The Dictatorship
The White House’s latest partisan accusation is inflammatory nonsense
The White House on Wednesday posted an article to its official site, titled “Democrats Inspire Vicious, Escalating Attacks on ICE.” The Department of Homeland Security — which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has said attacks on ICE agents and other federal officers working in immigration enforcement are up 700% over the same six-month period a year ago, which the White House article says is “a direct consequence of dangerous, inflammatory rhetoric from Democrat politicians.”
The White House’s article shows 14 quotes from Democratic lawmakers, which are mostly benign criticisms of ICE’s violent, secretive tactics.
Regarding the provenance of “700%,” Fox News reported earlier this month that “DHS recorded 10 assault events from Jan. 21, 2024, to June 30, 2024. From the day after President Donald Trump took office earlier this year until Monday, the department recorded 79 assault events, representing a 690% increase year over year.” I’ve reached out to DHS and ICE requesting the raw data to back up the new “700%” statistic, but received no response.
Still, whether it’s 690% or 700%, that’s certainly a marked increase, and a number of these assaults on federal agents have included potentially deadly violence — including shooting at officers, throwing Molotov cocktails and dragging an officer with a car. Assaulting a federal officer is a felony, and as I’ve written many times, violence is both strategically stupid and morally wrong.
But statistics can be misleading when stripped of valuable context. The levels of alleged violence against federal officers vary widely. For example, a 22-year-old in Oregon, who after officers chased someone they saw spray-painting a building, allegedly “kicked the officer in the leg, causing the officer to trip,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Each of the 79 assaults on federal officers over a six-month period is too many, just as each of the over 140 assaults on police officers by rampaging Trump supporters on Jan. 6 were unacceptable crimes. However, the same president who incited that bloody riot at the Capitol pardoned nearly every one of those assailants, lauding them as American heroes. Now, in his second term, Trump’s White House blames “inflammatory rhetoric” by Democrats for the recent spate of assaults on federal officers.
And a scan of the White House’s article shows 14 quotes from Democratic lawmakers, which are mostly benign criticisms of ICE’s violent, secretive tactics — or political criticisms of the agency itself.
Among the supposed “inflammatory rhetoric”:
“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said ICE ‘should not exist.’”
That’s not a call for violence; it’s a call to abolish a wildly unpopular federal agency that’s existed for 22 years. The Trump administration is currently trying to abolish (or effectively abolish) the Department of Education and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — policy decisions that no one is likening to a call for violence.
“Rep. Dan Goldman compared federal agents to ‘secret police’ who must be unmasked.”
Masked ICE agents violently arresting people — including U.S. citizens — without identifying themselves can reasonably be described as secret police, even if the White House doesn’t appreciate the historical comparisons to rogue regimes. (ICE insists agents must be allowed to wear masks in public to prevent “doxxing” and other harassment.)
As for cherry-picked quotes from Democrats like Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Kweisi Mfume — who called for the public to “fight” the administration’s lawlessness “in the streets” — the quotes in full context clearly show they’re calling for nonviolent protest, alongside legislative and legal “fights.”
The Trump administration is not only defining down completely legitimate and lawful political speech as ‘inflammatory rhetoric,” it’s defining down violence itself.
If it weren’t already evident that the White House doesn’t have the receipts to back up its claims against Democrats, Wired reported on Thursday that the national security nonprofit Property of the People used public records requests to obtain DHS bulletins “urging local police to consider a wide range of protest activity as violent tactics, including mundane acts like riding a bike or livestreaming a police encounter.”
So the Trump administration is not only defining down completely legitimate and lawful political speech as “inflammatory rhetoric,” it’s defining down violence itself to include taking photos or recording videos of policewhich is a constitutionally protected right.
Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans grow more brazen by the day with their inflammatory rhetoric.
Rep. Randy FineR-Fla., in a post to X called Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., a “Muslim terrorist.” Rep. Andy OglesR-Tenn., last month called New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “little muhammad” and demanded the U.S. citizen’s denaturalization and deportation. Then there’s the fact that ICE is openly engaging in racial profiling — even if officials won’t use that phrase to describe its actions. (Both Republicans later doubled down on their incendiary comments.)
Among the White House’s list of “naughty” Democratic rhetoric is a comment by Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who likened masked ICE agents to “some 1800s bank robber or some KGB officer in Russia.” I very much doubt either comparison would incite extremist violence in the street.
The White House’s article is another case of MAGA crybullying — they’re allowed to be as vicious, lawless and inflammatory as possible, but they need to fetch the fainting couch any time they’re called on it.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for BLN Daily. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
When white South African refugees enter the United States in the coming weeks, they reportedly can expect a special treat: a gift bag containing an Android tablet, copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and an American flag. Oh, and one more perk: literature that argues white people in South Africa and the U.S. are victims of discrimination — and that the U.S. Civil Rights Movement was misguided.
That’s the plan that’s being finalized in the Trump administration, according to a new story from The New York Timeswhich cites government documents and an official familiar with the matter, and observes that welcome gifts of this kind are “unusual.” These welcome bags are a brazen expression of white nationalism. And remarkably, they represent the White House doing exactly what MAGA conspiracy theorists love to (ludicrously) accuse the left of trying to do: Use immigration policy to boost its political fortunes.
Literature reportedly included in the bags encourages incoming Afrikaners to align themselves culturally and politically with the MAGA movement.
According to the Times, the bags are expected to include a letter that reads, “The Trump administration understands America’s immigration system must put the U.S. citizen first, and only welcome in those who will assimilate into the American way of life and preserve our borders, language, culture, traditions and ideals.”
The president and his administration have long made it clear that Afrikaners are virtually the only people who fit the White House’s criteria. At a Turning Point USA event in April, Trump boasted, “We suspended all refugee resettlement — except for persecuted South Africans.” And Trump has said that the people in South Africa being “persecuted” are Africans — basing his claim on white nationalist disinformation that a “white genocide” is being perpetrated in South Africa.
Singling out this population, amid all the people enduring wars and serious persecution around the world, was in and of itself a white nationalist salvo. But the letter, combined with other texts and booklets planned for the bag, take it to another level.
Other literature reportedly included in the bags encourages incoming Afrikaners to align themselves culturally and politically with the MAGA movement. According to the Times, the plan is for the bags to include “several products from PragerU, which produces right-wing educational materials, such as a story about a Black South African who must protect a white rugby teammate from a Black mob.” That story describes Nelson Mandela, the legendary anti-apartheid activist and South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, as a “South African lawyer and activist who sought to end apartheid with acts of sabotage.” It also says that the South African government in the post-apartheid era has “made race relations even worse.”
The Times reports that the administration also plans to include a report by Trump’s 1776 Commissionwhich “likens progressivism to fascism, and says Americans were being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery.” The report says the Civil Rights Movement “was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.”
Remarkably, Trump’s white nationalist goodie bags would help inaugurate a right-wing version of the right’s own racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. That evidence-free theory holds that Democrats favor immigration as a way to “replace” the local population with meek immigrants who will (for some reason) vote as a bloc in favor of Democrats. Now it seems the Trump administration is angling to create a new bloc of immigrants who help support right-wing ideologies and political goals — to the exclusion of all other populations.
The planned white nationalist goodie bags make it clear that Trump is willing to welcome foreigners with welcome arms. They just need to look and think a certain way.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.
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