Miles O'Briens Ghost

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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:

Q: So you're not pulling back in Minnesota?

TRUMP: No no. Not at all.

This has generally been the response whenever I've asked military people to review domestic police raids. But the stuff we're seeing from ICE and Border Patrol is especially bumbling and amateurish thuggery.

🚨CAUGHT ON TAPE: a clip going viral shows Greg Bovino’s orders to ICE agents in Minnesota, saying “this is OUR fucking city” - and pushing mass arrests. He promises “trailers of that shit,” meaning tear gas.

This is why people are dead. Share this everywhere.

#ICEoffOurStreets

DOW JONES - Home Depot has laid off 800 workers associated with its corporate headquarters, part of an effort to boost the company's speed and focus more on its frontline workers.

$HD

Trump hung a photo of himself alongside Vladimir Putin inside the White House.

If this is true, it’s staggering. You don’t outsource sensitive Pentagon IT to engineers sitting in China and call it “efficient.” Cost savings? No- that’s a national security self-own. Oversight failed, and it needs fixing fast. #CyberSecurity #NationalSecurity #China
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This giant ICE Army they are building this year is also likely to be at polling places during the midterms in heavily Democratic precincts with the excuse being that they are looking for “illegals trying to vote.”

The president of the United States had his Justice Dept. raid an election office and seize ballots in order to cast doubt on an election he lost. Yet, this is treated by legacy media as just another normal day.

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It is conventional wisdom that the Washington Post's current death spiral and was caused by the Harris endorsement fiasco. I actually think it was these endorsements in January 2025.

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Congress could stop this if they chose to do so.
Congress has a responsibility to uphold the constitution.
Impeach and remove the traitor pee resident, who continues to commit crimes and encourage others to do so every day.

TWO SHOOTERS. Not just a lone dumbass in a panic, poorly trained, altho a gun expert claims they were running with fingers on triggers, so they are indeed lacking any real law enforcement skills. Taught to gun people down like it’s their Call Of Duty, the video game they gushed on afterwards,

Kristi Noem: "Everything I've done, I've done at the direction of the president and Stephen"

Seth Abramson (@sethabramson) No American has to wonder what fascism looks like up close anymore. You are in it.

substack.com/@sethabramso...

🎯🎯🎯🎯

Once upon a time, a white liberal man who claimed to love me told I was being “hysterical” when Donald Trump won and forwarded me articles about why he couldn’t do things he was already doing.

I no longer talk to that person. They refused to see their own privilege.

The end.

JesusFreakingCongress posted: Just so we're clear... The trump admin has officially [also unoficially] stripped away your: 1st, 2nd, 4th, & 5th Amendment rights. Free speech gets you assaulted. Legal gun ownership treated as a death sentence. Homes can be broken into whenever they want. Access to lawyers is now dictated by the government. The Constitution is being dismantled in real time.

He & his cabal are certainly ACTING like these rights mean fuck all.

Hey, I’m fine with granting social amnesty to any Republican who says “I’ll never vote for Trump again.” But they’ve gotta mean it.

two cartoon characters standing in a kitchen with the words it 's funny because it 's true above them ALT: two cartoon characters standing in a kitchen with the words it 's funny because it 's true above them

Late night talk show host Seth Meyers had this gem in his monologue Monday night:

Seth Meyers: “President Trump accused Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey yesterday of ‘inciting insurrection,’ which means they could each be facing up to four years as president.”

I call them the TRUMP/EPSTEIN FILES in all my posts. Kinda like the Trump-Kennedy Center but more accurate.

I mean we know there is Video and Audio recordings...so I mean it's pretty bad.

I don’t think we should make concessions to the Masked Murderers Guild of America. I don’t think we should compromise so the Masked Murderers Guild of America stops using kidnapped kids from schools as bait. I thought this was already illegal. The Masked Murderers Guild of America should not exist.

Words & Phrases Apparently, Trump wants to erase the 4th and 2nd Amendments

Kash Patel falsely stated on Sunday, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.” That is a lie. Minnesota has a concealed carry law that gun owners do not lose when they attend a rally.
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Today’s retreat is absolutely an attempt to take pressure off of Congress to rein in ICE so that a funding package can get through.

That pressure has been effective. We can celebrate Minneapolis’ win but we need to keep the pressure on. They’re not going to stop forever.

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.

Greg Bovino sadly filling one steamer trunk after another with elaborate fashy overcoats, the teargas canisters he always has bouncing around on him like labubus, and dozens of "chest-belts." They will be shipped ahead of him as he prepares to return to his home, which is a men's size 10 boot.

The strongest qualification Kristi Noem had to build the kind of terror squad Trump wanted, was that she shot her own dog rather than take the time to train it.