A step toward the nightmare

I have several times referred to ICE and DHS agents as "Tonton Macoute wannabes." For those who don't know and don't want to have to look it up, the Tonton Macoute or just Macoute was a vicious "secret" police and paramilitary force who reported directly to Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. (I put "secret" in quotes because there was nothing secret about them; everyone knew damned well who they were.)

It was regarded as among the most brutal such forces in the entire world and its criminality extended beyond suppressing any and all opposition: Its members were effectively a law unto themselves, able to steal, murder, torture, and rape as they pleased both because resisting or objecting was a death sentence and Duvalier didn't give a damn as long as he was in his palace and the grift kept rolling.

Well, it appears our own masked secret police is a step closer to achieving its dream.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has decided not to investigate Jonathan Ross, the ICE good who murdered repeat murdered Renee Good.

Not only will he not be prosecuted, not only will he not even be charged, he will not even be investigated. The regime can't even be bothered to, indeed refuses to, look at what happened because they are terrified of the meaning of what they would see, what they already have seen, what they already know. Better to evade the knowledge he would be - and through that their embrace of thuggery would be - convicted. Better to pretend it didn't happen the way they know it did, better to smear accuse and blame and investigate the victim (Renee Good - say her name) on some impossibly vague charge of being "involved with the activist groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration agenda," better to try to turn "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" into "domestic terrorism."

Better to put Ross - whose name, interestingly, is pretty much absent from news coverage, where he is just "the ICE agent" - beyond the law, the better to ignore what he represents, let him be answerable, it seems, only to the Orange Overlord - who, like Duvalier, just doesn't give a damn as long as he is in his palace and the grift keeps rolling.

And the ghost of Papa Doc smiles "Now you're getting it."

Sometimes pushback works

Nice to know some people still believe freedom of expression does not require universality of opinion.

The board of the Adelaide Festival runs as part of the overall event Adelaide Writers Week, the nation’s largest free literary festival .

On January 8 the board announced that they had disinvited Australian-Palestinian writer Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event. They cited “her previous statements" and the "cultural sensitivities“ surrounding the antisemitic mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach - even as they admitted her writings don't “have any connection with the tragedy.”

They didn’t cite any specific statements by Abdel-Fatah, but we can safely assume they are to referring to her support for Palestinian rights and her denunciation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, especially given that her exclusion came as the result of lobbying by the Jewish Community Council for South Australia and South Australia state premier Peter Malinauskus.

The upshot? By January 13, 180 speakers - amounting to about 70% of those invited - had withdrawn as had some sponsors of the event, the Festival’s director had quit, the whole event had been canceled, remaining board members were to resign, and the future of the wider Adelaide Festival was in question.

There is to be a new board, hoping to keep the wider festival, now in its 40th year and a major draw for the state of South Australia, going.

Footnote: The statement announcing the cancellation offered Abdel-Fattah a non-apology apology referring not to the actual decision but only to “how the decision was represented” while claiming "this is not about identity or dissent."

Yeah, sure. Whadevah you say, Mac.