An amusing bit of Internet slang that I began hearing some years ago was the acronym "NPC."
NPC stood for "Non-Player Character," a video-game reference to the very large number of characters who do not represent participants but are instead generated automatically by the software system itself. These constitute the background wallpaper for the humans who are actually playing the game, and are therefore always rather robotic and simplistic in their actions and responses. A classic example might be the members of a large horde of Orcs who are so easily slain by someone playing a hero wielding a magic sword.
In its broader, metaphorical context, the reference was to those individuals whose responses to the stimuli of our controlled-media are so simplistic and predictable that they function as almost mindless meat-puppets, easily manipulated by the powerful forces that quietly shape and dominate our society.
Over the last twelve months the Department of Homeland Security of the Trump Administration has deployed its militarized federal immigration enforcement agents in numerous high-profile actions around the country. These troops are widely called ICE, a loose term that actually subsumes agents of the Border Patrol as well, and their operations have attracted a great deal of public attention.
The controversial fatal shootings in Minneapolis recently raised that issue to a top national news story, and when I've considered the responses of many conservatives and right-wingers to these developments, the term NPC has increasingly come to my mind.
Last week I published an article on the politically self-destructive policies of President Donald Trump, as emphasized by leading Republican strategist Karl Rove. Although Trump had been elected based upon his promise to sharply curtail illegal immigration, the excessively harsh tactics of his ICE agents had now cost him the key support of top podcaster Joe Rogan, a crucial pillar of his 2024 presidential victory.
- Is Donald Trump Playing 27-Dimensional Chess?
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 26, 2026 • 5,400 Words
The bulk of my article had been written prior to the fatal Saturday morning shooting of Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis. So although I briefly mentioned that incident and showed a couple of the early videos carefully analyzing what had actually happened, it was only a small part of my discussion.
However, I did note some of the remarkable ironies, which had been emphasized by Glenn Greenwald in his coverage of the killing :
As acclaimed journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in his own discussion of the incident, not only were the facts absolutely clear-cut in this particular case, but it was equally obvious that all the government officials were blatantly lying. Greenwald particularly condemned the "Israelization" of American society, in which anyone killed by the government is immediately denounced as "a domestic terrorist."One of the main excuses provided by Trump's minions was that the victim had possessed a perfectly legal handgun for which he had a permit, a handgun that he had never touched let alone attempted to draw. For many decades conservatives had always expressed their fervent support for the Second Amendment, so Greenwald noted how strange it was that so many of them had now totally reversed their position on that issue.
Tucker Carlson ranks as the leading figure in the conservative media landscape, and he expressed those same views, as did former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fierce MAGA loyalist:
I've carefully followed American politics for nearly the last half-century, and during all those years a leading element of the conservative political coalition, especially lauded by right-wingers, had been the pro-gun groups. These were always fiercely protective of the rights of all Americans to keep and bear firearms, and they sometimes even took those ideological positions to extremes.
Most of Trump's administration has been notoriously right-wing, and everyone would have assumed that nearly all its members fell into that pro-gun camp. Yet as the exact circumstances of the Pretti killing became known, an ideological reversal of staggering proportions immediately occurred. As they defended and justified the ICE killing, Trump officials seemed to be arguing that federal agents were authorized to summarily execute any American citizen who exercised his legal right to own and carry a handgun.
Judge Andrew Napolitano is a former FoxNews host, and one of his recent videos conveniently included a montage of numerous senior Trump administration officials taking that surprising position. In their public remarks, they suggested that anyone who brought a perfectly legal firearm to a protest could justifiably be shot and killed by federal ICE agents.
I was hardly the only person to be shocked by these government statements. The same day that my piece appeared, the Wall Street Journal ran an article quoting various conservative Second Amendment leaders who expressed their total dismay over the positions taken by those Trump officials:
A number of Republicans have criticized Alex Pretti-who was killed by a federal Border Patrol agent Saturday-for carrying a gun during protest activity.They are facing pushback from an unlikely quarter: gun-rights groups that traditionally have largely sided with the GOP.
"The first thing that politicians want to do is blame the gun," said Taylor Rhodes, spokesman for the National Association for Gun Rights, based in Greenville, S.C.
Rhodes said he has attended hundreds of protests and rallies over the years, always with a gun. He said a thorough investigation is needed, but judging from videos of the shooting, "I don't think it looks good on the ICE agents."
For Second Amendment activists, the conversation around Pretti's shooting intersects with an argument they have long made: Gun owners have a constitutional right to carry their firearms in public.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse, was filming federal officers on a street before he was shot and killed...
The NRA struck a different tone the same day when Bill Essayli, a Republican and first assistant U.S. attorney in California, posted on X: "If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you."
The NRA condemned his remarks as "dangerous and wrong."
Many other news stories and interviews reinforced the same stunned reaction to that sharp and totally unexpected ideological reversal:
FBI Director Kash Patel magnified the blowback Sunday on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo." No one, Patel said, can "bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple."Erich Pratt, vice president of Gun Owners of America, was incredulous.
"I have attended protest rallies while armed, and no one got injured," he said on CNN.
Conservative officials around the country made the same connection between the First and Second amendments.
"Showing up at a protest is very American. Showing up with a weapon is very American," state Rep. Jeremy Faison, who leads the GOP caucus in Tennessee, said on social media.
Trump's first-term vice president, Mike Pence, called for "full and transparent investigation of this officer involved shooting"
"You remember Kyle Rittenhouse and how he was made a hero on the right," said Trey Gowdy, a Republican former congressman and attorney for Trump during one of his first-term impeachments. "Alex Pretti's firearm was being lawfully carried.... He never brandished it."
Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who has studied the history of the gun debate, said the fallout "shows how tribal we've become." Republicans spent years talking about the Second Amendment as a means to fight government tyranny, he said.
"The moment someone who's thought to be from the left, they abandon that principled stance," Winkler said.
Kyle Rittenhouse, Credit: Gage Skidmore
Indeed, just as that former Republican Congressman had mentioned, one of the most famous cases of a civilian who brought his legal firearm to a public protest was that of Kyle Rittenhouse, who even crossed state lines to do so during August 2020.
In Wisconsin that 17-year-old Illinois resident used his AR-15 rifle to shoot three antifa who attacked him, killing two of them, and was greatly lionized by conservatives and right-wingers for doing so.
But due to the circumstances of the current case, all that celebrated history has now been entirely flushed down the memory hole. Several years ago in a different context, I noted a passage from George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984:
There's that famous scene in which an orator is giving a lengthy wartime speech at a political rally, praising the heroic ally of Eurasia and denouncing the arch-foe of Eastasia, but then is quietly handed a note partway through and completely reverses himself, vilifying the former and hailing the latter. "We have always been at war with Eurasia."
Most government officials probably have such little personal integrity that we shouldn't be too surprised when they completely reverse their ideological positions as political circumstances warrant. But the reactions of so many right-wing Trump supporters fell into a different category.
Our very lightly moderated website attracts a wide range of extremist or eccentric commenters, most of them on the right.
Their views are usually about what I would expect. But I was really quite surprised to see that a large fraction of those fervent right-wingers had suddenly thrown overboard their decades of fierce commitment to gun rights and the Second Amendment, and instead fully endorsed the contrary position taken by the Trump Administration. They now all agreed that federal agents could justifiably kill-summarily execute-anyone who had the audacity to bring a fully legal firearm to a protest demonstration or perhaps even merely carry it on the streets.
It was at this point that the slang acronym of NPC came to my mind, exemplifying how these dim-witted right-wingers were so easily manipulated into suddenly reversing what had supposedly been their deepest personal convictions.
Indeed, that reversal was so stark that some more thoughtful right-wingers even suspected that many of the others might literally be NPCs, namely AI-constructs generated by Palantir or some other government contractor to flood the Internet and pretend that the new firearms policies of the Trump Administration had far more support than they actually did.
I've never owned a gun and I'm not sure I've ever even handled one during my entire life except as a child when I fired pellet guns in the shooting galleries of local carnivals. But for the last couple of generations I've read countless news stories in which conservatives and right-wingers praised the Second Amendment as the most important part of our Bill of Rights because it protected all the others against governmental tyranny. Yet now many of them seem to have suddenly thrown overboard all those decades of deepest commitment.
Just as those conservatives had always predicted, the sudden willingness of the Trump Administration to trash the Second Amendment does seem closely tied to their total disregard for the rest of our Bill of Rights.
The same videos showing the Minneapolis killing also showed masked ICE agents brutally attacking bystanders who were merely filming them with their smartphones, an activity fully protected under our First Amendment. But Trump Administration officials denounced this as illegal interference with an ICE operation.
About two weeks ago, a leaked memo revealed that ICE had now been authorized to enter private homes without judicial warrants, even battering down doors to do so, an absolute violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. An article that we republished described this shocking development and opened with the following paragraphs:
"Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door and storm into your home," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, demanding congressional hearings.The United States government is looking for ways around that pesky Fourth Amendment," an investigative journalist said of Wednesday reporting by the Associated Press on an internal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo claiming that ICE agents can forcibly enter a private residence without a judicial warrant, consent, or an emergency.
The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution states, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
ICE's May 12 memo, part of a whistleblower disclosure obtained by the AP, says that "although the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of the General Counsel has recently determined that the US Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose"
American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: "It has been accepted for generations that the only thing which can authorize agents to break into your home is a warrant signed by a judge. No wonder ICE hid this memo!"
While Reichlin-Melnick shared photos of a scene in which armed immigration agents used a battering ram to enter a Minneapolis home and arrest a Liberian man, federal agents also recently broke down the door of a residence in neighboring Saint Paul, Minnesota, and arrested ChongLy "Scott" Thao, a US citizen who was later freed.
As might be expected, the same right-wing commenters who had jettisoned their longstanding support for the Second Amendment were equally dismissive of these blatant violations of the Fourth. As NPCs, they obviously failed to comprehend that they were providing the legal justification for a future Democratic administration to use similar tactics in support of government policies that they would find much less congenial.
A witty and thoughtful commenter who saw those obvious implications provided some hypothetical future examples:
Today is such a sunny day. Nothing to worry about when it comes to ICE. If you are not here illegally, no worries ! Smile and have lollipop.Haha Heehee Hoho....
In developing news, President Gavin Newsom has taken unprecedented measures to utilize ICE to collect reparation payments from defiant white suburbanites currently in arrears in their payments.
The Gavin Newsom administration is taking unprecedented measures to ensure the safety of every American by sending ICE into suburban neighborhoods to collect firearms from all citizens that have failed to surrender their firearms under the new EO demanding surrender.
Today, President Gavin Newsom issued an Executive Order that empowers ICE to go door to door to determine if any household is hiding a person that would otherwise meet the criteria for being drafted into the three front war with Russian, China, and Iran.
During these difficult economic times, the Newsom Administration is utilizing ICE to ensure food distribution is equitable. ICE will be going door to door to ensure that no citizen is hoarding food in excess of their personal need. ICE will be confiscating and redistributing any quantity of food determined by ICE to be in excess of individual need.
Shall we go on?
Today... "ICE is on our side ! No worries!"
Tomorrow... "Oh no ! What's happening ! ICE is terrible!"
There is cause for everyone to be concerned about ICE... Right now.
Although the Trump Administration had only recently declared that ICE agents need not respect the Second or Fourth Amendments, I've repeatedly noted that ICE attacks against the First Amendment began within weeks of Trump's inauguration. By late March 2025 a viral video showed the shocking case of the sudden abduction of a fully legal resident of America who had dared to criticize Israel in her campus newspaper.
Late last week an astonishing event occurred in American society, and video clips of that incident quickly went viral across the Internet.A 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar from Turkey was walking across her Boston-area neighborhood on the way to a holiday dinner at a friend's house when she was suddenly seized and abducted in the early evening by six masked federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The terrified young woman was handcuffed and taken to a waiting car, secretly detained for the next 24 hours without access to friends, family, or lawyers, then shipped off to a holding cell in Louisiana and scheduled for immediate deportation, although a federal judge has now temporarily stayed the proceedings.
Just one of the Tweets showing a short clip of that incident has been viewed more than 4.5 million times, with a much longer YouTube video accumulating another couple of hundred thousand views.
That very disturbing scene seemed like something out of a Hollywood film chronicling the actions of a dystopian American police state, and that initial impression was only solidified once media reports explained why Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets of her home town. Her only reported transgression had been her co-authorship of an op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier sharply criticizing Israel and its ongoing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza.
Aside from being captured on video, this particular incident was hardly unique. Around the same time, hundreds of other legal American residents had been similarly snatched off their streets or seized in dawn raids by ICE squads merely for exercising their First Amendment rights to criticize the government of Israel. These early ICE actions obviously had absolutely nothing to do with the stated ICE mission of deporting illegal immigrants.
A couple of months ago, Tucker Carlson had noted with alarm the determined efforts of some important members of the Trump Administration and other Republican officials to outlaw all criticism of Jews or Israel. His guest Megyn Kelly, another conservative podcaster, strongly seconded those concerns about the looming destruction of our First Amendment.
The Trump Administration has been extremely vigorous in its efforts to stamp out the scourge of antisemitism, and last year top Trump advisor Stephen Miller publicly confirmed to CNN that they were "actively looking at" suspending habeas corpus, thereby allowing the permanent imprisonment of Americans without charges or trial in total violation of our Sixth Amendment.
Given all of these developments, it seems perfectly possible that we might one day see squads of masked, helmeted ICE agents snatching American citizens off their streets because they had posted a Tweet sharply critical of Israel. According to Carlson, thousands of citizens in Britain, Germany, and other European countries have already been imprisoned for hate-crime offenses along roughly those same lines.
Probably the most prescient early warning of the likely future trajectory of ICE had been made more than six months ago by right-wing Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin.
- Dear MAGA: If You Think Masked ICE Thugs Wouldn't Do the Same to You, You're Even Dumber Than You Look
- Andrew Anglin • The Daily Stormer • July 11, 2025 • 3,100 Words
A few days ago Anglin followed this up with a much longer piece describing how all these events had subsequently unfolded in the wake of the Minneapolis killings, and another very hard-core right-winger using the name Eric Striker took a similar position.
Both Anglin and Striker lie at one extreme end of the spectrum of respectability, and I can't believe that any mainstream journalist would ever admit to reading them, let alone quoting their views.
But reality tends to be the same for most thoughtful individuals regardless of their personal ideological inclinations, and just a couple days ago I noticed a particularly striking example of such parallel evolution.
The Economist arguably ranks first among equals as the world's most influential mainstream media outlet and its current issue focused rather heavily upon the disturbing recent events in Minneapolis and the broader question of ICE.
Much of its leader on the subject seemed rather remarkably similar to what Anglin and Striker had been saying around the same time. Leaving aside different ideological skews and stylistic flourishes, the pieces could have almost been written by the same people, or perhaps the Economist editors have been eagerly devouring every new Anglin column whenever it appears:
Federal action in the streets of Minneapolis goes well beyond immigration. It is a test of the government's power to use violence against its own citizens-a dividing-line between liberty and tyranny. And it will not be the last.After immigration agents killed Alex Pretti on January 24th, and the Trump administration slandered a good Samaritan as a would-be mass murderer, America was spiralling towards civil unrest
ICE has a reason to be in America's cities. Mr Trump has a mandate to deport illegal immigrants. Having dramatically curbed illicit flows across the southern border, he claims to be seeking "the worst of the worst". But that is not what his enforcers are doing. Recently, only 5% of those detained have been people convicted of violent crimes. Instead ICE's brutal means indicate ends that are darker than immigration-control, for several reasons.
One is that the administration appears to believe ICE should be a law unto itself. In their zeal to fill quotas and live out their macho "destroy the flood" culture, ICE agents have revelled in the wanton use of force. Administration officials have nonetheless told agents that they enjoy "absolute immunity" as they go about their duties and, a judge complains, have defied court orders. They rushed to brand Mr Pretti, and Renee Good, a woman shot earlier, as terrorists. They have strained to ensure that investigations into those killings are safely under their own control. Impunity is a formula for more violence.
Another reason to worry is that ICE and its leaders are trampling the constitution. By insisting that witnesses and protesters are criminals, they are denying people their First Amendment rights to free speech and association. In a state like Minnesota, when the head of the FBI says people cannot bring a gun to a protest he is denying their Second Amendment rights. And when ICE agents stop or arrest people without cause and search their houses without a court warrant, they are denying their Fourth Amendment rights
The most disturbing possibility is that the president is creating a militia which answers only to himself. As our briefing explains, from the Texas Rangers to Grover Cleveland's use of the army and marshals in the 1890s, Americans have periodically worried about the unaccountable use of state violence. Abroad, from El Salvador to the Philippines, would-be despots often turn the army and the police against their people in the name of keeping order.
Supporters of Mr Trump will treat this argument as wildly overblown. Early in its history America set up mechanisms to curb the president's power. Citizens have the right to bear arms. The states have national guards to counterbalance the army. The Insurrection Act sets out rare circumstances when the president may legally use the army to control the mob. The courts and Congress can step in.
Yet ICE is ideally placed to sidestep protections. Illegal migrants are spread across America and Mr Trump asserts that Democrats deploy them as voters. Agents can therefore stage provocations pretty much anywhere with impunity, including during elections. When a protest eventually turns violent, it is politically useful and a justification for further deployments. And when politicians complain about ICE, as have the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis, the Justice Department can investigate them for obstructing federal officers.
A theme of Mr Trump's second term has been the accumulation of presidential power. Even if the 47th president does not use federal agents as an all-purpose coercive tool, the 48th or the 49th might-and, Republicans should remember, they may be Democrats. If Mr Trump has no anti-democratic designs on ICE, he should be eager to limit its actions
After this week, even that would not remove the spectre of a presidential militia. Hence the courts need to make clear that states can in fact prosecute federal agents who commit crimes; that ICE's view of the constitution is wrong; and that the federal government cannot ride roughshod over the states.
So a very broad ideological coalition now exists, stretching from the Economist, through Tucker Carlson and MTG, over to Anglin and Striker at the far end. American liberals and leftists are almost without exception committed members of this same coalition.
The Young Turks is the leading progressive channel on YouTube, having twice the subscribers as Amy Goodman's venerable Democracy Now!, and it has been scathing towards the abuses of ICE.
One of its recent videos reported the story of a 17-year-old American citizen working at a Target store who had been abducted by a squad of masked ICE agents, hustled into an unmarked van, tortured or at least badly beaten, and then left terrorized in the parking lot of a local Walmart.
Vice President JD Vance is a graduate of the Yale School of Law, and according to his public statements all ICE agents are completely immunized against investigation or prosecution by local authorities for any crimes they might commit, including beatings, torture, or murder. Furthermore, since they are masked and display no names nor forms of personal ID, simply identifying the ones who were accused of committing any such crimes might be quite difficult.
That last point is a very important one that has not been emphasized as much as it should be. I also find it noteworthy that most of these ICE agents seem to wear no standard issue uniforms, but merely various forms of semi-military-style clothing or gear, making it difficult to even determine whether they are actually the government agents that they purport to be.
For example, that same Young Turks video also mentioned that there seem to be growing reports that masked individuals claiming to be ICE agents have begun abducting young women from local city streets, dragging them into unmarked vans, and sexually assaulting them, with many but not all of the victims being Latinas. It's obviously difficult to know whether these perpetrators are actually legitimate ICE agents exploiting their positions to obtain some extracurricular fringe benefits or instead merely criminals pretending to be in that category.
I had strongly emphasized this point in my article last week, and a couple of days later, Anglin did the same, writing:
Anyone can pretend to be ICE. This is a smaller issue in the scheme of things, but the reason police show their faces and have badges with numbers is so people can't impersonate police officers. Right now, any organized gang could impersonate ICE and throw people in vans. The fact that these people wear masks is extremely dark and the idea that they do it "for their safety" means that the safety of this Praetorian Guard sits above the safety of everyone else in the country. As a very first step, it should be demanded that these people show their faces (at least during normal operations) and wear badges.
While I would hate to give dangerous ideas to any rogue-or not so rogue-members of the Trump Administration, there are some obvious logical consequences to this unusual ICE policy.
Suppose squads of ICE agents began assassinating or abducting American elected officials, journalists, academics, or others whose views they or their political masters found overly disagreeable. Surely it would be very easy for our government to flatly deny that ICE had been involved and instead shift the blame for those dreadful crimes onto criminals or terrorists or even anti-Trump leftists who had merely disguised themselves as ICE agents.
Among liberals and leftists, these masked ICE troopers wearing military-style gear are often denounced as Trump's Gestapo or his Nazi SA Stormtroopers. Meanwhile, I have generally labeled them as an American version of Stalin's Soviet NKVD, while others have identified them with the earlier Bolshevik Cheka.
But although I do think that those latter characterizations are closer to the mark, I'd admit that none of these analogies actually seem correct.
As far as I know, none of the members of any of these highly disreputable security services were regularly masked, nor sported the military-combat-style gear favored by ICE troopers. The Gestapo and the Cheka were generally dressed in ordinary civilian clothes except for the long leather trench-coats that they often favored. And although the SA and the NKVD wore more military uniforms, masks or combat-style gear were not part of their typical outfits.
Bolshevik Cheka agents
Nazi SA Stormtroopers
So the ICE troopers that we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis and other major American cities do not resemble an American Gestapo nor an SA nor a Cheka nor a NKVD. Instead, given their masked total anonymity, they are actually far more fearsomely garbed.
Indeed, I think that the inspiration for their outfits may have come less from our history books than from the fertile imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters.
Over the decades there have been many films and television shows depicting the horrors of some future fascist American regime, and the dreaded security forces that it deployed to crush all resistance. I think that in some cases these latter were portrayed as masked, militarized commandoes, wearing outfits that were deliberately intended to terrorize their helpless civilian victims, and that seems to have been the model for ICE.
So the masked federal ICE troopers now patrolling the streets of our cities, snatching terrified college students into their unmarked vans, and smashing open front doors without judicial warrants represent a cartoonishly exaggerated version of what liberals had always imagined an American fascist state would look like. What we are seeing almost seems based upon the script of some over-the-top leftist propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.
Many other aspects of our current American government seem to follow that same strange pattern.
Rather than describing the policies of the Trump Administration as right-wing or extremely right-wing, I think they could better be characterized as cartoonishly right-wing. Just consider the public statements of our top officials in the immediate aftermath of their successful kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro at the beginning of last month.
In a widely-discussed CNN interview, top Trump advisor Stephen Miller brazenly issued the most extreme sort of "Might Makes Right" declarations of what now constituted American foreign policy.
Around the same time, Trump himself sat down for a wide-ranging two-hour interview with four New York Times reporters, and he was equally bold in his public assertions of his own absolutely unlimited power and authority.
And he said that he did not feel constrained by any international laws, norms, checks or balances.Asked by my colleagues if there were any limits on his ability to use American military might, he said: "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me."
Perhaps Louis XIV the Sun-King might have said such things, or some of the absolutist Czars of the Russian Empire. But I very much doubt that any of the elected European presidents or prime ministers of the last couple of centuries would have made such statements, and if one of them had, the resulting scandal would have quickly driven him from office and perhaps even gotten him packed off to a lunatic asylum.
Indeed, as far as I know, none of the most infamous world dictators of the last one hundred years such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mussolini or their chief henchmen had ever made such extreme public statements. If any of them had, these would surely have been featured front-and-center in all my introductory history textbooks. So to denounce the Trump Administration as following in the footsteps of Stalin or Hitler seems somewhat inaccurate.
My own understanding of the Trump Doctrine has been provided in the title of the article I published last month:
- The Trump Doctrine: "They Have It. We Want It. We Take It."
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 12, 2026 • 7,200 Words
The Trump Administration seems overwhelmingly Zionist in its political orientation, and perhaps that tendency helps to explain so much of its rather cartoonish behavior, behavior that seems totally devoid of any self-awareness.
Consider a similar development that recently took place in the world of social media.
Over the last couple of years, pro-Israel groups have grown alarmed over the relatively unrestricted flow of information that became available in TikTok. That hugely popular Chinese social media app was free from the traditional restrictions imposed upon all our mainstream media outlets and most of the other social media platforms. As ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt lamented in a conference call, "We really have a TikTok problem."
So deploying their formidable political influence, the pro-Israel lobbyists eventually solved that problem by forcing the sale of TikTok sale to a group of pro-Israel American billionaires, and a few weeks ago, TikTok installed a Jewish Zionist named Adam Presser as its new CEO.
In an interview with the World Jewish Congress, Presser explained that TikTok would now be banning all criticism of "Zionists" as hate-speech. While users could certainly still use that same term in a positive sense, such as declaring themselves to be "proud Zionists," any pejorative use of that same word would be absolutely prohibited.
I think it's extremely rare that an official censorship policy has been publicly presented in such utterly cartoonish terms.