Intimidation. Illegal arrests. Abuse. Lies. And now, murder.

Plus: Another shooting in Portland., Ore.; Venezuela, Greenland, and Chevy Chase.

Photo by Phoebe T on Unsplash

📰 Breaking:

Federal agents have shot two people in Portland, Oregon. Preliminary reports say federal agents shot a husband and wife in a vehicle being chased in an attempted immigration stop.

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🗝 The shackles are off

The immense power of the United States — its military, its wealth, its bully pulpit — are in the hands of a madman. And Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court have abandoned the guardrails.

Murder in Minneapolis: It was inevitable. And it feels as though this was the plan all along: Bully, intimidate, grab people off the street without identifying yourself or having a judicial warrant, abuse those being held in detention centers, rough up protesters, and finally, kill someone in case the message hasn’t gotten through.

It’s the message of all fascists: Shut up and fall in line. Or else.

Renee Nicole Macklin Good was a 37-year-old US citizen and mother of three who one of Trump’s hired ICE thugs shot in the head, killing her. She was a legal observer, trained to attend public protests and watch and document interactions between police and demonstrators in case legal action arises from the encounters.

She had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school.

If she had observed other protests, and how ICE behaves, then there was no chance in hell that she was going to get out of her vehicle when ordered by ICE goons.

As attorney Joyce Vance pointed out in her newsletter “Civil Discourse:”

The federal judiciary has repeatedly condemned the administration’s detention policies, with 309 out of the 323 judges that cases have been brought before ruling against ICE. Mostly recently, a federal judge in New Hampshire ordered the release of an immigrant being held unlawfully in custody.

I’d run, too. In fact, an eyewitness said ICE agents were yelling at her to leave until the point that one tried to get her out of her vehicle.

Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and others in the administration have consistently lied about Good’s murder. Trump went so far as to say that the ICE agent was run over by Good’s car, injured, and hospitalized. Video shows him walking down the street in perfect health after he killed Good.

Noem labeled Good a “domestic terrorist.” Why? I think they’re setting up the country for an even harsher crackdown on their political opponents.

MS NOW’s Chris Hayes laid it out on Stephen Colbert’s show:

This has been one of the grimmest realities of this entire year, which is that the president of the United States clearly views himself not as the president of the entire nation, which is the position he occupies. It is the only position, along with the vice president, that is elected by the entire nation and represents every person of this country as an equal. He views himself as the president of the country of MAGA. And he views any municipality, locality, state, or territory that is not within his political coalition as essentially an enemy that he needs to occupy, subdue, punish, and discipline.

And now, kill.

As Joyce Vance has tracked, ICE has stopped dark-skinned people and demanded that they prove they’re a citizen, in violation of the Fourth Amendment — moving away only after noticing that bystanders were recording them. Journalists have been detained, then released without charges — a clear attempt at intimidation. They have dragged innocent women and children out of their homes in the middle of the night, separating parents from their kids. They have pepper-sprayed and pepper-shot Christian ministers who were peacefully protesting — and even praying.

And then there was the detention officer who sexually abused a Nicaraguan woman who was in custody in an ICE facility in Louisiana. Surprisingly, he was fired and prosecuted. How much other abuse is going on?

One other point: Has there ever been a cop or other law enforcement person involved in a fatal shooting or other serious episode who did NOT lie about what happened?

They, their partner, their colleagues, their bosses — most of them just straight out lie about how a situation developed. But then their body camera videos are released. Videos recorded by witnesses emerge. And inevitably, we all see that events unfolded far differently than the cops claimed.

It’s not surprising. They have a good model: A criminal president who’s running an increasingly lawless government, a guy who spurred a conspiracy to seize power on Jan. 6, 2021 and who regularly ignores the Constitution and the courts.

Clouded vision in Venezuela: Trump’s lawlessness is international. He doesn’t care about democracy in Venezuela, or else he would have allowed the guy who was democratically and legitimately elected in 2024, retired ambassador Edmundo González Urrutia, to take office. Actually, it would be Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado who would rule; González was a figurehead she asked to run in her place because Maduro barred Machado from running.

He most certainly doesn’t care about the drug trade, or else he wouldn’t have pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted in the US of running a vast and violent drug trafficking conspiracy that poured more than 400 tons of cocaine into the US. (He reportedly issued the pardon at the request of the peripatetic dirty trickster Roger Stone who somehow was buddies with Hernández.)

Trump also didn’t carry out regime change; he simply removed the guy at the top and let the entire corrupt administration remain in place while he bullies Maduros VP-now-president, Delcy Rodríguez, to do his bidding. Never mind the human rights violations, the hungry residents, the depleted economy. Trump doesn’t care about any of that. All he wants is to strip Venezuela of every natural resource he can get his grubby, tiny hands on.

Oh, and one other thing he wants: For the Venezuelan government to lie for him and say it was, indeed, involved in rigging the 2000 election. You may remember that election deniers and Trump himself started spreading wild rumors that somehow the Venezuelan government helped Dominion and Smartmatic — two makers of US voting machines — rig those machines to throw the 2020 election to Joe Biden. You may also recall that Faux News had to pay Dominion a whopping $800 million to settle a defamation lawsuit about Fox’s lies.

Handing Russia and China most of the world: Trump’s move on Venezuela is part of his new National Security Strategy, a significant document produced annually by every administration that sets out its view of global relations and challenges. Trump’s version this year is shocking. He is hostile to our European allies, wants to be buddy-buddy with Russia, and doesn’t criticize China. He implies a new world order in which the US and those two powers oversee spheres of influence. The US wants to focus on dominating the Western Hemisphere. Russia’s incursion into Ukraine isn’t even mentioned; Trump doesn’t care. China is included as one of the “larger, richer, stronger” powers within an exclusive tier of dominant powers. It’s a stunning departure from previous administration’s view of threats to the US.

Targeting Greenland: New York Times climate reporters have an interesting take (🎁) on why the climate-change denying Trump wants to take over Greenland: Climate change.

1 Arctic ice is melting, making northern waters easier to navigate. As a result, international shipping has increased in the region, which is a huge shortcut for countries sending commercial goods back and forth between Asia and the US or Europe.

Reuters reported that in October, a Chinese container ship carrying solar panels and electric vehicles reached Great Britain in 20 days on this route, half the time it takes with other routes.

Trump doesn’t want China or Russia monopolizing or cutting off access to those Arctic routes, and he sees Greenland as a strategic launchpad for American interests in the area.

2 Likewise, Greenland is actually turning green, making it easier to mine its abundance of rare earth minerals essential for the manufacture of high-tech products. Even though there are few residents and even fewer roads, some Trump allies already are investing in mining companies there. Can his family be far behind?

I have another theory: If Trump fails to buy Greenland from Denmark and tries to take it by force, it could fracture NATO in a way that may be irreparable. Will other NATO countries really come to Denmark’s aid and start a war with the United States? Will there be infighting, disagreements, fractures in the alliance?

Trump has been trying to destroy NATO as a favor to Putin since his first term. Greenland could be the key. In fact, Marco Rubio is headed to Denmark next week to start the bullying campaign.

And there’s this: Trump just wants to own things. He’ll rename it Trumpland and start building golf courses and garish hotels. He believes that he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants. He told the Times that there is no limit to his power, except one: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Trump actually believes that he has morals. Incredible.

Bottom line: We’re “governed” by a guy who is careening madly from one crisis of his own making to the next, and everybody around him is too scared to seize the controls. It’s a frightening time.

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📺 Finally …

A documentary about comedian Chevy Chase, which began streaming on CNN this month, does much to confirm the guy’s comic genius. But it also reveals something else: He’s a Class A jerk.

I’m not really interested in watching, but just about every review I’ve read has mentioned his nastiness. Here’s a succinct summary from Variety:

Off camera, a lot of comedians have prickly and difficult personalities. But there’s prickly, and then there’s the unique drive-by karma of Chevy Chase, a comedian who helped to invent “Saturday Night Live,” who proved to be a singular and hilarious master of ironic barbed detachment, who became one of the most celebrated movie stars of the 1980s, and who was such a famously nasty and unpleasant person to deal with that the word “asshole” followed him around as if it was his middle name.

No thanks. I see enough men behaving badly every time I turn on the TV.

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📝 A note about Fast Forward

(I guess the “Finally” section was premature.)

When I retired from the Boston Globe and moved Fast Forward to Substack last fall, I mentioned then that since I was no longer being paid to write it, I was going to start charging for it sometime after the first of the year, but have a slimmed-down free version available for those who can’t or don’t want to pay.

Being a subscriber to the free version will mean that you would receive the main essay in yesterday’s regular weekly edition.

Being a paid subscriber will mean that you also would receive today’s extra issue, or any others that I write beyond the main Wednesday newsletter. I’m also going to reserve access to the Bookies reading lists, the Fast-Told Tales (reader essays), and other reader contributions for those who pay for a subscription.

I do want to thank the many readers who already have pledged a paid subscription that will automatically activate when I turn that on.

When will that be? In about a month, in the first week of February.

What will it cost? Well, Substack has a philosophy that writers should be paid for their work, so they set a minimum fee that we can charge: $5 a month, or $50 a year (saving 10 bucks).

I will remind you again at the end of this month. Meanwhile, I am eternally grateful for your support, your insightful and funny emails, your intelligent contributions. I was on the fence about continuing Fast Forward after I retired, but I didn’t want to lose you all just yet. Thanks for sticking around.

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