In the immediate aftermath of the ICE killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis last week, the Trump administration smeared her as a “domestic terrorist,” claiming that she had weaponized her vehicle. They labeled Good a “violent rioter” and insisted every new video angle proved their version of the truth: Good was a menace and the ICE agent a potential victim. That’s despite video evidence to the contrary, showing Good, by all appearances, trying to leave the scene of the altercation, while ICE agents acted aggressively. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, spent Sunday doubling down, insisting that Good had supposedly been “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.”  Last Thursday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz invoked Orwell’s 1984 to describe this break between what millions of people saw, and what Trump and his allies insisted had taken place: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he quoted. “It was their final, most essential command.” So, on Sunday, I joined the throng in Manhattan for one of many dozens of protests held around the country this past weekend. In the middle of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by raucous, defiant New Yorkers, I asked protesters the simple question: What did you see?  “I mean, it seems like the bottomless, self-radicalizing thing that the government is going through,” said Anne Perryman, 85, a former journalist. “Is there any point when they’re actually at the bottom, and they’re not going to get any worse? I don’t think so.” “I think there’s a small minority of Americans who are buying that,” said Kobe Amos, a 29-year-old lawyer, describing reactions to the government’s gaslighting. “It’s obviously enough to do a lot of damage. But if you look around, people are angry.” “I saw an agent that overreacted,” he added, “and did something that was what—I think it’s murder.” Protesters also described a growing resolve amid the anger sweeping the country. “This moment has been in the works for too long,” said Elizabeth Hamby, a 45-year-old public servant and mom. “But it is our time now to say this ends with us…Because we want to be a part of the work of turning this tide in a different direction.”

In another dizzying plot point around President Donald Trump’s attempts to federalize the National Guard, three judges on the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision on Monday that Trump has the authority to deploy the Guard in Portland.  > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by Mother Jones (@motherjonesmag) The ruling represents another turning point in legal battles taking place across the country, from Chicago to Washington, DC, and Los Angeles—all of which have been involved in lawsuits related to Trump’s troop deployments. While Oregon leaders continue to fight the Ninth Circuit’s decision, demanding a review by the full court, protesters have consistently shown up to the ICE facility in South Portland—driving the Trump administration’s ire and claims of a war-ravaged city under antifa siege.  But here’s the kicker: The ICE facility is just one block in a 145-square-mile city. Given that—and that even there, protests have been led by an army of inflatable animals—many question the validity of deploying the National Guard. After the No Kings protest on Saturday, hundreds flocked to the facility for a nonviolent protest, but federal agents had other plans. “I’m a veteran who fought for my country,” Daryn Herzberg, 35, said. “I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic. And what I’m seeing right now is a terrorist in the White House trying to call us terrorists while we are out here trying to stop our friends and neighbors from getting kidnapped.” In an intense confrontation, agents fired tear gas, flashbang grenades, and pepper balls for over five minutes straight. For many protesters, that aggression is nothing new—just another night at the facility.

A joyous, mocking menagerie of frogs, axolotls, and at least one giant pink hippo made its way down Seventh Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday, alongside thousands of others, in a defiant protest that formed part of the nationwide “No Kings” rallies. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by Mother Jones (@motherjonesmag) With limited visibility inside hot inflatable suits, the marchers’ steps were sometimes ginger. Amphibious, reptilian, and fantastical alike were repeatedly stopped by fellow protesters, photographers, and journalists like me—making progress slow and a bit hapless, adding to the general air of absurd exuberance. “Solidarity with Portland!” said Denise Cohen, a 59-year-old dog groomer and podcaster from upstate New York who was peering out from inside a unicorn costume, alongside her husband Marty (in a dinosaur outfit.) “I wanted frogs, but nobody had frogs,” she said, referencing the original protesters who donned the inflatables in Portland in recent months. “I tried to get a Portland frog outfit and they were sold out until November,” said Oscar Hernandez, 58, from Weehawken, New Jersey, dressed in a giant pink rhino costume and shuffling (or perhaps dancing—hard to tell) down the street. “You know, this is fun! This is, this is America. This is not a hate America rally,” he said, referring to how Trump and his team have been representing the mass gatherings. Rather than wearing an inflatable, financial analyst Christopher Hardwick, 46, appeared in hastily constructed drag, clutching a McDonald’s coffee, and adorned with black and yellow accessories “to make it look a little Proud Boy-y.” His goal was to reclaim the word “antifa” from the Trump administration. “I’m a big antifa girl now!” Keith Whitmer, 70, wanted to do the same. “I really don’t want the right-wing Republican Party to take antifa—the word antifa—and make it mean something bad, because it’s actually what we’ve been doing since the 1940s.”

It’s much more difficult, in fact, well nigh impossible, to call Portland, Oregon, a war zone when ICE agents are forced to stare down an inflatable bunny rabbit. Portlanders have deployed a new tactic to address the Trump administration’s attempted takeover and its false and inflammatory claims about their city: don’t fight, but mock, and dress up in ridiculous, adorable, instantly recognizable inflatable costumes.  It’s not the first time we’ve seen something like this. Kristi Noem’s photo-op at the Portland ICE facility, during which she stood atop the facility’s roof leering at protesters below, was awkwardly interrupted by the appearance of a person wearing a chicken suit. Apparently outraged by the insubordination, she then appeared at the White House and accused elected leaders of “covering up terrorism,” an accusation that has been denied by both Portland’s Mayor Keith Wilson and Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, both of whom happen to be Democrats. As the Antifa terrorist allegations escalate and fail to make any impression, federal agents have stepped up their use of force against protesters outside of the Portland ICE facility. While inflatable chickens, dogs, and frogs have a dance party, agents respond with tear gas, shooting pepper balls, and dragging people into the ICE facility. Often, they film these violent encounters as they are taking place. Saturday, October 11, marked another major escalation of force by the feds on peaceful protesters in Portland. At least ten arrests were made, and hundreds of less-lethal munitions were fired. Nonetheless, the ever-more creative Portland demonstrators were undeterred. From the Portland Frog Brigade to an emergency naked bike ride—which Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson found threatening—Portland is determined to put Trump on his heels by keeping Portland weird. “I’ve just never been more proud of Portland,” the SpongeBob Squarepants inflatable told me. “There is power in mockery…It’s a pretty effective tool to combat, I mean, overt fascism.”

President Trump is planning to ramp up his federal reach into local enforcement after first flooding the streets of DC with National Guard troops, and this week he promised to send troops to more cities—including Baltimore. Despite a federal judge ruling that Trump broke the law when deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this summer, Trump insisted during a press conference on Tuesday that his administration had “a right to do it because I have an obligation to do it to protect this country… and that includes Baltimore.” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has been speaking out in defense of his city, including in a sit-down interview this week with me. Scott pushed back against Trump’s claims, saying that this year, his city has witnessed “the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record. That’s a 50-year low, and that’s still not good enough for me.” The Washington Post recently reported that homicide rates in Baltimore have plummeted nearly 23 percent compared with the first half of 2024, while non-fatal shootings fell by nearly 20 percent. Scott also decried federal cuts to the very programs he says have been instrumental in reducing crime in Baltimore. “Community violence intervention, victim services, all of those kinds of services that have been cut,” he said. “What we want from the president is very simple — reinstating all the cuts that they’ve made to federal grants to programs that have been working to reduce violence.” Watch the full video here:

Since March, the Trump administration has dismantled a leading office at the Department of Homeland Security whose mission was averting terrorism and targeted violence. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, has been stripped of funding, and most of its 40-plus personnel have been fired, reassigned, or otherwise pushed out. Amid this process, the White House temporarily put in charge a 22-year-old Trump superfan who arched an eyebrow for his agency portrait and has zero leadership experience in government, let alone in national security. The demise of CP3 comes as the White House has diverted major law enforcement and security resources toward deporting undocumented immigrants. It also comes as high-profile acts of political violence have surged in the United States. The list of recent devastation includes an ISIS-inspired truck massacre in New Orleans, the bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, and a spate of antisemitic attacks—including the murder of a young couple working for Israel in Washington, DC; an arson attack against the governor of Pennsylvania; and a fiery assault on peaceful marchers in Boulder, Colorado. Last year, a healthcare CEO was gunned down point-blank in Manhattan, and President Trump barely avoided death from an assassin’s bullet on the campaign trail. Twelve days ago, a right-wing extremist in Minnesota targeted Democratic state lawmakers in a deadly gun rampage, killing former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her spouse, and gravely wounding two others. The nation is now also on heightened alert after Trump ordered the bombing of Iran, a major state sponsor of terrorism. Though political extremism has been rising, it is almost never the only factor in targeted violence, including with most, if not all, of the above cases. Most perpetrators are also driven by a mix of rage and despair over acute personal problems, such as financial or health crises—and many are suicidal. This complexity was a focus of CP3’s $18 million in annual grants to state and local partners. Drawing on long-established public health research, the office worked with law enforcement, educators, faith leaders, and others to use “upstream” interventions with troubled individuals who may be planning and moving toward violence. The work gained traction over the past couple of years, according to William Braniff, a military veteran and national security expert who was director of CP3 until March. He said that many states were working with the office to build this kind of strategy and that CP3 was flooded with $99 million in eligible grant applications—exceeding its funds by more than fivefold. He resigned when eight of his colleagues were fired without cause. “I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance,” Braniff told me. “A lot of the headquarters-based offices within DHS are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted.” As the wave of recent attacks shows, a variety of extremism is fueling the danger. Researchers have tracked growing acceptance and endorsement of political violence in America in recent years, particularly among people who identify as MAGA Republicans, a finding reaffirmed in a new national study from the Centers for Violence Prevention at University of California, Davis. > “We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our > democracy.” In response to my email asking for an explanation of the shutdown, DHS assistant secretary of public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said CP3 “plays an insignificant and ineffective role” in DHS counterterrorism efforts, and further claimed, without providing any evidence, that CP3 was “weaponized” under the Biden administration for partisan purposes. Braniff, who is now executive director of the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University, explained in our recent interview (lightly edited below for clarity) how CP3 built out its national model for violence prevention. He also spoke about what citizens and communities can do to counter the danger of political violence—and the disturbing normalization of it. First, can you talk a little bit about the CP3 strategy and how the programs worked? From school shootings and grievance-based workplace violence, to hate-fueled violence, to terrorism, we needed an approach out of the federal government that would address all of those. And so we looked to the public health community, and specifically the decades of work on violence prevention from places like the Centers for Disease Control—evidence-based programs for prevention of suicide, intimate-partner violence, violence against children, and community-based violence. And we said, well, what if we could apply those tested approaches to some of these more “exotic” forms of violence? For too long, and especially after 9/11, we exoticized terrorism as this foreign kind of violence, when in reality, underneath the manifestation, you have these very human things happening: individuals who have unaddressed risk factors in their lives. That might be an adverse childhood experience, trauma, or financial hardship. That might be social isolation. And these risk factors, when left unaddressed, might spur the individual to go seeking answers down dark rabbit holes that preach hate, that preach violence for the sake of it. And regardless of the way that violence might manifest later, there are these upstream preventative programs that we can put in place. So CP3 was the primary entity in the US government for creating these upstream programs, informed by public health. Social isolation is a massive risk factor for all kinds of negative health outcomes, including self harm and perpetration of violence. And so you look at these underlying risk factors and you say, well, we can actually mitigate against them. Very rarely in the national security realm do we get to talk about building positive programs that make us all happier and healthier and less susceptible to violence as a solution. Sometimes people still might gravitate towards violence. And in those instances, we invested in secondary prevention. These are multidisciplinary interventions, so that if someone makes an offhand comment about starting a racial holy war, accelerating the downfall of the government, or being an infamous school shooter, these ideations of violence are not dismissed. We created these programs so that bystanders had a place to refer someone they cared about. And the purpose wasn’t criminal justice, it was to get them access to help. > “You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from > more mental health professionals and social workers. We were bringing these > folks together and blending their assets.” Out of the 1,172 interventions that we funded through our grant program, 93.5 percent of the individuals who were exhibiting threatening behavior got help. They got access to a clinician or a caring professional. In 6.5 percent of the incidents, the persons had already broken the law or were an imminent threat to public safety, and they were referred to law enforcement. And that wasn’t the point of the intervention, but there was that safety net there for when that person really was an imminent risk to their community. We could balance public health and public safety through these multidisciplinary, evidence-based programs. There’s a lot of research on their efficacy, including to make sure that persons of color are getting equitable treatment and programs are not succumbing to implicit bias in schools and workplaces. And so there’s all sorts of value to these programs socially as well as economically. They’re much cheaper than criminal justice or the cost of violence. Given that we’re in this heightened environment of political extremism and attacks, why shut down CP3? What is your view of that? I don’t think that CP3 was targeted by the Trump administration specifically. I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance. A lot of the headquarters-based offices within the Department of Homeland Security are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted. Ignorance is not an excuse for what’s happening. The primary mission of DHS, as enshrined in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, is to prevent terrorism. And CP3 was the latest manifestation of an office within DHS that was trying to find a way to get traction in this prevention space. And we got it in the last couple of years. Eight states worked with CP3 to publish a state strategy, and when I left in March, another eight states were drafting their strategy with CP3’s help. Twenty-seven states had agreed to work with CP3 and were in the queue. So we were normalizing this at the state and local level. Why? Because it’s pragmatic. It’s cost-effective. It works. You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from more mental health professionals and social workers, because law enforcement officers are not equipped to do this kind of upstream intervention. We had $99 million of eligible grant applications for our $18 million grant pool, which means we were wildly oversubscribed. We were bringing these folks together and blending their assets. A whole range of political ideology and extremism feeds into targeted violence, but we also know there’s been a steady rise in far-right domestic terrorism in recent years. I’m curious how you view the long-term impact of losing this type of work in the federal government, particularly as it relates to things like Trump’s clemency for January 6 insurrectionists, including a lot of violent offenders who attacked police. Some groups associated with that event are again instigating on social media for potentially violent behavior. What message is this all sending, and what does it do in terms of the political environment that we’re in? It’s such a good set of questions. We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our democracy. And that is a potential death blow to a free and open society. It’s not to say that these things can’t gravitate back towards a norm of nonviolence. But right now we are creating permission structures for individuals to dehumanize the transgender community, to dehumanize Jews or equate their individual actions with that of the Israeli government, half a world away. We’re at risk of normalizing school shootings among youth who don’t imagine a healthy future for themselves and are succumbing to this kind of nihilistic manipulation that we’re seeing in [online extremist] movements like “764.” And when these norms are accepted at a societal level and encouraged at a political level, they become entrenched and really difficult to reverse. And so what we were doing at CP3 and what we’re doing now at my current organization at American University is trying to normalize prevention, the idea that we can and should build thriving communities where individuals don’t need to buy the violent empowerment that either a politician or an online groomer is selling that leads to violence. The things you’ve listed are incredibly concerning, and frankly, we all have to decide that we care about this issue. If we don’t, if we decide we’re going to be apathetic about it, the violence is going to win the day because it’s going to capture the news headlines, and the algorithms, and the path of least resistance is to surrender to violence as a norm in our current information environment. And so it’s going to take intentional decision making by all of us as individuals to decide that’s not the country or the community that we want to live in. So there are some real problems in our political system right now with a permission structure, as you describe it, for violence. Isn’t rejecting that part of not normalizing it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the techniques that we study and work with at PERIL is called video-based inoculation. It’s the idea that you can give individuals a microdose of some sort of manipulative tactic that they might come across on social media or cable news. And you give them this microdose of this manipulation so that they develop “antibodies” to it. They realize that they’re being manipulated. That is really important, for us to sort of throw sand in the gears of what otherwise spreads like wildfire when we’re passive consumers of information. And so with the last antisemitism video that we tested, individuals were 24 percent more likely to openly challenge manipulative material online if they saw the inoculating video first. So we think there’s a lot of promise there to engage all of us as stewards of our information environment. Is it your hope or expectation that this kind of prevention work will come back more strongly in the federal government in the future? Yes, it has to. The threat is growing and manifesting in more and different ways. There’s been nearly a 2,000-percent increase in mass casualty attacks in the United States since the early 1990s. There are approximately three violent attacks per day that either are plotted or carried out in the United States. School shootings are up linearly since the Columbine attack of 1999. Political assassinations are being normalized. We have to marshal resources to push back on this. I do believe it’ll come back—I think Americans will demand it, but only if they know that violence is preventable, which it is. If, instead, they’re told by their government or anyone else that this is just inevitable and we should be resigned to it, they may believe that. Instead of recognizing that the overwhelming majority of school shooters tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, and that nearly 50 percent of mass-casualty attackers tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, we’ll ignore that reality and just accept the violence. And so it’s really important that we continue to push on this now, but ultimately demand it of our federal government.

Trump has been on a spree this week: He’s pardoned or commuted the sentences of a host of people this week, tax fraudsters and TV personalities among them.  So, how do you get one of these pardons? In my new video, I point out that if you’re Black, you should probably know Trump’s “Pardon Czar,” Alice Marie Johnson. Trump just pardoned rapper NBA YoungBoy, who spent time in prison for gun charges, and Larry Hoover, founder of the Gangster Disciples gang. Johnson’s fingerprints appear to be all over the pardons. NBA YoungBoy even thanked her in a statement after his release.  Johnson herself was actually pardoned by Trump back in 2020. When she was released from prison in 2018, she’d served more than 20 years of a life sentence for her involvement in a multi-national cocaine operation in Memphis, TN, which had connections to a Columbian drug cartel. Her story was championed by the ACLU, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, and others. Now, her Instagram is full of pictures with Black rappers and entertainers, appearing to help turn pardons into loyalty to Trump from some Black entertainers, drawing more Black voters into his orbit.  Meanwhile, Trump is firing entire civil rights departments, militarizing the police, and ending corruption investigations into police departments known for targeting Black people.  It’s a bizarre sleight of hand. “Hey, look over here, I pardoned a Black person!”—while making it easier and easier to imprison Black people.

It’s been five years since George Floyd was murdered on a Minneapolis street in the Spring on 2020. Though far from novel, this particular act of state violence shocked the world and ignited one of the largest protest movements in modern history. In my latest video, I argue that this moment was much bigger than Floyd; from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the chains of mass incarceration, from slave codes to Jim Crow, the full weight of America’s long-standing commitment to anti-Blackness bore down on that moment and the months of protest that followed. People were energized: books written about Black authors topped the New York Times‘ bestseller lists, corporations pledged billions of dollars toward racial justice, and diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners were in high demand. From London to Lagos to Los Angeles, the world seemed to unite under one banner: Black Lives really do Matter. But five years later, it’s worth asking: What actually changed? The answer is complicated. In many ways, the mass awakening of 2020 gave way to a powerful retrenchment over the four years that followed. A year after the world marched for George Floyd, conservative politicians and pundits began rallying against so-called “Critical Race Theory”an academic field of study based on the honest examination of racism’s historical and present-day impact on society—and twisted it into a catch-all for anything conservatives didn’t like. Within a couple of years, Republican-led book bans would target bestselling titles that once spurred on a America’s “racial reckoning.” Nowhere is that clearer than in the debate over of police reform: the most substantive policy demand of the Black Lives Matter protests. Despite efforts by lawmakers like Senator Cory Booker and then-Senator Kamala Harris to introduce police reform legislation as early as June 2020, Congress ultimately failed to pass a bill curbing chokeholds, no-knock warrants, or qualified immunity. Instead, in many cities, police budgets grew and a dozen states have broken ground on large-scale police training centers — dubbed “Cop Cities” by critics. The penultimate act of America’s racial retrenchment came in the fall of 2024 when Donald Trump, buoyed by replacement theory fears and anti-“woke” campaign ads, was reelected president of the United States of America. We’ve seen the rapid deterioration of civil rights protections, a commitment to arming police with surplus military gear, and the cancellation of Biden-era federal investigations into the police departments involved in the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. All while his most vocal supporters call for a federal pardon for Derek Chauvin, the officer convicted of murdering Floyd. Yet, despite all of this, I think there is still reason for hope. If 2020 was The Awakening, and the last four years have been The Retrenchment, then 2025 may mark the beginning of a new phase: The Reevaluation. I think the 2020 BLM protests were about bolstering Black social and political power, and despite all of the attacks that effort has endured, Black people aren’t giving up on it any time soon. In Louisiana, Black voters helped defeat a constitutional amendment that would have made it easier to try children as adults — a move that many viewed as a veiled attempt to deepen mass incarceration. We’re seeing it in economic protest too, with Black consumers leading boycotts of major corporations like Target, disrupting profit margins and forcing boardroom conversations. And we’re seeing it in grassroots organizing. Activists like Angela Rye and journalist Joy Reid are crisscrossing the country on the State of the People Power Tour, mobilizing and educating Black communities on how to build lasting political power from the ground up. So, five years later, when we ask what’s changed, maybe the most honest answer is that we changed; and that might be the most powerful change of all.

Why do Republicans and their enablers insist on fantasizing about one of the most evil empires in science fiction? In a recent CNN appearance, former Mitch McConnell adviser and GOP operative Scott Jennings went on the defense, justifying Emperor Palpatine’s violent vision for a galactic empire. When podcaster and contributor Van Lathan pointed out just one of the many war crimes the Empire engaged in—blowing up Princess Leia’s adopted home planet and massacring everyone on it—Jennings replied: “I think some could argue that it was warranted, given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.” The entire massacre of a planet is justified because of some “unelected hippies” and “protesters”? It turns out Jennings isn’t the only right-winger to defend the Empire’s actions—and specifically the destruction of an entire planet. For decades, the GOP and its allies have played with defending the Empire’s violence for the sake of order. (Republican and former FCC chairman Ajit Pai literally quoted Palpatine in a hearing once.) Now, of course, Star Wars is entirely science fiction. It’s not real. But this past week, the final episodes of Andor, Disney’s critical and audience hit about how the rebellion in the original trilogy came to be, dropped. And the show has pulled the Star Wars franchise into somewhat of a cultural renaissance, as its obvious point of view on authoritarianism marks a return to what made Star Wars: Dissecting the effects of state violence on the everyday people who work toward liberation. “I do think that looking at how Star Wars and other stories like it are used in our political conversation reveals something interesting about our political moment: Republicans are gunning for their own Galactic Empire, and they will blow up a planet to make it happen. Or in this case, they will blow up our country.”

For years, I’ve heard the familiar refrain: “America should be run like a business.” First, it came from the young Republicans at my small, conservative, undergraduate institution, advocating for Mitt Romney in 2012. More recently, it has become a justification for Elon Musk’s indiscriminate cuts to government spending alongside his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In a recent interview on Fox News, Musk claimed that a commercial company would have filed for bankruptcy by now if they were to operate the way that the federal government operates.  So I reached out to Mike Mechanic, a senior editor at Mother Jones, to ask if the government should be run more like a business. His answer was simple: That’s bonkers.  Not only does the government provide services and resources that do not easily map to the business world’s profit/loss framework, the government is, designed to be a corrective force to the excesses of business.  “The government does all sorts of things that you can’t put a number on the outcome,” says Mechanic. Watch part of my conversation with Mechanic here: