Kris Powell

Dem leadership: changing this is a difficult process, you fool. You rube. You utter infant. Give us between $5 and $50

Mamdani, wiping grease off his hands: So it turns out there's a switch on this machine that puts it into either orphan-shredding mode or free school lunch mode. Just had to flip it

Every day Mamdani comes out and is like "hey guys, I turned off the orphan-crushing machine. Literally just had to flip a switch. Took less than 5 minutes."

After decades of dem leadership pissing and moaning and fundraising about how complex an issue it is and how difficult the process is etc

Minnesota folks: if you know someone who needs a flight to MSP after being detained in Texas, standwithminnesota.com has collected donated SkyMiles to help them get home -- spread the word!

Read: They are going to lockdown prisoners to contain spread leaving them to suffer and spread to each with no access to healthcare or treatment.

FTR: Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, father board plane for Minneapolis after detention center release A federal judge on Saturday ordered that the pair be released.

Liam and his dad are finally free and on their way back home to Minnesota.

They never should have been kidnapped in the first place.

abcnews.go.com/amp/US/5-yea...

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

Also trying to parse all the emails that read like they were written by a concussed golden retriever I think I finally get why these guys are so enthusiastic about getting chatbots to write for them

And that's likely not even including the misspelled words search isn't finding!

Support Independent Journalism | GF

Georgia Fort's is chilling, and it's being overshadowed by the equally chilling arrest of Don Lemon.

A GoFundMe is being set up for Fort. In the meantime, you can support her work directly – without paying massive fundraising platform fees – through her website:

www.georgiafort.com/support

Here's an opportunity to support the other journalist arrested today; Georgia Fort, who will have far fewer resources available to her than Don Lemon.

The arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are a test for every MSM member with a platform. If you are not voicing your outrage at this blatant violation of the First Amendment, you are utterly discredited as a journalist.

ICE agents shatter window, leave 1-month-old baby, mother in car after Portland arrest Video shows federal immigration agents leaving behind an infant and broken glass after detaining a Guinean immigrant with no known criminal history.

Video shows ICE leaving behind an infant and broken glass after arresting a man with no criminal history.
“There was a car seat in the back... There were broken glass shards all over it... There was just this tiny peanut of a baby. He was crying.”
My latest: www.pressherald.com/2026/01/28/i...

A legal asylum-seeker who works at Chipotle and plays music at a church in Maine went missing. His pastor searched and searched, eventually finding his abandoned car with the keys on the floor.

ICE grabbed him. No criminal record. No explanation.

Best gas masks “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” AG Bondi asked.

my colleague @sarahjeong.bsky.social did some service journalism www.theverge.com/policy/86857...

An ICE agent covered head-to-toe in body cams, just thousands of tiny cameras, beating the shit out of an old woman. That's the bipartisan dream

The loneliness epidemic is OVER

finally a good dating app

A reminder that ICE hasn’t slowed down in Minneapolis at all.

Outside of Minnesota, it might feel like everything has changed since Alex Pretti’s murder. But ICE hasn’t actually lost any power and they’re continuing to terrorize our communities.

While independent bookstores are giving out free whistles, hosting protest sign making events, and donating proceeds to mutual aid, Amazon is *checks notes* providing technology that assists ICE in their terrorizing of communities.

Independent bookstores deserve your support. Amazon does not.

Its called compassion. And even if you can't personally change what happened, you can allow it to personally change you for the better. So, "it changes nothing?"
It changes you. And that's not nothing.

Reminder that, as of the latest reports, Liam Ramos is still in prison in Texas - now for 5 days.

His parents are legal asylum seekers with no criminal record.

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

Thank you, Minneapolis 😢❤️

Minneapolis is really laying a blueprint here that is telling a powerful story in organized, community resistance. Pay attention.

And he's still giving them an out by saying they're "untrained"!

Love the information you share, but I won't read Substack. So will just keep following you here.

Precisely. There are plenty of examples of righteous whiteous from the founding to now. It's why I don't buy the "they were a product of their time" bullshit. There were other white people... abolitionists, union organizers, civil rights workers who were also the product of their time

statistically speaking (and based off the articles) it is a near certainty that thousands of people currently patrolling the streets in Minnesota are people who did not immediately believe the warnings of the left 10 years ago. I see very little criticism of *them* on here

Heyo, Chicago pals: Quick note that the executive vice president of the Bob Loquercio Auto Group is vociferously defending the murder of Alex Pretti.

The auto group has 16 locations in and around Chicago, listed below. Please take your business elsewhere.

www.blautogroup.com/locations/in...