- Now the administration is arresting journalists for covering news they don’t like;
- A right-wing response, anxious for public executions;
- Every accusation is a confession;
- How the withdrawn Philip Glass symphony is in a way about Trump;
- How Trump is making America stupider, because he loves the uneducated!
Now they’re arresting journalists for simply covering the news. News they don’t like. Another box to check on your authoritarian bingo card.
CNN, 30 Jan 2026: Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort arrested after Minnesota church protests
NY Times, 30 Jan 2026: Federal Agents Arrest Don Lemon Over Minnesota Church Protest, subtitle “Three others were also arrested on charges that they had violated federal law during the demonstration this month, reviving a case that was rejected last week by a magistrate judge.”
Slate, Jill Filipovic, 30 Jan 2026: Don Lemon’s Arrest Is a Five-Alarm Fire Moment
Late Thursday night, former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested by federal agents at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi. Independent journalist Georgia Fort was arrested as well, along with activists Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy. The arrests stem from a protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the pastor is also an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. Protesters entered the church chanting “ICE out,” disrupting services. Troubling though this may be—places of worship have often been considered off-limits for political protest—the protesters did not assault anyone or even destroy property. Whatever protesters did or didn’t do, Lemon was not demonstrating; he identified himself as a journalist and was clear he was documenting the protest, not participating in it. These arrests came after the Trump Department of Justice’s original criminal complaint against Lemon was rejected because a federal judge—a man who was a former clerk for conservative icon Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a George W. Bush appointee—found there was no probable cause to arrest him.
Still, Lemon found himself under arrest for the crime of doing journalism. The White House tweeted out: “When life gets you lemons…” followed by two chain emojis and an image of Lemon, accusing him of “involvement in the St. Paul church riots.”
Even for an administration that has spent a year violating the First Amendment in all kinds of novel ways, the arrest of a prominent journalist is a shock—a five-alarm fire moment.
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A right-wing lunatic responds.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 30 Jan 2026: James Fishback Says Don Lemon Is ‘Lucky That He’s Not Getting Executed In The Public Square’
As with the killings in Minneapolis, this guy is hallucinating things that no one else saw. Ransacked?
“It is a good day for law and order in America,” Fishback declared. “A man ransacked a church during Sunday service with BLM and antifa thugs. If our Founding Fathers knew that a bunch of thugs, led by Don Lemon, had ransacked a church on Sunday morning while parishioners were praising our awesome God, they would have likely called for his public execution.”
It’s notable he feels this is some kind of oppression against Christians. And it’s notable he’s salivating for a public execution.
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Once again: every accusation is a confession.
AlterNet, 30 Jan 2026: Trump staffer backed into corner after claiming reporters ‘intentionally mislead’ public
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Because Trump’s musical tastes don’t extend much beyond “YMCA.”
The New Republic, Harry Litman, 29 Jan 2026: Trump’s Too Dumb to Know, but Philip Glass’s Symphony Is About Him, subtitled “The work that the famed composer pulled from the Kennedy Center is inspired by a historic Lincoln speech that’s almost a little too on point.”
Glass, 89, a towering figure in modern composition whose place in the history of music is secure, did not merely pull a much-anticipated work that is likely his last symphony. He pointedly sounded the symphony’s theme as a direct protest to the dangerous authoritarian rule under Trump.
Glass wrote, “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.… Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.” And he announced his withdrawal on January 27—exactly 188 years to the day after Lincoln gave the speech that inspired the symphony.
Symphony No. 15, Lincoln, draws centrally from Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address, generally considered his first great speech. Lincoln delivered the address to a group of young professionals in Springfield, Illinois, when he was just 28—an age when Trump was still shining his father’s shoes.
Trump, who one suspects has never read the Lyceum speech or listened to a Glass symphony, viewed the gesture, as he invariably does, as a personal affront. In fact, it was far more. It incorporated Lincoln’s prescient warning about democratic collapse, a warning that lands with unsettling accuracy on the dangers of Trumpian rule.
The article goes on about that Lincoln speech and contrasts its themes with Trump’s behavior.
His contempt for law is not episodic or rhetorical; it is foundational. Courts matter only when they serve him. He casts legal accountability as persecution. He elevates loyalty over legality, impulse over judgment, grievance over governance. Mobs are not an aberration but a tool—summoned, legitimated, and excused. The result is precisely the “mobocratic spirit” Lincoln warned would rot a republic from within and prepare the ground for despotism.
Lincoln’s remedy is as important as his diagnosis. He does not call for charismatic saviors or heroic leaders. He calls for simple “reverence for the laws”; what he famously terms, in high Enlightenment rhetoric, a “political religion.” Lincoln is explicit that bad laws may exist and should be repealed. But while they remain in force, they must be obeyed, for the sake of example. “There is no grievance,” he insists, “that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” The alternative is not liberty but a descent into lawlessness that invites tyranny.
Trump, of course, venerates Lincoln (and Washington) by rote, without understanding or believing anything they actually said.
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His fans cheer Trump on. Remember his comment from 2016…
The Bulwark, Catherine Rampell, 29 Jan 2026: Trump Is Making America Stupider, subtitled “How MAGA is purging scientists and other skilled workers from both the private and public sectors.”
“I LOVE THE POORLY EDUCATED,” Donald Trump once declared. That was back in 2016, during his first presidential campaign.
Now, a decade later, he and the rest of the MAGA movement have manifested that love into policy, with a series of changes that have hobbled America’s entire knowledge sector.
It’s been both disruptive and deeply damaging. For over a century, America’s knowledge economy has been our golden goose. Thanks to both private and public R&D, we have developed the strongest military, the most cutting-edge tech companies, and global dominance in the fields of science and medical research. These successes didn’t happen by accident. They were the result of deliberate policy choices going all the way back at least to the Morrill Act of 1862.
And they love him back.
