Man, some wild shit is going to happen before 2032. All of this is one scenario, yes, maybe, but this stuff is like weather forecasting on the Titanic at this point.
It's not that serious a mystery.
If you stick people in tents in the desert, they tend to die. And, not a lot of people want to be involved with something like that, and so they're making the point by giving absurd amounts of money to anyone who is willing to be involved. Same as the high salaries for ICE recruits.
Paul Manafort was just one of the names we heard.
Who were the others?
I bet Zelensky himself do see him as a major threat for his reelections.
I get your point. He's popular and at some point when the dying stops, it'll be relevant. I would say it would be relevant if Vance was able to replace Zelensky with this guy before the war was over, but I don't think Vance is competent enough to make that happen, fortunately enough. I feel like people in that part of the world have a lot stronger civil immune system against disinfo.
Further, if Ukraine survives and everyone gets to go back to normal life, my guess would be that Zelensky wouldn't give two shits if a competent military commander got to take his job with his biggest concern being losing the election, but who knows.
They can do whatever they want. On the other hand, the people of the country can throw things other than sandwiches.
People tend to get confused, even when they are familiar with all these founding documents and principles (which the current government is not). They start to think there are "rules" and they get to say what's allowed, and they can punish people who do what's not allowed, but it doesn't go the other way, because that's not allowed and they're in charge. That's not reality. Reality is, we're all just on this planet bebopping around, and if someone is in a "government" role, it behooves them to make sure the people "under" them agree with the idea of them being in charge. Because no one has a monopoly on violence or vigor.
Even the top leaders of the USSR (starting with Kruschev) had to figure this out: He made a mostly unspoken deal with the other leaders that he wouldn't try to kill them for being potential threats, and in return they wouldn't kill him to take him out of power and replace him. And what do you know, it worked! It's better that way. The US up until now has had a little more sophisticated version, extending beyond the inner circle of leadership, but it sounds like Trump is hankering for an earlier era without really being aware of its perils.
Others in Ukraine see him as a potential political figure.
Which others, though? Specifically who in Ukraine sees him as a potential political figure? The only one named in the article is Paul Manafort.
There is so much vigorous disinformation in this space that I want to read pretty critically anything that sounds like this, and I saw plenty of stink lines crop up more or less instantly when I held it close to my face. For all I know it's legit, it just ticks a few of the disinfo boxes.
Zaluzhnyi declined, but also pledged loyalty, up to a point. He promised Yermak he would not criticise Zelenskyy in public while the war continued
What in the loaded bullshit
What is the point of this type of innuendo?
So far, Zaluzhnyi has not communicated that message, although there is an increasing belief in Kyiv that he is readying a political run. The general is coy even privately with close associates about his plans, but many assume he is just biding his time before entering the fray.
So... there's no particular reason to think he might have any interest in politics at all, but The Guardian is real enthusiastic about painting it that he's just "biding his time."
I think what Trump wants them to do is put down protests, and overrule judges, politicians, and local law enforcement through violence if anyone doesn't obey. You're right that arresting random individuals is a lot of what they're doing right now, but that's not why Trump wants to send them.
https://www.youtube.com/@BrickImmortar
https://www.youtube.com/@FascinatingHorror
https://www.youtube.com/@MrBallen
https://www.youtube.com/@blameitonjorge
https://www.youtube.com/@STRANGEONS
Roughly in order of how well it matches what you want, I think. MrBallen also has long-form podcasts, I think, on Amazon or something.
Yeah. I don't really know politics well enough to know how realistic it is. I do know that most of them exist in a weird white-collar corruption ecosystem which really doesn't give a shit about parties D or R, working people, America's standing in the world and success or failure, any of that stuff. They just work for who pays them, and for the most part, who pays them is the rich sociopaths who are completely fine with putting all the poors in camps.
I feel like a certain amount of it is also deliberate partisan sabotage by people who care specifically about R instead of D, but I think mostly it's just the bipartisan Washington consensus that Bernie Sanders is a loony old guy and Hilary Clinton / George W / Mitt Romney / Hakeem Jeffries / all those indistinguishable dickheads are the future of this country, because they're going to continue to enable all of "us" to get filthy rich without really having to work for it.
Honestly, the National Guard is a lot better trained at this kind of "dealing with large groups of angry but mostly unarmed and harmless people" situation. The cops are trained and experienced at dealing with individuals, for the most part, but when they're faced with a big protest or a riot they are often making it up as they go along.
One thing that multiple National Guard people said after they got involved in BLM in 2020 was that they often felt like their role in practice was to protect the people against the police. Since their job is, more or less, to maintain order, and the people were (most of the time) pretty orderly and the police often were not.
And when he's floating in a barge off Gitmo, he'll be very mad that it was someone else's fault. This isn't supposed to happen to people like him, he was doing everything professional and right.
President Donald Trump has has long considered both the media and higher education as his enemies — which makes college media a ripe target. The arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk over an op-ed that she co-wrote for the Tufts University campus paper proved that student journalists are at risk, especially foreign writers who dared criticize Israel’s war on Gaza.
But one student newspaper is fighting back.
The Stanford Daily — the independent publication covering Stanford University — filed a First Amendment lawsuit suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this month over two tactics they’ve used in targeted deportation cases.
“What’s at stake in this case is whether, when you’re in the United States, you’re free to voice an opinion critical of the government without fear of retaliation,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a civil liberties group representing the plaintiffs.
“It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Fitzpatrick said.
Soon after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration agents in early March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, student journalists and editors around the country sensed a shift.
“That’s when we saw a significant uptick in calls,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, who manages the nonprofit’s hotline.
Over three decades helping student reporters navigate censorship and First Amendment issues, Hiestand had never fielded so many calls focused on potential immigration consequences for coverage on campus, both for the journalists and their named sources.
Öztürk’s arrest just a couple weeks later sent the legal hotline “into overdrive,” Hiestand told The Intercept. He heard from reporters, editors, and even political cartoonists worried their work about Israel, Palestine, and student protests might make them targets too.
In early April, the Student Press Law Center put out an unprecedented alert with other student journalism organizations, which advised campus publications to consider taking down or revising “certain stories that may now be targeted by immigration officials.”
“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” reads the alert.
The next week, the Stanford Daily editorsran a letter about the chill its own staff was facing on campus.
“Both students and faculty have been increasingly hesitant to speak to The Daily and increasingly worried about comments that have already been made on the record,” their letter read. “Some reporters have been choosing to step away from stories in order to keep their name detached from topics that might draw unwanted attention. Even authors of dated opinion pieces have expressed fear that their words might retroactively put them in danger.”
Following the editors’ letter, FIRE approached the Stanford Daily’s editors to sue the Trump administration. It’s not the first time the publication has fought for freedom of the press in court. In 1978, a case brought by the Stanford Daily over a search warrant targeting its newsroom reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-3 that the warrant was valid and did not violate the First Amendment.
The student newspaper’s current suit — filed with two individual plaintiffs suing under the pseudonyms Jane Doe and John Doe — challenges two broad, arcane legal provisions that have become Rubio’s go-to tools against student activists and campus critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The first provision, which was added to the country’s immigration code in 1990, grants the secretary of state sweeping authority to render noncitizens deportable if they “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The second law is even broader, allowing the secretary to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”
There are relatively few cases in which either statute has been the grounds for deportation, particularly compared to the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained since Trump returned to the White House.
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In fact, immigration scholars found that invoking the foreign policy provision as the sole grounds for deportation was “almost unprecedented,” according to a brief submitted in Khalil’s ongoing court battle by more than 150 lawyers and law professors. Based on government data, the scholars identified just 15 cases in which the foreign policy provision has ever been invoked, and just four in the past 25 years — most recently in 2018, during the first Trump administration.
“At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare,” the scholars wrote in their brief.
In Khalil’s case, the government identified only two others beside Khalil who had been targeted by Rubio under the “foreign policy” provision: although not identified by name, descriptions of the cases match Rubio’s orders against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, and Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University. Oddly, the government failed to mention the case of Yunseo Chung, another Columbia undergraduate with a green card, whose deportation Rubio authorized in the very same letter as for Khalil.
The State Department greenlighted Öztürk’s detention, meanwhile, under the second, broader provision, court records show. The government has not made any similar accounting of how many times Rubio and his staff have invoked his “discretion” to revoke visas over alleged antisemitism. At one point Rubio claimed to have revoked as many as 300 visas, without specifying the authority under which he did so.
“The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick, the FIRE attorney, said. “It doesn’t take deporting thousands of noncitizens to accomplish that chill,” since no one wants to become “the next Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk.”
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Read our complete coverage
In recent months, numerous courts have cast doubt on whether these two statutes can be used to target noncitizens based on their speech.
In Khalil’s case, which is currently pending in a federal appellate court, a district court judge in New Jersey ruled in June that the “foreign policy” provision is “very likely an unconstitutional statute.”
Similarly, in May a judge in Vermont ordered Öztürk’s release to “ameliorate the chilling effect that Ms. Ozturk’s arguably unconstitutional detention may have on non-citizens present in the country.” The government has also appealed that order, along with similar rulings that freed Mahdawi and Suri from detention, and another ruling that blocked the Trump administration from detaining Chung.
Now, the Stanford Daily is mounting a direct challenge to these two laws as deployed by the Trump administration. The student newspaper argues both provisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at least when used to retaliate against protected speech.
“The Secretary of State and the President claim to possess unreviewable statutory authority to deport any lawfully present noncitizen for speech the government deems anti-American or anti-Israel. They are wrong,” reads their complaint, filed August 6. “The First Amendment cements America’s promise that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavored treatment because those in power do not like his or her message.”
Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian who has written about the history of ideological deportation in the U.S., told The Intercept that Congress never meant for the foreign policy provision to be used “as a tool to suppress freedom of expression and association.”
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“Members of Congress intended for the foreign policy provision to be used in unusual circumstances, and only sparingly, carefully, and narrowly to exclude or deport specific individuals who would have a clear negative impact on United States foreign policy,” Kraut said, citing changes signed into law after the Cold War.
“What this case is seeking to establish is that political branches’ authority over immigration does not supersede the Bill of Rights,” FIRE’s Fitzpatrick said.
Briefing in the case is ongoing, and a hearing is scheduled for October 1.
“It’s gratifying to see a student newspaper upholding free speech at a time when many institutions are bending the knee,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford, in an emailed statement. “Many students are afraid to protest the Trump administration’s actions not only because of the deportations, but because their own universities restricted speech and harshly disciplined protestors. I hope their courage inspires others to act.”
The post The Student Newspaper Suing Marco Rubio Over Targeted Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.
It is funny that in Piefed this topic is classified under "Chilling"