ICE: What You Need To Know About America’s Secret Police. Steve Williamson, Karen McClelland and Gary LaMaster discuss the history, structure, recent actions and excesses of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
This year, the agency has sent heavily armed masked agents into communities across the U.S. to round up migrants who are “the worst of the worst.” Instead, it has arrested, abused, and detained your neighbors, co-workers, military veterans, American citizens, even elected officials. As a result, there are currently more than 68,400 people being held in often deplorable conditions.
It could be argued that all of this has ties to last week’s show on oligarchy. Because a strongman/tyrant needs a loyal and compliant police force to make the nation safe for themselves and the oligarchs.
The United States Of Oligarchy. Steve Williamson and Karen McClelland welcome frequent contributor Mik Jordahl to discuss oligarchy. Jordahl begins by offering a definition of oligarchy which he says means “rule by the few” in which political power is concentrated in the economic elites.
Interestingly, Williamson found that, when he asked AI about oligarchy and Donald Trump, the AI responded that it couldn’t talk about that yet. “AI is afraid to comment about current policy,” he says. Jordahl adds, “There are a few oligarchs behind that.”
Williamson continues to note the growing influence of billionaires in the media, politics and social media platforms. “Modern oligarchy systems form around tech wealth and resource wealth that stretch social influence,” he says, “Oligarchy is not usually something that happens with a big bang.”
Indeed, the United States has transformed over time. As Jordahl states, “The bottom 50 percent has stagnated. It’s share of the wealth of the United States since 1989 has diminished over time…the share of the super wealthy has shot way, way up. In 1990, there were 66 Americans qualified as billionaires. In 2025 there are over 900 billionaires in the United States. This is something we’ve chosen through policy, through tax rates.”
Woke, Cancel Culture And Tribalism. Steve Williamson and Karen McClelland welcome back Mik Jordahl to discuss the concept of Woke. Williamson begins by noting that Woke began when the great blues singer Huddie William Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly) used the term in his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys” in which he asked people to be aware of social injustices they may face. The term gained popularity during the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s and grew more popular with the Black Lives Matter movement making it a target of the political right.
Jordahl says, “It has become a real pejorative term in general, so I almost hesitate to use it because it sort of lends credence to the rightwing perspective.” He adds, “There is a twin called cancel culture, and the Republicans have honed that to a great degree.” He goes on to explain, “There is a real effort across the board to suppress speech. And people are afraid, whether it’s on the right or left, to speak their minds.”
McClellan notes that such tribalism has been used by the right to divide us in what they decry as identity politics.
The Theology Of Liberation. Steve Williamson welcomes theologian Dr. Mitri Raheb, former pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem and founder and president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem.
Raheb combines liberation theology with political action. He says, “The Bible itself, which really came out of Palestine, was written in the context of occupation…a Babylonian occupation, a Greek occupation, a Roman occupation and so the theme of the Bible, the main theme is liberation because of the context of occupation. And so, the Bible itself talks about liberation in the real sense of the word, which unfortunately later became the salvation of the soul which you don’t find in the Bible at all.”
Asked about Christian Zionists who believe Israel should dominate the Holy Land, Raheb replies, “We consider Christian Zionism to be a heresy because these are people who hijack the Bible for not only political ends…they are antisemitic, too. They want to bring all of the Jews to Palestine with the intention that two-thirds of the Jews will be killed, and the last third will convert to Christianity so that Jesus will come back.”
Raheb continues, “Palestinians have been living in Palestine for the last 3,000 years, and they are the native people of Palestine. They changed maybe over time their religion.” He adds, “Palestinian Jews were always part of the Palestinian people. Our problem is not with the Jewish people. Our problem is with European Zionists who came as settler colonialists to take the land and to replace the Palestinians.”
Reimagining The Future Of The Democratic Party. Steve Williamson, Karen McClelland and Gary LaMaster break down what they believe are the Democratic Party’s failings that have allowed MAGA to destroy our government and put us on the path to dictatorship. In our view, the Party has become far too reactive and transactional – only communicating with voters through appeals for money and support during election season.
While it is true that the Democratic Party has made great social progress over the decades, its accomplishments have been poorly communicated. Moreover, its achievements are often incremental in nature. Too often they address the symptoms rather than the causes of our rigged economy and the pain being felt by Middle America, particularly in rural areas.
Addressing The Mythology Of Climate Change. Karen McClelland welcomes Stefan Sommer and Erin Mahan of NAZCCA (Northern Arizona Climate Change Alliance) to discuss the impending climate crisis. Mahan is also Vice-President of Membership and Regulatory Affairs of SunSpec Alliance, a global trade association that brings renewables to the grid faster and makes interconnection possible.
Sommer begins the discussion by noting that greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels change the Earth’s average temperature by acting as a blanket to hold in the heat from the sun. “We’ve known this since about 1850,” he says. “The really scary thing that we now see is that the warming has accelerated. It’s hard to reverse this, but we desperately need to because we are now affecting every ecosystem on Earth. We are affecting our agricultural ecosystems. We are driving people out of their homes because they can no longer live where they once lived.”
Sommer and Mahan go on to explain that climate change can be reversed through good leadership and policies. That may be costly. But the cost is far less than the impact on health and that of rebuilding infrastructure following damage from our increasingly extreme storms and other weather events.
When Enough Is Enough. Karen McClelland welcomes Jen Emmerich and Janis Mock-Jones to discuss their community activism and the success of their recent “No Kings” march in the Village of Oak Creek.
Mock-Jones has been involved in all of the “No Kings” protests in VOC and she notes that they are getting larger each time.
Asked why they chose to get involved in the protests, Emmerich says, “I come from another place where protest is a vital part of life. And sitting here looking at the warped value system of racism, prejudice, materialism, self-aggrandizement, vulgarity, pseudo-Christianity, I’m not going to sit here and say nothing. It’s time to speak out.” She adds, “This is part of the tyranny playbook. There’s an emboldening of hate with a blatant disregard of the facts.”
As for the continuing growth of protests against the regime, Mock-Jones explains it this way, “He’s offending more and more people every day. And people are starting to realize, hey, this is going to affect me.”
For those who want to get involved, the two encourage everyone to join a local chapter of Indivisible and to get out and vote.
The Rising Threat Of Secret Police In America. Steve Williamson and Gary LaMaster detail the mounting attacks on immigrants and communities by the Trump regime.
According to the regime, they will detain 600,000 immigrants this year. And they claim two million immigrants have already left. That’s 2.6 million people who contributed to our communities, our nation, and our economy gone.
As a result of a Supreme Court ruling, we’re seeing thousands of masked and armed ICE and Border Patrol agents invading communities and sweeping up residents based solely on their ethnicity. If they look Latino or speak Spanish, they are subject to being detained, often brutally, and forced to prove they’re American citizens. According to a Pro-Publica report, nearly 200 citizens have been illegally and unconstitutionally tackled, dragged, beaten, tased and, in at least one case, shot.
Arizonans will recognize this as the Joe Arpaio formula on a national scale.
And the situation is only going to get worse. Because ICE and CBP now have a vast surveillance network based on ALPR (Automatic License Plate Reader) cameras, facial recognition, and other biometrics that allows ICE to track the movements of both immigrants and citizens in real time.
Ironic isn’t it that the so-called conservatives who armed themselves against tyranny are the ones who are now supporting it?
MAGA’s Decades-Long Attacks On Voting. Steve Williamson, Karen McClelland and Gary LaMaster detail the many attempts by MAGA (formerly known as the Republican Party) to prevent Democratic-leaning populations, especially people of color, from voting.
Dating back to at least the 1960s, MAGA has resorted to dirty tricks, intimidation of voters and election workers, extreme gerrymandering, barriers to voter registration, barriers to voter IDs, barriers to voting, barriers to student voters, voter purges, voter challenges based on exact matches to often faulty government databases, refusal to register voters such as homeless and Native Americans without a home address, attacks on absentee ballots, attacks on early voting and attacks on mail-in ballots. MAGA has even resorted to “alternative” electors, pressure on governors to “find” enough ballots to change the outcome and, most famously, the attempted coup on January 6, 2021,
For the coming election, MAGA seems poised to attempt to block all mail-in and electronic voting, and by passing the innocuous sounding SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act designed to intimidate and exclude millions of women and voters of color by requiring voters to provide (often difficult to obtain) documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. In addition, the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court seems ready to eviscerate the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
There is even the very real threat that the Trump regime will suspend the 2026 midterm elections by using the Insurrection Act of 1807 to declare martial law!
All of this begs the question: Why?
The answer, of course, is that MAGA doesn’t feel it can win a free and fair election.
How Do Victims Of Political Violence Become Martyrs? The answer, of course, depends on how their legacy is used by supporters to further their cause.
Steve Williamson and Gary LaMaster look at some examples of political martyrs beginning with Horst Wessel, a member of the Nazi Stormtroopers whose murder was elevated into the status of martyr and used to grow the Nazi Party.
Unfortunately, history includes many other political victims ranging from the abolitionist John Brown to the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara to the civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. Some of the martyrs like King and Abraham Lincoln were leaders seeking freedom and civil rights for large portions of the populations. Others were simply partisan politicians or activists.
Not surprisingly, the discussion leads to the questions: Which is Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA? And what separates his memory from that of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman who, along with her husband, was gunned down in their own home?
