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Federal Agents arrest a man during an Immigration Enforcement Operation in
Minneapolis, Minneapolis, MN, U.S., January 13, 2026.Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via
Getty Images
[40]Politics
Fascists Are Pathetic
[41][Vic]
By [42]David Roth
9:27 AM EST on January 15, 2026
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[47]
475Comments
Two days before a shouting cluster of its agents surrounded the car of a
Minneapolis mother and [48]shot her to death last week, ICE was demanding
answers from the Hilton hotel group on Twitter. "Why did your team in
Minneapolis cancel our federal law enforcement officer and agent reservations?"
the government account of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency [49]
asked, repeatedly tagging Hilton's corporate account per the longstanding suite
of best practices among the population of squeakers prone to this kind of
social media crashout.
The meltdown continued in a subsequent post, which began with the capitalized
sentence "NO ROOM AT THE INN!": "When officers attempted to book rooms using
official government emails and rates, Hilton Hotels maliciously CANCELLED their
reservations," the agency, which [50]had a $28.7 billion budget in 2025,
posted. "This is UNACCEPTABLE. Why is Hilton Hotels siding with murderers and
rapists to deliberately undermine and impede DHS law enforcement from their
mission to enforce our nation’s immigration laws?" The hotel group and the
independently owned hotel in question both [51]apologized later that day, both
taking care to note that they don't condone any kind of discrimination. In the
streets, the horrors continued.
It is not accurate to say that the current government of the United States
speaks with one voice; there are too many half-sociopath [52]influencers and
podcasters and unstable television personalities scrabbling around in high
positions for there to be anything like that kind of shared purpose, and the
reactionary social media gremlins working under them are all too busy [53]
signaling to their own degenerate micro-communities to get into anything like
harmony. But, one brutal and stupid year into the second Trump administration,
it seems fair to say that the federal government has cohered into a sort of
collective personality. It is maybe more accurate to say that the public-facing
part of the federal government is identifiable at this moment as a specific and
repellent type of American Guy.
You do not have to know this guy personally to know what he is about; you do
not need to understand what he believes to grasp how dangerous he is or why.
You need only to put some tactical gear and a gaiter on him, dress him up with
whatever weaponry looks toughest, and drop him behind the wheel of a rented
Jeep Wagoneer. Instinct and panic and a gnarled suite of anti-values will do
the work from there; you can't trust him for much, but you can trust that this
guy will point that vehicle's enormous snarling grille at a smaller vehicle
being driven by someone the guy in question has identified as a target. They
would be doing this, or spending hours every day fantasizing about doing it,
even if they had not been told that [54]their right do it now supersedes every
other right in public life.
This type of person exists in American life—"our neighbors, friends, and loved
ones," in [55]the words of Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin—in sufficient
enough numbers that everyone who does not want to become a character in the
incoherent first-person shooter video game that plays over their every waking
moment knows to avoid them. They are all around us, but contra Sen. Mullin they
are not really our neighbors or friends; they do not quite fit that concept,
and cannot really buy into it. They are self-deputized; their personal defects
make them unstable in a way that leads inexorably to car crashes.
In his weepy tweet defending their negligible honor and that of the work they
do, Mullin calls them "red-blooded American patriots," and that, too, is both
directionally correct and plainly laughable on the merits. They're American,
all right, and the patriotism they claim—an old, small, ignorant version, but
one that for those reasons nevertheless has some claim on the word—is just one
of many. Before they put on plate carriers and masks and threw themselves into
the dirty business of terrorizing their neighbors and breaking their families,
they were still identifiable as who and what they are and always were—seething,
unappeasable, deliriously and defiantly pig-stupid, and absolutely a threat to
the peace and comfort and flourishing of everyone and anything else. The masks
only make them easier to see.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks at a news conference on
January 7, 2026 in Brownsville, Texas.Kristi Noem doing the classic Standing
Around In Front Of A Bunch Of Uniformed CHUDs maneuver in Texas in January
2026. (Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images)
There is no disjunction between the political movement that is so frantically
preening and whining and lying [56]on social media and into any camera lens it
can find, and the one prosecuting an aimless, endless, brutish reign of terror
in the hospitals and outside the preschools and across the big-box parking lots
of the greater Twin Cities metropolitan area. They are two sides of the same
coin, or the same side of this particular personality type—baffled, brutish,
plainly terrified and out of control, incapable of self-regulation or basic
self-soothing, never learning a single thing and making as big and violent a
mess as they can on principle. There is no legible strategy in the ICE-led
offensive in Minnesota beyond [57]trying to make the situation worse to see
what might happen, and no sense of what victory might look like; when "get told
to eat shit by dozens of bystanders" and "drive off amid a cloud of tear gas"
represent this big a part of the tactical stack, it becomes easy to doubt that
there actually is any broader goal.
It's a terror campaign, of course, but the people doing it are themselves so
terrified and so manifestly out of their depth and incapable, and so deeply
lost in their own single-serving fogs of war, that it all becomes recursive.
Its purpose, to the extent one is visible, is to keep going. The original
justification for the surge was [58]an incomprehensible viral video by a
conservative influencer, but it has since become both [59]a campaign of
indiscriminate punishment and cyclical content creation and omnidirectional
retribution—a frantic tantrum unconvincingly dressing itself up as an act of
stern paternal discipline, and a screen-addled movement of hair-trigger
illiterates that has [60]lost the ability to do anything but react, generating
new scenes to react to.
It could only ever be incoherent, and was always going to be brutal. As a
farcical re-enactment of the lost foreign wars of the last two decades on
American soil, it could not be any other way. For the same reason, it is hard
to know when or how it will end. In Trump's second term, the federal government
has intentionally rid itself of the capacity to do anything but make things
worse; it has quite literally traded Ph.D scientists and dedicated civil
servants for the chance to hastily stand up this expansion team from the
waiver-wire flotsam of the violence worker community. The public money that was
once spent, grudgingly and kludgily, on keeping people alive is now being spent
on this mission and others like it, whose only purpose is to hurt those that
the state has identified as enemies.
The people carrying this out have been behaving [61]exactly as you might expect
armed sadists to behave after they'd been told that they would be immune from
any future consequences. None of them really seem to understand the mission
they've been given beyond some atavistic mandate to violently pacify and punish
everyone that Doesn't Look Right, to make everything clean and quiet and keep
it that way, to patrol empty streets with their blood up and their guns out
until such time as the threat, which was always just everything and everyone
else, is somehow neutralized.
And that may well be what the mission actually is. Some people who did not know
anything, and who kept themselves scared all the time, and who held a grudge
against the whole rest of humanity because of how ignorant and frightened that
bigger world's existence made them feel, handed weapons to other people who
felt the same way, and told them to figure it out. All that war and the ways in
which the rot it made weakened various important structures and edifices, the
terrible use reactionary cynics found for that rot, the toxins that invariably
showed up in the groundwater downstream from all that violence—all of these
things made the culture stupid and cruel in new ways, or maybe just in very old
ones. All of that made this awful moment, too.
The capacity to cry about being treated rudely on social media while carrying
out this open-ended gambit is new, but the instinct to do so wasn't. There is
something deeply, shamefully American about this strike force of out-of-town
shitheads complaining about the customer service it has received from the
people it is trying to oppress, and doing so in language—NO ROOM AT THE INN!
—that stridently references and oafishly misuses one of the foundational
stories of the faith that movement relentlessly claims. A lesson about
humanity, and a whole humane way of seeing the world, shrinks so effortlessly
into a preening, indignant, fundamentally meaningless complaint.
Minnesota, among other places, is currently in a stalemate between people who
[62]want to live their normal lives without fear of being brutalized or
terrorized or beaten or even killed, and an occupying force that understands
preventing that from happening as more or less the substance and purpose of its
mission, and that is awful. But just because the people doing all that shooting
and crying don't know what they're doing doesn't mean anyone else is as
deceived. Every day, those pissy goons go out looking for trouble, and every
day people who never previously imagined that they would do such a thing tell
them to fuck off, absorb outsized violence for doing so, and resolve to do it
again the next day.
It's inspiring, this persistence of community and care in the face of a
campaign to annihilate them, and the defiance of people who want to live their
lives against a force that doesn't want anything at all, and all of these small
and vital human things pushing up through the attempt to make those things and
that resistance impossible. But it is also a reminder of how pathetic—how
sincerely and deeply abject, how valueless and lost—this offensive is. There is
all this rude and humble everyday life and all these different types of people
who believe it is meaningful, and then there is this attempt, overseen by an
elite that doesn't believe in anything at all, to replace it with something
dumber, simpler, more demeaning, and more like content. They are going to lose,
and not just because they are outnumbered.
Recommended
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January 12, 2026
[67]Ice guy slips and falls
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• [69]Share on Bluesky
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[73][Vic]
[74]David Roth
[75]@davidjroth.bsky.social
Editor. Co-host of The Distraction.
Read More:
• [76]Actual Existing Trumpism,
• [77]dhs,
• [78]donald trump,
• [79]Fascism,
• [80]ice,
• [81]jd vance,
• [82]kristi noem,
• [83]Minneapolis,
• [84]Trumpism
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[87]NBA
[88]
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McQuade
[89]157Comments
[90][rat]
[91]Ray Ratto
January 30, 2026
[92]Tyrese Maxey #0 of the Philadelphia 76ers reacts after the game against the
Sacramento Kings at Xfinity Mobile Arena on January 29, 2026 in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. The 76ers defeated the Kings 113-111.
[93]Announcements
[94]
Dan McQuade, 1983–2026
[95]1104Comments
[96][IMG]
[97]Tom Ley
January 28, 2026
[98]Dan McQuade sits in a blue chair, which is big and fake leather-ish, and
has big arms on it. He has his head resting on his left arm, which is on the
left arm of the chair. He has long light brown hair, a beard cropped to his
face, and I dunno I'd say he's pretty handsome, but I am biased as I am the
subject of the photo. Dan is wearing a red shirt with a grey and white tabby
cat's face on it, with a rose under (and patially covering) the cat. Under that
it says DEFECTOR with the 4 degrees slant logo. He has on blue shorts or pants
(they're shorts, I know they're shorts), they're not jeans but they're not
sweats, like a sort of inbetween situation. There's a hospital admit bracelet
on his left arm. His right arm is on the other arm of the couch.
[99]Cycling
[100]
Double Kangaroo Chaos Will Reverberate Across The Cycling Season
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[102][hea]
[103]Patrick Redford
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[104]The peloton rides past a kangaroo road sign during the Tour Down Under UCI
Men's Cycling in Adelaide on January 25, 2026.
[105]Podcasts
[106]
How Do You Make A Podcast When The World Is On Fire?
[107]4Comments
[108]A headshot of Jae Towle Vieira
[109]Jae Towle Vieira
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[110][2025_NormalGossip_LogoArt_16_9_Loc]
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Bill Belichick Becomes The Target Of Someone Else’s Pettiness, For A Change
[113]158Comments
[114][rat]
[115]Ray Ratto
January 28, 2026
[116]Head coach Bill Belichick of the North Carolina Tar Heels gives a thumbs
up during the ACC Football Kickoff at Hilton Charlotte Uptown on July 24, 2025
in Charlotte, North Carolina. He looks real weird doing it.
[117]NFL
[118]
Heartwarming: Miserable Man Frustrated In Ultimately Insignificant Way
[119]252Comments
[120][Vic]
[121]David Roth
January 28, 2026
[122]New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick announces he is leaving the
team during a press conference at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough,
Massachusetts, on January 11, 2024.
[123]See all posts
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[49] https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3mbpd7zecxc2p
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[56] https://defector.com/jd-vance-is-a-hog-thatll-eat-any-slop
[57] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/former-ice-workers-trump-violence-by-design-renee-good/
[58] https://www.cjr.org/laurels-and-darts/ice-minnesota-fraud-somali-community-nick-shirley-viral-debunked-video-dhs-surge.php
[59] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hundreds-federal-agents-are-headed-minnesota-noem-says-rcna253547
[60] https://www.theverge.com/tech/856948/nick-shirley-minnesota-daycare-fraud-influencer-media-cycle
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