Association for Political and Legal Anthropology / PoLAR journal

MPD body cam footage from DOGE raid on US Institute of Peace RECEIVED 😎

I'll be watching and sharing news and takeaways in the coming days. Stay tuned!

New addition to the bookshelf (hi randy)

LLMs as contrast dye for where resources are missing.

Because she was working with a federal task force, she was considered a federal officer, and thus protected by SCOTUS rulings making it all but impossible to sue federal cops, even for egregious abuse.

Now consider what this means for Trump's immigration thugs.

Democrats had two years to fix this.

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus Advocacy group reports commanders giving similar messages at more than 30 installations in every branch of the military

EXCLUSIVE: At more than 30 installations, U.S. commanders told troops the war on Iran is a Christian war.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been “inundated” with more than 110 complaints.

One NCO said they were told the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus…

Remember that lying in the service of Trump is a sacrament to Trumpers so no blowback for this.

BLUMENTHAL: Is the agent who shot Ms Martinez sill on the job?

NOEM: Our officers conduct operations every day-

B: Is he still on the job carrying a gun?

N: I dunno

B: Would you agree he shouldn't be?

N: I'll get back to you

B: I think Americans would find it absolutely terrifying if he is

Meeting on U.S. Measles Status Is Delayed Until November The decision to revoke the country’s elimination status would now likely come after the U.S. midterm elections, experts noted.

Nothing to see here

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/w...

She was arrested for standing up during the SotU and this is the first I’m hearing of it? 🫠

Questioned by Durbin, Noem wouldn't retract her false claims that Alex Pretti and Renée Good were domestic terrorists, but didn't repeat the claim and claimed she got that information from "agents on the ground," ie blaming them for the lies.

“The Intern in Charge”: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention One year out of college and with no apparent national security expertise, Thomas Fugate is the Department of Homeland Security official tasked with overseeing the government’s main hub for combating v...

The Republicans seem to be prepping an argument that any domestic terror attacks in the aftermath of their Iran attacks will be the fault of Democrats for shutting down DHS funding, so I'd like to remind everyone of this appointment:

Hey, remember how we let a nazi near-trillionaire annihilate the US state capacity? I know it was a whole year ago, but it turns out that this has consequences beyond "murdering 14 million people by ending USAID" (which apparently no one cared about).

“The Intern in Charge”: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention One year out of college and with no apparent national security expertise, Thomas Fugate is the Department of Homeland Security official tasked with overseeing the government’s main hub for combating v...

Some questions that no one has asked: Why Kristi Noem put an inexperienced 20-something in charge of terrorist prevention.

www.propublica.org/article/trum...

At least 40 killed in Israeli strike on girls' school in Iran, state media reports The reported deaths are the latest in the region after the United States and Israel began its attack on Iran this morning.

11. Trump is acting like the Great Liberator. In reality, he’s justified more repression by an already repressive government. More than that, he’s undermining the credibility of dissidents. Who’s going to be seen as US allies after the US bombed a girls school?

www.thejournal.ie/iran-strike-...

How have crime rates in the United States changed over the last 50 years? Both violent and property crime are far below their 1990s peak, but some crimes see periodic rises.

Looking at the 2024 crime figures, it's absolutely insane how Trump, tech billionaires, and centrist pundits fooled everyone into thinking Biden had turned the U.S. into some Hobbesian hellscape.

50-year lows for violent crime, armed robbery, property crime. Second-lowest homicide rate.

'UNIMAGINABLE CRUELTY': Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointeee from NY, thrashes DHS' treatment of a man who came to the US at 9 as an abuse/neglect victim, has no criminal record and became a college grad.

"The laws of decency condemn such villainy." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Right after her questions about Pizzagate, Rep. Lauren Boebert during Hillary Clinton's House deposition on Jeffrey Epstein asked Clinton about the false Frazzledrip conspiracy theory, which has spread in the far-right over the years. www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mar...

214. The Court's (Selective) Impatience is a Vice The only theme uniting Monday night's twin grants of emergency relief is the Republican appointees' willingness to upend long-settled limits on the Court's power when, but only when, they *want* to.

As I explain via the latest “One First,” the only theme that unites the Supreme Court’s (unrelated) grants of emergency relief Monday night in the California transgender student and New York redistricting cases is what might be called “selective judicial impatience.”

And that’s *not* a good thing:

Texas AG Paxton Declares Therapists Affirming Trans Youth To Be Illegal And Child Abuse The declaration echoes his 2022 efforts to target parents of trans youth with child abuse, and may force conversion therapy on trans youth in the state.

1. This morning, Texas AG Ken Paxton just released a chilling new declaration:

Mental health therapists, counselors, and psychologists must cease affirming trans youth - using their name and pronouns - or potentially face child abuse charges and loss of licensure.

Its a horrifying escalation.

i had an uber driver in baltimore yesterday who used his theory that john hinckley was a patsy to segue into the conspiracies he's workshopping on who really shot charlie kirk if anyone wants to pay me to write up the interview, he was a white guy in his fifties so it's a matter of national scrutiny

Trump: The United States Munitions Stockpiles have, at the medium and upper medium grade, never been higher or better - As was stated to me today, we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons. Wars can be fought "forever," and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries finest arms!). At the highest end, we have a good supply, but are not where we want to be. Much additional high grade weaponry is stored for us in outlying countries. Sleepy Joe Biden spent all of his time, and our Country's money, GIVING everything to P.T. Barnum (Zelenskyy!) of Ukraine - Hundreds of Billions of Dollars worth - And, while he gave so much of the super high end away (FREE!), he didn't bother to replace it. Fortunately, I rebuilt the military in my first term, and continue to do so. The United States is stocked, and ready to WIN, BIG!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP 386 ReTruths 1.38k Likes 3/2/26, 8:56 PM

Trump insists the U.S. has plenty of munitions by writing “we have a virtually unlimited supply” and making us all think of the term forever war.

“Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies…”

He also refers to Zelensky as P.T. Barnum.

Some Incredibly Inconvenient Data For College Republicans Their khakis were pleated. I remember that much. It was a few days after George W. Bush somehow won re-election against John Kerry because John Kerry had read a book and enjoyed windsurfing and college Republicans at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus set up tables outside the grimy old student union, the one they tore down soon after and replaced with a soulless shopping mall food court. They handed out pamphlets and lobbed insults at students giving them the finger on their way to lunch. These college Republicans – all of them men, almost all of them whiter than me – were peacocking after Bush’s inexplicable 2004 victory, urging campus libs to abandon their politics and join the winning team. Post-9/11 politics had been good to these kids, rooting for the ultra-nationalist team, which kicked the ass of the empire management team in 2002 and 2004. > **Become a****Bad Faith Times supporter****today and get access to the BFT****discord community****, where we talk politics, movies, music, and other stuff. You can also****leave a tip****if you see fit.** I remember their smug smiles and the self satisfaction seeping from their pores. They could not be happier with the misery that surrounded them. They were an island of spiteful joy in an ocean of students wearing all-black to mourn a loss to the idiot boy king, who had been installed by friendly Supreme Court justices four years earlier. I wanted to throw my Taco Bell burrito at them, but I was hungry and had a five-hour block of classes coming up. So I ate the burrito and glared at the Bush freaks, who have – in the intervening years – surely logged on hard enough to learn to hate the former president as a RINO and a traitor to the white race, things of that nature. One of the pamphlets those college Republicans handed out that day (mostly unsuccessfully) was about their rights being denied on campus. All these years later I can’t remember the exact wording. I do remember this: They wanted more “pro-America” professors at the university to balance the “anti-American” educators indoctrinating us with the truth about American imperialism at the turn of the century. Bad Faith And The Creation Of American Thought CrimeHigher education officials fell for the right’s bad-faith bullshit. Now students are paying the price.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Keeping the White House, having a Supreme Court majority, holding congressional majorities, gaining power in the states: It was not enough for these kids. The right wing’s domination of the country’s culture and politics in the years after the 9/11 attacks would not suffice. Through sheer will these young men kept up their grievances and maintained their victimhood in the face of the totalitarian leftist ideology they believed existed on Maryland’s campus. These boys once heard a professor express skepticism about the all-encompassing Bush administration psy-op that rushed the nation into a catastrophic war and they said look, we are being persecuted for our beliefs. Maybe they heard a sociology professor say being gay was not in fact a personal choice (the zoomers may not remember this discourse) and they said, look, we are being persecuted. Perhaps an economics professor said flatly that progressive taxation was a viable system for maintaining a capitalist society. The persecution has never been so blatant, so severe for these boys, who must remain victims of a merciless left-wing system or their entire politics would fall to pieces. From their dorm bunks at night, these boys cry out for a flat tax. Remembering those campus Republicans, recalling their Vance levels of smugness and their pleated khakis, I was surprised to see today’s college right wingers say they don’t feel persecuted for their shitty politics. In fact, hardly any college student believes they’re being persecuted, according to a national survey released this month by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup, an organization that recently stopped tracking presidential popularity because they’re afraid of the most unpopular president in history. Just 3 percent of student respondents – including 2 percent of self-identified Republicans – say they “feel they don’t belong on their campus due to their political beliefs.” It’s the kind of data that makes one think the entirety of the right’s grievance culture is made up. You might call this unreality if you are a faithful Bad Faith Times reader. Well, well, well, if it isn't Actual Reality. Almost three quarters of college Republicans in US say their school does an excellent or good job protecting campus speech. That a lower rate of self-identified campus Democrats say the same never seems to make its way into our media's hysterical coverage of campus political environments. That so many elite universities with more money than god immediately and happily caved to the Trump regime in their 2025 takeover of those schools hasn't changed the tenor of this coverage, focused almost exclusively on the downtrodden right wing students complaining that they can't use slurs on campus without repercussions. Students who "identify with a political party are just as, if not more, likely than their peers to believe their own views are accepted on campus," according to the Lumina data. This polling, like every other measurement of American politics, is based on the idea that all politics are the same, that good and bad things are precisely the same thing. The political belief that immigrant families should not be thrown into the back of an unmarked van by masked government agents is the same as the political belief that masked men should, in fact, be able to violate the constitution every hour of every day and throw immigrants into the buzzsaw of a totally lawless deportation machine. These beliefs are treated as equal and opposite. If conservatives on college campuses do feel persecuted for their beliefs, maybe it's because their beliefs are bad and wrong. Maybe it's because their worldview is not compatible for a working representative democracy. Maybe you should get better politics and stop being such a shit if you don't want to be shouted down by people with good politics. It's one solution we should consider, anyway. It doesn't make you feel any better, I know, but you now have data to back up your well-founded and totally justified belief that the whole campus-conservatives-as-victims canard was made from whole cloth. Almost no one on America's college campuses feels persecuted for their political beliefs. Campus Republicans are not being herded into camps. They are not being disappeared by shadowy forces. That, sadly, is the fate of left-wing college students. The Trump regime's use of AI surveillance to persecute of college educators who refuse to tow the fascist line was always a solution in search of a problem. The ruination of lives and careers at the hands of the government and right-wing, billionaire-backed activists who want nothing more than a totalitarian fascist state – under the guise of academic freedom, naturally – was not done in service of political balance on college campuses, whatever the fuck that actually means. It has been done in bad faith to stop young Americans from buying into the foundational principles of the multiracial liberal democracy the right wants to annihilate. The American right wing's incessant crying about campus censorship was always an admission: They wanted to censor their cultural and political enemies, to place strict limitations on what their opponents could teach to young Americans with impressionable minds. The American right does not crave fairness or an equal playing field; it craves domination, it craves subjugation. Something as flimsy as reality – that 3 percent of college students feel put-upon for their politics – is not going to get in the way of that wretched little project. _Follow Denny Carter on_ _Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social_.

Right wingers on college campuses don't actually feel persecuted

America Needs to Prepare for Elon Musk Like He's a State-Sponsored Cyber Attack His anti-virtue approach: scramble, divide, conquer.

www.thefarce.org/america-need...

Woman sues Kenbridge, police after chief allegedly tipped off shooting suspect The town of Kenbridge and its police department are facing a lawsuit of more than $140 million.

A woman’s ex boyfriend, who is a cop, threatens to shoot her

Women are at the highest risk for being killed when they try to leave a relationship.

She calls 911 for help & the Police Chief WARNS the boyfriend instead.

Boyfriend opened fire on her car

We aren’t angry enough.

*eye twitch*

For months, @jacksonwryan.com has been looking into why so many video games sites have become full of gambling and casino stories, unusual author images, and, most recently, the use of AI. We've connected these sites to Clickout Media. Here's what we've learned.

After Detention, Families Stranded in Border Town Face Harrowing Journey Home Parents and children from a detention center in Texas found themselves dropped at a border town shelter with few means to leave.

After detaining children and parents for weeks, or months, inside Dilley detention center, ICE is dumping them at a shelter in Laredo, TX. They are often thousands of miles away from where they were arrested, with no money to get back home. THREAD (1/)
www.themarshallproject.org/2026/03/02/i...