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Crimean Roma (Çingene) were deported alongside Crimean Tatars. During World War II and nazi occupation of Crimea, Crimean Roma faced the threat of mass extermination as part of the Romani Holocaust. Most of the mass murders of Crimean Roma took place from 1941 to 1942.

Friends,

I received the following from Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri in the United States House from 1977 to 2005 and served as House Democratic Leader from 1989 to 2003, and Tim Wirth, who served in the U.S. House and Senate from Colorado from 1975 to 1993 and as the first U.S. Secretary of State for Global Affairs.

I have worked with both and know them quite well. Neither is an alarmist, but they did want me to help spread this alarm. Hence, I’m sharing with you what they wrote to me. (Research is from Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan NGO focused on fair elections.)

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Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these, and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture.

Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration but few have taken a step back and connect the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision or a single day.

On September 25, 2025, President [Trump] signed a directive called a National Presidential Security Memorandum known as NPSM-7 (titled ‘Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence’).

Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled “anti-American”, “ anti-capitalist”, “ anti-Christian” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”

No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism; NPSM-7 does it anyway. It tasked the FBI, the IRS and the Treasury Department with tracking the funding sources and supporters of organizations suspected of directly or indirectly facilitating political unrest, with no reference to the First Amendment.

Soon thereafter, the FBI organized a Joint Mission Center, drawing hundreds of personnel from ten federal agencies to identify and prosecute the targets of NPSM-7. The Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, subsequently testified [that there was] a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified that thousands of U.S. citizens and non-governmental organizations are now on a secret watch list tied to the Joint Mission Center.

Concurrently the Justice Department has opened grand-jury investigations and indictments aimed at officials of previous administrations including former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey.

The President’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly described political opposition as a “fifth column,” and Trump himself amplified this by declaring “Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all… But first, Barack Obama.”

On May 6, 2026, the administration’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy that names “violent left-wing extremists,” “anti-fascists,” and certain religious minorities as principal threats to the United States.

Bondi provided a Department of Justice operational order that included a five year plan for retroactive mining of data files and plea interrogations along with the requirement that financial donors be named. The Joint Mission Center uses its $12.5 billion dollar budget to do the targeting. The President’s lead lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel have preauthorized the use of domestic force.

Meanwhile the administration has appropriated $45 billion for construction of new ICE detention facilities, a 265 percent increase over previous years and more than four times the entire budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Tom Homan, the President’s “border czar” has overseen the proposal for the acquisition of over 100,000 detention beds above the current capacity of 70,000, with contracts for permanent mega-centers whose scale far exceeds anything an immigration processing operation would require. These are undoubtedly prisons for political prisoners, even as 1974 federal law prohibit the detention of American citizens without an act of Congress.

In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, U.S. forces have killed more than 200 people across nearly sixty strikes on small boats designated as “narcoterrorists” without indictment, trial or judicial review. The commander of U.S. Northern Command has said publicly he would “definitely” execute lawful orders to apply this same authority on American soil.

The White House has declined to rule out using lethal force against U.S. citizens designated as members of domestic terrorist organizations, while Trump has fired most of the Department of Defense officials responsible for overseeing the legality of military operations.

Trump is seeking yet more funding for what appears to be his private army of ICE and Border Patrol agents, to be deployed in numerous target states, at airports and at urban polling places in the states he lost in the 2024 election, where he has now begun to seize voter roles and ballots.

[The U.S. Senate recently passed a $70 billion supplemental funding bill for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The legislation is on track for an upcoming U.S. House vote. The funds aim to finance these agencies through 2029.]

[Another piece of the puzzle: Over the last year, the Justice Department has sought voter roll data from most states; sued those that have declined to comply; opened a criminal investigation into 2020 election results in Fulton County, Ga., a state Trump narrowly lost that year; and demanded ballots from the 2024 race from Wayne County, Mich.]

Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter roles, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents. These are among the many individual actions and plans of the “rolling coup” which is currently underway.

Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.

Why aren’t more Americans seeing this? Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial — we are not deploying the military domestically, we are not declaring an emergency over elections, we are not coming for citizens.

Congress, paralyzed and outnumbered, has not mounted a serious institutional response. Some press has reported stories about the pieces but not on the whole dangerous picture.

The first job of any coup is to make the recognition of it seem premature. That is the trap. By the time recognition is no longer premature, the moment to resist has already passed.

So what is to be done?

Congress must reassert its Article I authority over emergency powers, military deployment on U.S. soil, and the Office of Legal Council’s power to rewrite statute by memo.

Governors and state attorneys general must adopt the protective measures that civil liberties lawyers have already drafted to shield citizens, non-profits and election workers from NPSM-7.

Newsrooms must report the rolling coup architecture as a single big picture story, because that is what it is.

And each of us — in pulpits, in classrooms, in podcasts, in union halls, at work and around kitchen tables — must call this by its name out loud, while there is still time and there is still room.

Unless we begin to act with resolve, fortitude and clear-eyed commitment to our democracy, a future election will be lost and our democracy will likely be destroyed by a Presidential declaration of a national emergency and the subsequent implementation of the emergency measures, not authorized by law but drafted and implemented without any Congressional oversight.

We took the same oath of office that every member of the military and every federal officer takes — to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The obligation in that oath does not end when one leaves office. We believe that an awake America can stop what a drowsy one will not, but time is short and the challenge is urgent.

— former House Leader Richard Gephardt and former Senator Timothy Wirth

Lance Rosen 

Is There An Internal Coup Plot Against Trump Underway As We Speak? If There's Not, I'd Be Shocked--

A friend shared a link to Bob Reich's Facebook column today. It's a doozy, a big deal.

Reich published an open letter from former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt and former Democratic Senator Tim Wirth. Most of you likely heard of these two.

It's pretty stark. They wrote the article that I should have written, was actually planning to write, but didn't because I was blocking. And honestly I wasn't ready to start a project that might send me into a tailspin because it is just so much lunacy.

It is a thorough summation of the recent overt moves by the Trump regime to institute dictatorship, void election results, mass imprison dissidents under so-called anti-terrorism executive orders, to deploy the military, ICE, and CBP as an armed force to conduct a Nazi-style election interference (my description, not theirs) and to expand their illegal global wars in order to seize raw materials and territory, overriding Congress entirely.

My friend was sending me this post to make the point that those quoted in Reich's article were saying things similar to my own recent coverage.

Well, yes, and no. They addressed what is in the headlines. In my view it is what they omitted which is much needed as the subject of my response to my friend. It is not by any stretch a refutation at all of anything they warned about, all of which are more than valid concerns. These are both super-qualified and experienced people, but I believe they are holding back to avoid spreading panic. We here will be looking at the third dimension of what amounts to a 3-D Chess game.

These long time Democratic stalwarts, like many opponents of Hitler in the 1930's, underestimate Trump's capacity for destruction and evil. The fact that none of them use the words "madman" or "insane" to describe his recent actions and statements is a function of their blindspot. Which is...

...the word "nuclear" is nowhere in their open letter. They need to revise the damned thing and re-release it as an addendum. I have some things to say about this.

Here is the Facebook link to Bob Reich's piece.

Here is my response, written for everyone, not just my friend.

"Thank you, I just read the whole thing.

It is always very eventful when a dedicated non-alarmist sounds the alarm, especially when it's done in a clinical, analytic fashion by two former Democratic leaders who between them never had much in the way of drama or big political scandals tied to their names.

But I have to say that they sound like morticians doing a pre-autopsy on someone who isn't dead yet.

The part that's missing, is that Trump wants to use nuclear weapons vs Iran. I'm not going to let myself or others to block on this. Reich misses the boat on the most important thing, in the name of trying to not sound alarmist.

The oligarchy itself is in massive internal conflict, chaos, and division, right now. A faction is trying to figure out how to put down the monster of their own creation.

Unless we start there with this strategic gestalt, we are looking at the problems from the bottom up, instead of the big picture.

I believe there is a kind of internal coup plot to remove him in the near term before he destroys everything, including them.

This has happened before. Hitler was funded by powerful Wall Street families. The ones who caused the Great Depression with their looting of labor and stock bubble speculation.

They supported racial eugenics and they wanted to re-arm Germany to march eastward and break up the Soviet Union. Hitler crossed up the Anglo-Americans, and moved westward first instead, provoking war with England by invading Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France, as well as the north countries. So the oligarchy which installed him reached a blowback crisis point where they had to get rid of their own creation in order to survive.

Wall Street stopped interfering with FDR's economic and war buildup because their survival depended on it too. FDR himself was a part of the oligarchy, but was looked at by the old blue-blood families as a renegade who betrayed his class. They did nothing but obstruct him for eight years, just like today with MAGA, using a right-wing Supreme Court to throw up obstacles. When we were getting pulled into the war, the obstruction ceased. They had to let FDR take full rein, to mobilize the country to produce enough, to build enough, in order to wage a global conflict.

Everything the oligarchy has done since then was intended to undo what FDR did to beat the Depression and the Axis.

This is what they do. They create monsters and disasters, then have to step back to let the real leaders lead, if for no other patriotic reason just to save their own asses. Then when the beast is finally put down at great cost in human lives, they'll crawl out of their crypts and do the same thing again which created the last crisis.

As you have probably guessed, this response from me is for everyone and not just in response to your comment and share of Bob Reich's piece. I'm here to give a general briefing.

I'm looking past the mainstream media headlines at the dynamics that are driving strategic events. I don't just kvetch about what Trump does on any given day, bad as it is. There is a bigger picture.

I keep saying he is in his downfall stage, and it is going to be a total effing mess, but I fear that people are getting very little in the way of leadership or deeper analysis.

The headlines don't tell the full story. Human nature is telling the story. And we need to put more time into thinking about that, because that's how we will figure out what to do.

And then you actually look onto the research.

Kids do not generally hate learning or school. Quite the opposite. Children tend to enjoy learning and are naturally curious. It is exactly the fact that they are forced into school and into the rigid structure of it that often punishes curiosity but also is hostile towards the differences inherent in people, that kids hate it.

Kids do not naturally hate medical care. While medical care is scary at times, the fear usually comes from medical care scenarios being defined by adults overriding a child's agency, not explaining things to him, and otherwise being abusive, that makes children afraid of medical procedures. Additionally the way a lot of medical procedures go hand in hand with denying a child's reality ("Look, it is not that bad") tends to be traumatizing to children.

There have been studies done in this. If you explain a child - even a toddler - what you do and why, children will generally be a lot more okay with stuff like needles and simple procedures, and will even agree to necessary surgical interventions.

If you create a learning environment that allows more for self-directed learning, and involves less specific testing, most kids actually will enjoy learning.

i used to work at a Local Organic Produce store that's popular with the lefties in my city who are interested in food justice. i quit for a lot of reasons, mostly the boss, but something i will always remember is one of our suppliers coming in to drop off produce, being told her check wasn't ready, and her laughing and responding it didn't matter -- even a low bank account was more than enough to pay the migrants who picked her produce. i am not filling in any blanks here. she said this.

after quitting, this was a common story i told people about my time there. some then became annoyed at me, acting like i was a wokescold trying to undermine the store's "eco" mission with unrelated "ethical" concerns. but, like -- if food justice isn't for the people making food, who the fuck is it for?