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Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on Twitter and/or BlueSky.
George Clooney says CBS and ABC should have told Trump, ‘Go fuck yourself.’
I concur. We are in the midst of an epidemic of cowardice. Every corporation and college and law firm that bent the knee should have said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ But it goes beyond that. Every university and corporation that bent the knee to progressive speech cops should have said the same thing. I don’t care whether the bullying and threats come from the Right or the Left or the Middle, from the top-down or ground-up, the only answer to a bully is, ‘go fuck yourself.’
Persuade me, make your case, argue vehemently and I’ll listen, but once the bullying starts, it’s go fuck yourself. Every single time, to every single bully, now and forever, world without end, amen.
One has to laugh at the projection behind every GOP/MAGA claim about weaponizing the government. It was a weaponized FCC that prompted both CBS and ABC to throw money at Trump, and the weaponization of the DOJ is so blatant that no further comment need be made. Creating a House committee on weaponization and then putting a partisan hack like Jim Jordan in charge is beyond ludicrous, but that’s how the Republicans roll – tit for tat, even when there has been no tat.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are planning to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign, part of what the agency called a “wartime recruitment” strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post.
The spending would help President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda dominate media networks and recruitment channels, including through ads targeting people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear, according to a 30-page document distributed among officials in this summer detailing ICE’s “surge hiring marketing strategy.”
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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.” “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.
But to reach ICE’s “rapid hiring” goal of about 14,000 new Enforcement and Removal Operations officers, Homeland Security Investigations agents, ICE lawyers and support staff, the strategy document also calls for deploying more finely targeted digital advertising tools that can home in on viewers’ interests and lifestyles.
ICE recruitment ads, the plan said, would be shown to people with an interest in “military and veterans’ affairs,” “physical training” or “conservative news and politics” and would target people whose lifestyles are “patriotic” or “conservative-leaning.”
The strategy said to target listeners of conservative radio shows, country music and podcasts related to patriotism, men’s interests and true crime, as well as any accounts that resemble users with an interest in “conservative thought leaders, gun rights organizations [and] tactical gear brands,” the document said.
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Listeners on Spotify have heard ICE ads calling on recruits to “fulfill your mission,” leading to hundreds of complaints on the music service’s message board. One NASCAR viewer who saw the ads on live streams said in a Reddit post that they changed the channel, and separately told The Post that they had “never felt such distaste for our government airing such ads.
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The recruitment ads run separately from other large-scale DHS campaigns that celebrate Trump’s immigration agenda and urge undocumented immigrants to leave the U.S. DHS has awarded more than $200 million in contracts this year to People Who Think and Safe America Media, two marketing firms linked to Republican political consultants, federal contracting records show. Representatives from the firms did not respond to requests for comment.
Those efforts, too, have relied on ad-targeting techniques more commonly used by corporate marketing campaigns. The ad library for Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, shows that DHS has spent more than $1 million on “self-deportation” ads in the last 90 days targeted to people interested in “Latin music,” “Spanish as a second language” and “Mexican cuisine.”
On a message board for the music streaming service Pandora, some users were furious about the ads they called “fearmongering … propaganda.” One user, who said she is a U.S. citizen who likes listening to reggaeton, said she had been overwhelmed by DHS commercials “implying I am an undocumented immigrant and instructing me to ‘go home’” that played in “nearly every other ad slot I hear.”
@Michael Reynolds: @Charley in Cleveland: Give me a reason to believe CBS under Ellison has any interest in resisting Trump. Seems to me the goal is an oligarch owned, regime aligned, news source.
Americans suffered a litany of horrors thanks to the Trump administration during 2025 – refusal to disburse emergency aid, soaring measles cases, collapsing small businesses, vindictive prosecutions, wanton destruction of the federal government, and (soon) soaring health insurance premiums. But few incidents were more shocking than the two-month siege of Chicago, in which America’s third-largest city was terrorized by a gang of violent, sadistic thugs.
The gang members in question were, of course, agents of the Trump administration, mainly although not all from ICE — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If you think I’m being hyperbolic in calling them sadistic thugs, read the Chicago Tribune’s long article about Operation Midway Blitz, which describes scene after scene of what went down:
What happened here for more than two months is unlike anything in recent American history: the federal government sending agents dressed for war into neighborhoods of the country’s third-largest city to arrest mostly people who look Latino and to ask questions later. To target people largely on the basis of their skin color, on the presumption that they may be in the country without documentation, or that they may have a criminal record, or an association with a gang.
Trump officials claimed that they were cracking down on violent crime committed by illegal aliens, but their own operation demonstrated, better than any conventional statistical analysis, that claims of an immigrant crime wave are bogus. The Tribune found that “only about 1.5% of those detained for immigration-related reasons had been convicted of a violent felony or sex crime.”
Lots more with statistics at the link. Link includes other links, e.g. to the Chicago Tribune.
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George Clooney says CBS and ABC should have told Trump, ‘Go fuck yourself.’
I concur. We are in the midst of an epidemic of cowardice. Every corporation and college and law firm that bent the knee should have said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ But it goes beyond that. Every university and corporation that bent the knee to progressive speech cops should have said the same thing. I don’t care whether the bullying and threats come from the Right or the Left or the Middle, from the top-down or ground-up, the only answer to a bully is, ‘go fuck yourself.’
Persuade me, make your case, argue vehemently and I’ll listen, but once the bullying starts, it’s go fuck yourself. Every single time, to every single bully, now and forever, world without end, amen.
2026: The international year of GFY.
One has to laugh at the projection behind every GOP/MAGA claim about weaponizing the government. It was a weaponized FCC that prompted both CBS and ABC to throw money at Trump, and the weaponization of the DOJ is so blatant that no further comment need be made. Creating a House committee on weaponization and then putting a partisan hack like Jim Jordan in charge is beyond ludicrous, but that’s how the Republicans roll – tit for tat, even when there has been no tat.
Cowboy up! ICE wants you!
“ICE ads”
(Gift linky)
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@Michael Reynolds: @Charley in Cleveland: Give me a reason to believe CBS under Ellison has any interest in resisting Trump. Seems to me the goal is an oligarch owned, regime aligned, news source.
Krugman on Immigrant Derangement Syndrome:
“Krugman”
Lots more with statistics at the link. Link includes other links, e.g. to the Chicago Tribune.