Yet another atrocity of the regime

They keep thinking of further ways to punish people violating, or existing, outside their picture of what America means. I had not thought of this one -- but of course...

Jill Filipovic reports: 

As part of its strategy of arresting and warehousing immigrants in abhorrent conditions which are leading to illness and even death, the Trump administration is grabbing up pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children from across the country and shipping them off to Texas so that they can’t get safe and legal abortions — and where they also don’t get adequate medical care.

This is an administration rule: If an undocumented child is pregnant, she goes to a single South Texas shelter in San Benito, where abortion is outlawed and where she will be hours away from the large hospitals that have the kind of specialized obstetric care that pregnant girls need. The girls are being sent to Texas specifically because Texas bans abortion, and moving them there means that they won’t be able to end their pregnancies. 

There are reportedly more than a dozen pregnant girls currently being held at this center. Before this policy was put into place, pregnant children who were in the US illegally and without a guardian would be sent to trained foster families or specialized facilities; not anymore. The directive came from Angie Salazar, the director of refugee resettlement, but was pulled directly from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan. ...

Filipovic -- rightly I think -- characterizes what is happening here as rape, the state repeating what has already been done to these children.

... after having control over every aspect of their lives stripped away, from where they live to what has happened to them sexually, the Trump administration is committing what I would qualify as tantamount to a second rape: Saying, just like a rapist does, your body is not yours, and I will do with it what I want.  

The girls' story escaped into the mainstream because even employees of the Office of Refuge Resettlement under the Trump administration understood they were being part of something very wrong. The plan to ship pregnant migrants of any age to Texas where abortion is outlawed was part of Project 2025. 

Any atrocity to ensure women have no control over our bodies ...

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.  

Sudan and us

Erudite Partner has attempted something nearly impossible in her latest article for the aggregation site, TomDispatch: she's tried to alert us to the ongoing agony of the civil war in Sudan where massacre and atrocity are the seemingly unending reality. 

This horror is not in front of us every day. Our media have pretty much given up on making it salient. This conflict is complicated; the warring parties include both local combatants and meddling foreign powers. There's a racial element, Arabs fighting Black Africans. For once, our own country is not the most significant international interloper. Yet as a result of Elon Musk's chainsaw to USAID, Donald Trump killed off our country's contributions to relief efforts. Millions of Sudanese are displaced; millions are without homes or livelihood. Millions are starving and hundred of thousands of women and children are dying in refugee camps.

And the trajectory in Sudan (and Algeria and Egypt) where militaries with their own agendas fight it out to the detriment of the civilian society should point to a warning to us all. This is what happens when a social order breaks down and the men with guns take what they can grab.

Displaced people take rest on the road from Darfur to Chad, where hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees have fled since the onset of the war. | 2025 © Jérôme Tubiana/MSF

When I looked for photos of Sudanese refugees to illustrate a post about the E.P.'s article, Surprising Lessons for the U.S. Resistance to Trump In Sudan’s Recent History, I looked for pictures from international aid agencies. Those are the westerners who are there alongside the Sudanese; the agencies want us to see what the world is ignoring. Seeing the pictures left me weepy -- but not because the horrors were so awful or novel. I've seen all too many pictures of maimed and starving children. But because images from Sudan, images of Sudanese women and children, seem so terribly beautiful. I've included one here.

The rich world has turned away from all this suffering. Does our willing ignorance bode well for the endurance of all our own societies? Modernity means we can see if we choose; how numb have we become?