It's Confirmed

A week ago Monday, I noted that Owen McIntire of Kansas City, MO had been arrested on charges of firebombing a Tesla dealership. This was in the context of the remarkably high proportion of Tesla arsonists who are trans males, and I wondered, as did others on social media, whether, given his feminine appearance in photos, he was trans as well, although legacy reports carefully avoided any reference.

This morning, it was confirmed:

The college student accused of firebombing a Tesla dealership has been released from federal custody to continue gender affirming medical care, according to a report.

. . . The University of Massachusetts physics student was granted release by US Magistrate Judge Jessica Hedges due to “serious and ongoing” medical needs — which include gender-affirming medical care that requires daily medication as well as mental health support, according to KMBC.

Fox News Kansas City quoted McIntire's defense attorney:

“What the courts don’t want to do is put too much burden on the jail staff to extend unique care or specialized care if they don’t have to.”

This is correct. The last thing jailers want to do is have to assure the safety of a trans 19-year-old. But the link adds another tidbit:

The defense filing says McIntire is undergoing treatment for depression, and is receiving gender affirming care that began in March of this year — and that care would likely be interrupted or terminated in federal custody.

So McIntire is facing charges for a firebombing that took place on March 17, within days or weeks of when he started taking drugs for gender-affirming care? Somehow, starting this treatment got him started on the road to arson. But there's more at the first link:

The University of Massachusetts physics student was granted release by US Magistrate Judge Jessica Hedges due to “serious and ongoing” medical needs — which include gender-affirming medical care that requires daily medication as well as mental health support, according to KMBC.

McIntire is also on the autism spectrum and was diagnosed with both ADHD and depression, all of which require medications and treatments that excuse him from remaining in prison, his lawyers successfully argued.

“By moving back home with his parents, he will have access to the care providers who are familiar with him and his specific needs,” the court documents read, according to KSHB.

With all this going on, why was he in college in Boston? It almost sounds as if the firebombing was a cry for help. But this brings me to a recent Commentary piece by Hannah Meyers:

Nationwide, headlines describe a spectrum of transgendered, nonbinary, and other “gender non-conforming” variations of criminal offenders. . . . In January, transgender repeat knife offender Jaia Cruz fatally stabbed a postal worker after jockeying over places in the sandwich line at a Manhattan deli. A few weeks later, transgender Nicol Suarez, who was being pursued by ICE for previous crimes, stalked and then raped a 14-year-old boy in a bodega bathroom in East Harlem. In February, 18-year-old transgender Trinity Shockley was arrested as she planned a mass Valentine’s Day school shooting. She failed where Tennessee transgender teen Audrey Hale succeeded; Hale gunned down six kids and adults at The Covenant School.

All of these cases raise a very obvious question: Do transgender Americans commit crime at higher rates or of different types than “cis-gender” Americans?

The answer is: We have no idea.

I suspect the article was written before the wave of trans arsons on Tesla dealerships, and the cases she cites indicate that the problem of trans crime existed before these and is much more widespread. She continues,

A Swedish study conducted in 2011 found that “transsexual individuals were at increased risk of being convicted for any crime or violent crime after sex reassignment.” More specifically, transwomen had a significantly increased risk for committing crime and violent crime compared with biological women—but not compared to cis-men. Indeed, transwomen retain “a male pattern regarding criminality.”

Transmen, on the other hand, had higher crime and violent crime rates than women—about the same rates as biological men. In other words, women who “transition” commit crime at rates similar to men—who, in the general population, commit most of the lawbreaking and violence.

An earlier Swedish study, from 1992, also suggests that higher rates of criminality exist within the transgender population. This research found that 9.7 percent of male-to-female and 6.1 percent of female-to-male sex change applicants had been prosecuted for a crime—higher than rates in the general population.

All anyone can say is that Owen McIntire's case is highly suggestive in this context -- he begins gender-affirming treatment, and within days or weeks, he's throwing Molotov cocktails. Meyers concludes,

Unless America recenters our debates about criminal offending in reality, and ballasts them with evidence, we will help neither crime victims nor offenders. And we will certainly harm transgender Americans, who are so often both.

Is Bezos Overrated And Out Of Control?

Two weeks ago, Jeff Bezos stepped into one of the biggest PR disasters you could imagine. Aaron Cohen, a PR and brand executive. wrote:

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin may have made history on Monday for sending an all-woman crew into sub-orbit on its New Shepard rocket ship for all the wrong reasons.

From a pure PR perspective, this was a Jupiter-sized faceplant.

. . . It reeks of poorly performed virtue signaling. Showing extremely privileged women taking a magical vacation into space as passengers while leaving common folk grinding away at their hamster wheel does not a good deed make.

. . . It is difficult to imagine any PR team approving this launch without waving flaming red flags.

But just yesterday, Amazon and Bezos stepped in it yet again:

Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday that, according to a source familiar with the matter, the e-commerce giant will start showing the figure added to the value because of the duties right alongside a product’s total price.

The move is reportedly an effort by Amazon to inform customers cost rises have nothing to do with it and everything to do with the Trump White House.

Stephen Green at PJ Media wrote,

Mere hours after a blistering Briefing Room performance from PressSec Karoline Leavitt — who slammed Amazon as a “China-aligned” online retailer — the company backpedaled faster than a skinny-dipper who mistakenly waded into a piranha pool. Leavitt was responding to questions involving a Punchbowl News report that Amazon would break out the "Trump tariff" on the price of imported goods.

Elsewhere, Green linked to this post on X:

This will backfire.

Amazon buys Chinese trash for $0.70 cents. Pays $0.50 tariff. Sells to you for $18 plus $0.50. Customer realizes they’re buying Chinese trash. https://t.co/cowWJ0T0x5

— Rob Schmitt (@SchmittNYC) April 29, 2025

Green continued,

Nick Sortor reported that "minutes after President Trump called Jeff Bezos this morning, Amazon CAVED and backtracked on their plans." Bezos isn't CEO any longer, but he can still jerk some chains.

Whatever the truth is, what a shame Amazon isn't sticking to its guns. As I wrote earlier today, breaking out taxes and letting consumers know up-front where their merchandise is coming from would be a big win. Even that, however, wouldn't be enough to fix what's wrong with the Amazon-China Connection.

The chart below is from last year, before the tariff controversy:

But there are apparently other problems with Anazon's business model:

UPS will cut 20,000 jobs this year, about 4% of its global workforce, the company said Tuesday. But UPS added the decision is unrelated to tariffs and is instead due to increased use of technology and a previously announced plan to trim its Amazon business.

UPS in January announced a “glide down” plan to cut its business with Amazon, its largest customer, in half by the middle of 2026. UPS CEO Carol Tome said Tuesday that most of the Amazon business that it is giving up is “not profitable for us, nor a healthy fit for our network.”

The UPS package volume from Amazon was already down 16% in the just-completed quarter, which was a bigger drop than UPS had forecast for the period. UPS said it will close 73 US buildings by the end of June as the next part of that “glide down” plan.

So UPS is losing money on its business with Amazon. On the other hand, Amazon has its own delivery service, Prime -- so why was Amazon taking business away from itself and giving it to UPS? I've got to assume UPS was cheaper than Prime for Amazon to use it instead. But now UPS is forcing Amazon to use its own higher-cost shipping, because Amazon was ripping it off. These were factors in play before Trump's tariffs. But the tariffs are also just an outcome, not a cause:

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has quietly canceled a number of orders from suppliers in China and Southeast Asia, according to Bloomberg. The move appears aimed at avoiding the rising costs tied to U.S. tariffs but it's left some vendors with goods they can't sell.

. . . A consultant familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Amazon canceled several direct import orders without warning. Because Amazon usually acts as the importer of record, it normally pays any tariffs once the goods arrive in the U.S. But when an order is canceled after shipping, that responsibility shifts to the vendor leaving them on the hook.

In its 2023 annual report, Amazon flagged risks tied to its China-heavy supply chain, warning that global events, security issues, or policy changes could affect results. Around 40% of items sold through Amazon come from these types of vendor relationships showing just how wide the impact could be.

In other words, Amazon was fully aware as early as 2023 of the risks in its supply chain, but it seems to have persisted in that risky business model for as long as it could.

“How'd That Work Out?”

Trump has bveen asking this question in various contexts lately, most recently over Taylor Swift. Of the Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl win, he observed at the White House yesterday,

“It was incredible. A little surprising,” the president said of the blowout win.

“I was there along with Taylor Swift,” Trump added before asking rhetorically: “How did that one work out?”

The “You Belong With Me” singer, who is in a high-profile relationship with star Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, was loudly booed — to her apparent surprise — when she was shown on the big screen during the game.

Moments earlier, Trump was greeted with applause and cheers when he was shown during the pregame performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

I've been wondering when Trump will address this question to J B Pritzker:

Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, scorched Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday night, calling for “mass protests” and declaring that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” during a fiery speech in New Hampshire that immediately sparked presidential speculation.

“It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” Pritzker said to a ballroom filled with Democratic activists, officials and donors. “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.”

But the story goes on with the inevitable setting of context:

The billionaire heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune addressed more than 800 people. . .

There's nothing incongruous about a billionaire rentier shouting "to the barricades!" at a group of wealthy activists, officials, and donors. No, nothing at all. On a web search I also learned that Gov Pritzker most definitely does not wear a toupee.

In an unrelated story,

On Sunday, during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) did not rule out impeaching President Donald Trump if Democrats take control of Congress.

. . . Schumer said, “Well, look, right now, President Trump is violating rule of law in every way and we’re fighting him every single day in every way. And our goal is to show the American people over and over again, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s Russia and overseas and whether it’s rule of law, how bad he is.

So two prominent Democrats are arguing for basically dusting off and replaying the 2020 strategy -- BLM riots, impeach Trump (twice), Trump is Hitler. How'd that work out? But there's also a confused echo of the 2024 campaign, and that's the odd juxtaposition of white upper-class style and faux revolutionary rhetoric:

A bizarre quote by Vice President Kamala Harris—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”—is going viral once again as she mounts her presidential campaign after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race following his rough debate performance, with supporters and even other politicians adopting coconut emojis and memes inspired by the quote on social media to demonstrate support for Harris.

Harris’ quote: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” which she said at a White House event last year, has become an ironic slogan in support of the vice president as she campaigns for the presidency.

I've frequently noted here Harris's affectation of white upper-class minimalist hair style, wardrobe, and accessories while clumsily mimicking ghetto street argot. Now Gov Pritzker's call for unrest in the streets contrasts again with his own wealthy lifestyle:

Before Pritzker — a venture capitalist billionaire — became governor of the Prairie State, the now-governor and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, allegedly removed the toilets from their second Chicago mansion they bought in 2007 for $3.7 million to write it off as "uninhabitable" on a property tax appeal.

Cook County only taxes vacant properties at 10 percent of their market value. The property was reported by the Chicago Sun-Times as being uninhabited and allowed to fall into disrepair.

A 2018 report from Cook County Inspector General Patrick Blanchard shed some light on the Pritzkers’ porcelain problem: in 2015, the couple hired contracting company Bulley & Andrews to remove five of the toilets from their second mansion, allegedly to take advantage of the county’s low tax rate for uninhabitable properties.

As a result of the mansion’s lavatories being lightened before the inspection, the Cook County assessor’s office "lowered the 6,378-square-foot mansion's assessed value from $6.3 million to about $1.1 million."

Following the assessment, Bulley & Andrews was hired again to reinstall a single toilet in the now-governor’s "hangout/meeting area."

I think what we're looking at is the bitter end of trhe Fabian socialist strategy advanced by the UK upper class in the late 19th century -- to forestall the proletarian revolution, gradually appease the workers with faux referms that are funded by sources other than plutocratic wealth, to wit, taxes, debt, and inflation. Thus we still have some of the wealthiest families in the country, the Pritzkers, Bill Gates and his estranged wife and children, Steve Jobs's widow, and others, clinging to this old strategy, with the Pritzkers in particular claiming now to be the revolutionary vanguard. J B's sister Penny is running her side of the revolution as Lead Fellow of the Harvard Corporation.

Somehow I don't think this will work out.

Not Much Actually New Here

The @nytimes story on the January DC plane crash hides its takeaway until the last sentences: the lady helicopter pilot ignored multiple warnings from her right seat about altitude (and his directly telling her to turn away) and flew straight into a passenger jet.

The end. Ugh. pic.twitter.com/7emtYkZTwQ

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 27, 2025

There's a new fuss over what seems to be a previously unreported excerpt from the cockpit recording of the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into an American Airlines jet at Reagan National Airport on January 29.

Three months on, new details published by The New York Times revealed that the pilot made more than one mistake leading to one of the worst catastrophes in aviation history.

Not only was Lobach flying her Black Hawk too high, but in the final moments before the impact, she failed to take advice and instruction from her co-pilot to switch course.

. . . Just 15 seconds before colliding with the commercial airplane, air traffic control told Lobach and Eaves to turn left, but she did not do so.

Seconds before impact, co-pilot Eaves then turned to Lobach in the cockpit and told her that air traffic control wanted her to turn left. She still did not do so.

The one bit of new information appears to be the exchange with air traffic control when Lobach was directly instructed to turn left, and the instructor pilot repeated the same instruction. The rest of the recording has been released for more than two months. Without the new exchange reported over the weekend, this was the surmise I had as of February 15:

[NTSB] Chairman Homendy makes the point that the maximum altitude for the helicopter when passing over the Memorial Bridge should have been 200 feet. However, at 8:45:30, the instructor pilot told Cpt Lobach that they were at 300 feet altitude at that location. But at 8:44:27 [of a February 1 news conference], the instructor pilot had already noted to Cpt Lobach that the helicopter was at 300 feet and needed to descend to 200. For some reason, this descent never took place, even though the instructor pilot clearly expressed the need for it.

. . . this gives a two-minute span between the Key Bridge and the Memorial Bridge where at least the instructor pilot understood they were at 300 feet, should have been at 200, but there was no discussion about this. If anything, if Cpt Lobach thought they were at 400 feet, she should have seen even more urgency to descend.

. . . The fact that the collision occurred indicates that the helo's altimiters were close enough, and the pilots were fully aware this was too high, whatever the exact numbers may have been. This would also be irrespective of whether the helo crew had parts of the ATC transmissions blocked when they were keying the mic.

The big question as of the February 1 news conference was whether the helicopter crew heard air traffic control's instruction to "go behind" the jet:

The transmission from the tower that instructed the helicopter to go behind the plane may not have been heard by the crew because the pilot may have keyed her radio at the same second and stepped on the transmission from ATC, the NTSB added.

The whole issue at the time was obscured by the possibility that the crew didn't hear this transmission. But now we learn there was a whole 'nother, even more specific, transmission from air traffic control telling the helo to turn left. This must have been available to the NTSB at the same time as they were able to scan the earlier transmission, but it appears that they left it ot of the February 1 news conference, and it's only been leaked now.

But even without that specific transmission in the record, as of February 15, I still came up with what I think is the only reasonable conclusion:

This was a check ride that Cpt Lobach had to pass. During the ride, more than four minutes before the collision, the instructor pilot doing the check noted that the pilot flying was too high, and indeed, although she had four minutes to get down to 200 feet altitude, she never did this. At the same time, the instructor pilot inexplicably told the ATC twice that he had the jet in sight and was maintaining visual separation, which he clearly was not.

Was Cpt Lobach already failing her check ride even before she ran into the jet? If she wasn't, was the instructor pilot complicit in conducting a silly charade that was going to pass her no matter what?

This, of course, doesn't appear to be anything like a full transcript of the helo's CVR from the whole flight. My surmise, during the two-week period before the NTSB would release even a redacted portion of the CVR, was that its contents would prove deeply embarrassing to the Army and the memory of Cpt Lobach. For now, I think I was right, and I would bet there's still more to come.

Looks like I was in fact right. More pressure needs to be put on Chairman Homendy to explain why this transmission was left out of the February 1 news conference.

The Atlantic Almost Gets It

An Atlantic piece, Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet, was linked on Real Clear Politics this morning. Its complaint:

In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany. And FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino spars with agents on the wrestling mats of Quantico.

Kristi Noem is a particular target:

Noem, who has earned herself several dismissive, Mattel-inspired nicknames—“Border Control Barbie,” “ICE Barbie”—is perhaps the most conspicuous offender. She has been photographed behind the controls of both a Coast Guard boat and a Coast Guard plane, donned a helmet and Border Patrol fatigues for an ATV tour along the southern border, and posed in cargo pants and an ICE vest. In a social-media video, she wielded a tricked-out automatic rifle, the M4 muzzle disconcertingly pointed at the head of the agent directly to her left.

But the latest role for Secretary Noem isn't really cosplay:

An illegal immigrant was arrested Saturday for stealing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s pricey Gucci bag containing $3,000 in cash and other personal items – and a second migrant suspect is still on the loose, according to sources.

Noem, 53, was on an Easter outing with her family at The Capital Burger in Washington, DC, when the masked thief stole the luxury shoulder bag, which also contained her driver’s license, passport, DHS badge and apartment keys on April 20.

. . . The perp, who is believed to be part of a large east coast robbery crew, is expected to appear in court early next week as law enforcement hunt for his accomplice, sources said. Officials are also looking for a second suspect who is also reportedly an illegal migrant.

Unless this was elaborately staged as some sort of Reichstag fire-type provocation, Noem simply underwent an all-too-common event-- she was victimized by a criminal illegal -- but then the perp was caught. And all this does is reinforce her own warnings:

Secretary Kristi Noem announced a nationwide and international multimillion-dollar ad campaign warning illegal aliens to leave our country now or face deportation with the inability to return to the United States. . . . “If you are a criminal alien considering entering America illegally: Don’t even think about it. If you come here and break our laws, we will hunt you down. Criminals are not welcome in the United States.”

Merriam-Webster defines cosplay:

the activity or practice of dressing up as a character from a work of fiction (such as a comic book, video game, or television show)

Wikipeida adds,

The term has been adopted as slang, often in politics, to mean someone pretending to play a role or take on a personality disingenuously.

On one hand, we might characterize Michael Dukakis's famous commercial from 1988 riding in a tank wearing a helmet with his name on it as true cosplay, because the message viewers immediately grasped was that Dukakis was not a macho type and wasn't comfortable. It was transparently disingenuous, and it couldn't have been worse for his campaign. But the Atlantic piece complains about Trump,

During his most recent campaign, he sported various working-class costumes to troll his political rivals. In October, mocking then–Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that, as a college student, she had spent a summer working at a McDonald’s, Trump tied on a navy-and-gold apron and served fries through a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s drive-through window. Later that month, in response to mumbled comments then-President Joe Biden made seeming to liken Trump supporters to “garbage,” Trump wore a neon-orange reflective vest and hopped into a white Trump-branded trash hauler in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The problem is that Dukakis's ride on a tank was disastrous, it came off as inauthentic. Trump's brief stint at McDonald's or his ride on a garbage truck in a hi-vis vest were authentic, instantly perceived as such, and were boons to his campaign.

Turn it around. What if Kamala Harris were to have pulled the same McDonald's stunt? On one hand, throughout her campaign she wore the understated hair style, wardrobe, and accessories of an upper-class white woman. On the other, even visiting convenience stores as a customer and not a worker behind the counter, she came off as awkward and staged. The same was true of Biden's visits to ice cream parlors.

Neither would have been seen as remotely authentic serving fries at McDonald's; body language woild have been a key factor. In the photo at the top of tis post, Trump is completely comfortable wearing an apron and is clearly enjoying what he's doing. Certainly part of the enjoyment is recognizing that neither Biden nor Kamala could pull off the same stunt. The fact is that part of politics is shakng hands and kissing babies, and Trump is good at it.

Let's move to the complaint about Pete Hegseth. that he "posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany". Let's look back at prior defense secretaries. Lloyd Austin was a retired general who'd gone on to work in the defense-intelligence private establishment. Robert Gates, who serve under both Dubya and Obama, had a PhD in Russian and Soviet History and had been CIA Director.

Hegseth's role is meant to be in complete contrast, his assignment is to eliminiate DEI and transsexualism fromthe military, restore the confidence of the troops, and increase recruitment. Of course he's going to do things that relate to these tasks. On the other hand, he isn't dressing up as Rambo.

It's OK to wear cowboy hats if you're Lyndon Johnson. LBJ could bring it off.

The Return Of J Edgar Hoover

Alt media so far haan't been happy with either Attorney General Bondi or FBI Director Patel, accusing both of grandstanding on Fox News without making real progress on the Trump agenda.

At the moment, Bondi’s position is much more politically precarious with the right, which might explain her omnipresence on Fox News and Fox Business programming, where she’s repeatedly turned to safely articulate her explanation for the Epstein files mishap — “Everything’s going to come out to the public,” she assured host Sean Hannity — and return to her preferred message of cleaning up the Biden era Justice Department and prosecuting violent crime.

The same story suggests Trump is nevertheless happy with her:

By all indications, Bondi’s position remains secure with President Donald Trump, who called her “fantastic” on Thursday and gave her a glowing review during a visit to the Justice Department Friday. The longer-term question is how much more patience and grace Trump’s base will grant Bondi, who already bears scars as the central figure in arguably the administration’s earliest blunder.

Developments over the past few days suggest both she and Patel are beginning to deliver what Trump seems to have expected they would:

I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan – a county judge in Milwaukee – for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov.

No one is above the law.

— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) April 25, 2025

In other words, high-profile, high-publicity arrests and prosecutions.

🚨BREAKING: First ARRESTS just made —

FBI takes New Mexico immigration judge Juan Cano and his wife into custody… accused of harboring a Tren de Aragua gang member inside their own home.

This is WILD. You can’t make this up.

How deep does this go?

Thoughts? ⬇️ 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/NuPsNWSktM

— Tony Lane 🇺🇸 (@TonyLaneNV) April 24, 2025

In both of these cases, it looks like the FBI alerted media to the upcoming arrests of both judges and made sure cameras were on scene to cover them. It seems to me that what we're beginning to see is the return of the old-time J Edgar Hoover FBI. A book review of the title linked at the top of this post says,

“The FBI gained complete control over how it was portrayed in the media and ultimately it exercised a lot of its power—and it was a powerful agency—in order to maintain that image and essentially to drown out critics,” [author Matthew} Cecil says.

. . . Hoover created an air of romance around the Bureau. There was a television series with scripts and actors vetted by Hoover and his men and a long line of articles that portrayed the agency in nothing less than a favorable light while dissent and dissenters were quickly squashed.

People keep forgetting that Trump had two successful careers before he went into politics -- he was a developer, and then he became a media figure. A big part of his political success comes from what he learned about media. One of those lessons is that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Look at what's come from the FBI arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee alone:

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued a statement accusing the Trump administration of undermining the country's judiciary "at every level."

"In this country, people who are suspected of criminal wrongdoing are innocent until their guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt and they are found guilty by a jury of their peers — this is the fundamental demand of justice in America," Evers said.

Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who is the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, said in a statement that while all of the facts about Dugan's arrest haven't been confirmed, "the implications of this arrest are chilling."

"This Administration has shown brazen contempt for the judiciary," Raskin continued. “Every American should be deeply troubled by this massive escalation."

My guess is that Trump is delighted with this. According to CNN,

The decision by the Justice Department to charge Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan for obstruction and concealing the individual from arrest turned a spotlight on the administration’s decision to exercise immigration enforcement in certain places that have in the past been mostly off-limits to such federal activity, including courthouses, schools and places of worship.

Her arrest Friday morning immediately drew intense criticism from legal experts and Democratic lawmakers, who widely viewed it as the Trump administration’s latest bid to strong-arm courts around the country as it pushes ahead with controversial immigration policies.

. . . Earlier this year, President Donald Trump revived a policy from his first term that allows federal officials to make immigration-related arrests in courts.

But as in so-called sanctuary cities around the US, court officials are not obligated to work with federal officials in such arrests if the warrant being executed is an administrative warrant and not a judicial one.

Such was the case for Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who federal officials were attempting to arrest on April 18, the day he was appearing before Dugan in a criminal matter. After learning that the officials were in possession of an administrative warrant for Flores-Ruiz, the judge allegedly helped him and his attorney leave through a nonpublic area of the courthouse. Flores-Ruiz was arrested by federal agents shortly thereafter.

. . . Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said that it’s likely Dugan wouldn’t be facing the federal charges had she only declined to cooperate with the agents that day.

For her conduct to result in the charges she’s facing, he said, “there needs to be some affirmative act taken. And here, showing this person the back door, giving this person access to the back door, and then ushering the person out the back door would be an affirmative act.”

What many commentators seem to ignore is that illegal migration is a major issue for the electorate, and Trump's policies have strong support:

Two separate polls released in the past week show strong support for President Trump’s key immigration policies: closing the border and deporting aliens here illegally. In fact, those are the most popular among the new administration’s policies, underscoring lingering discontent over the prior administration’s much more permissive immigration stances.

The more publicity for such arrests, the better -- and the more hard-left Democrats hysterically denounce them, the better for Republicans.

But let's recall that the last FBI hero in the public mind was James Kallstrom, who as assistant director in charge of the in New York field office led the investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. He came into the picture after the FBI's disastrous raids at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and before the FBI's involvement in the bogus Trump investigations that led to Director Comey's firing and Robert Mueller's public humiliation. Kallstrom, the last hero, who began his career during Hoover's final years, said of those developments that he "did not recognize the agency I gave 28 years of my life to".

It looks like Trump's aim -- recall that he's a proven genius at both media and politics -- is to put the FBI visibly back on the right side of things, where Hoover had originally put it. If that's the case, both Bondi and Patel are doing exactly what he expects. The same likely applies to other high-level appointees like Hegseth; there's no such thing as bad publicity where they're concerned.

UPDATE: CNN actulally gets the point:

ROSSI: You have the right to get an arrest warrant, and you have the right to get a summons, and that they got an arrest warrant for a judge shows that they wanted to make this a spectacle. . .

JENNINGS: Why wouldn't you want to make a spectacle of it? I mean, the fact of the matter is, there are Liberal Democrat elected officials, not all are judges, some are mayors and others, all over this country who have said repeatedly since Donald Trump became the president that they would like to obstruct his principles and his program when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants. Here, you have this person, if these facts are proven true, obviously that's exactly what she's trying to do here.

Tren de Aragua Is Back In The News

In posts like this one a few weeks ago, I've tried to trace the ecosystem by which the Biden administration brought in illegal migrants, not just by letting them through the border, but by recruiting them in their home countries, flying them to the US, settling them in designated communities, giving them quasi-legal protected status, and paying for their food, shelter, transportation, and medical care.

What we still don't know much about is who designed this very complex system. We do know that a key part of it was roughly a dozen "faith based NGOs" that received billions in federal grants to implement the settlement program. Although they represented different denominations with different governing structures, they all appear to have operated in a similar way, settling migrants in specific cities and coordinating with for-profit sweatshop employers, slumlords, and car dealers.

One nationality that keeps reappearing in these accounts is Venezuela. This is partly to be expected, because Venezuelans were singled out under the so-called CHNV program:

Under that program, known as CHNV, a total of 532,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela were allowed to fly to the U.S. after securing a sponsorship from U.S.-based individuals. Upon entry, they were granted immigration parole and allowed to work in the U.S. lawfully for two years.

The "sponsors" appear to have been coordinated by, and closely aligned with, the faith-base NGOs that were implementing the strategy. But the information that keeps coming to light is how coordinated each piece of the overall strategy was, from recruitment in home counties to final placement in US communities. For instance, Venezuelans didn't just randomly turn up, one day in Idaho, the next in New Hampshire. The whole program routed them repeatedly to individual cities where the faith-based NGOs operated. We've heard, for instance, about Aurora, CO and El Paso, TX.

In addition, where groups of resettled Venezuelans turn up, the Tren de Aragua gang turns up with them. According to Newsweek,

In its operations in the U.S., it is believed its members mainly target other Venezuelan migrants, although some members have been linked to recent murders, including Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas and Laken Riley in Georgia.

The same report ran a map of states in which Tren de Aragua is thought to be operating, including Tennessee, where the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation indicates it is present in every major city. Yellow is confirmed, orange is reported, red is unknown:

It seems as if the easiest way to find where Tren de Aragua is active would be to identify the cities in which the faith-based NGOs have been settling Venezuelan migrants, but so far, it doesn't seem as if anyone has thought to do this, although the faith-based NGOs themselves must know perfectly well where they're operating. One previously unsuspected location is Mobile, AL:

Thursday, the FBI Mobile division held a press conference regarding recent arrests.

Investigators say six men named Jose Ramon Rivera-Garcia, Alejandro Jose Gomez Rivera, Jose Antonio Garcia Garcia, Jesus Alberto Queva-Vasquez, Keiber Jose Maiz-Martinez and Kendry Alexander Queva Vasquez are all suspected to be members of Tren de Aragua.

. . . Investigators with the FBI said they had multiple leads in the case, however, the main lead stemmed from an arrest made a month ago. The person arrested was a brother to one of the men and investigators said they were able to connect the dots to his siblings being in the gang.

According to investigators, the six men had tattoos that indicate they are in Tren de Aragua and all lived in Mobile, mostly in the same house.

There are other tantalizing suggestions here. What we've been seeing in all the CHNV resettlement programs, for instance, is the placement of migrants in overcrowded conditions in slum type housing. In this case, at least six gang members were in one house, but we have no idea what the total number of people living there was. But this strongly suggests that the Venezuelans' living arrangements were coodinated by the NGO operating in Mobile, and the NGO probably had a good idea of what was going on.

Another report suggests there was an intentionality at work in every aspect of the program:

According to the FBI, some Venezuelan government officials, in order to erode public safety in the United States, “likely facilitate” the migration of Tren de Aragua gang members to the United States.

Tren de Aragua has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration.

. . . The Venezuelan move to destabilize other countries also includes Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, Fox News Digital reported, adding, “The FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan government officials likely will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to threaten, abduct and kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of [Venezuala President Nicolás] Maduro and his regime.”

This suggests to me that, for motives that are misguided at best, actors from Venezuela through the US government to NGO workers on the ground in US cities have been making a coordinated, deliberate effort to include Tren de Aragua members among the parcels of migrants that have been flown in under the CHNV program. For instance, what are we to make of this?

The FBI has arrested former New Mexico Magistrate Judge Juan Cano and his wife Nancy Cano for allegedly harboring an illegal alien with suspected ties to Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang known for trafficking, extortion, and violence.

The arrest comes just weeks after Cano resigned from his judicial post following a dramatic federal raid at his Doña Ana County residence, where agents apprehended Cristhian Ortega Lopez, an illegal immigrant now charged with unlawful firearm possession and gang affiliation.

The Gateway Pundit was one of the first outlets to report that longtime Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano — a Democrat and former police officer — abruptly resigned after federal agents arrested an alleged member of the violent Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang at a residence he owns.

. . . Ortega-Lopez, who had unlawfully entered the United States by scaling a barbed-wire fence in Eagle Pass, Texas, was released on so-called “humanitarian parole” due to overcrowding — a tragic consequence of Biden’s wide-open border disaster.

Once in New Mexico, prosecutors allege Ortega-Lopez became acquainted with April Cano, the judge’s stepdaughter, who reportedly owned a cache of firearms and allowed the illegal alien to shoot and pose with the weapons — images that later surfaced on Facebook.

It's hard not to think there's a great deal more to learn here. Is Las Cruces yet another city where an NGO has settled groujps of Venezuelans? Is Ortega-Lopez the only Tren de Aragua member Judge Cano has been associating with? What's going on here?