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  • When the Republic Wears a Mask: ICE, Trump, and the Constitution in the Crosshairs of Encroaching Power

    When the Republic Wears a Mask: ICE, Trump, and the Constitution in the Crosshairs of Encroaching Power

    James Madison warned that “power is of an encroaching nature, and…ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”  In Donald Trump’s hands, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become the very embodiment of that encroaching power: an armed, masked, and increasingly unaccountable apparatus that kills a U.S. citizen in Minnesota, terrorizes communities, and dares the constitutional order to stop it.  An agency that claims the mantle of law has slid into something closer to a standing force of intimidation, operating in a gray zone between policing and political control that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin would have recognized as the threshold of tyranny.

    Madison, encroaching power, and the ICE state

    Madison’s core insight in Federalist No. 48 was brutally simple: “power is of an encroaching nature” and “mere parchment barriers” are not enough to stop a determined branch from slipping its leash.  He feared precisely what is visible today in immigration enforcement: a single executive apparatus accumulating practical control over lawmaking (through broad discretion), execution (through raids and detention), and adjudication (through executive‑run immigration courts).  This “tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands,” Madison wrote, is the very definition of tyranny, whether wielded by a monarch or an elected president.

    Under Trump, ICE has become such a concentration point. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations wing conducts raids, arrests, detention, and deportation. Policy memos from the White House and DHS effectively rewrite who is targeted and how aggressively, far beyond what most Americans imagined when Congress wrote the underlying statutes.  Madison would not be fooled by the bureaucratic language. He would see an executive machine steadily expanding its reach, using the gaps between law on paper and practice on the ground to enlarge its power.

    The Minnesota killing: when “enforcement” becomes lethal impunity

    The killing of 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis is not an aberration; it is a revelation.  Good, a U.S. citizen, mother of three and celebrated poet, was in her car when ICE agents confronted her on a residential street. Video shows an officer at her door while another steps in front of the vehicle and fires multiple rounds into the windshield at close range.  Federal officials rushed to frame her as a threat who tried to run over agents, yet witnesses’ footage shows an officer shooting almost immediately as the car inches forward. The city’s mayor called it “reckless use of force” and told ICE to “get out of our city.”

    Local leaders have emphasized that Good appears to have had no serious criminal record and was reportedly present as a legal observer monitoring ICE activity, while the Trump administration branded her a “domestic terrorist.”  This is the logic of encroaching power: those who watch the state become enemies of the state. A federal officer can shoot a citizen in the face on a city street, then retreat behind a wall of official narratives and procedural reviews.  Madison warned that when one branch operates with “overruling influence” and escapes effective checks, “dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community” follow.  Good’s death is one of those oppressions, and the “minor party” is anyone the executive chooses to target.

    The “law and order” defense — and why it fails

    Defenders of ICE under Trump insist that such force and sweeping tactics are the price of “law and order.” They argue that agents face real dangers, that criminals will exploit any restraint, and that masks, unmarked cars, and aggressive raids are necessary to protect officers and communities alike.  Madison and the founding generation would have recognized the danger in this argument: it turns necessity into a blank check.

    Madison’s warning that power is “of an encroaching nature” was directed precisely at governments that invoke safety to justify permanent expansion of force.  Hamilton cautioned that when the federal government “overpasses the just bounds of its authority and makes a tyrannical use of its powers,” the people must “appeal to the standard they have formed”—the Constitution—and seek redress.  Franklin, for his part, wrote that the “means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” a line that lays bare what happens when law‑and‑order rhetoric licenses masked agents to kill a citizen like Good and terrorize entire neighborhoods.  The question is not whether enforcement is needed, but whether it remains constrained by law, transparency, and accountability; when it does not, it ceases to be “order” in any constitutional sense.

    Masks, unmarked cars, and the aesthetics of fear

    The methods ICE now routinely employs reveal how far the culture of the agency has drifted from ordinary law enforcement toward something darker.  Across the country, residents watch masked agents in plain clothes jump from unmarked vehicles, armed with rifles, surrounding people on sidewalks and in driveways. Even mayors describe these scenes as resembling “violent abduction,” not policing.  The Department of Homeland Security insists that masks are needed to protect agents from doxxing and threats, pointing to cases where officers’ families were harassed after photos circulated online.

    But civil‑rights advocates and local officials note that masked, anonymous armed men seizing people off the street “compound fear and chaos” and “evade accountability for agents’ actions.”  When the state sends masked figures in unmarked vehicles to carry out its will, it deliberately blurs the line between law and terror, between a warrant and a snatch‑and‑grab.  Madison’s insistence that power must be visibly separated, checked, and identifiable is not satisfied by a small “ICE” patch on a vest. A power that hides its face from the public it serves is already behaving as if it is above that public.

    “Law enforcement” without law

    Formally, ICE is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, charged with enforcing immigration and customs laws and “preserving national security and public safety.”  In practice, the Trump‑era posture has treated “law enforcement” as a talisman that justifies almost any method, while the rule of law—the predictable, proportionate, rights‑respecting application of statutes—often appears as an afterthought.  Raids at homes, hospitals, and schools, family separation as leverage, and lethal force against a nonviolent U.S. citizen all point to an institution where the executive’s will is the primary law.

    The Founders knew that “law enforcement” can become a mask for oppression. Hamilton warned that when the federal government “overpasses the just bounds of its authority and makes a tyrannical use of its powers,” the people must “appeal to the standard they have formed”—the Constitution—and seek redress.  Franklin cautioned that “the means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” a sentence that reads today like a prophecy of post‑9/11 security agencies turned inward on vulnerable communities.  The question is not whether ICE fits the bureaucratic definition of “law enforcement,” but whether its conduct still reflects the deeper law of a constitutional republic.

    The Founders’ moral horizon: liberty, asylum, humanity

    For the founding generation, liberty was universal and inseparable from the dignity of the person. Franklin wrote that “equal liberty” is “the birthright of all men,” language that sits uneasily beside images of children taken from parents and locked in detention centers because those parents lacked the right papers.  Jefferson spoke of the United States as an “asylum” for the oppressed and warned that if the federal government claimed ungranted powers over aliens and others, Americans would end up “living under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority.”

    The killing of Renee Good and the masked‑raid culture around ICE mark a moral break with that vision.  A government that can shoot a citizen observer in the head, on disputed facts, and then march agents back into the streets wearing masks to “ensure their safety” while whole neighborhoods live in terror has ceased to see liberty as a birthright; it sees public fear as a tool.  Madison’s warning that “when the people fear the government, there is tyranny” is no longer a distant abstraction. It is a description of what residents of immigrant communities, and now even citizen observers like Good, experience when they see a DHS badge.

    The Madisonian response: draw the line

    Madison understood that “mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits” is never enough; it is the vigilance of citizens, legislators, and courts that prevents encroaching power from hardening into permanent despotism.  The ICE that kills a Minnesota mother, moves in masked formations through American cities, and claims the absolute mantle of “law enforcement” while operating in legal and moral gray zones is exactly the kind of institution that must be confronted in Madisonian terms.

    To “appeal to the standard” of the Constitution, as Hamilton urged, means demanding transparent investigations and prosecutions where warranted in the Good case, legislative restraints on raids and use of force, and judicial scrutiny of policies that turn communities into occupied zones.  It also means a civic refusal to accept masked, nameless agents as a normal feature of democratic life: insisting on clear identification, recorded operations, and public accountability whenever armed federal staff operate in local neighborhoods.  If Madison is right—and the history of republics suggests he is—then the line must be drawn now, before the encroaching power that killed Renee Nicole Good becomes a permanent, accepted feature of American government.

    Americans now face a test that previous generations knew only in theory: whether loyalty belongs to a leader and his armed agents, or to the Constitution and the republic it binds into being.  The blood spilled at Lexington and Concord, on the fields of Antietam and Normandy, in Selma and at Kent State, was not offered to sanctify a regime of masked men in unmarked vehicles, but to preserve a nation of laws where power answers to the people.  When ICE can kill a citizen like Renee Good on a quiet Midwestern street, when families live in terror of raids more reminiscent of juntas than of justice, the United States drifts toward a resemblance it has long condemned in others: the look and feel of the very dictatorships it claims to oppose.  The choice now is stark and inescapable: either citizens, churches, cities, states, and courts rise in open, principled defense of the constitutional order—demanding that this government once again fear its people, not the other way around—or the encroaching power Madison warned against will finish its work, and the republic so many men and women died to preserve will quietly become something else.

    References

    1.Ammo.com. (2024, April 19). Founding Fathers’ quotes on government, democracy, and power in the people. https://ammo.com/articles/founding-fathers-quotes-democracy-government-power-in-people

    2.Avalon Project. (1788). Federalist No. 48. Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed48.asp

    3.Bill Muehlenberg. (2021, November 29). The Founding Fathers on freedom. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2021/11/29/the-founding-fathers-on-freedom

    4.Bill of Rights Institute. (2024). Founders’ quotes. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/founders-quotes

    5.CBC News. (2026, January 9). The White House is defending fatal ICE shooting of Minneapolis woman. But what are the rules of engagement? https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ice-minneapolis-shooting-use-of-force-9.7038275

    6.Civil and Human Rights Coalition. (2025, February 17). The human costs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. https://civilrights.org/blog/the-human-costs-of-trumps-immigration-crackdown

    7.Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute. (2016). Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/immigration_and_customs_enforcement_(ice)

    8.FEE. (2025, November 19). 17 Benjamin Franklin quotes on tyranny, liberty, and rights. Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/17-benjamin-franklin-quotes-on-tyranny-liberty-and-rights

    9.Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. (n.d.). Founding Fathers’ selected quotations key. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/Key%20to%20Founding%20Fathers%20Selected%20Quotations.pdf

    10.Hamilton, A. (2017). Alexander Hamilton quotes about tyranny. AZQuotes. https://www.azquotes.com/author/6160-Alexander_Hamilton/tag/tyranny

    11.Monticello. (n.d.). The question of immigration. Thomas Jefferson Foundation. https://www.monticello.org/the-art-of-citizenship/the-question-of-immigration

    12.National Constitution Center. (2016, March 15). James Madison: Birthday quotes from the most quotable Founding Father. https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/james-madison-birthday-quotes-from-the-most-quotable-founding-father

    13.NPR. (2025, July 9). Masked immigration agents are spurring fear and confusion. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5440311/ice-raids-masked-agents

    14.Press-Pubs, University of Chicago. (n.d.). Jefferson, T. Resolutions relative to the Alien and Sedition Acts. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch8s41.html

    15.Teaching American History. (2024, July 24). Federalist 47, Federalist 48, and Federalist 51. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/federalist-47-federalist-48-and-federalist-51

    16.The Conversation. (2018). How the media dealt a major blow to Donald Trump’s family separations policy. https://theconversation.com/how-the-media-dealt-a-major-blow-to-donald-trumps-family-separations-policy-98669

    17.The New York Times. (2025, July 20). LA Mayor: Masked ICE agents created “reign of terror”. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/politics/ice-agents-masks.html

    18.The New York Times. (2025, August 5). Inside Trump’s new tactic to separate immigrant families. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/us/politics/trump-administration-family-separation.html

    19.United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (2003– ). United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement

    20.Federal Law Enforcement Training & Research Center. (2014, November 25). What is ICE? https://www.federallawenforcement.org/ice/what-is-ice

    21.ABC News. (2026, January 7). Woman killed by ICE agent in Minneapolis was a mother of 3, poet… https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/woman-killed-ice-agent-minneapolis-mother-3-poet-129008055

    22.BBC News. (2026, January 7). US immigration agent fatally shoots woman in Minneapolis. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jvnl4j1n4o

    23.BBC News. (2026, January 8). Renee Nicole Good: Who was the woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1jepdjy256o

    24.Al Jazeera. (2026, January 8). Who was Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed in ICE Minneapolis shooting? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/8/who-is-renee-nicole-good-the-woman-killed-in-the-ice-minneapolis-shooting

    25.SupplySideLiberal. (2022). The Federalist Papers #48: Legislatures, too, can become tyrannical (James Madison). https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/2/6/the-federalist-papers-48-legislatures-too-can-become-tyrannicaljames-madison

    26.Critical Skills Blog. (2024, July 21). The Founding Fathers’ fears of tyranny: Insights from Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington. https://criticalskillsblog.com/2024/07/22/the-founding-fathers-fears-of-tyranny-insights-from-jefferson-madison-hamilton-and-washington

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Trump, the New Chimera: A Hybrid of Stalin and Hitler on the World Stage

    Trump, the New Chimera: A Hybrid of Stalin and Hitler on the World Stage

    by Amal Zadok

    When a president says only his “own morality” limits his power and that he “does not need international law,” while a mother of three is shot through her windshield by an ICE officer on an American street, the mask is off. This is no longer a debate about policy; it is the birth of a regime that reserves law for the weak and bullets for anyone who get in the way. 

    A president who crowns himself

    Trump’s statement to The New York Times that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality” is the distilled creed of authoritarianism. In his own words, there is “one thing” that can stop him: not Congress, not courts, not treaties, but his “own mind,” followed by the contemptuous aside, “I don’t need international law.” 

    This is not some late-night tweet; it is a formal doctrine announced from the Oval Office. In that interview, he waves away the UN Charter, the ban on aggressive war, and decades of treaty obligations as optional restraints that apply only if he personally decides they should, implicitly trampling the Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and the core idea that even great powers are bound by law. 

    He prides himself on using military strikes, invasions, economic strangulation and political coercion as tools of personal will, not as acts accountable to any external standard. A president who claims that law is binding only when he feels like it has ceased to be a constitutional officer and has slipped into the role of a sovereign who believes that legality is a costume he can put on for international conferences and drop whenever he wants to unleash force.

    From “rules-based order” to rule by fear

    For years, Washington preached a “rules-based international order” to other states. Now Trump publicly shreds that script and replaces it with a gangster’s logic: power first, rules never. He openly treats treaties as disposable, walks away from arms-control agreements, and shrugs at the possible collapse of the last major nuclear restraints with a fatalistic “if it expires, it expires.” 

    The message radiates far beyond Washington. If the United States claims the right to strike where it wants, topple whom it chooses, and threaten nuclear and non‑nuclear states alike without even pretending to obey international law, why should Moscow feel bound in Ukraine or Beijing in Taiwan? The “order” that once at least pretended to restrain the strong becomes a stage on which the biggest actor improvises violence while lecturing others about norms. 

    Trump’s “own morality” is not a safeguard; it is a surrender of civilization to personality. It tells every future strongman—from Budapest to Brasília—that law is ornamental and that the only crime is losing. 

    The ICE bullet in Minneapolis

    While Trump claims he does not need international law abroad, his domestic security machine is being trained to treat American streets like occupied territory. In Minneapolis, 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen, a mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE officer while sitting in her car on a cold Midwestern street, neighbors watching from their windows as sirens and shouts shattered the night. 

    She was not a cartel boss or a terrorist; she was a neighbor, a writer, a woman who had come out—according to local accounts—to care for those around her. The official story shifts like a propaganda broadcast. DHS officials insist she “failed to comply,” that she “attempted to run over” an officer. Local witnesses describe confusion and conflicting commands, with one officer telling her to drive away from a stuck ICE vehicle and another simultaneously trying to pull her from the car; body‑camera and bystander video show agents swarming the vehicle, one officer stepping into her path, firing at close range as she attempts to drive off, her car then crashing down the street as her life bleeds out on the asphalt. 

    Minneapolis city officials have said openly what federal spokespeople will not: that this was “a federal agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.” The FBI has now taken over the investigation after the state’s own Bureau of Criminal Apprehension backed away, a sign of just how toxic and politically charged this killing has become, while community grief vigils name her not as a suspect but as a poet, a newcomer, a mother. 

    The same contempt for accountability that lets a president shrug off the UN Charter now underwrites a culture in which an ICE bullet can end a citizen’s life and the first instinct of power is to justify, not to repent. 

    The quiet architecture of a police state

    This is how police states are built in real time—not with a single spectacular coup, but through a series of “operations,” “raids,” and “emergency deployments” that normalize the presence of armed federal agents in daily life. In Minneapolis, thousands of federal officers were deployed in what DHS bragged was the “largest operation ever,” turning a U.S. city into a live‑fire training ground for an internal occupation. 

    The use of ICE, a civil immigration agency, like a paramilitary police force is not an accident. It is a deliberate fusion of domestic and foreign logics: the border mentality imported into the heart of the city, where neighbors blowing whistles to warn each other become suspect, where legal observers and bystanders are treated as obstacles, and where a parked car is one nervous trigger pull away from becoming a coffin. 

    Trump’s doctrine—that only his conscience limits his power—seeps down the chain of command. If the man at the top says law is malleable, if he publicly promises to back his officers no matter what, then every badge and gun on the street hears the same message: you are the law. This is exactly how Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo operated—not because every officer was a monster, but because the system told them that their violence was always already justified. 

    A monstrous hybrid of Nazism and Stalinism

    The horror of the current moment is not that America has become identical to Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union; it is that it is mutating into a hybrid that borrows the worst tools of both. From Nazism, Trump borrows the cult of the leader whose “moral sense” legitimatizes everything, the theater of strength, the glorification of “law and order” as a shield for state brutality. From Stalinism, he borrows the idea that internal enemies lurk everywhere, that entire communities (immigrants, protesters, “anarchists,” “terror sympathizers”) are fair game for sweeping repression. 

    When federal agents can snatch people off streets, deploy to cities over local opposition, and now kill a mother in her car under the banner of immigration enforcement, the line between democracy and dictatorship is not “eroding.” It is being redrawn in blood. When a president announces that courts, laws and treaties are lower‑tier obstacles compared to his “own mind,” he is not defending America from enemies; he is positioning himself as the only real branch of government that matters. 

    This is how hybrid tyrannies work. Elections still occur, some courts still function, newspapers still print—but the security services learn that their real loyalty is owed upward, not outward. The constitution becomes a script for public ceremonies, while the real constitution is whatever the leader and his loyalists can get away with. 

    The conscience that kills

    Trump insists he is “not looking to hurt people,” even as he lists lethal operations as achievements, even as his policies unleash missiles abroad and militarized raids at home. His “own morality” apparently allows for the bombing of foreign soil without authorization, the kidnapping or coercion of foreign leaders, the tearing up of refugee protections, and now a domestic climate in which federal officers gun down a woman in Minneapolis and are treated as heroes in waiting. 

    There is a cruel symmetry here. Abroad, he claims the right to ignore international law in the name of “national strength.” At home, his security forces act as if ordinary Americans are foreign subjects in a pacification campaign. The shared logic is simple: the people at the receiving end of American power—Venezuelan civilians, Iranian technicians, migrants at the border, a mother in a Minneapolis sedan—do not matter as rights‑bearing human beings. They matter only as problems for the leader’s will to solve. 

    When a man with this worldview sits in the Oval Office and tells a major newspaper that only his conscience can stop him, the world should stop pretending this is normal politics. This is not conservatism, populism, or even crude nationalism. It is the theology of the police state: one man’s inner voice elevated above constitutions, courts, treaties, and the screams from the street where Renee Nicole Good died. 

    An ultimatum to real patriots

    So the question is no longer what Trump will do next; the question is what Americans are going to do about an America that the Founders would not recognize. A republic whose president claims to stand above law and whose federal agents kill unarmed citizens in the name of “order” is not the republic Madison and Hamilton were arguing for; it is the nightmare they wrote the Constitution to prevent. 

    The Constitution does not ask “real patriots” to clap for strongmen; it demands that they use every peaceful tool it provides—speech, press, assembly, petitions, jury service, litigation, elections, impeachment, and relentless oversight—to drag power back under law. It calls legislators to defund and dismantle rogue operations, judges to enforce rights without fear, civil servants to refuse illegal orders, and ordinary citizens to organize, vote, strike, and resist until no man’s “own morality” can ever again stand in for the rule of law. If Americans will not use those tools now, when a mother lies dead in Minneapolis and a president boasts that only his conscience can stop him, then the Constitution will become nothing more than an antique in a glass case—and the hybrid monster of Nazism and Stalinism will finish the work it has already begun. 

    References 

    1.The New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump addresses Venezuela, Greenland and presidential power in wide‑ranging interview. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.htm

    2.The New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump said his global power was limited only by his ‘own morality’. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/briefing/trump-interview-oval-office-apple-ceo.html

    3.Bluewin. (2026, January 9). USA: Trump: Only my sense of morality can hold me back. https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/international/trump-only-my-sense-of-morality-can-hold-me-back-3041854.html

    4.Moneycontrol. (2026, January 8). ‘Only my morality can stop me’: Trump claims sweeping war powers, shrugs off international law. https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/only-my-morality-can-stop-me-trump-claims-sweeping-war-powers-says-he-doesn-t-need-internatio-article-12812335.html

    5.Financial Express. (2026, January 8). ‘I don’t need international law’: Trump says only his own morality limits his global power. https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/only-one-thing-can-stop-me-trump-says-he-dont-need-international-law-boasts-12812091/

    6.World Socialist Web Site. (2026, January 8). Declaring ‘I don’t need international law,’ Trump moves to assert unlimited warmaking powers. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/09/qyot-j09.html

    7.Al Jazeera. (2026, January 8). FBI takes over investigation into ICE agent killing of woman in Minneapolis. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/8/fbi-takes-over-investigation-into-ice-agent-killing-of-woman-in-minneapolis

    8.ABC News (Australia). (2026, January 7). What led to an ICE agent fatally shooting a public observer in Minneapolis? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-08/ice-shooting-minneapolis-minnesota-immigration-crackdown/106209128

    9.NBC News. (2026, January 7). Renee Nicole Good, woman shot by ICE officer, was out ‘caring for her neighbors’. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/renee-nicole-good-minneapolis-ice-shooting-victim-caring-neighbor-rcna252901

    10.Colorado Public Radio. (2026, January 7). Woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis originally from Colorado. https://www.cpr.org/2026/01/07/fatal-minneapolis-ice-shooting-colorado-woman/

    11.CNN. (2026, January 8). ICE officer who shot woman in Minneapolis was dragged by a car in 2025, video shows. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/us/ice-agent-minneapolis-shooting-car-dragged-invs

    12.NBC News. (2026, January 8). ICE officer who fatally shot Minnesota woman was dragged by a car during a prior enforcement stop. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-officer-fatally-shot-minnesota-woman-was-dragged-car-june-immigrat-rcna252992

    13.City of Minneapolis. (2026, January 6). Minneapolis responds to fatal shooting of woman by federal agent. https://www.minneapolismn.gov/news/2026/january/fatal-shooting-response/

    14.PBS NewsHour. (2026, January 8). Woman killed by ICE agent was mother of 3, poet and new to Minneapolis. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/woman-killed-by-ice-agent-was-mother-of-3-poet-and-new-to-minneapolis

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Tear Down This Union: How Ursula von der Leyen Turned Europe Into a Gilded Prison

    Tear Down This Union: How Ursula von der Leyen Turned Europe Into a Gilded Prison

    by Amal Zadok

    Kornelia Kirchweger: ‘The EU must disappear. Over the years, through treaties and crises, the EU has acquired an occupying power over Europe and, in my opinion, it occupies this continent in a brutal and authoritarian way, suffocating cultures, freedom, freedom of expression and leading this continent precisely to the place from which the EU claimed it would rescue it: out from under the rubble of war – and precisely back there is where the EU is dragging Europe once again. And this EU must disappear. The EU must disappear. The EU has entrenched itself over the years, through treaties and crises.’”

    Kornelia Kirchweger says out loud what millions of Europeans only dare to mutter at their kitchen tables: the European Union does not “unite” Europe; it occupies it. The smiling blue flag with its neat golden stars has become the banner of a new empire that does not need tanks or barbed wire to crush nations, because it rules instead through debt, digital surveillance, and an ideology that brands dissent as heresy. Her demand that “the EU must disappear” is not a theatrical provocation; it is a necessary act of European self‑defence.

    The EU was sold as a guarantee of “never again”—never again war, never again authoritarianism, never again the trampling of peoples by distant, unaccountable power. Yet what exists in Brussels now is precisely a distant, unaccountable power that blackmails elected governments, dictates economic policy, and polices speech under the holy trinity of “security, safety, and stability.” The continent that once produced revolutions against divine‑right kings now applauds as faceless commissioners and central bankers issue decrees that bind hundreds of millions who never voted for them. This is not cooperation; it is vassalage dressed as progress—the “occupying power” over Europe that Kornelia names with surgical precision.

    Kornelia identifies the method: treaties and crises. Each crisis—financial, health, geopolitical—has been seized as a pretext to centralise more control in Brussels and Frankfurt, tying national budgets and laws to institutions that answer to no electorate. Treaties once presented as tools of peace have hardened into chains. Opt‑outs vanish, “temporary” emergency measures become permanent, and referenda that deliver the “wrong” answer are ignored or re‑run until obedience is achieved. Consent, the heart of any genuine democracy, has been replaced by weary resignation. When Kornelia says the EU has “entrenched itself,” she is simply describing how the coup by paperwork has already taken place.

    At the centre of this drift stands Ursula von der Leyen, the unelected queen of an empire that pretends not to be one. She has mastered the art of ruling by permanent emergency, using the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and now “information warfare” as pretexts to bypass member states, concentrate power in the Commission, and present herself as indispensable commander of Europe’s “permacrisis.” Her Commission has become a quasi‑dictatorial sovereign, a machine that treats national parliaments as rubber stamps and voters as an obstacle to be managed. If the EU is the occupying force over Europe, von der Leyen is its soft‑Stalinist party secretary: unelected, unremovable, and convinced that history runs through her desk.

    What makes von der Leyen’s rule particularly dangerous is the fusion of moralism and soft Stalinism. She divides politics into loyal comrades of “European values” and enemies labelled “Russian puppets,” “extremists,” or “threats to democracy,” echoing the old tactic of branding opponents as agents of foreign powers. Sanctions lists are drafted behind closed doors, freezing assets and destroying reputations without meaningful due process, while she lectures the continent about the rule of law. This is not justice; it is a bureaucratic blacklist system worthy of Stalin’s clerks, updated with IBAN numbers and SWIFT codes. Kornelia’s phrase “brutal and authoritarian occupation” finds a face and a signature here.

    The regime’s poison lies in its moral camouflage. Brussels speaks the language of human rights while cutting off oxygen to any culture that resists its dogmas. National identities are tolerated as folkloric decoration, provided they never obstruct the homogenous “European way of life” defined by unelected ideologues. The EU preaches diversity but practises uniformity: uniform currency, uniform rules, uniform narratives. A Polish farmer, an Italian nurse, a Greek dock worker are treated not as citizens of concrete communities, but as variables in a spreadsheet to be adjusted for “convergence.” 

    This is the suffocation of cultures that Kornelia denounces—accomplished not with bayonets, but with compliance reports.

    Her accusation that the EU asphyxiates freedom of expression cuts to the bone. In the name of fighting “disinformation,” Brussels under von der Leyen has constructed a censorship architecture more efficient than anything the old dictatorships could dream of. The Digital Services Act and its siblings give Eurocrats leverage to pressure platforms into shadow‑banning, de‑monetising, or deleting voices that question official narratives on war, migration, public health, or the sanctity of EU institutions. No show trials are needed when a single email can erase a journalist, scholar, or priest from public visibility at the speed of an algorithmic tweak.

    This is soft totalitarianism: no gulags, but social death; no midnight knocks, but destroyed careers; no banned books, but invisible search results. The dissident of the 21st century is not dragged before a court; he is rendered unemployable, unbanked, and unseeable. Because all of this is done “to protect democracy,” the average citizen is shamed into applauding his own gagging. Kornelia’s refusal to applaud exposes the regime’s deepest fear: that Europeans might rediscover the courage to speak like she does—and realise how many already secretly agree.

    The same contempt for peoples that drives censorship also shapes policy on war and peace. The EU that boasts of a Nobel Peace Prize now behaves like a bloodless war‑management office. Under von der Leyen, the Ukraine war has been instrumentalised not only to rearm the continent but to cement Commission control over foreign and security policy, powers never explicitly granted by the treaties. Endless escalation—sanctions that wreck European industry, arms spending that drains public coffers—is not driven by popular will, but by a fanatical Atlanticist class that sees ordinary Europeans as expendable collateral in its geopolitical fantasies.

    Brussels and its faithful capitals treat the war as a moral pageant in which they can pose as defenders of civilisation while families pay in energy bills, inflation, and lost futures. War fever has become a convenient instrument of internal control. Question sanctions and you are a Putinist; oppose pumping more weapons into a meat grinder and you “undermine European security”; call for ceasefire and negotiation and you become suspect, perhaps criminal. A foreign conflict is transformed into a loyalty test for EU citizens, justifying new surveillance powers, tighter protest restrictions, and elastic “extremism” laws that can stretch to cover anyone who still dares to shout no. It is the road back to rubble that Kornelia fears—this time moral and institutional rubble, prepared in peacetime.

    A civilisation collapses long before its buildings fall. It collapses when truth becomes a risk, when fear hums constantly in the background, when parents quietly prepare their children to emigrate because they no longer believe their homeland has a future. Across Europe, that collapse is visible: brain drain, demographic winter, emptied villages, cities where locals cannot afford to live, parliaments that resemble branch offices of an imperial centre more than houses of a sovereign people. In such a landscape, Kornelia’s cry that “the EU must disappear” is not nihilism; it is an act of hope against managed decay.

    Defenders of the Union insist that without Brussels, Europe would sink into nationalism, conflict, and chaos. Yet it is under von der Leyen’s Brussels that Europe is again flirting with catastrophe: fuelling wars it cannot win, provoking powers it cannot defeat, and crushing precisely the democratic vitality that could renew it. The choice is not between this Union and a new Dark Age; it is between this Union and the possibility of a Europe that is genuinely plural, genuinely democratic, and genuinely peaceful. Kornelia forces the real question: is the current EU architecture compatible with freedom at all, or has it become structurally hostile to it?

    To reach that better Europe, the EU in its current form must indeed disappear. Not be gently “reformed,” not be slightly “rebalanced,” but dismantled as a structure of domination. Powers must be repatriated to national and local levels, treaties scrapped or radically rewritten under real popular scrutiny, censorship mechanisms abolished, and the permanent war footing decisively rejected. Cooperation between European peoples is desirable; a Brussels‑centred oligarchy commanded by an unaccountable Commission president is not. Kornelia’s radical clarity destroys the comforting illusion that cosmetic tinkering will ever suffice.

    Her sentence, “The EU must disappear,” is therefore a line of liberation, not despair. It tells a tired and frightened continent: you are allowed to fire your jailers. You are allowed to say no to the empire that acts in your name while looting your savings, your freedoms, and your sons. You are allowed to imagine—and then build—a Europe after Brussels: a Europe of peoples instead of commissars, cultures instead of codes, conscience instead of slogans.

    Either Europe listens to voices like Kornelia’s and dismantles its gilded prison from within, or it will learn again that empires built on fear and lies always fall—but they often drag their subjects into the rubble with them.

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Hijacked Democracy: How Israel’s Lobby Captured the Heart of America

    Hijacked Democracy: How Israel’s Lobby Captured the Heart of America

    by Amal Zadok

    For decades, the American public has been comforted by the illusion that they live in a functioning democracy, their interests safeguarded by a government built on checks, balances, and constitutional law. This myth is now unsustainable. At the root of America’s democratic decay lies not abstract forces or vague external pressures, but the concrete, multi-generational influence of Israel and its deeply entrenched lobby—an axis of power so effective, so persistent, that it has rendered the sovereignty, freedoms, and very essence of American democracy subservient to foreign interests.

    The Architecture of Power: How the Israel Lobby Seized Washington

    It is often said that nations are manipulated by shadowy external lobbies, but in the case of the United States, the Israel lobby stands alone as an unparalleled testament to foreign influence. From presidential palaces to congressional offices, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and allied Zionist organizations operate with impunity. Their methods are no secret: targeted campaign finance, direct threats, networked media pressure, and legal intimidation. Israel’s coalition of advocates have, over decades, built the infrastructure that steers U.S. policy, not for the interests of American citizens, but for the priorities of Tel Aviv.

    This lobby co-opts both political parties. Presidential candidates, congressional hopefuls, senators, and state representatives are repeatedly forced into pro-Israel postures, whether they agree with the policies or not, simply to survive political fundraising and media scrutiny. Careers are built or broken by declarations of loyalty to the Israel agenda. The result is routinized production of legislation, executive directives, and judicial decisions specifically crafted to serve Israel’s security, military, and territorial ambitions.

    Elections Rigged and Freedoms Sold

    Nowhere is the corruption of democracy more evident than in the election process itself. Recent cycles have witnessed an exponential increase in pro-Israel donor spending, reaching nearly $45 million in 2024 alone—triple that of the past two cycles. This flood of cash doesn’t just skew outcomes; it warps the electoral agenda itself. Policy debates avoid mention of Palestinian suffering, Israeli war crimes, or the cost to American lives and treasure. Otherwise promising, progressive candidates who dare challenge the Israel lobby are eliminated—Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman just recent casualties of coordinated, high-dollar campaigns to silence dissent and preserve operational control.

    Even primary contests are infected, with Republican funding channeled through AIPAC and PACs to distort Democratic races and neutralize critics. Sitting members of Congress live with the constant fear that a single pro-Palestinian comment will spell the end of their careers, drowned out by a blitz of negative advertising, legal threats, and orchestrated scandal. In this climate, the sovereign will of the American people is an afterthought.

    Media Manipulation and the Death of Free Speech

    The Israel lobby’s ingenuity is most brazen in its campaign against American freedoms. Freedom of speech, once a sacred American principle, is now rationed by fear. Journalists, academics, artists, and activists face relentless blacklisting, doxxing, and direct intimidation if they dare raise Israeli abuses or support Palestinian rights. Larger outlets toe the party line, echoing AIPAC-scripted narratives; smaller, independent publications are bullied, derided, or driven out of business. Even social media platforms have come under pressure to shadowban, demonetize, or delete content exposing Israeli aggression or occupation.

    The highly public criticism and targeting of Tucker Carlson offer a powerful example of the methods deployed against voices that challenge the pro-Israel narrative in American media. As one of America’s most recognized commentators, Carlson has repeatedly raised uncomfortable questions about the U.S.-Israel relationship, confronted high-profile figures over unconditional support, and, most controversially, speculated publicly on intelligence connections and censorship related to Israeli interests in Washington. Following outspoken episodes questioning aid, alliances, and American militarism in service of Israel, Carlson has been the subject of one of the most orchestrated campaigns of public denunciation: widely accused of antisemitism, targeted for supposed conspiracy-mongering about Israeli intelligence activities, and relentlessly condemned for platforming perspectives critical of Zionism.

    The backlash has included professional threats, advertiser boycotts, media smears, and legislative scrutiny—reinforcing the chilling effect on other journalists who might otherwise raise critical questions. The controversy surrounding Carlson’s investigations and commentary is not simply a matter of contentious opinion; it is emblematic of how powerful interests shape the boundaries of public debate. His case demonstrates that even widely followed, well-resourced journalists are not immune from the machinery of suppression, which is activated at full force when criticism of Israel penetrates mainstream coverage.

    Anti-Semitism laws have become bludgeons, wielded to criminalize criticism of Israeli policy even when it’s couched in universally accepted terms. College students are expelled, faculty disciplined, and public institutions subject to invasive federal and donor oversight, putting a chill on all forms of pro-Palestine advocacy. The culture of silence is so complete that even moderate voices tiptoe around the real effects of the Israel lobby, lest they be erased from public discourse.

    Sovereignty Subjugated—America as the Proxy

    American sovereignty is now a theoretical construct, as Israel’s priorities dominate not just the foreign policy apparatus but the very laws that govern U.S. autonomy. Every year, billions are shipped to Israel in aid and military hardware, far exceeding assistance to any other nation, without meaningful debate or review. Arms deals flow not in response to genuine U.S. strategic needs, but in service of Israel’s ongoing occupation, with American troops and assets positioned globally to defend Israeli interests even at the expense of critical domestic priorities.

    U.S. presidents, regardless of party, regularly adopt Israel-centric stances and policies—moving embassies, vetoing U.N. resolutions, forsaking international law—all to maintain unshakeable loyalty to Tel Aviv. Legislation is routinely tailored for exemption: business partnerships, visa policies, and intelligence sharing all bend the rules for Israeli benefit. The influence goes well beyond policy: it festers within the military-industrial complex, federal law enforcement, and intelligence, often turning American resources towards defending Israeli aggression and suppressing dissent in the name of “security.”

    Suppression of Dissent and Criminalization of Solidarity

    Every campaign in defense of Palestinian rights faces ruthless legal, financial, and organizational sabotage. The Israel lobby leverages courts, legislatures, and executive branches to ban Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions actions; to punish protestors and organizers; and to marginalize—even criminalize—advocacy for Palestinian liberation. Constitutional protections for speech and assembly offer little protection in practice; the machinery of state, propelled by Israeli interests, now polices the boundaries of permissible protest.

    Dissent is not just discouraged—it is defined as anti-American. Police crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests, university discipline of activists, and congressional hearings to “defend” Israel all work to delegitimize solidarity movements. The message is clear: American freedom exists only for causes that align with Israel’s narrative, and dissent comes with direct, systemic consequences.

    The Cost of Subservience: What America Has Lost

    There is no single force hollowing out America’s democracy, sovereignty, and freedom more completely than the influence of Israel and its lobby. The cost to American lives, treasure, and the integrity of its institutions is incalculable. Democratic practice, once messy but vibrant, is now little more than a charade, with outcomes and debates determined in advance by distant interests. Sovereignty—once defended as sacred—is exchanged for subservience to an ally whose priorities increasingly diverge from the needs and hopes of most Americans.

    Meanwhile, rights and freedoms once taken for granted have become commodities—offered or withheld by political patrons, media barons, and the legal apparatus that arbitrates permissible dissent. The entire American system now operates in a permanent state of compromise, not to the advantage of its citizens, but in perpetual service to the Israeli state.

    The Uprising and Its Hard Limits

    Momentous change is afoot. As the depth and brazenness of Israeli influence is exposed, younger Americans and liberal activists increasingly reject manufactured consensus, challenging both the mechanics and morality of U.S.-Israel policy. Public opinion is shifting rapidly, with majorities of Jews and non-Jews alike questioning unconditional support for Israel and the machinery that enforces it. The bipartisan, uncritical embrace of Israel is cracking at its foundations. Progressive coalitions, united in their opposition to AIPAC, are rising—yet face the daunting task of dismantling the most sophisticated lobbying machine in American history.

    Legal countermeasures, media campaigns, and mass mobilization intensify—a battle not just for Palestinian liberation, but for the recovery of American democracy itself. Yet the Israel lobby, having mastered the arts of subterfuge and financial pressure, is unlikely to relinquish power without a fight. It continues to invest record sums, to target and destroy critics, to recruit media allies, and to manipulate the boundaries of what Americans are even allowed to debate. The struggle will be long and brutal, with many false starts and bitter defeats.

    Naming the Problem: The Essential First Step

    America cannot restore its democracy, its sovereignty, or its freedom until it honestly confronts the singular influence of Israel and its network of patrons. The problem is not abstract; it is present in every campaign contribution, every forced resignation, every murdered debate, and every law calibrated to benefit a foreign regime at the expense of national interest.

    Only brutal honesty, combined with united grassroots resistance and principled leadership, can begin the process of recovery. The first critical act is to name the Israel problem—without euphemism or self-censorship. Otherwise, the collapse will gather speed, and the last shreds of American liberty will be traded away.

    Soft coup in a progress? What to do?

    In light of these forces, we must ask: Are we witnessing, in real time, a soft coup d’état of the American government and its most valuable institutions—an upheaval not executed by tanks and generals, but by lobbyists, donors, and clandestine influence wielders whose loyalty is to Tel Aviv rather than Washington?

    Should this radical subordination of American sovereignty continue, the coming midterms may become not just another exercise in frustration for a disenfranchised electorate, but a flashpoint for collective reckoning. Will Americans, finally awakened to the theft of their democracy, rise to reject the capture and reclaim self-rule—or will they remain paralyzed, lost in a spectacle designed to obscure the true locus of power? The next ballot may not simply test policymaker popularity, but the strength of American identity itself.

    References

    1. Mearsheimer, J., & Walt, S. (2006). The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

    2. Cleland, B. (2025, July 1). How Israel’s allies hijacked U.S. democracy. Independent Australia.

    3. Responsible Statecraft. (2025, September 2). Israel’s foreign influence is the most unrelenting in US history.

    4. Mondoweiss. (2025, November 11). AIPAC is suddenly a political liability. Is the Israel lobby in trouble?

    5. World New World. (2025, July 6). The Israeli State and Its influence on U.S. Foreign Policy.

    6. AMUST. (2025, June 28). The corruption of the American political system by Pro-Israel lobby.

    7. Arab American News. (2025, October 31). How pro-Israel advocacy built an influence machine in the West and what it cost.

    8. OpenSecrets. (2025, June 11). Pro-Israel Summary.

    9. UWA News. (2025, April 9). What is the Israel lobby – and why is it so anxious?

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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