From yesterday and today: it certainly appears ICE in Chicago are wearing the Meta AI Ray-Ban glasses.

Passed by this billboard like half a dozen times like "That looks like AI, but surely nobody would make a giant mural of an AI image," and yeah, turns out it's AI blockclubchicago.org/2025/09/22/o... @blockclubchi.bsky.social

dudes rock

Holy shit these people are pathetic

The pastor of First Presbyterian down in Woodlawn, which hosts the mutual aid org where we volunteer. A real mensch.

moments ago, ice agents again came out of the broadview detention/“professing” facility to escort a silver suv out of the lot. one of the agents picked up and threw congressional candidate kat abughazaleh to the ground.

That was the most aggro I've ever seen the agents. While pushing to get vehicles out, agents grabbed at least 2 people. Multiple tear gas cannisters deployed and pepper balls fired into the crowd.

Researching an obscure Gilded Age anarchist periodical: omg it's called *Lucifer, the Light Bearer*, and it advocates gender equality and free love. And it started out in Kansas. Incredible stuff. And then it changed its name to ... oh. The *American Journal of Eugenics.* Oh dear.

Wait they chased off an ICE raid in WHEATON?????????? WHAT???????????????????????????? For people who don't know Chicago imagine like Brigham Young or Liberty University chasing off an ICE raid this is fucking WILD Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

The Trump administration giving the largest grant in the history of the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to the Tikvah Fund represents an attempt to construct a parallel infrastructure for the academic study of Judaism, explicitly allied with ethnonationalist, Christian nationalist forces.

Quote a poem from the Song.

Yeah now this is a very good point. I actually said myself to colleagues at the RNC last year that Richard J Daley is the American politician to study to understand Trump

Am I the only one who doesn't watch late night TV but does remember Kimmel fondly from *Win Ben Stein's Money*? I can't believe the fash came after the smarmy smart guy's performatively dumb sidekick.

There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for people to build on the rubble of what’s being destroyed before our eyes. Private corporations bending over to forcefeed everyone government-approved speech is evil and amoral, but more than anything this creates boring, inauthentic, unwatchable shit.

Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

Please chill, "didn't you know ICE was already doing this?" peanut gallery. Chicago has had very low arrest numbers. We've been in a lull since their attempts at immigration court in June. In the last week and a half, they've kidnapped hundreds of people. That we know about.

Yes. I use this pair of images when teaching post-Civil War lit. On the left, Thomas Nast's 1847 cartoon with racist whites shaking hands and reestablishing "The Union as It Was" over the heads of Black people suffering lynching and terrorism. On the right, old veterans shaking hands at Gettysburg.

In case this is helpful to anyone: We were having a hard time getting covid shots for our kids at the pediatrician's office -- they're saying supplies are short for pediatricians everywhere. But we were able to get them vax appts at CVS immediately, no questions asked.

Say what you will about him but Philip Roth coined the best phrase for this in *American Pastoral*: "the counterpastoral [...] the indigenous American berserk."

Since we’re talking about political violence, know this: “The murder rate for Black politicians in Reconstruction was 2,317 per 100,000. This rate is 20 times greater than *any* *other* demographic in the United States as of 2020, where the highest homicide rate was less than 105 per 100,000.”

The Trump Tower Riverwalk, whose planned development agreement requires it to remain open to the public, is again sealed off behind PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESSPASSING signs.

Isn't this just the plot of To Have and Have Not

As planned, we biked downtown with Mexican flags to join the Mexican Independence Day celebrations. Got honked at in an intersection, provoking instant biker reflex of shouting at the car ... only to realize it was a friendly honk from a fellow Mexican flag flier. Bike v car, the real culture clash.

Here’s another jarring juxtaposition of the Underground Railroad memorial in the parking lot of a McDonald’s.

Dropped a Sister off at O’hare and took a quick side trip to see the McDonald’s commemorative Underground Railroad stop. That’s not a typo: McDonald’s is built on what was once a safehouse for the Underground Railroad.

THIS REPORTING CONTAINS A VERY IMPORTANT LIE THE AGENT WAS NEVER HIT BY A CAR. He was walking alongside the car as the driver reversed. He was never hit. He was never dragged, like ICE claims. STOP PUBLISHING THE POLICE'S LIES IN THE NEWSPAPER — ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S THE GESTAPO.

If you're still not sure who the baddies are, they're ones who fire rounds at disabled women.

Listening to a bio of Catherine the Great that argues there never were "Potemkin villages," but rather Grigory Potemkin successfully founded actual settlements just as he'd been ordered to do. The "fake village" idea was just a slander by his court enemies that went viral. Disinfo never dies!!

last night as i was trying to wind down for bed i had a unified theory of what the fuck just happened, and i wrote it down, and filed it under "well, i can't talk about this on main without sounding insane until and unless the perp gets caught and is provably a groyper" anyways, great news! (1/X)

Weekend plans, maybe. We already got a giant Mexican flag to put on the car. Nobody in our family is Mexican, just want to contribute to the message. (Once the question might have been whether this is cultural appropriation... different times ...)

*getting on hobbyhorse* : it's like the Haymarket Affair, where the bomber was never identified but four journalists were judicially murdered for supposedly inciting the crime, and there was a massive crackdown on left organizations, which were also held responsible.

Revisiting this heater from @wilmes.bsky.social

Very, very bad stuff coming from leading right-wingers

I agree with Patrick intellectually, but practically I think any statement - especially from the Right - that violence is un-American is good right now, however untrue it is.

Me learning that Emily Dickinson was a big Brontë fan and that she requested this poem be read at her funeral:

Jeez, the fact that the Texas A&M case went down in a class on YA lit is just too on the nose. The YA culture of supercharged Tumblrism and reactionary backlash thereto ricocheting out into the academy. (No, this isn't the fault of the YA community; just noting where the enemy has chosen to fight.)

Technically the drug dealers would be "dregs" while Vance himself would be "scum." The dregs of society are the vile layer at the bottom, while the scum is the equally vile, oily layer that floats to the top. Here's Victoria Magazine explaining the distinction in 1875.

Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him;

The Mexican Independence Day Parade in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood went on as planned today despite concern of disruption by federal immigration agents. While parade festivities were underway, volunteers patrolled the area for on lookout for federal agents.

The Onion News Network truck is currently stationed outside the Broadview ICE Detention facility just outside of Chicago.

They have just enough (im)plausible deniability here to say that it’s about the Ride of the Valkyries scene from Apocalypse Now but yeah that’s the “game” they are playing

Happening now: smelled a chemical smell wafting from the parking lot, went to check it out. It's Chicago ICE agents unwrapping and assembling a stack of fresh riot shields.

Big protest at a northern entrance to Great Lakes Naval base in North Chicago

Like so much else about this moment, this was prophesied in Super Sad True Love Story.

Outside the ICE facility in Broadview, IL this morning— Masked agents in unmarked cars are arriving at work. DHS will be using the de facto detention center as their main "processing" site for the impending Chicago ICE surge. Protesters are gathering, with a large number of press here as well.

On September 4, 1966, activist Robert Lucas led a march from Chicago's North Lawndale neighborhood into the suburb of Cicero to protest housing segregation. White residents of Cicero responded with vitriolic jeers as the police struggled to prevent a riot.

Stumbled onto a right-wing poetry project (Soc of Classical Poets) with an intro video explaining that Ezra Pound loved Walt Whitman and they both hated the idea of order and they invented Modernism and the only 20th century poet read by "normal people" is Frost, because Frost hated Modernism.

Nice history of federal troops in Chicago. The reasons behind deployment have ranged from noble (enforcing desegregation) to nefarious, but the troops have never been a good idea.

Masked ICE agents just returned to 55 Monroe in a Dodge Caravan to attempt more pickups. A woman immediately sat in front of their van at the parking garage entrance. The van backed up and turned around. A building security rep emerged and told ICE watchers he's called Chicago Police.