Chris Kaiser

If America still had the rule of law, this would be the easiest prosecution ever, but we all know absolutely nothing will happen.

Gaza, south Lebanon, the West Bank, southwest Syria, this is the model that Israel wants across MENA: weak, permanently unstable, incapable of infrastructural reconstruction or administrative cohesion.

The practical upshot of this, if true, is that it allows the Trump administration to claim they have achieved regime change, call it a day, and go home if the campaign fails to produce other desired results (i.e. abandoning nuclear program, democratic regime change).

There's a real danger that members of Congress and the American public tune out this killing spree at sea as mere background noise.

Don't normalize or become inured to this deeply abnormal and lawless premeditated killing.

The administration has asserted a license to kill outside the law.

Thrilled that my article, Forgotten Framers: Black Conventions and the Second Founding, is forthcoming in the Stan. L. Rev. @stanlrev.bsky.social. It discusses Black Conventions held during Reconstruction and how these conventions are critical to a proper understanding of the 13, 14, & 15th Amdts.

Tonight at Law Dork: A new DHS memo lays out an aggressive anti-refugee policy. www.lawdork.com/p/exclusive-...

It is imperative that those who are elected to the next Congress understand that one of their principal jobs will be to reassert the prerogatives of the House of Representatives as the Article I branch of the U.S. government.

No Money for Murder. No Funding for Fascism. No Payouts for Pedophiles.

this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new. We are part of one civilization - Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.

The Rubio speech really is appalling, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should.

www.state.gov/releases/off...

Line graph that shows a blue line of # protests since Trump's 2nd inauguration surpassed, showing these to have exceeded 42k by the end of Jan 2026. A green line counts # of protests during the same time period in Trump's first term and just exceeds 10k.

Overall, we have tallied 4x more protests through Jan 31, 2026 than we had through Jan 31, 2018

cool, cool. so we are sort of like citizens, but not really?

We turned our neighborhoods into surveillance panopticons to help Amazon get a foothold in thousands of law enforcement agencies, chiefly because it wanted to cut its annual shrinkage from package theft by a few percentage points.

A crucial point bc, as Cedric Robinson reminds us, “the first attack is an attack on culture.”

Culture is the “common sense“ language through which power is mediated. It is the weakest point in fascist systems & disproportionately facilitates their collapse.

“the migrant has no rights the white man is bound to respect”

AWFUL news tonight. This blesses the “mandatory” detention in the 5th Circuit without bond (and little chance at habeas) of every undocumented immigrant who originally entered across the border, no matter how many decades in the past.

It will fuel ICE’s push to transfer people to Texas immediately.

Gläßel and Scharpf pointed to three mechanisms that reshape career incentives: purges, the erosion of legitimate accountability mechanisms, and signals of impunity for loyalists. These patterns that are clearly emerging in agencies like the FBI, and mirror other authoritarian settings they have studied. Once an agency is corrupted: officers hope that the regime will reward them for shouldering the burden of the regime’s dirty work. The rationale is simple: extreme loyalty and repressive commitment offer a path to advancement otherwise unavailable to them.

A while back, I wrote about the deprofessionalization of the FBI. Christian Gläßel and @ascharpf.bsky.social study how authoritarians build loyal security forces. They pointed to a sense of impunity being a key factor. That is what we are seeing now.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-fb...

But later that week, as F.B.I. agents equipped with a signed warrant prepared to document blood spatter and bullet holes in Ms. Good’s S.U.V., they received orders to stop, according to several people with knowledge of the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The orders, they said, came from senior officials, including Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, several of whom worried that pursuing a civil rights investigation — by using a warrant obtained on that basis — would contradict President Trump’s claim that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” who fired at her as she drove her vehicle.

Kash Patel, a podcaster selected because of his fierce loyalty to the President, told FBI agents not to investigate the details on Renee Good's shooting because it would contradict the President. Fact matter less than the King's opinion in a personalist regime.

Prosecutors Began Investigating Renee Good’s Killing. Washington Told Them to Stop.

You should read this. It is the type of detail that experts in authoritarian regimes see as telling.
In this case, state agents are offered impunity from higher ups, and the legal system is rendered inoperative as a mode of accountability.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/u...

In Va we’re protecting access to our courts, schools & rule of law.

Collaboration with ICE is antithetical to all.

HB1441 stops ICE from absorbing Va law enforcement

HB650/SB351 protect our institutions
@katrinacallsen.com @salimvasenate.bsky.social @lopez4va.bsky.social
@ireneforva.bsky.social

Remember the incident where DHS claimed officers shot a guy because he attacked them with a snow shovel?

Yeah. It didn't happen. They shot him through the door of his own home. And then arrested him. And then lied about it. Again.

And they almost shot some kids in the process.

if you're not willing to engage in serious political and institutional reform, you're not willing to engage in reform.

This is really good! This is what journalism is! I wish many media institutions would apply this same logic to their coverage of Gaza and the loss of hundreds of their colleagues there who were trying to do real journalism too! More of this!!

ICE now confirming that there is a measles outbreak at the Texas concentration camp where young Liam was held.

Here's my full 50-page indictment of CBP and ICE and decades of corruption, abuse of force, racism, and misogyny. I promise you — however bad you've ever thought it was, the full reality is even worse, deadlier, and more corrupt. This isn't a "Trump only" phenomenon:

Feds make 'unauthorized' use of license plate reader in Mountain View Mountain View police criticized the company supplying its automated license plate reader system after an audit turned up "unauthorized" use by federal law enforcement agencies.

Feds make ‘unauthorized' use of license plate reader in Mountain View

www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/f...

This is just insane. It’s only a matter of time before DHS kills another innocent person here.

(clip via MPR and @davidjbier.bsky.social on X)

Text from Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, "The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."

The reason why they're still pressing ahead is not because they have some secret plan, but the pretty classic Umberto Eco fascist-folly - because of their ideology they are "constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."

“If your state doesn’t help us we will be forced to murder its citizens” is an argument that only works on people who are already subnormal bootlickers.

"To continue calling the shooters in Minneapolis “law enforcement officers” is not a professional courtesy; it is an act of collaboration that validates the lie that power still flows from the consent of the governed." -- Kyle Varner