epstein files has made clear that many of the long-running conspiracy theories surrounding the world’s most notorious sex trafficker were, in fact, grounded in reality. There truly was an elite network of people who either participated in or knowingly looked away from Epstein’s crimes—and the government spent years protecting many of them by keeping those records secret.

The public takeaway has been simple and powerful: there are two sets of rules in America—one for elites and one for everyone else.

That is why the Epstein story has captured so much attention. The idea of powerful people protecting one another at the expense of everyone else helps explain why so many Americans feel the system is stacked against them.  

What Donald and MAGA have wrought

My Erudite Partner, Rebecca Gordon, has written a meditation on home, refuge, and asylum for our disgraceful moment: On Seeking Asylum and Refuge. She ponders: was this country ever a safe place? For who? What is a safe place anyway?

... the word asylum has Greek roots. It suggests being free from someone else’s right of seizure, and so, by extension, “refuge.” When people come to this country seeking asylum, they are looking for refuge from horrors of all kinds: political oppression, familial or institutional violence, war, torture, you name it. An asylum is, by definition, a refuge, a safe place. That’s why institutions for people with mental illness used to be called “insane asylums.” (It’s been suggested that Donald Trump confuses the legal concept of seeking asylum with the term insane asylum, which is why he thinks that other countries are sending their mental patients here.)

An asylum should be a safe place, even if it may never feel like home. But in the first year of Trump’s second term as president, it’s become clear that, for those seeking, or even granted, asylum, the United States is no longer a safe place. ...

Read it all here. 

San Francisco educators on strike

 

You know the rally you are on the way to is going to be large when the BART trains are full of happy people with signs. Such was the case yesterday.

 

The strike by United Educators of San Francisco brought a happy crowd of public school teachers, students, supporting unionists, and friends to Civic Center Plaza midday yesterday. 

Teachers are on strike for their students ... 

 

For pay and benefits of course ... how are workers who have not somehow acquired stable housing supposed to live and serve students in this absurdly expensive city?

 

They have to fear for the children and their families, even themselves, under a regime striving to Make America White Again.

My Mission neighborhood is full of these signs. For the present at least, many San Franciscans stand with their teachers!

Donald: world class loser

As an honest to goodness fan of American football, I have to admit this year's Super Bowl was a snoozer. The best teams this year all were in the NFC, so the intra-conference championship, which is what the SB is, didn't pit the true top teams --and it showed.

But the buzz around Bad Bunny, a performer whose existence is a thumb in the eye to MAGA, was fun. And outside in Santa Clara, northern Californians got their digs in.

 As Joe Garofoli explained in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Donald Trump lost the Super Bowl. 

He didn’t even show up. Said it was “too far.” The guy who complains that pro football has gotten “too soft” was afraid to face the tsunami of boos that would have power-washed his fake tan.

Instead, he ceded the stage on America’s unofficial national holiday to performers like Green Day, whose lead singer told ICE agents to quit their jobs at a show earlier in the week and changed the lyrics of their song “American Idiot” to assert that “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.”  Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, was outside the stadium (which is in his district) with activists to demand no new funding for ICE.

Longtime LGBTQ activist Brandi Carlile sang a lovely version of  “America the Beautiful” pre-game. The halftime show featured cameos from other LGBTQ-positive performers in Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga. Activists passed out 25,000 towels outside the stadium that read “ICE OUT.”...

It's nice to see that Trump is also losing the Winter Olympics before a world audience. JDVance caught the boos.

Americans brought in their own opinions:

While Italians in the host country had plenty to say:

We better get used to being a pariah nation. Erase Donald and MAGA!

Fox News would not publish this. I still can.

Two-thirds of Americans believe Trump has "gone too far" with ICE. The cruelty & extremism is out of control. Our new ad features Joe Rogan asking "Are we really going to be the Gestapo?...Is that what we've come to?" Check it out & share.

[image or embed]

— Halie Soifer (@haliesoifer.bsky.social) February 7, 2026 at 9:09 AM

It's America that threatens Canadian freedom

It breaks my heart that the Orange Toddler has made Canada and Canadians our enemies. Understand, I don't begrudge Canadians anything they have to do to escape the clutches of the regime currently in power in Washington. But our necessary estrangement tears at me.

This display of flags marked the center of the Peace Bridge over the Niagara River between Buffalo. NY, and Fort Erie, Ontario, in 2007. (That middle one is the UN.) I assume this display no longer marks the border today, It's probably been replaced, perhaps by a threatening sign.

Canada was very nearby when growing up in Buffalo a long time ago. In fact, I sailed my Sunfish across the river and landed in a foreign country without concern. Driving to Canada was regular part of learning to drive. 

No longer.

Canadian author Stephen Marche explains the look of things from Toronto: 

... American aggression and American decline are of a piece. As Mr. Carney has announced a slew of measures aimed at boosting Canada’s electric vehicle industry, nobody has argued for a moment that American equivalents could compete. By ending E.V. tax credits, Mr. Trump may have all but ensured that the American electric vehicle will one day be a thing of the past. America has decided not to compete. It would rather pose. If you are integrating yourself into the American sphere of influence, or whatever Mr. Trump’s national security apparatus calls it, you are integrating yourself into antiquity — or worse.

At the same time, America is becoming synonymous with dangerous randomness. The constitutional system is in collapse. The legislative branch, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, is missing in action. The Supreme Court debates the legal equivalent of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, while the legal order that has held the country together for 250 years sputters toward an ignominious end. Nobody knows what America is anymore — not Americans, not their enemies, not their friends.

Coming to terms with this reality has not been easy in Canada. American exceptionalism is a hell of a drug; it’s hard to break the habit of thinking of Americans as the good guys. For Canadians, what is unfolding in Minnesota and elsewhere is happening to our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues, our kin — it is happening to people we love and understand better than anybody. But “the rupture,” as Mr. Carney calls it, is nothing more than seeing clearly. Today, it’s America that poses a threat to our freedom and democracy. Not China. Not Russia. America. ...

Read it all [gift].

In the land of the mad king

The so-called National Prayer Breakfast brings out the most unhinged ravings from the Orange Toddler. It's not our resident lunatic's most natural environment (might that be a bordello?) so his freak flag flies. He offered an uninhibited glimpse of his disordered psyche the other day.  By way of Heather Cox Richardson: 

at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.” 

This is a sick man.

As the opinion writer and historian Jamelle Bouie wrote recently "This isn't sustainable." Trump's prayer breakfast antics are in the same category as his crazy note to Norway complaining about not being awarded the Nobel Prize. (No, Norway doesn't award the prize ... but he's butt ignorant.)

... most coverage of Trump treats him as president in a functional way even if he doesn’t perform the civic duties of the office. His letter to the prime minister of Norway suggests that this is a mistake. It shows that he is essentially unable to serve as president of the United States, that he is as temperamentally and psychologically unable to engage with the practical as he is the symbolic, and that he has totally collapsed the distinction between his interests and those of the country, if he even recognized them in the first place.

The uncomfortable truth is that the president of the United States is a man with the mind of a spoiled child. His debilitating solipsism is a threat to the stability of the entire world. A functional Congress would impeach and remove him. But the Republican majority is in a codependent relationship with the president, unable to separate his identity from that of their party. And the president’s advisers are either cowed supplicants desperate to please or scheming viziers eager to use his power for their own ends. There is no one, then, to pressure Trump to resign like there was for Nixon.

In John McTiernan’s 1990 film adaptation of “The Hunt for Red October,” Fred Thompson, in the years before he was elected as a Republican senator from Tennessee, delivers a haunting warning as he, and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Ryan, observe a deadly naval disaster. “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”

We have three years left with a mad king. It does not feel sustainable. 

In this year of the 250th anniversary of this country, we'll be reminded we once were subject to another king who contemporaries diagnosed as nuts. (This will probably be argued this year; everything in history is) The courtiers around mad King George III eventually locked him in an asylum several times. Eighteenth century practices for treating madness almost certainly just made the guy more miserable. 

Can't somebody just slip our current mad king some nice erectal function drug that allows him to float off into haze of imaginary adoring bimbos and leave the rest of us alone?

Truths told

 

Julie Le, a lawyer who was representing the Trump administration in court in Minneapolis and had worked for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement before the current ICE invasion, had a lot that was inflammatory to say when she appeared before a federal judge. She came close to begging to be held in contempt just so she could get 24 hours respite from dealing with the deluge of habeas corpus petitions she was supposed to fight on behalf of ICE.

 

But what else she told the Black federal judge before whom she was appearing chills to the bone:

I share the same concern with you, Your Honor. I am not white, as you can see. And my family’s at risk as any other people that might get picked up too, so I share the same concern, and I took that concern to heart. But, again, fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it. I don’t have the power or the voice to do it. I only can do it within the ability and the capacity that I have.

You will not be surprised to learn that Le is no longer in that job -- and perhaps on her way out of government work.

Beware the war of attrition on America's soul

Roxane Gay is an author and contributing New York Times opinion writer. She has an admonition [gift] for weary Americans which is easy to lose sight of amidst the depredations of the Trump regime.   

The relentless brutality of the Trump administration is threatening to debase us. I was posting on Bluesky about the horrors taking place in Minneapolis, sharing my sorrow, anger and frustration about the injustice. Someone responded, in a post that has since been deleted, advocating capital punishment for ICE officers.

I understood the instinct to make such a comment — what federal agents are still doing, across the country, is abhorrent. It is inhumane. I also understood that the Trump administration is hoping we will surrender to our baser instincts, in the same ways that it does.

It can be hard to stand up for what you believe in, and to do so consistently. But now, more than ever, we don’t have the flexibility for certain misjudgments. If human life is sacred — and I firmly believe it is — then all human life is sacred, from the best to the worst of us. We cannot demand justice for our undocumented neighbors, or rage against senseless murders, and in the next breath call for our enemies to die.

When we stand for what is right, we have to always stand for what is right, without exception. We cannot succumb to a worldview that embraces isolation, scarcity and control through fear.

... But we have to remember that humanity is, always, enough. We have a right to protest, legally carry a firearm, drive while Black, walk in a neighborhood at night, play in a park, sleep in a bed or do anything else whether we are wonderful people, and beloved or not. Neither is citizenship status a factor in whether or not someone deserves to live. Some of us have forgotten this when making distinctions like “He was a citizen,” as if an American passport makes the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good more tragic.

The tragedy is that Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti are dead and their deaths were preventable and there will probably be little justice for them. The tragedy is that they were being human and humane and it did not matter. And that tragedy is compounded by the fact that in 2025, we know, 32 people died in ICE custody, and already in 2026 there have been at least eight deaths related to ICE enforcement. ...

... People often misunderstand nonviolent protest. It is not merely eschewing violence. It doesn’t mean that we are silent or that we are not angry. Instead, nonviolent protest means, among many things, that we understand who we are fighting. We know that nothing will reveal who they are more clearly than the contrast between their actions and ours.

... When our leaders are feckless, and amenable to criminality so long as that energy is directed toward the people they deem undesirable, it’s easy to lower our standards. It’s easy to decide that when in a dystopia, we should act dystopian. It is easy to lose sight of who we are and what we stand for when we see federal agents acting with impunity and armed with instruments of war as Mr. Vance and Mr. Miller declare (though Mr. Vance has walked this statement back) that federal agents are afforded immunity to carry out their duties.

It’s easy to want vengeance instead of justice when we see that people are being terrorized, afraid to leave their homes because they have Black or brown skin. It’s easy, for example, to compromise on prison abolition so long as we can soothe ourselves with the knowledge that our enemies will suffer, too. These are difficult times, so we must make the difficult choice to be different, and to be better.

The Trump administration is fighting a war of attrition on America’s soul, but it has vastly underestimated the strength, endurance and conscience of the people against whom it is waging this war.

Let's be wary lest we become what we hate. 

Checking in on a National Park bookshop

Nestled under the Golden Gate Bridge next to the Fort Point historic site, the National Park Service runs a book and trinket shop to lure the many visitors who flock to the area. It's called The Warming Hut, a proper name for a place often wrapped in dense fog -- though not so often in winter as bright sun shone yesterday.

Since the MAGA wrecking crew took over, I've been watching to see whether their attempt to erase the true, messy, magnificent history of this state and country had yet prevailed in the book display. 

Last July, The Warming Hut displayed several shelves of both adult and children's books which explored the history and present conditions of which the regime is trying to keep us ignorant: lots of serious treatments of dispossession of California's natives, of Black soldiers, of looming climate change. 

By late September 2025, the adult books that offend MAGA had been pushed to a shelf in the corner, but they were still there. However, the children's section was still magnificent -- wildly diverse and clearly curated by some thoughtful employee who cared.

Yesterday, though depleted, the NPS is still selling books which MAGA would abhor. (Do they read? I shouldn't be snotty, I suppose.)

Here's the adult shelf, small but still there:

Meanwhile, the children's section is still imaginative, if not large as it once was:

Click to enlarge.

I'll check in again next summer and see how nuance, truth and complexity are holding up in this national park ...

Spring begins here in northern California

With apologies to my friends in the freezing south and northeast of the United States, around here in San Francisco, you can feel the change of season. These daffodils stuck up their heads through the weeds in our front yard.

Yesterday, we walked the beach; the sun broke through, surfers (in body suits) played in the waves, the breeze was friendly rather than freezing. 

It's often like this in early February here; we may well get a bit more winter, but we can feel the season is turning.

In the Christian tradition, this is the week of Candlemas. This festival day is a bit unintuitive to moderns: a mix of the ancient Hebrew ritual of presenting the new born male to the Jerusalem temple, the celebration of the new light (Epiphany) that the God-child brings, and northern European delight that the dark and snow is finally letting up. We are midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Daylight is noticeably longer. We can feel the cycle of life turning, if we are fortunate enough to be able to pay attention. Perhaps no darkness lasts forever ...