Louisiana Voice

“They never said who they were. I didn’t know if I was going to be seen again. I didn’t know what was going on. But I could tell that I was being arrested or detained or something.”

—Evelyn Bassi, 30, a lifelong Portland resident, on being swept up by men in cammo who never identified themselves during protests in Portland, Ore. In July.

“This transfer that took place on June 2 was ordered by ICE headquarters. I do know that the local field office pushed back and attempted to refuse the transfer, and they were overridden by officials in Washington.”

— Jeffrey Crawford, the director of the Farmville, Va. Immigration jail, told Farmville’s town council on Aug. 12, after the Trump administration circumvented restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel by employing the ruse that detainees were being “transferred.” Among the Department of Homeland Security detainees were dozens who tested positive for COVID-19 who, in turn, infected 300 inmates of the Farmville facility, one of whom died. [The subterfuge by Trump allowed the rapid transfer of ICE agents employed to put down protests in Washington.]

“CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration. CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening . . . Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear. The reports must be read by someone outside of CDC like myself, and we cannot allow the reporting to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous. Its lunacy. Nothing to go out unless I read and agree with the findings how they CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and ‘complete.'”

—Donald Trump appointee Paul Alexander, aide to Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo, in typical attack on the CDC’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality reports on COVID-19 by unqualified, non-scientist political hacks. [The attempts by Trump to deflect attention away from his epic failure in responding to the coronavirus continue long after his bombshell revelation to Bob Woodward.]

“The ballots in Nevada on election night should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state. They are completely corrupted. No votes should be counted from the state of Nevada if that turns out to be the provable case. Send federal marshals to the Clark county board of elections, Mr. President!”

—Roger Stone, in an interview on Alex Jones’s Infowars, Sept. 10. [Stone also said Trump should seize total power and jail Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg, Harry Reid and Apple’s Tim Cook, and form “an election day operation using the FBI, federal marshals and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections ([to results) and if necessary, to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.” [This, and the quote below, are prime examples of Third-World patriotism.]

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want. Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in and we, we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that, because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes.”

—Donald Trump, in interview with Fox News’ Jeannine Pirro, on Saturday. [If this dangerous rhetoric doesn’t serve as a would-be dictator’s desperate attempt to cling to power, nothing does.]