Steve Renfro

From a George Will article: "Someone should read to him “Lost, Not Stolen,” a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists). They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result. Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes. It would be reassuring to think that Trump believes nothing he says about 2020: Cynicism in the presidency is less disturbing than delusion. But reassurance is not plausible. As the poet William Blake wrote, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” https://lostnotstolen.org/.../Lost-Not-Stolen-The...

When Kristi Noem was — what? informed? reminded? — that her meeting with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un, which she reported in a prepublication manuscript of her memoir, never happened, this did not ruffle her sang-froid. She placidly said that the “anecdote” about the meeting would be “adjusted” before the book was published.

Today, Noem, a former member of Congress and former governor of South Dakota, is secretary of homeland security, under whose supervision Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates. There are, however, many reasons, beyond Noem’s nature, that multiplying millions of Americans do not and should not trust ICE.

Much has been said about the social ripples from what began with the introduction of the smartphone. Some consequences, such as instant access to torrents of information, are excellent. Others, such as addictive access to oceans of rubbish, are awful. But an insufficiently appreciated benefit of this device is that most Americans most of the time are carrying video cameras.

Governments around the world are using myriad technologies, some of them sinister, to surveil their populations. U.S. governments — national, state local — are not impervious to the temptation to overdo this. But today, a salutary effect of the ubiquity of smartphones is the surveillance of the government by citizens. Including those exercising their constitutional right to petition government for redress of grievances, and people watching other people do this.

Graphic journalism can change the world. It did so in May 1963, when Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, used body-slamming fire hoses and snarling dogs against young Black civil rights demonstrators. The nation was appalled and, as important, embarrassed by photos and videos of what was being done in its streets by government.

Minneapolis is today’s Birmingham. Citizens with smartphones are supplementing journalists in gathering facts. It is infuriating, yet grimly sublime, that the current national administration, which will not stop banging on about how it is restoring America’s greatness, is incessantly embarrassing (about Greenland, vaccines and much else). The administration requires an addition to the typologies of government: loutocracy.

For a glimpse of what government of, by and for louts looks like, find on the internet the video, taken by a citizen in Minneapolis, in which a participant in the excitement of a melee — tear gas and other instruments for combating citizens — exclaims: “It’s like ‘Call of Duty’! So cool huh?” “Call of Duty” is a video game, away from which some new agents were perhaps lured by the signing bonuses, some up to $50,000, that have fueled the agency’s breakneck expansion.

Policing is a hard, dangerous profession. Done well, it demands of its practitioners discipline and judgment, and deserves from society a respect approaching reverence. The current administration, by erasing the distinction between police work and military operations — by allowing marauding ICEmen to pose as police — has grievously wounded the dignity of policing.

This is unsurprising. In a July 2017 speech to a law enforcement audience, President Donald Trump urged police, “don’t be too nice” to suspects taken into custody. The International Association of Chiefs of Police responded tartly:

“Managing use of force is one of the most difficult challenges faced by law enforcement agencies.” They “develop policies and procedures, as well as conduct extensive training, to ensure that any use of force is carefully applied and objectively reasonable.”

Trust, including trust in government, is the glue that gives successful societies the cohesion requisite for collaborative dynamism. It is calamitous when government forfeits the public’s trust. But when, as today, such forfeiture occurs, assume the worst.

Today, it is more than prudent, it is good citizenship to assume that everything ICE says, and everything the administration says in support of its deportation mania, is untrue until proved to be otherwise. Or, as Noem might say, until it has been “adjusted.”

Some administration louts have said that the most recent (as of this writing) person killed in Minneapolis by a federal officer was a “would-be assassin” and, of course, a “domestic terrorist.” Because Republicans control congressional committee gavels, and because today’s president controls congressional Republicans, there will be no oversight of ICE’s rampages. The Senate, which disgraced itself by confirming Noem and others unqualified for Cabinet positions, is especially unlikely to suddenly acquire the inconvenience of a conscience.

So, expect more killings, and more political smearing of the victims. That ICE’s disgraces will continue is, in its revolting way, a promise kept: loutocracy.

If you are conservative or still worship at the altar of trump, please read this and pay attention. It was written by George Will, one of the traditional conservative columnists who has been around for decades.

Click/tap on the caption, and the article should open for you. I "gifted" it from the Washington Post, meaning you shouldn't be confronted by a paywall.

I like this paragraph the most:

@GeorgeWill: "Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement. ... The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself"