Authoritarian Clowns, Masked Agents, and the Three-Year Clock

While Trump’s regime reboots the Confederacy, turns ICE into Miller’s personal gestapo, and prepares for war via BlueSky memes, the planet’s last shot at 1.5°C survival slips away.

Good morning! On this Juneteenth, as the nation marks the final emancipation of enslaved people in Texas two and a half years after Lincoln declared their freedom, we’re once again reminded that tyranny rarely retreats on its own. It delays, denies, lies, and defends itself to the bitter end. Which brings us neatly to the state of American governance under Trump’s second term, where freedom is once again being delayed, denied, and quietly dismantled, this time with ICE agents in masks, military brass who won’t say no to illegal orders, and a vice president trolling trans people between war councils.

In the Senate, Elissa Slotkin offered what may be the clearest public window yet into how far the Trump administration has slipped. Facing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth across the dais, she asked the only question that matters: will you refuse an illegal order to turn military force against unarmed American citizens? And like a man wholly unfit for the office he holds, Hegseth couldn’t say yes. Not even when Slotkin reminded him, with receipts, that former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper documented in his memoir how Donald Trump ordered his team to “shoot protesters in the legs” during the 2020 demonstrations. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley confirmed the Oval Office confrontation. Hegseth, confronted with this plain and verified history, retreated behind a smirk and a line destined for the tombstone of American constitutional collapse: “Be careful what you read in books. Except the Bible.”

Slotkin, who actually served at the Pentagon and completed three CIA tours in Iraq, wasn’t buying it. She invoked a chilling image, one that should haunt every American who still imagines this is all just standard partisan theater. What happens when a protester steps in front of a tank at Trump’s next military parade? What happens when orders come down to clear the streets by force? “I thought of Tiananmen,” she said. She didn’t have to finish the sentence. Everyone watching could fill in the rest.

Meanwhile, across town, Congressmen Nadler and Goldman faced their own institutional brick wall as they attempted to conduct lawful oversight of ICE detention facilities in New York. They were blocked and denied entry. Refused access to a federal facility where immigrants, many non-criminal, some fully documented, some seeking legal asylum, are being held for days, forced to sleep on floors and benches, while masked agents prepare to snatch them immediately upon dismissal of their cases. The agents wore no names, no identifying numbers. Only black masks, as if ripped straight from a dystopian Netflix series about a failing democracy. Nadler didn’t mince words: Gestapo tactics. Goldman was equally blunt: “Who are we? And what are we becoming?”

We know, of course, exactly who is behind these orders. Stephen Miller’s fingerprints are everywhere. If central casting put out a call for “authoritarian villain who dreams in mass deportations,” they’d have to invent someone like Miller if he didn’t already exist, part Dracula, part young Palpatine, with his sunken eyes and thin-lipped sneer practically dripping malice. New reporting confirms that Miller personally orchestrated the ICE ramp-up, issuing direct orders for agents to fan out across the country, not simply to arrest immigrants at borders or known criminal hubs, but to hunt them down in Home Depot parking lots, 7-Elevens, schools, hotels, kitchens, and factories. He instructed ICE to target peaceful protests deliberately, weaponizing public demonstrations as a pretext to launch mass arrests. We are witnessing a live-action propaganda exercise designed to manufacture fear, bait governors like California’s into confrontation, and feed Trump’s base its steady diet of racialized vengeance. It is political policing and it is metastasizing.

But while the regime’s internal machinery slides deeper into its authoritarian reflexes, its public leadership remains cartoonishly unserious. Enter Vice President JD Vance, who spent the hours leading into a Situation Room meeting about possible U.S. military strikes on Iran doing what any serious statesman would do: trolling trans people on BlueSky.

At 4:50 PM, Vance posted a thread linking to that day’s Supreme Court ruling upholding red-state bans on gender-affirming care for minors, mocking medical professionals and scientists, and declaring that “common sense” had prevailed. Ten minutes later, he walked into the White House Situation Room to discuss whether the United States would initiate war with Iran. Because apparently, there’s always time to own the libs before weighing the merits of dropping bunker busters on Tehran.

The war meeting ended around 6:00 PM. Vance emerged and immediately returned to his primary theater of operations, not consulting with defense experts or huddling with national security staff, but posting again: “Just set up my page on BlueSky. Hope to see you guys there.” Somewhere Dick Cheney is weeping, not out of conscience, but out of professional embarrassment at the sheer amateur hour spectacle his heirs have become.

The absurdity is not lost on America’s global allies. Just days ago, Macron and Modi were caught on camera openly mocking Trump’s social media governance, laughing about how America now fights its wars on Twitter. That moment, uncomfortable as it may be, captured precisely where this country stands: a nuclear-armed empire run by trolls who treat global brinkmanship like a live-action roleplaying forum.

And while they fiddle with hashtags and execute roundups of desperate asylum seekers, the real existential crisis marches on. New data unveiled at the Bonn climate summit now shows that we may have just three years left before the planet overshoots its carbon budget to keep global warming under 1.5°C. For small island nations in the Pacific, this is not a policy debate, it is a death sentence already written in sea level charts. “The climate is on fire and our way of life is on the line,” warned Greenpeace’s Shiva Gounden. “This is a matter of survival.”

But in the White House? Not a single adult in the room raising the alarm. Only JD Vance, bouncing between BlueSky dunk contests, while the Situation Room flips between target maps and TikToks.

And so on this Juneteenth, as Americans honor the unfinished work of emancipation, Trump’s regime marches proudly in the other direction. The Pentagon, which had begun renaming military bases once glorifying Confederate traitors, is now quietly reversing course. Several bases are being restored to their original Confederate names, part of a broader ideological project to whitewash America’s first insurrection and embrace its second.

This is where we are. Armed federal agents storming congressional offices. A Defense Secretary unable to say he won’t fire on civilians. A Vice President play-acting as a culture war influencer while the world inches closer to another war. The institutions we rely on to restrain tyranny are being mocked, defied, or subverted entirely. But cracks are showing: in the hearings, in the confrontations, in the retired military officials filing briefs, in the members of Congress refusing to stay silent.

The regime wants its critics exhausted. It wants Americans convinced that resistance is futile. But the truth remains: authoritarianism always looks invincible until it isn’t.