Context, Catastrophes, and Selective Empathy
Things were a colossal mess before, but throwing innocent people in a dungeon without cause, and deportation for speech, crosses lines. (And, resisting digital prisons and transcending war mentality.)
"Since so many people seem to have forgotten, due process is not enshrined in the US Constitution because the framers wanted to be nice to monsters. It is there because the framers wanted the new nation to operate according to the rule of law, not according to the will of tyrants, whose excuse for tyranny is always 'the monsters'“- CJ Hopkins
Summary
Fast-paced events are being reported without context. What’s reported is often the inverse of the truth. We’re told of innocent public servants being forced out or unfairly investigated. Looking deeper shows, again, at least in some cases, the narrative tells the opposite of truth.
But not always. Some innocent people are being swept up, rights are being violated, and both ethically and legally, lines are being crossed. The media’s loss of credibility and double standards are obstacles to understanding, and for some, taking seriously, what looks so far to be unprecedented violations of human dignity.
Rumesya Ozturk, a legal immigrant working on her PhD at Tufts, is in a harsh detention center and may be deported, when all she’s been directly accused of, and all it appears she’s done, is co-authoring a calmly worded op-ed.
The US government is targeting people based on lists given to them by groups full of hatred, who conflate any public empathy for Palestinians with anti-Semitism and allegiance to terrorism. One group, Betar USA, has written, “Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!” in response to a list of babies killed before their first birthday.
Andry Hernandez Romero, a makeup artist from Venezuela who came to the US legally through a port of entry, escaping persecution for being gay, is in a brutal El Salvadorian confinement center, with the gang members he was fleeing. It seems like he was assumed to be part of Tren de Aragua because he has tattoos. Others also without criminal records are being mistaken for gangsters on account of their tattoos. (Update - not even with tattoos in some cases. This nineteen-year-old was sent to that dungeon in El Salvador, even though one of the officers who took him said, “‘No, he’s not the one,’ like they were looking for someone else. But the other said, ‘Take him anyway.’“)
When these peoples’ stories are told and defended by the same media and politicians who’ve shown amazing double standards and a history of lies, it may not help their case.
Most conservatives, who called out the censorship, speech policing, and deplatforming of anyone whose (mostly true) speech challenged the last administration, are rationalizing censorship now. The same people rightfully angry at lack of due process when conservatives were targeted seem to be OK with no judicial review for immigrants on their way to - not just “deportation”, but to a horrific dungeon, where they may be tortured and have no chance to leave. Violent crime by migrants is real. But that’s not a reason to send other people to hell based on no solid evidence. (Some of) the same people who explained how wrong the official narrative was before January 20th, now take the government at their word that it’s only brutal criminals being sent to CECOT.
The liberals, media, and Democrat politicians who have plenty of criticism for team Trump, and who are showing (or making a show of) empathy for everyone harmed by, and scared of, the current administration, are the same people, politicians, and organizations who cared nothing for, and actively violated, the human rights of people who exposed info showing their narrative to be full of lies. These same people, politicians, and groups showed no care for anyone severely injured from trusting the narrative and tried to ruin those who spoke up for those injured people. *This does not invalidate reasonable points they’re making now - but it makes it harder to take them seriously*.
Digital / “REAL” IDs can be a trojan horse for abuses of power I wouldn’t have believed could “happen here” in the West, until seeing what did happen, and what is happening. Many, who have been right on a lot, warn that since REAL IDs can connect every aspect of our lives, and the powers-that-shouldn’t-be have shown their true colors and goals out in the open - that this is about more than efficiency and security. Canadian Meghan Murphy, a critic of rising authoritarianism, decided to run for Parliament. The day her candidacy was confirmed, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, her bank account was frozen at the direction of the Canadian government. Actions like this would be much easier, and more common, if REAL IDs, biometric scanning, etc, are widely implemented. This is not a power that any government can be trusted with. What’s acceptable speech / opinions / actions under one administration can be unacceptable to the next.
Despite the pressure, ads, articles, and framing of efficiency and security (or sustainability, depending who the framing is trying to appease) - a REAL ID is not necessary to travel. More info here, RefuseRealID.org
Both “sides” see it as the other side is intent on destroying everything. Both sides are certain the other side’s goal is to demolish the constitution, democracy, human dignity, the rule of law. Both sides have understandable reasons for feeling this way, although media distortions both omit context and exaggerate.
When the people divide into tribes that hate each other, are consumed with vengeful bitterness, and see anyone who voted differently as subhuman, it doesn’t help change the power structure - it feeds excuses for more top-down control. It’s possible to not be on any “side”, with skepticism of everything and respect for other humans even if they think or voted differently. This doesn’t mean not protesting, lobbying, organizing, having opinions and making them known, etc. But there’s too much dehumanization, everywhere. We’re consumed with mental and emotional wars while on the precipice of kinetic wars. Can we transcend war mentality?
Clarification and Context in a Mad World
When I started working on this Substack last year, the administration in power and the mainstream media were basically the same thing. There was immense amount of criminality, lies, manipulation, and trauma, but it wasn’t getting through most of the information channels. It wasn’t allowed to.
My first Substack article was about assessing the media’s gaslighting through a subject I’d taken years to understand - that COVID was treatable all along - and could state with exhaustive evidence the mainstream narrative was not just wrong about, but murderously wrong - while censoring, smearing, and persecuting those who were right.
But, while this may be incomprehensible and misunderstood in such a polarized environment, I didn’t mean that, or anything I’ve said, to be broadly praising this current administration.
I’m trying to be objective and assess information before making assumptions. My advice in that article about following information all the way to its roots and headwaters is more difficult when news and changes are coming at ridiculous speed, about, well, everything. Yet due diligence with info is important if holding strong opinions, such as trusting the words of public health figures with one’s life, or feeling sure some people deserve, or don’t deserve, to languish in a horrific dungeon.
I’d also said that if an info source has gotten plenty wrong, even though they may get bits of things right amidst the bullshit, they should never be trusted again. After recent events, I remain very reluctant to trust them on the same subjects I’m sure they royally lied about. But for topics I’m less familiar with, where they have resources to investigate and some honest independent journalists find their info credible enough to draw from - I’m open to listening. Especially now.
This piece, (not yet part two of Information, Permaculture, and Cooties), intended to be a short note that became longer. It’s an attempt at balance, context, sharing gems from other writers, and difficult but urgent information, from a place that sees valid points on both sides of what are two completely different narratives in different universes.
Note, April 16 - While I see both sides of a lot, there are some things that are just never OK, that warm-blooded people should not allow to happen. Plenty of those things already happened under “Biden”, I’ve mentioned them before, and throughout this article. Other, different things are happening now.
If anyone reading this understands the very real damage downstream of open borders, and supports deporting illegal migrants, and imprisoning violent criminals, I ask you to keep an open mind to seeing that what’s being done now is way beyond that. Treating humans of certain demographics as disposable things is what many warned Trump would do (while they laughed with Jimmy Kimmel and other TV hosts dehumanizing the “other” of that time).
It’s not OK when anyone does it. Especially not when they have the power to send people to hell. More on these tragic situations later, I wanted to put this near the top in case you can’t digest more than the beginning of this too-long article.
If you understand the damage done by open borders, you probably don’t trust the mainstream media. Neither do I. And I try not to form opinions immediately after hearing things.
But if there is any chance some of this is true … it is gruesomely unjust. These people are being spoken of as having been “deported”, or “removed” from our country. Deportation is sending someone back to their homeland, not to a brutal confinement fortress where it’s been said “the only way out is in a coffin”. The media and politicians are mainly focused on one man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but there are others, with no evidence at all of gang connections, being sent to one of the worst places on Earth.
From CBS News, who “obtained internal government documents listing their names and any known criminal information. We cross referenced that with domestic and international court filings, news reports and arrest records whenever we could find them. . . But we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans - 179 men- now sitting in prison.”
Border Czar Tom Homan said immigration agents spent hours conducting rigorous checks on each of the men to confirm they are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang president Trump campaigned on eradicating. . .
But in Andry's case, the only evidence the government presented in immigration court were these pictures of his tattoos, crowns, which immigration authorities say can be a symbol of Tren de Aragua
Lindsay Toczylowski (his lawyer): These are tattoos that not only have a plausible explanation because he is someone who worked in the beauty pageant industry. But also the crowns themself were on top of the names of his parents. The most plausible explanation for that are that his mom and dad are his king and queen.
Cecilia Vega: Could it be possible that there is something that perhaps the government knows that you don't?
Lindsay Toczylowski: I don't think that that is possible. But if it was possible that they had some information, they should follow the Constitution, present that information, give us the ability to reply to it.”
My distrust of the media was, for four years, accompanied by the work of honest doctors and independent researchers and writers who could methodically dismantle the media’s lies and explain, down to the roots, what an honest version of the story was. I’m open to learning if there’s something missing that demonstrates these people deserve to be in that hellhole. Aside from showing a (dubious, but, something) past record on the one man who has been most talked about, I don’t see anything clarifying due diligence was done to ensure no one was wrongfully sent to what is, by definition, a concentration camp, not a prison. Prisons are for people convicted of crimes.
Neither this government nor the previous one, nor the next one, deserve more control of all of our lives. And that’s where we’re headed with digital IDs.
REAL ID And “Virtuous Citizens”
There’s engineered polarization that doesn’t want us seeing deeper issues, happy for the people to fight amongst each other while herding us all into digital prisons. (And throwing some into worse-than-prisons in the physical world.)
The projection of so much hate onto Elon Musk has fed another narrative that sees him as a hero, giving his time and brilliance to re-balancing what truly is a mess of fraud, corruption and waste (along with some worthwhile endeavors and real human beings).
I think DOGE is a subject where multiple things are true at the same time, it’s neither all wonderful nor all terrible. But I don’t trust the tech wizard who plans to build the “Everything App” having access to so much data, at a time when plans are converging from multiple angles to herd us into data integration that could be abused in so many ways. That distrust is shared by others who have gotten most things right. Importantly, they’re not influenced by either extreme hatred nor devoted adulation towards certain people.
In lots of areas, including election integrity1, there’s context not being reported.
And - the multiple truths at the same time thing. The SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) act just passed the House. There are good reasons to distrust how elections have been run. Democrats have disagreed with every presidential election this century that went Republican, including some disputing this one, yet somehow now wondering about election fairness in one election, after mail-in ballots greatly expanded, has been equated with domestic terrorism.
The SAVE act is framed by some as an intentional effort to disenfranchise women. The act has provisions for discrepancies in birth name and current name, but those provisions are quite ambiguous. It may end up presenting cumbersome obstacles for citizens, especially married women who changed their name, to vote. Which, if true, is not OK. Yet neither was the situation before …
What the media doesn’t want anyone wondering about, though, is if voter ID laws are a step on the way to digital control - something that’s desired by the powerful strings behind both parties. Looks like voter ID laws + Real ID are trojan horses for much more than efficiency and election integrity.
If you’re thinking something like, “that conspiratorial thinking speculates and exaggerates … digital IDs are used to control people in places like China, not in democracies …”, I thought that also … until I saw what happened all over the West.
This is an article from Italy, about a digital driving license, where “virtuous citizens” get extra points. It’s not hard to imagine what could go wrong …
(Thanks to heart centered, beyond partisan kindred spirit Tessa for this link - who foresaw a digital control system long before most of us did. Highly recommend her Substack!) I don’t know the current status of this program in Italy, I’d like to sift through much more info on what’s already been done with digital control, but then this article will be longer and more delayed!
From investment banker and wise recognizer-of-patterns Catherine Austin-Fitts, in this informative piece listing “the steps the Administration is (and is not) taking in a variety of areas to facilitate a rapid control grid build-out.” (I added the bold font) -
“A digital control grid is an electronic network of digital telecommunication and information systems that allows individuals to be surveilled, tracked, and made subject to invasive controls applied to their financial transactions and resource use (such as electricity, food, water, transportation)—compromising, if not ending, all human rights and liberties. Control grids operate with significant data collection and AI to apply social credit systems that can be dictated on a highly centralized basis. A digital control grid ends financial freedom, replacing markets with technocracy—a system run by rules created and maintained centrally by “experts.”
Is the Trump Administration building a digital control grid? We provide the following checklist to assess the steps the Administration is (and is not) taking in a variety of areas to facilitate a rapid control grid build-out.
A highly precise digital ID system is essential to operate a digital control grid. The U.S. has been trying to implement this type of digital ID since the immediate passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11, with the current drive to do so happening through the REAL ID system operated through the states. . .
REAL ID
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is aggressively promoting the REAL ID with a misleading campaign that is trying to persuade people that they will not be able to fly in the United States without a REAL ID. This is not correct.Signs at airports and driver’s license bureaus inaccurately maintain that, starting May 7, 2025, an unconstitutional REAL ID in the works since 2005 is required to fly; however, the REAL ID Act only requires a federal ID (among other federal IDs, a passport qualifies). . .
Energy
Summary: An all-digital control grid and AI use extraordinary amounts of energy. One article in Bloomberg predicted that Texas would need 30 new nuclear power plants to support data centers by 2030.
In these times when each “side” is sure the other wants, at all costs, to destroy everything that keeps a tyrant’s power in check - hopefully we can all agree to refuse the REAL ID.
Context
Digital IDs can have lots of benignly useful, convenient purposes - if assessed without the context of how digital integration can be, has been, and is planned to be used as a tool to do what every power-hungry group of elites has always wanted to do - subdue and control the masses.
Put into context, no conspiracy “theories” required, the REAL ID is a trojan horse. Even assuming benign intent of 99% of its advocates (naive after all that’s happened), it has the capacity to be used as a trojan horse.
Context is important in everything. Without it there are incomplete puzzle pieces, dangled in front of us. Without context for why people feel as they do, or voted as they did, we’re being encouraged to despise half the country. Everything, including murder, is being justified. We’re living in times when murderers are idolized by the same people who freak out if they hear the word “retard”.
Some context about USAID -
In situations where I’m familiar with the context, reality is very different from - really, the opposite of - what’s being reported. That makes it really hard to believe that anything is as reported. Which sucks, because it’s important to remain skeptical and vigilant.
“Over and over again, people do the DO YOU SEE WHAT TRUMP IS DOING NOW maneuver in isolation, shoving aside a bunch of crushingly obvious scaffolding that structures and precedes his choices. It’s the Big Bang theory of politics: Nothing ever happened, but then OH MY GOD TRUMP. There is silence and darkness, but then from the eternal nothing blossometh inexplicably and magically that which is cruel and orange.” - Chris Bray, journalist, historian, former soldier, and sarcasm virtuoso.
Recently, one of the admired figures in the TDS-Industrial-Complex, who was thoroughly wrong on COVID, warned that The Bad Man’s executive order about former CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) director Chris Krebs, revoking his security clearance and investigating his censorship activities, shows the end of democracy. Apparently, Kreb’s “only crime was telling the truth”.
But an honest look shows it’s the reverse - his crime, and others in the Censorship Industrial Complex, was silencing those who told the truth. That resulted in devastating human suffering (which Trump had a role in, too - although not from orchestrating censorship or mandates).
Still, might the flood of Executive Orders contain some narcissistic personal vengeance? Maybe. Various things can be true at the same time.
“Refusing the certainty we’re offered may be the most subversive act in this carefully engineered landscape. Choosing to inhabit the uncomfortable space of questioning rather than knowing. Recognizing that wisdom begins not with conviction but with the willingness to acknowledge how little we truly understand. When the entire information ecosystem is designed to produce certainty, embracing uncertainty becomes a radical act of resistance.
This is the central tension of pattern recognition in our time: the very tools we need to discern reality - precision, evidence, facts - can be weaponized against our understanding when deployed without context.” - Joshua Stylman, in another excellent, insightful, not-partisan treasure.
It’s helpful to have clarification from journalists who have been objective, correct on most things, and who inhabit the rational space that doesn’t automatically jump to hating or loving whatever happens based on personalities and programmed hatred, or programed loyalty.2
And all of them are seeing some fucked-up things happening now.
And the fucked-up things may get lost in the dumpster fire of the mainstream media’s self-destroyed credibility. The same info-ecosystem that despises Trump, Elon, and now electric cars, with frenzied, panicked hatred, has left a trail of getting nearly everything wrong.
Might they be getting more things correct now than before? Maybe. As I said, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on the tragic stories of wrongly accused people thrown into hell, while open to conflicting info. I don’t want to turn away, as many are, understandably jaded from years of seeing the narrative twist the truth inside out.
Speaking of dehumanization, another thing being separated from its context is the humanity of people who, for solid reasons that the media kept invisible, saw whatever puppets Biden, Harris & Walz as a greater evil than the team currently in power. (And whatever puppets Biden, Harris & Walz is also guilty of inhumane disasters.)
Before the “Big (Orange) Bang”
For most of the last four years, we didn’t know who the president was - we still don’t know who was the running the sock puppet of the decrepit dementia patient, playing the part of “President” in a Truman-Show-meets-Tales-from-the-Darkside horror reality show.
Now, there are books written about Biden’s mental decline by and with quotes from insiders and media who must have known all along he was incapacitated and the only moral - and constitutional - option was to step (carefully) down.
One of Biden’s last coherent speeches was lying and coercing millions of Americans to either loose their jobs or be injected with products they’d never consent to if presented honestly. Soon after that, it became obvious to everyone that he was well on his way to becoming a cognitive vegetable. Even before then, it was clear to more astute observers.
The policies of constant lies covered multiple issues …. Corrupt is too gentle a word to describe those who ran our “public health” agencies. These beasts are still grasping on to control of a narrative that they’re loosing to authenticity which can explain itself all the way down. More on this in future articles.
Even worse, if that’s possible, the US government was in some twisted partnership with sex trafficking cartels, transporting unvetted children to unvetted sponsors, like free cartel-Uber drivers - surely sending some to a life of repeated rape. At least 85,000 migrant children were unable to be accounted for. And that’s not the only government-enabled catastrophe that was devastating innocent children.
To say that that administration lacked empathy, while feigning caring and manipulating compassion in every way they could, doesn’t scratch the surface of their crimes.
Without context of the worst atrocities under “Biden”, it’s impossible to understand that there were solid reasons the election went as it did.
Those who saw through the deluge of lies no longer believed anything that administration and media said.
Yet, looking around now, I admit that some of what the media I heaped criticism on were warning about is coming true. Some. They still were, and are, demonstrably and unforgivably wrong on nearly everything medical, they still fearmonger with selective outrage, conflations, and distortions.
But some of what’s happening is seriously disturbing.
These are strange times indeed when even the mainstream media, after having lost all credibility, may be getting things right more than once in a great while. And these are tragic times when the last election was a “choice” between one side that facilitates child trafficking and gaslights disabled people whose disability was caused by what the government told them or made them do, and another side that laughs about sending people to a torturous dungeon, claiming they’re criminals but lacking evidence.
From Censorship + Cancellation to Censorship + Detention + Deportation
Seeing foreign-born legal residents being scooped off the streets for detention in awful places and deportation with no clear reason - justified by the sloppiest of empty conflations - is impossible to separate from how those on the right were, generally, the most vocal about the Orwellian censorship networks that Democrat, starting with Obama, administrations inflicted on Americans and much of the world, and that the European left was / is using even more viciously.
Conservatives, independents, and libertarians (and some thoughtful liberals, in-betweeners, and the non-political and politically homeless), were frustrated at the can’t-make-this-stuff-up level at which the Wrongthink Police infiltrating almost every school. From elementary to university, they commanded obedience. The most angry members of their favored groups must be protected from hearing an uncomfortable word, so everyone else must stick to the approved script - who cares about reality? Reality is what the script writers say it is.
“There were words you couldn't pronounce. You could get fired and become blacklisted if you pronounce the word. This was like the laws of blasphemy in the Middle Ages.” - Sociologist Liah Greenfeld
Many who voted for Trump thought censorship was a beloved tool of the left in these times, not the right.
Meanwhile, Team Harris was screaming that if The Bad Man wins, anyone could be targeted, not just illegal migrants and criminals, but people of color, people with tattoos, anyone but straight white men. To those not on Team Harris, that sounded like insanity-level media fearmongering, huge distortions, and terrifying people with no real reason besides milking their baseless fears into votes.
It sounded like the media doing their thing, conflating the bit of truth of promised roundups of migrants who crossed illegally, who in any country would be subject to deportation, with a mad regime who also throws out legal immigrants, and anyone with ideological or physical characteristics that the dictatorship doesn’t like.
And Now . . .
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Tufts University PhD student, here legally on a visa, was walking in Somerville, Massachusetts on her way to break Ramadan fast with friends on March 25, when she was encircled by federal agents, whom she feared were going to kill her, and taken to Vermont. She was flown the next morning to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, where she was more likely to be judged by those aligned with the government. And where there have been many reports of disgusting conditions and inhumane treatment.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified revoking her visa by saying,
“ . . . if you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa. If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa. . . every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa. We’re looking every day for these lunatics who are tearing things up.”
He then invoked an analogy of being a guest in someone’s house and trashing it. He also mentioned the brutal Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The common thread of his statement was, that like any country, the government of the United States has the right to determine who is allowed to stay here, and if people come here to vandalize and harass, the government has the right to take away their visa.
OK. Sounds fair enough.
Yet he, nor anyone else so far, has presented any evidence of Ozturk doing anything resembling vandalizing, creating a ruckus, or even mentioning support of violence or Hamas.
It’s like cutting and pasting two things together that aren’t directly related. That’s one thing if you’re rushing to finish a school paper, but this is the secretary of state talking about people’s actual lives.
Yes, Hamas very bad.
Yes, there were cold-blooded celebrations of Hamas’ brutality. Also bad.
And this girl co-wrote a calmly worded op-end about freedom of discourse and economic pressure on behalf of murdered Palestinians.
Wait, what??
Cult-Like Obedience
Ethical due diligence to discern who may be a threat to the United States may be reasonable - especially after four years of migration architected by those who did not have the best interests of the United States, nor of migrants, at heart.
But this is not that. This is taking the word of intolerant extremists at face value, and assuming, or pretending to assume, that solid vetting has been done.
This is taking “evidence” that - yes - some protestors for Palestine vandalized, were violent, cheered the death of Jews, and blocked Jewish students from getting to class … and then just dragging and pasting that onto other people who share their empathy for murdered and starved Palestinians, but have not shared their actions, tactics, or more violent beliefs or even words. Sounds like what the left did after January 6th.
This is assuming everyone on the “bad list” are “lunatics”, while not seeing that one is literally taking orders from lunatics. Cancelling because the cult is offended, but can’t clarify harm done, is something Team Trump had no shortage of anger and mockery about Democrats doing. Just a different cult.
Canary Mission and Betar US are groups that vehemently defend Israel, going far beyond supporting Israel’s existence and right to “defend itself” - which sounds like respecting Israelis’ humanity and rights to live in peace, but, tragically, has become a way to rationalize an infinite cycle of violence that leaves no one safe.
These groups are certain the Israeli government and military can do no wrong, ever, no matter what they do.
They’re certain of Israel’s complete innocence. And they’re positive that anyone who dare publicly disagree is a dangerous enemy. They compile lists, and encourage reporting of, students, professors, doctors, and professionals who have spoken up for the plight of the Palestinians. Actual anti-Semitism, violence, harassment of Jews, or support of terrorism need not be present to make it onto these lists. Probably some on the lists are guilty of those things. But not necessarily - and people are being snatched up for no real reason.
These extreme list-makers concoct every accusation and stretch possible to portray their targets as dangerous terrorists, whose presence in the United States is as perilous as a literal Hamas terror cell gathering bomb-making supplies.
So, with all that effort to make these students look as wicked as they can, this is all Canary Mission has to say about Rumeysa Ozturk. Her “anti-Israel activism” is only the one op-ed she co-authored. The crimes of Hamas on October 7, 2023, are featured on Ozturk’s Canary Mission page - but connected to her in no way besides conflating one with the other.
If they could have dug up a statement of her celebrating that bloodshed in any way, they would have. Her “crimes” seem to be only supporting the movement to boycott and divest from Israeli businesses (BDS) and writing an op-ed five months after Jews were murdered by Hamas (and five months after Gaza endured even more relentless bombing than before, murdering over 61,000 Palestinians, and injuring more than 111,000).
It’s fair enough to disagree with the BDS movement. It’s fair enough to feel strongly that in the tragedy of bloodshed in the Middle East, Isreal is / has not been the only obstacle to peace3.
But supporting a movement to boycott - a tactic used by many different causes - is not in the same planet as terrorism, and it doesn’t at all match Rubio’s attempt to justify her deportation.
Like a COVID mask outside, there is no there there.
The op-ed she co-authored in the Tufts Daily was quite tame and reasonable. It intelligently expresses why diversity of spoken and written ideas is essential to authentic education. (I added the bold font.)
“According to the Student Code of Conduct, ‘[a]ctive citizenship, including exercising free speech and engaging in protests, gatherings, and demonstrations, is a vital part of the Tufts community.’ In addition, the Dean of Students Office has written, ‘[w]hile at times the exchange of controversial ideas and opinions may cause discomfort or even distress, our mission as a university is to promote critical thinking, the rigorous examination and discussion of facts and theories, and diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas and opinions.’ Why then is the University discrediting and disregarding its students who practice the very ideals of critical thinking, intellectual exchange and civic engagement that Tufts claims to represent? . . .
We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people and reject the University’s mischaracterization of the Senate’s efforts.
The great author and civil rights champion James Baldwin once wrote: ‘The paradox of education is precisely this: that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which [they are] being educated.’ As an educator, President Kumar should embrace efforts by students to evaluate ‘diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas and opinions.’ Furthermore, the president should trust in the Senate’s rigorous and democratic process and the resolutions that it has achieved.”
And for this, she was taken to a detention center in Louisiana, where the deck of justice is more likely to be stacked against her. She’s not the only one, but her case in particular - absent anything substantial besides calm, reasonable words and supporting a movement that is economic, not violent, by nature - is especially chilling.
“To my knowledge, the only thing I know of that Rumeysa organized was a Thanksgiving potluck,” said Jennifer Hoyden, a close friend of Ozturk’s who studied with her at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “There’s a very important distinction between writing a letter supporting the student Senate and taking the kind of action they’re accusing her of, which I’ve seen no evidence of.”
“We Demand Blood”
While so far there’s no evidence of Rumeysa Ozturk even attending a protest or encampment for Palestine, let alone organizing them, a group morally pure enough to declare her a menace to society has said this -
This was in response to a tweet listing the names of Palestinian babies killed by Israel before their first birthday, noting it’s likely an undercount because of bodies buried under rubble.
From Palestine historian Zachary Foster, PhD:
“The organization in part responsible for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil is
, according to this reporting by the Forward (https://forward.com/news/703018/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-cuad-ice/)
Betar's former leader Ross Glick ‘shared a list of campus protesters with federal immigration authorities.’
(Incidentally, Glick was arrested & convicted of second-degree harassment for posting revenge porn. whoops. https://nypost.com/2019/02/25/the-disturbing-story-behind-nycs-revenge-porn-perpetrators/).
A little about Betar. The organization has said:
1. ‘Turn Gaza to rubble!!’ This is incitement to commit a war crime, as purposeful destruction of civilian infrastructure is during armed hostilities is a war crime. https://x.com/Betar_USA/status/1892611426390364362
2. ‘We demand blood in Gaza,’ in response to a tweet by
listing the names of Palestinian babies killed by Israel. This is direct incitment to murder Palestinian babies. This is the literal definition to support for terrorism. https://middleeasteye.net/explainers/betar-who-is-far-right-jewish-american-group-blood-gaza
3. They proudly boost of their members vandalizing private property (literally the exact same accusation they've leveled at Mahmoud). https://x.com/Betar_USA/status/1886907012052566208
4. They threatened violence against UCLA students protesting against a genocide, writing, "we demand police remove these thugs now and if not we will be forced to organize groups of Jews to do so.” https://forward.com/news/703018/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-cuad-ice/
Betar has given the phrase ‘every accusation is a confession’ new meaning and purpose.”
This is who generates lists that the US government accepts as sufficient, vetted proof that someone is dangerous enough to be seized, detained with inhumane treatment, and deported.
(April 18 - the “Turn Gaza to rubble!!” link now has a different message than before, with the same lovely sentiment. It now says, “Fuck your ceasefire!! Turn Gaza to rubble!! For the Bibas family! They must go!”, with graphics that scream FUCK. YOUR. CEASEFIRE. // NO MERCY. #HuntThemAllDown”)
From the Grayzone - “The Bibas family demands the Israeli government cease exploiting the deaths of their family members for propaganda purposes as layers of evidence support claims an Israeli airstrike killed them.”
And Secretary Rubio called Rumeysa Ozturk a “lunatic”? He says, “these lunatics”, judging all by the actions of the most unstable. Something most everyone seems to be doing.
Mahmoud Khalil
An immigration judge ruled that Columbia U student and pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who has been in detention in Louisianna for over a month, can be deported for (supposedly) being a “threat to US national security” and “foreign policy”.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noam (ugh), has said, about Khalil’s deportation, “. . . when you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans, and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country.”
This looks like stretching and holding one person responsible for what others have said and done. But, I’ll reluctantly admit, it’s not as bizarre a stretch as with Ozturk. Khalil was at least directly affiliated with a group which had been disruptive. Yet disruptive student protests are part of the fabric of this country.
The activities at Columbia which crossed lines, like property destruction and harassment, were not done by Mahmoud Khalil. Glenn Greenwald reports that Khalil was not a leader, but a mediator, because he was a trusted, balanced voice. People who know him have said he would de-escalate conflicts, and step in front of aggressors to protect Jewish students.
There’s a clip a few seconds long where, in a discussion, Khalil mentions “armed resistance”, saying it’s been tried in Palestine - along with nonviolent and every possible form of resistance, yet Israel calls it terrorism. People jump on that as Proof!! that he’s close enough to terrorists that he must be deported. If that’s enough evidence of him supporting terrorism and being a threat to the US, would the same standard apply equally? Would a student born in Israel or another country be deported if they’d said a few words rationalizing Israel’s massive bombing of Gaza, saying it’s Israel’s right to defend itself? If they implied the bombing, or various other horrific things done to Palestinians were rational response to murders and kidnapping by Hamas, Isreal resisting violence from terrorists by their own armed resistance - would that be considered cause to deport them? Of course not. Isreal can do whatever it wants, and Isreal supporters can say whatever they want, including “we demand blood!”, and “hunt them all down!” with no consequences.
It’s an endless cycle of awfulness, with, as Naomi Wolf says, “Grief Enough for All.” But there’s a tremendous double standard.
“Anti-Semitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement” – Mahmoud Khalil, April 19, 2024
Ozturk and Khalil are far from the only non-violent legal immigrants snatched up and lumped in a bucket with activists who may actually have committed, incited, or celebrated violence. I haven’t looked deep enough into the others, but this casting-a-wide-net trend, that listens to groups like Betar and Canary Mission, and doesn’t seem fond of due process, is extremely disturbing.
At the very least, the case of Rumeysa Ozturk crosses a serious line, where people can be disappeared and deported for what they have written, which in no way glorified nor incited violence or anti-Semitism.
That’s why Substack and FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression, issued a joint statement and effort to protect writers.
FIRE has often defended right-leaning folks from the left’s Speech Police. But, true to the integrity of objectively observing patterns rather than taking sides, they see the overreach of deporting students for speech, and that’s more important than partisanship.
Tattoos (or not even tattoos) and Torture
After years of Democrats and the media (same thing) defending the indefensible, it was natural to believe that, reflexively opposing everything team Trump initiates, Dems were horrified that violent Tren de Aragua and MS-13 members had to leave luxury hotels and apartment complexes where their neighbors were terrified, and face prison.
Then Glenn Greenwald, an objective, non-partisan gem of a journalist, pointed out that team Bush / Cheney assured us that only “the worst of the worst” terrorists were sent to Guantanamo - while wrongly accused innocent men were among them.
And that’s happening now too. (Also in Guantanamo)
Innocent men have been grabbed and sent to, not just an awful detention center in the US on the way to be deported back to their homelands, but to one of the most Hell-on-Earth type of confinement centers, likely for life, the CECOT confinement center for terrorists in El Salvador.
Andry Hernandez Romero, a Venezuelan makeup artist who is gay, had legally applied for asylum at a port of entry. This thin, gentle-looking man, who has been photographed with makeup brushes, has tattoos, crowns on top of the names of his parents. Now, with no evidence he’s a gang member or committed a crime, he is in the CECOT hellhole.
“. . . Andry did appear in photos taken by Time magazine photographer Philip Holsinger, who was there when the Venezuelans arrived at CECOT.
Holsinger told us he heard a young man say: "I'm not a gang member. I'm gay. I'm a stylist." And that he cried for his mother as he was slapped and had his head shaved.
Lindsay Toczylowski: It's horrifying to see someone who we've met and know as a sweet, funny artist, in the most horrible conditions I could imagine. . .
The Trump administration has yet to release the identities of the Venezuelan men it sent to El Salvador last month. We obtained internal government documents listing their names and any known criminal information. We cross referenced that with domestic and international court filings, news reports and arrest records whenever we could find them.
At least 22% of the men on the list have criminal records here in the United States or abroad. The vast majority are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing. About a dozen are accused of murder, rape, assault and kidnapping.
For 3% of those deported, it is unclear whether a criminal record exists.
But we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans - 179 men- now sitting in prison.
In response to our findings, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said many of those without criminal records, quote "are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more. They just don't have a rap sheet in the u.s."
Border Czar Tom Homan said immigration agents spent hours conducting rigorous checks on each of the men to confirm they are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang president Trump campaigned on eradicating.
But in Andry's case, the only evidence the government presented in immigration court were these pictures of his tattoos, crowns, which immigration authorities say can be a symbol of Tren de Aragua . . .” - CBS News
(Symbol or not, crowns are, to say the least, common.)
This article, from yet another narrative-shill publication that’s been colossally wrong on so much, quotes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal (another often wrong narrative mouthpiece, yet maybe non-pharma subjects are different), noting the abysmal record of the man who may have sealed Andry’s fate.
Apparently, Charles Cross, Jr was the contract worker for CoreCivic who signed as “Investigator” the form which implicated Andry as affiliated with Tren de Aragua, based on his tattoos. Cross, a former police sergeant, had been placed on a list of officers with credibility issues. His accomplishments include crashing a car while driving drunk, allegedly claiming overtime he didn’t earn, kicking in a door, threatening to kill himself, and having an alcohol problem.
Sounds like a perfectly qualified “investigator” to decide people’s fates and cast them into hell(?)
As the Supreme Court recently ruled, while judicial review isn’t necessary to deport migrants who crossed illegally, it is necessary when sending human beings to prison. People like Andry Hernandez Romero deserve a fair hearing. And they deserve advocates with better track records.
When I try and learn about these people, there’s articles from Rolling Stone and Mother Jones and sources who trashed all their credibility with COVID, and Biden, and more. It’s almost understandable that half the country rolls their eyes and assumes these are all lies, defending criminals and wanting them to come back to return to their free phones and debit cards. Trump is deporting illegals and imprisoning brutal gang members, and the left is freaking out again with everything backwards, they think.
It’s not just my assumption, I’m seeing lots of comments dismissive of anything from sources who consistently showed there’s no reason for any thinking person to take them seriously. About anything, ever. The same media that didn’t give a shit about the vaccine injured, who were locked inside a torture chamber of their own bodies.
(Before the rush to judgement, of everyone thinking anyone who can look away from these innocent, now confined and tortured men has no heart … 99.4% were the same people who looked away from other human beings, trapped in the torture chamber their bodies became after the COVID vaccines)
Unless there’s something huge that I’m missing, this is really, really, wrong.
There is not clear evidence of crimes committed, or even likelihood of “precrime” by being in a gang or coming illegally, while there should be a high bar of reason to send someone to a place that horrific. It’s far worse than prison, how inmates are treated - and prison is after a criminal conviction. This hellhole houses men who have had no hearings or conviction. This nineteen-year-old, Merwil Gutiérrez, came through the legal channels, with no criminal history - nor even tattoos. He may not even have been who they were looking for(!) Yet he was disappeared to CECOT.
“Many of the detainees were like Merwil: randomly picked up without any prior suspicion. CBS’s 60 Minutes discovered that 75% of the Venezuelans now imprisoned had no criminal record after they obtained internal government documents and cross-referenced them with domestic and international court filings along with news reports and arrest records.”
The indisputable fact that criminals have been welcomed into the US by whatever was running the “Biden” government, and that there have been brutal attacks, rapes, murders, of innocent people downstream of this, can’t just be cut and pasted onto reasons to throw other people who have not committed crimes into one of the world’s worst confinement centers.
It’s also a fact that there’s a growing two-tier system - of thinking, reporting, policing, enforcing, and prosecuting - that’s rapidly growing across the West, that is much harder on whites and Christians than it is on immigrants and migrants. The left’s narrative immediately labels someone racist for even noticing this. But it’s real. It’s understandable to not want the US to become what’s happening to the UK, and Canada. Corrupt governments that have been more lenient on migrant criminals, even for rapes, and this contributes to frustration with floods of migrants, and that’s part of the ground which dismisses these people.
And everyone looses their humanity in the process. So now a differently corrupt government is sending innocent immigrants and migrants into hell. That shouldn’t be OK with anyone, whatever you think of migration.
“Inmates at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as Cecot, are kept in cells equipped with metal bunks and crowded with dozens of inmates for 23 ½ hours a day, according to CNN. The cells have no sheets, pillows or mattresses, inmates are not allowed books and meals are served through the cell bars, CNN reported. The State Department also documented credible reports of “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions,” including incidents it described as “torture,” such as beatings by guards and the use of electric shocks in a 2023 report. The facility was opened two years ago amid El Salvador’s crime crackdown and houses as many as 20,000 prisoners, many of whom are accused murderers or drug dealers.” - Forbes article about men with no criminal history, yet with tattoos, who have been thrown into that hellhole.
"Since so many people seem to have forgotten, due process is not enshrined in the US Constitution because the framers wanted to be nice to monsters. It is there because the framers wanted the new nation to operate according to the rule of law, not according to the will of tyrants, whose excuse for tyranny is always 'the monsters'“- CJ Hopkins, “The War on Whatever”
One Person, Two Narratives
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who, depending what side of the narrative you’re on, is either a “Maryland father” of three special needs children, or, “an MS-13 gang member”, has been sent to CECOT in El Salvador, without being convicted of any crimes.
One narrative says - We deported a criminal, who crossed the border illegally, and the same people who showed no desire to vet floods of migrants, nor any empathy for victims of violence, including families of raped and murdered girls and mothers, if that violence was done by illegal migrants - are demanding we bring back this criminal.
The other narrative says - A Maryland father, an innocent man, was rounded up and sent to prison for no reason, and despite admitting an “administrative error” was made, the administration, which grows more dictatorial by the day, is not returning him to his family. Not only was he ripped away from his family, but he disappeared into a brutal prison.
Frustratingly for anyone trying to figure this out, and tragically unfairly for those directly affected, both sides have shown they’re willing to say anything to support their narrative, even if it’s not true. They’ve both shown astounding lack of compassion, just for different people.
The same media that’s lied about almost everything, portraying the guilty as innocent and the innocent as guilty time and time again, is framing this as an atrocity done to an innocent father.
The same administration that considered co-writing an op-ed as sufficient reason to throw a student in detention and then to deport her, and found that Andry Hernandez Romero’s tattoos of crowns over the names of his parents means he’s Tren de Aragua, framing this as “Garcia was found / verified to be MS-13.”
There is a record on this man, and while in the world I want to live in, this person is not worst of the worst enough to warrant being thrown into that physical nightmare. But there’s something, including physical violence towards his wife several years ago, and it’s left out of most narratives.
The Memorandum Opinion by District Judge Paula Xinis states that in 2019, when Homeland Security determined Garcia was an MS-13 member, they “relied principally on a singular unsubstantiated allegation that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13.”
“The “evidence” against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s “Western” clique in New York—a place he has never lived. . .
Defendants suggested in their response that the public retains an interest in not returning Abrego Garcia to the United States because “he is a danger to the community,” only to abandon this position at the hearing. Again, with good reason. No evidence before the Court connects Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.”
(Update - the Justice Department shared this as evidence of Garcia’s gang ties. Same thing, based on his clothes and reliable source of infonnation, who advised Kilmar Armando ABREGO-GARCIA is an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique.”
Not that I’m familiar with Hispanic gang culture, but sounds like similar clothes to what lots of people wear. But there is more backstory to his case than the “Maryland father” narrative discloses. His wife got two protective orders for two (maybe three?) instances of domestic violence in 2020 and 2021, yet she claims they worked through their problems, went to counseling, and the problem didn’t escalate.
I don’t know what to make of this, there may be reasons this man could present a danger. But so far, even if all that’s alleged is true, it doesn’t seem proportional to sending him to a torture chamber he may never get out of.
Garcia’s Senator, Chris Van Hollen, just flew to El Salvador to meet with Garcia. I don’t know all the details of his trip, but seems like Van Hollen was singularly focused on releasing this one man, who has gotten the most media coverage, yet ignored the other men trapped in CECOT without clear evidence.(???)
Here is Garcia’s House Representative, Jamie Raskin (D-MD-TDS) valiantly standing up for his human dignity and rights to due process.
“Due process”, says Raskin, quoting one of his law professors, are “the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Familiar Faces
“All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces …
I find it hard to tell you 'cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it's a very, very
Mad world
Mad world . . .” - Tears for Fears
I agree with Representative Raskin that due process is an important right everyone should have before being sent to confinement. But I don’t trust this guy one bit. He is, in the words he used to describe others, guilty of “absolute moral hypocrisy”.
This is the same Jamie Raskin who would have loved to see Dr. Eithan Haim go to prison for ten years for sharing carefully redacted non-identifiable patient information with the Texas Attorney General’s office and also with the media, to show that Texas Children’s Hospital was lying when they said they were no longer medically transitioning children, meanwhile they continued to implant puberty blockers inside the bodies of children too young to comprehend or consent to these life-altering procedures.
(Note to anyone triggered by this topic - I hadn’t planned on bringing up the often misunderstood topic of youth gender “medicine” until I could take the time, and space, to back up allegations with substantial evidence. The evidence is exhaustive enough to fill many long articles.
But while finishing this article, after seeing Raskin speak on behalf of Garcia’s humanity and rights, I read about and listened to the hearing from April 9th, “Ending Lawfare Against Whistleblowers Who Protect Children”, happening around the same time as Democrats are demanding due process for some and not others (as are Republicans, the other way around).
If you haven’t stopped reading by now with disgust at my hateful “transphobia”, I assure you my stance on this issue is not from hate, bigotry, exclusion, or any “-phobics”. I remain extremely open minded about all subjects related to sexual identity, gender expression, inclusion, respect for all, etc.
I have no problem with transgender people, who of course deserve dignity and respect. Most just want to live their lives in peace. Some are out there working to protect children from doing what they realize they were too young to grasp but can’t be undone.
Others don’t regret their transition but are saying adults making carefully thought through decisions is different than children being pushed into something they don’t understand. I have deep respect for them.
Others are part of an angry, closed mindset that doesn’t just resist debate but threatens and assaults those who bring different experiences, opinions and evidence. These aren’t only trans-identifying people who do this, it’s also “allies” who believe the narrative that spewing instant hatred on people who disagree, or who dare be loving mothers accepting their gay sons, is the way to be a kind, inclusive, ally. Disliking that is not anti-trans, it’s anti-rageful-Cluser-B-closed-mindedness-that-harms-children-while-accusing-others-of-what-they-are-doing.
I don’t claim to deny anyone’s lived experience. There may be children for whom the medicalized path to living as the sex they’re not, but feel better living as, is truly the best thing for - risks and all.
When a knowledgeable, reality-based, compassionate psychiatrist who has thoroughly studied and witnessed the wreckage of innocence, health, and families that medicalizing gender non-conformity creates also acknowledges there’s a few children it still may be right for, I’m surely not qualified to say that never should happen.
But, if it should happen, that would be in a world where there’s honest, serious assessment of risks, and sincere care taken to first, do no harm. In this environment, for every child who these intense, irreversible, invasive procedures may potentially be right for, there are many, many, many, many more swept up in a pipeline of intentional indoctrination meant to confuse and lead in a certain way - that too often ends in profound regret, and way-too-early health problems.
After studying this deeply for three years, as someone who would likely be caught up in this if I were a kid today (probably as a confused “they/them”, likely drawn to puberty blockers, marketed as a “reversible” - they’re not - “pause button”), I know this for sure - the current environment does not even try to ensure only children with real, serious gender dysphoria that can’t be helped in a safer way are put on the pipeline to become lifelong medical patients.
There is no informed consent. There is a tremendous amount of indoctrination. And the physical and mental devastation of these medical practices are real, and profound. And those who don’t want “gender affirming care” criticized, don’t have respectful disagreements. They are cruel and brutal.
And it’s most harmful to gender non-conforming youth who would likely grow up to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual the most.
I won’t make this article impossibly long by doing deeper, but this is one of the few subjects I can confidently cite hundreds of credible sources for. (This site is a treasure trove of solid evidence, with love, acceptance, and science that can be followed all the way down.) There are Substacks in my recommended section that focus on youth gender medicine, from the perspective of the school-to-gender-clinic-pipeline being a form of conversion therapy that tells feminine boys and tomboy girls, likely to grow up same sex attracted, that they’re not OK as they are. Each word of “gender affirming care” is gaslighting.
Similar to the COVID narrative, the “science” that’s pushed on the public is full of holes if looked at closely, there’s emotional manipulation, the institutions and media-quoted “experts” are fully captured, the injured are treated like shit, and the doctors, detransitioners, and parents who tell the truth are persecuted.
As Chris Bray says, this hearing on whistleblowers who protect children “offers profound insight into the values we’ve grouped behind the imperfect labels of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in contemporary politics.” It truly is, “Competing Values, Illustrated So Clearly It's Painful to Watch”
(But that doesn’t mean it’s only folks on the “right” who oppose what’s happening to kids in the gender pipeline and don’t think Dr Haim should be in prison. It seems like it’s only conservatives who oppose confusing, poisoning, and castrating children. But there are a lot of lefties who see the harms disguised as “gender affirming care”. They just are not listened to in the liberal bubble, they aren’t welcome to speak in mainstream media. Their perspectives, even if informed by having worked in a gender clinic, or having regretted their own transition, are not welcome. Like these beautiful souls -
This is part of a statement by Dr Eithan Haim (I added the bold). A man who the same politicians who claim to be standing up to authoritarian unfairness wanted to rot in jail for ten years. Based on “evidence” which was found in discovery to be false.
“The past few years have been a grueling ordeal, with the Biden DOJ deploying its infinite resources to send me to prison for a decade. They were targeting me for blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine. I exposed their secret—they were continuing their pediatric transgender program after telling the public they shut it down.
They alleged that I violated HIPAA by accessing patient records without authorization and under false pretenses. This is despite their own evidence showing these allegations were false. This is despite no identifiable patient information being released. This is despite the indictments having nothing to do with patients - rather, the victims were “TCH and its physicians.” This is despite the lead prosecutor, Tina Ansari, having egregious conflicts of interest with TCH and Baylor - they were so egregious she stepped down from the case after my legal team made them known.
Their goal was clear: to paint me as a criminal and dismantle my life and family, all because I challenged their ideology. The DOJ’s case was a clear abuse of power, but, after years of bitter fighting, more than $2 million in legal debt, in January 2025, they dropped all charges with prejudice.”
Rep Jamie Raskin is especially mean and dismissive towards Dr Haim. Raskin operates according to tribal allegiance, with no ethics or curiosity, unless it’s something that fits the narrative he wants to portray.
“. . . Democrats spent the hearing pronouncing his guilt, outcome be damned. Just before the ten-minute mark, you’ll find ranking member Mary Gay Scanlon saying this about the unsuccessful prosecution of Dr. Haim: ‘This is an open-and-shut case. And that’s why the grand jury determined that there was enough evidence to charge him with criminal HIPAA violations. So it wasn’t the Department of Justice that politicized Dr. Haim’s case when it charged him with blatant violations of HIPAA privacy laws. It was Dr. Haim himself who came up with a political excuse for his illegal actions.’
These are the people who keep warning us about Orange Hitler’s scary assault on Our Sacred Political Norms™: the people who know that their opponents are guilty the moment a grand jury indicts them, case closed. Being accused is being convicted. (Due process? Are you a Nazi!?!?)
Jamie Raskin does the same thing, around the 22:53 mark in the video: ‘He’s a doctor who fraudulently obtained the medical records of youth who were not his patients.’ That exact claim, fraudulently obtained, was the central deficiency in a case that repeatedly forced prosecutors to try again with repeated versions of new indictments. As Haim himself told the subcommittee, in comments you can watch at 31:50, ‘The DOJ’s own evidence, that they gave us in discovery, disproved every single one of the claims against us.’
But there’s something much uglier going on in this discussion, as Democratic politicians repeatedly frame ‘gender-affirming care’ as warm and kind, and Dr. Haim describes the gender program at Texas Children’s Hospital as an effort to ‘manipulate, mutilate, and sterilize healthy young children.’ Watch around the 53:36 mark as Dr. Haim describes, for example, ‘fistulas, where stool from the rectum can pour into the wound that they call the neovagina.’ What a warm and wonderful thing to do to a child, castrating him so he can have a chunk of his own guts sewed into his crotch as a surgical ‘vagina,’ which then fills up with shit and becomes infected. You can see that only monsters would oppose that kind of wonderfully gentle and decent medical care.” - Chris Bray
Team Biden was fully captured by a cult that militantly forbids challenge to their narrative that “gender affirming care” is perfectly safe, anyone can change sex, lots of children are born in the wrong body, and it’s cruel to accept and affirm them in the bodies they were born in. (And also team “Biden” loved funding Israel’s endless wars, although deporting immigrants was not politically useful for them)
Team Trump is captured by a cult that militantly forbids challenge to their narrative that public criticism of what the government and military of Isreal do, with our money.
Oy vey.
And More Familiar Faces
Neil Young and Joan Baez joined Bernie Sanders and AOC in LA for their “fighting oligarchy” tour, which funnels legit frustration into channels that pose no threat to the power structure. The same Neil Young who demanded Spotify remove Joe Rogan for platforming doctors who got everything right.
And the same Joan Baez who … painted a picture of Dr Fauci, and wrote lovingly to him, “you are engaging in nonviolent resistance every time you stand in front of the cameras and attempt to educate the public on how to survive the Covid-19 pandemic.”
(And it’s noteable but not surprising that some of the most enthusiastic protestors of team Trump now, from individuals to organizations, were the harshest critics of challenges to the narrative on COVID. They were certain anyone advocating early treatment, or warning of vaccine harms or sharing their personal or loved ones’ ordeals of post-vaccine disability, deserved shaming, and being removed from platforms, listservs, Facebook groups, etc, etc.)
That tragic, manipulated mental reflex which automatically sorted anything counter-narrative into a degraded, demonized folder of “disinformation”, filing it with disrespecting the dead and the grieving plus strengthening the (very bad) MAGA had the effect of driving enough people away from Democrats to swing this election towards the outcome they wanted so badly to avoid.
All the way around, the left’s cooperation with what’s basically pharma-fascism created the inverse of a caring, interconnected society where the vulnerable are taken care of. Some of the most devoted believers in “safe and effective”, who insulted and blocked the vaccine risk aware, lost loved ones to COVID. There is real grief there deserving of respect, but it’s also been manipulated. If a closer look is ever dared, they likely died of lack of early treatment for COVID, plus terrible, dangerous protocols in the hospitals they probably would not have progressed to if they had the Just in Case Kits the media demonized and had started treatment thoroughly and early.
And More Selective Empathy
Calling out selective empathy is not to claim anyone is less deserving of empathy.
But it’s important to zoom out for context and recognize patterns.
Our empathy is being tugged on repeatedly, and sometimes it may be well deserved - like innocent men thrown in the worst prison without due process, while also being manipulated for Dem-loyalty and Trump-hate. Multiple things can be true . . .
Maybe, possibly … can we expand our empathy to those who have also been deserving —-?
The same media-blob that’s now cultivating empathy for the wrongly accused being sent to detention and prison without, so far, due process, is the same media-blob that got everything wrong on COVID / medical issues. The same media-blob with creepy connections and loyalty to a narrative, not to truth.
And most significantly, to those who’ve noticed patterns and problems not only when a certain person is president - this is the same media blob that had Zero Empathy for The Millions of Vaccine Injured Whose Lives Were Destroyed.
Not a shred of concern for grieving families who had the audacity to connect the death of a loved one to vaccines, even if they were a generally healthy baby twelve Hours before being multiply-vaccinated.
Jeremiah Hosea, insightful writer, musician, and chess teacher who also comes from the left, who has interviewed real, human, victims of vaccine injury, says -
“. . . Is it just me, or in recent years have more and more people taken to referring to themselves as "empaths" as though it were a mystical designation? Empathy, however, is quite natural to human beings. We are all empathetic to one extent or another. A person without empathy is a psychopath or a sociopath. . .
Something strange has occurred in the present age, however, that to my mind is novel and unfamiliar. There is a new category of individual who is not being shown any compassion or empathy. They are being treated like non-entities. That group is the vaccine injured.
While I may have said ‘new group’, this is incorrect. The vaccine injured is a category of people that is certainly as old as vaccines themselves. In vaccine injury support groups on Twitter, which I frequent — it is a mix of people injured by the Covid injections combined with people injured by the other vaccines, the ones that predate Operation Warp Speed. . .
I have two questions (or, you could say one question divided into two parts), for you, my astute readers — how did they achieve this atmosphere? How did they, Big Harma and the Poison Pushers, make vaccines the only thing in the universe that we are not supposed to question? In theory, all branches of science are continually self-correcting and updating their paradigms. Any discipline not doing so can be presumed to be a dead science. We are constantly inquiring into the nature of everything in the universe, including the universe itself.
Is vaccinology the first branch of science in which no correction can be implemented, no improvement can be made whatsoever? The first area of human endeavor that has resulted in perfection — how interesting. . .
Part two of my question, pertains to the human beings — the members of our race — who have been injured by these products: the vaccine injured. How did the vaccine injured become the one group of suffering people it is okay to shun and negate? I've never seen anything like it. If someone were thrown from a bicycle and got all scraped up, if they burned their hand on a grill, if they sprained their knee in a soccer game they would be responded to with concern and compassion. Mention a vaccine injury on the other hand and and people are likely to turn away. They're likely to change the topic abruptly. . .
my question to all the poison pushers, to all the people who bought into the agenda, to all the people who shamed others for being reluctant about an irreversible decision what do you have to say in the face of the vaccine injured and the reality of people who have had their health completely destroyed in unimaginable ways, by these injections?
To the people who called me a ‘conspiracy theorist’, or claimed that I had drifted into right-wing ideology — put all of my beliefs, or what you perceive as my beliefs aside and please listen to my vaccine injured guests. What do you have to say about people describing their own injuries, in their own words? Do you deny the humanity of these people? I don't understand what's happening here. It started out that the vax zealots wanted to get everyone vaxxed for their own good, for their own protection. They were so concerned about people getting sick and possibly dying — from covid. But when those very same shots that were supposed to protect, injure people severely and even kill vast numbers of people, they don't care. Now they're as cold as ice.
Links to his interviews with the vaccine injured are below this excellent, short, well worth reading article ~
I urge everyone with doubts that more than a few “rare” vaccine-injured exist to at least watch the six-minute trailer for this film, Follow the Silenced, at FollowTheSilenced.com. The film will soon be free to watch, either this week, or early May. The trailer is a film in itself, just a few minutes long
The left has been masterful at selective empathy.
And, after calling out unfair treatment of indoctrinated children and imprisoned peaceful protestors, now conflating anyone team Trump throws in prison with gang members without taking time to understand who’s who, and cheering on taking lawful student visas from peaceful protestors (or, um, op-ed co-authors), the right is doing a great job at selective empathy also.
Half the country can’t imagine being cruel enough to rationalize innocent men being thrown in a dungeon, or peaceful legal immigrants deported for dubious, or empty, reasons.
The other half can’t imagine being cruel enough to rationalize babies dying or children regressing or becoming paralyzed or having a heart attack, or nurses getting neurological injuries within hours or days of being vaccinated. Half (or however many, but a lot), watched in horror, some for four years, some for four decades, as permanent disabilities, and deaths, happened after vaccination, yet they were told vaccine injury can’t be acknowledged, for to do so would harm the “greater good”. Reducing gang violence helps the greater good. . .
At least, there’s power in recognizing the selective empathy. And there is power in seeing the other as human.
We’re all emotionally beaten down by divisive, dehumanizing narratives.
Endless Wars, Inside Our Minds and Hearts
Charles Eisenstein says, in this objective, heartfelt piece, When Politics Becomes War, written from a place free of both Trump Derangement Syndrome and Trump Devotion Syndrome (yes, that place exists … there are lots of us here.) -
“War mentality isn’t a thirst for violence nor a lust for fighting. War mentality is a pattern of thinking and a habit of seeing. It organizes the world into us and them, friend and foe, hero and villain. It poses solutions in terms of victory and success in terms of winning. It traffics in punishment and blame, deterrence and justification, right and wrong. ...
The disastrous public health response to Covid drew on war mentality. After decades of declining health and rising chronic disease, for which no single external culprit could be identified, finally here was a threat that could be identified and controlled. So, all of the public’s anxiety was projected onto the new scary bad guy. The habit of find-the-enemy thinking is what made the public so susceptible to policies that ranged from the foolish to the absurd to the tyrannical.
Our leaders construct a narrative that locates evil in a certain person, nation, or group, and the habit of war thinking does the rest. Soon the public is ready to support war, censorship, lockdown, suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law, and crimes against humanity. . .
That patterning is, again, war mentality. It is us-versus-them thinking. It is dehumanization and othering, the division of the world into the full human and the subhuman. The latter category can adopt the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth, or just simple contempt for an opposing opinion tribe.
Once two sides are locked into war thinking, it escalates like an addiction until all else is consumed.
Hate and contempt have spiraled out of control in American politics. . .”
He then says - “Trigger warning: it is impossible to write about this while remaining faithful to the narrative of either side.”
And warns that for those who feel certain that one “side” is fully terrible and dangerous, or fully good and will restore freedom and sanity,
“You will feel frustration, even rage, that I’m making any argument that does not include a full-throated denunciation of the bad guys. When you face pure evil, no response is valid except to fight it by any means necessary....
In the United States the opposition politician, Donald Trump, survived the lawfare and won the election. The question is, is that a victory for democracy, or is it just a victory for Donald Trump? Will he end the political weaponization of federal agencies like the Justice Department, the IRS, the State Department, CISA, the CIA, and the FBI, or will he merely direct them at new targets? Will he restore free speech and civil liberties, or will he apply the tools of censorship and surveillance to new enemies?”
Eisenstein talks about having wanted his essay to include personal stories of worthy projects, like regenerative farming, which have been cut by DOGE. But, while his public writings and talks remain heart centered, balanced, and above partisan bickering and judgement, he has not been loyal to the narrative and politicians of the Democrats - so the people he wanted to talk to refused, even to comment anonymously.
“. . . my associations and opinions on certain politicized topics marked me as a member of the opposing side, the bad side, the untouchable side. In a sense, it is “unsafe” to associate with me. I have cooties, you see, and anyone who associates with me might catch them. . .
The fact that my intention was to showcase some stories that might wake people up from Trump Adulation Syndrome (the mirror-image of Trump Derangement Syndrome), doubtless a worthy goal in the eyes of my correspondents, was insufficient to overcome the taboo of associating with a socially unacceptable person.
This widening gulf within our society also tends to feed on itself. Once it gains enough momentum, it proceeds inexorably toward civil war or genocide. . .
If I, a peace evangelist, am so easily cast into the ranks of the untouchable, what hope is there for understanding or reconciliation among society’s warring factions? . . .”
Both “sides” are being conditioned more and more to hate each other. And there’s always an excuse, something with bits of truth, or not, to spin out of proportion and accuse the other side of. And sometimes there are real horrors that don’t need exaggeration, that are just simply horrifying as they are. And we selectively focus on some and not others.
No Good “Choices” Were Allowed
Perhaps you can’t believe any decent human being could vote for an authoritarian regime that’s scooped up innocent people along with gang members and flown them to a hellish prison. Who censors on behalf of whoever they’re beholden to. Maybe you think only cruel, hateful people could vote for a regime whose budget plans potentially could take health coverage away from those who can’t afford to loose it, a regime that already has cut nutritious food for children.
Is it possible to imagine that, from another perspective, it boggled the mind and broke the heart to think of an authoritarian regime that helped shuttle victims of human trafficking to their captors, turning the border patrol into “Uber drivers for the cartels”? From this other perspective, what was voted against was an authoritarian regime that, against what they promised, gave millions the agonizing “choice” of submitting to multiple shots or loosing their jobs or ability to attend school - some who could not afford to be unemployed. And they censored the voices of people now trapped in bodies that didn’t work, trying to find each other online, among the legions of voices they censored.
It was that regime, the one last in power, the DNC, who sabotaged a fair primary while knowing Biden was incapable. Then, they went full speed ahead to sabotage the candidacy of an independent candidate who, I believe, has much more compassion than Donald Trump, and more integrity than either candidate we were allowed to “choose” between. Who has been wrongly smeared in the press. Who the liberals protesting now did not want to hear anything from or about, yet if he hadn’t been blocked every which way from reaching people, perhaps now The Bad Man wouldn’t be president. This article is long enough, I’ll say more about this when there’s room for more sources, but the information he says about health / medicine, which has been distorted and ridiculed, is solidly based and, really, can be followed all the way down.
Recognize Patterns, Resist Polarization
It’s hard to resist polarization. While this article is partly about the toxicity of division and blame, I haven’t transcended that yet myself.
I am angry at a system that captured the empathy of people I once was close to, that led my mother to think I was listening to “far-right” lunacy in the last years of her life. And to be afraid of me for some of those years. A system that, maybe(?), killed her.
And I can understand people are angry at lots of things happening now.
It’s been heartbreaking putting this article together. Going back and forth between this, and this.
But they want us judging and hating each other. To judge, or dismiss, before thinking or feeling. Or to be addicted to feeling rage, and wishing death to the “other side”.
Joshua Stylman’s words always resonate, from the place beyond partisan side-taking.
“ . . .nuanced positions get immediately collapsed into predetermined camps. The manufactured dialectic demands you choose a side rather than pursue the truth wherever it leads. This isn’t accidental - it’s precisely how mental landscaping operates. . .
The complex patterns documented across multiple domains were reduced to simple political allegiances, making meaningful dialogue impossible.
These dialectical traps don't just limit our thinking - they actively fracture our communities. The moment we label someone based on a single opinion, we stop seeing them as complex individuals with nuances, contradictions, and rich inner lives. Instead, we flatten them into caricatures, reducing the full texture of their humanity to a single position or belief. This mental shorthand might be cognitively efficient, but it devastates our capacity for genuine connection and understanding.
These caricatures strip away all nuance and humanity, reducing complex individuals to predictable avatars of tribal allegiance. The reality is that most people don't fit neatly into these boxes - they contain multitudes, contradictions, and unique perspectives shaped by their particular life experiences. Yet the architecture of information design thrives on these reductions, training us to automatically categorize and dismiss rather than engage and understand. . .
What’s most destructive about these dialectical traps is how they prevent us from finding common ground. When we step back from the manufactured binaries, we often discover that people across political divides share fundamental concerns - about corporate influence, fair elections, healthy communities, and accountable institutions- concerns that, when ignored, pave the way for social engineering. . . .
For meaningful dialogue to occur, however, we need some shared understanding of reality - not identical conclusions, but at least agreement on what constitutes evidence, how to evaluate it, and the possibility that either of us might be wrong. When this common ground erodes, we end up talking past each other rather than with each other, each inhabiting separate realities with no bridge between them. . .
The most striking aspect of these exchanges isn’t the disagreement itself but the immediate retreat to binary thinking - the assumption that questioning one narrative means wholesale endorsement of its opposite. This mental shortcut transforms nuanced pattern recognition into simplified tribal warfare.”
Thanks for reading.
To open minds and open hearts, and reaching across divides … perhaps first in our minds and hearts …
I haven’t followed election discrepancies thoroughly enough all the way down to state anything with certainty on this subject - besides that there’s at least enough oddities to warrant allowing a discussion of election fairness without shutting it down immediately. The same tactics are used to silence critics of recent elections as are used to silence critics in other issues, where I’m certain the mainstream narrative is lying.
Reporters with integrity like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, James Corbett, The Grayzone, former mainstream reporters Natali and Clayton Morris of Redacted News, and Jimmy Dore. Insightful, beyond-partisan objective, wholistically-thinking observers like Joshua Stylman, Josh Mittledorf, and Naomi Wolf. The Substacks in my Recommended section are all worthwhile gems of integrity and knowledge.
This article speaks to the Israel / Palestine conflict from a different perspective, with plenty of blame for those who kill and scapegoat Jews, and their puppet masters. Yet at least he recognizes that, “October 7 wasn’t just Hamas—it was a collapse orchestrated by those who stood aside. Netanyahu’s government, lashed to Washington’s leash, left the south naked. Why? Because blood fuels escalation, keeps the war engine roaring, and binds Israel as the world’s perpetual firing line.” It seems impossible that a country with as much surveillance and military resources as Israel couldn’t have known, if not that it was about to happen, surely they knew that it was happening, yet didn’t respond for hours. This doesn’t “justify” either side of endless death spirals, but it’s a crucial point. So much bloodshed, and now censorship and targeting, has been done downstream of Oct. 7th,’23. Each side justifies violence by pointing to the past actions of the other side. But one side is much more powerful, and uses our money to commit atrocities, which they lie about.