Fascism in Florida: Building the Horrors to Come

Update 7/3/25: Oooh, I am so sorry I missed getting mentioned on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up today. I'm a bit distracted with taking care of an ill kitteh and a few other personal things, sorry. Thank you, Batocchio, for the share. To anybody still visiting, I promise to blog four times for the 4th of July (my Four For the Fourth thing) so I hope to see you tomorrow.

There are times I hate living in this godforsaken deep Republican hellhole that is Florida.

Pandering to the harsh anti-immigrant war on our American communities, Governor DeSantis and his cronies are fast-tracking a migrant detention center in South Florida (via Rachel Treisman at NPR):

Despite resistance, Florida officials are turning an airfield in the Everglades into a migrant detention center, which they've nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" due to its proximity to the apex predators.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier proposed the project last week, saying in a video posted to X that, in support of the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had asked state leaders to identify places for temporary detention facilities.

"I think this is the best one, as I call it: Alligator Alcatraz," Uthmeier said, referencing the infamous prison island in San Francisco Bay.

The goddamned trumpshirts can't give up their fantasies about Alcatraz, can they?

Uthmeier told the right-wing podcast The Benny Show on Monday that the federal government had approved his plan that morning, with the facility on track to open the first week of July. He said it would have 5,000 beds — half of its total capacity — by "early July."

"Alligator Alcatraz will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida," the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) later wrote on X.

DeSantis is using emergency powers to take over the site, which is owned by Miami-Dade County.

But not everyone is on board.

Environmental organizations and immigration advocates have expressed concerns about multiple aspects of the project, from the potential consequences on the fragile Everglades ecosystem to the well-being of the people who will be detained there, especially in the hot summer months.

If anyone's paying attention to the overwhelmed ICE "detention facilities" right now, there are serious overcrowding, food availability, and wellness problems to where people are dying in custody. Even this horrific attempt to alleviate crowding at existing facilities won't stop this new prison - it's not a detention center, trust me - from being overcrowded itself. Stephen Miller wants his fucking quotas filled, and doesn't give a damn about treating his and ICE's victims with any basic decency or civil rights.

From what people can see happening at the airfield - there are already protestors gathering, bless them - it's looking like a bunch of portable classrooms getting converted into barracks, which I guarantee you will not be adequately air-conditioned. I doubt there will be any serviceable water or sewage considering that abandoned airfield would need months of dedicated construction efforts to make it genuinely livable.

This isn't going to be a safe or healthy place to get imprisoned.

And the majority of people getting sent to this forsaken swampy Alcatraz aren't going to be gangbangers, or criminals, or violent people. It's going to be nurses, mothers, veterans, families, honest-to-God citizens.

This isn't even really a prison: it's a goddamned concentration camp, and the first of many under trump.

This is ethnic cleansing, the likes of which we've seen in Nazi Germany, and the Balkans in the 1990s, and dozens of other places we used to pretend we'd never be like. Except that is for the history of us punishing Native Americans in the 19th Century and Japanese residents during the Second World War.

This is us at our worst, America. We need to fight back against what trump and Miller and their ICE thugs and their wingnut allies are doing to our communities and our neighbors. 

Addendum: JFC the Florida Republicans are selling t-shirts promoting this! This is akin to Nazis shilling merch promoting Dachau! Yes I went there, because these goddamn wingnuts are blatantly rounding people up just like 1930s Germany.

The cruelty is not only the point, the cruelty is not only policy, the cruelty is open vice signaling to their fellow haters. GODDAMN THEM.

Escalation Just Means It'll Get Worse

And so it begins (via Elena Moore and Megan Pratz at NPR): 

The U.S. military has joined with Israel to launch military strikes against Iran, a dramatic escalation in the years-long effort by both nations to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

"We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan," President Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday...

Saturday's attack marks the first act of direct military involvement by the U.S. in the rapidly escalating conflict between Iran and Israel.

It included a strike on the heavily-fortified Fordo nuclear site, according to Trump, which is located roughly 300 feet under a mountain about 100 miles south of Tehran. It's a move that Israel has been lobbying the U.S. to carry out, given that only the U.S. has the kind of powerful "bunker buster" bomb capable of reaching the site. Known as the GBU-57 MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator), the bomb can only be transported by one specific U.S. warplane, the B-2 stealth bomber, due to its immense 30,000 pound weight...

The U.S. carried out the strike despite years of promises by Trump to keep the country from entangling itself in another Middle East conflict. Yet Trump has also said it is paramount that Iran never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Trump initially sought to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran — one to replace the Obama-era agreement that he abandoned, despite Iran's apparent compliance, in 2018. But in the days after Israel's initial strikes on Iran earlier this month, he grew increasingly vocal in his opposition to Iran and the possibility it could attack U.S. assets in the region...

Israel considers Iran an existential threat and says its attacks this month have been necessary to keep Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The attacks have strictly targeted military and nuclear facilities, according to Israel, but the Iranian government says they are already responsible for the deaths of more than 200 civilians.

Iran has responded with a barrage of missile and drone strikes aimed at Israel. The Israeli military says it has intercepted many of those projectiles, but not all. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says dozens have been killed, and hundreds more wounded.

Iran has long defended its nuclear program as peaceful, but Netanyahu has argued it poses a risk not just for his nation, but for the U.S. as well...

For its part, the U.S. intelligence community has said it believes Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard relayed that guidance as recently as March during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee...

Gabbard has since backtracked her statements to the Senate, siding with trump's - and Netanyahu's - allegations.

No one can determine for now where all of this will lead. Iran's leadership will be pressed to respond in an escalating manner, which would drag America even further into the mud pit with escalations of our own.

So far, Iran's public response was to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokehold in the Persian Gulf. It would cut off 20 percent of the oil getting shipped across the globe, triggering spikes in oil prices and worsening inflation woes everywhere especially in the U.S. How they would implement that - using whatever naval forces they have to attack tankers, most likely - would surely sparking a shooting battle and arguably escalate matters even further. There's still the possibility Iran would strike at any of the U.S. military bases across the Middle East, which would definitely escalate things to likely ground invasion.

All of this happening without anyone openly declaring war, even though everyone involved knows full well that this is a war and nobody in this wants to be the one to step back and calm things down.

It's not a war that a majority of Americans want: All of the current polling is opposed to trump leading us into another Middle East debacle. We've been burned out by the mistakes and destruction of the post-9/11 Global War on Terror that sucked us into Iraqi and Afghani quagmires, neither of which ended cleanly (and with a sorrowful return of Afghanistan to a brutal Taliban rule). And yet, the neocons at Fox Not-News and throughout the Republican ranks are salivating at another chance to inflict "Regime Change" on an Iranian population that's already suffered too much from American involvement in their history.

All this threatens is another quagmire full of occupation, torture, terror strikes by local resistance, and years of misery for all involved.

Gods help us all. I keep saying this, and I keep getting proven right: None of this is going to end well.

The Reckless Reprisal

Update: Again, thanks to Steve in Manhattan for sharing this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Stay safe and abolish ICE, America.

We're going through the turmoil of having donald trump rattle sabers - again - at Iran, using more direct and dangerous language than he used back in 2019 (via Rebecca Rosman and Franco Ordoñez at NPR):

President Trump on Wednesday declined to say whether the United States is moving closer to a decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, after Iran's supreme leader warned the U.S. against an attack and rejected Trump's call to surrender.

"You don't seriously think I'm going to answer that question," Trump said when a reporter at the White House asked whether the U.S. would attack Iran. "I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do..."

"We're the only ones that have the capability to do it — but that doesn't mean I'm going to do it," he told reporters in the Oval Office after an unrelated event. The president said he would be meeting in the Situation Room — which he also referred to as the "war room" — about the crisis...

This comes amid nearly a week of fighting between U.S. ally Israel and Iran, and amid signals from U.S. and Israeli officials that Trump could be considering an attack on Iran.

In a string of social media posts on Tuesday, Trump demanded Iran's "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" and boasted, "We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran," raising speculation that U.S. forces were already more involved than previously acknowledged.

Khamenei responded to the demand in his address Wednesday, his second public appearance since Israel launched strikes on his country last week.

"This is a nation that will never surrender to any form of imposition," he said.

On Tuesday, Trump also issued a direct threat against Khamenei. "We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now."

Again, this could all be the bluster of an overgrown bully that we've seen from trump when he's trying to force a deal on others. However, trump is also impulsive, and currently irritable over how disastrous his birthday parade turned out. he's in a mood to hurt somebody, and dropping bombs on civilians over in the Middle East would seem too easy a move for him to make.

You have to remember what happened during trump's first tenure in the White House: sporadic missile attacks on certain Islamic targets, followed by our Army quitting the battlefield and our regional allies to struggle against Russian-backed Syrians, followed by a targeted attack on a high-ranking Iranian official on Iraqi soil that aggravated regional tensions.

All of this impulsive, unfocused acts of a desperate man trying to pose as an elite Alpha Male on the global stage; with no consideration of the consequences and harm those acts imposed on our nation and whatever allies we have left. Most of this getting imposed on our nation by the only "ally" we are counting on in that region, as Israel - led by a genocidal schemer in Netanyahu who's trying to avoid getting kicked out of power again - is forcing the United States to commit to a military action that will honestly lead into another quagmire for us.

I wrote about this the last time around, back in 2019 when I posed seven reasons we shouldn't invade Iran. All of the arguments I made then are still relevant today, with the added possibility that modern technological boosts to drone warfare will expose our Navy fleets and our regional military bases to potentially disastrous (for us) yet effective (for Iran) ends.

We also have to consider trump's flippant attitude towards our own nuclear stockpile, and that if this situation worsens - and considering how inept our current Defense leadership is, that's likely - trump could well exercise that option. Even one nuke dropped on any place in Iran would kill thousands of civilians and leave literal fallout, while the metaphoric fallout would be the entire world turning the US into a pariah state.

If trump thinks this can push Iran to the negotiating table to hammer out a no-nukes agreement to replace the one he blew up, he's wrong. It won't placate Netanyahu, and the escalation will continue to where we'll be back at the "bomb 'em all" brinksmanship only at a more extreme and irrational level.

This was never going to end well with trump in charge. None of you 77 million voters realized that? /headdesk

The Bleak Parade

Just as donald Shitgibbon trump ruined January 6th in my mind, the bastard is going to ruin June 14th on a personal level as well. 

Where June 14th is officially Flag Day for the United States and the anniversary of the official formation of the Continental Army that evolved into the US Armed Forces 250 years later, it also happens to be trump's birthday.

So we're getting the unwarranted - and in some ways offensive - spectacle of a military parade in front of the White House while trump stands there and revels in it.

If this was going to be a celebration of the Army there were better places to host such an event, like Valley Forge or one of the nearby bases, or a memorial held at Arlington National Cemetery. However, trump is not a fan of cemeteries - unless he's the focus of everything - and considering how he keeps dumping on soldiers as "suckers", he's not about to honor the troops with anything when he's too busy honoring himself.

Let Eliot A. Cohen at the Atlantic spell it out for us (paywalled):

The United States Army deserves a celebration, as do the other armed services during their upcoming birthdays. Tens of millions of Americans have passed through the Army’s ranks, and something close to a million have died in the line of duty, while many more were wounded or taken prisoner, or suffered extraordinary hardships. We owe them a lot.

The administration, however, is orchestrating a parade not to honor service, but to celebrate power. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles will tear up the capital’s streets as helicopters thrash overhead. Tough-guy stuff, in other words, designed to show the world that we are, in the much-overused word of the secretary of defense, lethal...

Nor is this hardware relevant to the strategic choices the Trump administration has avowed, leaving Europe and the Middle East and focusing on the Indo-Pacific. Tanks will not persuade China to keep the People’s Liberation Army Navy behind the first island chain. This is about preening for the American public and indulging a kind of juvenile fascination with big, noisy armored vehicles...

If the draft-evading president and disgruntled former National Guard major running the Department of Defense better understood the American military, they would know that by sending National Guardsmen (and now Marines) to deal with riots when neither the governor of the state nor the mayor of the city concerned want them, they are courting danger. They would not promise, as Trump has, the use of “heavy force” against protesters. They would not, in other words, anticipate, almost with glee, the prospect of Americans in uniform shooting their fellow citizens. For that matter, they would know that deploying thousands of military personnel to the southern border disrupts training for war, which they supposedly value highly...

All this so a confirmed draft-dodging felon and sex offender can pretend to be an Alpha Male in front of his lackeys.

At the least, we should expect the roads of Washington DC torn up by the heavy tanks and transports rolling up and down the square (the military's promised they reinforced the roads but I doubt it will help), adding millions of wasted dollars being spent to deploy the troops and equipment this way.

At the worst, I'm dreading how trump could turn this parade into a public call of a military takeover (technically an autoglope) and declaring the Constitution suspended while he orders the entire military to join in with ICE's mass deportation pogroms across our major (mostly Democratic) cities. And attack any protests that rise up against him.

No matter what happens, I am making the rather miniscule - hello, ten readers of this blog! - call to my fellow Americans to avoid this bleak trumpian parade at all costs. Just don't be in Washington DC at all. Don't add to the numbers that trump will try to claim as turnout, make it as deserted as his 2017 inauguration.

There's a ton of other places to be this Saturday. There's these No Kings rallies happening by the by that you can register and attend across every state. If you're in Chicago, Da Pope is hosting a livestream mass as a blatant counterpunch to trump's self-indulgence (although I've heard it's sold out). If you're not inclined to protest or pray, you can always go to the beaches (it's a bit of a drive to Virginia Beach but worth it)

Just remember that this parade isn't honoring our Army, it's not for the troops to display their discipline and training, it's not anything honoring America.

This parade is for trump's vanity and his alone, and it will be as vulgar as he can make it.

Paramount

As the ICE persecution of legal migrants/refugees escalated over the past month, more protests have erupted across the nation even in places like Minnesota. A lot of anger and frustration towards trump's thugs who are rounding up moms and children instead of the "criminal gangs" that the Far Right have screamed about for the last 40 years.

The tension made its way to Los Angeles this Friday, where the outrage among the residents - many of them in defense of their neighbors getting rounded up for doing nothing wrong - erupted into the kind of protest that brought out the LAPD and their crowd control of gas, rubber bullets, and batons.

Today, the protests continued in the neighborhood of Paramount, and the violence escalated even more (via Steve Patterson and Dennis Romero at NBC News):

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies deployed tear gas on protesters in Paramount this afternoon as they sought to end the chaotic gathering.

The deployment was preceded by explosive less-lethal rounds and the placement of cinder blocks in the street near a Home Depot where protesters believed federal immigration enforcement agents were conducting a raid. Fireworks also peppered the soundscape.

Sheriff Robert Luna said no immigration raid took place, though there was staging at federal offices adjacent to the Home Depot.

Sheriff's officials ordered the raucous crowd to disperse around 2:30 p.m., though several people remained in the area hours later.

While it's heartening to see Americans rising up against the brutality of trump's - and Stephen Miller's - anti-immigrant campaign, this is unfortunately the response those SOBs were hoping for, because it can justify trump's declaring martial law and assuming dictatorial powers (via Maya Yang and Diana Ramirez-Simon at the Guardian (US)):

The Trump administration will deploy the national guard to immigration protests in Los Angeles, border czar Tom Homan said on Saturday, as an immigration crackdown in the area erupted into mass protests with police in riot gear deploying teargas at bystanders.

“We’re already mobilizing. We’re gonna bring national guard in tonight and we’re gonna continue doing our job. This is about enforcing the law,” Homan said in an interview with Fox News.

US immigration authorities on Saturday extended area raids into Paramount, south-east of Los Angeles, and were met with more protests outside an industrial park.

Border patrol personnel in riot gear and gas masks stood guard outside the park, deploying teargas as bystanders and protesters gathered on medians and across the street, some jeering at authorities while recording the event on smartphones...

Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner and the White House deputy chief of staff, wrote on social media that Friday’s demonstrations were “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States”. On Saturday, he described the day’s protests as a “violent insurrection”.

During Friday’s protests at a federal detention facility in downtown LA, David Huerta, the president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union, was arrested amid a police response that included teargas and flash-bangs.

Huerta, who was injured and detained, released a statement to the Los Angeles Times from the hospital, saying: “What happened to me is not about me. This is about something much bigger.”

“This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice,” he added.

The reports are that they'll be sending in about 2,000 Guardsmen, but if they're thinking that will subdue a metro of 18 million people covering a geographic area of 400 square miles or so, that isn't going to help. I'm willing to bet they want this deployment to get overwhelmed so trump can justify sending in the US Army to "pacify" all of Los Angeles.

California's governor Newsom is trying to defuse the situation, but it's a question of what he can do to stop his state's National Guard from answering to trump's generals.

LA authorities are able to access law enforcement assistance at a moment’s notice. We are in close coordination with the city and county, and there is currently no unmet need. The Guard has been admirably serving LA throughout recovery. This is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.

— Governor Gavin Newsom (@governor.ca.gov) June 7, 2025 at 8:14 PM

Somewhere in a dark hole, Stephen Miller is enjoying the suffering and chaos he's wanted to inflict on our nation, if the reports are true about his obsession to terrorize Latino communities (via Tom Boggioni at Raw Story):

Following up on her Wednesday report on how Miller and Donald Trump's war on immigrants is "reshaping" the focus of what crimes should be prioritized, NBC's Julia Ainsley told the hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the abrasive Miller is increasingly angering other members of the administration.

For NBC News she wrote that in May, Miller "berated and threatened to fire senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials if they did not begin detaining 3,000 migrants a day," and has since demanded other agencies help out with his "Operation At Large..."

Noting plans to use members of the National Guard to round up immigrants, Ainsley added, "This comes a week after the infamous, now infamous meeting where Stephen Miller called in the leaders of ICE and screamed at them, yelled at them, threatened to start firing the bottom 10 percent of performers if they didn't get their arrest numbers to 3000 a day."

Anna Giartelli at the Washington Examiner had more details about that rant:

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.

“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?'” the official recited.

One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.

“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,'” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official...

Miller doesn't want gangbangers. He wants Latino families. And he's desperate to shove too many of them into kennels and basements and overflowing prisons.

It's proof that the anti-immigrant forces were never interested in stopping crime. It's proof that these bastards were interested in their racist agenda to purge America of anyone too dark-skinned for their liking.

We have monsters ruling the nation.

We have to defy them. It is paramount that we do so.

Tiananmen Square 2025: You Cannot Wash Away the Blood and Tears

No matter what the Chinese government does to erase the massacre of the democratic protests that fateful June 4, 1989, the world will not forget (via Helen Davidson at the Guardian): 

The world will never forget the Tiananmen Square massacre, the US secretary of state and Taiwan president have said on the 36th anniversary of the crackdown, which China’s government still tries to erase from domestic memory.

There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989...

The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.

New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.

The report published on Wednesday by Article 19, a human rights research and advocacy group, said that the Chinese government “has engaged in a systematic international campaign of transnational repression targeting protesters critical of the Chinese Communist party,” with Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hongkongers particularly likely to be affected.

There are too many other nations opposed to Chinese interference and bullying ways. There are too many people - like myself - who remembered what happened and refuse to forget.

I'm still hoping I get to meet Tank Guy some day.

Flirtin' with Disaster Once Again: Welcome to the 2025 trump Hurricane Season

Update: Hello again, those of you coming from Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Thanks as always to Batocchio for including this blog to the array of socio-political blogs still out there. Good luck, and stay safe.

In the "What Could Possibly Go Wrong" category of bad news today, Reuters is dropping this particular tidbit about trump's pick to run our federal disaster relief agency (via Leah Douglas, Ted Hesson, and Nathan Layne):

Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said during a briefing that he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season, according to four sources familiar with the situation.

Insert every facepalm GIF you can find, folks.

The U.S. hurricane season officially began on Sunday and lasts through November. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast last week that this year's season is expected to bring as many as 10 hurricanes.

The remark was made by David Richardson, who has led FEMA since early May. It was not clear to staff whether he meant it literally, as a joke, or in some other context.

Richardson said during the briefing that there would be no changes to the agency's disaster response plans despite having told staff to expect a new plan in May, the sources told Reuters.

Richardson's comments come amid widespread concern that the departures of a raft of top FEMA officials, staff cuts and reductions in hurricane preparations will leave the agency ill-prepared for a storm season forecast to be above normal.

Hurricanes kill dozens of people and cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually across a swath of U.S. states every year. The storms have become increasingly more destructive and costly due to the effects of climate change...

Richardson, who has no disaster response experience, said during Monday's briefing, a daily all-hands meeting held by phone and videoconference, that he will not be issuing a new disaster plan because he does not want to make changes that might counter the FEMA Review Council, the sources said.

President Donald Trump created the council to evaluate FEMA. Its members include DHS head Kristi Noem, governors and other officials.

trump, of course, would like to use that "council" to make recommendations to gut that relief agency - and anything that would highlight the reality that climate change is happening - altogether. When you consider how trump is refusing to send aid to states like North Carolina still recovering from last year's hurricane season, we are facing a grim situation that when the storms do slam into the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts that our federal government is not going to lift one damn finger to help even if the heavily Republican-controlled states getting hit are screaming to high heaven.

Add to this how trump is denying aid to the midwestern states getting hit by tornadoes, and we're talking about an administration that doesn't give a damn about the lives on the ground. 

And so YES, Red state America. Every single one of you who voted for trump this 2024 you are getting exactly what you voted for: Cruelty and denial.

We are so royally fucked (again).