hay rick
hay rick's JournalAmerica's concentration camp network: Heather Cox Richardson.
HCR's full post here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-7-2026
HCR turns over a rock to examine the truth of something we would rather not think about...
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This policy has dramatically increased detention of immigrants. Before it, the U.S. held about 40,000 people on any given day. Now, according to Laura Strickler and Julia Ainsley of NBC News, the United States is currently holding more than 70,000 immigrants in 224 facilities across the nation, 104 more facilities than it had before Trump took office. Those detainees include children.
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From 2002 to 2023, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helped to make sure detainees had medical care if an ICE facility couldn’t provide it, with ICE paying the VA for the coverage. But in 2023, Alabama Republican senator Tommy Tuberville lied that President Joe Biden was “robbing veterans to pay off illegals,” and on September 30, 2025, a small right-wing nonprofit sued to get documents from the Trump administration about the VA’s role in detainee care. On October 3, Legum discovered, “the VA ‘abruptly and instantly terminated’ its agreement with ICE,” leaving it with no way to provide prescribed medication or access off-site care.
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Douglas MacMillan, Samuel Oakford, N. Kirkpatrick, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported that according to ICE’s own oversight unit, Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, Texas, has violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention. The contract for the $1.24 billion project was awarded to a small business that operates out of a residential address and has, as Lyndon German of VPM News reported, “little to no publicly available record of managing immigration facilities.”
Much more. Many in the administration view shuttling around detainees as a warehousing problem and want to create a reverse Amazon Prime...
Richardson concludes the post with a story about the German citizens of Ohrdruf touring the nearby Buchenwald camp immediately after the war. It feels relevant to America in 2026.
They are fishing for ways to nullify election results.
There is no legitimate difference of opinion on the chain of custody of ballots, only a difference in goals. Breaking the chain of custody of ballots, like in Puerto Rico and Fulton County, creates the opportunity to forge counterfeit claims. Breaking the chain of custody or routing it through a criminal enterprise is the exact opposite of the usual prosecutorial burden of demonstrating a legitimate chain of custody of evidence.
This is not partisan disagreement. This is an attack on American democracy by its enemies.
The fact that he is still roaming the grounds freely suggests he is still useful to the powerful.
Trump's reign continues despite the obvious mental decline that exacerbates his lifelong sociopathic behavior. Trump is useful because he breaks things that others want to see broken. He has demonstrated many times over that he can get away with destructive behavior that would lead to an immediate downfall for others.
One thing that I think helps keeps him in place is the belief that his designated replacement, J. D. Vance, lacks both MAGA cred and the ability to lie to peoples' faces like he believes a word he is saying. Vance is equally repulsive in his own way but he is no Donald Trump.
Another difficulty for those using him is that I think he is kept in place by an informal coalition of oligarchs who have overlapping but different agendas. He continues to be useful to some while his increasingly reckless behavior is viewed as a threat by others. I doubt that there is a single faction that can unilaterally remove him and inertia will keep him in place until there is some kind of consensus among the looting elite.
Winner, winner, bonespurs dinner!
Did somebody say the White House? Ding! Ding! Ding!!!
Murder.gov
In the 1930s, Murder, Inc. was part of a crime syndicate that offered murder-for-hire services and was reputed to have killed over 1,000 people (mostly other gangsters) in a little over a decade. A movie of that name was made in 1960. A young Peter Falk played "Kid Twist", a psychopathic killer. A Kid Twist speech from the movie:
Don't ask questions- Take!
What you want- Take!
What I want I take!
Stealing Lunch Money- Venezuela.
Only Donald Trump could make a person root for Nicolas Maduro. Maduro stole Venezuela's presidential election in 2024, which he appears to have lost by a wide margin. Maduro won a close and disputed election in 2013 and has ruled as an authoritarian leader since. In addition to electoral fraud, his rule has been marked by corruption, censorship, and human rights abuses including extrajudicial killings. His leadership has also resulted in severe economic hardship. Venezuela's GDP shrunk by an astonishing 80% (approximately $380 billion in 2013 to $120 billion in 2024). More than 7,000,000 people fled Venezuela- almost a quarter of the population. The majority of those who remain live in poverty.
Trump has no plan to address the misery of the Venezuelan people. He has ruled out installing the actual winners of the last election in power. There is no remotely credible plan to repair Venezuela's deteriorating petroleum industry, the greatest source of the country's wealth. Impoverished as the Venezuelan people may be, they are likely to become even poorer as the only clearly articulated administration plan is to extort many millions of barrels of oil by blockading and impounding oil tankers.
Paul Krugman sheds light on one part of Trump's actual "foreign relations" model:
Singer has made huge political donations to Trump, raising questions about how much he has influenced policy. His purchase of Citgo was also remarkably well-timed. What did he know?
How many others in Trump's inner circle of billionaires, family, and business associates are serendipitously positioned to share the loot?
I believe election suppression will be selective.
They do not need to cancel every election or even most elections. They can target a handful of elections and assure that they keep a majority in the house, which is their primary vulnerability. The competent people- graduates of the 2025 project and people funded by Thiel with all of Palantir's hijacked data, are surely war-gaming this. Different strategies can be pursued in different districts.
The shaky premise that American democracy will be saved by fair elections in 2026 encourages people to take the path of least resistance- tolerating the current, escalating abuse and waiting to be rescued by the ballot box.
CBS News new show: 47 Minutes.
The idea for the graphic came from a comment on DU yesterday. I thought the show could use a trailer.
Another new font for Marco Rubio!
Q: Why did Marco Rubio cross the road?
A: Like most squirrels he has no idea where he left his nuts.
The other day Marco announced that all official State Department documents must use a14-point Times New Roman font. I humbly suggest that an even more appropriate font is available: Times New Swastika (see below).
Rubio decided it was important to replace the sans serif Calibri font because it was part of a "wasteful DEIA program." While the DEI bogeyman is familiar to most of us, it turns out that if you add A to the acronym you can also include "Accessibility" in the woke target list. Watch out wheelchair ramps, MAGA is coming after you!
About the font: by happy coincidence, the real name of the font is Fette Trump-Deutsch. It's a widely available free font created by Professor Georg Trump in 1936.
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