Except for timely election info, the extensive list of voting resources will now be at the end.

“There’s a reason why you separate military and police. One fights the enemy of the State. The other serves and protects the People. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the State tend to become the People.” ~ Commander Adama, “Battlestar Galactica” (“WATER”, Season 1 episode 2, at the 28 minute mark.)

“The policeman isn’t there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder” (0:05) ~ Mayor Richard J. Daley’s 1968 police speech was a misspoken response to criticism of Chicago police brutality during the Democratic National Convention (Quote starts at 0:39)

Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig on KPFT Houston at 90.1-HD2, Galveston 89.5-HD2, and Huntsville 91.9-HD2. KPFT is Houston’s Community radio

On this show, we discuss local, state, national, and international stories that may have slipped under your radar. At my website, THINKWINGRADIO-dot-COM, I link to all the articles I read and cite, as well as other relevant sources. Articles and commentaries often include lots of internet links for those of you who want to dig deeper.

This begins the 26th week of Trump’s National Guard troops in Los Angeles; the 17th week of Trump’s military occupation of Washington DC; 8 weeks since Trump deployed National Guard troops to Memphis, Tennessee; and an ongoing federal law enforcement occupation in Chicago.

There have been various court rulings that these military actions in US cities are illegal under the Posse Comitatus  Act, but our lawless regime is resisting compliance. To be continued …

1. In election news, Harris County is having runoff elections.
   1. Early Voting begins on Monday, December 1. The hours are as follows: Mon-Fri, December 1-6, 2025 — 7AM-7PM; Sunday, December 7, 2025 — 12PM-7PM; and Monday & Tuesday, December 8 & 9, 2025 — 7AM-7PM.
   2. Election Day is Saturday, December 13, 2025 — 7AM-7PM.
   3. REMEMBER: If you are on line to vote before 7PM, you CANNOT be turned away!
   4. Further election information can be gotten at HarrisVotes-dot-Com or your local election clerk or county clerk.
   5. You can also obtain election information for anywhere in Texas at VoteTexas-dot-Gov.
   6. RUN-OFF elections matter! Make sure you show up and vote. Our democracy depends on it.
   7. Charles Kuffner has a still-relevant piece on these December and eventual January runoff elections at the link I’m providing to OffTheKuff-dot-com.
2. From HOUSTONPUBLICMEDIA — State investigates Harris County for allegedly registering P.O. boxes as voter addresses; By Sarah Grunau | HOUSTONPUBLICMEDIA.ORG | Posted on November 25, 2025, 5:01 PM. TAGS: Harris County, Local, News, Harris County Elections, Paul Bettencourt, Texas Elections, Voter Registrations,
   1. The Secretary of State has initiated an investigation after Senator Paul Bettencourt filed a complaint claiming that Harris County allowed voters to register their home addresses to post office boxes in violation of bills he authored in 2023.
   2. In a November letter to Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Annette Ramirez, Bettencourt asserted that Harris County failed to remove voters from the county’s rolls who had registered their addresses to local United Parcel Service stores, also known as P.O. boxes. The alleged oversight, he wrote, could put the county in violation of state laws that aim to boost election integrity.
   3. The complaint mentions two UPS locations on Westheimer Road and Waugh Drive that found more than 120 registered voters registered to those P.O. boxes.
   4. In a statement on Tuesday, [Texas Secretary of State] Jane Nelson said that county election officials are obligated to maintain accurate voting registrations and remove ineligible voters.
   5. [Nelson said,] “If we find reason to believe the Harris County Elections Office is failing to protect voter rolls or is not operating in the good faith Texans deserve, we will not hesitate to take the next step toward state oversight.”
   6. Another layer of oversight imposed on Harris County could restrict state funding from the registrar. This wouldn’t be the first time that Texas officials have called for stronger state supervision over the county’s election practices.
   7. The state office did not return a request for comment.
   8. Bettencourt and other Republican state lawmakers in 2023 introduced bills to bolster election integrity, some of which targeted Harris County — the state’s largest Democratic stronghold. One piece of legislation written into law that year aimed to eliminate Harris County’s Elections Administrator position and turn over voter registration control to the tax assessor-collector’s office.
   9. State lawmakers also advanced a Senate bill that would grant state oversight under specific circumstances for county elections through a complaint process — allowing Texas to override those same elected officials. Under the legislation, complaints can be filed by an individual who participated in an election, including candidates, county or state chairs of a political party, election judges or heads of certain political committees.
   10. That law came after a 2022 midterm election in Harris County marked by a ballot paper shortage issue, accusations of delayed polling location openings and malfunctioning software. A flurry of legal action filed by candidates, including a contender for the district clerk’s position, emerged from the issues, and an appeals court in June this year struck down the final Republican-backed lawsuit that sought to challenge the results of the election that year.
   11. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also initiated this year his own investigation into more than 100 cases of alleged noncitizens voting in recent Harris County elections. The investigation targets similar assertions in South Texas counties.
   12. On Tuesday, Bettencourt told Houston Public Media that extra state oversight on Harris County’s election practices could impose certain penalties like more audits, up to the removal of the office holder. The issue hasn’t risen to that level yet, but his office is taking the issue seriously, he said.
   13. [Bettencourt said,] “There’s obviously an utter lack of compliance, and that’s gone on for years. There is the ability for [the] Secretary of State to withhold money if people aren’t doing their job, that’s part of the law.”
   14. Language inside a bill he passed in 2023 says a notice of administrative oversight would include a specific recurring pattern of problems with election administration or voter registration identified by the state secretary. He is the first senator to file a complaint about a violation of that state law, Senate Bill 1933.
   15. In a letter addressed to Ramirez this week, Christina Adkins, director of the state agency’s elections division, said the county is allowed 30 days to provide a response with any supporting documentation relating to the complaint. Bettencourt called the response he received from the tax assessor-collector’s office about the complaint insufficient.
   16. Frida Villalobos, a spokesperson for the county’s tax assessor-collector office, said that the office was made aware of the senator’s complaint. In a statement to Houston Public Media on Tuesday, Ramirez said that the office is reviewing the records associated with the two addresses at the center of the complaint and will promptly take any necessary action.
   17. [The statement said in part,] “The Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar’s office is committed to ensuring the accuracy and integrity of the Harris County voter roll and to complying with all applicable laws.”
   18. Bettencourt on Tuesday said that the county will need to comply with the recent Senate bills all over the county, and not only address the two locations at the center of the complaint.
   19. [Bettencourt said,] “The problem by not complying is that we’ve had too many elections that have been decided in primaries or general elections by too few numbers to let this go. What we know from statistics working this problem is that about half of these PO box registers are really people that are headed out of the county. Their next stop already is out of county.”
   20. MIKE: “The [State] complaint mentions two UPS locations … that found more than 120 registered voters registered to those P.O. boxes.”
   21. MIKE: According to Harris County, as of 2024, the county had 2,664,202 registered voters. During that presidential election year, only 1,567,610 — that’s a little under 59% — turned out to vote.
   22. MIKE: Here’s what that 120 voter registrations look like as a fraction of the total number of Harris County registered voters. It’s approximately 4.5 to the minus-fifth power
   23. (MIKE: 0.00004504162972627451 (In scientific notation, my calculator says 4.504162972627451e^-5, or approximately 4.5 to the minus-fifth power.)
   24. MIKE: That’s 1/25,000^th of all the registered voters in Harris County. That number is so small that my old brain can’t even quite figure what that is in percentage terms.
   25. MIKE: So Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson is threatening a State takeover of Harris County elections because a number of voter registrations almost too small to calculate as a fraction of County registrations — registrations by people who are probably otherwise eligible to vote under state law — have an improper address registered on the voter rolls. And once noticed, should be easy enough to rectify.
   26. MIKE: Also note that these addresses are probably formatted as a street address with an “apartment number” or “unit number” — or at least what looks like one.
   27. MIKE: I concede that it’s odd that two UPS box addresses have 120 of these mis-addressed registrations. And I understand why the State requires a voter registration to have a physical residential address, but sometimes there may be extenuating circumstances.
   28. MIKE: It may also be that some of these PO box addresses are by people who fear getting mail at home. Perhaps an abused spouse. Sometimes, the registered voter may have misunderstood the instructions. Basically, who knows?
   29. MIKE: So at the end of the day, does that seem to you like the State’s interference and threats sound like a form of selective official oppression? Because it sure does to me.
3. Greg Abbott, long a defender of states’ rights, embraces Trump’s push to expand presidential power; By Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | Nov. 24, 2025, 4:30 a.m. Central. Tagged: Donald Trump, Greg Abbott,
   1. Just last year, Texas Greg Abbott joined a bipartisan chorus of governors in denouncing a Biden administration plan they said would strip states of powers guaranteed to them under federal law.
   2. The plan would have transferred Air National Guard units from six states to the U.S. Space Force, the newly created military branch, stoking concerns about federal overreach and the erosion of governors’ control over their own guard forces. Texas wasn’t among the affected states, but Abbott made his opposition unmistakable in an open letter to the president.
   3. He called the plan an “intolerable threat that would set a “dangerous precedent.”
   4. [Abbott wrote,] “I strongly oppose any attempt to sideline governors when it comes to their respective National Guards.”
   5. A year later, Abbott helped Donald Trump do just that. He said that he “fully authorized” the president’s plan to send Texas National Guard members to Illinois and Oregon to protect federal law enforcement personnel who are executing immigration laws. Those states’ governors vigorously objected, saying such action was an unnecessary escalation that interfered with state sovereignty.
   6. Abbott defended the deployment on Fox News. The president, he said, has the authority to mobilize guard members to preserve public safety.
   7. [Abbott said during the interview,] “President Trump and I have a good, longstanding working relationship, and there is a substantive reason behind that.” He added that he and the president were “operating very closely aligned on ensuring that our country is going to be safe.”
   8. Abbott, the leader of the largest state led by Republicans, has emerged as one of Trump’s most important allies as the president tests the limits of executive power. While governors often align with their parties’ presidents, Abbott’s support for Trump’s expansion of federal powers is a striking departure from his own historical and ardent defenses of state sovereignty.
   9. That, constitutional experts say, sets a risky example that may be difficult to reverse.
   10. [Said Georgetown University Law Center professor Victoria Nourse,] “What he’s doing is short-term gain for his political positions, and Texas’ political positions, but not for Texas as a state moving forward. … You might like this president, but you’re not necessarily going to like what happens to Texas with the next one.”
   11. There are myriad examples of Abbott bending his views on state sovereignty to accede to the wishes of the new administration, including directing state agencies to assist the administration’s immigration enforcement — an action that constitutional law experts said essentially deputized the Texas government into federal service — as well as providing data on voters and redrawing legislative boundaries to net more GOP-friendly seats in the U.S. House.
   12. Abbott’s arguments then and actions now are an example of what Jessica Bulman-Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University, calls partisan federalism, a term describing how state leaders’ fervor for defending their sovereignty increasingly depends on whether their party is in power in Washington. She said Abbott’s support of the guard deployments is particularly alarming because it diminishes the traditional power of governors to manage law enforcement in their states.
   13. Abbott did not respond to interview requests or written questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. But Robert Henneke, general counsel for the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, and James Peinado, chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Texas, which advocates for limited government, said they saw no contradiction between Abbott’s historic defense of states’ authority and his support of Trump’s actions. Trump is following the law, Henneke said, and “the states don’t have the power to block the lawful exercise of authority of the federal government.”
   14. Abbott’s actions, however, have drawn rebuke from fellow governors, including at least one from his own party.
   15. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, told The New York Times that he was surprised Abbott sent Texas guard members to Illinois. [Said Stitt, who did not respond to interview requests,] “We believe in the federalist system — that’s states’ rights. Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”
   16. [MIKE: In my opinion, that sums up the position that any governor — Republican, Democrat or other — should be taking at this time. Continuing …]
   17. Ron Beal, a retired law professor at Baylor University, said Abbott’s actions not only violate the historic spirit of cooperation among states, but provide Trump cover to unlawfully interfere in state matters.
   18. [Beal said,] “Trump’s reason for sending troops is clearly a total fabrication of reality and I believe a constitutional violation. … It is simply outrageous that Abbott would participate and cooperate with such activity.”
   19. … Abbott’s devotion to state sovereignty has long been central to his political identity.
   20. In January 2016, entering his second year as governor, he published a 92-page essay defending states’ rights and decrying what he called the Obama administration’s executive overreach. In a speech that month to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, he accused President Barack Obama of bypassing Congress by enacting climate change and immigration policy through unilateral executive orders. Abbott also lambasted the Supreme Court for upholding the Affordable Care Act, arguing the justices invented a legal basis for it.
   21. [Abbott wrote,] “State leaders were supposed to have the power and opportunity to check any attempt by federal officials to overstep their bounds. … Indeed, the entire structure of the Constitution was premised on the idea that the states would be stronger than the national government.”
   22. [MIKE: I’m not a Constitutional scholar, but I think that Abbott is describing the original Articles of Confederation that first governed the United States rather than the current Constitution, but continuing …]
   23. Abbott proposed the “Texas Plan,” a set of nine constitutional amendments that he said would restore the balance of authority between the federal government and states. Among them was one that would make clear that the president, Congress and judges have no powers beyond those expressly mentioned in the Constitution.
   24. The essay offered a well-reasoned critique of growing federal power, said Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, who has assigned it as required reading for his students.
   25. Levinson said Abbott’s recent actions mark a complete reversal.
   26. [Levinson said,] “He condemned presidents for overreach, particularly in executive orders, and said we had to do something to rein that in. There’s much to be said for that, but that is certainly not his view in 2025. … Most of what Trump does is through executive order.”
   27. Trump has sought to use executive orders to force changes to elections and voting. He has also pressured state leaders to make changes on his behalf, and Abbott has obliged.
   28. Over the summer, Abbott became the first governor to comply with Trump’s demand that Republican-led states break from the traditional 10-year cycle of redrawing congressional districts to create more GOP-friendly seats for the 2026 midterm election.
   29. Initially sympathetic to incumbent Republican House members’ worries that the strategy could weaken solid GOP seats by spreading the party’s voters across too many districts, Abbott ultimately called a special session of the Texas Legislature to draft new congressional boundaries.
   30. Texas lawmakers in 2003 similarly conducted a rare mid-decade redistricting, but that was not directed by then-President George W. Bush, said Karl Rove, one of Bush’s senior advisers. [Rove said in a text message,] “The White House and RNC didn’t provoke or lead the [2003] effort.”
   31. [MIKE: As far as I can recall, that’s true. It was entirely the project of then-US Representative Tom DeLay. DeLay’s political nickname at the time was “The Hammer”. He was also known as “The Exterminator”, from his time as a pest control business owner. Continuing …]
   32. A governor allowing a president to influence when a state redistricts cedes the historical power of states to run their own elections, said Mimi Marziani, who teaches election law at the University of Texas.
   33. She said Trump’s request for more GOP-friendly seats “has everything to do with national party interests and nothing to do with state interests.” And she warned that if governors give in, they will be vulnerable to future presidential meddling.
   34. Earlier this month, Trump endorsed Abbott for reelection, citing redistricting as one of the governor’s key accomplishments. A week later, a panel of three federal judges blocked the state’s newly drawn congressional map from taking effect, finding that it discriminated against voters based on race. On Tuesday, Abbott said Texas would “swiftly appeal” to the U.S. Supreme Court.
   35. Abbott’s cooperation has extended to sharing voter registration data with Washington.
   36. Texas joined more than a dozen states in turning over voter roll information to the Justice Department, despite long-standing resistance to federal oversight of state elections.
   37. The Constitution allows states to run elections, subject to oversight by Congress. But Trump sought greater control over the process, issuing an executive order in March that prioritized enforcing the federal laws that bar noncitizens from voting.
   38. Trump has repeatedly claimed that noncitizens are voting en masse to sway U.S. elections in favor of Democrats, while research has shown this not to be true.
   39. A recent voter roll audit by the Texas secretary of state, using a federal citizenship database, flagged 2,724 voters — or 0.015% — as potential Preliminary investigations by county voter registrars, however, found that some of those voters are citizens.
   40. Acting on Trump’s order, the Justice Department requested from states their entire voter rolls, including dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, according to a letter sent to Texas and obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune under public records laws.
   41. Records show that Texas provided voter roll information to the Justice Department in October.
   42. Texas secretary of state spokesperson Alicia Pierce told ProPublica and the Tribune that the secretary of state provided only the publicly available version of its voter roll, which redacts information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.
   43. [MIKE: I’ll note that given the veracity and competency challenges of the current regimes in question, I have my doubts. Continuing …]
   44. The Justice Department is suing eight states, six of which had provided or offered publicly available versions of their voter rolls because they did not include all the information the federal government sought. One such state is Pennsylvania.
   45. [Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, wrote to the Justice Department in August,] “This request, and reported efforts to collect broad data on millions of Americans, represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process.”
   46. Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre declined to comment on why the federal government had not included Texas among the states it was suing for failing to share all the information the government sought.
   47. But the same month that Texas quietly handed over the limited voter roll, Secretary of State Jane Nelson, an Abbott appointee, announced her office had finished running the full roll, along with Social Security numbers, through a federal database to check voters’ citizenship status.
   48. The Department of Homeland Security stores voter data uploaded by state officials, DHS records obtained by ProPublica found.
   49. Nelson’s office did not answer questions about whether doing so essentially provided the federal government with even more data on Texas voters than it had initially sought.
   50. … Abbott embraced Trump’s deployment of Texas National Guard troops under a novel interpretation of a federal law that authorizes the mobilization of troops to quell a rebellion or threat of rebellion, or if “regular forces” are unable to enforce federal law. No modern president has invoked the law to assist in carrying out immigration policy.
   51. Despite Abbott’s support, the 400 Texas National Guard troops mobilized by Trump are still not on the streets of Illinois or Oregon.
   52. [MIKE: I’ll note here that these guard troops are basically civilians who have had their professional and private lives disrupted by being activated for what amounts to political theater … And dangerous political theater, as we recently saw in Washington, DC. Continuing …]
   53. Federal judges temporarily halted the deployments after Oregon and Illinois sued the Trump administration, arguing that its actions violate the 10th Amendment, which gives the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution.
   54. The states’ arguments echo those Abbott made in his 2016 essay, in which he warned that Washington too often ignored that amendment to impose its will on states. He proposed making it easier for states to sue the federal government over alleged abuses of power.
   55. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is handling the Illinois case, had a similar take. In an Oct. 16 ruling, the court said the Texas troop mobilization was “an incursion on Illinois’s sovereignty” and likely a violation of the 10th Amendment.
   56. The litigation kept Texas Guard members who were deployed to the Chicago area more than a month ago, in limbo, unable to carry out what Trump wanted them to [do,] but unable to leave. A U.S. Defense Department spokesperson said the 200 guard members who were training at a base in Illinois returned to Texas last week. The rest, bound for Oregon, remain at Fort Bliss in El Paso.
   57. The U.S. Supreme Court has placed the Illinois case on its emergency docket and is considering the parties’ written arguments. The court’s pending ruling would likely apply to the Oregon case as well.
   58. Despite the uncertainty regarding the deployment’s legality, Trump suggested in an October speech to U.S. military members that he was prepared to send troops, including active-duty units, into more cities.
   59. Abbott’s cooperation thus far will make it harder for other states to resist Trump in future deployments, said James Gardner, a constitutional law professor at the University at Buffalo. The framers of the Constitution intended for states to stand with one another to ensure officials in Washington never accumulated too much power, Gardner said.
   60. He said that while Abbott, who is seeking a record fourth term next year, would likely rediscover his passion for states’ rights if a Democrat were elected president, the governor may struggle to regain power he helped take away from the states.
   61. [Gardner said,] “By altering the Constitution’s contemplated balance of power, it makes it easier for the central government to crush dissenting states.”
   62. MIKE: For those who don’t recall, in 2003, Texas withdrew from a multistate program used by states to update voter rolls without sending any data to the Federal government. As stated in that article, “…withdrawal from the program [came] after Republican leaders pushed the effort and approved legislation to stop using the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, a program 27 states use to check duplicate voter registrations and clean voter rolls”.
   63. MIKE: I think that in the main, this article supports my view that, by and large, the Republican Party no longer has what can be described as “conservative principles”.
   64. MIKE: Rather, they seem to constantly express “situational political positions” depending on which party is in power and whose metaphorical ox is being gored.
   65. MIKE: As Abbott clearly demonstrates, the Republican Party has lost its philosophical compass. Whether it claims to be the Party of Lincoln or the Pary of Reagan — which I must say is a remarkable pair of ideas to keep in their heads simultaneously — today’s Republican Party has virtually no ideals at all except to be in opposition when out of power, and to favor central authority over local governance when they control the levers of government.
4. And here’s some legal reporting on court opinions of Trump’s deployment of the Guard to US cities. From MILITARY-dot-COM — A Federal Judge Blocked Trump’s National Guard Deployment to DC But Troops Aren’t Leaving Just Yet; By Matt Brown, AP | Associated Press via MILITARY.COM | Published November 22, 2025 at 6:57am ET. TAGS: Military Headlines, National Guard, Army National Guard, Washington D.C., Donald Trump,
   1. A federal judge on Thursday [Nov. 20] ordered President Donald Trump to end the deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital. But the ruling is unlikely to be the final word by the courts, the president, or local leaders in the contentious duel over the federal district.
   2. S. District Judge Jia Cobb put her order on hold for 21 days to allow the Trump administration time to either remove the troops or appeal the decision. The ruling marks another flashpoint in the months-long legal battle between local leaders and the president over longstanding norms about whether troops can support law enforcement activities on American streets.
   3. Trump issued an emergency order in the capital in August, federalizing the local police force and sending in National Guard troops from eight states and the District of Columbia. The order expired a month later but the troops remained.
   4. The soldiers have patrolled Washington’s neighborhoods, monuments, train stations, and high-traffic streets. They have set up checkpoints on highways and supported federal agents in raids that have arrested hundreds of people, often for immigration-related infractions.
   5. They’ve also been assigned to pick up trash, guard sports events, conventions and concerts, and have been seen taking selfies with tourists and residents alike.
   6. The White House has said Trump’s deployment was legal and vowed to appeal the ruling.
   7. Here’s what to know about the National Guard deployment in the nation’s capital.
   8. The judge ruled the deployment was unlawful— District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed the lawsuit against the administration that led to Cobb’s ruling.
   9. Cobb ruled [link added by Mike] that Trump’s troop deployment violated the governance of the capital for a variety of reasons, including that the president had taken powers that officially resided in Congress; that the federal district’s autonomy from other states had been violated; and that Trump had moved to make the troop deployment a possibly permanent fixture of the city.
   10. [Cobb wrote,] “At its core, Congress has given the District rights to govern itself. Those rights are infringed upon when defendants approve, in excess of their statutory authority, the deployment of National Guard troops to the District.”
   11. The judge also added that D.C. “suffers a distinct injury from the presence of out-of-state National Guard units” because “the Constitution placed the District exclusively under Congress’s authority to prevent individual states from exerting any influence over the nation’s capital.”
   12. Cobb added that repeated extensions of the troop deployment by the National Guard into next year “could be read to suggest that the use of the (D.C. National Guard) for crime deterrence and public safety missions in the District may become longstanding, if not permanent.”
   13. Troops won’t necessarily leave the capital following the ruling— The Trump administration has three weeks to appeal the decision and White House officials have already vowed to oppose it. Troops remained stationed around the city on Friday after the ruling came down.
   14. Before the ruling, states with contingents in the capital had indicated their missions would wrap up around the end of November unless ordered otherwise by the administration. According to formal orders reviewed by The Associated Press, the Washington D.C. National Guard will be deployed to the nation’s capital through the end of February. One court document indicated that the contingent could stay into next summer.
   15. Deployments in Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon and Chicago have each faced court challenges with divergent rulings. The administration has had to scale back its operations in Chicago and Portland while it appeals in both cases.
   16. The White House stands by the deployment — The White House says the Guard’s presence in the capital is a central part of what it calls successful crime-fighting efforts. It dismissed the ruling as wrongly decided.
   17. [MIKE: “Crime fighting.” So again, Posse Comitatus. Continuing …]
   18. [Said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson,] “President Trump is well within his lawful authority to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., to protect federal assets and assist law enforcement with specific tasks. … This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of DC residents — to undermine the President’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in DC.”
   19. That stands in contrast to what local D.C. leaders say.
   20. Schwalb, the District’s attorney general, praised the judge’s decision and argued that the arrangement the president had sought for the city would weaken democratic principles.
   21. [D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said in a statement,] “From the beginning, we made clear that the U.S. military should not be policing American citizens on American soil. … Normalizing the use of military troops for domestic law enforcement sets a dangerous precedent, where the President can disregard states’ independence and deploy troops wherever and whenever he wants, with no check on his military power.”
   22. C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has tried to strike a balance between working with some federal authorities and the opposition of some of her voters, has not publicly commented about the ruling.
   23. States across the country have watched D.C.’s legal case play out — The case could have legal implications for Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to other cities across the country. Dozens of states had joined the case, with their support for each side split along party lines.
   24. The District of Columbia has always had a unique relationship with the federal government. But the legal dispute in D.C. raises some similar questions over the president’s power to deploy troops to aid in domestic law enforcement activities and whether the National Guard can be mobilized indefinitely without the consent of local leaders.
   25. Prior to the D.C. deployment, Trump in June mobilized National Guard troops in Los Angeles as some in the city protested against immigration enforcement activities. Since deploying troops to Washington, Trump has also dispatched National Guard troops to Chicago, Portland and Charlotte, with more cities expected to see deployments in the future.
   26. The mostly Democratic governors and mayors who lead the cities and states in the administration’s crosshairs broadly oppose the deployments.
   27. JB Pritzker of Illinois, in a November interview with the AP, warned of the “militarization of our American cities.” Pritzker and other Democratic governors have been among the most intense legal opponents to Trump’s troop deployments and federal agent surges nationwide.
   28. Some Republican leaders have welcomed federal law enforcement intervention into their states and lent state resources and agents.
   29. Yet some of Trump’s allies have expressed concern. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, chair of the Republican Governors Association, warned that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops without a state’s consent “sets a very dangerous precedent.”
   30. MIKE: In my opinion, Trump’s deployment of federalized Guard troops to US cities has always been about political intimidation and a blatant, if illegal, effort to exercise federal control in places that Trump and the Republicans simply don’t like because they are predominantly Democratic political strongholds.
   31. MIKE: And now, two National Guard troops from West Virginia have been shot and seriously wounded, and one of them has died.
   32. MIKE: Her death was totally unnecessary. She was deployed in DC purely to serve Trump’s political ends, especially since her deployment was unwelcome by the DC authorities and served no legal law-enforcement purpose.
   33. MIKE: As near as I can determine, the West Virginia National Guard was not federalized by Trump. Rather, it appears that West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey decided to send his Guard troop to DC at the request of Donald Trump.
   34. MIKE: A statement on the Governor’s official web page from August 16, 2025 said in part: “At the request of the Trump administration, Governor Patrick Morrisey has directed the West Virginia National Guard (WVNG) to support the President’s initiative to restore cleanliness and safety to Washington, D.C. … .” [Said Governor Morrisey,] “West Virginia is proud to stand with President Trump in his effort to restore pride and beauty to our nation’s capital. …”
   35. MIKE: The full statement is at the linked page if you want to read it, but it appears to me that, based on the unwarranted and apparently illegal deployment of these Guard troops to D.C., West Virginia Governor Morrisey has a share of the unnecessarily-shed blood of National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom on his own hands.
   36. MIKE: Republicans make no bones about gerrymandering election districts to dilute Democratic and racial voting power. In my own opinion, Trump and the Republican Party are implementing what might almost be considered a military gerrymander.
   37. MIKE: That is to say that Democratic-voting cities such as Washington D.C. are being militarily occupied in an attempt to control and intimidate voters and elected officials, and — perhaps down the road – to affect election outcomes in 2026 by intimidating some voters from participating in their Constitutional right to vote in free and fair elections. Elections that are particularly free from government military oversight, or even implied military oversight.
   38. MIKE: Sadly, legal rulings against these deployments notwithstanding, and in view of the lawlessness of our felon-led federal government, this situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.
   39. REFERENCE: Where things stand with the National Guard shooting in D.C.; By Sarah Ventre, David Folkenflik | NPR.ORG | Updated November 29, 2025@2:50 PM ET.
5. I’ve been saving this article for when I have time in the show. I think it’s still important, though it’s from June 16. From the Guardian — Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’; By Jonathan Freedland | THEGUARDIAN.COM | Mon 16 Jun 2025 @ 00.00 EDT. TAGS: US politics, , Donald Trump, Yale University, Trump administration ,US immigration ,Far right (US), The far right, interviews,
   1. She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.
   2. In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.
   3. Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. [Said Shore,] “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
   4. Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday, or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.
   5. [Shore reflects,] “It’s all almost too stereotypical … A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. [She continued,] “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”
   6. That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the “neo-totalitarianism” exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. We speak as Shore is trying to do her day job, having touched down in Warsaw en route to Kyiv, with Poland and Ukraine long a focus of her studies. Via Zoom from a hotel lobby, she peppers our conversation with terms drawn from a Russian political lexicon that suddenly fits a US president.
   7. “The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it’s obnazhenie; ‘laying bare’.” It’s an approach to politics “in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,” not concealed in any way. “And that’s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.”
   8. She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has “really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that’s hidden and expose it, and we think that’s going to be what makes the system unravel.” But the problem is not what’s hidden, it’s “what we’ve normalised – because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.”
   9. None of this has been an overnight realisation for Shore. It had been building for years, with origins that predate Trump. Now 53, she had spent most of her 20s focused on eastern Europe, barely paying attention to US politics, when the deadlocked presidential election of 2000 and the aborted Florida recount fiasco made her realise that “we didn’t really know how to count votes”. Next she was wondering: “Why exactly were we going to war in Iraq?” But the moment her academic work began to shed an uncomfortable light on the American present came in the presidential race of 2008.
   10. “When John McCain chose Sarah Palin, I felt like she was a character right out of the 1930s.” The Republican vice-presidential candidate lived, Shore thought, “in a totally fictitious world … not constrained by empirical reality.” Someone like that, Shore believed, could really rile up a mob.
   11. And then came Trump.
   12. Once again, it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. [She says,] “Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil.” Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin’s lies were in the service of some vast “eschatological vision” [Link added by Mike], the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is “advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It’s pure, naked transaction.”
   13. When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore found herself “lying on the floor of my office, throwing up into a plastic bag. I felt like this was the end of the world. I felt like something had happened that was just catastrophic on a world historical scale, that was never going to be OK.”
   14. Did she consider leaving the US then? She did, not least because both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. “We tore our hair out debating it.” Snyder’s instinct was to stay and fight: he’s a “committed patriot”, she says. Besides, their children were younger; there was their schooling to think about. So they stayed at Yale. “These things are so contingent; you can’t do a control study on real life.”
   15. But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. [Said Shore,] “So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.”
   16. Events so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were “abusing” him, an episode, says Shore, “right out of Stalinism” – to say nothing of Trump’s regular attacks on “USA-hating judges” who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. “Dark fantasies are coming true,” [she said].”
   17. She readily admits that her reaction to these events is not wholly or coldly analytical. It’s more personal than that. [She says,] “I’m a neurotic catastrophist. I feel like we could just subtitle [this period] ‘the vindication of the neurotic catastrophist’. I mean, I’ve been anxious and neurotic since birth.” She draws the contrast with her husband, [saying]: “Tim is not an anxious person by nature, and that is just hardwired.”
   18. She’s referring in part to their different backgrounds. Snyder is a child of Quakers; Shore is Jewish, raised in Allentown, eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a doctor and her mother “a doctor’s wife” who was later a preschool teacher. Shore grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors. [Said Shore,] “I do think there’s something about having heard stories of the Holocaust at a young age that was formative. If you hear these stories – people narrating what they went through in Auschwitz, even if they’re narrating it for eight, nine or 10-year-olds – it impresses itself on your consciousness. Once you know it’s possible, you just can’t unknow that.”
   19. How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.”
   20. She also worries that instead of fighting back, “people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.”
   21. Later she speaks of the beauty of solidarity, those fleeting moments when societies come together, often to expel a tyrant. She recalls the trade union Solidarity in communist-era Poland and the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. By leaving America – and Americans – in their hour of need, is she not betraying the very solidarity she reveres?
   22. [She sighs,] “I feel incredibly guilty about that.” All the more so when she sees the criticism directed at her husband. They were on sabbatical together in Canada when Trump won the 2024 election, but “had he been alone, he would have gone back to fight … That’s his personality. But he wouldn’t have done that to me and the kids.” To those minded to hurl accusations of betrayal and cowardice, she says: “Direct them all to me. I’m the coward. I take full blame for that.” It was she, not Snyder, who decided that “no, I’m not bringing my kids back to this”.
   23. [This author lingers] on that word “coward”. It goes to one of the fears that led to Shore’s decision. She does not doubt her own intellectual courage, her willingness to say or write what she believes, regardless of the consequences. But, she says, “I’ve never trusted myself to be physically courageous.” She worries that she is, in fact, “a physical coward”.
   24. She began to wonder: what would I do if someone came to take my students away? “If you’re in a classroom, you know your job is to look out for your students.” But could she do it? Many of her students are from overseas. [Shore continues,] “What am I going to do if masked guys in balaclavas come and try to take this person away? Would I be brave? Would I try to pull them away? Would I try to pull the mask off? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I run away?”
   25. She didn’t trust herself to do what would need to be done.
   26. So now she is in what she calls “a luxurious position”: at a university across the border, safely out of reach of both Trump’s threats to cut funding and the ICE officials currently striking terror into the hearts of international students and others. As a result, she feels “more obligated to speak out … on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of other Americans who are at risk”.
   27. At one point in our conversation, we talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. “Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose And that disgust, I couldn’t shake that. I thought: ‘People wanted this – and I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’”
   28. Does that mean she will never return to the US? “I would never say, ‘I would never go back.’ I always feel that what history teaches you is not what will happen, but what can The possibilities are generally much more capacious than anyone is expecting at that moment.”
   29. Contained in that remark is, if not optimism, then at least the possibility of it. And, right now, that might be as much as we can ask for.
   30. MIKE: This might be a good time to reflect on the famous, “First they came …” statement, often mistakenly referred to as a poem, by Martin Niemöller.
   31. MIKE: “A version by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a charity established by the British government, is as follows:^[2]
   32. First they came for the Communists, And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist.
   33. Then they came for the Socialists, And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist.
   34. Then they came for the trade unionists, And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist.
   35. Then they came for the Jews, And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew.
   36. Then they came for me, And there was no one left To speak out for me.”
   37. MIKE: For some of us, speaking out is the best we can do. But for all of us, speaking out is something we must try to have the courage to do, whenever we can. We may not find that courage every time, but we must remember to at least try to find it every time.
   38. MIKE: We now live in a country where people are suddenly assaulted by individuals in unmarked vehicles, wearing apparel that could be militia cosplay, and forcibly wrestling victims to the ground whether they resist or not.
   39. MIKE: This is the stuff of 1940s movies, and it’s like living in a nightmare.
   40. The article from the NY Times includes a video piece. I’ve recorded the audio and have slightly edited it for time. Here it is: (PLAY CLIP — 6m 26s)
6. Chinese newspaper editor Cheng Yizhong once said, “In China, supervision by the media can only proceed within the existing system. Freedom means knowing how big your cage is.” ~ Cheng Yizhong, then-editor of the Southern Metropolis Daily (GUANGZHOU, China), from “In China, an Editor Triumphs, and Fails”, story by Philip P. Pan in the Washington Post (August 1, 2004). Originally, full article was here. Now available here. (In China, an Editor Triumphs, and Fails; By Philip P. Pan |COM | August 1, 2004