About Joe Weber

Now the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, I worked 35 years in magazines and newspapers. I spent most of that time, 22 years, at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine, leaving in August 2009 as chief of correspondents. So far, I have worked in central New Jersey, New York City, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai and Lincoln, Nebraska. The adventure continues.

When is it time to quit?

Posted on February 11, 2026 by Joe Weber

Athletes, academics and politicians have trouble letting go

Joseph Weber

After Lindsey Vonn wiped out in the downhill competition in the Olympics, suffering barely endurable pain from a complex tibia fracture in her left leg, her father made clear his preferences for her athletic future.

“She’s 41 years old and this is the end of her career,” former ski racer Alan Kildow told The Associated Press. “There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it.”

From his lips to G-d’s ear, we might say. Far too often, athletes, academics and, particularly, politicians, just stick around too long. They can’t let go, it seems, even when their bodies – and perhaps, their minds – should compel them to do otherwise.

Consider Tom Brady, who played professional football for 23 seasons. Unable to say sayonara, at age 45 the longtime New England Patriots star jumped to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2022. That led to his first losing season, with an 8-9 record and a playoffs washout.

A writer at SBNATION was unflinching about the faded star. “Tom Brady’s final season was a huge waste of time for everyone involved: It was a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad year” was the headline.

Years earlier, there was Muhammad Ali, who quit boxing at 39 in 1981. After two decades in the ring, Parkinson’s Disease ultimately delivered a knockout to “The Greatest.” Ali’s pace and speech began to slow down in the late 1970s, but he wasn’t formally diagnosed with Parkinson’s until 1984, three years after he had left professional boxing, as TheSportster recorded

In academia, many professors linger well past 65. Some may be fine well into their 80s, but it’s all too likely that they grow out of touch with progress in their fields, as well as the cultural and social world their students inhabit. They also clog up the talent pipeline, keeping younger – and more diverse – potential faculty out.

“Nationally, aging faculty remain overwhelmingly white, and the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that swept through elite universities in the 2010s largely failed to dislodge them,” an opinion writer observed in The Harvard Crimson. “As the writer Jacob Savage demonstrated in a viral essay in December, efforts to remedy elite institutions’ lack of racial diversity fell not upon older white men, but upon incoming hires.”

Of course, politicians are among the worst for being unable to hang it up. The infirmities of age that afflicted Joseph R. Biden, in office until age 82, and Donald J. Trump, soon to turn 80, are well-known. Indeed, had Biden quit the game earlier, we all might have been spared the many griefs inflicted on us by the increasingly doddering and rambling Trump.

Trump is showing signs of aging in public and private, The Wall Street Journal has reported. He has struggled to keep his eyes open during several televised events, and some people close to him have said he at times strains to hear. (Trump denied having a hearing problem and said he closes his eyes for relaxation.) Biden’s age-related collapse in 2024 damaged the Democratic Party in ways it is still working to repair.

As the newspaper also reported, Rahm Emanuel, a 66-year-old Democrat and Washington veteran, recently called for a mandatory retirement age of 75 for presidents, cabinet officials, members of Congress and federal judges. The former congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor and potential White House contender said that should also apply to him, should he ever return to a major Washington job.

According to The Harvard Crimson opinion writer, Alex Bronzini-Vender, in 2025, roughly 37 percent of congressional Democrats were 65 or older, along with 29 percent of congressional Republicans. In 2024, nearly 18 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were aged 65 or older. And in 2020, about 14 percent of American lawyers and 24 percent of state judges “had crossed the same threshold.”

Twenty-four members of Congress are 80 or older, according to NBC News. In total, this Congress is the third-oldest in U.S. history, with an average age of 58.9 years at the start of this session one year ago. The median age in the U.S. is 39.1.

Of course, the threshold for packing it in can vary by field. Skiing for fun is something folks in their 80s do, but perhaps not rushing down mountains at speeds topping 70 miles an hour.

The longtime champion Vonn was famous, of course for retiring in 2019 after a slew of injuries. She underwent three surgeries between the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons after tearing her LCL with three tibial plateau fractures in her left leg. She also missed the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics due to injury, after winning gold at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics despite fighting through an “excruciating” bone bruise in her leg.

After she underwent surgery for a partial knee replacement in 2024, she felt healthy, prompting her to leave retirement. Even after she tore her left ACL in training a week before her disastrous run on Feb. 8, she insisted on competing.

“But being here today, being around all of this Olympic spirit has me so excited about the potential and how I could hopefully close my career in a way that is really based on what I want to do,” she said before the race. “I retired in 2019 because my body said no more, not because I didn’t want to continue racing. I feel like this could be an incredible moment to end the chapter, this chapter of my life, and move forward in a really exciting and peaceful way.”

Skiing, of course, had been Vonn’s life. Her father and grandfather taught her starting at age 3 in Minnesota. She competed in her first races at 7 and took part in international competitions at 9, took part in her first Olympic Games at 17 and kept competing – and usually winning — for decades.

And the problem with that sort of commitment – not uncommon in sports or in some other fields with nearly lifelong obligations – is that one has to either discover or reinvent oneself when the playing field is no longer available. The question arises: “Who am I, if not a top-level skier or quarterback or professor or journalist or politician?”

Consider George Koonce, a former NFL player who attempted suicide after his playing days with the Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks ended. Speaking on the point in a 2012 ESPN piece, he said: “Football becomes your identity. Your family buys into it, your friends buy into it, the alums from your college buy into it. And then it is gone. You are gone.”

But Koonce decided not to be “gone.” He earned degrees in sports management and administration (the latter a doctorate), and filled important positions at Marquette University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Marian University. He coauthored the book “Is There Life After Football?:Surviving the NFL.”

Even as athletics, academics and politics may well shape a person’s life and career, there comes a time when they need to look to other things – perhaps in related areas, perhaps not. In hindsight, it seems that time should have come far sooner for Vonn. One wonders whether her father and others in her life might have delivered that message earlier, sparing her the globally broadcast anguish she suffered.

Extraordinary

Posted on February 9, 2026 by Joe Weber

Bad Bunny’s halftime show echoed peace and unity messages of old

Joseph Weber

As the Vietnam War raged in October 1967, one of more than 70,000 protesters at the March on the Pentagon was photographed sticking flowers into the barrels of rifles held by MPs.

Whether the “flower power” movement of the day had much to do with the end of U.S. involvement in the war five and a half years later is a matter of debate. But it was one of countless many peaceful – and sometimes not so peaceful – efforts that surely helped to turn the tide against the gruesome and ultimately failed U.S. disaster in that country.

It was a bold and gentle effort – reminiscent of the pacifism of Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King and others – aimed at the conscience of a nation, if not at the hardened hearts of its leaders.

Bad Bunny’s remarkable performance at the Super Bowl was in line with that sensibility. His performance, a joyful celebration of the richness and liveliness of Latin culture, was a flower stuck in the eye of Donald J. Trump and other racists who denigrate, torment and deport Black and Brown Americans and immigrants with an anger and viciousness rarely seen in recent history.

Matching the gesture of that Pentagon protester, the Puerto Rican rapper properly known as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio showcased his message on the billboard above Levi’s Stadium, “The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate is Love.” The sentiment echoed King’s comments: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that” and “I have decided to stick with love … hate is too great a burden to bear” and Gandhi’s “Hatred can be overcome only by love.”

Suited to the event, Bad Bunny led a group of performers carrying the flags from countries across the Americas and the Caribbean. He shouted out “God Bless America, and recited a long list of the nations, at least 23 of them that make up the Americas and the wider region. As a writer for CNN noted, “Bad Bunny declared himself an American patriot in the broadest sense of the term.”

It was an ecstatic performance that even drew praise from Tom Brady, the former New England Patriots quarterback and Trump supporter. Brady exclaimed on social media: “Amazing!!!!!!!!!.”

What a far cry from Trump’s reaction.

The president, who had groused about Bad Bunny before the show, declared on his Truth Social site afterwards that “It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence,” Ranting, he complained that “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” and called the halftime show “a slap in the face to our country.” Trump said there was “nothing inspirational” about the show, and that it would still get rave reviews from “the Fake News Media, because they haven’t got a clue of what is going on in the REAL WORLD.”

As an Esquire writer noted: “Much like most of the President’s rambling screeds on social media, it’s a saddening—yet unsurprising—take to stomach. The guy can’t even appreciate a wedding on live TV just because Bad Bunny criticized ICE at the Grammys. And if you speak another language in this country, then that apparently makes you un-American now, too. Forget the fact that the “REAL WORLD,” according to the United States Census Bureau’s 2019 report, states that more than half (55 percent) of the Spanish speakers in this country (over 40 million people, by the way) were U.S.-born Americans citizens.”

Bad Bunny drove home his core message at the end, as a writer for The Atlantic noted. “Pushing toward the camera with throngs of drummers, he closed by holding up a football with a message on it: Together, We Are America. It was a pointed message but also a conciliatory one, a unity slogan.”

Make no mistake, though. Bad Bunny’s performance was a political statement aimed at Trump and other nativist philistines who would turn back the clock on the appeal of the United States to other Americans – broadly defined. That he sang in Spanish at the nation’s preeminent sporting event made it clear that the country is richer and more diverse than the whites-only population that Trump would prefer. “We’re still here,” the rapper sang.

And Trumpists felt stung. “Bad Bunny is absolutely vile. I can’t understand a word of it but I just know it’s foul, vulgar, and demonic. Cover your kids’ ears. The NFL owes millions of Americans an apology,” one wrote on X. Another chimed in: “If we can learn anything from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, it’s that we should be deporting even more people.”

Of course, they watched, though.

They seem not to have been among Trumpists who jumped to Kid Rock’s streamed alternative halftime show. Recall that the classic Kid Rock tune “Cool, Daddy Cool,” includes the Epstein-esque lyrics: “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ‘em underage/See some say that’s statutory …” The clownish Rock’s show drew about 6 million viewers, a minuscule fraction of the more than 130 million thought to have been drawn to Bad Bunny.

Will Bad Bunny’s positive Gandhi-esque message resound as immigration and Border Patrol agents prowl the nation, rounding up countless innocents who look a lot like the people in the halftime show? Certainly, attempts to prick the conscience of the heartless and soulless likely will fail. Trump is evidence of that.

But, for the rest of America, the chance to heed the singer’s message looms near. Elections in November will give us the first signs of whether this updated version of “flower power” can have an effect, assuming that the Trumpists don’t corrupt the voting. And then there will be November 2028, far off as that seems.

In time, Americans with hearts, brains and consciences will get the chance to respond both to Trump and Bad Bunny.

Shrinking its way to greatness?

Posted on February 4, 2026 by Joe Weber

The Washington Post will surely not find success that way

Joseph Weber

Someday, a smart academic will cooly analyze the rival game plans that enabled The New York Times to thrive while, just down the road, The Washington Post slipped into what has been looking like a slow-motion death spiral.

But it’s likely that two things on that list will include an owner committed to great journalism and a passion for innovation, even at great cost.

Consider first the nonstop innovation that has kept the Times vibrant. The New York paper’s website is a cornucopia of offerings from the news of the day and in-depth magazine offerings to games, consumer advice in Wirecutter, exceptional sports coverage in The Athletic, audio offerings that range from The Daily to Opinions, along with entertainment, cooking and health news.

The soup-to-nuts menu of the paper could keep a reader, listener or video-watcher engaged for hours. Just picking out the best things to tap into takes a while each day.

By contrast, the best that can be said of the Post is that it tries.

In unoriginal ways, the Post mimics some of the same offerings, but with far less content. While on a given day the Times might have whole subsections devoted to the Trump Administration, the Epstein files, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Super Bowl and more, along with the top stories of the day in its many categories, the Post offers short lists of pieces that take no time to scan through.

It could hardly be otherwise given the yawning gap in staff at the papers. While the Times employs more than 2,800 people in its journalism operations, the Post shrank its newsroom in multiple downsizings in recent years to 800 and now is losing more than 300 of them, along with more on the business side.

With its extraordinary breadth, the Times has been on a roll in adding digital subscribers and is now up to 12.78 million total subscribers as it aims for 15 million by the end of next year. By contrast, the Post is believed to be down to about 2 million subscribers.

Sadly, the soup is thin in the D.C. paper and the latest trimming could hardly bulk it up. As the Times reported about its competitor, the Post’s sports and books sections will close, its metro section and international staff will shrink. In a sharp contrast with the growing Daily podcast at the Times – which just added a Sunday version – the daily “Post Reports” podcast will disappear.

Just how will all that make for a better, more relevant and profitable product? The Post, as of Feb. 4, hadn’t even reported on its layoffs. Instead, it posted an Associated Press story that quoted editor Matt Murray saying in a note to the staff: “We can’t be everything to everyone.”

Just what the Post will be to anyone, going forward, is tough to see. Ashley Parker, a Post veteran now at The Atlantic, offered hints, though, and they are hardly optimistic.

“Today’s layoffs provide a whiff of the latest alleged strategy: an almost-exclusive focus on politics and national-security coverage, though even that explanation defies credulity, as the growing list of those laid off includes some of the nation’s finest political and international reporters and editors,” she wrote. “To the extent that a plan exists, it seems to be to transform the Post into a facsimile of Politico.”

Parker noted that Politico was born out of the Post nearly 20 years ago. Two Post reporters launched it as a “fast-paced, scoop-driven, win-the-morning publication,” she wrote.

Parker also quoted a longtime Post reporter bemoaning the new cuts. “We’re changing and trimming and cutting our way toward a much more mundane product, and one that doesn’t seem to attract more readers,” the journalist told her.

And what’s especially disheartening is that Post owner Jeff Bezos could easily underwrite the sorts of innovation that the Sulzberger family has done at the Times. Indeed, after he bought the paper in 2013, he backed ambitious efforts and the paper was gaining in leaps and bounds.

Ralph E. Hanson, a professor at the University of Nebraska Kearney, described some of the surge. Instead of focusing narrowly on D.C., he noted, Bezos and his editors pushed the paper into becoming a national or even international paper, much as the Times is.

By 2016, under Bezos’ ownership, Hanson wrote, the paper had a growing audience, increasingly ambitious reporting, and was gaining recognition as a national read. Politico’s Ken Doctor said that the Post was joining the ranks of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today as having nationwide appeal.

While other papers were laying journalists off, in fact, the Post was hiring, Hanson noted. He cited Politico’s estimates that the Post’s newsroom grew by more than 60 positions, or 8 percent. This gave the Post a news staff in excess of 750, compared with 1,307 at the NY Times, 450 at USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal with about 1,500.

And 2016 delivered a 75 percent increase in new subscribers over the year and doubled digital subscription numbers. Under the guidance of Marty Baron, who joined in January 2013, that growth was driven by exceptional journalism, the sort that won 11 Pulitzer Prizes before he retired in 2021.

Of course, the paper was punching above its weight in terms of staffing. It had always done so, compared with the Times. “Not being The New York Times, being forced to do more with less, was freeing,” contended Post veteran Parker. “It created—required—a culture of collegiality and collaboration, a willingness to experiment and take risks, a certain puckishness.”

A former colleague, now at The Athletic, told Parker: “There’s sort of an Avis mentality at the Post: ‘We try harder.’” The quip recalled the Hertz-Avis ad campaign of decades past.

But lately, Bezos has apparently not seen much reason to try hard at all. “Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future,” Parker wrote.

Marty Baron, source: The Harvard Gazette

Baron, in a post on Facebook, acknowledged “acute business problems that had to be addressed.” As anyone in the industry knows, and Baron noted, we are in “a period of head-spinning change in media consumption.” It is one that requires “radical innovation,” which, of course, demands money.

More than that, it requires courage and values – of the sort that the Sulzbergers have long had. In recent years, Donald J. Trump has filed at least three major lawsuits against the Times, including a pending $15 billion defamation suit filed last September. Two were dismissed.

Bezos, instead, has sought to cozy up to Trump, perhaps mindful of the power Washington has over his financially far more important Amazon business and other interests.

“The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top —from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity,” Baron wrote. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands.”

As readers lost faith in the paper, journalists were losing trust in Bezos, as well. “Similarly, many leading journalists at The Post lost confidence in Bezos, and jumped to other news organizations,” Baron wrote. “They also, in effect, were driven away.”

The former editor, known for his grace, said he remained grateful for Bezos’s support during his tenure.

“During that time, he came under brutal pressure from Trump,” Baron wrote. “And yet he spoke forcefully and eloquently of a free press and The Post’s mission, demonstrating his commitment in concrete terms. He often declared that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life. I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it.”

There also seems no sign of an editorial vision at the diminishing newspaper. Perhaps one will emerge, but it’s likely impossible for the Post to shrink its way to prosperity.

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” Baron wrote. “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

The odds are that the academic who someday analyzes the Post’s rise and fall will, in effect, be conducting an autopsy. And that is sad for us all.

What drives ICE and Border Patrol?

Posted on February 3, 2026 by Joe Weber

Agents regularly arrest their “own kind,” unbothered by that, it seems

Joseph Weber

Alex Pretti under assault by federal agents; source: Texas Public Radio

Pecola Breedlove, an 11-year-old Black girl in Lorain, Ohio, in 1940-41 is routinely mocked by other children for her dark skin, curly hair and brown eyes in Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel, “The Bluest Eye.” Yearning for acceptance, Pecola prays daily for her eyes to change color.

The girl is not alone in her hunger to fit into white middle America, in her desire to deny who she is so she can slip into the dominant culture. Other Black characters in the novel mock one another over their skin color, with one of the light-skinned girls saying “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly.”

Might a similar dynamic be taking place for the two Latino agents who fired on – and killed – the Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti? Indeed, might that same sort of process animate the large number of Latino Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection agents who regularly round up other Latinos for deportation?

ProPublica named Pretti’s shooters as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Both are veteran agents from south Texas. Ochoa, 43, joined the patrol in 2018, while Gutierrez, 35, signed on four years earlier.

Gutierrez works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units.

Ochoa, who prefers the Anglo name “Jesse,” graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American with a degree in criminal justice, according to his ex-wife, Angelica Ochoa. A longtime resident of the Rio Grande Valley, Ochoa had for years dreamed of working for the Border Patrol and finally landed a job there, she said.

As ProPublica noted, Ochoa has a thing for weapons. By the time the couple split in 2021, he had become a gun enthusiast with about 25 rifles, pistols and shotguns, Angelica told the news outlet.

Ethnically, both men fit in well with perhaps half the officers in the Border Patrol who are Latino and nearly 30 percent of ICE agents who are.

Of course, we don’t know what drives Gutierrez and Ochoa. But we do know that their jobs pay well; such agents can earn between $64,200 and more than $137,000 a year, not counting recruitment and retention bonuses.

As experienced officers, they may also be eligible for generous retention incentives. Such incentives can now total up to $60,000 for supervisors and officers eligible to retire in certain locations. Similarly, new agents are eligible for up to $60,000 in incentives, including $10,000 after completing the training academy and an additional $10,000 if assigned to a remote location.

So, really, it’s all about the money. Such pay is crucial for Customs and Border Patrol agents, according to David Cortez, an assistant professor in political science at Notre Dame who has researched the motivations of Border Patrol and ICE agents.

“But for many of them, this job is not necessarily about stopping immigration,” Cortez told NPR in 2019. “This isn’t about their dedication to immigration law or their dedication to keeping migrants from crossing the border illicitly or anything like that. This is about economic self-interest. This is about survival.”

Many, Cortez said, come from poor border towns and work for the immigration enforcement agencies – often in teams with fellow Latinos – as a matter of economic opportunity they might not otherwise have. He pointed to one ICE agent who before joining up was barely surviving on rice and beans

Claudio “CJ” Juarez, 48 when Cortez met him, appears to have signed up for the money. Juarez said: “I wish I could say that it was idealistic or more sexy, but it really was as simple as they [ICE] were the first ones that called me, and I jumped on the first opportunity.”

Still, Cortez found that such Latino officers do feel a connection with the people they arrest — one they either set aside or use to their advantage.

The kinship such agents feel “raises this interesting kind of dilemma,” he said. “[T]hey find themselves coming face to face with men, women and children who, you know, might remind them of their own children, who look and talk, sound like they do or whose stories kind of mirror those of their own families.”

But the agencies find that the ethnic backgrounds of such officers are invaluable in carrying out ICE surveillance and raids. “It literally is a key to get through doors,” the professor said. “For example, if you are Latinx and a person with a brown face is at your door, you’re more likely to open it.”

Seemingly, many agents don’t feel any difficulties in using that edge or, apparently, in making life very uncomfortable for others who look like them. CNN in a December report on Border Patrol recruits raised that issue.

Juan Peralta, a 20-year-old trainee featured in the CNN piece, admitted that friends asked him, “How do you feel about arresting your own kind?” His answer: “They didn’t come in the right way, so they aren’t my kind.” Peralta was the son of an immigrant raised in a border town.

And another agent, Claudio Herrera, offered a more expansive answer.

“I’ve been asked, ‘aren’t you ashamed of apprehending your own?,’ he said. His answer: “I say, ‘of course not, because I’m protecting my community. I’m protecting both sides of the border.’” It took Herrera 11 years to become a citizen, and he joined the Border Patrol six years ago. He urges those coming from Mexico to do so legally.

Crossing legally scarcely seems like an option now, of course. More people have been leaving the U.S. than coming in, according to Brookings, which pegs the net loss in migration at between 10,000 and 295,000 last year. Numbers are hard to come by; thus the yawning range.

Since February 2025, the first full month of Donald J. Trump’s current term, the Border Patrol has recorded fewer than 10,000 encounters with undocumented migrants each month at the southwestern border, according to Pew. Those are the lowest totals in more than 25 years.

Recent totals have been even lower than the 16,182 encounters in April 2020, when international migration plummeted in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

Still, people have tried. The Border Patrol reported 237,538 encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2025 fiscal year, which began in October 2024 and ended last September. That was down from more than 1.5 million encounters in fiscal 2024, more than 2 million in fiscal 2023 and a record of more than 2.2 million in fiscal 2022. The 2025 total was the lowest in any fiscal year since 1970, according to historical data from the Border Patrol.

“Encounters” here refers primarily to apprehensions of migrants crossing into the U.S. between official points of entry. The term refers to events, not people. So, Border Patrol agents may encounter some migrants more than once – for example, if a migrant is apprehended and deported but tries to enter the U.S. again.

As for Ochoa and Gutierrez, perhaps in time — and if there’s a trial — we’ll find out whether Alex Pretti’s killers feel any remorse about shooting him as he lay defenseless on the ground, pinned down by a group of immigration agents. Aside from being a fellow American, Pretti was not one of their “own kind,” not Latino.

Still, maybe then, too, we’ll get a better sense of their sentiments about dealing with fellow Latinos. Are their identities things that, like Pecola Breedlove, they’d rather deny? Or are their backgrounds assets that they — like so many other agents — can use, even if that makes life miserable for others who look and speak just like them?

Not just footballs will be in the air

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Joe Weber

ICE will also share the limelight at the 60th annual Super Bowl

Joseph Weber

When the Seahawks and Patriots meet in the Super Bowl on Sunday, politics will be in the air every bit as much as the passes tossed by rival quarterbacks Sam Darnold and Drake Maye. With musicians who have been sharply critical of Donald J. Trump slated to appear, it couldn’t be otherwise.

Indeed, the performances by Green Day and Bad Bunny seem likely to further showcase Trump’s slide in pop culture as other events — particularly involving the hard-pressed Kennedy Center — underscore the president’s deterioration in more highbrow realms. Altogether, they focus a spotlight on just how out of touch this geriatric president is, culturally as well as in simple humanitarian terms.

At halftime, Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper properly known as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is expected to perform before an audience of about 130 million people worldwide. And whether the global superstar is explicit in his hostility to U.S. immigration policy and Trump or not, his message – even if only implied – will resound.

Bad Bunny has already set the tone. As he won three Grammy awards including Album of the Year on Feb. 1, he took the stage to say: “Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE out. We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we are humans and we are Americans … the only thing that is more powerful than hate is love.”

As yahoo!news reported, the right is seething.

Conservative commentator Eric Daugherty called Bad Bunny “trash,” while Fox News personality Tomi Lahren dismissed the protesting stars at the show (many of whom sported ICE OUT pins). “Overpaid musicians and celebrities at the Grammys say ‘F**k ICE,’ Lahren said on X. “Meanwhile, the hardworking men and women of ICE and border patrol (majority Hispanic) are out on the streets removing public safety threats and protecting communities. The audacity is astounding.”

Bad Bunny’s presence in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara alone will be a political statement. Last fall, Trump showed how removed he is from popular culture with his reaction to the rapper’s selection for the Super Bowl. “I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know who he is,” Trump said in October. “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.”

Then, after the NFL announced that the band Green Day will perform at the game’s opening ceremony, Trump dug in deeper, slighting both acts. “I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” he told The New York Post.

Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day has long criticized Trump, decrying Trump’s “fascist overtones if not straight up fascism” and slamming his racism. And Green Day has been turning up the heat. At a recent Los Angeles show, the band updated the lyrics to “Holiday,” one of its classic early 2000s songs, to take a knock at Trump aide Stephen Miller by name.

As HuffPost reported, the song’s original lyrics include the line, “The representative from California has the floor.” Armstrong instead said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Miller now has the floor,” before launching into the bridge of “Holiday,” which includes the lyric, “Sieg Heil to the President Gasman.”

Armstrong explained: “This song is anti-fascism. This song is anti-war. We stand up for our brothers and sisters in Minnesota.”

“Hey everybody, please look out for your neighbors,” Armstrong added. “Make sure you take care of each other. Make sure you love one another. Protect each other. “Chinga la migra!” (which loosely translates to, “f**k the immigration cops.”)

Of course, in the pop world, Bruce Springsteen recently grabbed the global spotlight with “Streets of Minneapolis,” his angry and sad ode to the city. The Boss bemoaned the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good and called out Trump and his servile aides by name.

Asked about the song, White House spokeswoman derided what she called “random songs with irrelevant opinions and inaccurate information.” She did not say what was inaccurate in the tune, however. And, as for relevance, the popularity of the song seems to undercut her claim about “irrelevant opinions.”

Within days of its release, the Springsteen song hit No. 1 on the iTunes charts in 19 countries. The anti-ICE track immediately trended on YouTube with millions of views and became Springsteen’s first No. 1 on the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart.

Just how explicit Bad Bunny gets — if at all — in any political message could be problematic for many viewers in another respect. He performs entirely in Spanish, which itself may infuriate conservatives. Distressed by Hispanic immigration, Trump in March issued an executive order designating English as the nation’s official language, something about 30 states have done, most since the 1980s.

About 45 million Americans, or roughly 14 percent, are believed to speak Spanish at home. This is more than double the number from 1990 and makes the U.S. the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, after Mexico. As Trump and conservatives resist such growth, they seem much like King Canute ordering back the tide.

Many of those Spanish speakers are Roman Catholics, another group with which Trump is lately losing ground. Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, (my hometown, as it happens) recently urged the faithful to press legislators to deny funding to ICE, which he called a “lawless” organization. He encouraged participants in an online interfaith service on Jan. 26 to say “no” to ICE violence.

“One way that we say ‘no’ is that we mourn, we do not celebrate death, and, what is probably worse, we do not pretend it doesn’t happen. We say names. We pray for the dead,” Tobin said, according to the National Catholic Reporter. “We mourn for a world, a country, that allows 5-year-olds to be legally kidnapped and protesters to be slaughtered.”

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, N.J., arrives in St. Peter’s Basilica for the Mass “Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice” (“for the election of the Roman pontiff”) at the Vatican May 7, 2025. (CNS/Lola Gomez) — Cardinal Tobin, source; NCR

Coincidentally, in a blistering opinion ordering the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas on Jan. 30 condemned “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty” the seizure of the boy and his father represented. As The New York Times reported, the judge chastised the government’s “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” and called for “a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.”

Cardinal Tobin was one of three U.S. cardinals who signed a statement condemning President Donald Trump’s foreign policy aims and calling for the White House to focus on peace. In his recent remarks, Tobin noted that he was speaking within a few miles from two ICE detention centers.

“Everyday people from many faith communities go to Delaney Street here in Newark, and to the Elizabeth Detention Center, and they say ‘no’ by standing at the gates, by talking with the ICE personnel, by insisting on the rights of the detainees within,” he said. “They bring them human comfort, they console the families of those who aren’t always admitted to see their loved ones. How will you say ‘no?’ How?”

But Trump’s cultural and religious shortcomings go beyond splits with anguished clergymen and hostile Spanish-speaking musicians. Consider his disastrous mismanagement of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Washington venue that caters to a broad range of arts interests.

After a flood of cancellations and dwindling attendance, the president said the Kennedy Center would close for two years, beginning July 4, for renovations.

Since Trump’s name was added to the complex’s facade, CNN reported, award-winning composer Philip Glass withdrew the June world premiere of his symphony based on Abraham Lincoln. And the Washington National Opera cut ties with the center.

Even before Trump loyalists at the center moved to rebrand it with Trump’s name along with Kennedy’s, Trump’s efforts drove out a string of performers. After the president’s hand-picked board elected him chair last February, artists including Issa Rae, Renée Fleming, Shonda Rhimes and Ben Folds resigned from their leadership roles or canceled events at the space. And Jeffrey Seller, producer of the hit musical “Hamilton,” canceled the show’s planned run.

The Kennedy Center, source: Visit Fairfax

Even as the center’s façade has worn Trump’s name since December, many news organizations continue to call it the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Congress named the center as a living memorial to Kennedy in 1964, the year after the president was assassinated, the Associated Press reported. “The law explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior.”

Kerry Kennedy, a niece of John F. Kennedy, said in a social post on X that she will remove Trump’s name herself when his term ends.

“Three years and one month from today, I’m going to grab a pickax and pull those letters off that building, but I’m going to need help holding the ladder. Are you in?” she wrote on a photo of the center’s new name. “Applying for my carpenter’s card today, so it’ll be a union job!!!”

As for the NFL showcasing Bad Bunny and Green Day at its premiere event, the choices may reflect an organization more in touch culturally than Trump is, but they are loaded with irony. Nearly 95 percent of some $132 million in federal election contributions by North American sports team owners, including many in the NFL, have gone to Republicans since 2020, according to The Guardian.

The owners of both the Seahawks and Patriots have been among GOP supporters, even as Seahawks principal owner Jody Allen has lately stayed on the sidelines. She gave nothing to either party in the 2021-24 period, though Allen and her late brother, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, donated to both major parties in prior years.

They gave $166,100 to Democrats between 2016 and 2020 and $248,700 to Republicans in the same period. Paul notably gave $100,000 in 2018 to a group dedicated to preserving GOP control of the House.

On the Patriots side, Robert Kraft gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration party in 2017 but he kept his distance from his former longtime friend after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Kraft said he was “upset” about the events. The two appear to have mended fences, however, with Kraft joining Trump in his box at the Kennedy Center at the recent premiere showing of the documentary “Melania.” Kraft has also given modestly to both Democratic and Republican candidates and interests since 2021.

“Melania,” as it happens, seems like yet another bit of cultural deafness by the Trumps, opening to scorching reviews. Consider The Independent’s: “It will exist as a striking artifact — like The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will — of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly.”

Perhaps because of the musicians slated for the big game — or maybe because he fears a raft of boos — Trump is staying away from Sunday’s big game. When he attended the 2025 Super Bowl, he was met with a mixture of cheers and jeers. Whether Bad Bunny and Green Day get a similar mix or one tilted toward cheers will make for interesting TV.

The Boss brings it home

Posted on January 30, 2026 by Joe Weber

Springsteen’s ode to Minneapolis may long resound

Joseph Weber

With “Streets of Minneapolis,” Bruce Springsteen brings his potent artistic and emotional firepower into the fray over the murderous actions of immigration enforcers in the city. And with this haunting and angry elegy, he adds his voice to a long list of protest singers, several of whom long ago put Donald J. Trump and his likes into their musical crosshairs.

“Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice/Singing through the bloody mist/We’ll take our stand for this land/And the stranger in our midst/Here in our home, they killed and roamed/In the winter of ‘26/We’ll remember the names of those who died/On the streets of Minneapolis,” the rocker sings.

Pulling no punches, Springsteen blasts Trump and his minions by name, accompanying his elegiac lyrics with a video about the savagery in Minneapolis. While slamming “King Trump’s private army from the DHS”, the Boss excoriates the “dirty lies” of Trump’s aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, as he memorializes their murdered victims.

“And there were bloody footprints/Where mercy should have stood/And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets/Alex Pretti and Renee Good,” Springsteen mournfully tells us. He assails “Trump’s federal thugs.”

With his soul-stirring and impassioned tune, Springsteen joins a long list of singers who have protested injustices in a tradition that dates back decades. Surprisingly, several are focused on Trump and his administration’s actions.

For instance, folksinger Jesse Welles garnered attention from Stephen Colbert just last November for his sarcastic “Join ICE” tune. The song goes: “Well, if you’re lookin’ for purpose in the current circus/If you’re seekin’ respect and attention/If you’re in need of a gig that’ll make you feel big/Come with me and put some folks in detention.”

Now, in the wake of the incompetence by ICE and the Border Patrol officers that led to the Minneapolis murders, Welles’s tune seems prescient. “See I failed the academy, the cops weren’t havin’ me/The Army didn’t sound that fun/So I found me a paramilitary operation/That was keen to hand me a gun.”

Both men are hitting hard on the heels of Neil Young, who last August released “Big Crime.” The song slams Trump’s National Guard efforts in Washington and his assaults on universities, saying “Don’t need no fascist rules/Don’t want no fascist schools/Don’t want soldiers walking on our streets/Got big crime in DC at the White House/There’s big crime in DC at the White House/Got to get the fascists out/Got to clean the White House out/Don ’t want no soldiers on our streets/Got big crime in DC at the White House/Got big crime in DC at the White House.”

Canadian-born Young has long been a critic of Trump. In 2020, he updated an older song of his with “Lookin’ for a Leader.” Aimed at Trump, the song pleaded for a replacement – successfully, it turned out that year. Young’s lyrics: “We don’t need a leader/building walls around our house/who don’t know black lives matter/and it’s time to vote him out!/We’re lookin’ for a leader/with The Great Spirit on his side;/lookin’ for a leader/in this country far and wide./Lookin’ for a leader/with The Great Spirit on his side.”

Though sharper and more targeted, Springsteen’s tune, of course, echoes his eloquent “Streets of Philadelphia.” That 1993 song, which he created for the movie about AIDS, “Philadelphia,” includes the lyrics “I was bruised and battered/I couldn’t tell what I felt/I was unrecognizable to myself/Saw my reflection in a window/And didn’t know my own face/Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin’ away/On the streets of Philadelphia?”

The “Philadelphia” anthem, seeming more like a plea than an indictment, nonetheless has resonated in popular culture for years. It’s a cri de coeur for compassion, while “Minneapolis” seems more like a demand for justice.

Some critics have compared “Minneapolis” more to the famous Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio.” The 1970 ode to four killed students at Kent State University resounded with a generation fed up with Vietnam, and it also didn’t hold back in attacking a U.S. president.

It’s lyrics: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio/Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down/Should have been gone long ago/What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground/How can you run when you know?”

But all these songs owe much to those by an iconic 1950s protest singer, Woody Guthrie. As it happens, Guthrie took Trump’s father Fred to task for excluding Blacks from Beach Haven, a sprawling apartment complex in Brooklyn, near Coney Island, where he lived for a couple years.

“Old Man Trump.” included the lines: “I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate/ He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed that color line/Here at his Beach Haven family project/… Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower/Where no black folks come to roam/ No, no, Old Man Trump!/Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!”

It took a couple decades, but the Department of Justice in 1973 sued both Trumps for racial discrimination at the complex (Donald was then helping run the family business). The pair settled the case in 1975 with a consent decree that required them to make sure apartments were rented without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Trump sold the complex in the early 2000s.

Woody Guthrie; source: Woody Guthrie Center

Guthrie’s song, which he never recorded himself, got a modest boost in 2016, after an academic found the lyrics in the folksinger’s papers. Ani DiFranco collaborated with Ryan Harvey and Tom Morello to record a version of the tune.

As it happens, Morello and Springsteen appeared jointly at a Jan. 30 benefit in Minneapolis, where Springsteen performed his new song. Titled “A Concert of Solidarity & Resistance to Defend Minnesota,” it raised funds for the Good and Pretti families.

Just how long it will take for justice to be done in Minneapolis is far from clear. Federal authorities have promised investigations, but – in light of the rushed prejudgments by Noem and other Trump lickspittles – can anyone really expect a full and fair probe?

As David Lillehaug, a former U.S. Attorney in Minnesota and former state Supreme Court judge there, told NPR, the outcome of any such probes seems dubious. “Well, I hate to say it, but it sounds to me like the outcome is cooked,” Lillehaug said “I mean, if you can’t have an investigation, and you’ve got the secretary of Homeland Security and the personnel on the line of authority down saying nothing to see here, then it looks like we’re not going to see anything.”

Truth and justice are not high on the agenda for the Trump Administration, of course. Recall that it has arrested a journalist, former CNN anchor Don Lemon, on charges of federal civil rights crimes in connection with a church demonstration. And this is even after a federal magistrate judge rejected an earlier government attempt to bring criminal charges against the now-independent reporter.

Perhaps efforts by the state will fare well in bringing the killers of Good and Pretti to heel. As some have noted, there is no statute of limitations on murder, so eventually — with a new administration, probably — prosecutions are possible.

In the meantime, Springsteen and other artists are memorably raging against injustices such as those in Minneapolis. For them, in the end it’s all about the need for major change. As Young put it in 2020 in lines that could echo anew in November 2026 and 2028: “We got our election,/but corruption has a chance/We got to have a big win to regain confidence./America is beautiful/but she has an ugly side./We’re lookin’ for a leader/in this country far and wide.”

About those foreign oxfords

Posted on January 28, 2026 by Joe Weber

Will Americans get the chance to buy Chinese-made cars?

Joseph Weber

A bit over 40 years ago, American shoemakers asked President Ronald Reagan to limit imports of foreign shoes. Cheaper footwear from abroad, they argued, was hobbling the domestic industry.

Reagan refused. He would not inflict a cost estimated back then at about $3 billion on American consumers by limiting the competition. And, if he did that for shoes, he reasoned, other industries would fast line up for similar shields.

“Protectionism often does more harm than good to those it is designed to help,” Reagan said. “It is a crippling ‘cure,’ far more dangerous than any economic illness.”

For some folks, that free-market move was disastrous: we don’t have much of a shoe industry in the U.S. anymore. Some 99 percent of footwear now comes from overseas, particularly from Asia. And fewer than 2,100 people work in shoemaking in the U.S. now, compared with nearly a quarter-million in the early 1940s, the so-called “Peak Shoe” period.

On the other hand, American consumers today have access to both the priciest and the most affordable shoes one can imagine. The range and availability are stunning. And, presumably, most of the American shoe workers moved on, perhaps to better jobs.

Are we facing a similar situation now in cars, with similar questions?

Chinese carmakers, who are selling state-of-the-art electric vehicles at home and in most places overseas, can’t now market those vehicles in the U.S. or — at the moment — in neighboring Canada. Protecting American carmakers and arguing that somehow Chinese cars would transmit sensitive data to Beijing, the Biden Administration imposed 100 percent tariffs, which Canada mimicked.

Restrictions have continued under Donald J. Trump, who also been pushing gas-powered cars, weakening the U.S. EV market.

But cracks are showing up in the North American great wall now. As The Atlantic reported, Donald J. Trump recently struck an enthusiastic note about letting Chinese automakers build cars in the United States. “If they want to come in and build the plant and hire you and hire your friends and your neighbors, that’s great,” he said in a talk at the Detroit Economic Club.

And, since then, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney opened the door to the Chinese cars up north, saying he would cut his country’s 100 percent tariff to just 6.1 percent and welcome up to 49,000 Chinese cars in this year. Noting how deeply intertwined the Canadian and U.S. car industry is, Atlantic writer Patrick George mused: “If Chinese imports can gain a foothold in America’s neighbor to the north, then perhaps it is only a matter of time before they do so in the U.S. as well.”

Of course, that could be a very long time. Was Trump serious about the Chinese setting up plants in the U.S., as many Japanese and German companies have? Would a country that Trump sees first and foremost as a business rival be allowed to gain a foothold alongside Volkswagen, Toyota, Hyundai, Volvo and others with U.S. manufacturing facilities? Would future presidents, who might be even cooler to Beijing, acquiesce?

Surely, many consumers might applaud. If they are allowed in, Chinese cars could prove to be far cheaper than many American or European competitors. In 2023, China’s BYD company (for “Build Your Dreams”) launched its Dolphin hatchback EV in Mexico for just $31,000. It competes overseas with the VW I.D. 3, priced at $39,000 to $43,000, but not available in the U.S.

Back at home, the Chinese sell their cars for prices that would set the wheels spinning for Americans. The Dolphin sells for the equivalent of about $16,500 in China. And Canadians, under Carney’s new deal, will get reasonable bargains. By the end of the decade, at least half of the EVs imported would be required to have a price of about $26,000, according to the Wall Street Journal.

To be sure, the Canadians will likely fare better than European car buyers. In Germany, BYD gets more than $37,400 for the Dolphin and $48,000 for a fancier car, the Seal. The Seal competes most directly with the Tesla Model 3, which ranges in price in the U.S. up to $56,630.

If the Chinese build plants in the U.S., American labor costs might force the prices in the States higher. Still, the Chinese carmakers would labor mightily to undercut entrenched American brands and popular Asian and Europeans rivals.

Certainly, with EVs in the U.S. now costing about $57,000 and gas-powered models averaging about $48,700, new competition could add a lot of spice to the market — a bit of tang that U.S. carmakers would not welcome.

Already, U.S. carmakers – like the shoemakers of the mid-1980s — are keen to put the brakes on any Chinese advances. General Motors Chief Executive Mary Barra has warned that the Canadian deal is a risk for North American auto manufacturing, as The Wall Street Journal reported. She said Canada’s China deal, announced earlier this month, is counter to building a strong North American industrial base and to protecting jobs and national security on the continent.

“I can’t explain why the decision was made in Canada,” Barra said during an all-hands meeting with employees, the paper reported. “It becomes a very slippery slope.”

Given Chinese carmaker gains, that slope could be a steep one. Globally, BYD has already replaced Tesla as the world’s biggest EV seller, the WSJ reported. The Shenzhen-based automaker delivered more than a million vehicles outside China in 2025, the company said, more than double the previous year’s total. It surpassed Japan as the world’s No. 1 car exporter in 2023.

Is it surprising the GM executives are nervous? If BYD is ever allowed into the U.S., the homegrown companies will be forced to produce better and cheaper cars. So, too, will the European and Japanese carmakers who churn out their cars in the U.S. Every player will feel the squeeze.

Could the advances of the Chinese spell the end for all those producers, as Asian shoes did for so many American shoemakers? Unless the price disparities are far bigger than they are now, that seems unlikely. BYD and other Chinese brands could amount to just a few more names in an already crowded market. Toyota hasn’t killed GM.

In that sense, this doesn’t seem like a repeat of what was a nightmare for shoemakers.

Still, coming from nowhere, the Chinese have been extraordinary in matching the quality of far more established brands or even relative newcomers that have shaken up the industry (read: Tesla).

When a British car writer took a few spins in the BYD Seal a couple years ago, he was impressed. BYD “has made a car that’s good to drive, doesn’t cost the earth, looks great, and is a truly viable alternative to what’s out there,” Alex Goy wrote. “If your wallet was itching, and it happened to be sold where you live, the BYD Seal would almost certainly be on your list.”

His car review was headlined, in part, “If You Could Buy One, You’d Probably Want To.” Back in Reagan’s day, similar things might once have been said about foreign shoes. And, thanks to that president, we did get to buy them.

Is the worm turning?

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Joe Weber

Lies by Trump and his minions seem to be catching up with them at last

Joseph Weber

In a 1967 essay for The New Yorker, the German-Jewish writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt shared unsettling thoughts that speak loudly to us now, nearly 60 years later.

“Truth, though powerless and always defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be, possesses a strength of its own: whatever those in power may contrive, they are unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it,” she wrote in the piece titled “Truth and Politics.”

“Persuasion and violence can destroy truth, but they cannot replace it,” the sometimes-enigmatic author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” wrote. Truth, she added, is “hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize …”

With the lies upon lies that Donald J. Trump and his minions tell about their now-twice murderous actions in Minneapolis, Arendt’s insights about totalitarians spring to mind. For tyrants, she wrote: “Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies.”

Thus, we hear protesters – including a lawyer and a school board member, as well as an ICU nurse and a poet – described as “anarchists,” and “deranged leftists.” Alex Pretti, the murdered VA hospital intensive care nurse, we’re told by Trump lapdog Stephen Miller, was a “would-be assassin.” Border patrol commander Gregory Bovino, fond of Nazi-like outfits, insisted Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement” and had “violently resisted” before his men killed him.

Never mind that videos of the killings of both Renee Good and Pretti have shown Americans starkly different realities. “Without waiting for facts, the Trump team has advanced one-sided narratives to justify each of the killings and demonize the victims,” a New York Times reporter wrote.

“The trick is that the Trump versions of reality have collided with bystander videos watched by millions who did not see what they were told,” reporter Peter Baker wrote. “Ms. Good did not run over the ICE agent who killed her; a video analysis suggested she was trying to turn away from him and he continued to shoot her even as she passed him. Mr. Pretti approached officers with a phone in his hand, not a gun; he moved to help a woman who was pepper sprayed and he was under a pileup of agents when one suddenly shot him in the back.”

In bids to buttress their lies, officials produced images of a gun Pretti carried – legally – that they had grabbed from his waistband. Never mind that he hadn’t pulled the weapon, hadn’t held it, hadn’t pointed it at anyone.

The question, of course, is how many Americans buy the lies that the Trumpists sell.

“When I hear the officials from the Trump administration describe this video in ways that simply aren’t true, I just keep thinking, ‘Your eyes don’t lie,’” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said on “Meet the Press”. “The American people aren’t sitting at a Trump cabinet meeting having to say everything to make him happy. They’re going to make their own judgments.”

Indeed, the worm seems to be turning on Trump. Some 57 percent of people responding in an Economist/You Gov poll now say Trump is not honest and trustworthy, while 55 percent dislike him as a person. Only 32 percent find the president honest and fewer, 30 percent, like him.

That poll was conducted between Jan. 16 and 19, and thus followed the Jan. 7 shooting of Good but preceded Pretti’s murder on Jan. 24. Only 29 percent said Good’s shooting was justified, while 56 percent said it wasn’t. Even more, 66 percent, said the ICE shooter, Jonathan Ross, should be investigated.

So far, only a handful of Republican politicians have agreed with most of those respondents.

As reported by PBS, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy said on social media that the shooting was “incredibly disturbing” and that the “credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake.” Cassidy, who is facing a Trump-backed challenger in his reelection bid, pushed for “a full joint federal and state investigation.” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who is not seeking reelection, urged a “thorough and impartial investigation” and said “any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump’s legacy.”

Even Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts, a staunch ally of Trump, called for a “prioritized, transparent investigation.” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, echoing that call, added that “ICE agents do not have carte blanche in carrying out their duties.” And Maine’s Susan Collins, facing reelection in a state Democrat Kamala Harris carried in 2024, said a probe is needed “to determine whether or not excessive force was used in a situation that may have been able to be diffused without violence.”

But will Trump and his minions heed the will of most Americans and these dissenters in the GOP? Encouragingly, Trump at last seems to be signaling a change, suggesting he will cut back on the number of ICE agents in Minnesota, according to officials in Gov. Tim Walz’s office.

This follows a Wall Street Journal editorial headlined “Time for ICE to Pause in Minneapolis” that called out the administration lies, particularly about Pretti.

“The Trump Administration spin on this simply isn’t believable,” the piece said. “Stephen Miller, the political architect of the mass deportation policy, called Pretti a ‘domestic terrorist.’ He was a nurse without a criminal record.”

Going further, the WSJ argued that Pretti’s shooting “as he lay on the ground surrounded by ICE agents, is the worst incident to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump Presidency.”

As Arendt contended just under 60 years ago: “Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character…. In other words, the more successful a liar is, the more likely it is that he will fall prey to his own fabrications.”

With the ICE and Border Patrol murders in Minneapolis, at least some of the many fabrications by Trump and his acolytes are finally catching up with this White House. If morality and decency aren’t enough for them, the scent of political reversals may be strong enough to move them — at least for now.

Brutality, it seems, is the point

Posted on January 22, 2026 by Joe Weber

Echoes of Italian fascism cannot be accidental for Stephen Miller and Donald Trump

Joseph Weber

Just over a century ago, in January 1925, Benito Mussolini laid out the vision for his emerging dictatorship to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies. “When two irreducible elements are locked in a struggle, the only solution is force,” he said.

Mussolini, like Donald J. Trump, was long derided as a buffoon before he seized power. But he knew how effective brutality could be.

Mussolini had risen with the help of the “squadristi,” paramilitary outfits also known as Blackshirts, who terrorized cities, such as Bologna, where socialists had been elected. “Town after town was taken over by fascist thugs,” according to the Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism. “Local democratic institutions fell, one by one. Once towns were taken over, control and obedience was maintained through torture and terror.”

Are we seeing a revival of Mussolini’s approach today?

Is it reappearing by way of Stephen Miller, an adviser to Trump who seems to have the president’s ear on everything from anti-immigrant efforts to foreign policy? “But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world,” Miller said in a CNN interview.

It seems hardly accidental that Miller is parroting the long-dead dictator. Certainly, Miller, through his influence on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is normalizing squadristi-like practices on American streets. Brutality seems to be his point.

Consider this Stateline report:

“Violence in immigration enforcement is on the rise. A federal immigration agent’s killing of Renee Good in Minnesota on Jan. 7 was one of half a dozen shootings since December. An immigrant’s death in a Texas detention facility this month was ruled a homicide. And detention deaths last year totaled at least 31, a two-decade peak and more than the previous four years combined.

“There also have been dozens of cases in the past year of agents using dangerous and federally banned arrest maneuvers, such as chokeholds, that can stop breathing.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and tactical vests have been recorded firing pepper spray into the faces of protesters, shattering car windows with little warning, punching and kneeing people pinned face down on the ground, using battering rams on front doors, and questioning people of color about their identities.”

And give some thought to the phrasing in this November ruling by a federal judge in Illinois: “While defendants argue that they used less lethal force as a de-escalation technique to reduce the risk of harm to both agents and the public, plaintiffs have marshaled ample evidence that agents intended to cause protesters harm and that no legitimate governmental interest justified their actions.”

Think, for a moment, about these observations by New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall: “In its efforts to triple the number of ICE agents in the field, the administration has adopted recruitment strategies that appear to be designed to appeal to white nationalists and supremacists, including the use of what amounts to an unofficial anthem of theirs, ‘We’ll Have Our Home Again,’ in a recruitment ad.”

“According to numerous reports, the Department of Homeland Security has cut back on new employees’ training about abiding by constraints during potentially hazardous confrontations,” Edsall adds. “In addition, the Trump administration, according to court documents, fails to enforce those rules and regulations in places such as Minneapolis.”

For the squadristi, who celebrated their raids with “alcohol, laughter and song,” and launched them with “[c]heerful photographs transmitting pride and brute-masculinity,” brutality was the point. Is that now the case with the Miller-guided ICE policies?

Certainly, the echoes of Italian Fascism and German Nazism – or at least their appeal to modern white supremacists – are not coincidental.

A writer for Vox, in a mid-January piece titled “The Trump Administration Can’t Stop Winking at White Nationalists,” nailed this.

“The administration opted to associate its immigration agenda with a Nazi slogan: Adolf Hitler’s regime famously advertised its rule with the tagline “One people, one realm, one leader,” Eric Levitz noted. “Three days after Renee Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Labor tweeted, ‘One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.’

Under Trump, he reported, the official accounts of federal agencies have repeatedly referred to white nationalist memes and works.

“On Jan. 9, the Department of Homeland Security posted, ‘We’ll have our home again,’ a lyric from an anthem adopted by the neofascist group the Proud Boys and other white nationalist organizations. This was accompanied by a link where one could sign up to join ICE.

“Last August, D.H.S. shared an ICE recruitment poster beneath the phrase ‘Which way, American man?’ — an apparent reference to the white supremacist tract, “Which Way, Western Man?’ which argues that “race consciousness, and discrimination on the basis of race, are absolutely essential to any race’s survival. … That is why the Jews are so fiercely for it for themselves … and fiercely against it for us, because we are their intended victim.”

“In October, the U.S. Border Patrol posted a video on its Facebook page of agents loading guns and driving through the desert, as a 13-second clip of Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us” plays — specifically, the lines ‘Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, k*ke me.’”

By all appearances, Miller’s ICE and Border Patrol agencies want to recruit the most brutal racist low-lifes they can find.

“The Department of Homeland Security has spoken publicly about its fast-tracked effort to significantly increase ICE’s workforce by hiring more than 10,000 new employees, a surge promoted on social media with calls for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders,” The Washington Post reported. “The agency currently employs more than 20,000 people, according to ICE’s website.”

The type of person DHS wants seems clear, and that is sort who would have fit in well with the squadristi.

“On social media, administration accounts have mixed immigration raid footage with memes from action movies and video games to portray ICE’s mission as a fight against the ‘enemies … at the gates,’ the Post reported. ‘Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?’ one post says. ‘Are you going to cowboy up or just lay there and bleed?’ says another.”

Trump and his aides such as Miller seem to know exactly what they are doing. Trump, a narcissist, craves power and wants more than anything to project “strength.” And Miller – ironically, a Jew – seems to see fascistic approaches as the way to serve his boss best.

Of the two, Miller’s psyche is the more perplexing and, probably, the more dangerous. Someday, perhaps, we’ll fully understand the likely self-hating psychology that animates him.

His hostility to non-white people appears to have begun in high school, but it congealed at Duke University. There, Miller worked with white nationalist classmate Richard Spencer, as members of Duke’s Conservative Union, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The two helped bring white nationalist Peter Brimelow to campus in 2007.

Of course, that doesn’t get to the root of Miller’s pathology. But, we also have some insight from Miller’s uncle, retired neuropsychologist David S. Glosser. In a 2018 piece for Politico, he labeled his nephew an “immigration hypocrite,” saying his family would have been wiped out in Europe if Miller’s approaches to immigration had been adopted a century before.

“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” Glosser wrote. “Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions.”

Sadly, Glosser may have been mistaken on one point. Neither Trump nor Miller seem numb to the brutality. Like Mussolini and the Blackshirts, they seem to exult in it.

Propaganda or news?

Posted on January 21, 2026 by Joe Weber

Sad and outrageous incidents don’t paint the full picture

Joseph Weber

Decades ago, sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein put some powerful words into the mouth of one of his memorable characters, Zebadiah “Zeb” Jones. “You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic,” Jones said.

The line appeared in a story about a rebellion against a theocratic government that had taken hold of the United States, “If This Goes On—,” a story first published in 1940. It appears in Heinlein’s collection, “Revolt in 2100.”

I’m reminded of this by some fascinating exchanges on a family chat site. They point to the peculiar hold that the Trump Administration seems to have on a substantial chunk of the American public. They also underscore the power of propaganda.

In the family chat, a dear relative who supports many of the president’s anti-immigrant actions often replies to criticisms of Trumpian policies with examples of outrages committed by undocumented folks.

One, drawn from Fox News, refers to the death of an 8-year-old girl in Boise, Idaho, in a pickup truck crash. The driver, we’re told, was an “illegal alien released into the country by the Obama administration who was provided a driver’s license by a sanctuary state and was eventually ordered to be deported.”

Another outrage, from a New Jersey radio station, details the attempted-murder charges against a Venezuelan national in north Jersey, apparently after a pre-dawn fight. His unidentified victim, we’re told, was hospitalized with “non-life-threatening injuries.”

Perhaps the most unsettling, though, is a third one, a Facebook post by comedian Terrence K. Williams saying “Four MS-13 illegal aliens have been arrested in Maryland after they hacked a 14-year-old boy to death with a machete.” The comedian added: “This is why we stand with ICE. So violent criminals are removed before they destroy families.”

All these involve ugly events. To my relative, the incidents apparently prove how immigrants pose horrific threats to Americans and must be driven out at whatever cost. With each, I suspect, readers of a certain bent will nod, find confirmation for their beliefs, and will be thankful for Trump and ICE.

But let’s look more closely. In the first case, every fatal pickup truck crash is awful, of course. We have about 20,000 such crashes each year in the U.S. But how many, one wonders, involve undocumented drivers? How much more likely is it that the vast majority involve homegrown Americans?

And does the one terribly sad case involving a child prove that undocumented drivers pose an inordinate threat? Does that case prove anything, in fact, other than that it was one awful accident, one among many?

And then there’s the early-morning fight that led to a New Jersey woman’s hospitalization. Do we know anything, really, about this case? Were the parties related or involved with one another?

All across the U.S., nearly 70 women are shot to death each month by their domestic partners. Might this have been something like that? And is it relevant that this shooter was a Venezuelan national? Does it suggest that such immigrants are more dangerous than the far greater number of homegrown Americans involved in such killings?

As for the men who allegedly killed a 14-year-old, it’s not clear that the four suspects charged in the ghoulish case were immigrants or were members of MS-13. So far, all that the police have said is that the killing appears to be gang-related and the victim knew one of his assailants. All involved appear to be Latinos.

We don’t have all the facts, though that didn’t stop the comedian from jumping to conclusions. And, even if all those charged were undocumented, does that prove anything about how big a threat such folks are to non-gang Americans?

Awful as such things are, gangsters of all nationalities have been killing one another for decades. For years, the Mafia made an industry of this and yet Italians haven’t been targets of mass deportations.

These cases remind me of an adage those of us in journalism education drive home to students: “the plural of anecdote is not data.” In other words, you can usually find cases to make just about any point you want to make, often with a potent emotional punch.

Fox News and anecdote-besotted politicians such as Trump know too well how to manipulate audiences with such cases.

But the question we must always ask is “do the data really support that point?”

Despite the cases my relative cited, numerous studies have shown that undocumented immigrants are involved far less in crime than American-born people are, for instance. One Department of Justice study, focusing on Texas, found that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”

As The Brennan Center reported last May, “the arrival of record numbers of immigrants at the United States–Mexico border over the past two years has not corresponded with an overall increase in crime in so-called “blue” cities where many of the recent arrivals have settled. In most places, the opposite has happened — crime, including violent crime, has trended downward (other than larceny and a small increase in robbery) after peaking across the country in 2020.”

Of course, the exchanges on our family chat were generated by the murder of Renee Good and the presence of nearly 3,000 ICE agents in Minneapolis. Each day, it seems, we are confronted with more examples of outrages not by immigrants, but by such agents.

Minneapolis residents opposed to what they see as a federal invasion of their city document by phone illegal raids on homes, harassment of people on the streets, rousting of innocent citizens in stores. Our Facebook feeds are filled daily with such imagery. And journalists are reporting on the fear that keeps innocents in hiding, afraid even to go to the grocery store.

Yes, these incidents – numerous as they are — are anecdotes, too. We don’t yet have the data to show how pervasive the abuses have been. Indeed, while Homeland Security officials say they’ve made some 3,000 arrests so far, we also don’t know how many involve violent criminals or just innocents whose only offense was fleeing into the U.S., or even those protesting the presence of masked armed men on their streets.

But the anecdotes of abuses do take on more power when elected leaders such as the mayor of Minneapolis, the state’s attorney general and the governor condemn the presence of the uninvited federal forces – and sue to have them removed. They do appear to represent a pattern, even if we don’t have the full picture yet.

And, when some of these leaders are subjected to Justice Department harassment, the pattern grows even darker.

Thanks to social media and the well-honed anti-immigrant propaganda spouted by Washington officials, the sad, broader truths about how the ordinary lives of Americans are being upended are being obfuscated. This has been the case in cities ranging from Chicago and Los Angeles to Minneapolis and, now, to smaller cities in Maine, where the ICE operation is called “Catch of Day.”

Maine, as it happens, has been a popular haven for Somalis, much as Minnesota has been. So ICE seems to see it as a target-rich environment.

A government official quoted by NBC did not say how many arrests were made during the first day of the Maine operation. But in a statement, she said officers had “arrested illegal aliens convicted of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and endangering the welfare of a child.” She pointed to four examples among those arrested, though she offered few details that would provide fuller pictures of their cases.

Already, however, local officials are wary that Mainers may face the same sorts of excesses that those in Minnesota have suffered.

Carl Sheline, Lewiston’s mayor, condemned the latest ICE action, for instance. “These masked men with no regard for the rule of law are causing long-term damage to our state and to our country,” he said, as The Washington Post reported. “Lewiston stands for the dignity of all people who call Maine home.”

Gov. Janet Mills also had sharp words for the Trump Administration.

“To the federal government, I say this: If your plan is to come here to be provocative and to undermine the civil rights of Maine residents, do not be confused — those tactics are not welcome here,” she said. “Maine knows what good law enforcement looks like …. They don’t wear a mask to shield their identities, and they don’t arrest people to fill quotas.”

Soon, we might expect, we’ll see more examples of shoddy law enforcement. Will Americans see the broader picture or will they fall for the propaganda? Will they be suckered by cases that appeal to their prejudices or will they use their sense of logic?

The Big Picture

Author Archives: Joe Weber

About Joe Weber

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Extraordinary

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Agents regularly arrest their “own kind,” unbothered by that, it seems

Not just footballs will be in the air

ICE will also share the limelight at the 60th annual Super Bowl

The Boss brings it home

Springsteen’s ode to Minneapolis may long resound

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Will Americans get the chance to buy Chinese-made cars?

Is the worm turning?

Lies by Trump and his minions seem to be catching up with them at last

Brutality, it seems, is the point

Echoes of Italian fascism cannot be accidental for Stephen Miller and Donald Trump

Propaganda or news?

Sad and outrageous incidents don’t paint the full picture