A Chill Comes To The Neigbourhood

That chill would be the one brought by ICE agents, who descended upon a Worcester Massachusetts neighbourhood to arrest an 'undesirable'.

Police say two people were arrested when a crowd of people tried to interfere with an ICE operation in Worcester on Thursday. The incident has generated a lot of anger in the city.

Crowds swarmed around federal agents on Eureka Street as they took a woman into custody. 

A witness describes what she saw. "The mom as she was being detained too, she was screaming, I don't know if she was being hurt as she was handcuffed, but she was truly screaming," Dali RaRocha said. "Those are the screams I have truly engrained in my ears right now." 

The scene was captured on video: 

Scenes like this are becoming commonplace in Amerika, and no one seems to be immune, as New Jersey's mayor found out recently, arrested for allegedly trespassing at an ICE facility:

Newark, New Jersey mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Elizabeth on Friday as the mayor and members of Congress joined demonstrations demanding answers from Donald Trump’s administration about the conditions inside, marking a major escalation of immigration protests surrounding the facility.

Videos from outside the facility shows a chaotic scene with masked federal officers pushing against a crowd in the detention center’s parking lot as Baraka is shoved towards the building and then placed in handcuffs.

New Jersey’s interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba — Trump’s personal attorney — accused the mayor of trespassing and ignoring warnings from federal law enforcement agents to leave.

Alina Habba,  a former Trump attorney and devout loyalist who is doing very well for herself (currently the interim State Attorney for New Jersey), issued a statement dripping with both irony and hypocrisy. She sanctimoniously intoned,

“He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW”

Except her boss, of course. I'll leave it at that, as words often fail me when I try to describe the rapid and seemingly irrevocable devolution of the 'United' States into fear, suspicion, and anarchy. 

 

When The Emperor Is Angered

The imperium formerly known as the United States of America does not take kindly to contradiction. Its emperor, Don Trump, displays this facet of authoritarian rule in the following interview, in which a dauntless ABC interviewer, Terry Moran, refuses to accept his mandated 'reality'.

The 40-minute interview in the Oval Office veered off course when Moran pressed Trump on the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian man living in Maryland who was deported despite a protective court order. 

The exchange deteriorated further when Trump insisted García had MS-13 tattoos on his knuckles, while Moran – after several times gently disagreeing and trying to move to a new topic – eventually pointed out that the image Trump was referring to had obviously been digitally altered.

“Why don’t you just say, ‘Yes, he does’ [have a gang tattoo] and, you know, go on to something else,” Trump said.

The US president added: “You do such a disservice … This is why people no longer believe the news, because it’s fake news.”

 

Given the vengeful nature of the imperium, Terry Moran's future is likely in jeopardy, especially during a time when many media outlets are bending their knee to the emperor.  It began with Trump calling ABC one of the worst of the media outlets, and was followed up by an immediate right-wing backlash:

Many on social media criticized Moran for not being respectful enough to Trump.

"The interview in the Oval Office with President Trump by Terry Moran is a disgrace to our country and to our President. ABC and Moran should be ashamed! They want nothing but to argue with the President. He's not conducting an interview, he's trying to embarrass the President," said one critic.

"Watching Trump torch ABC News on their own turf is like watching a lion maul a pack of sick hyenas," replied advocate Jane Adams. "These people humiliated the country for years propping up a dementia patient, and now they’re being publicly gutted by a president who actually knows what he's doing."

"ABC once again proves that it is nothing more than a Marxist propaganda outlet controlled by the Democrats," said a Second Amendment rights account.

"His bias was blatant, disrespectful and rude," read another message.

At least one viewer accused ABC of using trick photo angles to make Moran appear taller than Trump.

None of this is the least surprising for a nation in moral, ideological and political freefall. We can only recognize and state it when we see it, and, as Canadians, take their devolution as a sobering object lesson on all the things to guard against in our own country. 

UPDATE Snopes has a lengthy discussion of this photo-shopped picture of Garcia's tattoo:

Trump's picture had been edited to add the text "MS-13" above the tattoos, but there was no actual evidence demonstrating a link between the tattoos and the El Salvadoran gang.