It’s hard not to interpret as only citizens (or in some way white people) matter

I took it the same way you did. The person who responded to you was of course correct, but the larger truth is that 100% ALL lives matter, black and brown lives every bit as much as white lives, non-citizen lives as much as citizen lives, etc. The distinctions are both immaterial and artificial in terms of value of life, a way to foster division where in truth there is none.

I’m glad you posted. It’s a good reminder.

Me and mine will be participating in solidarity, and I hop everyone angered by this insane govt overreach does whatever they can as well. A bunch of little adds up to a lot, and the powers that be hate that shit, so Friday the 23rd is the perfect time for all of us – not just Minnesotans – to do whatever we can.

I don’t expect mainstream media to cover it fairly, though. Any more that’s news by the rich, for the rich, and they hate this kind of thing. (Anyone else remember the air traffic controllers and how they got demonized for YEARS by the Reagan administration and the press? Yeah.) I’ll wait for Minnesotans to tell us how they feel about it on the day.

Honestly, I would expect a new Nullification Crisis much sooner than 2028, sooner even than midterms, inasmuch as the federal government, under this regime, is literally waging war – or trying very hard to start a real one – against the state of Minnesota, among others. A state could easily say, “Enough!” long before November rolls around.

I’m not saying Walz would do this, but hypothetically, a state that has enough of this federal incursion that finds no real respite in the courts, or finds itself being actively bankrupted or otherwise destroyed, could simply start nullifying the most onerous orders, or really, any federal orders, because at that point, restraint would make no real difference, as hypothetically every other imaginable remedy would already have been tried. Its exercise would hypothetically be the step immediately prior to secession, probably discussed directly as such, and like 1832 before it, the direct cause would likely be financial because unlike then, today the executive is already engaging in the use of force against a state.

The interesting thing, to me, is that the Nullification Crisis ended peacefully and fairly quickly in spite of the Force Bill because at the end of the day, both parties strove to find a solution that would preserve the union. Andrew Jackson being marginally less shitty and somewhat more sane than the current executive, they succeeded in that, so the Force Bill was never relied upon to use military might against a state’s nullification.

That is NOT the case here. In fact, we’re already past it. There have already been National Guard troops in the streets, on orders that were subsequently deemed unlawful by the courts, and we haven’t even really gotten near the federal defiance of Posse Comitatus and/or formally using the Insurrection Act yet, events that are almost certain to come as well. The fed does NOT want peace: if it can push a state to open fighting it will, and as far as I can see is already working strenuously to that end wherever it can. So from where I’m sitting, at that final point of provocation, whatever it ends up being, state nullification doesn’t look very much different from secession at all, either in execution or federal response to same.

Also, not really on topic but I’m just going to throw in a gentle reminder that it would take no more than a handful of Republicans in the House and Senate to put a stop to all this madness TODAY. That’s not an absolute majority, of course, but it is more than enough to rein in that tertiary syphilitic madness enough to make the threats to both domestic and international targets stop instantly.

I’m not an attorney, but I like reading the various cases and rulings from time to time, and this order is great. It’s 18 pages of a federal judge schooling a jumped-up insurance attorney, like this gem on page 2:

Ms. Halligan’s response, in which she was joined by both the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, contains a level of vitriol more appropriate for a cable news talk show and falls far beneath the level of advocacy expected from litigants in this Court, particularly the Department of Justice. The Court will not engage in a similar tit-for-tat and will instead analyze the few points that Ms. Halligan offers to justify her continued identification of her position as United States Attorney before the Court.

And this, on page 16:

At the end of the day, Ms. Halligan’s Response asserts that she is free to act in an unlawful capacity, because she disagrees that she does so unlawfully. But that’s not how our legal system works.

Imagine being an attorney and a judge taking you through his elementary school-level “this is how the law works” courthouse tour in his ruling against you personally.

She offered him the usual orange mix of lies and bluster; he threw the book at her, almost literally. Out of 200+ years of material to choose from, he cites Supreme Court justices like Scalia (right-wing hero), Gorsuch (right-wing and currently on the bench), and even threw out her attempted use of the recent Trump v. CASA ruling. I’m no attorney, but even I can see some of the MANY levels of shade the judge threw in here. The ending is just as good:

The Eastern District of Virginia has long enjoyed the service of experienced prosecutors with unquestioned integrity from both political parties serving as the United States Attorney. Despite coming from different political backgrounds and holding very different ideological views, they all shared an unwavering commitment to the Rule of Law, putting the interests of the citizens of the District before their own personal ambitions, as true public servants do. Unfortunately, it appears that this ethos has come to an end. A district judge acting at the direction of the Chief Judge of the Fourth Circuit has ruled on behalf of the district judges of this District that Ms. Halligan was invalidly appointed as the United States Attorney. No matter all of her machinations, Ms. Halligan has no legal basis to represent to this Court that she holds the position. And any such representation going forward can only be described as a false statement made in direct defiance of valid court orders. In short, this charade of Ms. Halligan masquerading as the United States Attorney for this District in direct defiance of binding court orders must come to an end. (emphases mine)

In the meantime, the judge has ordered the title “Unites States Attorney” stricken from all documents filed in the case she currently has before him, barred her from representing herself as US Attorney on anything that comes through his court until she has a valid legal appointment, and if she continues past midnight tonight to falsely represent herself as US Attorney, he will pursue disciplinary action not just against her, but also any other signatories to anything she files that way.

It’s a good read. If you’re not familiar with legalese, just skip the references and words in Latin and concentrate on the text, where the judge speaks for himself: you’ll get the gist of it just fine.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.586311/gov.uscourts.vaed.586311.23.0.pdf

Thank you for this. TIL.

In community, at the state and local level. There are 340 million of us, something like 40,000 federal troops, and much growing anger.

For all the pRoTeStS dOn’T dO AnYtHiNg crowd we tend to hear from online, the individual people who have taken the trouble to attend are the first ones now organizing their neighborhoods and preparing for direct action. Meanwhile, Minnesota is not giving in to provocation.

Keep in mind American history: states were first, and the fed came later. You tend to see only the fed, especially internationally, but this country is physically massive and most practical, actual power still resides in the states. That was by design. The fed almost didn’t come at all: with states refusing to ratify otherwise, the Constitution had to be tweaked multiple times to ensure that we’d never again have the concentration of power in the executive that we are seeing now.

Yet of all the sins of King George III listed in the Declaration of Independence, the orange kiddie raper is up to somewhere between 32 and 40, last I heard.

But because of how the Constitution was structured, if the fed goes off the rails, all it really takes to fuck it all up for him, in countless ways large and small, are a handful of non-compliant states deciding that the fed isn’t worth obeying. The fed literally does not exist without the states, and certainly not without states continually sending up money, remittances that are made up of taxes levied on our collective labor.

I have no idea of what it might take for states to withhold taxes, but I certainly know whether I can withhold my labor in a general strike. No need to wait, regardless of how unthinkable that may seem right now. And if he wants to bring martial law to the streets it’s going to slow commerce: I don’t know what the price of that will be, but he can’t expect the same amount of cash to flow from the states when the streets are filled with soldiers. Not to mention what it does to the dollar in the international markets if states, or even large groups of people, start checking out of taxation by whatever means, passive or active, even for short periods of time.

Again, the real power does not lie in the fed, even when it comes to maintaining the value of the dollar. It resides in us and in our willful individual and collective participation in federal government, or, if he really wants it that way, our individual and collective denial thereof. No one can make me go to work, lol. But they can make me stay home.

Meanwhile there are various individuals and groups looking at Minneapolis right now, planning for how they will react if/when the orange pedo brings his personal SA into their cities and towns. The good citizens of Chicago and Portland and LA have made it hard for him. Very hard, to the point of making it impossible for him to remain in their cities with any real significance. Minneapolis is following in their stead. And if he wants to keep cosplaying as king, that’s all we have to do at this point: resist. It’s just not going to work if we simply do not give into fear and anticipatory submission. We CAN stop it here, if enough of us work together.

There’s something else. For all the noise and bother of his incursion into peaceful cities, I’d like you to notice the progression here: he started in Chicago and LA, massive cities, then he downgraded in size to places like Memphis and Minneapolis and New Orleans, and the latest news is that he’s going in to Lewiston, Maine. That sprawling metropolis of 37,000 that many of us didn’t even know was on the map. He can claim it’s about Somalis all he wants, but the fact of the matter is he can’t win in the big cities and he’s having to try smaller and smaller targets, again losing power faster than he can consolidate it.

He’s a year in and nothing he’s touched is working out for him, including getting kicked out of the larger cities by the courts.

All this stinks of desperation. Not on our part, but on his. Meanwhile, impromptu local demonstrations are springing up and growing, even in places like Florida.

I have no idea what will happen next, but it’s not all lost. Do not look to mainstream press to show you the truth; they’ve already given in. But many of us have not even yet started.

Anyone else see the headline and think, “Nah, he was 100% involved, where’d they get this halfsies shit?”

It took me a second, ngl.

This is an excellent article and far surpasses any legal analysis mainstream media has offered. I had to turn on reader mode to get through it but it was well worth the trouble. Thank you for posting it.

When I hear impossibly good encomiums like this pronounced as a defense when their loved one openly gets caught doing something heinous, it has the opposite effect on me, to the point they’d be better off just shutting their mouths. This is from Ed Ross, the murderer’s dad:

You would never find a nicer, kinder person,’ the father added about his son. ‘He’s a committed, conservative Christian, a tremendous father, a tremendous husband. I couldn’t be more proud of him.’ – from the Daily Mail article

Yeah. Tremendous. That’s what people said about Ted Bundy fifty years ago, and it’s always the same. This is not a joke and I’m not exaggerating: Bundy was active in his community, very popular to the point he even considered running for public office. The author Ann Rule met him while volunteering on the same mental health help line, helping people to not commit suicide on the night watch – and the whole time Bundy was doing his weird, dark, vile, unnatural murder shit. Over and over again.

And Bundy is just one instance out of countless many; I can’t remember a single time when all this impossibly high praise turned out to be anything more than worthless, empty words after someone really evil gets busted. It’s more like a hint to look harder for the bodies.

So when I see shit like this I just think Keep telling me about your Ed Gein spawn, motherfucker. Carry on.

Tetsuo from the end of Akira… yeah…

Way to paint a picture, man 🤣

Good luck!

What a nasty little bit of news to get out of the blue. You must be reeling right now. Wishing you all the best.

The military is not the FBI or the (well gutted) IRS, it is a worldwide operation with bipartisan leadership that has come up through the ranks. He’s come after dissenters at the top, general rank, but I haven’t heard of much going on lower than that. In reality the relatively short length of time involved and the vast scope of necessary purging that would be required to remake the military like other government offices suggest that it’s just not possible, and instead of hearing about turnover in military leadership what we’re hearing in the news is stagnation, and at one point approvals for promotions were not even being processed at all.

I don’t know what military people you personally know, or when the last time you asked what their level of support was, but not only is the military full of men and women who have never fired upon their own countrymen, it is full of brown and black people who are now seeing with their own eyes that US citizens who look exactly like they do are being scooped up right along with the undesirables.

I think you forget that he has already threatened the Insurrection Act in multiple instances to post the National Guard, such as in LA, and gotten shot down by the courts. And let’s not forget that he was talking about invoking full martial law before the inauguration. He wanted to have this done by last spring, yet it’s not. It’s not even near, because judges have already thrown the National Guard out of Portland and Chicago, and even more suits are in the works.

To be clear, believe what you want. I do not care about changing your mind. If your own evidence comes down to “you know people” then by all means rely on that. But I do not believe the wider facts support that conclusion at this time.

Speaking solely for myself, there seems to be a lot of corroborating circumstantial evidence, times and places and dates that check out for people looking into it, but even if it’s 100% true I don’t think it’s ever going to be verifiable.

That said, I know a survivor, I know what their recollections tend to sound like and why, and to me Sascha Riley’s recordings do have the ring of truth to them, very much so. This is one of those things where people need to decide for themselves, but I do believe that he personally believes what he says, and that there is a likelihood that what he says is largely true in reality.

The original reporting:
https://lisevoldeng.substack.com/p/dont-worry-boys-are-hard-to-find

A partial overview of the same reasons I personally tend to believe him:
https://bethmcdonnell.substack.com/p/a-new-survivor-speaks-epstein-files

They don’t have the military, or rather the critical mass of support within the military that it would take to ensure the new fascist regime’s power, and never did. But he’s decided to test it anyway.

History proves that, unequivocally, there is NEVER a successful coup without either the tacit or overt support of the military and the secure understanding that if the ruling power wants boots on the ground willing to fight their fellow countrymen, that will happen.

He does NOT have this, but he’s decided to call for it and see if it sticks anyway. He’s speedrunning this on steroids because he knows it’s now or never.

You write as though you have no idea whatsoever how this works in reality.

Go read up on Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan. Great legs, mediocre attorneys, illegal appointments, and they’ve lost more for the regime than they ever even began to win.

Hell, I’ll make it easy for you and give you a TL;DR: because the previous Virginia AG refused to prosecute revenge charges for Trump against his political enemies and walked out, and was replaced by Lindsey Halligan, the resulting questionable legal moves and political drama meant that in the end charges against James Comey and Letitia James have been dropped altogether. Similar situation with Alina Habba, who is now no longer New Jersey AG.

Walking out and taking your expertise with you, forcing the regime to find people to replace you, is already working very well on the ground to fuck up the regime’s revenge prosecutions.

A government derives its authority from the consent of the governed.

And the DoJ no longer had the consent of their prosecutors in Minnesota, so they walked, as was their right.

Walking out en masse and taking their combined years of experience with them was the right thing to do. Now the regime that already has a serious problem retaining legal talent has to go find some more talentless hacks to fill these empty positions, lol.

There’s a reason Pam Bondi’s truly pissed by this, and it’s not all superficial.

How to get around the federal blockade of the investigation, for one. How to get access to critical evidence like the gun and the autopsy report. How to get past the multiple claims of immunity the defense will try to exercise. How to build a strong case even without key evidence in spite of federal efforts to shut it down at every level, at every step.

This is not a once and done. There is no statute of limitations for murder, even as public consent to the excesses of this regime is obviously past its sell-by date. In both respects, the MN AG has all the time in the world, and is wise to use it.

I intend to do it in solidarity anyway, and I doubt we’re alone.

State investigators are still looking into it. It’s not impossible, and it looks like the political will in the Minnesota AG office to prosecute is there, but it does face some hurdles. NYT did a pretty thorough look into it today. From the article:

Minneapolis’s top prosecutor, Mary Moriarty, said in an interview on Wednesday that lack of access to the federal investigation was “not a complete barrier” to prosecution. “This isn’t a whodunit,” she said, adding that she was exploring ways to compel the F.B.I. to share the evidence. A thorough investigation likely would take months and require a detailed analysis of the episode . . .

Can the ICE Agent Who Shot Renee Good Be Prosecuted?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/us/renee-good-ice-shooting-prosecution.html

Archive link, same article:
https://archive.ph/4sPiZ

I’d like to add that a good prosecution takes time. Take a hint from Jack Smith and don’t judge them for moving at a snail’s pace here.

EDITED to add a thorough legal perspective addressing the specific challenges of prosecuting Jonathan Ross in spite of federal actions to prevent it at the state level:

Minnesota Can Prosecute Jonathan Ross—But It May Not Be Easy
“States can prosecute federal officials for violating state law, depending on the specific facts and laws”
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/minnesota-can-prosecute-jonathan-ross-but-it-may-not-be-easy

Then everyone nearby knows ICE is in the area, and takes whatever action they need to take before ICE gets a chance to get to them too.

You can’t help being first on their list when they hit your area, but with some warning there’s a non-zero chance you can help being the second.

And every whistle, effectively helpful or not, is the sound of a neighbor who cares enough to try to have your back.

Don’t mock the whistles. They’re not there to impress you.