Jonathan M. Katz
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Jonathan M. Katz
@katz.theracket.news
79K followers 790 following 11K posts
Author of GANGSTERS OF CAPITALISM and THE BIG TRUCK THAT WENT BY. Subscribe to my newsletter: http://theracket.news | Signal: jmkatz.18 | @KatzOnEarth on TikTok & Insta | Avi by @mollycrabapple.bsky.social
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Here we go!
Get ready for CBS News Chief Correspondent Olivia Reingold
January 26, 2026 at 3:18 PM
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Tellin ya'! theracket.news/p/when-will-...
But that isn’t going nearly far enough. Restructuring federal agencies isn’t sufficient when the heads of all the other departments are weaponizing themselves against the people as well. There are plenty of agencies that can step in as militarized oppression if ICE is gone. (To wit, initial reports are that Pretti was shot to death not by ICE but by agents of Customs and Border Protection). If you get rid of DHS, you’re still left with a Department of Defense whose war-crimes-enthusiast secretary responded to Pretti’s murder by spiking the football. Impeach Kristi Noem, yes. But Hegseth would have no qualms about finishing the exploding network of detention centers — centers that Andrea Pitzer rightly notes meet the historical definition of concentration camps. No, if you want to prevent more killings like those of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and Silverio Villegas González, if you want to stop the unraveling of our society and prevent the descent into full authoritarian takeover and/or civil war, there’s only one option. Donald Trump must be forced to resign.
January 26, 2026 at 3:15 PM
katz.theracket.news
You go get them Andy
Andy Ngo 1 PM. Which business is this? @MrAndyNgo •Jan 21 S ... 36 {7 139 • 31K 贝 Dirty7uckycharms Char... @charmsx2 Follow G... Wouldn't this be an attempted murder of a police officer 9:28 PM • Jan 21, 2026 • 1,799 Views ) 4 • 507 1 企 @ShemiRa... • Jan 22 • ... Shemi-Ra... Yep ill 34 贝 adriaticque... @adriaticque... • Jan 21 S ..° Yes 02 Caleb @CalebCrotzer • Jan 21 A threat at least ıll 65 贝 S... 02 Jay @JGStudios2023 • Jan 22 No
January 26, 2026 at 5:07 AM
katz.theracket.news
Not even their dogs are safe from the obviously fake receipt thing
Homeland Security Follow @DHSgov THEY'RE EVEN GOING AFTER THE DOGS! In Minneapolis, anti-ICE agitators are targeting our @CBP K-9s, including K-9 Dina, pictured here. At the kennel where K-9 Dina was staying, it was discovered that an employee had written "ICE OUT" on her feed chart. F *stoms & Border Protection nine Enforcement Feed Chart K-9 Dina Ja mary 2026 3:45 PM • Jan 21, 2026 • 2.1M Views 3.9K 17 10K 28K 1.2K
January 26, 2026 at 5:07 AM
katz.theracket.news
Hell yeah 52-year-old mother of two
Thomas Brophy, an ICE official, told me he’s surprised by the lengths anti-ICE activists will go to hinder their missions. “As a United States citizen, you don’t have the luxury to pick and choose which laws you want to follow and when you want to follow them,” Brophy said. “I don’t understand that mindset.” But a 52-year-old mother of two active in an ICE watch Signal group told me she feels it’s her duty to take action after Good’s killing. “I’m incredibly stressed out and angry about what’s happening in our country,” she said, adding that she felt our nation was becoming “more like a fascist state.” “As old white ladies, it’s important we do something and put ourselves out there.”
January 26, 2026 at 3:10 AM
katz.theracket.news
They probably gave up after sending ace reporter Olivia "Starving Kids is Okay as Long as They're Also Disabled" Reingold to infiltrate a Ice Watch Signal chat, only to find it was populated by normal, community-minded people performing acts of quiet heroism.

archive.ph/hI5lj
I Joined ICE Watch Ordinary citizens in Minneapolis have created a vast digital network for tracking and warning against immigration enforcement activity. (Illustration by The Free Press; photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images) Everyday citizens are tasked with 5 a.m. patrol shifts, license plate–tracking, and rapid response teams. By Olivia Reingold 01.14.26 — U.S. Politics U.S. Politics Breaking news, deep investigations, and eye-opening commentary that favor no party.
January 26, 2026 at 3:07 AM
katz.theracket.news
OK tell me more Mr. Fanon
These stories have much more in common than you might think. All are driven, in my view, by terrible leaders who prefer easy, violent solutions to the hard work of
January 26, 2026 at 1:43 AM
katz.theracket.news
July 2020: theracket.news/p/illiberali...
THE RACKET = The people the letter seems to be aimed at -protesters, activists, and those who sympathize with them-have far more in common with the people the McCarthyites attacked: opponents of segregation, LGBT folk, and anti-fascists. (A common reason for being fired during the scare was having supported efforts to help refugees from fascism during the 1936 Spanish Civil War.) Rather than being a sign of rising censorship, the tea-cup tempests in which many of the letter's signers have found themselves are a product of entire classes of people emerging from decades, if not centuries, of censorship, and thus finally having a chance to push back on orthodoxies and take a leading role in public debate. R THE RACKET The letter-writers called out Trump by name, noting that he is "a real threat to democracy." Williams justified his decision to nonetheless focus on the strongest voices speaking out against Trump, at great personal risk, by telling the Times that their supposed illiberalism "both fueled and echoed" the president's. It's a nonsensical statement. My pointing that out doesn't impinge on his right to say it. =
January 25, 2026 at 4:04 PM
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You sure that’s the most indefensible part Matt
Matthew Yglesias C @mattyglesias Follow .. • • The smearing of the victim by top officials is the most indefensible part, and the only solution is to defeat them and have a governing regime that is not composed of vicious and immoral people. 6:23 PM • Jan 24, 2026 • 113.2K
January 25, 2026 at 3:37 AM
katz.theracket.news
What the fuck
At a press conference on Saturday, U.S. Border Patrol and ICE said a federal agent fatally shot an armed man during a targeted immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. Commander Gregory Bovino said the man, identified as Jose Huerta Chuma, approached agents with a handgun and resisted efforts to disarm him. Authorities said the shooting was followed by the arrival of roughly 200 people who obstructed and assaulted law enforcement, prompting crowd-control measures. The incident remains under investigation, with officials accusing local leaders of omitting key details about the presence of a firearm during earlier public
January 24, 2026 at 10:10 PM
katz.theracket.news
Gangsters of Capitalism, Chapter 17: America, p. 325-326
The real danger, Butler knew, lay in that idea’s negation. If a faction gained power that exemplified the worst of America’s history and instincts—with a leader willing to use his capital and influence to destroy what semblance of democracy existed for his own ends—that faction could overwhelm the nation’s fragile institutions and send one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen tumbling irretrievably into darkness. Katz, Jonathan M.. Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire (pp. 325-326). (Function). Kindle Edition.
January 24, 2026 at 9:54 PM
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I can linearly state that both of those claims are bullshit.
Curtis Yarvin @curtis_yarvin She drove her car at a cop. He pulled a gun on the cops. Watch the way the lib, without denying these fundamental facts, sinuously works around them
January 24, 2026 at 9:42 PM
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Added a footnote to yesterday's Racket explaining why Stephen Miller's vision of geopolitics is very Nazi. And also, yet another example of the Nazis looking to the turn-of-the-century United States as a model. Time is an ouroboros.

theracket.news/p/the-monroe...
2 The Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt proposed a global system of Großraum, or “great spaces,” each dominated by a central empire or Reich that would not interfere in the others’. His stated model was the “Monroe Doctrine,” by which he meant the Rooseveltian model, not the original. Hitler gleefully adopted this theory as his own (“Germany will fight until Britain and France recognize a ‘German Monroe Doctrine for central Europe’ and restore her war-lost colonies,” his representatives told U.S. envoy Sumner Welles in 1940), but — as is ever the case with megalomaniacs — did not stick to it for a minute, intervening with hopes of breaking U.S. alliances in Latin America whenever he could.
January 23, 2026 at 3:32 PM
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Confirmed! Thanks @tomtomorrow.bsky.social
Book inscribed “to my best friend Jonathan! Tom Tomorrow”
January 22, 2026 at 2:45 AM
katz.theracket.news
Well of course Gaza keeps having deadly days, what with all this autonomous fire flying around.
AP Immigration enforcement DONATE Sign in Stock market today Sever Israeli fire strikes journalists and children on one of Gaza's deadliest days since ceasefire
January 22, 2026 at 12:46 AM
katz.theracket.news
Pensamientos y oraciones
That has changed under President Trump. He has repatriated more than 1,600 Cubans in 2025, according to the Cuban government. That is about double the number of Cubans who were repatriated in 2024. And in the years that Mr. Trump has been president, he has sent more Cubans back than his three predecessors.
January 21, 2026 at 7:18 PM
katz.theracket.news
Get off X, people. Brain damage is irreversible.
Wesley Yang @wesyang Follow -- Be Jerry Falwell in 1986 -- Claim that homosexual Congressmen will someday proudly photograph themselves shirtless at open-air BDSM festivals where men urinate in each other's mouths in public -- Claim that homosexual state Senators will someday decriminalize the transmission of HIV, remove the requirement that 24 year old homosexuals that anally and/or orally copulate with 14 year old boys be placed on the sex offender's list, force male rapists and murders into women's prisons, teach every child that any of them can change sex, allow any 12 year old to put themselves into foster care where the state will block their puberty and dose them with cross-sex hormones against the will of their parents, make it unlawful for school districts to require notification of parents that their children have had their names and pronouns changed, and decriminalize loitering laws that make it impossible for the police to enforce laws against prostitution and the sex trafficking of children. -- Be laughed at by the whole of the
January 21, 2026 at 5:08 AM
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Wrote this in 2016:

www.theatlantic.com/internationa...
If the transformation of audacious showmanship and fame into political power reminds you of a certain real-estate mogul turned celebrity candidate in the United States, well, it should. Martelly presaged Donald Trump in a lot of ways. Before his election, Martelly’s supporters liked to say that, because he was already so rich and famous, their candidate couldn’t be bribed or bought. Every time he’d insult other candidates or critics, or just say what other politicians wouldn’t, disaffected, angry voters—especially young, unemployed men furious about their endless poverty and the failed response to the 2010 earthquake—just loved him more. In one recording, purportedly made days before the 2011 presidential runoff, Martelly informed a crowd that members of the rival left-wing Lavalas party of ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were “ugly” and “smell like shit.” “Go fuck your mother, Lavalas. ... Go fuck your mother, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,” he said, over cheers and peals of laughter. (The phrase is even dirtier and meaner in Haitian Creole.) Then he challenged them to come to his house and kill him.
January 20, 2026 at 4:00 PM
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Tfw the dog won’t wag
Quinnipiac poll: Nearly 9 in 10 U.S. voters oppose taking Greenland by military force Q: Would you support or oppose the United States trying to take Greenland by military force? Note: Totals may not equal 100% because of rounding. Source: Jan. 8-12, 2026, Quinnipiac poll of 1,133 registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 3.7 percentage points. Error margins are larger among subgroups. Support Don't know/No answer • Oppose Registered voters 86% Republicans 23% 68% Democrats 95% Independents 94%
January 19, 2026 at 3:04 PM
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Embarrassment implies a capacity for shame
PRIZE •‹ Donald Trump celebrates 'great honour' of winning Fifa peace prize - video Fifa Growing sense of embarrassment at Fifa over Donald Trump peace prize
January 19, 2026 at 6:05 AM
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This MAGA diner safari has been on the NYT homepage for three days
Springsteen Denounces ICE Deployments and Renee Good's Killing 2 MIN READ One State, Two Very Different Views of Minneapolis 6 MIN READ Trump Administration Greenland F.A.A. Warnings
January 19, 2026 at 5:19 AM
katz.theracket.news
Pardon?
There were fears at the time of DHS's founding, particularly on the political right, that the government was creating an authoritarian monster. The United States had never had the kind of all-
January 17, 2026 at 2:21 PM
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😔 theracket.news/p/an-insane-...
RAI THE RACKET = The Times wrote that "consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic and cost barriers would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Mr. Trump seeks in the span of a four-year presidential term." But what legal barriers? The Supreme Court just ruled that a president can do whatever he wants, so long as it is an "official act." And who says Trump - who, again, tried to overthrow an election by force - will allow himself to be limited to just one more four-year term?
January 16, 2026 at 12:49 AM
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Was just going over some old issues of The Racket and found this. I wrote it in July 2024, just after the Republican convention.
R THE RACKET And don't be confused about this: Rounding up 20, or even 10 or 5, million people is a project that will touch every aspect of life in the United States. It will mean checkpoints and random raids at workplaces and in neighborhoods; it will mean mistakes, wrongful detentions and deportations, racial profiling and state violence at an unprecedented scale. I can tell you from having covered past threatened mass expulsions, particularly in the Dominican Republic, that even when the full extent of the government's threat is not realized, in practice it is an exercise in terror and a virtual carte blanche for violence against the targeted minority, up to and including outright lynching. The Times wrote that "consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal,
January 16, 2026 at 12:47 AM
katz.theracket.news
In reverse order: 2. FUCKING TALK ABOUT THE CHAOS

1. I wouldn't bring up out-of-touch people living in a bubble if I were him
The Trump administration is filled with a bunch of out-of-touch people living in a bubble. • And this is what Trump's so-called Golden Age looks like - get by with less, and stop complaining about affordability.
January 15, 2026 at 9:34 PM