Saturday Report 9/20/25 - The Nazis famously required German states to give them the names of Jews; Trump’s FBI appears to be on the verge of compiling a list of Trans people...
The Best of the Rest of the News
— 1,800 Men Went Into Alligator Auschwitz, but when ICE started to shut down the facility, only 600 Came Out. As Charles Pierce writes for Esquire, “It appears that the agency is just as incompetent as it is cruel.” A federal judge, based on a lawsuit from the Miccosukee Tribe, ordered the concentration camp closed down and ICE began to comply, but somehow over a thousand men went missing. Nobody knows where they are. Deported to Africa? Dumped in the Everglades? Escaped (not likely)? Shipped to federal prisons or other facilities? Dealt with via Brian Kilmead’s “involuntary lethal injection” suggestion? Families are getting hysterical, worried about where their fathers, brothers, and sons have gone, but ICE is blaming the DeSantis administration (which built and ran the facility) and DeSantis is blaming ICE and nobody is taking responsibility for these missing human beings. And even more amazing, not a single major media outlet has bothered to pick the story up from the Miami Post and other Florida sources. Having masked secret police disappear people — permanently, apparently — has now become “normal,” just like in Germany in the late 1930s. Welcome to Amerika.
— Did the FCC Chairman break federal law with his “authoritarian” move against ABC? When Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger who also shot two other Democratic politicians and had a hit list he was going through, Don Jr. claimed the killer “seems to be a leftist” and “a Democrat.” Elon Musk, in the context of that murder, said the left was “murderously violent,” and Laura Loomer demanded Democratic Governor Tim Walz be “detained by the FBI and interrogated.” None apologized, as far as I can tell, and nobody in the Trump administration called for their censure. Even Republican Senator Mike Lee got into the act, tweeting, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” But when Jimmy Kimmel said Charlie Kirk’s assassin was “MAGA” (apparently in error) he wasn’t even given a chance to correct himself on the air the next night; he was simply pulled off the air in the wake of FCC Chairman Carr’s threat to pull the broadcast licenses of TV stations that carried the show. Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler pointed out, “the statute of the FCC says in section 236 that you won’t do these kinds of things,” and “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest.” Whether Carr broke the law or not, threatening TV stations because of the political content they carry flies in the face of the First Amendment, written by our Founders in 1787 in response to King George outlawing publication of anything that libeled him or subjected him to ridicule (King George III’s 1787 Royal Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, outlawed “morally critical satire.”) Kimmel had roasted Joe Biden and Barack Obama; neither would ever have even considered trying to get him or Stephen Colbert (or any other comedian) pulled off the air. We’ve passed a critical threshold on the road from freedom to tyranny, and it’s shocking that the rightwingers and Republicans who’ve been arming up for the day when tyrants take over America and lock down free speech are happily going along with it. (Apologies for mixing up ABC and CBS in yesterday’s Daily Take; I’ve corrected the article online: I strive for accuracy and appreciate the notes I received from y’all setting me straight.)
— The Nazis famously required German states to give them the names of Jews; Trump’s FBI appears to be on the verge of compiling a list of Trans people. Ken Klippenstein reports, “The Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’ in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, two national security officials tell me.” Bondi and Trump have both made remarks seeming to justify the action, claiming there’s some kind of dark conspiracy of Trans people planning violence against Republicans. When asked about shootings by trans individuals by a Republican on the House Judiciary Committee this past Wednesday, FBI Director Kash Patel said, “We’re looking at the entire spider web for any of these attacks.” This kind of demonization is exactly what led to the “final solution” back in the day; after all, the first targets of Hitler’s wrath in the first weeks of his 1933 administration were Trans people. Ever day with every new outrage, it appears that Trump and his people are committed to following, step-by-step, the classic dictator’s playbook that’s been recently followed by Putin, Orbãn, Erdoġon, et al. Defining “an enemy within” is one of the classic early steps, particularly when that enemy is a small and generally misunderstood minority group.
— Joe McCarthy was a piker; he just waved around a piece of paper, claiming to have the names of hundreds of communists within the State Department. Today, Trump and his people are going after students who criticized Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, federal employees who’ve posted on social media in support of Black Lives Matter, and “radical leftists” who’ve been critical online of Charlie Kirk. The witch hunts are now fully activated, with the Vice President calling on people to snitch to snitch on their friends and neighbors, and Senator Tom Cotton saying it’s time for people to “take matters into their own hands” when they discover Netanyahu critics among them. Their goal is obvious: stifle all public dissent and create a single-party state where everybody sings the praise of Trump, his friend, and their hard right vision of Amerika.
— Love Charlie Kirk? Join the Army! That’s the bright new idea from higher-ups in the Department of Defense War, arguing that Kirk has “awakened a generation of warriors.” What could possibly go wrong? This, by the way, is the reason we shouldn’t have an all-volunteer Army and should restart the draft, this time with a public service option, for one year for all men graduating high school. Having a diversity of opinions in the military is essential to avoiding the kind of group-think that leads to atrocities and allows military forces to become instruments of oppression.
— Trump is violating his own executive order. Chafing under Twitter and Facebook bans that he thought (incorrectly) were mandated by the Biden administration, Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office to stop government censorship. Titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” his EO starts out: “The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.” It then gets explicit, saying his administration will “ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen…” Irony is dead.
— Cities are pushing back against ICE; here’s what’s happening in Portland. Our mayor is using land use regulations to demand that ICE stop using an office building to overnight house people its masked secret agents have kidnapped off the streets. The terms of their current permit only allow for detentions up to 12 hours, so Mayor Keith Wilson said, “U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement made clear detention limitation commitments to our community, and we believe they broke those policies more than two dozen times.” Other cities are finding their own ways to push back; keep an eye on this growing resistance movement.
— Geeky Science! Do fatty foods scramble your mind? It appears so. Granted, the study was done on fruit flies, but the parts of their brains that were affected by a high-fat diet that caused memory loss are pretty identical to those in humans. The study out of Japan was published in a peer-reviewed journal and suggests that eating too much fat can lead to long-term memory loss. So much for the Atkins diet!
— Hunter in a Farmer’s World:
— Wisdom School:
Using my First Amendment rights to see you in the streets and to say....
Folks on the left, did not give birth to or raise Tyler Robinson. We read his grandmother's quote and saw the pictures. Those explain a lot.
JD doesn't understand there's no need to LIE about what Kirk said---we can just play the footage. Vance's call for the new Stasi is working. People are being fired; students protesting for their teacher were on last night's local news. The snitches need to remember the rhyme.
Kirk was an unapologetic racist, misogynist, and Christo-fascist. We should not apologize for saying so. Many speaking up are retired, but unfortunately Miller got our bank info from Musk's DOGE thefts. They probably got our medical records, and that doesn't bode well for the trans community.
As for the memorializing, here is a good quote: "How you die does not redeem how you lived!"-Reverend Howard John Wesley. Amen. Love. Peace. Better Days.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Jimmy K.
This line was MISinterpreted by many [e.g., Bill Maher and Mr. Hartmann] as suggesting the suspect was aligned with the MAGA movement.
"... trying to characterize ... as anything other than one of them ..."
It's just a statement of fact, in my opinion.
This is about the "MAGA gang" and their finger-pointing, their knee-jerk blaming.
It is Not about what the murderer's affiliation actually was.
Only the shooter knows, and he's not cooperating.