THE MAINSTREAM PRESS IS DESPERATE TO FIND A REPUBLICAN WITH BASIC HUMAN DECENCY -- EVEN A FAKE ONE

Yesterday, The New York Times published Caroline Kitchener's long, insipid profile of Alabama senator Katie Britt, whom you might remember from her poorly received response to President Biden's State of the Union address in 2024. Kitchener's author page on the Times says that she tries to "seek out human stories that are not black and white." You'd never know it from this profile, which portrays Britt as a secular saint, interleaving carefully curated Christian-mom details with multiple excuses for Britt's unswerving loyalty to President Trump.

The piece bears this headline:

The G.O.P. Senator Who Can’t Stop Thinking About the Boy ICE Detained

Although Britt has done nothing to end the imprisonment of "the boy ICE detained," Kitchener gives her credit for feeling bad about him -- credit that goes on for paragraphs and paragraphs.

I haven't seen the Melania documentary, but it can't possibly be more hagiographic than this article. Here's Kitchener interleaving homey details about Britt-as-mom with "reporting" on her alleged anguish over the detention of this boy:

Her son had been at the orthodontist for 45 minutes when Katie Britt saw the picture of the boy in the bunny hat.

Waiting in her car for her son’s appointment to finish, the Republican senator from Alabama could not look away from the photo on her phone that had just gone viral: The agent’s hands on the boy’s Spider-Man backpack. The icy black vehicle. The flash of terror in those 5-year-old eyes.

“Can you look into this?” Ms. Britt texted her team from a Montgomery parking lot on a Thursday morning in late January, afraid to believe that this could happen in America. She had read reports that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement had used the boy as a “pawn,” sending him to knock on the door of his home in hopes of luring out others.

Ms. Britt’s 15-year-old son climbed into the car, his teeth checked and braces adjusted. He would sit for an A.P. World History test later that day, compete in a speech and debate tournament over the weekend.

The boy in the bunny hat would be sitting in an ICE detention facility over a thousand miles away from his home.

What does Britt do on behalf of Liam Ramos? Well, nothing:

... Ms. Britt sat at her kitchen table on the phone with her legislative director, trying to discern exactly what had happened with the boy in Minneapolis.

“What did JD say about it?” she asked.

Vice President Vance had defended ICE, the staff member explained, arguing that the agents had no choice but to detain the child after they arrested his father, whom Mr. Vance called an “illegal alien.”

Ms. Britt scribbled a few notes in her planner. She wanted to talk directly to the woman in charge.

As she prepared to call Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, Ms. Britt gamed out what the secretary might say, and how she should respond. If Ms. Noem told her that the child really had been used to lure others out of a home, Ms. Britt thought to herself, that would have to be a red line.

How does that play out?

When she reached Ms. Noem on the phone, the secretary told Ms. Britt exactly what she was hoping to hear, Ms. Britt recounted later: The boy was never used as a pawn. ICE agents had cared for him after his father fled the scene. The agents followed proper procedures....

“Thank you so much,” Ms. Britt recalled saying to Ms. Noem. “This is so helpful to hear.”

... But Ms. Noem’s facts did not match the accounts coming from local officials. Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of the boy’s school district, told reporters that masked agents had instructed the 5-year-old to knock on the door of his home to see if others were inside — “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”

Nonetheless, when asked if she believed Ms. Noem without a shadow of a doubt, Ms. Britt did not hesitate.

“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”

Britt, we're told, never defies the president:

In Mr. Trump’s second term, Ms. Britt has voted in line with the president 100 percent of the time. Her disagreements emerge only in private, in conversations with top White House officials and cabinet secretaries, whose numbers are all saved in her phone.

But never mind, because she's a nice lady who reads to children:

Twenty minutes after she and her son arrived home from the orthodontist, Ms. Britt was off to a round-table event at a local day care center to highlight her recent child care legislation, which would be covered by members of the national media. Before she turned to the policy discussion, she knelt on the floor with a copy of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”

One little boy climbed into her lap.

He was a big fat caterpillar!” the boy said, resting his head on her chest as she read the book aloud.

Ms. Britt was still thinking of the boy in the bunny hat, she said, who is right around the same age.

When it was time to talk to the cameras, she did not mention Minneapolis, reaching instead for a tagline she’d rattled off many times before.

“We are the party of parents, the party of families,” Ms. Britt said, bright lights in her eyes.

“President Trump has led the way on that.”

She wants to make sure you know she loves God ...

Ms. Britt opens her Bible every day when the house is quiet, just before 5 a.m.

She has had the same copy since she was 7 years old, its pages enthusiastically annotated with the pink and purple gel pens of a girl who always came home with straight A’s.

“Too often we don’t fall back on this,” she said, sitting in her sunroom armchair, her Bible open to a favorite passage on forgiveness. “And I think you have to.”

... and, as she showed when she ran for the Senate, also Trump:

When she was trailing in the Republican primary polls, she made a last-ditch effort to charm Mr. Trump — showing up to a Trump rally for Mr. Brooks and maneuvering her way to the front of the photo line....

“I’m going to win this election,” Ms. Britt told Mr. Trump, her husband recalled, as she looked him square in the eye. “And when I do, I’ll be a killer for you.”

Trump endorsed her, and she won.

We're told that she nudges Trump behind the scenes, and maybe it's true:

Over the last year, Ms. Britt has occasionally convinced the Trump administration to reverse course, according to several people with knowledge of conversations between Ms. Britt and Trump officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe those interactions. A call to the Pentagon restored the training materials on the Black airmen from Alabama, the people said. A call to the White House got Mr. Trump on board with funding body-worn cameras for ICE agents. And a call to Mr. Trump directly restored billions of dollars for research last summer to the National Institutes of Health.

But it's disgraceful to publish a puff piece about Britt's deep feelings regarding Liam Ramos when she's accomplished precisely nothing to get him released. Meanwhile:

This is a remarkable @nytimes.com split screen: A huge 3,526 word + photos profile on Sen Britt who "can't stop thinking about the boy ICE detained" But Rep Jaoquin Castro- who actually got Liam Ramos out of detention & back home- gets no interview, no pix, just 116 words inside a story. WOW.

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— @NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) (@newsjennifer.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 2:13 PM

(The story about Joaquin Castro's efforts is here.)

And since the Kitchener story was published, has Britt said anything about this?

The federal government has filed a motion seeking to end asylum claims for the family of Liam Conejo Ramos, according to the lawyer representing the family....

The Department of Homeland Security filed a motion Wednesday to expedite deportation proceedings in the family’s case, said immigration attorney Danielle Molliver with Nwokocha & Operana Law Offices.

Nope.

*****

My comments here aren't just about Katie Britt. There's a larger issue involved.

The New York Times has done some good work in its coverage of Trump's war on Minnesota. In particular, it published several video analyses that definitively debunked administration lies about the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

But the Times is still the Times. It never abandons its quest to find that mythical beast, the reasonable Republican. Corporately, the Times seems to despise Trump, but what it would very much prefer is a government run by a right-centrist Republican -- although a corporatist Democrat will do in a pinch. The Times simply won't accept the obvious fact that moderate Republicanism no longer exists at the national level, or anywhere in America outside the Northeast. The Times continues to believe that surely someone will save the GOP from its worst instincts. (Needless to say, the GOP in 2026 is nothing but its worst instincts, and that will be true for the foreseeable future.)

And here's a warning: If we have free and fair elections in 2028, the Times and other mainstream outlets may very well portray J.D. Vance the way Kitchener portrays Britt -- as a thoughtful, soft-spoken Republican who wants to move the GOP away from its worst instincts. This won't be universal -- Jamelle Bouie, in particular, knows that Vance is an evil, sadistic man and a gutter racist, and I don't expect him to stop saying that -- but Vance is quite likely to win the Republican nomination, and political reporters at the Times are likely to express their hopes about Vance, regardless of the facts.

We'll get insipid, soft-focus profiles of Vance, and he'll be portrayed as a turn of the page after Trump -- more so than loudmouths like Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee.

It might be persuasive to Times readers. Or it could be that most of these readers now see through the bullshit. If you go to the Kitchener story and look at the "reader picks" among the comments, you find a lot of anger:

Who cares what her misgivings may be?

Obviously, this ridiculously flattering essay pretends that this woman's feeling badly for people who are abused, mistreated and, yes, even killed, by ICE goons somehow makes up for her groveling and sniveling support of the most evil president in U.S. history.

Who cares what she "feels", or, more accurately, claims to feel? She is complicit in this enormous evil that we all see. She is even more culpable than Trump, because she claims that she sees something wrong, people being hurt and abused, and, although she's in a position to do something, does nothing.

Quite a few Times readers aren't falling for this kind of thing anymore.

THE MEDIA BELIEVES IN TWO CONTRADICTORY MONOCULTURES, NEITHER OF WHICH EXISTS

There's a new poll out from NPR, PBS, and Marist College, and it says what nearly every recent poll says: Most of America disapproves of the actions of the Trump administration, and Trump's Republican supporters are the outliers. Independent voters aren't as overwhelmingly opposed to Trump as Democrats, but they're strongly opposed nonetheless. Some examples:

91% of Democrats and 68% of independents say ICE's action are making Americans somewhat less or much less safe. In fact, 80% of Democrats and 56% of independents believe ICE is making Americans much less safe. However, 77% of Republicans report the actions of ICE are making Americans much more safe or somewhat more safe....

Six in ten Americans (60%) disapprove of the job ICE is doing. 33% approve. Democrats (91%) overwhelmingly disapprove of the agency's performance, and 66% of independents agree. Nearly three in four Republicans (73%), though, approve of how ICE is doing its job....

Nearly six in ten Americans (59%) think the demonstrations around the country to oppose the actions of ICE are mostly legitimate protests. 40%, though. say the demonstrations are mostly people acting unlawfully. Again, stark partisan differences exist, with 85% of Democrats and 65% of independents reporting these demonstrations are mostly legitimate protests. 75% of Republicans say they are mostly people acting unlawfully....

Seven in ten Democrats (70%) and almost six in ten independents (58%) think lowering prices should be the focus of the Trump Administration. A plurality of Republicans (44%), though, assert controlling immigration should be the Administration’s top priority....

56% of Americans say placing tariffs or fees on imported products from other countries hurts the U.S. economy.... Democrats (87%) and independents (63%) are more likely than Republicans (20%) to say tariffs hurt the economy. About two in three Republicans (66%) say tariffs benefit the national economy.

As I keep saying, on most issues these days, Democrats are the normal ones. Roughly two thirds of independents agree with us on nearly every issue. Republicans are the out-of-touch oddballs.

And yet it remains an article of faith in the media that heartland white Republicans are the "real" Americans, and Trump critics really aren't Americans at all.

But if we shift to the realm of popular culture, the opposite view holds. A large percentage of highly successful pop culture figures lean left. Awards shows, like the recent Grammys, can seem like anti-Trump political rallies.

The media believes that America loves entertainers who are proudly progressive, but also believes that "real" Americans are right-wing. Does anyone in the press ever wonder how both of these things could be true?

I don't think either perception is fully accurate. The majority of Americans seem to be leaning to the left right now, but many people in the middle aren't there permanently. Some voted for Donald Trump in 2024, and they may vote for downballot Republicans in the future. The one thing I'm certain of is that angry, cruelty-is-the-point MAGA/Fox News Republicans aren't the majority in this country. They're not normative. But because every state has two U.S. senators regardless of population, including small, rural, right-leaning states, and also because the Electoral College is apportioned based on congressional representation, right-wingers wield disproportionate political power in America. They don't need to win the popular vote to control the Senate or win the White House.

That plus the fact that they vote for Trump in somewhat larger numbers than pollsters expect leads the political media to believe that urban and suburban liberals and leftists are the oddballs and Republicans are normative. But the pro-Republican "vibe shift" that supposedly happened in 2024 has now been over for months. Pro-Trump voters aren't normative.

But they exist, and they've surprised some of us by buying tickets for the documentary Melania. The film was expected to make $5 million at the box office; it's made more than $9 million so far. Expectations were based on poor advance ticket sales, but the audience for Melania is older, and Baby Boomers are the least likely moviegoers to buy tickets in advance.

The movie still won't make enough to turn a profit, but there's a niche audience for it -- part of the same niche audience that thinks ICE is doing a swell job right now and that believes Trump's tariffs are awesome.

And I just want to warn you that Turning Point USA's alternate Super Bowl halftime show starring Kid Rock could get decent ratings. We shouldn't assume that it will be a flop. I expect it to find its niche audience, too, even though the real Super Bowl halftime show starring Bad Bunny will have higher ratings.

I wish political commentators understood that the current political divide mimics the pop-culture divide: hardcore Republicans are out there -- but they're the minority.

BILLIONAIRE WINGNUTS EXPECTED MEDIA OWNERSHIP TO BE EASIER

So this just happened:

The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.

Here's one response to the news:

Everybody has it backwards. Billionaires aren’t buying up these institutions to make money. They’re buying them to kill them. Same as the oligarchs destroying government and social programs and things like weather forecasting and regulatory bodies. They’re creating a world they control completely

— Jared Yates Sexton (@jysexton.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 10:47 AM

The Washington Post and CBS aren’t intended to succeed. They’re intended to fail and as they fail any sort of power or influence they have over public opinion will demonstrably wane until it disappears. It’ll happen over and over again until there are no impediments for the wealthy.

— Jared Yates Sexton (@jysexton.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 10:50 AM

I don't agree. Look at Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter/X: He hasn't managed to make it profitable, but he's converted it into his version of Henry Ford's anti-Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent -- a conduit for his racist and far-right views and the far-right and racist views of his favorite tweeters. He doesn't want "any sort of power or influence" X has to "demonstrably wane until it disappears." He wants touse X to help elect neo-fascists in the U.S., Britain, Germany, and elsewhere.

The Ellison family clearly could have hired someone much more low-profile than Bari Weiss if they wanted to destroy CBS News. They clearly plan to let her make significant changes -- sure, there'll be layoffs, but they're letting her bring in (semi-)boldface names and introduce new features at CBS.

And Jeff Bezos seemed to be trying to preserve The Washington Post after he purchased it in 2013. He hired an acclaimed editor, Marty Baron, and put some resources into the paper. More recently, though, he's tried to make it both leaner and Trumpier. Now he seems to be stripping it for parts, but I don't think that was the original intention.

Tech guys become impatient when everything they touch doesn't instantly turn to gold. They expect that they can move fast, break things, and watch the value of their new toy go up because they've made it buzzy. But that's not how mature businesses work. Even Twitter was a semi-mature business when Musk bought it. Musk couldn't accept that Twitter was never likely to be profitable, and Bezos doesn't seem to have understood how hard it would be for him to build an economically thriving newspaper.

Also, these guys wanted to see their increasingly right-leaning views reflected in the content produced by these properties. They can't accept the reality that this alienates large portions of their potential market.

I'm a genius! they tell themselves. So why is this so hard?

I don't think these guys are looking to destroy what they've purchased -- but they're all doing such a terrible job of building an appealing product that I can understand why it looks that way.

REPUBLICAN VOTERS HAVE LIVED IN AN AI-SLOP FANTASYLAND SINCE BEFORE THERE WAS AI

Did you know that Zohran Mamdani is Jeffrey Epstein's son? Alex Jones says he might be, so it must be true.

A major investigation is underway to determine if reports are true that the current New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani
Is the biological son of Jeffrey Epstein? pic.twitter.com/2bd2E7RT7A

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) February 1, 2026

As a reader noted, the image is AI generated, but the tweet has twenty thousand likes.

This follow-up isn't even AI:

Analyze these faces @grok and tell us the probability they are related pic.twitter.com/IrBX4OPwdp

— USA NEWS 🇺🇸 (@usanewshq) February 2, 2026

I don't see any resemblance there. Do you? Does anyone?

But I don't think this is intended to be carefully scrutinized. It's intended to be wish fulfillment for right-wingers: We hate Mamdani -- who might be the secret son of the most notorious pedophile of all time!

A Hannah Arendt quote, from her last public interview, is often invoked in discussions of Republican mendacity:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

This may be applicable to other authoritarian states, but it's not applicable to 21st-century America. GOP voters -- who are the only citizens Republicans care to persuade -- never reach a point where "nobody believes anything any longer." They continue to believe whatever they're told by Republican propagandists, or at least they're willing to give credebnce to whatever contradicts accepted truth if it reinforces their priors and prejudices. Zohran Mamdani's father isn't really a Columbia professor, but, rather, a demon who walked among us? Sure, that's believable! Or at least it's a satisfying story.

And most Republican lies don't "have to be changed." Consider this one:

Trump: "These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize voting. We have states that I won that show I didn't win. You're gonna see something in Georgia."

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— Molly Ploofkins (@mollyploofkins.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 1:08 PM

Republicans have been telling us for decades that ineligible immigrants routinely vote Democratic in large numbers -- this despite the fact that no one can actually find these unqualified voters, including right-wing think tanks:

A database maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation found "fewer than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than 1 billion lawfully cast ballots."

The Heritage Foundation!

But the culture of lying in right-wing media conditions Republican voters to believe that anything could be true if it contradicts an official narrative they don't like. These voters aren't conditioned to believe that there's no such thing as truth -- they're conditioned to believe that there's no such thing as a truth they'd prefer not to believe.

There are influencers on the right who specialize in creating imaginary worlds where everything that upsets and enrages Republicans is shown to be a lie. These are AI-slop worlds in verbal form, and they existed before there was AI slop. Remember this, from 2018?

Republicans can't get enough of this sort of thing, to this day:

The Melania documentary had a more successful opening weekend than a lot of us expected, but its audience is about what you'd expect demographically:

Audience members were largely white (75%), women (70%), and 55 or over (72%). Dallas, Orlando, Tampa, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta and West Palm Beach were among the top markets over the weekend, according to data from Amazon MGM Studios.

Even if the intended audience doesn't fully believe the Nick Adams tweet, and didn't believe the Jacob Wohl tweet, the tweets nevertheless conjure a world in which no American is really as anti-Trump as "they" want you to believe. The Big Lies that Donald Trump and other Republicans tell us -- that the 2020 vote was phony, that protesters in Minneapolis and elsewhere are in the streets only because George Soros and his son are paying them to protest -- get reinforced.

Hannah Arendt was thinking about societies in which the majority of the populace needed to be manipulated by lies. In America, GOP control of enough states to nearly win the Electoral College and Senate in every electoral cycle means that the Republican Party cares only about persuading its own voters. And those voters live in a fantasy world.

OVERTHINKING THE ETHNICITY OF ALEX PRETTI'S KILLERS

ProPublica has identified the two men who shot Alex Pretti.

The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez....

Ochoa is a Border Patrol agent who joined CBP in 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014 and works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units.

I don't like the framing of Marcy Wheeler's response to this:

Stephen Miller Paid Latino Thugs to Murder Alex Pretti emptywheel.net/2026/02/02/s...

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— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 6:53 AM

Wheeler notes that a number of Miller's goons aren't white. For example:

Alfredo Mancillas Jr. was found in St. Paul last Tuesday, passed out drunk in his illegally-parked car, covered in his own vomit....

The two heavily masked ICE agents who snatched Brad Lander last June are “a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who lives in Brighton Beach” and “an Indo-Guyanese gentleman who lives in South Ozone Park.”

(Lander was the comptroller of New York City and a supporter of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign. He's currently primarying Congressman Dan Goldman from the left.)

What I don't like about Wheeler's framing is that she doesn't seem to believe that these non-white enforcers of Miller's reign of terror have any agency of their own. To Wheeler, only the whites in the Trump regime can be decision-makers. And her belief that Miller feels the need to conceal the ethnic identity of these men seems absurd to me.

There are a lot of reasons Stephen Miller’s goons wear masks. To terrify the communities they invade. To make it harder to shame them. To make it harder to tie them to other crimes they may have committed....

But there is accumulating evidence that a big reason these goons hide their faces is to hide that the white nationalist project Stephen Miller is pursuing — like virtually everything else in America — relies on brown people to do the hard work. Miller can only sustain the myth of white self-reliance by hiding the faces of those who murder white men at his behest in the streets of Blue cities....

They’re trying to hide how much even their deeply racist project is helpless without brown labor.

Wheeler doesn't offer us any of this "accumulating evidence," only a list of non-white offenders.

I think this misunderstands the way right-wingers look at race. Some are pure bigots in the David Duke/Nick Fuentes mold. They hate anyone who isn't white and Christian. And even those who don't fall into this category want to live in an America in which white male heterosexual Christians run pretty much everything.

But the people hoping to build a white ethnostate are always in tension with those on the right who proudly point to everyone of color who seems to have "escaped" from "the liberal plantation." The organizers of Trump's campaign rallies seemed happy to have the candidate speak with "BLACKS FOR TRUMP" signs in the background. Trump embraced Kanye West before West became too toxic. And Republican candidates of color -- Herschel Walker in Georgia, Mark Robinson in North Carolina, Royce White in Minnesota -- have won Republican primaries throughout the Trump era. In the Florida governor's race, Byron Donalds leads all other candidates in Republican primary polling by more than 30 points, and in polling of the Ohio GOP gubernatorial primary, Vivek Ramaswamy's lead is more than 50 points. Most Republicans enjoy pointing to these figures and accusing liberals of being "the real racists."

Wheeler's framing implies that Miller's non-white immigration agents are laboring in a state of pseudo-enslavement, or at least doing the work reluctantly because there's nothing else available. That's belied by what the ProPublica story tells us about one of the agents:

Ochoa, who goes by Jesse, graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American with a degree in criminal justice, according to his ex-wife, Angelica Ochoa. A longtime resident of the Rio Grande Valley, Ochoa had for years dreamed of working for the Border Patrol and finally landed a job there, she said. By the time the couple split in 2021, he had become a gun enthusiast with about 25 rifles, pistols and shotguns, Angelica Ochoa said.

And this doesn't surprise me:

Records show both men are from South Texas.

Recall the results of the 2024 election:

After years of losing the statewide Latino vote by double digits, Republicans set a high-water mark with Donald Trump capturing 55% of the critical voting bloc, besting Vice President Kamala Harris’ 44% share, according to exit polls.

In the traditionally Democratic strongholds along the border, Trump managed a near sweep.

He won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled his attention-grabbing 2020 performance in the Latino-majority region. He carried all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley just eight years after drawing a mere 29% in the region — a feat that included delivering 97% Latino Starr County to Republicans for the first time since 1896. And, though he lost El Paso, one of the border’s most populous counties, he narrowed margins there in ways not seen in decades.

According to Pew, Trump won 28% of the Hispanic vote in 2016, 36% in 2020, and a remarkable 48% in 2024. He won 50% of Hispanic men. Polls show that Trump's support among Hispanics has plunged since the 2024 election, but a quarter of Hispanics still back him.

I don't believe that the Hispanic men who killed Alex Pretti were men of color reluctantly doing jobs for white overlords. I think they shared the mindset that compels white men to become immigration officers. It's patronizing to imply that they didn't want to be to be doing what they're doing. I've watched my fellow Italian-Americans move to the right during my lifetime, and I think it can happen to members of any ethnic group. The Republican coalition is still overwhelmingly white, but it isn't exclusively white. Maybe Stephen Miller wants it to be, but we're not there, even now.

REPUBLICANS WANT TO BE CRUELER TO IMMIGRANTS' CHILDREN THAN I WANT TO BE TO STEPHEN MILLER

A federal judge has ordered the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who were detained last week in Minneapolis by President Trump's immigration goons. At the time of his arrest, Liam Ramos was wearing a bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack.

In The New York Times today, Elora Mukherjee, the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia University, notes that Liam Ramos is far from unique:

Children all across the country are being arrested and detained.... From January to October 2025, at least 3,800 children under the age of 18, including 20 infants, were arrested and detained by U.S. immigration authorities. Since March 2025, many hundreds of families with children who are minors have been detained in federal immigration custody, with more than 1,700 children in custody since family detention centers reopened. Many have been detained for long periods of time, some for nearly half a year.

The children at Dilley with whom I’ve worked over the past year range in age from 2 to 16 years old.... A 2-year-old boy was breastfeeding in detention. One 6-year-old boy had leukemia. An 8-year-old girl began wetting the bed. A 14-year-old girl engaged in self-harm. All of these children and their parents were detained despite being eligible for release — ICE has the authority to release these families, who are not flight risks, on parole — and while seeking asylum and other humanitarian protections in the United States. None of these children or their parents had a criminal history anywhere in the world.

What's sickening about this is the gratuitous cruelty:

The family detention facility at Dilley is a hellhole. Children and parents consistently report not having access to sufficient potable water, palatable food (both children and parents have told me they found worms in their meals), adequate medical care or meaningful educational opportunities. Lights are left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep.

And the cruelty has been the point since the first Trump presidency:

... the first Trump administration insisted in 2019 before a federal appeals court that it was “safe and sanitary” to detain immigrant children for days in facilities without soap or toothbrushes and to make them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights without blankets in cold temperatures.

How does all this advance the administration's stated goal of removing every undocumented immigrant from America? How, for instance, does leaving the lights on 24 hours a day in areas where children are detained advance that goal in a way that allowing a period of darkness wouldn't?

They're doing it because people in the administration, as well as their most devoted voters, relish the suffering of these immigrants, the same way they relish the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They want the people they hate to suffer, and that includes children of immigrants.

I don't know about you, but while I want the people orchestrating this orgy of brutality to be held accountable, I don't fantasize about piling on sadistic punishments for them. I think it would be justice for the president to die in prison, and for long terms to be meted out to Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino, and many other Trump officials, as well as the cops who killed Good and Pretti. But this is America, where conservatives are rarely held accountable, so I don't expect any of this. Nevertheless, at the very least, I'd like these people to be lifelong pariahs, as marginalized and widely reviled as David Duke.

Your mileage may vary. You might hope that these people will be brutalized in the future. But even so, you feel that way because they've actually committed unspeakable offenses. Republican voters feel this way about little kids -- kids who've done nothing to them.

The key voting bloc in the coalition that elected our current federal government has a worldview that places right-wing heterosexual Christian men in a dominant position in the culture and believes they should be given carte blanche to dole out extremely harsh punishments to everyone who fails to live up to their standards of behavior, starting with their own children and wives. These are people who believe it's sinful not to subject your children to corporal punishment. These are people who believe empathy for people outside one's own tribe is a grave sin.

I don't think these people represent a majority of America. But for years they've been seen as normative, while the rest of us have been seen as elitist weirdos.

Maybe we're arriving at a point where their extremism is being recognized outside communities of liberals and progressives. Yesterday's election of a Democrat (by approximately 14 points) in a state legislative district in Texas that went for Trump by 17 points in 2024 suggests that maybe times are changing. I hope so. But for now, the dominant ideology in America approves of mistreating children if they're the "wrong" children.

*****

UPDATE: Liam Ramos and his father have been released.

THE RELEASE OF ADDITIONAL EPSTEIN FILES IS JUST ONE MORE BIT OF EFFLUENT IN THE FIREHOSE

More Jeffrey Epstein files were released yesterday. The government has additional documents but says it won't release them, in defiance of the law. Nevertheless, what we saw yesterday hinted at the loathsomeness of many famous people -- Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Howard Lutnick, Steve Tisch ... And then there are the more horrifying claims, such as the allegation that the late Robin Leach, who hosted the TV series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in the 1980s and 1990s, "strangle[d] a young girl to death at a party."

Was this worth it? We're shaming these boldface names, but no one seems to have a plan to hold anyone accountable, up to and including Trump. It's good to put a scarlet letter on these vile people, but that's probably all we're going to get out of this.

As for the timing: In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon told Michael Lewis that the correct Republican strategy for dealing with the media was to "flood the zone with shit." The standard interpretation of this phrase is "flood the zone with lies and half-truths" -- as David Corn wrote last year, "It’s Trump’s version of what’s been called the 'firehose of falsehood' model of propaganda utilized by Russia."

But what we're getting from the Trump White House in 2026 -- and have been getting since he was inaugurated a year ago -- isn't a firehose of falsehood necessarily. The Trumpers just throw everything at us all at once, and we struggle to respond to one outrage as twenty others pop up on our phones. Yesterday I noted that the Trump administration has been arresting journalists who covered a protest at a church in Minnesota, seizing ballots and other electoral records in Georgia, and planning to do to Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, what's recently been done to Minneapolis. Now there's more. It's being reported that Trump wants the arch he intends to build in D.C. to be more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial. He also announced that he wants an Indy-car auto race to take place on the streets of Washington this summer, and he wants a stadium that can hold 100,000 people to be built in front of the White House, in time for a scheduled UFC event scheduled for his birthday. This isn't "shit" as in lies and misinformation -- it's "shit" as in I'm doing this, and you haters will just have to eat shit.

The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell posted this yesterday:

Called it.

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— Sarah Longwell (@sarahlongwell25.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 11:15 AM

I'd say that Trump is throwing so much at us that it's all a distraction from Minneapolis, and the other items I've mentioned are distractions from the newly released Epstein files, and the fact that the administration withheld millions of Epstein pages but exposed many famous people in the newly released files is a distraction from the additional appearances of Trump's name in the newly released files, and reports that the administration is adopting a "new tone" in Minnesota are distractions from the fact that the crackdown hasn't really abated -- the administration continues to claim broad powers to arrest people without judicial warrants, and there's this:

The government is escalating its war, not drawing down.

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— The Editorial Board (@editorialboard.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 8:45 AM

We're all struggling to get purchase on all of this, and that's what the Bannon strategy envisions.