Two Trump voters, on their way to a medical appointment, learn all about FAFO
They voted for Trump who told them what he would do, then, he did it to them.
FAFO.
A couple of US citizens were driving around Southern California, minding their own business scoping out recreational opportunities, while heading for a medical appointment. However, Federal agents decided there was a distinct possibility they were criminals. And interfered with their plans.
This is how NBC 7 San Diego reported the event (with video):
A couple detained by Border Patrol in Boulevard said they believed agents did not have reasonable suspicion to stop them at all, recording the interaction and alleging they were racially profiled, pulled over by an unmarked vehicle as they were scoping out campsites on their way to the dentist.
George and Esmeralda Doilez are US citizens who live in Brawley and were headed to a dental appointment in North County on Wednesday. They said they were exploring Jacumba and the surrounding area for the first time when a dark-colored SUV started following them near McCain Valley Recreation Area, then put on a siren and pulled them over.
At first, George was sanguine about the traffic stop. He told the reporter
“We didn’t think we had anything to worry about.”
However, when agents approached his car wearing masks, he questioned their rationale.
“Who does that? Criminals do that. Robbers and thieves do that. Kidnappers do that. And that’s what we’re seeing by our own government.”
Esmeralda was concerned enough to start recording the encounter. At which point, the agents lowered their masks. Which makes you wonder why they were wearing them in the first place. The Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent explained why they had stopped the Doilezes.
“The reason why we’re stopping you is because you did U-turns and there’s a known alien out in the area.”
In the video, George can be heard telling the agent that he and his wife were avid campers, “exploring” on their way to the dentist. This caused the agent to offer unsolicited advice on the appropriate way for citizens to go to medical appointments.
“If you have a dentist appointment, it probably wasn’t the best decision to be out in the middle of nowhere.”
George pointed out that he thought he was living in the land of the free.
“We have the right to travel anywhere we want to travel.”
The agent confusingly replied by both agreeing and disagreeing with George.
“You’re absolutely right you do, and I actually have the right and authority to stop you.”
George then wondered if the agent was following a racist policy
“Why are we not allowed to be here? Because we’re not white? Our skin doesn’t match?”
In the video, George can be seen showing the agent his ID but refusing to get out of his car. At which point, Border Patrol called for a K-9 unit. The dog detected marijuana. This prompted an agent to say they now had probable cause, and he would arrest the couple if they did not get out for a full search of the vehicle.
After the search, an agent told the couple that he could seize their vehicle and ticket them for having the marijuana, but that he would let them off with a warning. However, by then, George had proved he had bought the weed legally. So the agent had no grounds for writing a pot-possession ticket or warning them about anything.
I’ll warrant his sham magnanimity was a psychological salve for a man who knew he had screwed the pooch.
Predictably, CBP denied that racism was involved. The agency maintains that the agents had noticed George’s vehicle:
“exhibiting suspicious driving behavior consistent with illicit cross-border criminal activity.”
Adding: “This incident concerns a lawful stop based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. The claim that the stop was based on racial profiling is baseless.”
This self-serving cant has all the validity of an MLB batter calling his own balls and strikes.
George reacted as all of us would when stopped and detained for 30 minutes by armed men. He told NBC 7 he was:
“Terrified, terrified, absolutely terrified. As a husband, you’re seeing your wife, you know, shaking and crying. Your natural instinct is: I got to do something to protect her. And then what is this going to lead to? In my mind, I’m thinking of so many things, OK?
If I fight these guys, I’m going to lose. I could get killed out here. But why should I allow them to trample on my Constitutional rights? Why should I allow them to get away with this kind of stuff?”
Welcome to America’s incipient fascist state, George. He added:
“This place is controlled by goons in masks in unmarked vehicles chasing down American citizens just because of the color of their skin. Nobody should be afraid of their own government. They’re here to protect, to serve, not to be pirates.”
However, while I feel for George and Esmeralda, they were the agents of their own terror. They both voted for Trump — in 2020, and again in 2024.
However, let’s welcome them back to the side of light. Both stated they regret their vote for Trump, not just because of their own experience. But because they told the reporter, they’ve watched his mass deportation effort unfold in immigration court and at workplaces, and seen that the majority of people Trump’s Brown Shirts have detained do not have a violent criminal record.
George reflected on his poor choices.
“I feel shame, guilt and anger at the same time because of the promises that he made that he lied to us about, going after the worst of the worst. He lied on those and he stole our vote.”
Two years ago, George nearly died in a workplace accident. Esmeralda told News 7 that the thought crossed her mind that she could have almost lost him again.
“I did think that there might have been a chance, I remember sitting there crying, thinking like, ‘Oh, my God, if this happens, what’s going to happen? I’m going to see something bad. I don’t want to see that.'”
“We already went through something traumatic two years ago, so, you know — we don’t want to see something else even worse. I feel sad this is where we’re at. I can’t believe this is where we’re at.”
Both said they felt the need to record and speak out to raise awareness.
George: “Do not comply, because complying is going to get you in a prison concentration camp. That’s what it’s going to do eventually. Maybe it might be sooner than we all think.”
Esmeralda: “We can’t let them take our rights.nThen we’re nothing.”
Trump’s total failure in DC
Trump’s stunt – putting FBI agents and National Guard troops on DC streets – is a failure from the start. It’s a big nothingburger. It’s not the streets on fire that Trump hoped for.
If you want to see clear evidence of Trump’s failure, watch the press conferences with the DC mayor and police chief. They are not expressing outrage about the FBI and NG personnel. Instead, they are talking about cooperation while, at the same time, going on with normal police operations.
Trump wanted DC officials to freak out, to pound the podium. Trump wanted DC residents to take to the streets, throwing Molotov cocktails, burning buildings. NOTHING has happened or will happen because everyone in DC from the mayor and police chief down recognizes Trump’s move to be a stunt, a shadow-puppet theater, a big nothing . . . all staged by Trump in hopes of prompting riots.
Furthermore, we all know Trump pulled this stunt in an attempt to draw public attention away from (1) the declining economy, (2) his coming failure in negotiating with Putin about Obama, and (3) the Epstein affair, which will not go away and which just may eventually sink Trump.
My daughter is an attorney living on Capitol Hill. She reported the following today.
Yes, there are FBI agents clearly identifiable because they cruise around in black SUVs or black sedans, all with federal government license plates. They monitor the DC police radio and when they hear an arrest in progress, they run to the scene so they can get on camera “assisting” the DC police.
Smoking weed. Marijuana possession and use is legal in DC provided you possess a small amount, do not sell weed, and use it only for personal consumption. In residential neighborhoods – especially the older DC neighborhoods made up of row houses – it is common for people to sit on their front stoop in the evening, visiting with neighbors, and smoking weed. Over the past two days, FBI agents have freaked out and tried to arrest people for sitting on their front stoop smoking weed. The FBI agents were told to fuck off, were informed about the DC law, and they left with their tails between their legs.
The churches. DC streets are crowded. In DC are several very large, well-attended churches, most of them Black churches although a couple of white churches have the same issue: Parking. So, on Sundays, at church time, parking is permitted on both sides of the streets around these large churches, and when church is out, no one interferes with those leaving church. Except this past Sunday, when at one big Black church, a couple of genius FBI agents blocked off the streets and tried to ticket drivers leaving the church and were eventually sent packing after church members explained the local customs and told – not asked – the FBI agents to get the hell out of the neighborhood.
Brown people. Reports are now circulating that the FBI agents are stopping cars with brown people driving or in the car. They demand ID, ask about immigration status, and generally harass people.
800 National Guardsmen. Everyone knows that, with 800 troops coming in, at any given time, there will NOT be 800 Guardsmen on the streets. To conduct 24-hour operations, they will have to work in shifts of about 200 while the other 600 are either off duty or are working on housekeeping chores. At least 25% of the 800 will never set foot on a DC street because their job is to support the other troops – cooks, medics, vehicle mechanics, personnel and finance clerks, and the like.
Face it, this deployment to DC is nothing but a stupid Trump stunt that he has dreamed of since his first term. The reaction by the DC leadership and residents is not what Trump expected and he doesn’t know what to do. But his halfwit, drooling MAGAt supporters just love it.
And now the mask is off and we see Trump the would-be dictator
President Donald J. Trump’s big announcement today at his press conference—to which he showed up late—was that he is assuming control over the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and about 40 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with officers from the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service and members of the District of Columbia National Guard, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.” He reiterated that officers would clear homeless encampments from the city.
In fact, statistics from the Department of Justice show that violent crime in the nation’s capital was at a 30-year low in 2024 and, according to Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. Former undersecretary of state and editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel noted that Washington is “not even in [the] top 10 dangerous cities in [the] U.S.” Meanwhile, legal analyst Asha Rangappa notes that FBI agents are not trained to patrol the streets, and that every one of them assigned to do that is not investigating foreign spies, foreign and domestic terrorists, or crimes like fraud, murder, corruption, and human trafficking.
If that was Trump’s big announcement, the big story seems to have been something different.
Trump’s performance at the press conference—an event for which his handlers would have made sure he was at the top of his game—made it clear that his mental deterioration is moving rapidly. He let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel explain the actual plan, taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape that exists only in his rhetoric.
The administration’s seizure of power is anything but imaginary. As Stengel noted, “Throughout history, dictators use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.” While Trump is mobilizing the National Guard under a pretext now, he memorably refused to mobilize it on January 6, 2021, to protect the lawmakers under siege in the U.S. Capitol as his supporters tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president.
Some clues to what the administration is attempting showed up today in a court in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are suing the Department of Justice, saying it broke the law by deploying about 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June without authorization. A federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as law enforcement officers.
Anna Bower of Lawfare Media was following the events in court today. She posted that the government agreed the troops in Los Angeles were subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and that they were put in place simply to guard federal buildings and law enforcement officials. But witnesses said that troops accompanied ICE when they made arrests and one of the documents introduced that related to the massive troop presence in MacArthur Park on July 7 said the purpose of the mission was to “protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions…while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”
The words “demonstrating federal reach and presence” seem to get to the heart of the administration’s object, for it is showing federal troops exercising power over civilians even while telling the court they are not. Making people fear the government is key to the rise of an authoritarian.
This mobilization echoes Trump’s attempt to take over Washington, D.C., in June 2020 when he was angry about the protests over the death of George Floyd, murdered in May 2020 by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. In 2020, members of Trump’s first administration stopped him from using the military against U.S. citizens, and, dramatically, members of the military stepped up to declare their support not for a president but for the United States Constitution.
This time around, Trump has installed loyalist Pete Hegseth at the head of the military. Hegseth made his support for the president’s plan clear today as he stood with Trump at the press conference. Ominously for civil liberties, observers note that no one from the administration is specifying where the administration intends to send people from the homeless encampments, although Trump wrote Sunday, “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”
The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”
Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.
Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”
Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.
But Trump’s press conference did not show a president in control of these dramatic changes. His words echoed the rhetoric he used to win office in 2016, rhetoric he summed up in his inaugural address that turned a speech usually designed to be uplifting into a description of what he called American carnage: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
But in the context of the president’s rambling nonsense, that apocalyptic rhetoric, along with Trump’s focus on renovating and redecorating the White House to look like one of his gold-splattered properties, seems like an attempt to return to a past in which he felt powerful.
Meanwhile, Trump’s second presidency has been following the plan outlined in Project 2025 closely, even though Trump denied any association with Project 2025 when he ran for office. Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the section of the plan that called for an extraordinarily strong executive in order to put in place Christian nationalism. Increasingly, it looks like members of his administration are using Trump in order to create a system that will respond to whoever is in charge, making it possible for today’s leaders to retain control over the country even without Trump there to mobilize MAGA voters.
Trump’s press conference today showed a badly weakened president. His apparent connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have already weakened him with his base. That story is not going away, and Trump has made it clear he is frantic over it. Then today he indicated even he is worried about his mental deterioration. At 7:36 this morning, he posted on social media that Representatives Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are “morons.” He wrote: “Each of these political hacks should be forced to take a Cognitive Exam, much like the one I recently took while getting my ‘physical’ at our GREAT Washington, D.C., Military Hospital (W[alter] R[eed]!). As the doctors said, ‘President Trump ACED it, something that is rarely seen!’ These Radical Left Lunatics would all fail this test in a spectacular show of stupidity and incompetence. TAKE THE TEST!!!”
Vice President J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations. As Bill Kristol noted today in The Bulwark, Vance also appears to be undercutting Trump over the Epstein files, twisting the knife while also seeming to make overtures to Trump’s MAGA voters, who have never warmed to Vance. As Kristol notes, Vance set up what Kristol calls a “very unusual” meeting at his residence to discuss Epstein, a meeting that just happened to leak to the press. Then yesterday, Vance brought up the issue again in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel, parroting MAGA beliefs that the files name prominent Democrats.
“[A] lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers,” Vance told Bartiromo. As Kristol notes: “With this bland statement, Vance succeeded—inadvertently, needless to say!—in reminding us that we don’t yet have the answers we want and deserve,” thus ginning up the Epstein story again.
Those people cheering on Trump’s drive for autocratic power because they still somehow think he will use that power to make their lives better might want to consider how their lives may change if that power is in the hands of J.D. Vance.
And so we have come full circle: the arbitrary nature of dictators was, after all, what made our nation’s founders base a government not on men, but on impartial laws that defended the rights and liberties of the people.
When is Melania Knaus going to hold her promised news conference?
Yes, on this very day in 2016, when Donald “TACO” Trump was just running for President the first time, he derided those who were claiming Melania may not have had a legal immigration process. Maybe her Einstein Visa was not received on the up and up. Imagine that! Well TACO put all of that to rest in a public statement.
They said my wife Melania might have come in illegally. Can you believe that one? No, no, no. [Responding to naysayers in the audience]. They said, headline, maybe she came in illegally. Maybe. Let me tell you one thing, she has got it so documented, so she’s going to have a little news conference over the next couple of weeks. That’s wha…that gonna be. I love it. I love it. They said “Melania Trump may have come into our country illegally, and how would that be for Donald Trump to be [undecipherable word].” Here’s the only problem. She came into the country totally legally. I mean, you know. All right, you’ll see it in a little while. I said to her, no, no, let it simmer for a little while. Let them go wild. Let it simmer. And, then, let’s have a little news conference. *
Well, as of today, it’s been exactly 9 years since that announcement. Or, in more Trumpian terms, it has been a couple of weeks plus, oh, a few, um, 466 more weeks. So, you can see where I’m getting just a little doubtful. Maybe she will never do it. Maybe (oh, can it be), something really was amiss with her Einstein visa. Maybe, if her name was something like Melania Garcia, instead of Melania Trump, goons would have surrounded her on a street and kidnapped her to a foreign or even a new American concentration camp. Gosh. Do you think I am being too distrustful?
Why do the idiot Republicans keep blaming everything on Obama?
Why? Because he’s a black man and, although he has not been in office for over 8 years, they know their hate-filled base just loves to attack Obama.
resident Donald Trump and his team have spent weeks trying to kill damaging headlines about their mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and while doing so, they have lashed out at a very familiar target: former President Barack Obama.
The Obama Distraction (Attempt)
The public has repeatedly told pollsters they think the government and Trump are covering up evidence related to Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking network. As a result, Team Trump has insisted that Obama was the mastermind of a convoluted conspiracy to interfere in elections, repeating long-debunked allegations alongside claims of treason and the threat of criminal trials.
Fox News, Trump’s most valuable propaganda ally, was on the case. The network blanketed the airwaves with hour after hour amplifying the Trump smear of Obama, desperately trying to drown out the Epstein coverage. Thus far, there are few signs that the campaign is working, but the right is giving their all.
Familiar Ground
Trying to weave a conspiracy theory around Obama is well-worn territory for the right—and for Trump’s team in particular. Back in 2020, many of these same people, led by Trump, attempted to create an Obama-related scandal titled “Obamagate.” Unlike its namesake, the infamous Watergate scandal, the Obamagate conspiracy fizzled, and a few months after all that sound and fury, the public elected Joe Biden over Trump by a significant margin.
Similarly, when Trump first took office in 2017, it was just a few weeks in that the right began to argue that the grassroots protests against Trump’s bigoted policies were an Obama creation.
Trump has made it quite clear that he hates Obama. He always takes great pains to name the former president in full as “Barack Hussein Obama,” an attempt to invoke bigoted fears of the name’s Middle Eastern roots.
Millions watched in 2011 as Trump uncomfortably squirmed in his seat at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Obama mercilessly mocked him over his racist birther crusade. It has been reported that the moment may have pushed Trump into the electoral arena, out of his desire for revenge.
The Roots Of Anti-Obama Rage
Obama is the first Black person to be elected president of the United States. He first did so by running in 2008 against then-Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a decorated military veteran and an icon in the conservative movement. Obama’s win was an affront to conservatives, who have historically treated Democratic presidents like usurpers, but with Obama, conservatives perceived it as more egregious because of his race.
The right, led by Trump, didn’t merely object to Obama’s stance as a Democrat—they argued that the first nonwhite person to occupy the presidential office was there illegally and was not even qualified for the job. Trump repeatedly claimed he had investigators looking into Obama’s birth certificate.
During an appearance on “The View,” Trump touted his purported team’s visit to Hawaii, Obama’s birthplace. “They cannot believe what they are finding,” Trump claimed.
Nobody found anything, of course, because conservatives were lying.
Four years later, Obama further angered the right by winning a second term, this time against self-described “severely conservative” Mitt Romney.
By this point, a Black man had twice beaten the Republican Party’s best efforts and the right-wing media smear machine.
GOP Unhinged
While Republicans have always fostered a conspiratorial culture, Obama’s double win appears to have been the party’s tipping point. Crackpots like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones became mainstream within conservative circles, and figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who went on at length about purported Jewish space lasers, were elected to Congress.
And of course, the birther-in-chief himself, Donald Trump, became the leader of the party and has spent the last decade shaping conservatism in his twisted image. Central to that is hating Obama.
Trump’s racism, working in tandem with conspiratorial thinking, is now the standard in the party. It’s no wonder that his team has reached for the familiar in trying to rid themselves of the stench of pedophilia and other sex crimes.
Obama has not been president for over 3,100 days. But Trump and his team believe the former president is always in the shadows, lurking and controlling world events. And when things go wrong for Trump, three words will always be on his lips: Barack Hussein Obama.
The price increase the no one talks about but that will, literally, kill us.
Perhaps it is time the United States joins the rest of the world with national health insurance – Medicare for All. Read on. Pay special attention to the last paragraph.
The price increases that should cause Americans more alarm
The price of health insurance is rising faster than the price of eggs or gasoline.
August 8, 2025 at 6:45 a.m. EDT
By Elisabeth RosenthalElisabeth Rosenthal is senior contributing editor at KFF Health News and author of “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.”
Wary of inflation, Americans have been watching the prices of everyday items such as eggs and gasoline. A less-noticed expense should cause greater alarm: rising premiums for health insurance. They have been trending upward for years and are now rising faster than ever.
Consider that, from 2000 to 2020, egg prices fluctuated between just under $1 and about $3 a dozen; they reached $6.23 in March but then fell to $3.77 in June. Average gas prices, after seesawing between $2 and $4 a gallon for more than a decade starting in 2005, peaked at $4.93 in 2022, and are now back to just over $3.
Meanwhile, since 1999, health insurance premiums for people with employer-provided coverage have more than quadrupled. From 2023 to 2024 alone, they rose more than 6 percent for both individuals and family coverage — a steeper increase than that of wages and overall inflation.
For many people who have the kind of insurance plans created by the Affordable Care Act (because they work for small companies or insure themselves), rates have probably risen even more drastically. In this market, state regulators scrutinize insurers’ proposed rate increases, but only if they exceed 15 percent.
And the situation is about to get worse: For 2026, ACA marketplace insurers have proposed eye-popping new prices: In New York, UnitedHealthcare has proposed a 66.4 percent rise. HMO Colorado has asked for an increase of more than 33 percent in that state. In Washington, the average proposed increase across all insurers is 21.2 percent, and in Rhode Island it’s 23.7 percent.
According to Business Group on Health, a consortium of major employers, “actual health care costs have grown a cumulative 50% since 2017.” In a recent survey, 87 percent of companies said that in the next five to 10 years, the cost of providing health insurance for their workers would become “unsustainable.”
Drugs, brawls, sexual assault — prison? NO. Tesla plant.
Working conditions at Tesla’s manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, have gone from bad to worse, with sexual assaults aboard company shuttle buses, drug and alcohol use onsite, all-out brawls breaking out between employees, and “prevalent” bigotry – including widespread use of the N-word, a bombshell lawsuit reveals.
In a 159-page federal lawsuit filed Thursday and obtained first by The Independent, Ozell Murray, a former Fresno police officer in charge of security at the 22,000-person factory, claims he and his team “routinely” seized cocaine and fentanyl onsite, confiscated guns discovered in the building, investigated “acts of sexual deviance” on Tesla grounds, and, at regular intervals, “pulled employees off the manufacturing line and sent them home for being alcohol-intoxicated and high on drugs.”
Those who reported the issues were fired over bogus charges or forced to resign, according to Murray’s complaint, to which several of his ex-colleagues signed on as co-defendants.
“Healthy profits have always been more important to the Company than a healthy working environment,” the complaint alleges. “For Tesla, more bodies on the manufacturing line meant more vehicles flying out the factory door – no matter how unclean the hands were that were assembling those cars.”
Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/tesla-lawsuit-elon-musk-california-b2804549.html
The mask is off: Trump goes full Nazi.
Neo-Nazi groups are praising President Donald Trump for bringing their bigoted ideas and rhetoric into the mainstream of American politics. Over the years, multiple Democratic leaders have warned about this possibility. The warnings were mocked and ignored, and now, here we are — full-on Nazi.
Reuters reported on Friday that the Aryan Freedom Network, a Texas-based white supremacist group, is pleased with the direction that Trump has taken the country in. Co-leader Dalton Henry Stout told the outlet Trump has “awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years” and described the head of the Republican Party as “the best thing that’s happened to us.”
The white supremacists told Reuters they love Trump’s repeated praise of “Western values,” his attacks on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and his opposition to immigration. Trump’s parroting of their brand of hate has reportedly increased interest and recruitment in the group.
Aryan Freedom Network describes itself as a “white racialist” group and has called for white people to “take back our land.”
The unity between the Trump-led MAGA movement and previously ostracized white supremacist groups has occurred alongside a rise in white supremacist violence. In 2020, 13% of extremist demonstrations and violent acts involved white nationalists, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, as reported by Reuters. That has grown every year since, and by 2024, almost 80% of those events involved white supremacists.
In the future, it will be more difficult to obtain data on white supremacist violence because the Trump administration has cut or scaled back federal programs collecting such data and countering such domestic terrorism. Naturally, that is a boon to the movement.
It probably isn’t a coincidence that the most visible instance of political violence with white supremacist overtones was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That insurrection was led by pro-Trump forces and initiated by Trump as a way to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. At the beginning of his second term, Trump pardoned many of the offenders, thereby sanctioning their violent acts.
Echoing the white supremacist movement, Trump has repeatedly sought to erase gains made during the historic Civil Rights movement. His administration has purged acknowledgement of milestone accomplishments by Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ Americans.
As part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s attack on government agencies, racists loyal to Trump benefactor Elon Musk were installed and supported in the administration. Most notably, as part of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been deployed to engage in street-level thuggery to harass, manhandle, and abuse migrant populations and the communities that support them.
In one of the more open endorsements of the type of white supremacy that groups like Aryan Freedom Network espouse, Trump has gone about restoring statues and military base names meant to honor pro-slavery Confederates.
The administration’s allies are on a neo-Nazi kick as well. Musk has allowed pro-Nazi content to flourish and thrive on his social media site, X, formerly Twitter. Musk has expressed support for Nazi-affiliated parties around the world, including the extremist Alternative for Germany party.
On Fox News, host Greg Gutfeld recently argued that conservatives should tell each other “What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi?” to mock Americans’ sensitivities to racism. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, one of the biggest Trump backers in media, posted a meme on Wednesday that argued “We Are ALL Hitler” after Musk and Trump were criticized for making Nazi-style salutes.
The affiliation between Trump and the neo-Nazi right was a topic of concern raised by then-Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign last year.
“I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said last September.
Now the tragedy has come to pass.
Why does SECDEF Hogsbreath want to repeal the 19th Amendment and take away from women the right to vote?
Why is Trump’s Secretary of Defense calling for women to lose their right to vote?
The United States Secretary of Defense just promoted a clip calling for women to lose their right to vote.
Pete Hegseth shares a clip saying women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands: “All of Christ for All of Life”
“All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth posted on social media, from an account marked with a grey checkmark that says, “This account is verified because it’s an affiliate of @DeptofDefense on X.”
That post accompanied a CNN interview (below) of Pastor Wilson. CNN billed the segment as “The Christian nationalist pastor with ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.”
“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson unapologetically told CNN.
“It doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce biologically,” he continued. “The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three or four or five eternal souls.”
Wilson also believes women should not have certain leadership roles, and should not be allowed to vote.