They Ransacked the US Capitol and Want the Government to Pay Them Back

Yvonne St Cyr strained her body against police barricades, crawled through a broken Senate window, and yelled “push, push, push” to fellow rioters in a tunnellike hallway where police officers suffered concussions and broken bones.

She insisted she did nothing wrong. A federal judge sentenced her to 30 months in prison and imposed $2,270 in financial penalties for her actions at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, declaring: “You have little or no respect for the law, little or no respect for our democratic systems.”

St Cyr served only half her sentence before President Donald Trump’s January 2025 pardon set her and almost 1,600 others free.

But her story doesn’t end there. St Cyr headed back to court, seeking a refund of the $2,270. “It’s my money,” the Marine Corps veteran from Idaho said in an interview with The Washington Post. “They took my money.” In August, the same judge who sentenced her reluctantly agreed, pointing to a legal quirk in her case.

“Sometimes a judge is called upon to do what the law requires, even if it may seem at odds with what justice or one’s initial instincts might warrant. This is one such occasion,” U.S. District Judge John D. Bates wrote in an opinion authorizing the first refund to a Jan. 6 defendant.

The ruling revealed an overlooked consequence of Trump’s pardon for some Jan. 6 offenders: Not only did it free them from prison but it emboldened them to demand payback from the government.

At least eight Jan. 6 defendants are pursuing refunds of the financial penalties paid as part of their sentences, according to a Post review of court records; judges agreed that St Cyr and a Maryland couple should be reimbursed, while five more are appealing denials. (St Cyr and the couple are still waiting to receive their payments, however.) Others are filing civil lawsuits against the government seeking millions of dollars, alleging politically tainted prosecutions and violations of their constitutional rights. Hundreds more have filed claims accusing the Justice Department, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies of inflicting property damage and personal injuries, according to their lawyer.

The efforts are the latest chapter in an extraordinary rewriting of history by the president and his allies to bury the facts of what happened at the Capitol, sustain the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and recast the Jan. 6 offenders as victims entitled to taxpayer-funded compensation.

“Donald Trump and the DOJ want taxpayers to reimburse a violent mob for the destruction of the U.S. Capitol. The Jan. 6 nightmare continues,” said Rep. Joe Morelle (D-New York), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees the Capitol’s security and operations.

The pro-Trump mob that ransacked the Capitol caused almost $3 million in damage, according to a 2022 estimate by the Justice Department. The losses included smashed doors and windows, defaced artwork, damaged furniture, and residue from gas agents and fire extinguishers. Defendants were sentenced to more than $1.2 million in restitution and fines, according to a tally by The Post.

But the government recovered less than $665,000 of those court-ordered payments, according to a source with firsthand knowledge who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) are pushing legislation — backed by some law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 — to block government payouts to rioters. Without any Republican co-sponsors, the legislation is not expected to proceed.

“The audacity of them to think they didn’t do anything, or to think that they’re right and then get their money back,” said former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn, who attended the sentencing of St Cyr and other Jan. 6 offenders. “It’s frustrating and it should not happen. They should have to pay more.”

Stacy Hager, a 62-year-old former warehouse supervisor, made his first trip to Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 6 rally. The lifelong Texan wasn’t that interested in politics before, but he was certain that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

Wearing a Trump hat and waving the Texas flag, Hager took photos and videos of himself roaming through the Capitol. He was convicted on four misdemeanor charges related to disorderly conduct and trespassing; he paid $570 in penalties and served seven months in prison, a punishment he describes as totally unjust and “a living hell.”

Hager still believes, fervently, that fraud marred the 2020 vote and that Trump won, though no new evidence has surfaced to contradict the findings of Justice Department officials, cybersecurity experts and dozens of judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans alike.

“You tell me why I shouldn’t be entitled to getting my money back,” Hager said. “The government took money from me for doing the right thing, for standing up for the people’s vote. That’s the reason we were there — for a free and fair election.”

About one month after Trump’s pardon in January 2025, Hager was the first of the Jan. 6 defendants to ask for his money back, court records show. “It’s a principle thing,”...

While the charges and punishments vary, the defendants seeking refunds share one legal quirk: All of them were appealing their convictions when Trump pardoned them on Jan. 20, 2025. After the pardon, courts vacated their convictions and dismissed their indictments following requests from federal prosecutors, as the Justice Department that once prosecuted the Jan. 6 defendants now takes their side. (...)

In the most far-reaching effort on behalf of Jan. 6 offenders, Missouri lawyer Mark McCloskey is trying to build support for a government-backed compensation panel, similar to the fund that has distributed billions of dollars to families of victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. McCloskey attracted national attention in 2020 when he and his wife pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their home; they pleaded guilty to firearms charges but were pardoned by the Missouri governor.

McCloskey said he has advocated for the Jan. 6 fund in four meetings with Justice Department officials, including Ed Martin, the director of a unit tasked with investigating Trump’s political opponents.

Martin, who helped plan and finance Trump’s rally that preceded the rampage through the Capitol, has said publicly that he supports “reparations” for Jan. 6 defendants.

Trump also has expressed support for government payouts. Asked about compensating Jan. 6 offenders in a March 2025 Newsmax interview, Trump said: “Well, there’s talk about that. … A lot of the people in government really like that group of people. They were patriots as far as I was concerned.”

by Beth Reinhard, Ellie Silverman and Aaron Schaffer, Washington Post/MSN |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Roaches gotta roach.]

It's Not Normal

Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.
Mrs Krabappel: It'll take you about six weeks, dear. 

-The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," S3E23, May 7, 1992

We are living through weird times, and they've persisted for so long that you probably don't even notice it. But these times are not normal.

Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.

6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).

Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.

But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an "access control" that you have to work around in order to make a modification.

For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you're only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with "unauthorized bread":

If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn't walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion "cooking robots" that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven't really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):

But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you'd embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful "System on a Chip" (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an "access control" that satisfies DMCA 1201.

Likewise, in 1998, "access controls" (also called "DRM," "technical protection measures," etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:

But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a "complementary good" that improves on it.

It's even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What's more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.

Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a "subscription":

A thing that keeps happening:

And happening:

And happening:

In fact, it happens so often I've coined a term for it, "The Darth Vader MBA" (as in, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further"):

Here's what this all means: any manufacturer who devotes a small amount of engineering work and incurs a small hardware expense can extinguish private property rights altogether.

What do I mean by private property? Well, we can look to Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

The right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

You can't own your iPhone. If you take your iPhone to Apple and they tell you that it is beyond repair, you have to throw it away. If the repair your phone needs involves "parts pairing" (where a new part won't be recognized until an Apple technician "initializes" it through a DMCA-protected access control), then it's a felony to get that phone fixed somewhere else. If Apple tells you your phone is no longer supported because they've updated their OS, then it's a felony to wipe the phone and put a different OS on it (because installing a new OS involves bypassing an "access control" in the phone's bootloader). If Apple tells you that you can't have a piece of software – like ICE Block, an app that warns you if there are nearby ICE killers who might shoot you in the head through your windshield, which Apple has barred from its App Store on the grounds that ICE is a "protected class" – then you can't install it, because installing software that isn't delivered via the App Store involves bypassing an "access control" that checks software to ensure that it's authorized (just like the toaster with its unauthorized bread).

It's not just iPhones: versions of this play out in your medical implants (hearing aid, insulin pump, etc); appliances (stoves, fridges, washing machines); cars and ebikes; set-top boxes and game consoles; ebooks and streaming videos; small appliances (toothbrushes, TVs, speakers), and more.

Increasingly, things that you actually own are the exception, not the rule.

And this is not normal. The end of ownership represents an overturn of a foundation of modern civilization. The fact that the only "people" who can truly own something are the transhuman, immortal colony organisms we call "Limited Liability Corporations" is an absolutely surreal reversal of the normal order of things.

It's a reversal with deep implications: for one thing, it means that you can't protect yourself from raids on your private data or ready cash by adding privacy blockers to your device, which would make it impossible for airlines or ecommerce sites to guess about how rich/desperate you are before quoting you a "personalized price":

It also means you can't stop your device from leaking information about your movements, or even your conversations – Microsoft has announced that it will gather all of your private communications and ship them to its servers for use by "agentic AI": (...)

Microsoft has also confirmed that it provides US authorities with warrantless, secret access to your data:

This is deeply abnormal. Sure, greedy corporate control freaks weren't invented in the 21st century, but the laws that let those sociopaths put you in prison for failing to arrange your affairs to their benefit – and your own detriment – are.

But because computers got faster and cheaper over decades, the end of ownership has had an incremental rollout, and we've barely noticed that it's happened. Sure, we get irritated when our garage-door opener suddenly requires us to look at seven ads every time we use the app that makes it open or close:

But societally, we haven't connected that incident to this wider phenomenon. It stinks here, but we're all used to it.

It's not normal to buy a book and then not be able to lend it, sell it, or give it away. Lending, selling and giving away books is older than copyright. It's older than publishing. It's older than printing. It's older than paper. It is fucking weird (and also terrible) (obviously) that there's a new kind of very popular book that you can go to prison for lending, selling or giving away.

We're just a few cycles away from a pair of shoes that can figure out which shoelaces you're using, or a dishwasher that can block you from using third-party dishes:

It's not normal, and it has profound implications for our security, our privacy, and our society. It makes us easy pickings for corporate vampires who drain our wallets through the gadgets and tools we rely on. It makes us easy pickings for fascists and authoritarians who ally themselves with corporate vampires by promising them tax breaks in exchange for collusion in the destruction of a free society.

I know that these problems are more important than whether or not we think this is normal. But still. It. Is. Just. Not. Normal.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Anything labeled 'smart' is usually suspect. What's particularly dangerous is if successive generations fall prey to what conservation biology calls shifting baseline syndrome (forgetting or never really missing something that's been lost, so we don't grieve or fight to restore it). For a deep dive into why everything keeps getting worse see Mr. Doctorow's new book: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025.]

So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes

A lot of people in the Republican party have been talking about abolishing property taxes lately. This is a bad idea with unintended consequences, and they shouldn’t do it.

Doing so would undermine economic growth and housing affordability gains certain red states have recently seen. Worse, we’ve already run this experiment and know where it leads: a California-style de-growth death spiral that slams the door in the faces of young working families.

I begin by explaining why property tax elimination is a bad idea:

1. States will never actually do it

2. The alternatives are worse

3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning

Then, I conclude by showing how to pragmatically reform property taxes in a way that delivers both meaningful tax relief and the sustainable pro-growth, pro-family, results craved by red and blue states alike.

1. States will never actually do it

The first reason eliminating property taxes is bad is that local politicians don’t have the guts to actually pull the trigger. As soon as it’s time for implementation, intra-party fighting overwhelms the legislative process, causing lawmakers to throw up their hands, slap on a band-aid, declare victory, and go home.

Why you can’t eliminate property taxes

In my home state of Texas, Republicans have tried and failed twice in back-to-back legislative sessions to eliminate property taxes. This is despite the fact that Texas has been under complete Republican domination for over twenty years.

First, it’s just too expensive. In 2024, the legislative budget board found that replacing property taxes would cost $81.5 billion dollars, more than the annual state budget of $72 billion. Read here:

“This is not something that you can find $81 billion on a per-year basis and not have a major impact on the remaining sales tax rates, because that is a huge amount of money to be able to replicate,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and [Lt. Governor Dan] Patrick’s chief lieutenant on property taxes.

Second, replacing all property taxes with sales taxes would require raising the sales tax rate to over 19%, according to the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association. Just in case state leaders don’t think prices on everyday goods have risen high enough yet, they should note that inflation is the number one most important issue1 among Republicans. [...]

Property taxes are less hated than you think

At least according to recent polling, the #1 most hated tax is not the property tax, but the Federal Income tax: [...]

Note the change in the last two decades: a net 20 percentage point swing in most-hated status between property tax and federal income tax. The large drop in housing affordability over that time period has surely contributed towards that change in sentiment...

Also, if property taxes are so desperately hated, why do states keep voting to keep them in place?

Every single state has some form of state or local property tax. Meanwhile, over a quarter of states opt out of at least one of sales, corporate, or income taxes.

In short, while it is often claimed that property taxes are the least popular tax by stated preferences, if we look at revealed preferences, they could actually be the most popular local tax. Perhaps this is why every time a red state tries to abolish property taxes, strident opposition crops up from unexpected places: [video]

But maybe you don’t care. In that case, pick an alternative.

2. The Alternatives are worse

An OECD report ranks different taxes by which are the most harmful to growth:

1. Corporate taxes (worst)

2. Personal income taxes

3. Consumption/sales taxes

4. Property taxes (best)

Overly high corporate taxes cause investment to flow to other states instead, and sufficiently high income taxes are a commonly cited driver of outmigration from blue states to red states. Modest sales taxes are the least distortionary of the three, but they’re still worse for growth overall than a well run property tax.

In conservative states like Texas, raising income and corporate taxes is already dead in the water (if not explicitly banned in the state constitution), which just leaves sales taxes. Since people say they hate property taxes more, shouldn’t we just bite the bullet and go all in on sales taxes?

The problem with this line of thinking is that the polling is based on sales taxes at current rates. The highest sales taxes in the nation cap out at 10%—rates as high as 19% are completely unprecedented. Even worse, the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association found that at those levels you start triggering tax avoidance, so you will inevitably have to raise the rate even higher to compensate, pushing it well past 20%.

We don’t even need to argue about whether this is popular or not because this exact proposal has been proposed twice already in Texas and it’s failed twice. Texans do not want to replace all property taxes with 20% state-imposed inflation on goods and services.

Ironically, reducing property taxes might actually be hardest in red states like Texas, precisely because the state is so anti-tax that there just aren’t many alternatives left. It’s no surprise then that the most famous instances of states that have “succeeded” in undermining property taxes are blue states.

The results have not been good.

3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning

Don’t California my Texas

One anti-property tax measure is not to lower tax rates so much as to completely undermine the entire system of property valuation itself, and there is no example more infamous than California’s Proposition 13. This 70’s-era reform fell far short of abolishing the property tax, settling for simply unleashing one of the most wildly unequal and unfair taxation schemes in the nation instead.

Prop 13 works like this:

• Assessed values are frozen at their 1976 valuations

• The tax rate is limited to 1%

• Increases in assessed values are limited to 2% a year

• New reassessments are allowed only for new construction or when property changes hands

Various propositions in the following decades added yet another privilege: a property’s Prop 13 status may be passed on to children and grandchildren, thereby literally establishing a class of hereditary landed gentry.

The results have been an absolute disaster for both housing affordability and any semblance of basic fairness. Side-by-side houses have wildly unequal property assessments (source):

Again, complete property tax elimination never actually arrives. What arrives instead is special treatment for one class at the expense of everyone else in the state. But that’s not all; on top of the much higher property tax burdens young working families face for the audacious crime of moving in last year, the state has extra treats in store (source):

The state’s top marginal individual income tax rate of 13.3 percent is compounded by a 1.1 percent newly uncapped payroll tax, bringing the all-in top rate to 14.4 percent. Additionally, nonresidents must file income taxes if they work even a single day in the state, and California is one of only four states to still impose an alternative minimum tax.

Don’t forget that California also has among the highest corporate taxes in the nation as well, just in case you were thinking of starting a business, or investing in one.

Honestly, the fact that it’s taken this long for California to start to bleed population really shows you what an incredible natural advantage California has long held over every other location in the United States. Even though the game has always been California’s to lose, if you spend multiple decades repeatedly punching yourself in the face, the crown eventually slips from your head.

NOTE: as much fun as it is to get high huffing California schadenfreude, Republicans would do well to remember that Prop 13 was pushed for in large part by members of their own party.

Unfortunately, California isn’t the only blue state with gorgeous weather and Edenic geography that’s been steadily sending its children into exile.

Aloha ‘Oe

The state with the lowest property taxes in the nation, at an effective tax rate of 0.27%, is Hawaii. Incidentally, Hawaii has the second highest top income tax rate at 11%. It also has the third highest net domestic outmigration rate of all US states between 2020-2024.

Even worse, the overall population “natural change” (births minus deaths) is steadily shrinking:

What’s not shrinking is the size of billionaire landholdings. Just 37 billionaires own more than 218,000 acres of Hawaii, roughly 5.3% of all land in the state, a figure equal to 11.1% of all privately held land.

Just one of those billionaires owns more than 1.27% of the entire state—Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who owns 98% of the entire island of Lānaʻi.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan have seen their landholdings in Kaua’i more than triple, from 700+ acres in 2014 to over 2,300 acres today over the last ten years. Oprah Winfrey now owns over 1,000 acres on Maui after a recent purchase, the same island on which Jeff Bezos owns 14 acres. But what Jeff lacks in quantity, he makes up for in quality: he paid $78M for his land in La Perouse Bay, a full $13M more than Zuck paid for his 1,000-acre Kawai’i purchase in 2025.

As a quick aside, this underscores another problem with rock-bottom property taxes: it turns real estate into the perfect speculative financial asset in which to park money. When so little cost to hold it, real estate becomes an attractive passive investment, and over time tends to take up an ever-increasing share of bank loans, as expertly illustrated in the paper The Great Mortgaging, by Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor. This has a double-whammy effect on the economy: real estate sucks up all the loans, bidding up its price, while leaving all other sectors (like actually providing productive jobs) with less investment...

Making real estate the perfect speculative asset for the ultra-rich is never a good idea, but Hawaii faces other problems too: the top reasons cited for leaving the state include high cost of living, limited economic opportunities, housing challenges, quality of life concerns, and education. That last one is exacerbated by chronically underfunded public schools.

Hawaii’s high income taxes and low property taxes have done little to curb the island state’s steady transformation into a paradise for the rich, but a port of exile for the young working families its future depends on.

Five thousand miles away, on the cold and distant far shore of the mainland, another blue state grapples with a similar challenge. [ed. hint: New York]:

In any case, whether it’s Texas, Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, or any of the other forty-five of these great United States, there’s a solution out there that meets everybody’s needs.

It delivers meaningful property tax relief to the median homeowner, without excluding renters and businesses or pitting seniors against young working families, all while driving overall economic efficiency and setting the state up for a pro-growth flywheel that keeps the budget balanced and taxes competitive.

That policy is Universal Building Exemption.

3. Universal Building Exemption is better

There is a problem with property taxes: it’s a good tax combined with a bad tax. The bad part of the tax is the portion of the tax that falls on buildings and improvements. We’re in a housing crisis, so why are we taxing houses? We’re in an age of rising unemployment, so why are we taxing workplaces? We want more construction, not less.

A universal building exemption fixes this by shifting the tax off of buildings and onto the unimproved value of land. Crucially, it’s revenue-neutral: it raises the same amount of property tax dollars as before, so it doesn’t break the budget.

Here’s why it’s the solution to the property tax debate:

Economists and key conservative thinkers support it

1. It balances the budget

2. It’s pro-growth and pro-natal

3. It’s better than the homestead exemption

4. It’s politically viable 

[specific details...]

Okay, but am I just talking my own book here, coming up with a tax shift that will just personally benefit me, a middle class Texas homeowner and father of three?

No, because the beauty of universal building exemption is that the biggest losers are the ones holding the most valuable downtown urban land out of use, and the chief beneficiaries are everybody else.

Who are the losers? The big losers are surface parking lots and vacant land, particularly those situated downtown next to skyscrapers. This shifts the tax burden off of locations people actually live in, to massively valuable locations where nobody lives.

This isn’t just a handout to homeowners, developers, and landlords, either—it’s a carrot and a stick. The carrot of building exemption rewards everybody who actually contributes more of what contributes to growth in our society—namely, homes, neighborhoods, and jobs—a category which includes the best kinds of property managers and builders. The stick of a higher effective tax rate on land pokes everyone in the butt who is sitting on the most valuable locations—which includes the worst kinds of slumlords and land-banking “developers”— to either build something already, or sell it to someone who will.

Lars Doucet, Progress and Poverty |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Gallup/James Medlock

[ed. Agree 100%. There should be some kind of penalty for developers holding dead land and letting it appreciate through scarcity and the sacrifice of their more productive neighbors. Also, the California Prop 13 issue is insane. Didn't know that's how it all played out. For a new way of taxing property (and easing the tax burden on productive businesses), see this video (and transcript) of LVT (land value taxes) that encourage more building and less vacant land speculation here.]

The Great Replacement

“What if you knew her and/ Found her dead on the ground/ How can you run when you know” — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

I am neither a forensic expert nor a jury member, but it sure looks to me like an ICE agent shot and killed a woman who wasn’t threatening his life. We have video of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7th, and the Washington Post has a detailed blow-by-blow analysis of the video: [...]

The Vice President’s claim that the shots were fired from the front of the car is pretty clearly false. He also repeatedly talked about ICE agents “going door to door” to deport illegal immigrants — pretty clearly ignoring the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures”.

Vance’s reception on social media — even from the kind of “tech right” types that are usually his fans — was largely negative.

 
Two days is probably far too early for the killing of Good to have shifted national opinion radically. The negative drift in views toward ICE is probably due to their consistent record of brutality, aggression, dubious legality, and unprofessionalism in Trump’s second term.

Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.

These are all things I noticed on X within just the last two days. There has been a pretty constant stream of these for months. Here’s a roundup of some others, by Jeremiah Johnson:

For the past year, ICE has been involved in a series of escalating incidents that rarely result in repercussions for anyone involved. ICE agents have recklessly caused traffic accidents and then, in one incident, arrested the person whose car they hit. They’ve tear-gassed a veteran, arrested him, and denied him access to medical care and an attorney. They have attacked protesters merely for filming them in public. They’ve pepper-sprayed a fleeing onlooker in the eyes from a foot away. They’ve pointed guns at a 6-year-old. They’ve knelt on top of a pregnant woman while they arrested her. They have arrested another pregnant woman, then kept her separated from her newborn while she languished in custody. They have repeatedly arrested American citizens, and they’ve even reportedly deported a citizen, directly contradicting court orders.

These are anecdotes, but there have also been careful, systematic reports about ICE arrests and mistreatment of U.S. citizens and poor conditions in ICE detention centers.

The Wall Street Journal also reviewed some other videos and other records of ICE shootings, and found a similar pattern to the Renee Good killing:

The Wall Street Journal has identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead…The Journal reviewed public records—court documents, agency press releases and gun-violence databases—of vehicle shootings involving immigration agents, though video is only publicly available for four of them…The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire.

Instead of causing ICE agents to pause in consternation, the killing of Renee Good appears to have made many even more aggressive. Here’s a video of an ICE agent in Minnesota telling a protester “Have y’all not learned from the past coupla days?”. Here’s a video of an ICE agent kicking over candles at a memorial for Renee Good.

Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the ultra-low standards for recruitment and training of ICE agents under Trump:

A deadly shooting in Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration officer comes weeks after a bombshell report on President Donald Trump’s desperate drive to rush 10,000 deportation officers onto the payroll by the end of 2025.

The explosive Daily Mail report found that the administration's $50,000 signing bonus attracted droves of unqualified recruits — high school grads who can "barely read or write," overweight candidates with doctor's notes saying they're unfit, and even applicants with pending criminal charges…[O]ne Department of Homeland Security official [said]: "We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English."

Jeremiah Johnson has more:

Reporting shows that ICE is filled with substandard agents. Its aggressive push to hire more agents uses charged rhetoric that appeals to far-right groups, but the agency has run into problems with recruits unable to pass background checks or meet minimum standards for academic background, personal fitness, or drug usage. One career ICE agent called new recruits “pathetic,” according to The Atlantic, and a current Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” and being inadvertently hired.

It’s worth noting, though, that Jonathan Ross himself is well-trained, with plenty of experience in law enforcement and military combat operations. So it’s not always a matter of poor training.

A number of Republican politicians have defended ICE’s actions with rhetoric that sounds downright authoritarian. Texas Representative Wesley Hunt said: “The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” Florida Representative Randy Fine said: “If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re going to end up just like that lady did.”

Is this America now? A country where unaccountable and poorly trained government agents go door to door, arresting and beating people on pure suspicion, and shooting people who don’t obey their every order or who try to get away? “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life” is a perfect description of an authoritarian police state. None of this is Constitutional, every bit of it is deeply antithetical to the American values we grew up taking for granted.

This tweet really seems to sum it up:

Why is this happening? Part of it is because of the mistakes of the Biden administration. For the first three years of his presidency, Biden allowed a massive, disorderly flood of border-hopping asylum seekers and quasi-legal migrants of all types to pour into the country, and as a result, Americans got really, really mad. That made immigration into a major issue in the 2024 election, helped Trump get elected, and provided political cover for a dramatic expansion of deportations. Now, probably thanks to ICE’s brutality and the administration’s lawlessness, support for immigrants and disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies are rising again. But the administration still has what it considers a mandate to act with impunity.

The deeper reason, though, is the ideology of the MAGA movement. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most Trump supporters view immigration as a literal invasion of the United States — not a figurative “invasion”, but a literal attempted conquest of America by foreigners.

And a substantial percentage of these folks believe that the purpose of this “invasion” is to “replace” the existing American population. This is from a PRRI poll from late 2024:

One-third of Americans (33%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” or the idea that immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background. The majority of Americans (62%) disagree with this theory. Agreement with this theory has decreased by 3 percentage points from 36% in 2019…Six in ten Republicans (60%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” compared with 30% of independents and 14% of Democrats. Among Republicans, those who hold a favorable view of Trump are more likely than those who hold an unfavorable view to agree that immigrants are invading our country (68% vs. 32%).

Perhaps some think that this “Great Replacement” is only cultural or partisan/political — the DHS recruits agents with a call to “Defend your culture!” — but many clearly think it’s racial in nature. The DHS recently posted this image:

100 million is far more than the total number of immigrants in the United States (which is estimated at around 52 million). Instead, it’s close to the total number of nonwhite people in the country. So the idea of “100 million deportations” clearly goes well beyond the idea of deporting illegal immigrants, and well beyond the idea of deporting all immigrants, into the territory of ethnic cleansing.

The DHS is posting these memes as a recruitment tactic, and polls about the “Great Replacement” show that there’s a large pool of potential recruits to whom this rhetoric is likely to appeal. In other words, many of the ICE agents now going around kicking in doors, beating up and threatening protesters, arresting citizens on pure suspicion, and occasionally shooting people believe that they are engaged in a race war. [...]

To be fair, the Great Replacement ideology didn’t arise out of nowhere. It’s an irrational and panicky overreaction that will lead America down the road to disaster — it’s full of hate and lies, it’s inherently divisive, it’s associated with some of history’s most horrible regimes, and it’s being promoted by some very bad actors. But it has also been egged on by a progressive movement that has made anti-white discrimination in hiring a pillar of its approach to racial equity, and has normalized anti-white rhetoric in the public sphere. This was an unforced error by the left — one of many over the past decade.

But whoever started America’s stupid race war, the real question is who will stand up and end it. The GOP, and the MAGA movement specifically, was offered a golden off-ramp from this dark path. In 2020 and 2024, Hispanic Americans, along with some Asian and Black Americans, shifted strongly toward Trump and the GOP. This was a perfect opportunity for the GOP to make itself, in the words of Marco Rubio, a “multiracial working-class” party. This would have been similar to how Nixon and Reagan expanded the GOP coalition to include “white ethnics” that the GOP had spurned in the early 20th century. But instead, MAGA took the victory handed to them by nonwhite voters and used it to act like exactly the kind of white-nationalist race warriors that liberals had always insisted they were. [...]

But Trump is an old man, and the younger generation was raised not on mid-20th-century nationalist rhetoric but on right-wing social media and memes. When Trump is gone, the MAGA movement will cease to be defined by his personal charisma, and will start being defined by the ideology of the Great Replacement — the same ideology that is now motivating many of the ICE agents acting like thugs in the streets of America.

And it’s increasingly clear that JD Vance, understanding that he lacks Trump’s cult of personality, has decided to make himself the leader, voice, and avatar of the “Great Replacement” movement — even if this arouses the disgust of many traditional conservatives and some figures in the tech right. With the disarray of the Democrats and the weakness of other GOP factions, Vance’s move may be a smart political bet, even if it comes at the expense of American freedom and stability.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: X/DHS

[ed. Oh for simpler times when a political break-in was considered the height of lawless government. Never thought I'd say this, but these days, and with this government, I'd vote for Nixon in a heartbeat:]

***

He covertly aided Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and ended American combat involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and the military draft the same year. His visit to China in 1972 led to diplomatic relations between the two nations, and he finalized the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. During the course of his first term, he enacted many progressive environmental policy shifts, such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency and passing laws, including the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts. In addition to implementing the Twenty-sixth Amendment that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, he ended the direct international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold in 1971, effectively taking the United States off the gold standard. He also imposed wage and price controls for 90 days, launched the Wars on Cancer and Drugs, passed the Controlled Substances Act, and presided over the end of the Space Race by overseeing the Apollo 11 Moon landing. ~ Wikipedia

Chairman Powell's Statement

[ed. Don't hear public comments from a Fed Chairman too often... screw around with administrative, social, legal fields and you might notch a few wins. Screw around with the nation's monitary system and expect significant pushback (from both parties). See also: Chairman Powell’s Statement (MR):]

***

Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.

What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.

[ed. And it all began with this: Trump Meets With Powell at Federal Reserve... leading to one of the most surreal political moments in recent memory.]

Fascism in America

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”

by US Army/War Department/Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: US Army

[ed. Dictators are gonna dictate, it's what they do. The real blame lies with supporters who give them their power, willingly. The people who think their personal fortunes or the country's will be enhanced by standing in the shadow of a strongman. And others: tuned out and oblivious, who "just aren't into politics" or rely on "talking points" to tell them what to think. It's all here. Now. See also: January 10, 2026:]

***

Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone. (...)

What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”

In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking b*tch” after he killed her. (...) [ed. Probably the same way they reacted to the storming of Capitol Building...] 

Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.

On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim. (...)

When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”

Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex

The idea is legally vital, but ultimately unsatisfying. Is there another way forward?

In 1978, Greta Hibbard was twenty-two and living in rural Oregon. She had a two-year-old daughter, a minimum-wage job, and an unemployed husband. She was, she would later say, “living on peanut butter sandwiches.” She and her husband, John Rideout, often fought; sometimes he hit her or demanded sex. On the afternoon of October 10th, when he did just that, Hibbard fled to a neighbor’s house. Rideout followed her, cornered her in a park, and took her home. Once inside, she said, he punched her several times in the face and pulled down her pants. Their toddler, who was watching, went into her bedroom and wailed as her father penetrated her mother.

That this might be rape, legally speaking, was a brand-new idea. Until the mid-seventies, much of the sex in the United States was regulated not by the theory of consent but by that of property: a husband could no more be arrested for raping his wife than for breaking into his own house. In 1977, Oregon became one of the first states to make spousal rape illegal, and even then some politicians thought the law should apply only to couples living apart or in the process of divorcing. A California state senator summed up the prevailing attitude: “If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?”

Hibbard herself had only just learned that she had a right to decline sex with her husband. (At a woman’s crisis center, she had noticed a sign on the wall that read “If she says no, it’s rape.”) The night before the incident, she and Rideout were chatting with a neighbor when she brought up the new law. “I don’t believe it,” Rideout said. When he was arrested a few days later, he still didn’t. What followed was Oregon v. Rideout, the first time in the United States that a man stood trial for the rape of a wife with whom he lived, and a formative test of the notion that consent should determine the legality of sex.

Sarah Weinman retells this story in “Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime” (Ecco). Weinman is known for taking a true-crime approach to intellectual history: her previous books center on the murderer who befriended William F. Buckley, Jr.—the founder of the National Review—and on the kidnapping that is believed to have inspired Vladimir Nabokov to write “Lolita.” Her writing is breezy even when the subject matter is not exactly beachy. Rideout’s trial, for example, teemed with outrages. His defense lawyer smeared Hibbard for her sexual past: two abortions, a supposed lesbian experience, and a previous assault allegation against Rideout’s half brother, which, according to Weinman, Hibbard retracted after threats from the accused. Meanwhile, even the prosecutor thought Rideout seemed like a good guy. “I don’t think he belongs in prison or jail,” he told the press. When Rideout was acquitted, the courtroom burst into applause.

Hibbard, who reconciled with Rideout almost immediately after the trial, would divorce him within months. But Weinman follows Rideout all the way through 2017, when he was once again tried for rape. This time, the victims were Sheila Moxley, an acquaintance who had grudgingly allowed a drunk Rideout to sleep on her sofa after he came over to help her fix some furniture, and Teresa Hern, a long-term, on-and-off girlfriend. Both women had been held down and penetrated by Rideout in the middle of the night. Once again, a defense lawyer attempted to paint the women as lying, scheming seductresses. But this time Rideout was convicted on all counts and eventually sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. “You are a bad man,” Moxley read in a statement. “You are an evil man. You are a monster.”

Weinman’s choice to begin and end with Rideout’s trials allows her to tell a story of comeuppance, in which, during the span of one man’s life, society decided to take rape seriously and punish the monsters who commit it. This is a happy thought. But the real arc of history is not so short, nor does it bend with anything like certainty toward justice. Today, about one in ten American women have been raped by their intimate partners—roughly the same rate reported in the eighties. This year, the Trump Administration removed the Center for Disease Control’s online statistics on intimate-partner and sexual violence; the page was restored by a court order, and now contains a disclaimer: “This page does not reflect reality.” Donald Trump himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least twenty-four women. He has denied these accusations, including one from his first wife, Ivana, who testified under oath that he threw her on the bed, ripped out a handful of her hair, and then forced himself on her. She later clarified that she didn’t mean the word “rape” in the “literal or criminal sense.”

In Weinman’s epilogue, she briefly points to the unfinished business of ending rape, spousal or otherwise. But her book assumes that society has at least sorted out the philosophical underpinnings of how to regulate sex. “Younger generations were far clearer about these issues,” Weinman writes, “understanding that consent must be given ‘freely and intelligently’ by those who were capable, and anything shy of full consent was considered rape.” There is, I think, no such clarity. It is not just people like Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Pete Hegseth, Brock Turner, Bill Cosby, Sean Combs, Dominique Pelicot, and their many, many friends who seem to have a bone to pick with consent. Feminists have their own quibbles. What does “freely and intelligently” mean, they ask, and what entails “full consent”? Who exactly is capable of consenting? And what are we to do with rapists?

For some second-wave feminists, the very idea that a woman living under patriarchy could “consent” to sex with a man was absurd. After all, we don’t think of a serf consenting to work for her feudal overlord: the serf might well enjoy tilling the fields, she might even love her master, but she didn’t choose farm labor so much as she was kept, by rigid and often violent social limits, from pursuing anything else. And even if the choice were free—even if decades of hard-fought feminist struggle had occasioned the sort of emancipation that meant women were no longer analogous to serfs—could such a choice ever be “intelligent”? Some women find knitting pleasurable, comforting, and affirming of their femininity, but how many would recommend it to a friend if it carried a ten-per-cent chance of rape?

These were lively arguments in the seventies and eighties, advanced by feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who had herself been battered by her husband. Today, the basic idea—often glossed as “all heterosexual sex is rape,” though neither MacKinnon nor Dworkin wrote exactly those words—seems almost farcical. Radical feminists no longer blame heterosexual women for “sleeping with the enemy.” It’s widely accepted that a woman really can consent to sex with a husband on whom she is financially dependent. The immediate though rather less accepted corollary is that she can also consent to sex with a paying stranger. To say anything else, many feminists now argue, would be to infantilize her, to subordinate her—to the state, to moralism—rather than acknowledge her mastery of her own body.

But the root of the second-wave critique, that there are power differentials across which professed consent is insufficient, lives on in other debates. Children, a class whom the poet Mary Karr once described as “three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate,” are an obvious example. It is easy to be horrified by situations where children are subjected to sex that is forced or coerced. But what about sex that they claim to want? Can children consent to sex with other children? With adults? Can a nineteen-year-old girl legally have what she believes to be loving, consensual sex with her stepfather? What about with her stepmother? Can students choose to have sex with their professors, or employees with their bosses? How we answer these questions depends on whom we consider to be so gullible, vulnerable, or exploited that they must be protected from their own expressed desires. (...)

One critique of consent, then, is that it is too permissive—that it ignores how coercion or delusion may result in the illusion of agreement. But another critique is that it’s too restrictive and punitive. Decades of reform laws have expanded the number of situations legally considered to be rape: it’s no longer a charge that can be brought only against an armed stranger who attacks a struggling victim, ideally a white virgin. On university campuses, the idea that “no means no” has given way—because of the well-documented fact that many people freeze and are unable to speak in moments of fear—to “yes means yes.”

Critics of this shift worry about encounters where both parties are blackout drunk, or where one appears to retroactively withdraw consent. They argue that a lower bar for rape leads to the criminalization—or at least the litigation—of misunderstandings, and so discourages the sort of carefree sexual experimentation that some feminists very much hope to champion. “I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us that assault is around every corner,” the self-identified feminist Laura Kipnis writes in “Unwanted Advances,” a 2017 book about “sexual paranoia on campus.” Kipnis describes her own mother laughingly recalling a college professor chasing her around a desk and trying to kiss her. That young women today are encouraged to think of this kind of “idiocy” as an “incapacitating trauma,” Kipnis argues, codifies sexist ideas about their innocence, purity, and helplessness. Another interpretation is that young women have decided, with a rather masculine sense of their own entitlement, that they need not smile indulgently upon their transgressors. But Kipnis is right in her broader point: the bureaucratization of our erotic lives is no path to liberation.

by S.C. Cornell, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Michelle Mildenberg Lara

Blame and Claim

A public adjuster on insuring a burning world

Just off a hiking trail, not far from where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea, a fuel and an oxidant combine and combust. The underbrush is dry and dusty, and within an hour flames engulf your home. Smoke fills your kitchen and your garage. Flecks of wallpaper from your children’s bedroom float down onto a nearby parking lot. Your wedding photos melt, as does your car battery. The glass windows of your dining room shatter and temperatures reach a thousand degrees. The root cause might have been a mountaineer who burned his toilet paper at dawn, a spark at a faulty transmission line in the foothills, a discarded cigarette fanned by the Santa Anas, or, simply, arson.

But it is too early to assign blame. Your attention is elsewhere. You are not home and you cannot get there, as the fire department has evacuated your neighborhood, the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. Your mind races, and you reach for your phone to ensure your family is safe even if you have already heard from them. Maybe you call the police, even though you hear the sirens throughout your neighborhood and see the caravans of emergency vehicles filling the streets.

When you do manage to get home, you stand on the sidewalk watching your rafters collapse and, covering your mouth with a shirtsleeve, you make your next call, to your insurance company to file a claim. You don’t know what this process entails. You have never filed a homeowner’s or business insurance claim, you have never read your policy, and you do not know if your policy covers what has happened, since you do not know what has happened or what caused it.

You are unaware that the insurance industry has been, in recent years, denying more claims and more coverage, exiting major markets, and raising premiums. As governments and corporations continue to enable fossil fuels, throttle renewable-energy sources, and deny long-established climate science, the related catastrophes (fires, floods, droughts, storms) and social effects (mass migration, war over natural resources, economic and demographic stratification) are increasingly commonplace and metastasizing. This new world order transfers the risk and harm of the disaster business by way of the insurance industry onto you, the consumer. On an episode of the climate science podcast A Matter of Degrees, Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner who is now the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley, said, “For many Americans, the single biggest financial asset you have is your home. If you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford enough insurance and that home is destroyed, then you’re left with basically nothing. Insurance is the climate crisis canary in the coal mine, and the canary is just about dead.”

Days later, as embers still burn and you begin to accept that not one object will be recovered or salvaged from your home, your insurance company sends one of its employees or contractors, called an adjuster, to assess the damage, value what is or was, and (hopefully) make an offer of payment. While insurance companies defend their adjusters as necessary agents who help them evaluate claims, critics label them as conflicted loyalists who will undervalue losses, delay settlements, and pressure policy holders to settle quickly.

But as you stand there, a man in business-casual attire emerges from the smoke and approaches you apprehensively. He introduces himself as someone who can help. His title, too, is adjuster, but if you are able to focus enough on his pitch, he tells you he is not an employee of your insurance company or of a roofing company or a general contractor. If you would like help navigating the ashes of your new life, he will help you rebuild: independently value your losses, handle communications and negotiations with your insurer, draft paperwork, and take care of the settlement of the claims. He is part private detective, part lawyer, part psychologist. All of this sounds reasonable, so you take his card and tell him you’ll be in touch.

That evening, as you make plans for your family to sleep at a nearby friend’s house or in a hotel, some quick internet research teaches you this “public” adjuster is indeed part of a legitimate industry (although sometimes public adjusters, you discover, are known as “private” adjusters). Staff adjusters, you learn, are the ones that work for insurance companies, and independent adjusters are contracted for certain projects by insurance companies.

This ecosystem of adjusters is baffling, but you decide to retain the public adjuster. As you sign his contract, he informs you that he will take a significant cut of any claim settlement he negotiates. Your calculation is that outsourcing the administration of the recovery of your life is worth the cost—so long as the insurance company agrees to write a check.

I recently spoke with the president of a large public adjuster firm in California that represented victims of the Palisades and Eaton fires that broke out in early 2025 and destroyed about sixteen thousand buildings on nearly forty thousand acres, causing tens of billions of dollars in damages. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

***

Tyler Maroney: How many claims does the average public adjuster typically handle in a year?

Adjuster: It depends on the size of the claim, but some will do a hundred claims a year, mostly smaller—$10,000 claims or $50,000 claims. But if you’re talking about somebody who’s handling complicated claims, I’d say an average load for an adjuster is somewhere between twenty and fifty a year.

TM: And you handle more than just massive disasters, right?

Adjuster: We respond to disasters every day, 365 days a year. Some of them are disasters that affect a hundred people or a thousand people. Those are big events. But there are buildings that burn down every single day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Minnesota or if you’re in New York, there’s water damage, there’s flooding, there are fires, there are robberies. It doesn’t require a hurricane or a wildfire for there to be a need for our service.

TM: I’ve read that clients don’t really know that public adjusters exist until they are desperate. Is part of your job getting the word out that this is an industry?

Adjuster: We’re luckier now in today’s world of technology because people can search for things online. I’ve been doing this thirty-three or thirty-four years, when there was no internet to search. If you had an insurance claim, you only had the connections you had, but today people can type into Google, “Can I get any help with my insurance claim?”

TM: I presume you go out into the field to attract clients?

Adjuster: Yes, part of the job is to be out there when an event happens or shortly after an event is over, to let people know that we exist.

TM: When a large fire like in the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles breaks out, you go as quickly as possible to the scene?

Adjuster: Yes. When you show up at somebody’s house and the family is in the front yard crying and trying to save things that aren’t savable, it’s sad. Sometimes it’s total loss, and you find people sifting through the rubble, lining up bits of pottery.

TM: And when you approach these suffering people, how do they respond?

Adjuster: You get a wide range of emotional responses, from “Get the fuck off my property, you ambulance-chasing vulture” to “Oh my God, we’re so lost. We don’t know what to do. Thank you so much for being here. Can you help us?”

TM: That must be a difficult emotional minefield to wade into.

Adjuster: Yes, and when you’re walking up to meet these people, most of the time they’ve never heard of a public adjuster. They have no idea who we are or what we do or that it’s a licensed profession. It can look like we’re trying to prey on people when they’re at this vulnerable point. The reality is that’s when they need help the most, because often they do whatever the insurance company tells them to do. That puts them in the worst spot they could be in.

TM: Worst spot?

Adjuster: So, say someone calls us six months after a fire. They have been arguing with their insurance company about the value of a claim and then, out of nowhere, they get a $65,000 bill from the restoration company [a third-party, for-profit vendor] and they want us to deal with that too. We have to say: You already agreed in writing and signed for them to do that work. That money’s gone, you spent it. We can’t take that back because it was an agreement you made before we were involved.

Most people just know they have an insurance agent that sold them some insurance, and they do what they’re told. Often that results in mistakes.

TM: What kinds of mistakes?

Adjuster: I’ll give you the easiest one. There is a fire in your house, but it burns only part of your house down. There’s still stuff in it. It’s not like a wildfire where it burns all the way to the ground. So the insurance company comes out, and they bring a restoration contractor. He’s going to help you get your stuff out of the house, store it, and get it cleaned up. Seems like an incredibly important service. He says it’s going to get worse if we don’t get your stuff out of the environment. Just sign here.

TM: Okay.

Adjuster: If the owner asks, “Who pays for this?,” the automatic response is “Oh, don’t worry about it, the insurance company pays for it, it’s part of your policy.” It makes perfect sense at the time. What they don’t share is that it erodes your contents limit [which means it reduces how much money the insurance company is likely to pay out]. You have given them carte blanche, and they can bill the insurance company directly. They charge not only for clean-up but for storage. And there’s no language that protects the homeowner if they’re not happy with the service.

TM: The homeowner is vulnerable at this point.

Adjuster: What they don’t understand is that six months from now, their stuff has all been cleaned, and the restoration company charged maybe a thousand dollars to clean something that was worth four hundred dollars and they don’t even want anymore. They could have just said, “Oh, a thousand dollars to clean that item? I don’t care about that anymore. Give me the thousand dollars.”

TM: And what can you do as an adjuster to prevent this?

Adjuster: You can say to the insurance company that our client wants to select items that have intrinsic value or that we believe are valuable enough to save and restore. We can advise that often the cost to clean something is more than its value or that it’s too damaged to properly restore it. Otherwise, a homeowner will find out that the restoration company has charged $65,000 when they have $300,000 of coverage for their contents, and that $65,000 is coming right off the top, and the cleaning costs reduces the amount of insurance they have for the things that they’ve completely lost.

TM: Back to the field, is the pitch as simple as “Hi, this might be awkward, but my name is x and I’m a public adjuster, which means I help people like you”?

Adjuster: Yeah. Often it’s “Your insurance company’s going to come out here, they’re going to assign an adjuster. That adjuster works for the insurance company. They don’t work for you. You have the opportunity and you have the right to hire your own public adjusting team that counterbalances the insurance company’s team so that you have an advocate who’s a true advocate for you to level the playing field.” That’s the pitch.

TM: Do you have a sense for what percentage of people who’ve been victimized by a catastrophe are able to engage public adjusters? I assume that most people, when they’ve gone through something like that, call their insurance company, right?

Adjuster: That’s traditionally what happens, yes. They either call their agent, if their insurance agent is somebody who they’re close with, or they call the insurance company and give notice that they have a claim. And some agents will refer clients to us in a secretive way. Some brokers [who work for policy holders, not insurance companies] think that if the carriers see that they’re recommending a public adjuster, that will be bad for their reputation with the insurance carriers. Some brokers don’t care.

TM: So how does that work?

Adjuster: Some brokers say, “Hey, don’t tell anybody I told you this, but you should talk to x public adjuster.” Or sometimes it’s more open, like, “Hey, [this public adjuster company] helped a lot of my clients, so you might want to talk to them.”

TM: So how do the brokers respond to you?

Adjuster: There are insurance brokers who haven’t worked with us or don’t know us. Or they feel threatened because they were hired to do this job, and by bringing or inviting you in as a public adjuster, they’re admitting that they don’t know what they’re doing. If you’re a salesperson and you’re selling insurance policies and you’re a credible person, you want to believe that what you’re selling is the best product available. You want to hold your head up high and say, “I represent x insurance company and they’re great insurance.” So for some insurance brokers, saying “Maybe you need help getting money” is saying something negative about the insurance company. For some insurance agents, that doesn’t feel right.

TM: Do you feel you are adversarial to insurance companies?

Adjuster: We are advocating for the policy holder, not the insurance company. The insurance companies like to say, “Why do you need a public adjuster? We’re going to pay you all the money you’re owed anyway.” But if that was true, then why would they care? Why would they even have that discussion if they’re going to pay the same benefits regardless of whether somebody has somebody helping them put it together? The reality is that they’re going to pay as little as they can. So are we adversarial, or are we just taking the workload off the policy holder? It’s an arduous process. Imagine a family where everything is gone, disappeared into the smoke, and you have the burden of sharing with the insurance company everything that you lost. Where would you start?

by Tyler Maroney, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Norman Wilson.

[ed. Public service post. Reminds me that I need to do an annual homeowner's insurance review. Been wondering how premiums and coverage have changed in the wake of increasingly common climate-related disasters. Unfortunately, no detail is provided on what these services are likely to cost (other than a "significant cut" of any negotiated claim settlement).]