Seattle’s communist Mayor Katie Wilson has announced plans to mobilize the city’s police force to gather intelligence on ICE agents conducting immigration enforcement operations and share that information with “community partners” on the streets.
Wilson said she will also bar federal immigration officers from utilizing city-controlled property, “including parks, parking lots, plazas, vacant lots, garages, and Seattle Center – for civil immigration enforcement.”
The mayor urged other local government entities, including the Seattle School District and Seattle Municipal Court, to adopt similar restrictions.
“Whoever you are, and wherever you come from: if Seattle is your home, then this is your city,” Wilson said in a statement.
Specifically, the mayor directed the Seattle Police Department “to investigate, verify, and document reports of immigration enforcement activity.”
Under the mayor’s plan, if a federal immigration enforcement operation is underway in the city, officers will be sent to the location to document the activity “with in-car and body-worn video, verify the identification of apparent federal agents, and secure scenes of potentially unlawful acts to gather evidence for prosecutors,” KOMO News reported.
Additionally, the city will mandate “closer cooperation between departments and community [anti-ICE] organizations, sharing information through a hotline operated by a community-led partner to connect residents with resources and support.”
Wilson also announced the launch of the Stand Together Seattle Initiative, inviting private property owners to post notices stating that federal agents may not access their property without a warrant.
City employees will receive training on how to report and respond to federal law enforcement activity and “conduct privacy reviews to limit potential data exposure, including reviewing data-sharing agreements in vendor contracts.”
The self-identified Democrat-Socialist said the city will allocate $4 million, previously appropriated by the City Council, to left-wing organizations providing legal defense to illegal aliens and “community support.”
Wilson urged the city to move quickly to organize and “keep people safe.”
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes said officers will continue to focus on public safety regardless of immigration status and comply with laws barring participation in immigration enforcement. While the department has no authority over federal agents or policies, Barnes said officers will document incidents if notified.
“The Seattle Police Department’s primary responsibility is the life safety of all people,” he said.
“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” — Albert Einstein
So true. Viktor Frankl, in “Man’s Search for Meaning,” also wrote of purpose and goals as central to a happy life. People will often let you down, and people are not under your control. Your goals are largely under control. Show me a person without goals or purpose, and you will be showing me an unhappy person. Relationships with people and material things can contribute to a meaningful life, for sure; but if you try to replace goals with other people or with things, you will be chronically disappointed.
Perhaps the most discouraging condition of the modern age is the absolute breakdown in communication among members of society. It once seemed reasonable to expect that the Internet and social media might aid in our understanding of each other. Instead, online forums are filled with people who speak the same language but interpret words entirely differently.
With the arrest of former CNN commentator Don Lemon for allegedly violating the religious rights of worshipers in Minneapolis, Democrats and the corporate news media have universally condemned Attorney General Pam Bondi for somehow “infringing” upon Lemon’s First Amendment rights as a so-called “journalist.” They intentionally ignore how Lemon joined others in storming a church, intimidating congregants, and causing emotional harm to those worshipers (including children) who understandably felt as if they were under attack. Lemon and his apologists continue to defend the organized raid of a Christian service as some kind of “protest” and describe the unwanted intruders as “protesters.” For those who were made to suffer through the invasion, however, their ordeal felt like an act of terrorism perpetrated by terrorists whose intent was to scare those assembled to worship.
When society can’t agree upon the difference between “protest” and “terrorism,” we have a serious problem. We have seen this dilemma play out all over the Minneapolis area recently. Democrat officials describe federal agents conducting lawful arrests as “terrorists” and “Nazis” and defend criminal illegal aliens as “victims.” Trained mobs of leftist agitators who intentionally obstruct the professional duties of law enforcement officers insist on calling themselves “legal observers” and “peaceful protesters.” When Democrat officials and members of the corporate news media describe people who commit crimes as “legal” and “peaceful,” it is impossible for society to share any common respect for the law.
As a society, we have been debating government attacks on free speech and government-engineered censorship with increased frequency at least since the presidency of Barack Obama. Obama was the first modern American president to really go on offense against what he called “fake news,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation.” He started the pressure campaign on Silicon Valley’s tech titans to “police” their social media sites for “false” information. While many of us vocally objected to this incipient collective of government and industry “experts” deciding for the rest of us what is “true,” Obama and his supporters insisted that “incorrect” information constituted an unacceptable national security threat.
But how can a society that disagrees about the distinctions between “protest” and “terrorism” or “criminal obstruction” and “legal observation” possibly decipher what is “correct” and “incorrect” information? When people with power accord themselves the additional power to declare what is “true,” a viewpoint monopoly inevitably rises to crush dissent. For free speech to function in any authentic form, the public sphere must remain a space where all information — whether true or false — is vigorously debated.
Otherwise, all we have is State-sanctioned dogma — or what the quietly dissenting members of communist societies once derisively referred to as “political correctness.” In a distressing sign of collapsing respect for free speech across the West, too many nations today actually police citizens’ speech in order to ensure that their thoughts and words comply with narratives constructed and deemed “correct” by the government. They do this despite having emerged victorious from a twentieth-century Cold War that routinely distinguished Western respect for freedom of speech from the suffocating Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union’s speech police.
The divisions within society have become so great that Democrats and Republicans in the United States can’t even agree about what should be protected as inviolable free speech. Conservatives and other non-leftists have felt the sting of censorship since Obama’s presidency. Without explicit warnings or explanations, Big Tech companies began removing online advertisers and other sources of revenue from conservative websites. Social media companies covertly limited the visibility (and therefore influence) of conservative writers. Search engines relegated popular conservative publications to obscurity by burying their keyword matches many pages back in relevant hits. Without any official announcements from government or corporate authorities, it became clear that conservative voices were being targeted for elimination.
Since Obama’s presidency, that cancerous viewpoint discrimination metastasized in many directions: Banks closed the accounts of conservative publications and institutions. Web hosts refused to support conservative websites. After the 2020 election, the titans of Big Tech conspired to censor any Americans who argued that various forms of electoral fraud had handed Joe Biden the presidency. The Biden administration piggybacked on Silicon Valley’s embrace of censorship by working with social media companies to censor anyone who disagreed with the government’s COVID policies. That censorship became so pronounced that even medical research was targeted for deletion under the pretense that concerns for “public health” and “national security” justified the censorship of scientific debate. As censorship of the 2020 election and COVID became more widespread, those who were doing the censoring kept pushing the envelope. For a while, it really looked as if Democrat-embraced narratives concerning everything from man-made “global warming” to “transgenderism” would be declared sacrosanct and too “politically correct” for Americans to debate. Feeling emboldened to declare “public truths,” the Biden administration turbocharged Obama’s initial directive for social media censorship by building the architecture for a “Disinformation Governance Board” whose purpose was unapologetically directed toward limiting conservative points of view.
For Republicans, conservatives, and other non-leftists, Democrats’ collusion with Silicon Valley to censor information deemed “untrue” constituted an unparalleled attack on Americans’ free speech. As with so many other conflicts in society today, ordinary Democrats didn’t recognize this threat at all. When they did acknowledge that conservative voices were being silenced, many immediately justified those infringements on Americans’ natural rights by repeating Obama’s original propaganda that “fake news,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and even simply information that fellow leftists judged as “harmful” to society deserved no First Amendment protections.
Perhaps more troubling, even as Democrats argue for mass censorship, they portray themselves as victims of censorship. When parents insist on protecting their children from “transgender” indoctrination, sexually explicit guides encouraging minors to engage in adult activities, and outright pornography, Democrats pretend that parental supervision violates free speech. When the FCC reprimands Jimmy Kimmel for lying to the American public by falsely blaming Charlie Kirk’s assassination on President Trump’s MAGA movement (instead of a leftist in a gay relationship with a “trans” furry and someone who allegedly disparaged Charlie’s Christian faith as a form of “hate”), Democrats pretend that Kimmel (who enjoys more free speech than almost anyone in America) is being censored. When Don Lemon joins a gang of leftist agitators to trespass inside a church, disrupt worship services, and terrorize those assembled to commune with God, the corporate news media pretend that the person doing the terrorizing is somehow a “victim” of government attacks on the First Amendment.
Right now in America censorship of non-leftists is justified, while any pushback against leftist orthodoxy is falsely portrayed as censorship. If this corrosive double standard weren’t already obvious, “comedians” such as Stephen Colbert make it more glaringly so each day. Just last week Colbert “joked” that federal agents who enforce America’s immigration laws are worse than Nazi Germany’s SS troops. Unlike members of that Nazi paramilitary organization, who would have surely imprisoned or murdered Colbert before he even had a chance to speak, ICE and Border Patrol agents put their lives on the line every day to arrest pedophiles, rapists, and murderers illegally residing in the United States. Colbert calls those law enforcement officers “Nazis,” and he will continue to enjoy the privilege of expressing his vile viewpoints on television.
However, when ordinary conservatives are censored online, Colbert says nothing. The powerful play “victim,” while the powerless are targeted and silenced. We may speak the same language, but our words don’t mean the same things.
THERE ARE NO MODERATE DEMOCRATS. The Party is radicalized. That’s what radicalized means. The Party is on the fast track to totalitarianism. Wake up!
In New York City and Virginia, Democratic Communists seek to minimize prison time — or even release — violent felons. They are working on the legislation at this moment, in Virginia. Their focus appears to be letting violent felons out. In Minnesota, it’s the same. It’s not immigrants they’re supporting so much as violent felons who aren’t citizens. Why do Democrats seethe with rage at the idea of violent felons being held accountable for their actions? They have no such problem with grandmothers peacefully protesting abortion or the 2020 election results spending the rest of their days in prison, often without due process as during the Biden regime. But a convicted murderer, rapist or terrorist sitting in prison? “Set them free,” scream today’s progressives. Something deeply sick, sadistic and sinister is at work in the views of the Party and those who support it.
“Marxist Democrats learned well from their Bolshevik mentors. Communism cannot take over a Rational, Law and Order nation. Communists must create cultural chaos (e.g., Welfare State, Welfare Fraud, CRT, DEI, Trigger Warnings, Classroom chaos, Failed Reading Methods, BLM, Occupy Wall Street, Boys in Girls sports, Illegal Alien Invasion, Common Core Math, Tik Tok mania, Video Games, etc.) to attack Reason and simultaneously defund and attack the agents enforcing Law & Order so that Communist thugs can ruthlessly take over the cities, then states, then the nation.”
“If you show up in a war zone, armed, and harass the soldiers trying to enforce the law, it’s not very good judgment and you’re going to get what you deserve.”
This seems so obvious, but to millions of befuddled, brainwashed or simply bad people — it isn’t obvious. Democrats and leftists are professional victims. They see themselves as victims when they are prevented from victimizing others. They feel as if they have a right to control others through all their socialism, forced vaccines, rigged elections, open borders, liberty for convicted violent felons, censorship, gun confiscation, woke madness and green totalitariaism — and if others resist or push back in ANY way, they cry and scream like babies, demanding to be appeased. We must stop appeasing and coddling leftists. President Trump is a gift, and they deserve far, far worse.
There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.
To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.
— Ayn Rand (Anthem)
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Somewhere along the way, taxes stopped being about roads, courts, and national defense.
They now exist to sustain worthless politicians and to reward the friends, donors, contractors, and constituencies that keep them in power.
Money is taken from everyone, filtered through Washington, and handed back to the favored few, all while being sold as compassion.
That isn’t a revenue system. It’s a patronage system.
A system built to serve itself has forfeited the right to exist. It’s time to bring the current federal income tax system to an end.
— Senator Chris McDaniel
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All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
— Frank Herbert, Author Of Dune.
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They must be hiding something very big in Minnesota to send their foot soldiers there from all over the country! They’re rattled, the fraud’s getting exposed, and enforcement isn’t slowing down. Keep the pressure on.
— Elon Musk
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Why do supporters of American Communism fighting ICE get to have guns, while nobody else does?
Ayn Rand wrote, “Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”
She nailed it.
Because I am a therapist, people always ask me: “What is self-esteem?”
In part, self-esteem refers to the attitude that you have a right to your OWN life, and to live for your OWN sake.
In line with Rand’s quote, socialism (which is tyranny) is incompatible with self-esteem.
In short: Freedom (economic and otherwise) is the mental oxygen you breathe. Your self-esteem will choke under socialism. And if you possess any self-esteem at all, you could never support socialism.
Contrary to repeated assurances by the Federal Chancellor, the German state apparatus is growing at an accelerating pace. What we are witnessing before our eyes is the transformation of the economy into a command economy.
You may recall: In the days between last year’s federal election and the appointment of the new government, a political window opened in which Germany committed fundamental breaches of its own fiscal rules. The outgoing Bundestag decided on a redefinition of the debt brake and ultimately executed its substantive demise by outsourcing massive new debt.
The legitimization of financing gimmicks, the establishment of sectoral exemptions and special funds constitutes a fiscal original sin. It opens the door wide for the state to finance administration, the welfare system, and economic policy interventions with ever more debt. Taxpayers are left holding the bag for this budgetary deregulation, while capital markets — thanks to the hypothetically unlimited backstop of the European Central Bank — remain wide open. Fiat credit flows freely, the state sector expands, and in doing so crowds out the productive forces of society.
The Classic Bureaucracy-Reduction Rhetoric
Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz used this phase of political power vacuum in April to offer glimpses into his political agenda. Alongside well-worn political platitudes such as “switching into growth mode” and launching an “investment offensive,” one familiar media trope made its appearance: cutting bureaucracy.
At first glance, cutting bureaucracy sounds citizen-friendly and suggests a responsible approach to public finances. A lean state would be tangible proof of serious fiscal policy and a guarantee that the private sector — the true engine of societal performance — is not burdened unnecessarily with documentation requirements and bureaucratic drudgery.
Friedrich Merz knows this. Cutting bureaucracy sounds good. It sounds reasonable. And it has devolved into a hollow political phrase — cheap to invoke while, at the same time, a veritable hyperstate is being constructed.
For it is public administration itself — now employing 5.5 million people — that exposes the political rhetoric as fiction. The gigantic special fund, adding €50 billion in new debt annually, must be administratively distributed. Thousands of individual subsidy projects must be reviewed, approved, and monitored. This requires massive bureaucratic expansion. Merz and Klingbeil were well aware of this when they wove the narrative of a lean state into their media messaging.
Moreover, since it has become clear that the conflict in the Donbas is not going away anytime soon, the build-up of a substantial military-industrial production system has emerged — under the shadow of stoked fears of Russia — alongside the green “art economy.” This year, Germany’s defense budget amounts to €120 billion. Distributing these additional funds equally necessitates additional layers of public administration, from ministerial departments down to local governments.
A Man of the Strong State
Friedrich Merz is by no means a man of the lean state. He is a committed advocate of centralized industrial steering under political primacy. He believes Germany can successfully pursue its transformation toward a green and militarized command economy through massive borrowing.
Politics now interprets the decline of German industrial production as a mandate to deliberately repurpose empty factories for arms manufacturing.
At the same time, the deep economic crisis — having already cost Germany 400,000 industrial jobs since 2019 — is largely kept out of public debate. Meanwhile, the public sector is being transformed into a buffer for an impending labor market catastrophe, expanding its workforce by roughly two percent annually.
By the end of the third quarter of 2025 alone, employment in public services, education, and healthcare increased by 205,000, according to Focus. Without disparaging these jobs, it must nonetheless be emphasized that they represent social services that must first be financed by value creation in the private sector.
In manufacturing — the core of Germany’s economic strength — around 143,000 jobs were cut last year. Fewer than eight million people now work in this fundamental sector. The automotive industry alone laid off more than 60,000 workers last year — six percent of its total workforce in Germany. This reflects a dramatic collapse in production activity, which has lost more than 15 percent of its volume across all industrial sectors since 2018.
The causes of this economic decline are well known: a self-inflicted energy crisis, high fiscal burdens, and mounting competitive pressure from China, India, and the United States — countries not subjected to the same regulatory pressure continuously imposed by the German state and the European Union.
We recall what Friedrich Merz promised in April of last year: to reduce bureaucratic costs — estimated by the ifo Institute at around €146 billion annually — by 25 percent, while simultaneously shrinking public-sector employment by eight percent over the coming years due to demographic effects alone.
A Distorted Reality
Ignorance or deception? The brazenness with which Merz distorted political reality at precisely this point is striking when viewed against the continued expansion of the public sector. People are migrating out of the productive parts of the economy into the state apparatus out of sheer self-preservation — the very apparatus that represents the greatest destroyer of economic performance.
Germany is facing a profound economic asymmetry that is being deliberately intensified by political action.
The expansion of the German state apparatus, which has pushed the government share of GDP above 50 percent, reveals one thing clearly: the social dislocations caused by a politically engineered energy crisis and subsequent deindustrialization are being papered over with cheap credit. More state, less private economy. New government debt is nothing more than confirmation that policymakers are rejecting reform pressure and shifting the costs of delay onto future generations.
If this debt camouflage succeeds — leading to net new borrowing exceeding 5.5 percent this year once the finance minister’s accounting tricks are included — politics buys time. Time it urgently needs in its battle against the economic reality of the green transformation.
The question is: how long can the federal government postpone unavoidable reforms through the credit pump? The social costs of open-border policies and the delayed adaptation of the welfare state to economic reality are accumulating into a socioeconomic fiasco — one that will unfold abruptly once capital markets begin to question Germany’s creditworthiness.
Yes, “our” backs. Republicans are killing conservatism. They are too quick to acquiesce to what seems (to them) to be Democrat reasonableness, but is really Democrat destructiveness.
Here are the two problems American voters face because of “maverick” congressional Republicans:
Their own pride in their alleged integrity forbids them to do what the voters want them to do. They believe they know better.
Their non-combative (weak) nature is a feature, not a bug, and it’s killing the conservative agenda.
Frankly, I’d like to strangle any Republican who does not support what Trump is doing. Our votes this last election gave Trump a mandate to do what we voted him to do, not to do what some egocentric false-pride congressman thinks is a better idea. We don’t want their better ideas, we want Trump’s better ideas. His track record proves that he knows things few others can figure out. That is a gift. The rest of us don’t have it.
I don’t know what Republican congressmen and senators think they are doing, but this I can tell them most assuredly: The American voter abhors their willingness to cave to Democrats and we hope their respective keisters will be primaried so we can get some courageous vertebrates sitting in those chairs.
The Quislings in our party are paying far too much attention to their local issues and not enough to the grand national mandate Trump received when he was elected. The Quislings pretend to be measured, moderate, pensive, calculating, …better. They are none of those things. In fact, they may as well be Democrats. We voters are sick of them.
It is way past due that “moderate” Republicans take a leaf from the Democrat playbook and vote loyally the way the leadership wants them to vote, not the way weaklings vote. Do they have a clue how weak they are? And in their weakness, they are killing Trump’s agenda, an agenda we the voters strongly approve of and voted for. How can it be clearer? Stop standing in the way of Trump’s agenda, which is the MAGA agenda. The margin is too thin for that kind of disloyalty to the voting public.
You won’t catch a Democrat doing that excrement. That is why we have so many problems getting Trump’s agenda passed; because some Republicans think they know better, are better. They don’t. And they aren’t.
NOTE TO REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS: We don’t want your moderation. People in the middle of the road get run over. We are in a war for the soul of America and you are a roadblock. Vote with Trump or kiss your derriere goodbye.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 