Louisiana Voice

If you’re not concerned by now, you should be.

If you’re not alarmed by now, you should be.

If you’re not ready to join the resistance, you should be.

The pretense is gone; The Trump administration and Repugnantcans like Mike Johnson have one objective by now: total control of our bedrooms, our schoolrooms, and our minds because once they get control of those, everything else they want will come easy.

Why would Pam Bondi write Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on the same day as the Alex Pretti murder, coincidentally (or not), to tell him if he’d turn over the state’s voter rolls, then ICE, Border Patrol and Homeland Security (read: Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, Oath Keepers, et al) just might be removed from his state.

That sounds an awful lot like extortion to me but hey, what do I know? I’m just an American citizen who was once proud of this country. Today, I have grave concerns for the direction in which we’re headed—not for me so much, I’m 82, but for my grandchildren who are at real risk of living under an authoritarian dictatorship.

For all these years, the political right has defended the Second Amendment as if it were the holy grail—even in the wake of multiple shootings of innocent school children. All they were willing to offer up were TAPs (“thoughts and prayer”). Now, in a whiplash-inducing about-face, the killing of Pretti was completely justified because he was carrying a weapon—legally. The fact that he was disarmed before the first of 10 shots was fired is suddenly irrelevant.

And why were DHS and ICE sent there in the first place? Ostensibly because Minnesota became embroiled in a massive federally-funded day care scandal whereby taxpayers were robbed of millions of dollars.

Horse hockey. Trump saw an opportunity to attempt to flip a blue state in this year’s elections and presto! He has an issue with which to express his disdain and disgust.

Except for that Mississippi welfare fraud involving a former Repugnican governor. That’s off-limits. I mean, c’mon, Mississippi is a red state; no need to go barging in there.

And Trump claimed a drug crisis as an excuse to invade Venezuela even as he was issuing a pardon to the former PRESIDENT OF HONDURAS who was convicted (in the same court where Venezuela’s Madura will be tried) of being the leader of one of the largest criminal enterprises that has ever existed and who is responsible for the smuggling of 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Trump says he was “set up.”

So now, Trump is judge and jury? That sounds an awfully lot like a despot handing down edicts.

Likewise, Trump is so offended at Minnesota’s rampant fraud as to dispatch federal forces there even as he PARDONS SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS CONVICTED OF FRAUD. Trump himself was forced to settle a fraud case involving his fake Trump University for $25 million and to repay millions in funds defrauded from a Trump non-profit foundation intended to help children with cancer—and to agree never to operate another non-profit in New York.

So, just as Venezuela wasn’t about drugs, neither has the crackdown in Minnesota been about immigration or fraud; it’s all about control.

After all, as one reader noted, ICE has 22,000 officers with a $27.7 billion budget, with $75 billion allocated over the next four years. The U.S. Marine Corps has 177,000 active-duty personnel with a $57 billion budget. Why does ICE need so much funding?

And if his henchmen happen to murder a few innocent people or abduct a five-year-old boy as being among Trump’s “worst of the worst,” then so be it. It’s all part of the process of seizing control and, at least to him, a small price to pay in order to gain that control.

But if we are willing to sit back and watch as he wreaks havoc, destroys lives and guts our freedoms without taking action, then we fully deserve what we get.

You have to know by now that Trump will go as far as he is allowed to go, whether it be invading or annexing a sovereign nation, destroying the White House’s East Wing to construct a $400 million ballroom or issuing pardons to insurrectionists, fraudsters, drug smugglers and sex traffickers.

But if we stand as one and say, “NO MORE” to the Trumps, the Pam Bondis, the Kash Patels, the Kristi Noems, the J.D. Vances, the Mike Johnsons, then maybe, just maybe, we can take this country back in the name of the citizens of the United States of America.

We can put football and the transfer portal aside, forget about March Madness and pay more attention to what the truly important things are or we can blithely go about our circuses and allow this monster to steadily erode our freedoms until we awaken one day as we’re being loaded onto the railroad cars (metamorphically speaking).

The choice is ours. You love your sports vernacular? Try this one: the ball is in your court.