The papers still fly

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Federal judge rules the Trump regime cannot deport foreign-born students for being critical of Israel. {AP 29 August}

https://apnews.com/article/israel-protests-deportations-ideological-d3694ba08ab714eb9441ca51a83fa57f

FTA: Judge Noël Wise, in a ruling Friday, delivered a victory for The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper at Stanford University, which has said some international students were afraid to speak out because of the deportation threat.

“Freedom of speech is illusory if we are only ‘free’ to express complementary views about the government and its leaders,” the judge wrote.

The decision largely piggybacks on findings from nearly a year ago by a U.S. district judge in Boston, who ruled that the Trump administration violated the Constitution when it targeted people who are not citizens for deportation solely for supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel.

Wise wrote that the freedoms of speech and the press are “foundational to America’s enduring democracy.” The judge cited free-speech and vagueness flaws that violate the First Amendment and Fifth Amendment as she struck down portions of the provisions that the federal government follows regarding deportations.

Wise cited retaliation in March 2025 by U.S. immigration authorities against people who engaged in speech supporting the Palestinians and against Israel’s actions — which a growing number of experts, including those commissioned by a U.N. body, have said amount to genocide. The judge also cited retaliation against people who were critical of Charlie Kirk after the Turning Point USA co-founder was assassinated last September.

“Tomorrow, or perhaps even today, targets may include anyone in the United States who exercises their freedom of speech to simply express opinions the government does not like,” the judge in San Jose said.

“This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely,” she added. “Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it. Zealous protection of our Constitutional right to free speech is a provocative demonstration of our country’s powerful lack of fear.”

The Justice Department did not respond Saturday to a message seeking comment on the decision.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Compassion is no repeal of law: DOJ orders Facebook to remove a group tracking ICE agents in Chicago

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{NYT 15 October} “Meta on Tuesday removed a Facebook group that was used to share information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Chicago after the Department of Justice requested that it be taken down.” 

One may rightly condemn the excesses of ICE, and insist that non-violent migrants deserve dignity rather than degradation—and I would concur. Yet compassion, however noble, does not erase law. To obstruct officers acting within their legal remit remains an offence, regardless of intent, and regardless of how unjust the methods ICE is employing these days may be. And, furthermore, if one must broadcast the movements of federal agents, then at least choose a medium less porous than the echo-chambers of social media. #JustSaying —Arthur Newhook, 15 October 2025.

An omen, perhaps: the aircraft bearing ‘Secretary of War’ Hegseth home from the NATO summit in Brussels makes an unplanned descent in Britain—its windshield fractured, as if by prophecy itself. {BBC 15 October}

“Nations that embrace openness and cooperation are surging ahead, while those resting on past privilege are being left behind.” Once the world’s most powerful passport, the US now ranks 12th—its holders welcomed visa-free to fewer shores than a decade past. {WP 15 October}

Trump confers a posthumous Medal of Freedom upon a man whose life’s work advanced Christian nationalism—curtailing freedoms for undesirables, and all who refuse the yoke of Dominionist rule. {The Guardian 14 October}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. FULL LIST OF LINKS - linktr.ee/arthurnewhook. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED on Cash App ($ANewhook).

Cruelty enthroned as creed: the Supreme Court rejects Alex Jones’ appeal, but the permission to be vile is sacrosanct in Trump’s #Murica and he will never be compelled to pay a single penny to the Sandy Hook families

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{USA Today 14 October} ‘Supreme Court rejects Alex Jones' appeal of $1.4 billion Sandy Hook judgment’

The Supreme Court of the former United States hath declined to hear broadcaster Alex Jones’s final appeal, thereby upholding the $1.4 billion judgement against him for his monstrous defamation of the Sandy Hook families. One might have hoped this would mark the end of his grotesque spectacle—but Alex Jones holds no intention of paying a penny to those he so cruelly tormented for profit, attention, and the hollow currency of infamy. Bankruptcy merely another pageant upon his stage.

And mark me: Trump will wade in—perhaps on the orders of the puppetmaster in Moscow—to absolve Jones of culpability. A pardon, a reprieve, some grotesque political gesture—nothing should astonish us. We are dealing with a cabal that hath proclaimed open war upon Reality herself, hellbent on turning Americans against one another, and therein they have triumphed beyond their wildest fantasy. These individuals do not merely distort the world; they unmake it, and demand applause for the wreck.

Long hath Jones sheltered behind the corruption of ‘free speech’, wielding the First Amendment as both shield and cudgel, whilst his retainers bleat about liberty even as they crush its very heart beneath their heels. If they cannot pardon him, they shall canonise him; if not canonise, they shall martyr him, à la Charlie Kirk, demanding again that homage be rendered at football games and flags be flown at half-staff in mock mourning. One way or the other, the next phase of the farce shall be redemption, not remorse. Millions will once more dutifully follow along, for this country—God deliver it—long since bartered sanity and decency for spectacle.

Indeed, a renewed campaign to ‘redeem’ Alex Jones is already underway this afternoon—a grotesque rehabilitation in the name of populist grievance. Observe how brazen in general the right-wing sphere hath waxed since Trump’s return to power; their confidence is absolute, their scorn unveiled. They know the nation’s fracture runs too deep to mend, that the peasants are itching to begin slaughtering each other en masse, and they lick their lips thereat. These be heady, halcyon days for American Fascists, theocrats, white supremacists, and the like.

The tragedy lieth not only in what was wrought upon the Sandy Hook families—hunted, exposed, and driven from their homes in Newtown—but in the cold indifference of the nation that beheld it. Who rose in their defence, in earnest? None. Barack Obama then sat upon the presidential throne, conjuring up a rather infamous tear, and the trembling voice, and the familiar elegy of ‘thoughts and prayers’—a pantomime of pity so practised it might have been writ in advance (and probably further encouraging malevolent fools in their conspiracism). Yet when the curtain fell, nothing changed.

I remember that dreadful day with nauseating clarity: even whilst the bodies of children lay cooling in their classrooms, the national conversation was already pivoting—not to grief, nor justice, but toward the largely phantasmal tyranny of gun control. In this land, the right to bear arms hath been elevated to a sacrament, sanctified above human life itself. School shootings are now so routine they scarcely interrupt the afternoon news cycle, each massacre met with the same weary shrug and constitutional catechism: ‘necessary evil, price of freedom’.

That any soul could gaze upon those parents, those tiny coffins, and pronounce them deserving of their woe is thought enough to curdle the spirit. Yet here we are, a republic whose moral arteries have calcified beyond cure—a nation that hath mistaken cruelty for conviction and named it liberty.

We stand upon the brink of that which, in my youth in the late 20th century, had been unspeakable: civil war, and a rot of conscience so absolute that compassion itself is spent. Would that I could summon hope—for the families of Sandy Hook, for the country—but the abyss hath already opened. What awaits is no mere politics, but total civil collapse: cruelty enthroned as creed. And Alex Jones shall yet be laughing all the way to the bank. —Arthur Newhook, 14 October 2025.

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