Dear Diary

The Wheel is Turning and You Can't Slow It Down

Dear Diary,

I’m writing this at the end of a week that feels like a month!

That’s not hyperbole. That’s just what it feels like now. Time isn’t moving normally. Events aren’t spaced the way they used to be. The news doesn’t break anymore — it punches me in the face. I don’t even finish processing one thing before the next one lands.

History is no longer echoes, it screams.

This week made that impossible to ignore.

We watched ICE — already violent, already out of control — get something close to a public blessing from the federal government. Not oversight. Not restraint. Immunity. Openly stated immunity.

Stephen Miller: “You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

Threats not just to protesters or undocumented people, but to mayors, governors, journalists, anyone who gets in the way.

That’s not law enforcement. That’s a message. And the message is simple: this force belongs to us, not to you.

I’ve been saying for months now that we’re living in a post–federal law enforcement era. This week felt like the moment when that stopped sounding dramatic and started sounding obvious. We keep seeing it play out the same way: an incident happens, the federal government puts out a statement, and within hours the statement is contradicted by video, by local police, or by both.

And don’t think it can’t work! Looks like the baseline on whether the shooting was justified is 53% but give Trump and the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, errrrrr, I mean the government time to work on Republicans. Don’t forget, they managed to convince them they didn’t watch an insurrection with their own eyes!

We will not be seeing justice for Renee Good or people like this 21 year old boy who was permanently blinded by ICE.

We also saw the Senate kill the War Powers resolution that actually managed to pass the House — one of the last tools Congress has to say “no” to unilateral war-making. And it happened at the same time NATO allies started sending reinforcements to protect Greenland.

Let that sink in for a second.

Our allies are reinforcing territory to protect themselves from us.

If I had told anyone that five years ago, they’d have laughed me out of the room. Now it barely gets a day’s coverage.

This is what collapse looks like when it’s bureaucratic instead of cinematic.

And layered on top of all of that was the stuff that really made my skin crawl — the symbolism, the language, the normalization. Kristi Noem standing at a podium with “one of ours, all of yours” behind her.

That’s not a vague historical parallel. That phrase comes straight out of Nazi collective punishment doctrine-exactly what you’d expect from someone capable of shooting a puppy in the face.

And it’s also not in isolation. As I wrote earlier this week Noem’s slogan is part of a package of Nazi propaganda being pushed across multiple official government accounts.

Get the full breadth of it here via PBS, who last week was dissolved by Trump’s board in case you missed that awful development.

That’s not a dog whistle. That’s a foghorn.

Same with ICE quietly keeping a prosecutor who openly praised Hitler and promoted white nationalist ideology. Same with an agency so desperate to staff up that it nearly hired an anti-ICE journalist without even bothering to finish basic background checks. Same with the DHS language that treats dissent as conspiracy and obedience as patriotism. Same as ICE claiming injuries on a guy who was never actually hit by the car.

Put it all together and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion: ICE isn’t just being militarized. It’s being personalized. Turned into a political army. Trump’s personal army.

An enforcement arm that answers upward, not outward. Loyalty first, legality later — if at all.

And here’s the thing that keeps rattling around in my head: none of this is happening because the public wants it.

One of the few bits of data that cut through the noise this week was a YouGov poll showing that support for abolishing ICE is now net positive.

I mean, when Bill Kristol and I are on team #AbolishIce, you’re talking about a policing force straight out of Berlin in the 1930s.

That gap — between public opinion and state power — is where bad things happen.

I also spent a lot of time this week thinking about accountability. Or rather, our near-total failure at it. Not just now, but historically. After the Civil War, after World War II, after every mass trauma. We always tell ourselves the same story: people are tired, they want to move on, it’s better not to look backward.

And so we don’t.

We pardon. We rehabilitate. We reintegrate. We tell ourselves it’s necessary because “someone has to run the government.” That’s how Nazi bureaucrats ended up working for the Allies. That’s how Confederates slid right back into power. That’s how the crimes get buried and the patterns get repeated.

Fatigue plus expedience is a dangerous cocktail.

We are absolutely going to feel that fatigue when this chapter finally ends — however it ends. People will want closure more than justice. Quiet more than truth. But if we give in to that instinct again, we’ll be laying the groundwork for the next collapse before we’ve even cleaned up the last one.

But as the late and great Tom Petty once said: “I’ve got one foot in the grave, one foot on the pedal. I was born a rebel.”

Editor’s Note:

I want to add one quick thing. When I started this project, I was honestly worried about how it would be received. I didn’t know if people would think it was indulgent, dramatic, or just… weird. A diary, really?

Instead, I got emails.

Some from people who told me they’ve been keeping a diary for years — mostly personal — and that this gave them permission to widen its purpose, to start recording the world around them, not just their own inner life.

And others from people who told me, like me, they’ve never kept a diary in their lives — and that they’re going to try this for the first time, alongside me.

That meant more than you probably realize.

So I’ll say it again: write this shit down. However you can. However it makes sense for you. You don’t need beautiful prose or perfect memory. You just need honesty and dates.

Because what we’re living through is going to matter.

And someday, people are going to want to know what it felt like from the inside the crazy train.

RIP: Bobby Weir. Fare you well.