More Sunday Male Beauty - Pt. 2

 

MAGA's Defense of Immigration Raids is Backfiring

While the Felon is seeking to make state terror and deliberate cruelty keystones of his regime as noted in a previous post, polling suggests that many Americans are rejecting the regime's propaganda and videos filmed by everyday citizens are exposing the fantastic lies and falsehoods disseminated by the Felon and his henchmen.  Indeed, the most recent New York Times polls shows that less than a third of Americans approve of the Felon's first year in office. The rejection of the Felon and his corrupt, brutal regime is particularly strong among younger voters, some of who helped put the Felon back in the White House.  While Fox News and its imitators are seeking to disseminate the regime's lies and ignore facts and evidence that contradict the lies, it appears that the effort is failing - likely even more so after another ICE murder in Minnesota where videos resoundingly document that the Felon, ICE Barbie and others are flat out lying and slandering the murder victim.  One can only hope that this unraveling will not only continue but accelerate. A piece at Salon looks at the right wing media's struggle to hide the regime's lies and the immorality that runs throughout the regime's policies.  Here are article highlights:

The [Felon's] Trump administration has thoroughly failed the conservative information ecosystem credited with elevating [the Felon] Donald Trump back into the White House. Right-wing media wanted pictures of dangerous criminals being arrested for mass deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead, they’ve gotten images of toddlers detained, a 37-year-old mother shot dead, an elderly grandfather dragged from his home and minor U.S. citizens injured and in trauma units. A now-infamous story of Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old in Minneapolis taken by ICE on Tuesday, is the perfect illustration of how fractured the media landscape has become in the age of Trump — and how the right’s hermetically sealed system is now undermining the administration’s deportation policies. 

To many Americans, the viral image of a child swept up in an enforcement dragnet is horrifying. Yet in the right-wing media silo, the reaction — if there has been any at all — is not concern but suspicion. Conservative outlets have insisted the story is a lie and are clearly exasperated by the widespread coverage of the child’s after-school arrest and transfer to a detention center over 1,300 miles away in Texas.

The most revealing aspect of the right’s current meltdown over anti-ICE protests is their confusion. MAGA world is flailing and sputtering, trapped inside a media ecosystem that no longer reaches reality. The result is a whack-a-mole defense of ICE that keeps collapsing under the weight of evidence, public outrage and even the testimony of people the right used to trust: cops.

When off-duty cops in Minneapolis revealed this week that ICE agents are stopping and handcuffing them, and even pointing guns at them, MAGA simply shrugged. Fox News made only passing mention. . . . . Meanwhile, the [Felon's] Trump administration’s lies have morphed beyond routine bureaucratic spin into wild, easily refutable fabrications. When DHS posted that one of their targets was “at large” and dangerous after they had smashed down doors and dragged a U.S. citizen into the snow half-naked, local journalists located the actual suspect in state prison within minutes using a public database. When immigration officers pepper-sprayed a vehicle with children inside as a family drove home from a basketball game, DHS posted on social media: “It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to violent riots” before deleting the post.

When they dragged Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen recorded telling agents she is autistic with a traumatic brain injury, from her car on the way to a medical appointment, a DHS spokesperson called her an agitator obstructing immigration operations.

How can anyone trust evidence produced by people who openly brag about their digital deceptions? Conservative influencers are nevertheless trying to explain away images of federal agents in masks pepper-spraying protesters in the face while pinning them to frozen pavement. Minneapolis has exposed something the right-wing media apparatus can’t spin away — and now their carefully constructed alternate universe is collapsing around them.

The administration’s credibility is shot. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino claimed on Tuesday that “everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law.” But ICE’s own training documents contradict that. A whistleblower revealed this week that agents are now entering homes without judicial warrants, using only administrative warrants they sign themselves. 

To be certain, there is a faction of Americans who want desperately to support Trump’s consolidation of power, and they have latched onto immigration because they believe — correctly, until recently — that it’s his strongest issue. . . . . But when you campaign on a promise of an unprecedented mass deportation, you eventually have to carry it out. And the brutality of executing it — masked agents, warrantless home raids and pepper spraying babies — is proving politically unbearable.

The Trump administration made a catastrophic miscalculation: They thought they could control the narrative through sheer force of lying. Now the cracks are showing everywhere. The great irony is that Trump’s 2024 achievement — expanding the Republican coalition — is being destroyed by his signature campaign promise of mass deportation executed with maximum cruelty.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good first exposed this fault line. In the immediate aftermath of her death, the Trump administration adopted an absolutist, no-apologies posture that was chilling even by American policing standards. Typically, when law enforcement kills a civilian, there is at least a ritual performance of solemnity: condolences and promises of an impartial investigation, along with an acknowledgment, however hollow, that taking a human life is a grave matter. 

Trump himself awkwardly admitted during a rambling press briefing on Tuesday that ICE “is going to make a mistake sometimes” . . . . But even this admission appears to be strategic, a softening of their rhetoric while maintaining the same brutal enforcement, all the while hoping Americans won’t notice the contradiction.

On Thursday night’s episode of CNN’s “NewsNight,” Jim Schultz, a former White House Trump attorney, conceded as much. “I think Republicans are losing the argument here because of the way it’s being conducted in the streets,” he said. “No doubt about it.”

The right built an impenetrable information fortress precisely to avoid moments like this. Conservative influencers, podcast bros and Fox News were supposed to form an unbreakable wall of narrative control. But the [Felon's] president’s polling collapse is stunning. 

Trump’s net approval among Gen Z voters has plummeted from positive 10 points in February 2025 to negative 32 points now, a catastrophic 42-point drop in less than a year, according to a New York Times/Siena poll released Thursday. These are the same young voters, especially young men, who helped carry Trump to victory by shifting 13 points in his direction from 2020. 70% of voters under 30 now disapprove of his performance as president. While Trump’s approval on immigration was split 50-50 among voters in March 2025, 61% now disapprove, including seven in 10 independents who say ICE has gone too far. 

Trump knows he’s losing the narrative. That’s why he announced he was revising a lawsuit against the New York Times over polling that showed only 34% of independents approve of his job performance, threatening that “fake and fraudulent polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense.”

The right-wing information barrier that protected Trump from political consequences is crumbling. The manosphere is fragmenting. He can sue pollsters and threaten to investigate whomever he wants, but he can’t make Americans unsee what’s happening in Minneapolis.

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

The Felon and ICE: State Terror Has Arrived

For years now, some "friends" and acquaintances have chided me for "over reacting" about the threat the Felon poses and for calling out the parallels between the Felon and his regime and Hitler's Nazi regime. Others have said they "don't want to talk about politics" rather than have serious discussion about immorality of these individuals who want to close their eyes to the deliberate cruelty - and now the murder of white American citizens -  of the Felon's regime and the hideousness of ICE operations. Still others parrot the regime's lie that those being swept up in ICE raids are "criminals" even though the vast majority of those being brutalized have no criminal records and instead are cooks, landscape laborers, domestic workers and simply those working to try to give their families a better life.  This failure to admit the ugly truth about the Felon and his regime becomes complicity as a blind eye is turned towards cruelty and brutality. This deliberate blindness to cruelty and now murder of U.S. citizens also displays the moral bankruptcy of apologists who are seemingly fine with any horror so long as it does directly impact them.  These people happily believe the regime's lies even when confronted with video evidence that proves that the regime is flat out lying. All of this has delivered the country to a place where state terror against citizens is now official policy of the Felon's regime.  A column in the New York Times looks at the state terror that has arrived:

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., federal officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range.

Confronted with a list like this — a deluge like this — we look for details that might explain why these people were subjected to this treatment, details that might reassure us that we, by contrast, are not in danger. Good was in a relationship with a woman, and her partner, who is butch, spoke impertinently to an ICE officer, so there, Good wasn’t your average white mother after all. Chong Ly Thao, the man who was dragged out of his house in his underwear, is an immigrant from Laos; he is not white, and presumably he speaks with an accent. The woman on her way to the medical appointment and the family with six kids drove through areas where anti-ICE protests were taking place.

We don’t focus on these details in order to justify the federal agents’ actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our nerves. If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency.

In the 1990s, when I talked to people in the former Soviet Union about their families’ experiences of Stalinist terror, I was repeatedly struck by how much people seemed to know about their circumstances. . . . My favorite book about state terror is Lydia Chukovskaya’s “Sofia Petrovna,” a short Russian novel that has been translated into English. The protagonist, a middle-aged woman loyal to Stalin’s Communist Party, loses her mind trying to make sense of her son’s arrest.

[T]he secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works.

The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive. Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay. Open protest would get one arrested; kitchen conversation would not. Writing subversive essays or novels or editing underground journals would get one arrested; reading these banned works and quietly passing them on to friends probably would not. A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.

When we think of the terror regimes of the past, it is tempting to superimpose a logical narrative on them, as though totalitarian leaders had an extermination to-do list and worked their way through it methodically. This, I think, is how most people understand Martin Niemöller’s classic poem “First They Came.” In reality, though, the people living under those regimes never knew which group of people would be designated an enemy of the state next.

In Niemöller’s day, terror was carried out by the secret police and the paramilitary forces — especially the SA, more commonly known as the Brownshirts — whose job it was to instill fear in the population. In 1934, Adolf Hitler had an estimated 150 to 200 members of the SA’s own leadership arrested and its top generals executed in the ultimate demonstration that no one was immune from the state’s deadly violence. Stalin regularly carried out similar purges. Terror itself was not the end goal of those regimes, but nothing that followed would have been possible without it.

The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. [The Felon] President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty