The Battle of Minneapolis
A News Link Round-Up
Editor’s Note: Since I’m commenting on politics mostly on my campaign site now, I’ve decided to create a mechanism for an occasional round-up of news link to be posted here, probably once a week, because there really is an awful lot going on—and there is some great reporting on it.
This first one will be longer than most to soak up some of the backlog.
—RWT
The Battle of Minneapolis
A Government Of Influencers, By Influencers, For Influencers
[T]here’s no bigger name in Minneapolis content at the moment than…Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old right-wing influencer whose video on supposed fraud at Somali-American daycares went viral in late December. While many of Shirley’s claims have been debunked, and there are obviously other reasons daycares might not be willing to open up and allow Shirley to inspect their children, the controversy provoked by his video was used by the Trump administration to justify the surge of ICE agents in the city. …
There are some precedents for MAGA social media craze over Minneapolis. The protests and counterprotests last year outside the Portland ICE facility that eventually earned Sortor a trip to the White House serve as the blueprint here, with right-wing influencers putting their bodies on the line in attempts to get explosive video that could double as an excuse for the Trump administration to intervene.
Donald Trump Has Built a Clicktatorship
Getting silenced on X is, and I realize how absurd it sounds, the worst professional fate a Trump official can face. It signals that Bovino is no longer a player in an administration that has, from top to bottom, merged a social-media-first worldview with authoritarian tendencies. I like to call it the clicktatorship. Political appointees in the clicktatorship are not just using online platforms as a mode of communication. Their judgment and decision making are hyper-responsive to what’s happening on the far-right internet. They view everything as content.
No one better exemplifies the clicktatorship than the president himself. Trump routinely makes policy announcements via social media. Consider when, in August, he attempted to fire the Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook on Truth Social. When a government lawyer was questioned by the Supreme Court on the lack of an appeals option for Cook, he suggested that Cook could simply have made her case on Truth Social. In the clicktatorship, due process is reduced to the right to post.
The Republicans’ veneration of the Founders is particularly rich at the moment because, of all the abuses England heaped on the colonies, nothing angered them more than the Crown’s deployment of soldiers on city streets—and the streets of Boston in particular. Anger, resentment, and violence simmered in Boston for years before the Boston Massacre in 1770. The Declaration of Independence Trump hangs in his office came six years later, followed by the American Revolution, then the birth of the United States.
The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The Founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about…exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
“The Courts Are Dead.” An interview with a fired immigration judge.
“Let me get right to the point. I can tell you that today, the immigration courts are substantively dead. They are completely absent of due process. Of fair hearings. They exist only for show, and in name only. Period. The courts are dead. If you’re concerned about doing due process of fair hearings, they’re gone. So we can start from that position.”
(Those last two are from Radley Balko, and yes, you should be reading him.)
