Ken Syring

Police body cam footage shows DOGE knew Institute of Peace was private property during raid Footage obtained by The Handbasket’s lawsuit shows a hostile takeover on March 17, 2025.

SCOOP — Body camera footage obtained as a result of my lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan PD confirms DOGE and the Trump administration openly admitted they were entering private property when they raided the building on March 17, 2025. That didn't stop MPD from breaking down the doors.

My report:

11-year-old me playing Nintendo:
“OH MAN I wish Mega Man was for real!”

43-year-old me realizing it’s becoming real, but between Musk and Altman all we’ve got are two competing Dr. Wilys:

This means that some folks are not human, and that classification will be adjudicated by Miller and the administration.

Means is another example of the trust trap.

When official assessments and prior claims can be discarded overnight, there is no stable factual baseline on which Congress, the press, or the public can evaluate policy or demand accountability. Authoritarians destroy the possibility of a shared reality and then rule by narrative. #holdfast

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

"Karen handcuffed, shackled and sleeping on the floor of a locked cell, before being driven for 12 hours through the night to an [ICE] detention centre. Karen was incarcerated for a total of six weeks – even though she had been travelling with a valid visa."

A British tourist was detained by ICE.👇

Incredible opinion. It holds that the common ICE tactic of jumping out of an unidentified rental vehicle and seizing suspected noncitizens while masked violates the Fourth Amendment because the *manner* of the seizure is incompatible with a free society governed by the rule of law.

a cartoon character holding a scroll of the u.s. constitution says hello i 'm the u.s. constitution ALT: a cartoon character holding a scroll of the u.s. constitution says hello i 'm the u.s. constitution

Roses are red
Violets are blue
If you’re born here
You’re a citizen too

Excising the Cancer in Our Institutions We need to start thinking about how we are going to separate the sheep from the wolves in sheep's clothing.

Some thoughts on what de-magafication of our institutions might look like when this nightmare is over (free post) open.substack.com/pub/asharang...

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

Next Superbowl halftime should include a recreation of the confederate surrender at Appomattox while Jefferson Davis flees the scene dressed as an old lady.

Kaitlan Collins @kaitlancollins President Trump now says it was Attorney General Pam Bondi who insisted DNI Tulsi Gabbard attend the FBI raid in Georgia. Last night, he told NBC he didn't know why she was there. And Gabbard said in a letter to Congress that "the president specifically directed my observance of the execution of the Fulton County search warrant."

I want to reiterate that this shit is nuts. A federal invasion of state-run elections, an intelligence community invasion of federal law enforcement, a White House invasion of a criminal investigation, and a president’s insane treasonable sore loser obsession all rolled up and muddled together.

happening this morning in Minneapolis -- ICE agents drawing guns on observers. I reiterate again that it is only a matter of time before DHS kills more innocent people in Minnesota. Congress needs to shut this shit down right now.

Unmarked car, no lights or police insignia. Masked armed men leap out. Victim not in the act of committing any crime. This is not how a serious federal law enforcement agency acts in a free society.

How is this not supposed to be a “right wing paramilitary force loyal to the regime”?

Frederick Douglass quote from 1857: Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power conceded nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

Anyway, good morning from this evergreen quote from a guy we teach the kids is a great American hero

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

This... is not the role of ODNI. This is so fucked up in all sorts of ways that will have lasting implications.

I recognize it's not going to happen, but this is something that Congress should freak the fuck out about.

Bovino is just the patsy - a noxious and odious fall guy. Stephen Miller is the architect and prime mover of the whole thing. Everything they do is at his direction - often after his threats. As long as he runs policy in the WH, nothing will change no matter how many Bovinos come and go.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the Democrats have to push their hand immediately. The parallels with the delays and subsequent failures after January 6th are blaring warning signs about what will happen if they don’t go after the issues with ICE and CBP at the root RIGHT NOW.

BREAKING: The Border Patrol's Greg Bovino has been ousted from his role of "Commander at Large"—and Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski could be next to lose their jobs, sources tell @nickmiroff.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Yes, It’s Fascism Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.

This piece by @jonrauch.bsky.social is very much worth reading. (Yes, I know, even if your reaction to the title is, "Gee, you don't say!") He lays out the case more carefully, clearly, and systematically than I have seen elsewhere.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

It’s time to RUC the ICE.

13/ Northern Ireland learned the hard way: when policing becomes fuel for conflict, reform is not enough; you need a new institution people can believe in. Our immigration and border enforcement agencies have crossed that line.

12/ What replacement looks like: judicial warrants for home entry, transparent use‑of‑force rules, independent oversight, real vetting & training, and a recruitment pipeline (incl. individuals well-versed in national and community service) that selects for service‑minded, community‑anchored people.

11/ So “abolish ICE” doesn’t mean “abolish immigration enforcement.” It means a repeal and replace of a broken institution with a new one built for constitutional compliance and public consent.

10/ You can’t body-cam your way out of a legitimacy crisis. You can’t “training” your way out of an agency design that rewards aggression, secrecy, and mission creep. Those are features, not bugs.

9/ Add the reported internal guidance claiming power to enter homes on administrative warrants—without a judge. That’s not “enforcement.” That’s a constitutional rupture. And it accelerates the legitimacy collapse.

8/ Now look at ICE: aggressive raids, crowd-control chemical agents, reports of U.S. citizens detained, and the killings of U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretty. This is what legitimacy collapse looks like.