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SHAMELESSNESS
13:48
Hasan Abi • Feb 17, 2026

SHAMELESSNESS

“My Fiancé Cheated on Me with My Best Friend”
26:41
Hasan Abi • Feb 17, 2026

“My Fiancé Cheated on Me with My Best Friend”

Report: ICE Officials Ignored Clear Warning Signs Before Killings
New Republic • Feb 17, 2026

Report: ICE Officials Ignored Clear Warning Signs Before Killings

Smashed windows, Tasers, and death: The warning signs were there, but officials at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement did not heed them.Top officials at the deportation agency knew as early as March that their officers were using more force against civilians than ever before, Politico reported Tuesday. The upward trend for both lethal and nonlethal force was documented in internal emails obtained by the liberal-leaning watchdog nonprofit American Oversight through Freedom of Information Act requests, revealing that top officials were well informed of the violence under their purview months before federal officers shot and killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.One March 20 email notified Caleb Vitello, the former acting director of ICE, that the agency had recorded 67 use-of-force incidents within the first two months of Trump’s term. That was nearly four times higher than the year before, when the agency reported just 17 incidents, according to Politico.Vitello received a similar notice days earlier flagging near-identical rates for the first two weeks of March, which noted that use of force had quadrupled during that timespan compared to 2024.Some of the reported violence included a March 10 instance in which officers smashed a woman’s car windows in order to grab an undocumented immigrant. In another instance, officers’ use of a Taser caused an individual to vomit and need medical assistance. At least one person was recorded dying from an encounter with immigration officers.Yet the Trump administration has tried to frame the escalation as a nonissue or, worse still, completely nonexistent. The Department of Homeland Security has insisted that officers are demonstrating “incredible restraint” in their roles, and that their actions are still consistent with the expectations set in their training.That’s in spite of the fact that AI-induced slip-ups have “sent many new recruits into field offices without proper training,” according to law enforcement officials who spoke with NBC News last month.And the agency’s seemingly endemic violence will likely only be exacerbated by the Trump administration’s slapdash recruitment tactics, which involve a “wartime recruitment” hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new officers in the coming year. Part of that strategy includes spending millions on social media advertisements targeted at gun rights advocates, UFC enthusiasts, and manosphere podcast audiences.

Trump’s climate policy experiment
Semafor • Feb 17, 2026

Trump’s climate policy experiment

Trump’s latest policy moves set up an interesting test of the power of different styles of government intervention to actually drive decarbonization.

ICE Shootings: FBI HIDING Evidence After Agents Caught LYING
21:36
Breaking Points • Feb 17, 2026

ICE Shootings: FBI HIDING Evidence After Agents Caught LYING

Homeland Security Spokesperson Leaving Amid Public Backlash to ICE
New Republic • Feb 17, 2026

Homeland Security Spokesperson Leaving Amid Public Backlash to ICE

Loyal MAGA equivocator Tricia McLaughlin is leaving her post as Homeland Security spokesperson amid the widespread unpopularity of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. According to Politico, McLaughlin planned to depart in December but stayed on through the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Most recently, she was asked to explain her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, labeling Pretti as a domestic terrorist, but she refused to use the same words. “Secretary Noem accused Alex Pretti of being a domestic terrorist. Is the administration standing by that language?” Fox News’s Dana Peroni asked McLaughlin last month. “So, initial statements were made after reports from CBP on the ground. It was a very chaotic scene. We know that our ICE law enforcement are facing rampant threats of violence against them, a violent campaign, so that is why this investigation is so important, so that we can get accurate facts to the American people,” she replied, avoiding the question. “Would you use that expression again?”“I think we have to really have the investigation be leading the way on this, Stuart,” she said. “And again, the early statements that were released was based on a chaotic scene on the ground and we really need to have true, accurate information to come to light, and so, again, Homeland Security investigators are leading that with the FBI supporting.”Otherwise, McLaughlin has eagerly spouted the Trump administration’s talking points. In December, she made headlines for defending President Trump’s racist attacks on Somali Americans. She is the second senior immigration official to jump ship after Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, following former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino’s reassignment last month.Her deputy Lauren Bis, who previously worked at the Heritage Foundation and the Trump campaign before joining DHS, will be promoted in her place.This story has been updated.

Barack Obama Said Aliens 'Are Real'
Jezebel • Feb 17, 2026

Barack Obama Said Aliens 'Are Real'

Many reasonable doubters I come across in my UFO digging ask me how the government could possibly keep something like this a secret all these years, and I like to answer that question with one of my own: what if they haven’t?

30 Years Later, It Looks Like Jesse Jackson Won the Economic Argument
New Republic • Feb 17, 2026

30 Years Later, It Looks Like Jesse Jackson Won the Economic Argument

It seems genteel and quaint today, compared to what we’re living through now, but at the time, to a lot of people, the Reagan revolution was shocking. He and his movement launched a massive assault on everything liberalism had advanced in the previous two decades: civil rights, women’s rights, concern for the environment, opposition to an immoral war (Vietnam) and excessive militarism, and more.Reagan also took aim at other, fatter targets: inflation, the disappearance of Rust Belt jobs, an America exposed as weakened by OPEC and Iran; rising crime, an explosion of welfare rolls, and the general sense that the country was in collapse. One expected a conservative Republican to attack all these. But Reagan went out of his way to undermine the whole project of twentieth-century liberalism, appointing people to run pieces of the executive branch who were outright hostile to those agencies’ missions. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pam Bondi are bad, no doubt about that; but go read up on James Watt and Ed Meese and Anne Gorsuch Burford (yes, she has a certain son who is prominent today).Democrats and liberals were on their heels. The congressional Democratic Party of the early 1980s was still more like it was in the 1930s than it is today—that is, it was a hybrid of Northern and Western liberals and Boll Weevil Southerners who were raised on the New Deal but were turning increasingly conservative. So a lot of them voted for most parts of the Reagan program.A few stalwart liberals like Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy stood their ground (most of the time). But one man did more. Jesse Jackson, who died Tuesday, was certainly famous then—first for having been there on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and for his civil rights activism in subsequent years. But he was still just the head of Operation PUSH, a Chicago-based social service and activist organization. And he decided that someone needed to be the voice of those the Reagan revolution had trampled—the Black and brown and poor; the white farmer (he campaigned a lot in farm country); the people whose supposed moral shortcomings were being constantly denounced on the then-new medium of cable news television, even as new shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous celebrated the “morals” of the new rich class, like the huckster who built that temple to his own ego at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.So Jackson ran for president in 1984 in the Democratic primaries. It was clear from the start that Walter Mondale, a respected senator and former vice president whose “turn” it was that year, was going to be the nominee. Gary Hart, then a young senator from Colorado, also ran, challenging Mondale mostly on generational arguments. Five senators’ campaigns lasted into late February and early March.But Jackson ran the full race. He won two contests—Louisiana and, oh yeah, the District of Columbia—and collected 3.3 million votes. He built and energized something called “the Black vote,” which wasn’t really a thing nationally until 1984, and his campaign rhetoric about a “rainbow coalition” reminded Americans that the Reagan movement, while popular and very easily reelected, was leaving millions of Americans behind.That laid the groundwork for 1988. In 1984, Jackson ran to make a statement. In 1988, though, he was running to try to win. He didn’t; Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis did. But he finished second—ahead of prominent Democrats Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and Paul Simon—with 13 victories, 6.9 million votes, and more than 1,000 delegates. Jackson never really seemed like he was truly going to win. But I do remember his massive victory in the late-March Michigan caucuses. That shocked people, and it put a scare into the party establishment. Three weeks later came the big New York primary. I was a young political reporter in New York at the time, and I remember those weeks well. If Jackson could somehow win New York, would people have to start taking seriously the idea that he could be the nominee?He got the progressive unions, and he spoke at large, boisterous rallies. But in the end the establishment rallied behind Dukakis, and Jackson finished a distant second (but still way ahead of Gore, who ran an embarrassingly Israel-centric campaign). He petered out toward the end of the primaries but had done enough to earn a marquee speaking slot at the convention, where he delivered a barn burner (he was one of the great political orators of our time). And his campaigns were the glue that brought a lot of up-and-coming progressives together for the first time. I remember Harold Ickes, then a top Jackson aide, telling me to keep my eye on a young state senator from Maryland who was working on the campaign. His name was Jamie Raskin.So Jackson was the leader of the party’s progressive wing. At the same time, though, something was brewing in the party’s stronger establishment wing: Al From founded the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, and he hitched the centrist DLC’s wagon to the talented Bill Clinton, and the rest is history. Despite representing very different politics, Jackson and Clinton always kind of liked each other, and Jackson, of course, still wanted to be a player. So he invited Clinton to come speak to his Rainbow Coalition conference in Washington in June 1992. I was there that day. It was a normal speech for about 15 minutes, nothing special, and then Clinton started in on this riff about this obscure rapper named Sister Souljah—condemning her quote about killing white people. There was no mystery about what Clinton was up to—pundits had been after him for weeks to “stand up to the special interests.” Jackson, at a press conference shortly after Clinton left, was clearly annoyed. But within a month, Jackson endorsed Clinton. “It takes two wings to fly,” I remember Jackson saying regularly at the time, reminding the dominant centrists that there were Democrats who were leery of free trade, angry about this new problem of income inequality, perfectly happy with big government, and eager to see their party defend unions and workers.The centrists called the shots for a long time. But 30 years on, who’s won that economic argument? On the four matters I name above, and a few more, it’s Jackson’s positions that are today ascendant. And it all traces back to his brave decision to confront Reaganism head-on at the precise moment that it was at its most triumphant. Jackson was a man of many accomplishments, and yes, a fair share of flaws. But for that decision, he deserves our thanks, and history’s respect.

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