The Trumptanic hits the ICE berg

It was supposed to be Trump's big winning issue.  In mid-2024, 62% of Americans, including 53% of Hispanics, favored mass deportation of illegal aliens.  Americans generally support the rule of law, and having ten-million-plus people living illegally in the country more or less permanently while everybody else just sort of puts up with it was never going to be accepted.  And the cultural implications of mass immigration were probably a big part of why Trump won the election that year.  However out-of-touch Trump was on many other issues, he was solidly in the mainstream on this one.

Today his support lies in tatters and the issue is even turning large numbers of Republicans against him.

It started with the chaotic and incompetent way deportations were carried out under Trump.  Large numbers of people were being arrested, locked away in camps, and even deported without due process, never given a formal opportunity to prove their residence status.  Legal residents and US citizens were caught up in the dragnet. Agriculture and other industries were disrupted as Hispanic workers in many places stopped coming to work for fear of arrest.  Still, these abuses occupied a limited space in the mass public mind, overshadowed by the economic harm caused by Trump's tariffs and the damage to vital alliances wrought by his arrogant and blundering foreign policy.

Then Minneapolis happened, and the true nature of what was going on was laid bare.  The huge expansion of ICE, it became clear, was no longer just about deporting illegals, however ineptly -- it was about building up a force of Brownshirts to harass and intimidate political opponents.  ICE had been sent to Minneapolis to terrorize and punish a part of the country where opposition to Trump was widespread.  Agents were abducting people without any grounds for suspecting that they were in the country illegally.  It's reported that they mainly targeted non-white people, but pretty much anyone who aroused their dislike in any way could fall victim.  The poorly-trained agents routinely used unjustifiable violence, culminating in the murder of Renee Good on January 7.  ICE behaved like a foreign occupying army and was increasingly treated like one, as the citizenry mounted a massive campaign of organized resistance unprecedented in the US since, probably, the War of Independence era.

Trump and his administration flagrantly lied about the details of the Good murder, as video evidence quickly showed.  Despicably, they launched an "investigation" of the victim's wife rather than of the agent who killed her.  A leaked memo revealed that ICE planned to carry out home invasions without judicial warrants, in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.  At that point, at the very latest, any pretense that the rule of law was being upheld collapsed.

But it was the murder of Alex Pretti on January 24 that seems to have been the real turning point.  As with the Good case, Trump and his toadies lied about the details of the shooting and smeared the victim.  But their truly colossal mistake was to claim that Pretti represented a mortal threat to ICE agents because he had a gun on him (though he did not draw it, much less threaten the agents with it), and to imply that coming to a protest with a gun was evidence of malignant intent and possibly even illegal.

I read a fair number of right-wing activist blogs, and if there's one thing that arouses those people's passion, it's gun rights.  The NRA and other pro-gun organizations are among the most active and powerful political groups in the country.  And they're surprisingly consistent in their position.  In September, for example, Trump floated the possibility of restricting the gun ownership rights of trans people -- and gun-rights groups forcefully rebuked and opposed him.  The fact that trans ideology is overwhelmingly rejected by right-wingers made no difference at all.  The sanctity of gun rights trumps everything.

The moment it became apparent that the Trumpist defense of the Pretti shooting was taking the form of challenging his right to be armed, the gun groups turned on Trump, rejecting the official narrative and demanding an investigation, effectively siding with Pretti despite his clear left-wing activism.  Some Congressional Republicans, such as Massie, joined in their condemnation.

It feels like a dam bursting on the right.  Some are now rebelling against the barrage of Trumpazoid lies defending ICE's atrocities (more here).  A Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota has dropped out of the race because he can't support what ICE is doing.  Some Senate Republicans are demanding that Noem resign or be fired -- enough, perhaps, for an impeachment to succeed -- while National Review headlined its editorial "Fire Kristi Noem into the Sun".  These observations from a right-wing blog show the growing discomfort about ICE's behavior, while another warns that a domestic army of thugs unconstrained by law endangers everyone, not only the left.

It's already being reported that morale among ICE agents is imploding, partly due to "hatred from the public".  The loss of so much right-wing support will surely dishearten them even more.

Meanwhile, majority opinion has turned against ICE's tactics, while only half now support Trump on border enforcement -- and there hasn't been time yet for polling to incorporate the shift in Republican attitudes since the Pretti murder forced the gun issue to the forefront.

One shouldn't mistake this for a fundamental shift in Americans' views on illegal aliens.  What most of us wanted, and I believe still want, was a humane removal of those who are not supposed to be here, in accordance with law and due process, and allowing time for the economy to adjust.  That will not change, and coddling illegal migration will continue to be a problem for Democrats even after Trump is gone.  But Trump's ham-fisted brutality, his use of illegals as a pretext to create an internal army of lawless thugs to terrorize opponents, and his disdain for the one part of the Constitution most sacred to the right wing, have completely blown the issue on which he started out with the broadest national support.

Image round-up for 27 January 2026

More pictures from my collection -- click any image for full size.

[For the link round-up, click here.  For the "rise of Amelia" post, click here.]

Bremen, Germany

Bordeaux, France

Siena, Italy

Lake Baikal, Russia

Ghent, Belgium

Apollo 17, 1972

Beirut, Lebanon

Pärnu, Estonia

Pompeii

In Hell, there are no ad blockers

The rise of Amelia

Something strange, wonderful, and purple is stirring in the land of my ancestors.  This really is a good one -- a clumsy attempt at indoctrination by a stodgy, repressive, scolding government has backfired so perfectly as to create a powerful inspirational meme for the resistance.

(Note:  Some of the following video material is "AI"-generated.  I'm not endorsing that process -- it's included because it's part of the phenomenon this post is about.)

The UK government funded the creation of a video game called "Pathways" intended to help indoctrinate young people with what those now in power consider to be acceptable political and social opinions.  The villain of the game is a character called "Amelia" -- a young "goth" woman with purple hair and a short pink dress, often seen holding a Union Jack (British national flag).  Amelia expresses nativist, anti-Islam, anti-immigration views -- that is, thoroughly mainstream views that many (probably most) British people also hold, but which the current political establishment disapproves of.  The goal of the game, as set up by its creators, is to avoid being led astray by Amelia and her "wrong" opinions.

Yes, it really was that clumsy and pathetic.  The wonderful part is what happened next.  Young gamers adopted Amelia as a kind of mascot, a personification of the natural feelings and attitudes which she represents in the game and which the finger-wagging bureaucrats were trying to scold them for.  The meme rapidly spread across the nativist resistance more generally.  This video by eccentric culture critic "Doctor Disaster" tells the story well:


It's in the nature of humans that strong emotions like loyalty and passion are more easily felt toward an individual than toward an ideology or an institution.  Perhaps an imaginary person makes an even better focus than a real one, since she exists purely as a symbol for the movement, and can never fall prey to human failings like hypocrisy or scandal, or betray the movement, or try to dictate what individuals do, as a flesh-and-blood leader can.

Here are some more examples of how the resistance is making use of the character:




The meme even appears to have spread to Japan:

If you know anything about the suffocating miasma of political correctness and woketardia which has blanketed western Europe for what seems like forever, you can imagine what a breath of fresh air this is.  Unfortunately I don't think something similar could happen in the US.  We're too bogged down in left-vs-right political thinking, which keeps people going round and round in the same old useless circles and never getting it.  I just hope that someday we'll break free from that.

Link round-up for 24 January 2026

Various interesting stuff I ran across on the net over the last week.

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Added link 1:  Be aware, heavy exercise (such as shoveling snow) in the cold can actually kill you, especially if you're a bit out of shape.

Added link 2:  Ongoing research by the Iran International news site now places the number of protesters murdered during the theocracy's crackdown at about thirty-six thousand.  In some cases the religious filth dragged away people being treated in hospitals and shot them.

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More snow and ice problems here.

It's the latest innovation in non-chemical weed killer.

Watch out for the camo cats.

This daring escape attempt didn't quite make it.

Jump onto the snow.

Your food is laughing at you -- or mad at you.

Here are some dogs with sticks.

The way to have fun with ice and snow is to get rid of it.

Hey kids, quit playing with your food.

I have caught a fish..... yikes!

What year is next year?  Ask "AI".

This is the Open Book fountain in Budapest.

See some interesting pictures from Pompeii here (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

Zero gravity causes people's brains to physically shift position inside their skulls, with unknown but probably bad effects.  Who knows what long periods in the abnormally low (for humans) gravity of the Moon or Mars would do.

We have an improved map of Antarctica below the ice, which suggests that the risk of melting ice raising ocean levels is less than previously thought.

South Korean researchers claim to have developed a spray that can close up wounds almost instantly.

A new mRNA cancer vaccine appears startlingly effective.

Gene therapy is successfully treating Huntington's disease in the UK.

India is planning to use miniature nuclear reactors to speed up its transition away from fossil-fuel energy.

The Artemis 2 rocket, soon to inaugurate an utterly pointless new series of manned missions to the Moon, may not be able to re-enter Earth's atmosphere safely.

Diet Coke isn't any unhealthier than water, at least for diabetics.

What kind of man obsesses about penis size?

Turn off the music, please.

If you're using "AI" summaries to follow the news, what you're getting is mostly rubbish.

If you eat canned tuna, read this.  There's some out there that's contaminated with an undetectable and deadly toxin.

If you have any of these seventeen browser extensions installed, get rid of them -- they're spyware.  I think "AdBlocker" refers to a specific program of that name, not to any and all ad blockers such as uBlock Origin.

Starlink has started stealing customers' data for "AI" training.

Your Ring camera is an ICE agent.

Congress just voted in favor of remote kill switches for cars.  I'm keeping my old car.

This classic movie scene is an important reminder for us all.

The Marsh family chews out Trump for bullying Denmark.

There is now an "AI"-equipped sex doll.  Just imagine all the interesting data about you that that could record and sell.

How on Earth are people dumb enough to buy things like door locks and flashlights that need an internet connection to work?  Far inferior to the old simple non-"smart" devices.

Tesla has taken the "safety monitors" (human emergency drivers) out of its robotaxis -- and put them in a second car following each robotaxi, to boost the illusion that the taxis are driverless.

The Ten Commandments are worthless bullshit.

San Diego Comic-Con says no to "AI" fake art.

Both political parties have embraced lunacy, and the voters are getting fed up with it.

Social Media idiots using "AI" have mis-identified the ICE agent who shot Renee Good.

The House has voted to sustain arts funding in defiance of Trump.

Lawsuits claim SpaceX managers ordered workers to not report serious injuries.

This was a perfectly fitting protest against "AI" fake art.

This month marks the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack.  All decent people must firmly condemn jihadism with no "but, however, on the other hand".

Young tech-bro types are giving up on sexuality, relationships, and fun in general to focus on glowing screens and dreams of money.  They're the next generation of shriveled souls.

We know what Martin Luther King Jr would be doing if he were alive today.

The resistance in Minneapolis is enormous in scale and not at all intimidated.  People are protecting vulnerable neighbors (which reminded me of a similar situation in another country years ago).

Here's how Minnesota is fighting back against the ICE invasion and federal overreach.  And here's video of yesterday's anti-ICE rally in Minneapolis.

The White House used "AI" to fake a photograph of an arrested protester in order to distort what actually happened.

There's an "AI"-generated fake image out there of the Renee Good shooting, designed to make it look like she was trying to run down the agent who shot her.  Expect more of this kind of thing.

As public opinion turns against ICE, Trump and Vance are starting to walk back their support for it a little.

This post claims that pro-ICE elements in Minneapolis are using decoys to distract the resistance from actual ICE operations.  Has anyone else heard of that happening?

Twitter has become a battleground for internal conflicts on the right.

Several critical House Democrats are standing up to the party leadership by voting to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt for ignoring a subpoena to testify against Epstein.  I thought that ignoring a subpoena was illegal?  Why have the Clintons not been arrested?

Elon Musk's xAI/Twitter/Grok/whatever is making it as hard as possible for victims of its "AI" fake nude image scandal (who may number in the millions) to get the images taken down.

Stop stressing about Trump "canceling the elections".  That's not how things work.  And stop obsessing about things that can't happen.

The CEO of Microsoft is preparing to shift the blame when the "AI" bubble collapses.

A sociologist explains the psychology of ICE violence and tactics for de-escalation.

Trump threw yet another silly tantrum because he didn't like the results of a poll.  JFC this senile idiot is such an embarrassment.

New York city's pension fund many defy Mamdani's bigotry and continue to invest in Israeli bonds.

A serious-looking bruise on Trump's left hand raises renewed questions about his health status.  It's no longer really debatable that he has dementia, along with the other mental issues he's probably always had.

Democratic legislators in Michigan are trying to rein in predatory "AI".

Four hundred millionaires have signed a letter demanding higher taxes on the wealthy.  However, there are estimated to be fifty-six million millionaires in the world (and almost three thousand billionaires), so four hundred is not a very large proportion of these.

Elon Musk and Trumpist Republicans work together to enhance each other's power.

The time will come when ICE agents are held legally accountable for their actions.

2025 was a mass-extinction year for cryptocurrencies.

Will tiny cars sell in the US?  I'd think reasonable prices alone would be a big draw.  I'd consider one, if it came without all the spyware and stupid electronic crap all current cars seem to have.

This is the future the enemy wants -- intellectual life destroyed, billionaires ruling over society like feudal lords, and everyone else reduced to menial labor doing what the billionaires require.

Stop doing business with companies that pander to predatory perverts.

"AI" in the workplace still isn't raising productivity and can't do anything reliably, but the hypesters just keep doggedly making dramatic predictions for how it will transform everything in the future.

The Supreme Court may be the last hope to stop election-rigging in California.

The courts keep slapping Trump down in his campaign against wind farms.

Requiring a man to get a pregnancy test is utter gibbering lunacy.  No amount of doubletalk and word-games will ever convince voters otherwise.

"AI" in schools is stunting children's development.  The future will belong to the countries that do the best job of keeping this shit out of their schools.

Canada is studying guerrilla insurgency tactics to be used in case of a US invasion.

These nutcases need to stop making ridiculous comparisons.  A man being told he isn't a woman is not the Holocaust.

Dutch students were forced to live alongside migrant refugees to help them integrate.  The result was a wave of rapes and assaults.

Polish citizens have donated over $700,000 to help Ukrainians through the winter, as Russian attacks cut off electricity.

These people are nasty.

People in Latin America are abandoning Catholicism in droves.  Incredibly, only 46% of Brazilian adults now say they are Catholic.

A UN representative says the number of protesters massacred by the Iranian regime may be even more than the twenty thousand estimated earlier.

Many Iranians are pinning their hopes on a US military strike against the regime.  Unfortunately it increasingly looks like Trump will do nothing, breaking his promise to the Iranian people as he has broken so many others.  Nevertheless, David Petraeus believes the regime is dying.

Takaichi's popularity in Japan remains around 70%, reflecting the nationalist and populist shift of the Japanese public in the face of the Chinese threat.

China's already-disastrous birth rate is still dropping despite the regime's increasingly frantic efforts to increase it.  In the long run the country's superpower aspirations are doomed.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a Lone Animator video on Lunar livestock, and the Greenland crisis.

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When Trump backed down on Greenland, he claimed that there was a "framework of a future deal", implying that his antics would still bear some fruit someday.  It's highly unlikely that any such framework exists.  Someone managed to explain to him that an all-out economic war with Europe would mean the US getting its ass kicked, and he had to come up with something to save face when he backed down.

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Americans' struggle against bullying, thuggish Christian extremism (often supported by the government) is mirrored by Europeans' struggle against bullying, thuggish Islamic extremism (often supported or at least coddled by governments).  As is increasingly the case these days, the "left" and "right" labels are irrelevancies which only block understanding of reality.  Our fight and theirs are much the same.

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I have said for years that the left should stop claiming (indeed, gloating) the US is going to become majority non-white in a few decades.  First, that's not going to happen.  Second, a lot of voters heard the claim and believed it (right-wingers call it "the great replacement"), and consequently millions voted for Trump who would not otherwise have done so.  I doubt he would have won, even in 2016, without that factor.

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How enshittification works:

The Greenland crisis

Trump's sudden eruption of befuddled neo-imperialism toward Greenland has the potential to be the most damaging episode of either of his terms as president, given its potential to isolate the US from NATO, divide the West, and trigger a devastating cascade of economic retaliation.  Pursuing this would benefit only the evil trinity of Russian imperialism, jihadism, and China.

In a real conflict, the US holds fewer cards, and Europe holds more, than Trump believes.  Europe's (the EU, UK, and other west European nations) holdings of US bonds and equities are twice as large as those of the rest of the world combined.  A serious selloff would cripple the US government's ability to keep financing the national debt, and do other serious damage to the US economy.  There is also Europe's "anti-coercion instrument" which would, if triggered, target a wide range of US economic interests.  The US has no equivalent economic leverage over Europe.  Even Trump's threatened 10% or 25% tariffs against European imports would, according to the Fortune link above, have little impact on Europe, and would also marginally increase US inflation.

France has been at the forefront of demanding strong economic retaliation if Trump doesn't back down on Greenland, and as of Tuesday Germany has joined it in doing so.  These two countries, the two largest economies in the EU, dominate the bloc.

And aside from what governments may or may not do, Danish consumers are organizing a boycott of US products in retaliation for Trump's threats to Greenland, much as Canadians did after he started threatening to annex their country.  If this boycott spreads across western Europe -- a vast market for US exports -- it could seriously impact the US economy.

What constraints are there on Trump within the US?  There are reports that US military leaders are trying to "distract" him from planning an attack on Greenland, but that's unlikely to work for very long, given his obvious obsession with the idea.  I don't know whether they would disobey a flat-out order from him to invade Greenland, but I wouldn't count on it.  Last week several Senate Republicans vowed to prevent him from taking over Greenland by force, and there have been claims that many Republicans in Congress would support impeachment if Trump actually invades Greenland.  This is not good enough.  Once an actual invasion had begun, it would be too late to prevent terrible damage to NATO.  If the Republicans want to prevent disaster, they must join with the Democrats in impeaching and removing Trump now.

Even aside from Trump's threats about Greenland, there are more than adequate grounds for doing so.  The gross ICE violations of core Constitutional rights in Minnesota, and Trump's repeated assertion of powers which the executive branch does not legally have, violate his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.  He has accepted numerous gifts and payments that clearly qualify as bribery, a crime specifically mentioned in the Constitution as deserving of impeachment.  Actually removing Trump would require the votes of twenty Senate Republicans alongside all forty-seven Democrats, far from a sure thing even in the event of an invasion.  Without enough Senate votes for actual removal, impeachment would be a waste of time, merely empty posturing and message-sending.  But if twenty Senate Republicans are at last ready to fulfill their duty under the Constitution, then the time to act is now, not after the planes and missiles are already flying.

Trump's recent message implying that he's making a fuss about Greenland because he's mad about not getting a Nobel prize is just the latest in a string of petty, whiny fits of temper more suited to a toddler than to a national leader.  Over the last year he has lost almost all self-restraint about venting such absurd tantrums, a sign of his now-undeniable advancing dementia.  One could make a serious argument that he is literally insane.

As to the legal and practical status of Greenland, Trump is wrong in saying there are no written documents supporting Denmark's sovereignty over it.  The US recognized that sovereignty as part of the 1916 treaty covering the US purchase of the Danish Virgin Islands.  It is also untrue that Greenland under Danish rule is defenseless against Russian or Chinese attack.  Denmark is a member of NATO and any attack on Danish territory, including Greenland, would legally obligate the US and the rest of NATO to come to its defense.  And the US already has a military base in Greenland, as it has bases on the territory of many other allies.

Already, Trump has threatened and insulted a loyal ally and fellow democracy which fought alongside us in Afghanistan, and he has done irreparable damage to our relations with Europe; there will be no "back to normal" in trans-Atlantic relations even after he is gone.  It is long past time to remove him from the office of which he has proven himself so pitifully unworthy.  The only question is whether Congress can finally find the bipartisan will to do so.

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Boycott campaign against US goods in Denmark:

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