appleannie1
appleannie1's JournalJust received a message from a friend in England. More like a warning.
A word of warning from a good friend in England. Stock up on anything you normally buy that comes from other countries. They are all going to stop trading with the US. It is amazing how many products labled "Made in the USA" have materials in them that come from other countries.
It is no longer safe in any city where ICE is present even if you are a citizen
Brandon Siguenza
Good morning,
My name is Brandon Siguenza, and I am a US citizen from Minneapolis. Yesterday, while doing legal observation, ICE stopped their cars to harass my friend and me. They sprayed pepper spray into the vent of our vehicle. We held our hands in the air and told them we were not obstructing, that the car was in park and they were free to drive forward and away. There was no active immigration raid. They returned to their cars, and drove forward a bit, then decided to stop again. They surrounded us, smashed the windows of our car, opened the doors (they were unlocked), ripped my friend and I out of the car and arrested us on charges of obstruction.
I was put in an unmarked SUV, separated from my friend. As I was put in the back seat an ICE agent tore the whistle off my neck and said “I’ll be taking this, I might need it later.” My phone was knocked out of my hand while being arrested. As we drove away I asked the driver and the passenger if they wouldn’t mind buckling my seatbelt, as they were driving erratically. I was ignored. I asked them if I could have the handcuffs loosened, as I was losing circulation, and was told no. At one point the passenger realized his own driver's license was in the backseat next to mine, and tried to surreptitiously grab it without me seeing it.
We were taken to the Whipple federal building, where I saw dozens of brown people being processed in an unheated garage. I was frisked, told of my charges, and saw buses and vans being prepped. I later learned that these were being filled with detainees and driven to the airport for deportation. As we were led in, I noticed that the building was very busy. I got the impression that one of the 2 agents bringing me around was being trained. At multiple points throughout my stay, government agents were unable to open doors, not sure where they were meant to be going, and overall confused and overwhelmed. They couldn’t figure out how to use the building phones, or complained about a lack of cell service preventing them from checking the internet or making calls.
The people in the cells were extremely scared. We heard people screaming "let me out!", crying, wailing and terrified screams. There were cells with as many as 8 people. I have no way of knowing how long they have been there, if they were allowed any contact with the outside world, or if they were being brought food or water. Most people were staring at the ground with almost no energy. I was not allowed to talk to anyone imprisoned. I distinctly remember seeing a desperate woman. She was staring at the ground with her head in her hands crying, hopeless, while her friend or family member sat on a bathroom seat observed by 3 men.
My friend and I were put in an area for "USCs," which we eventually learned meant US citizens, separated by gender. We were imprisoned for 8 hours, during which my friend was never allowed a phone call. I was allowed to call my wife and tell her where I was. During my interview with Special Agent William and Special Agent Garcia, they asked me to empty my pockets. When I pulled out gloves, Agent William said those were meant to be taken when I was processed, and complained about having to fill out the form again. He frisked me once more, where he found glass in my pocket from when our car window was shattered. He filled out the form listing my personal items again, but put the wrong date. I was read my rights, I pleaded the fifth and was led back to my cell.
Food, water, and bathroom breaks were extremely difficult to acquire. I would ask over the intercom provided in the cell for a bathroom break, be told someone was on their way, then ask again 20 minutes later, be told someone was on their way, wait another 20 minutes, etc. Eventually they either turned off the intercom or it stopped working, because no one would respond. I could get water and bathroom breaks by pounding on the glass when someone happened to walk by and beg them directly. Hours would go by without anyone checking on us. I am vegan and the only food they offered were turkey sandwiches, fruit snacks with gelatin, and granola bars with honey. I eventually ate a granola bar out of hunger.
I was in the cell alone for between 1 and 2 hours, then another man was put into my cell, whose shirt was ripped open from his arrest, and an injured toe, who was carried aggressively into an unmarked car during his arrest. After about 4-5 hours, another man was brought in who had a cut on his head from his arrest. He told me he was tackled by 4 or 5 agents during his arrest. At no point was he offered medical assistance.
Later I was told that a lawyer was here to see me, and I was able to speak with him in a visitation room. The special agent told me that the door could not be closed all the way, so it was cracked during my interaction with my lawyer. I got the impression that they were not used to having lawyers present, and were trying to follow procedure as best they could. I asked an agent if the other detainees were allowed lawyers and was not answered.
At one point, 3 men from the department of Homeland Security Investigations brought me into a cell. They insinuated that they could help me out. After inquiring several times what exactly they meant they finally told me that they could offer undocumented family members of mine legal protection if I have any (I don’t), or money, in exchange for giving them the names of protest organizers, or undocumented persons. I was shocked, and told them no.
Finally, after hours of detention, I was told to follow an agent. At no point was I told whether or not I was being charged, or where I was going, but I was led out of the building. I asked if I could use a phone to call my wife to pick me up, and was told I could not. After pleading for several minutes eventually Special Agent William let me use his phone to call my wife. As I was escorted off the property by government agents, I was told to turn right. I was escorted to the protest area, where 5 minutes later, tear gas was deployed and I was struck by a paint ball gun. I was not protesting, I was simply being released without charges after an 8 hour detention. I was on the other side of the street, as instructed by the agents that released me and the agents shouting orders over a bullhorn. A passerby who was tear gassed was panicking and having an asthma attack, so I helped her find a medic to get her an inhaler. I used a stranger's phone to co-ordinate pickup, and was picked up by my wife.
During my detention I knew that I was being released. I knew that as a citizen of the United States I have legal protection. The hundred or so other people being detained had no such protection. At this time I don’t need your help, it is the families that are being separated, abused, terrorized, harassed and killed that need your help. If this is happening to me, an American citizen born in the United States, then what is happening to the people in here that have no one calling lawyers on their behalf? That have no constitutional rights to due process? What is happening to the people that they will never be released to see their families, go to their jobs, or walk through their city ever again?
Please take care of yourselves, your family, and your community. I am safe and healthy, if you feel compelled to help, please offer your help to the Immigrant Defense Network at https://immigrantdefensenetwork.org/. If you know someone detained by ICE, call or text CAIR-MN at 612-206-3360 for 24/7 legal intake.
When I come here now, Guardio pops up a page saying this is a malicious website
I never had that happen before in all the years I have read here almost daily. I guess learning the truth is now considered a virus and heaven forbid we say anything negative about the chief disease spreader in this country.
I overrode Guardio's warning forever, something I hated to have to do in case this site ever IS hacked. I mean it is bad enough that AI now changes what we are saying and we have to erase and redo things almost daily to write what we want to say.
Hegseth announces Qatar will build air force facility at U.S. base in Idaho
Washington — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday announced a finalized agreement that will allow the Qatari Emiri Air Force to build a facility at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho.
The agreement, which Hegseth announced alongside Qatari Minister of Defense Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani at the Pentagon, will allow Qatari pilots to receive training alongside U.S. soldiers. There are no foreign military bases in the U.S., but some foreign militaries do maintain a presence for training. The Singaporean Air Force also has a presence at the Mountain Home base.
Hegseth said he is "proud that today we're signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force Facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-qatar-air-force-facility-us-base-idaho/
Gee, that should go over big with the MAGA crowd. They hate Muslims and now they will have their own air base and planes to fly all over the US. Hmmmm.
Gee. The Kennedy Center is having trouble finding performers.
https://ifeg.info/2025/10/01/maga-world-explodes-as-yo-yo-ma-avoids-trump-run-kennedy-center/?fbclid=IwY2xjawNNKm1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFrTFlibHYzaDFzVFE4bWFVAR714HPmwEPvpMeK2yXOKtMKBIkYsdJkBvbHuHhH-WxnoAFigxqiL0dSA3DdkA_aem_u7Ps3VzPHYvvxMMIvJHAMgIn a move that has sent shockwaves through MAGA world, legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma, along with other prominent artists, has made it clear that he will avoid the Trump-controlled Kennedy Center in favor of other venues. This is a bold, yet significant step, as top-tier artists are increasingly choosing not to associate with an institution that has been overtaken by MAGA loyalists, leaving an unmistakable mark of protest against the current political regime.
*************They can always get Kid Rock or Billy Ray Cyrus or Rascal Flatts.
Fired federal prosecutor tapes a note about duty to the door on his way out
Trump getting rid of anyone that disagrees with him. Period.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/03/politics/fired-federal-prosecutor-michael-benary-virginia
Days after being fired, the top national security prosecutor in Virginia’s eastern district taped a letter outside his former office accusing top Justice Department officials of being “more concerned” with going after President Donald Trump’s perceived enemies than protecting the country’s security.
The typed letter dated Friday and signed by Michael Ben’Ary said that as a prosecutor, he took an oath “that requires you to follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, free from fear or favor, and unhindered by political interference.”
“In recent months, the political leadership of the Department have violated these principles, jeopardizing our national security and making American citizens less safe,” he said.
Look at this totally unnecessary monstrosity messing up the WH lawn.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-white-house-ballroom-renderings-construction-details/?ftag=CNM-00-10aac3aCan you imagine how many hungry people could be fed or how many homeless people could have living quarters built? What a waste of tax dollars. I think he is making sure no one can ever plant a garden there to provide food for DC food pantries again and the Easter egg rolls are a thing of the past too.
They Wanted a Foreigner
For thirty-three hours after Charlie Kirk was shot dead in Utah, Governor Spencer Cox prayed. Not for peace. Not for understanding. Not even for Kirk’s family. He prayed that the shooter would be “from another country.”
That sentence, dropped almost casually, reveals the whole architecture of the modern American right. The horror of the act itself mattered less than the convenience of its narrative. If the killer were foreign, the state could mobilize fear, summon camps, station troopers, tighten the grip. A foreigner would mean utility. A foreigner would mean profit.
But the shooter was not foreign. He was not Antifa. He was not trans. He was not an immigrant. He was one of their own — Tyler Robinson, twenty-two years old, born and raised in Utah, white, Republican, raised in a MAGA Mormon family, a product of the very ecosystem that made Charlie Kirk. And suddenly, the story no longer worked.
The right had prayed for a scapegoat. What they got was a mirror.
⸻
From the moment Kirk’s body hit the ground, the spin machine went into overdrive. The talking points were pre-written: this was the “radical left.” Trump himself, within hours, blamed Democrats. Fox News echoed the charge. Online MAGA influencers flooded timelines with warnings of “Antifa terrorism.” Before Robinson’s name was even known, the enemy had already been declared. It was trans activists, anarchists, immigrants — anyone but a white Republican son of Utah.
The propaganda was not sloppy. It was deliberate. By the time Robinson’s identity became public, millions had already absorbed the false narrative. Millions had already been primed to believe that Kirk died a martyr at the hands of the left. When the truth emerged, it was simply discarded. Some commentators pivoted to “woke college professors.” Others mumbled about vague “online influences.” Anything but the reality: that Kirk had been murdered not by his ideological enemies but by the very movement he helped build.
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The bullet casings themselves carried the mark of our poisoned culture: “Hey fascist, catch.” “Bella Ciao.” A line from the video game Helldivers 2. These were not slogans of organized revolution but fragments of irony and trolling, the detritus of meme culture. A generation raised in digital nihilism, where jokes blur into threats and threats into action, where violence is content and content is violence.
Robinson wasn’t a lone wolf. He was the logical extension of a movement that has fed its youth a steady diet of hate, grievance, and contempt. His world was not MSNBC, not drag shows, not universities. His world was the warped digital subculture that the right itself built.
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To understand why Robinson turned his gun on Charlie Kirk, you have to go back to the Groyper Wars. In 2019, Nick Fuentes and his army of young online followers declared Kirk to be the enemy of true conservatism. They crashed his Turning Point USA events, peppered him with barbed questions about immigration, Israel, and LGBTQ rights, then flooded the internet with clips portraying him as evasive, cowardly, corrupt. To the Groypers, Kirk was “Conservative Inc.” — a slick marketer of empty patriotism, more interested in billionaire donors than purity of ideology.
This was not a debate on the margins. It was a generational revolt. Kirk preached capitalism, small government, and a sanitized culture war. Fuentes and the Groypers demanded ethno-nationalism, open antisemitism, and Christian authoritarianism. The fights got ugly. Kirk’s staff barred Groypers from events. Fuentes’ followers smeared Kirk relentlessly online. The feud metastasized into a cold civil war inside the right.
By 2020, Kirk and Fuentes despised each other openly. Kirk denounced the Groypers as extremists who were sabotaging conservatism. Fuentes labeled Kirk a traitor, a puppet, a grifter. And through it all, Kirk tried to hold his ground as the respectable face of Trump’s youth movement. But the ground was shifting beneath him. His audience was bleeding into Fuentes’ camp, drawn by the thrill of extremism, by the promise of belonging to something rawer, meaner, more “authentic.”
Charlie Kirk was not killed by the left. He was killed by the ideological heirs of Nick Fuentes. His assassination was the bloody exclamation point on a feud that had been raging in full public view for half a decade.
⸻
And yet the political class cannot admit this. The Trump administration delayed the public announcement of Robinson’s arrest for nearly nine hours, holding it back so that the president himself could reveal it live on Fox & Friends. Even justice became theater. Even grief became ratings.
Stephen Miller invoked Kirk’s supposed “last words” as a sacred charge to fight the radical left — a fabrication that fit the script even as the facts shredded it. The White House doubled down on the myth rather than confront the truth. The machine cannot survive without scapegoats. So it creates them.
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But there is another dimension to the fallout: speech. Not as abstract ideal, but as battlefield. The post-Kirk world has seen dozens of people fired, suspended, or disciplined for their responses on social media. Teachers, emergency workers, military staff, journalists — all losing jobs or being investigated because of what they posted online. The right, in many of these cases, has acted both as targeter and prosecutor, amplifying posts, doxxing accounts, calling for action.
A few high-profile cases: Matthew Dowd, a political analyst, was fired by MSNBC after he suggested on air that Kirk’s rhetoric may have helped create a climate of hateful words leading to hateful actions. (Guardian, People)  Another case: in Florida, educators in Clay County were removed and under investigation for social media posts celebrating or rationalizing Kirk’s death. One teacher posted: “This may not be the obituary we were all hoping to wake up to, but it is a close second for me.” Another, a counselor, alluded to previous positions of Kirk’s about gun deaths, invoking that stance in their reaction. 
Also among those disciplined: a Secret Service agent under scrutiny for social posts; a communications coordinator for the Carolina Panthers fired over Instagram commentary; an NFL team‐communications staffer; university employees; emergency services personnel; and others. Many employers drew upon codes of conduct to justify terminations or leave. 
These firings serve two functions: punishing people for crossing red lines, sure. But also sending a message. Speech is dangerous. Dissent or mockery is toxic. Any deviation from the accepted narrative (mourning, outrage, solidarity) risks professional ruin. It’s a chilling atmosphere, intentionally built.
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Governor Cox’s prayer reveals what was really at stake. He wanted the shooter to be foreign because foreignness makes cruelty easier. Foreignness can be packaged. Foreignness can be deported, detained, walled off. Foreignness feeds the machine.
But Robinson was not foreign. He was familiar. He was family. He was the boy down the street with the MAGA hat and the AR-15 in his truck. He was the son of the very people who prayed for a scapegoat. And so the mask slips. The cruelty is not imported. It is homegrown.
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What emerges is a three-part cycle: one, radicalization on the right that festers via meme culture, extremist critique (e.g. the Groypers vs Kirk); two, political violence as its logical outcome; three, narrative control, scapegoating, and speech suppression when that violence reflects poorly on the movement.
We can see this cycle in real time:
• The Groypers have long objected to Kirk’s conservatism, his perceived moderation, his willingness to play well with institutions. The hostility was ideological but daily: public criticism, viral clips, provocations.
• That feud radicalized followers — people who saw Kirk not as a leader to follow but as a target.
• Then came the assassination.
• When the assassin turned out to be one of their own (a MAGA, Trump‐aligned man), the right needed a different narrative: someone external, someone antisocial, someone leftist.
• So they invented or promoted one: the shooter was a trans leftist, or Antifa, or liberal, or foreign.
• That fell apart under scrutiny. So then came phase - punish dissent: people who said things that threatened the narrative are fired.
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The right’s hunger for scapegoats is not new, but this instance highlights how theatrical and preemptive the scapegoating now is. They didn’t wait to see facts. They didn’t wait for confirmation. They created the blame network first. Those who dissented — those who asked “Wait, what if this was someone from our side?” — were silenced, punished.
What is being lost in this moment is not just truth, but the possibility of self-reflection. Because no movement that cannot reflect on its own violence can contain it. No ideology that equates dissent with betrayal can avoid eating itself. And right now, when the killer was one of their own, the movement pivoted to purge.
⸻
The aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination reveals truth about America’s authoritarian drift more starkly than almost any event of this decade. The cruelty is not imported. The violence is not foreign. It is familiar, bred in homes draped with MAGA flags, in churches that sanctify grievance, in organizations that equate outrage with virtue. The right wanted Kirk to be a martyr killed by liberals. What they got was Kirk consumed by his own ideological ecosystem, collateral damage in a civil war raging inside the house of conservatism.
They wanted a foreigner. They wanted a scapegoat. They wanted to hold someone else accountable, someone outside. But what they got instead was someone who looked like them. The mask slips. The scapegoat collapses. And the movement, starving, turns to suppression. Punishment. Silence.
The blood is theirs. The killer is theirs. The message is theirs.
https://www.facebook.com/ThePeskyLiberals
Trump Administration Cuts Funding for Life-Saving Baby Heart Device
Dr. Evan Zahn, a pediatric cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles who is not involved with PediaFlow, called the funding loss a blow to children’s health.
“Technology specifically designed for our children, particularly babies across the board, is desperately needed, so losing funding for something like that is a real loss,” he said.
On March 30th, a federal funding grant was approved for the next phase of research into a pioneering and highly promising medical device intended to save babies born with heart defects. Last week, the Trump administration cancelled its own $6.7 million dollar grant.
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Member since: Thu Jun 30, 2005, 10:25 PMNumber of posts: 5,434