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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.”
…
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.
..
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.
..
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.
In keeping with my decades long new year’s eve tradition, I’ll go to bed well before midnight and skip the whole thing. The way work’s been this past month and a half, I may go to bed by 6 pm if I make it that early.
The internet has provided options for watching the New Year’s Eve celebration and still tucking oneself into bed at a reasonable (for an old guy) hour. When I remember, I’ll watch the celebration in Paris or London, which are happening at the much more reasonable 6pm or 7 EST
@gVOR10:
It’s why I favor Netflix over Paramount at risk of angering @Eddie. Worse for movies, better for the country. Although best of all would be an independent WarnerBros.
It’s hard to describe succinctly, so I’m stealing this from the brief description at Good reads: “But when we look closer, we find that most of these monsters aren’t God’s opponents–they are God’s entourage.”
the reason I recommend it is that I’ve long held a very dim view of the Biblical god. This scholar surpasses me in this regard, and provides the receipts to boot.
I wholly agree with you. While Netflix purchasing WB is bad for the film/TV business. It’s much better, long term, for the country and democracy, than Paramount/Skydance taking it over and killing CNN and other assorted businesses as tributes to Trump.
Regardless of what the critics say, CNN is still a very profitable business, spitting out more than $400M yearly in free cash flow, and is profitable to the tune of hundreds of million dollars per year.
The Ellison’s want WB so that they can kill CNN for Trump. Hopefully, the WB board holds firm.
@Michael Reynolds: One of the most disturbing aspects of civil society’s response to Trump’s authoritarian impulse is the degree to which a number of powerful actors (law firms, universities, media empires) didn’t even put up a mock fight.
@Michael Reynolds: @EddieInCA: Pretty clearly, there are massive problems with Netflix winning that contest, but it is absolutely more preferable than the Ellison play.
On Netflix v The Late Paramount, I read the Netflix deal would not include Warner’s cable channels, especially CNN. Therefore the wingnut oligarchs should be able to acquire that without the need to buy all of Warner.
Isn’t the purchase of Warner Brothers usually the start of a an or decline into irrelevance for the purchaser?
From Time-Warner to AOL-Time-Warner to Discovery-Warner…
Was it good for AT&T? It’s like their march to own the world just stopped dead after they got Warner Brothers.
Maybe we should be hoping for the worst possible new owner. It’s the Afghanistan of business acquisitions — well positioned, makes sense on paper, has never worked out, but this time it will be different!
I’ve read some about mergers and acquisitions. There’s a lot of variance, but essentially the buyer tends to overpay for the assets acquired. This may or may not be fatal for the combined company. A lot depends on their status pre-merger/acquisition, their revenue streams, value of brands (if any), etc.
Sometimes the merger causes way more problems than it solves. Perhaps a classic case is Pan Am’s merger with National. They didn’t quite get the domestic network they wanted, and integrating National’s pilots at their prior seniority* really irked lots of Pan Am pilots (maybe the cabin crews as well).
This also applies mostly to mergers between large companies. When a large company buys a smaller one, like say when Google bought Youtube, the risks tend to be much smaller.
*Seniority is like the only measure that matters in commercial aviation as far as pilots and flight attendants are concerned. Pay, scheduling, and some promotions, are all determined by how long you’ve been working there. This is why few cockpit or cabin crew switch jobs between airlines. If they do, they have to start over.
@charontwo: I have seen one of those “go home immigrant” ads on YouTube. I’m not sure what I was tagged under, maybe “jazz lover”? I mean, I don’t hate Mexican/Latin music, but I don’t listen all the time.
Good lord, how repulsive. And if there’s a reaction like that in the public, good. If they are surprised, it’s because they haven’t been paying attention. Which in some ways is ok, since one should not have to pay attention to one’s government. But right now, that’s not really the case.
When it comes to blowing up alleged drug dealer boats, I think this bit from Rick & Morty captures the feelings of a large swath of the US population: they’re just robots
@Steven L. Taylor:
But the most disturbing (and disgusting) part in my mind was the combination of a plurality of the voters (who WANT this – combined with a minority who said, nah works for me) decided that the goal was for us to be all “good Germans” in 1938.
One of the most disturbing aspects of civil society’s response…
I’ve been re-reading some stuff on the fascist ascendancy to dominance in Italy and Germany, and the similarities re existing institutions bending the knee are quite striking.
And the US institutions don’t even have the excuse of the fascist use of systematic physical violence, just threats to their balance sheets.
“Oh Lord, make me act according to my convictions. But not yet.”
@JohnSF: A thing I find so disturbing is that Germany suffered terrible casualties, lost a world war, lost territory, was occupied by the victors, had to pay reparations, went through the Great Depression, and saw their currency collapse. With a democratic tradition dating back all of fifteen years. In the world’s premiere democracy the MAGA got into the same state because they’ve been told not to use the N word or the F word, were asked to wear a mask in an epidemic, and briefly saw 9% inflation.
Huh. The Iranian government may actually be in trouble. There are government buildings burning in multiple locations.
Getting way out ahead, there doesn’t seem to be a united front or leadership to the uprising so, if the Ayatollahs fall the country may fracture. I wish I knew more about the regional issues but I do know Baluchis and the second big ethnic group in the region, Pashtos, are Sunni. Baluchistan is snug up against Pakistan and Afghanistan. Will either or both intervene? They aren’t exactly best buddies. All very interesting.
********************@
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)
…
..
..
@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.
In keeping with my decades long new year’s eve tradition, I’ll go to bed well before midnight and skip the whole thing. The way work’s been this past month and a half, I may go to bed by 6 pm if I make it that early.
And I still have to get my COVID booster…
The internet has provided options for watching the New Year’s Eve celebration and still tucking oneself into bed at a reasonable (for an old guy) hour. When I remember, I’ll watch the celebration in Paris or London, which are happening at the much more reasonable 6pm or 7 EST
@gVOR10:
It’s why I favor Netflix over Paramount at risk of angering @Eddie. Worse for movies, better for the country. Although best of all would be an independent WarnerBros.
Unusually for me, I ‘m recommending a book I haven’t finished reading: God’s Monsters, by Esther J. Hamori.
It’s hard to describe succinctly, so I’m stealing this from the brief description at Good reads: “But when we look closer, we find that most of these monsters aren’t God’s opponents–they are God’s entourage.”
the reason I recommend it is that I’ve long held a very dim view of the Biblical god. This scholar surpasses me in this regard, and provides the receipts to boot.
@charontwo:
Oh, swell. Just what we need: 14,000 new Kyle Rittenhouses.
@Michael Reynolds:
I wholly agree with you. While Netflix purchasing WB is bad for the film/TV business. It’s much better, long term, for the country and democracy, than Paramount/Skydance taking it over and killing CNN and other assorted businesses as tributes to Trump.
Regardless of what the critics say, CNN is still a very profitable business, spitting out more than $400M yearly in free cash flow, and is profitable to the tune of hundreds of million dollars per year.
The Ellison’s want WB so that they can kill CNN for Trump. Hopefully, the WB board holds firm.
@Michael Reynolds: One of the most disturbing aspects of civil society’s response to Trump’s authoritarian impulse is the degree to which a number of powerful actors (law firms, universities, media empires) didn’t even put up a mock fight.
@Michael Reynolds: @EddieInCA: Pretty clearly, there are massive problems with Netflix winning that contest, but it is absolutely more preferable than the Ellison play.
On Netflix v The Late Paramount, I read the Netflix deal would not include Warner’s cable channels, especially CNN. Therefore the wingnut oligarchs should be able to acquire that without the need to buy all of Warner.
Isn’t the purchase of Warner Brothers usually the start of a an or decline into irrelevance for the purchaser?
From Time-Warner to AOL-Time-Warner to Discovery-Warner…
Was it good for AT&T? It’s like their march to own the world just stopped dead after they got Warner Brothers.
Maybe we should be hoping for the worst possible new owner. It’s the Afghanistan of business acquisitions — well positioned, makes sense on paper, has never worked out, but this time it will be different!
@Gustopher:
I’ve read some about mergers and acquisitions. There’s a lot of variance, but essentially the buyer tends to overpay for the assets acquired. This may or may not be fatal for the combined company. A lot depends on their status pre-merger/acquisition, their revenue streams, value of brands (if any), etc.
Sometimes the merger causes way more problems than it solves. Perhaps a classic case is Pan Am’s merger with National. They didn’t quite get the domestic network they wanted, and integrating National’s pilots at their prior seniority* really irked lots of Pan Am pilots (maybe the cabin crews as well).
This also applies mostly to mergers between large companies. When a large company buys a smaller one, like say when Google bought Youtube, the risks tend to be much smaller.
*Seniority is like the only measure that matters in commercial aviation as far as pilots and flight attendants are concerned. Pay, scheduling, and some promotions, are all determined by how long you’ve been working there. This is why few cockpit or cabin crew switch jobs between airlines. If they do, they have to start over.
@charontwo: I have seen one of those “go home immigrant” ads on YouTube. I’m not sure what I was tagged under, maybe “jazz lover”? I mean, I don’t hate Mexican/Latin music, but I don’t listen all the time.
Good lord, how repulsive. And if there’s a reaction like that in the public, good. If they are surprised, it’s because they haven’t been paying attention. Which in some ways is ok, since one should not have to pay attention to one’s government. But right now, that’s not really the case.
When it comes to blowing up alleged drug dealer boats, I think this bit from Rick & Morty captures the feelings of a large swath of the US population: they’re just robots
@Steven L. Taylor:
But the most disturbing (and disgusting) part in my mind was the combination of a plurality of the voters (who WANT this – combined with a minority who said, nah works for me) decided that the goal was for us to be all “good Germans” in 1938.
MAGAt’s try to bury this by releasing it late this afternoon.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-jack-smith-jan-6-congress-537fcb8673e385202c354a3e83897194?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share
Happy New Year to all!
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’ve been re-reading some stuff on the fascist ascendancy to dominance in Italy and Germany, and the similarities re existing institutions bending the knee are quite striking.
And the US institutions don’t even have the excuse of the fascist use of systematic physical violence, just threats to their balance sheets.
“Oh Lord, make me act according to my convictions. But not yet.”
@JohnSF: A thing I find so disturbing is that Germany suffered terrible casualties, lost a world war, lost territory, was occupied by the victors, had to pay reparations, went through the Great Depression, and saw their currency collapse. With a democratic tradition dating back all of fifteen years. In the world’s premiere democracy the MAGA got into the same state because they’ve been told not to use the N word or the F word, were asked to wear a mask in an epidemic, and briefly saw 9% inflation.
Huh. The Iranian government may actually be in trouble. There are government buildings burning in multiple locations.
Getting way out ahead, there doesn’t seem to be a united front or leadership to the uprising so, if the Ayatollahs fall the country may fracture. I wish I knew more about the regional issues but I do know Baluchis and the second big ethnic group in the region, Pashtos, are Sunni. Baluchistan is snug up against Pakistan and Afghanistan. Will either or both intervene? They aren’t exactly best buddies. All very interesting.