#radley balko

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch:

Since the election, a number of readers have asked how worried we should be, and what we should be looking for in the weeks and months ahead. My general answer: pretty worried! At this point, I see little reason to think that Trump won’t at least attempt his most authoritarian and destructive campaign promises. Whether he succeeds will depend on how much resistance he gets from the courts, Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and the rest of us.

Trump’s nominations to cabinet positions so far are a clear indication that he’s dragging his party further into a nihilist cult of personality. It isn’t just that so many of them are unqualified, corrupt, or destructive (though it’s also all of those things). It’s that they’re uniquely unfit for the specific positions he has appointed them to hold. He’s daring someone to stop him, and learning from what follows.

The Matt Gaetz pick for attorney general was bad, but it wasn’t even his most dangerous. Appointing crank conspiracy theorist and Trump/Assad apologist Tulsi Gabbard to the most sensitive national security position in government is a direct threat to national security and a reflection of Trump’s own fondness for authoritarians. Department of Defense pick Pete Hegseth has never led more than a dozen or so people (the one small nonprofit he did lead, he ran into the ground). As a National Guardsman, he was barred from working security for Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo common to white supremacists. He lobbied Trump to pardon war criminals who had been reported by their own platoons, and believes the U.S. military should ignore the Geneva Conventions.

Then there’s the fact that the leader of the QAnon party, a man himself found responsible for rape and credibly accused of sexual assault or misconduct by dozens of women, appointed four — four — cabinet level officials accused of engaging in or covering up sexual misconduct. There’s Gaetz, of course. RFK Jr. has also been accused of sexual assault (he didn’t exactly deny the accusation). The sexual assault allegation against DOD nominee Hegseth are particularly credible. And Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for Department of Education, was accused in a lawsuit of covering up a ringside announcer’s sex abuse of a boy while she and her husband ran World Wrestling Entertainment.

None of this is all that surprising, given that Trump’s party keeps nominating and electing sex creeps up and down the ballot. Nor does it seem to bother Trump’s congressional supporters. Instead, they’ve decided to single out and bully the first trans woman elected to Congress, barring her from using the women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill . . . because she’s a “threat” to women. (We’re still waiting to hear which bathrooms male Republicans neutered by Donald Trump will be permitted to use.) Trump is also refusing to subject his nominations to FBI background checks, and his campaign says he won’t release the names of donors to his transition. Both are clear signs that he has no intention of making himself accountable or transparent to anyone. Nearly everything he’s done since the election points to a president who not only intends to buck every norm, convention, and check, he won’t even pretend to try. It’s just open defiance.

In the coming days, I’ll look at the free press and the First Amendment, immigration, and crime and criminal justice. But today, I’ll focus on Trump’s openly-stated plans to weaponize the government against his critics and enemies. I fully expect to see Trump follow through on his promises to seek retribution against people like Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Alexander Vindman, Anthony Fauci, and countless others. Whether he’ll do it by ordering the DOJ to make sensationalist arrests and criminal charges or use subtler though still pernicious tools like IRS audits, subpoenas, or parading people before Congress for public ridicule, is hard to say. But investigations alone can ruin lives and careers.

Let’s start with the DOJ. I’m not sure that the Gaetz debacle provides much instruction on whether Senate Republicans have the backbone to provide any real oversight. (It did show us, however, that House Republicans were willing to remove their spines, gift-wrap them, and hand-deliver them to Trump.) I suspect Gaetz’s tendency to anger and insult members of his own party hurt his nomination more than his extremism, sex pestery, and utter lack of qualifications.

Trump’s new AG nominee, Pam Bondi, is less abrasive than Gaetz, but every bit the devout MAGA loyalist. As Florida Attorney General, Bondi was at one point set to join other states in suing Trump University (Florida has more “alumni” than any other state). Shen then mysteriously pulled out of the class action after Trump made a $25,000 donation to her PAC — a donation that came from Trump’s “charity,” by the way — and then held a fundraiser for her at Mar-a-Lago. (Bondi has a long history of that sort of pay-to-play.) Bondi quickly became a full-throated supporter. She’s not only a 2020 election denier, she was part of Trump’s legal team in his bid to overturn the election. She actually stood next to Rudy Giuliani at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Bondi has also already made clear that she fully supports Trump’s plan to weaponize the agency he has nominated her to lead.

[...] We’ll see an important test of Trump’s power shortly after he takes office. He plans to fire FBI director Christopher Wray and replace him with Kash Patel, a vengeful loyalist wholly unqualified for that position. The FBI director is supposed to serve outside the political influence of individual presidents. It’s why the position comes with a 10-year term, and why an FBI director can only be fired for cause. Remember that when Trump fired James Comey, Jeff Sessions considered it a serious enough abuse of power to appoint a special counsel. We’ve become so accustomed to Trump’s power grabs that it’s now just widely expected that he’ll fire Wray for pretextual reasons and install an unqualified lickspittle like Patel — a guy who has vowed to imprison journalists and critics. If the Senate allows that to happen, I fear dark days lie ahead. (Trump is also reportedly considering appointing Patel to a position that doesn’t require Senate approval, but which could still give him the power to act as Trump’s retributive hammer.)

[...] Trump is also already planning to devote DOJ resources to “uncovering” evidence that he won the 2020 election, and to prosecuting state officials who resisted his attempts to coerce them. Expect to see a full-throttle effort to rewrite history about that election, only this time Trump will have more power to force federal agencies to provide faux credibility to his bullshit fraud conspiracies. Watch to see which agencies fall in line.

[...] The Post and other outlets have since reported that one of the key architects of Trump’s plan to purge federal agencies of institutionalists is Russ Vought, Trump’s former head of the Office of Management and Budget — one of the most powerful under-the-radar positions in government. Vought was also a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a Trump II administration so deeply unpopular that Trump repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he had nothing to do with it. That of course was a lie: last week, Trump nominated Vought back to his old position.

[...] Finally, one particularly pernicious pattern we’ve seen from Trump officials and MAGA pundits is the targeting of not just politicians and public officials, but everyday people they see as representative of their enemies — at which point the MAGA faithful swarm with threats and harassment. We saw Trump-loyal publications repeatedly try to dox whistleblowers who exposed corruption and abuse. We saw them upend the lives of people like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, along with countless other 2020 election workers who signed up for the sort of nonpartisan positions necessary in a functional democracy.

They did it to doctors and nurses during COVID, healthcare workers who treat trans people, and of course to the Haitian immigrants in Springfield — along with any local residents who dared to defend them. The Libs of TikTok account on X run by Chaya Raichik basically exists solely for this purpose — to sic an army of online followers to heap hate and invective on people she has deemed to be on the wrong side of the culture war. Trump’s “co-president” Elon Musk has been particularly eager to weaponize the social media platform he bought for this sort of targeting. Shortly after purchasing Twitter, he selectively released emails, internal documents, and other private correspondence to a few hand-picked “journalists” to create a dubious narrative about public-private censorship. While there were certainly some examples of improper government pressure on Twitter, most of the claims were wildly overblown. More worrying, the whole project — along with the complicity of Republicans in Congress — led to harassment and death threats against former Twitter employees, whistleblowers, misinformation researchers, and others caught in the crossfire.

Radley Balko wrote a great piece on how the incoming Trump Misadministration seeks to weaponize government agencies to be sharp tools to help his authoritarian masturbatory revenge fantasies.

[akatsukirites]

just got done reading 'rise of the warrior cop: the militarization of america's police forces' by radley balko and OF COURSE THE ONLY THING I CAN THINK OF IS KISAME AU. book basically talks about the history and use of SWAT teams; in particular the egregious offensives against the fourth amendment. and also documents police chiefs, law enforcement academia, heads of agencies now long gone, and literal SWAT cops quoted saying "omg we shouldnt be doing this" (pg. 241 of 1st edition) SO YES KIASME AU IS COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE.

also there is a theme that keeps returning of 'if we think the people we are supposed to protect/serve are the enemies, what does that make us?' LIKE... HELLO. THIS IS KISAME'S MONOLOGUE.

apparently i read a book about police brutality and immediately think of kisame. great. JUST GREAT. FUCKIN BRAINROT ALL THE WAY TO HELL I GUESS.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Radley Balko gives us a libertarian take on the SCOTUS immunity decision here:

"The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States is its worst decision of my lifetime. John Roberts’s sloppy, arrogant, contradictory majority opinion provides license for any future president to lie, cheat, steal, suppress dissent, and — if they have the stomach for it — assassinate. It obliterates a guardrail for executive power that’s fundamental to a functioning democracy. So fundamental, in fact, that until the country elected an aspiring autocrat brazen enough to engage in open-air corruption, it was a guardrail few thought necessary to actually define.

Of course the president can be prosecuted for actual crimes. When Trump initially made his claim of “absolute immunity” for presidents from criminal charges, it was widely derided among constitutional scholars as a hopeless Hail Mary. Then John Roberts answered Trump’s prayers. This opinion isn’t a stain on Roberts’s legacy. It is his legacy. He will be remembered as the “institutionalist” who destroyed the legitimacy of the institution entrusted to his care. And if that’s the worst of the damage, we’ll all be lucky."

[azspot]

Just a reminder that Musk couldn’t get a top level security clearance. And he was under investigation for violating the terms of the clearance he did have. Now he has your Social Security number, your tax returns, and is unilaterally deciding who the government does and does not pay.

Radley Balko

[nodynasty4us]

It’s also time to end the asymmetrical decency. You don’t owe any deference or reverence to “the office” of the presidency when the man occupying it is a vulgar thug who’s exploiting the office to enrich himself and smite his enemies and whose administration is provoking a constitutional crisis by openly defying the federal courts. You needn’t respect “decorum” during a speech in which the president is blood-libeling immigrants, threatening allies, promising to wreck the economy, and telling lies that everyone knows are lies as a raw display of power. And it is especially craven to scold one of your own for a modest act of defiance against an administration that has threatened to arrest and imprison you over protected speech.

Radley Balko, Three things the Democrats can do right now

[bishopmyrielfundraiser]

Auction Rules for the Bishop Myriel Fundraiser 2023

Public defenders, lawyers who provide legal defense for those who cannot afford it, are often all that stands between modern Jean Valjeans and 19 years in prison. This post by Radley Balko, a journalist advocating for criminal justice reform, points out that even though the right to a lawyer is guaranteed in the USA if you're facing serious charges, public defenders are underfunded, overworked, and demoralized. All of which gets in the way of putting up a good fight in court for their clients. That's where you come in. We're going to raise money for public defender organizations via the Bishop Myriel Fundraiser 2023. You can start submitting your offers now, in accordance with the rules, and bidding will commence as the offers are coming in.

Rules

1. Offering

SUBMIT your offering post to this blog! Include a link to this rules post in your own post, and also a minimum starting offer for your item, which can be a fic, art, or a physical item--be creative! Your offer does NOT have to be connected to the Les Misérables fandom, although such items are always welcome! Any terms and conditions of your offer should also be included in the post, eg what fandoms you are wiling to write for, any hard no’s on content, etc. Offer posts can keep coming in through the SUBMIT button until the auction closes.

2. Bidding

Bid in REPLIES NOT REBLOGS (this is important because replies enable me to figure out who bid when and avoid conflicts) until end of day Eastern Time December 15th, 2023. The highest bidder at that time will be the winner. Bidding can start as each item is posted.

3. Claiming or delivering your item

If you have won an item, I will contact you directly via DM and ask you to provide a receipt or other verification for a donation to an indigent defense/public defender orgnaization in the amount bid. Send such verification to bishopmyrielfundraiser@gmail.com or in a screenshot on Tumblr. AFTER I have verified that, I will contact the offerer to let them know they can deliver the item. If you do not respond at all to my attempts to contact you within one week, I will move on to the next highest bidder. So check your DMs. All items should be delivered by March 31st, 2024 at the absolute latest, unless you have made other arrangements, eg the custom item/fic takes longer than that to create or write and you communicate about this. Earlier is even better, but remember that the most important thing is to keep the winner informed and make sure everyone has a good time. Let's keep this a fun event in the spirit of Bishop Myriel, so this fundraiser can keep going for years to come. 4. Donating Please do not donate your bid until I have contacted you to inform you that you won the item! Then follow the procedure above. While you can choose any organization to donate to as long as it covers the overall cause of indigent defense/public defenders, here are a few New York-centric recommendations, shamelessly ganked from the linked article: Bronx Defenders Brooklyn Defender Services Neighborhood Defender Service However, the Bishop Myriel Fundraiser intentionally allows a broad range of donations as your state or country may have specific organizations you know of doing good in this field. Remember: BID IN REPLIES, NOT REBLOGS. Let's go!

[angryisokay]

Police militarization? That ball got really rolling with Nixon iirc, with the whole War on Drugs nonsense. Every president since has added to the problem. I guess you could hold Biden double accountable, since he was a key figure pushing the ‘tough on crime’ attitude as a Congressman. Republicans and Democrats have been trying to outdo each other in the ‘who can suck cop dick harder’ contest since the late 70s at least.

Which American president can be fully, or get the most blame, for the over-militarization of the US police?

Because I want to be bet money that it’s a Democrat.

[thoughtfulfangirling]

2024 Reads

Another human invented marker of time has passed moving us from one year to the next. It's a good reason to start over my lists right?! XD 2023's list can be found here! 2024 starts below!

You Made a Fool out of Death with Your Beauty - Awaeke Emezi

Pussypedia: A Comprehensive Guide^ - Zoe Mendelson & Maria Conejo

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek -Kim Michele Richardson

Meru - S.B. Divya

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South^ by Radley Balko & Tucker Carrington

Watching the Tree: A Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Tradition, and Spiritual Wisdom^ - Adeline Yen Mah

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg^ - Helen Rappaport]

Pride and Prejudice* - Jane Austen

Fresh Girl - Jaida Placide

Butts: A Backstory^ - Heather Radke

The Girl Who Chased the Moon - Sarah Addison Allen

The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides

The Blue Sword - Robin McKinley

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex^ - Nathaniel Philbrick

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico^ - Amy S. Greenberg

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible^ - Charles E. Cobb Jr.

This Is Your Mind on Plants^ - Michael Pollan

The Silent Patient*~ - Alex Michaelides

Finding Me^ - Viola Davis

Wuthering Heights# - Emily Bronte

Exit Strategy~ - Martha Wells

The Girls Who Went Away:^ The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe V. Wade - Ann Fessler

Bowling Alone:^ The Collapse and Revival of American Community - Robert D. Putnam

Fugitive Telemetry%~ - Martha Wells

The History of Wales^*% - History Nerds

The War on Everyone^% ~- Robert Evans

Searching for Black Confederates:^ The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth - Kevin M. Levin

The Great Influenza:* The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History [2004] by John M. Barry

Network Effect~ - Martha Wells

Zelda Popkin:^ The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer - Jeremy D Popkin

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon

Medical Apartheid:^ The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present - Harriet A Washington

The Assassination of Fred Hampton:^ How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther - Jeffrey Haas

The Death of Vivek Oji - Awaeke Emezi

Mutual Aid:^% Building Solidarity in This Crisis (And the Next) - Dean Spade

Passin' Through - Luis L'Amour

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store - James McBride

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

Histories of the Transgender Child^ - Jules Gill-Peterson

Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curiosu Man^ - Mark Kurlansky

When I Fell from the Sky:^ The True Story of One Woman's Miraculous Survival - Juliane Koepcke

Dear Senthuran:^ A Black Spirit Memoir - Akwaeke Emezi

Emma* by Jane Austen

Lud-in-the-Mist - Hope Mirrlees

Woman:^ The American History of an Idea - Lillian Faderman

System Collapse - Martha Wells

A Dark and Starless Forest - Sarah Hollawell

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love^% - Bell Hooks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks^ - Rebecca Skloot

Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America^ -Rachel Hope Cleves

The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle^ - Lillian Faderman

The Woman in Me^ - Brittany Spears

Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America^ - Gregory Smithers

Being Huemann: An Unrepentant Memoir of Disability Rights Activist^ - Judith Huemann

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When a Disaster Strikes and Why^ - Amanda Ripley

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone^ - Edward Dolnick

Utopia for Realists:^ How We Can Build the Ideal World - Rutger Bregman

The Echo Wife - Sarah Gailey

To Believe in Women:^ What Lesbians Have Done for America - Lillian Faderman

Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

Tribe:^% On Homecoming and Belonging - Sebastian Junger

Freedom^% - Sebastian Junger

Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield

Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea% - Mark Kurlansky

Bridehead Revisited# - Evelyn Waugh

The Witch Elm - Tana Frencyh

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

HumanKind: A Hopeful History - Rutger Bregman^

Autumn at the Willow River Guesthouse - C.P Ward

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World Find the Good Death^ - Caitlin Doughty

A Study in Drowning - Ava Reid

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

Gideon the Ninth* - Tamsyn Muir

See What I Have Done - Sarah Schmidt

Plain Bad Heroines* - Emily M Danforth

Tell Me I'm Worthless - Alison Rumfitt

On Killing:^ The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society - Dave Grossman

Camp Damascus - Chuck Tingle

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror - Daneil M. Lavery

The Night Gardener - Jonathan Auxier

The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals^ - Aaron Mahnke

The Willows% - Algernon Blackwood

Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones% - Alvin Schwartz

The Motion of Puppets - Keith Donohue

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow% - Washington Irving

Wisconsin's Ghosts^ - Sherry Strub

Trauma and Recovery^: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror - Judith Lewis Herman

An Enchangment of Ravens - Margaret Rogerson

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell* - Susanna Clark

Portrait of a Thief - Grace D. Li

The Five^: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper - Hallie Rubenhold

Countrymen: The Untold Story of How Denamrk's Jews Escaped the Nazis, of the Courage of their Fellow Danes^ - and the Extrondinary Role of the SS - Bo Lidegaard

The Road to Jonestown^: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple - Jeff Guinn

The Scary Book of Christmas Lore^ - Tim Rayborn

On Tyranny^: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder

The Old Magic of Christmas:^ Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year - Linda Raedisch

Harrow the Ninth~* - Tamsyn Muir

The Hogfather - Terry Pratchett

12 Days at Bleakly Manor - Michelle Greip

Christmas Truce: The Western Front December 1914^ - Malcolm Brown & Shirley Seaton

Midnight Never Come* - Marie Brennan

Behind the Scenes:^ Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House - Elizabethy Keckley

Key: * = Reread ^ = Nonfiction ~ = Read with Empty % = Novella #= Doc book club

My goal for 2024 is for 40% of my reads to be nonfiction. I've had two years within the recent past where I managed 20% of my reads to be nonfiction, so I'm aiming to double that.

Okay, below the cut I'm putting the nonfiction books on my tbr, most of which I have the lovely people of Tumblr to thank for the recommendations!

1968: The Year that Rocked the World

The Age of Wood; Our Most Useful Material...

The Assassination of Fred Hampton

Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the...

Being Human

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shelf

Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

Bowling Alone

Brave the Wild: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped...

Butts: A Backstory / Evermore Recommended

The Cadaver Kin and the Country Dentist / Automatuck9

Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse...

Dear Senthuran

DisneyWar

Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with...

Finding Me (Viola Davis)

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed...

The Food of a Younger Land

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women...

The Glass Universe

The Great Hunger: The Story of the Famine...

The Great Influenza

Helping Her Get Free: A Guide for Families and Friends of an Abused Woman

The History of Ireland

The History of Scotland

The History of Wales

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Indifferent Stars Above

In the Heart of the Sea / ecouterbien

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death...

The Last Days of the Romanovs / Automatuck9

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical...

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During the Crisis...

A New World Begins

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous...

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get you Killed / Empty

Radium Girls

The Road to Jonestown

Paper: Paging through History

Pussypedia / Bookstagram Rec

Salt: A World History

Say Nothing

Sea Biscuit: An American legend

Searching for Black Confederates

This is Your Mind on Plants

Unmasking Autism

The Unthinkable: Who Survives when Disaster Strikes - And Why

Watching the Tree / found all by my little self

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we Will be Killed...

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the.. / Rose

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta...

[atthecenterofeverything]

in this book I’m reading (Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko) the author uses the example of Columbine to demonstrate a situation where, despite being in theory the exact reason SWAT teams were founded in the 60s, none of the units present on the scene were able to stop Klebold and Harris in any way. this is supposed to come as a contradiction since the author is clearly a liberal, which it will not to anyone reading this.

the official explanation behind the creation of SWAT teams under Nixon was that regular law enforcement would not have the weaponry to intervene in active shooter situations (specifically the Texas Tower Massacre in 1966) - though of course the urban riots happening at the time and the fear of Black nationalist militant groups (like the Watts riot or the Black Panther Party shootout in 1969) had more to do with it.

except that several SWAT team units were stationed outside and none of them went in because the situation was deemed “too dangerous”. at the height of the shooting, there were eight hundred cops and eight separate SWAT teams. a teacher bled to death for four hours because despite having received the message that someone was dying, none of the forces came in.this is something that is repeated in many similar shooting situations, especially in the past 20 years - SWAT didnt go in until after the shooters were confirmed dead. how your takeaway from this can be anything but "this shows the point of SWAT teams is not to intervene in shootings but to break down the door of ppl with half a gram of weed in their house and terrorize communities" I do not know

[fnord888]

I had originally planned to paywall some stuff, or at least give subscribers a preview for a few days. But shortly after I launched, I had a call with the folks at Substack, and they recommended just keeping everything available for free, at least for now.

Substack asked Radley Balko to *not* paywall any posts?! Obviously he's in a very unusual position in having the support base he does, but definitely a surprising anecdote. I has assumed that no paywalls was a principled decision on his part (and possibly a concession he got from Substack based on that unusual position), not that it was Substack's idea.

[eggcatsreads]

February Wrap-Up

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Favorite Read of the Month:

Solita by Vivien Rainn (GR review)

It’s only through facing the past and her buried fears can Sadie find salvation as she upturns the Hacienda’s twisted roots, roots born from the faith and fire of the conquistas, the Spaniards who came from distant shores, bringing with them not only their God, but also their demons.

THE gothic romance. This book changed my perspective on romance books. I've thought about this book regularly since I read it.

"In my time," he continues, voice low, "sanctity was measured by suffering. Those saints that abstained from the pleasures of life, fasted to starvation, mortified their flesh, drank the blood of the wounded - it was only they who saw the eyes of God, it was only through their agony that they were touched by true divinity, enraptured by their own faith."

"I...I'm not a saint, Silas." Her eyes meet his in a gaze that's wrapped up in the promise for everything she's always denied herself. The promise of temptation for the taste of that forbidden fruit, a single bite all it takes for irreversible expulsion, for an eternal fall from grace.

"I never said you were."

The warmth of his breath is so close to her own, heat mingling, pulses flush close. "Then what are you saying?"

"That I am," he answers. "I found God. And I'm looking into her eyes."

HELLO???? THIS QUOTE HAS IRREVOCABLY CHANGED HOW I READ ROMANCE BOOKS. THIS IS THE STANDARD.

-----------------------

Rest of Books Read Under the Cut:

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover (sequel)

The second book in the Murder & Magic series of historical fantasy novels featuring Hetty Rhodes and her husband, Benjy, magic practitioners and detectives living in post–Civil War Philadelphia.

Godkiller by Hannah Kaner

Kissen’s family were killed by zealots of a fire god - now, she makes a living killing gods. That is until she finds a god she cannot kill: Skedi, a god of white lies, who bound himself to a young noble, and are on the run from assassins.

The Book of Living Secrets by Madeline Roux (GR review)

Best friends Adelle and Connie love of a little-known gothic romance novel called Moira. When they find a way to enter the book, suddenly everything isn't how they remember.

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton (GR review)

It's 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to be executed for a crime he may, or may not, have committed. Out at sea things begin happening. A twice-dead leper stalks the decks. Strange symbols appear on the sails. Livestock is slaughtered. And then three passengers are marked for death, including Samuel.

The Song of the Sandman by J.F. Dubeau (GR review) (sequel)

After a terrible mass shooting at Cicero’s Circus, the evil presence responsible for the carnage is taken in by a doomsday cult lying in wait for such an opportunity.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist by Radley Balko

For nearly two decades, medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. Michael West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart.

Hell's Half-Acre by Susan Jonusas

In 1873 the people of Labette County, Kansas discovered the remains of countless bodies, and below the cabin was a cellar stained with blood. The cabin's family, the Benders, were nowhere to be found, sparking a frenzy that continued for decades.

Seductive Poison by Deborah Layton

In this haunting and riveting firsthand account, a survivor of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple opens up the shadowy world of cults and shows how anyone can fall under their spell.

-----------------------

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Born to be Hanged by Keith Thomson

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than three hundred daring, hardened pirates gather on a remote Caribbean island. The plan: to wreak havoc on the Pacific coastline, raiding cities, mines, and merchant ships.

-----------------------

Books read so far this year: 21

How I rate books.

[azspot]

If you look at J.D. Vance, he considered Trump a clown and a threat to the country back in 2015 and 2016, and the same with Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik. All these people are now being somewhat challenged on what they said about Trump back in 2015, and their responses are to get angry at the media for quoting them directly. But it's a cult. I don't know how else to describe the behavior that we're seeing from some of these politicians.

Radley Balko

[morlock-holmes]

Reblogging because this is a misreading that I hadn't considered.

I'm cheating with the first one, I assume somebody has called Robin DiAngelo seminars DEI, but the latter two were not tarred as "DEI initiatives" by right-wing idiots, they were self-described as DEI initiatives.

The second was part of Wal-Mart's diversity (Now "Belonging") program and the third was from this chilling Radley Balko article about policing in Minneapolis leading up to the murder of George Floyd

We also know that medical examiners face immense pressure, are often perceived to be on the same “team” as law enforcement, and can be influenced by cognitive bias. In one of the first studies to test cognitive bias among medical examiners, researchers found that when given otherwise identical autopsy reports, participating pathologists were more likely to rule an infant death a homicide when told that the child was black and that the last person to care for the child was the mother’s boyfriend, than when told the child was white and the last caretaker was a grandmother. 

“I’ve seen medical examiners say things like, because of the color of the decedent’s skin, they couldn’t tell if there were bruises,” Joye Carter told me. Carter, the former chief medical examiner in Washington, D.C., was the first black woman to hold a chief ME position in the country. Carter had tried for years to get the National Association of Medical Examiners to start a diversity, equity, and inclusion program. “When I’d tell that story to explain why representation of nonwhite people is important, they would just shut down. They didn’t want to hear it. They just hear that as you calling them racist.” Her idea received so little interest that she eventually resigned from the organization in frustration. But after Floyd’s death, NAME reached back out to Carter. She is now working with the group to educate medical examiners about the role of race in death investigations. 

"Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" became a major corporate buzzword around 2020, which means that all kinds of programs got that label, everything from meaningless corporate training nonsense to genuinely important attempts to mitigate severe problems.

Things that I have seen referred to as "DEI":

Robin Di Angelo struggle sessions

A charitable donation to a historically black university from a private corporation

The head of a city's medical examiners hearing people in the department say, "Yeah I don't really know how to check for bruises on people with dark skin" and trying to implement a training program to remedy this

To me, these things seem different enough from each other that your opinion about one doesn't need to be your opinion about the other two.

[cordycepsfem]

hi!

If you had to recommend one book to a younger feminist, what would it be?

To any feminist, regardless of age, I recommend Invisible Women. I'm a data nerd, and when I read books about different ways data is being used in the world to affect how services, institutions, products, and experiences are changed for people, I always appreciate how mind-opening it is. Some of the smallest things in life that we just assume "is what it is," is actually not natural.

For instance, as a frequent medical patient, I knew that there was a lot of medical misogyny, having experienced it myself, but Criado Perez's book goes deeper into how women are treated across the board by the medical establishment.

And thanks to a job my mom held when I was a kid, I was exposed to crash test dummies at a young age (a weird thing, for sure). I never asked why they were all the same size and weight, because it never occurred to me that car companies wouldn't take everyone into account. Boy, was I wrong.

Invisible Women is not heavy on feminist theory - at least, not what I think of as "traditional theory." But part of taking feminist actions, for me, is learning about how the world got to where it is, and how can I take concrete steps to make changes right now. Learning about things like "the pink tax" and how ads specifically target women made me look more closely at the products I buy. Knowing that I can take small but real steps makes me feel like I'm really able to use information right away, especially because then I can share that information with other women.

And on the off chance you were asking for other types of book recommendations, not specifically feminist readings, here are some of my favorite non-fiction picks:

I'll Be Gone in The Dark - Michelle McNamara

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces - Radley Balko

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires - Douglas Rushkoff

Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy - Martin Lindstrom

Brandwashed - Martin Lindstrom

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking - Susan Cain

And I'm a quarter of the way into Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. It's a dense read but it's amazing and relevant, and I think I will do a recap of it once I'm finished.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch Substack:

Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted. But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan. “You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”

The Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post have all looked at what Trump and the MAGA coalition have planned for immigration policy should he be elected again. Those stories all got some attention at the time, but not nearly enough to reflect the insanity of what he’s proposing. Perhaps it’s the sort of bluster Trump often spurts out in the moment, but never bothers to implement. We ought to take it more seriously. Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board.

Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life. Miller himself has long made clear that the distinction that matters most to him is not between “legal” and “illegal,” but between white and non-white immigrants. Both prior to and after joining the Trump campaign in 2016 and White House in 2017, Miller sent hundreds of emails to far-right outlets like Breitbart touting racist literature like Camp of the Saints, and links to unabashed white nationalist sites where writers argue that nonwhite immigrants are of lower intelligence, and are disease-ridden, parasitic, and predisposed to criminality.

(It shouldn’t need saying, but immigrants and their children contribute far more to the economy than they take from it, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, interracial IQ comparisons are based on a false premise and have few real-world implications, and provided there’s some basic screening at the border, there’s zero evidence that immigrants threaten public health.) In November, Miller offered the details of his plan in an interview with Charlie Kirk. Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants. He plans to house the millions of immigrants he wants to expel in tent camps along the border, then use military planes to transport them back to their countries of origin.

[...]

Miller also wants to end birthright citizenship (more on that in a moment), and during the first Trump administration pushed a “denaturalization” program to strip naturalized immigrants of their citizenship. Last year, a coalition of MAGA factions put together “Project 2025,” their blueprint for a second Trump term. It’s basically a roadmap to autocracy. And they make no secret of the fact that they want to do away with legal immigration — and nonwhite legal immigration in particular.

The Project 2025 plan would end the only legal way for seasonal and agricultural workers to come to the U.S. to work. It would also effectively end the H1-B visas that allow immigrants to work in fields like tech, engineering, and medicine — most of whom come from India or China. They want to end humanitarian programs that grant sanctuary for refugees fleeing war or natural disasters, and suspend all visas to any country that the administration deems uncooperative in accepting deportations. They want to screen visa applicants for ideology, barring entry and terminating the visas of people Miller considers politically impure. Miller told the New York Times that the administration would also invoke a 1798 law that allows federal officials to deport immigrants without due process during wartime, taking the broad view that drug cartels are waging a war against the United States.

The Project 2025 plan also calls for cutting all federal aid to colleges and universities that provide financial aid to undocumented students, including DACA recipients — the undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. It would cruelly tie all sorts of unrelated federal aid — including emergency aid after natural disasters — to state and municipal cooperation on immigration enforcement. The plan would require at least 70 percent of the staff of any federal contractor to be U.S. citizens — not legal residents, but U.S. citizens. As the Niskanen Center puts it, “the Mandate aims to demolish the American immigration system, coerce states and localities into cooperating with administrative schemes, and intimidate immigrants present in the United States.”

[...] Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economy. Inflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression. Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support. Trump and Miller aren’t going to deport 15 million people in four years. It just isn’t possible. But the important thing — the thing that ought to be immediately disqualifying — is that they plan to try.

[...]

Trump’s plan would require deportation officials to go into cities, workplaces, colleges, and neighborhoods, find undocumented immigrants, and forcibly extract them. He did some of this during his first term, but it was sporadic and mostly for show. This would be on a much, much larger scale.

These will be people who for the most part are indistinguishable from legal residents and citizens, and whose only offense is to be in the country without documentation (which is a civil offense, not a criminal one). That means it’s a near certainty that a significant number of people who are here legally would be mistakenly detained. Some would be deported. And once they’re gone, they’d have to battle a backlogged and bureaucratic morass of an immigration system to get back in. Usually, refugee crises are brought on by large groups of people either voluntarily migrating from regions struck by war or natural disaster, or armies forcibly moving people en masse. Trump’s deportation plan would mean identifying the undocumented people in virtually every decent sized city, town, and county in the United States, detaining those people in some regional facility, transporting them to a bus station or airport, then flying, walking, or driving them across the border.

Imagine what it would take to evacuate the entirety of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Imagine the number of buses and you’d need, the number of holding facilities, and everything you’d need to staff and equip those facilities. You’d need security. You’d need medical staff and food services. You’d need bathroom and shower facilities. You’d need janitorial staff, bus drivers, and pilots. Now imagine moving a population equal in size to the populations of those cities, but spread out all over the United States. In addition to Miller’s tent encampments along the border, you’d also need detainment facilities in every major city to hold immigrants as they await transport. Sanctuary cities would resist letting the administration use space in their jails. But even in cooperating jurisdictions, there wouldn’t be nearly enough available space. In his Atlantic piece, Brownstein consulted with experts who made the dystopian suggestion of housing immigrants in warehouses and abandoned shopping malls.

Currently, removals are handled by the Enforcement and Removals Operations (ERO) division of ICE. At the moment, that office has 7,600 employees. Last year, ERO removed about 142,000 people with a budget of $4.7 billion. If we apply these numbers to Trump’s 15 million plan, and spread it out over a 4-year term, Trump would need the ERO or an equivalent agency to increase its capacity by a factor of about 26. So the office would need to increase to more than 200,000 employees, and a budget of $122 billion. But that’s just the “muscle,” or the people who carry out the removals. ICE also has investigators, administrative staff, and attorneys who argue immigration cases in court. Overall, ICE has about 20,000 employees, with a budget of $8.5 billion. If we assume the current staffing and budget would need to expand at scale with the number of removals, Trump’s deportation plan would need 530,000 employees. That’s about 70,000 more staff than current active-duty troops in the U.S. Army.

The overall ICE budget would need to increase to $225 billion — 80 percent more than the current budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security, and 20 percent more than the Army’s 2025 budget. You’d also need to multiply the number of immigration courts and judges. Currently there are 69 immigration courts with 650 immigration judges. To keep the current ratio of courts and judges to deportations, you’d need more than 1,800 courts and over 17,000 judges. The current budget for these courts is $981 million. That would need to jump to $26 billion.

Radley Balko wrote an insightful column on the costs of Donald Trump’s fascistic mass deportation plan, as it would be very costly to the economy and would require tons and tons of people to carry out.