On June 11, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) and her colleagues on the House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee launched an investigation into 200 nonprofit organizations suspected of supporting illegal immigration. On the same day, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism announced a similar investigation in the wake of the peaceful protests in Los Angeles.

These are not isolated incidents. Just last week, Green hosted a hearing entitled “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild” aimed at “exposing” nongovernment organizations (NGOs) as “corrupt” agents of “money laundering” and “abuse.” Meanwhile, a provision that would allow the secretary of the treasury to accuse any nonprofit of being a “terrorist supporting organization” without providing evidence was defeated narrowly in the House Ways and Means Committee.

These actions synchronize with a growing, coordinated movement by Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass domestic terrorism laws—and to use post-Sept. 11 state laws that criminalize domestic terrorism, or support and assistance for it—to suppress civil society and citizen activism.

Americans typically think of NGOs as organizations providing “public benefit”: feeding the poor, aiding social causes, or supporting health or medical research. As the law governing 501(c) status states, no particular person or stakeholder makes a profit from these activities. The broad array of big and small political ideas, social causes, and local and national efforts has led to a nonprofit landscape of more than 1.48 million nationally.

So why are conservative leaders in Congress attempting to link these organizations with crime and terrorism? In repressive regimes around the world, expanding the government’s ability to label groups as criminals and terrorist organizations has been a successful tool—not to prevent terrorism, but to shrink the public space, limit social discourse, and consolidate authoritarian power. As Republican actions indicate an effort is underway to target NGOs, considering how other governments have chosen to categorize domestic citizen groups as a threat to erode fundamental rights could provide key insights into how to approach events in the United States.

. . .

The Trump administration just refused to allow an Australian writer entry to America because he’d penned articles on his personal blog critical of the administration’s support for the Netanyahu government’s Gaza policies.

Whether you support or oppose those policies, this should shock every American.

George Orwell noted, in his novel 1984:

“The Thought Police are always watching. The only safe way was to think nothing, to know nothing, to believe nothing.”

Are we there yet?

. . .

Alistair Kitchen is a 33-year-old Australian writer who spent six years in New York at Columbia University getting his Masters Degree. His Substack blog, “Kitchen Counter,” explicitly called out the university and both Republican and Democratic politicians for approving of Trump arresting students based on their speech.

That, apparently, was enough of a crime to keep him out of the United States when he tried to enter the country recently for a two-week visit to friends in New York.

“Because I was a creative writing student, I took the opportunity to witness the protests and wrote about them in depth on my personal blog,” he told a reporter for The Guardian.

Concerned that his writings may offend the Trump administration, he deleted his comments before boarding the plane from Melbourne to Los Angeles, but it wasn’t enough. The hypervigilant officers, apparently worried that anybody who disagreed with Netanyahu or Trump represented a threat to America, caught him at the airport in LA, interrogated him for nine hours, and then deported him back to Oz.

“The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests,” he told Guardian Australia.

He added:

“Clearly, they had technology in their system which linked those posts to my [visa] … a long time before I took them down. Because they knew all about the posts, and then interrogated me about the posts once I was there. … They had already prepared a file on me and already knew everything about me.”

. . .

ProPublica has been killing it during these crapulent times, and they’re out with another longform banger to answer the question, just what did El Salvador’s dictator Nayib Bukele get in exchange for helping Trump disappear 300-something immigrants into his mega-prison?

More than money, it (allegedly) turns out: Bukele also got protection from US money laundering investigations, an indefinite delay of extradition of criminals from El Salvador who are wanted in the US, and a return to El Salvador of prisoners from the US who know about certain mutual-aid deals Bukele made with the MS-13 gang. The New Yorker has also been on this story; though not many other places seem to have picked it up. But with our own country getting a fascist makeover, one can’t pay attention to everything!

You remember Nayib Bukele, the greasy dictator who has been building massive mega-prisons, and hopes someday to maybe even put American citizens in them? He’s been imprisoning people like crazy down there since being elected in 2019. Now El Salvador’s got more than 110,000 people currently in prison, the highest incarceration rate in the world, more than triple even the United States’s. Journalists, lawyers, activists, fruit sellers, people who overcook fish, straight to jail. For nearly three years and counting, El Salvador has been in a Bukele-declared state of emergency over “gang violence,” which allows the regime to disappear anyone, including children, into torture prison with no evidence or any process. And that is what it does.

In a normal world no American president would be caught touching such a guy with a 10-foot-pole, much less hugging them in the Oval Office like some kind of a long-lost hermano, but here we are.

Buleke’s bio offers lots of things he and Dear Leader have in common, and not just because Bukele looks like AI following a prompt to “draw Don Junior, but oilier.”

Bukele is a self-made dictator, and proud of it. He claims a 90 percent approval rating, but that’s only because if you don’t approve of him, guess what? Jail! Right to jail!

This clip sure is getting a workout lately!


. . .

This is an interesting development:

Trump recently appeared to declare war on the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal advocacy organization that played an essential role in his election both in 2016 and 2024. After one of his first-term appointees ruled against him in a major challenge to his tariffs, Trump launched a public tirade against the former chair of the group, Leonard Leo, who Trump described as a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America” before blaming the group for “bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.”

But the more tangible potential rupture with at least parts of the conservative legal movement is coming over Trump’s decision to nominate Emil Bove — formerly Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, currently Trump’s enforcer at the Justice Department — to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Apparently, the conservative legal establishment has been speaking out and the MAGA wingnuts are not happy.

Bove is a thug who has been doing Donald Trump’s bidding since he’s gone to DOJ, targeting political enemies and letting his allies off the hook. The legal establishment thinks that may not be the best thing for the judiciary. Imagine that.

But don’t count on the Senate Republicans who are little more than dancing puppets for whatever Dear Leader demands:

{B}ased on how Trump’s second term has gone so far, it’s clear Senate Republicans will be reluctant to tank one of his nominees.

That’s particularly true because the opposition to Bove has produced an aggressive defense from Trump’s most ardent defenders in the conservative legal community. The Article III Project quickly produced a stream of articles and commentary supporting Trump’s choice — largely, it seemed, on the grounds that Bove would be a reliable supporter of Trump’s political agenda and legal positions.

Mike Davis, the group’s founder and onetime counsel to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), lauded the appointment while tweaking both ends of the opposition. “The left fears Emil Bove because he’s effective,” Davis said. “The establishment right resents him because he refuses to play by their rules.”

Here’s the real nightmare. Bove is frequently mentioned as a top Supreme Court choice should one of the current justices retire or die.

. . .

Writing in 2011, former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “By denying any one government complete jurisdiction over all the concerns of public life, federalism protects the liberty of the individual from arbitrary power.“ This simple insight offers a key vantage point for understanding the threat that President Donald Trump’s unwarranted deployment of the California National Guard and the U.S. Marines in Los Angeles poses not just to the rights of protesters but also to the very structure of American government.

Last week, Federal District Judge Charles R. Breyer highlighted that threat in an important decision returning control of the guard to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear from the Trump administration seeking to overturn Breyer’s decision.

The Ninth Circuit should uphold what Breyer did and resist the president’s assault on the Constitution. Whatever happens on that appeal, the importance of Breyer’s discussion of America’s federal system will be undiminished.

Along the way, Breyer determined that the president’s actions “were illegal—both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

The Tenth Amendment? It is one of the least discussed but most important provisions of the Bill of Rights, a key to James Madison’s vision of limited government.

Recall the language of that amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

. . .

If Trump can get away with circumventing the Tenth Amendment, the president will move closer to having what Justice Kennedy called “complete jurisdiction over all the concerns of public life.” Kennedy is right to remind us that “State sovereignty is not just an end in itself: ‘Rather, federalism secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.’”

Well, folks, they caught the motherfucker. We don’t know exactly what took so long to find the Christian nationalist anti-abortion activist Trump supporter who impersonated a cop and assassinated Democrats in Minneapolis on Friday night, with plans to target many more, but they caught him. Maybe they were just looking the wrong places? We would have checked Republican politicians’ houses first, but that’s just us.

Anyway, they found him in a field.

Again, who this guy Vance Boelter is, it’s not shrouded in mystery, and it’s been out in the open from the beginning. He’s one of them. He’s just a typical Republican voter who decided to assassinate some Democrats. You’d think MAGA would be proud of what it’s wrought. And some of them are, to be sure.

But then there are piece of dogshit Republican senators like Mike Lee who have been lying since the beginning.
@BasedMikeLee: This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way


Why so ashamed, bud?

You’d think considering Mike Lee’s extremist record, he might already be lobbying Donald Trump for any extra pardons he’s got lying around for Boelter.

Vance Boelter is a registered Republican. He’s an anti-gay, anti-abortion pig. He’s a conservative Christian preacher. Basically all the red flag characteristics that say “Here’s a guy you shouldn’t leave your kids alone with,” but that MAGA Americans find godly and manly. Again, why is Mike Lee so ashamed? He has a lot in common with this guy! Surprised they aren’t taking up a collection for this guy’s legal defense in Mike Lee’s church. He just reminds us so much of Mike Lee (or any other white Republican loser, they really do all look alike).

. . .

It’s another Monday in the Trump administration, which means we are headed into more of the same. Trump is threatening to send ICE agents into Chicago, New York and other of “America’s largest cities,” at the same time he’s giving a pass to his pals who own farms, hotels, and restaurants. Trump says he’s learned some “good people” are being arrested, and ICE is backing off. But, of course, this makes no sense. Trump has long advocated for 100% enforcement, and there is no one more culpable than the business owners who knowingly employ undocumented people, so they can take advantage of cheap labor. This about face is exactly what it looks like; instead of the rule of law, we have the friends of Trump rule.

It’s a crime to knowingly employ someone who is here in undocumented status, and any employer who hires more than 10 undocumented people in a 12-month period faces serious felony charges and up to 5 years imprisonment. But instead, American immigration and law enforcement resources are being used to deport nine-year-olds like Martir Garcia Lara, the California boy we’ve discussed previously..

We are so much more than this current administration.

This week, we’ll be studying the charges in the Minnesota case, and also watching developments in the litigation in California that will determine how much power a president has to federalize a state’s National Guard. It’s more important than ever to understand these legal developments and how they affect our politics and our futures. Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse for all of it.

We’re in this together,
Joyce

That the two events should coincide was so perfect as to almost feel heavy-handed. Donald Trump’s comically underattended military parade lurched through Washington DC at the exact same time on Saturday as the overwrought opening ceremony unspooled for Fifa’s beleaguered Club World Cup, in a definitely-not-full Hard Rock Stadium in Miami.

Trump’s jingoistic birthday bust contrasted painfully with the multimillion-strong turnout at the “No Kings” anti-Trump rallies that gathered all over the country. The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, meanwhile – or “Johnny”, as Trump pronounces the name of one of his favorite allies in the sports world – had promised the opening match of the swollen tournament he forced down the soccer world’s throat would be sold out. Instead, attendance between Inter Miami and Al Ahly, a fitting 0-0 stalemate, was announced at a still-better-than-expected 60,927 in the 64,767-seat venue.

Mind you, that was after ticket prices had reportedly been cut from $349 to just $4.

And so began not only the expanded Club World Cup but the Concacaf Gold Cup as well, kicking off a 13-month period, culminating in the 2026 World Cup final, during which organizers hope the United States will take a star turn as a soccer destination, elevate the sport and enrich all those involved.

For all the buildup, and despite the bought-and-paid-for enthusiasm from the Dazn studio analysts hyping up the Club World Cup, the entire spectacle felt a bit flat, and about as impactful as the omnipresent advertising for Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund on the hoardings surrounding the field at both tournaments.

. . .

Local police in Oregon casually offered various surveillance services to federal law enforcement officials from the FBI and ICE, and to other state and local police departments, as part of an informal email and meetup group of crime analysts, internal emails shared with 404 Media show.

In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance tools and tactics they have access to and felt comfortable using, and in some cases offered to perform surveillance for their colleagues in other departments. The thread also includes a member of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and members of Oregon’s State Police. In the thread, called the “Southern Oregon Analyst Group,” some members talked about making fake social media profiles to surveil people, and others discussed being excited to learn and try new surveillance techniques. The emails show both the wide array of surveillance tools that are available to even small police departments in the United States and also shows informal collaboration between local police departments and federal agencies, when ordinarily agencies like ICE are expected to follow their own legal processes for carrying out the surveillance.

In one case, a police analyst for the city of Medford, Oregon, performed Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) lookups for a member of ICE’s HSI; later, that same police analyst asked the HSI agent to search for specific license plates in DHS’s own border crossing license plate database. The emails show the extremely casual and informal nature of what partnerships between police departments and federal law enforcement can look like, which may help explain the mechanics of how local police around the country are performing Flock automated license plate reader lookups for ICE and HSI even though neither group has a contract to use the technology, which 404 Media reported last month.

Kelly Simon, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, told 404 Media “I think it’s a really concerning thread to see, in such a black-and-white way. I have certainly never seen such informal, free-flowing of information that seems to be suggested in these emails.”

. . .