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While the DHS is sending masked ICE agents into cities, rounding up immigrants and citizens alike, killing protesters, and creating chaos, Democrats are making a big show of being anti-ICE. They’re calling for reforms, body cams, accountability, and training.

This sounds great, but civil rights attorney and Copaganda author Alec Karakatsanis reveals it’s actually “extremely dangerous.” Under the guise of reform, the Democrats are playing a key role in a centuries-old strategy of building an oppressive, high-surveillance police state used to target the most vulnerable communities in the country.

And it’s all a plot.

Useful Idiots: What are the most dangerous reforms being pushed by the Democrats and why are they dangerous?

Alec Karakatsanis: One of the most important ones that you hear constantly from Democratic Party leadership right now is body cameras. Now, aside from how silly that is in this context, the officer who shot and killed Renee Goode literally filmed himself doing it, it’s actually much deeper.

The evidence is overwhelming that body cameras do not make police less violent and they do not reduce police misconduct. So you have to ask yourself, why are Democrats proposing something that everybody agrees does not make police more accountable? And the history of this is that police agencies wanted body cameras for many, many years, but they couldn’t get the billions of dollars of funding for them.

What they wanted is to link all this new footage and data into algorithms that train AI into massive databases. That’s why you see ICE with cameras. They scan people’s faces. Prosecutors also wanted body cameras so they could get guilty pleas really quickly, like trespassing charges against unhoused people and drug possession cases.

So they had this problem: the industry wanted to make billions of dollars in contracts. The police wanted them for surveillance and to connect people to AI. But they couldn’t afford it.

And then what happened was after Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, the Obama administration worked with local Democratic Party officials and the policing surveillance industry to just remarket body cams, not as police surveillance but as accountability and transparency for well-meaning liberals who were desperate for something to be done.

That resulted in the greatest expansion of policing surveillance technology in modern history.

Useful Idiots: So the Democrats’ current stance is that they’re threatening to block the funding of the Department of Homeland Security, where ICE is a component, unless there are certain reforms?

Alec Karakatsanis: What the Democrats are basically saying is ICE needs to spend even more money on surveillance technology like body cameras and on so-called training.

Anybody who knows what the police and military training industry is in the United States would not support more money going to that. It’s one of the most dark, violent, and fascist corners of our society.

These training programs are where they learn to do the stuff that you’re seeing in these videos. That’s why in 2020 there were thousands of videos of police committing intentional, brutal crimes and violence, and it looked the same in hundreds and hundreds of cities. It wasn’t some one off mistake. This is what police are trained to do.

The Democrats are saying, ‘if you do those reforms,’ which the police want anyway, because there’s huge industries behind them, ‘we will then give you this entire budget.’

The main leverage Democrats actually have is reducing the ICE budget, but they’re starting the negotiation by saying we’ll give you everything you want. It’s really, really insidious.

Subscribe to watch the full interview with Alec on why AOC and other Dems calling for the National Guard and police agencies to stop ICE is exactly what the police state wants, and why those videos of police playing basketball or handing out donuts evolve from colonialist tactics used by the French against Algerians.

Plus, catch this week’s Friday Free-For-All: Smug Man Accidentally Admits He’s MAGA Now

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Bill Maher awards the next Nobel Peace Prize to……… Donald Trump!

The smuggest man on TV, used for years by conservatives as the token “liberal” to bash on the left (like: when you’ve even lost Bill Maher, you know you’re too far left), has now officially come out as MAGA.

“If [Trump’s attack against] Venezuela causes Cuba to fall,” he says on Real Time, “if he somehow gets Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran… he should get a Nobel Peace Prize!” What does it say about a person if they believe causing more destruction, more war, more people to suffer on top of the many people suffering already due to Trump’s policies, should get you the Nobel Peace Prize?

It’s straight-up neocon behavior that puts Maher to the right of most Republicans.

We really do try to avoid showing clips of this slimy man on Useful Idiots: it’s low-hanging fruit and it causes our viewers nausea, but this one was too mucilaginous (a word I just learned when searching ‘Bill Maher synonyms’) not to mock.

Also in this week’s Friday Free-For-All: CNN trips over itself in a crazy contradiction while trying to defend Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro, Mike Pompeo claims that what the Iranian government did to it’s protesters in two days is somehow worse than Israel destroying all of Gaza over two and a half years, and Trump admits that he no longer cares about affordability for young people.

Trying to stay warm in the freezing weather? This Free-For-All will make your blood boil. Subscribe to watch all the craziest news clips of the week with Katie and Aaron:

Elon Musk is a bad joke teller.

“You know I heard about the formation of the Peace Summit,” Musk sets up the joke in a what else, what else rhythm. “And I was like… is that spelled P-I-E-C-E??” He looks around with a big grin, waiting for the laugh.

There’s silence. Next to him onstage, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink laughs nervously. Only then does Musk realize he hit the wrong punchline. So he does what any good comic does, and explains the joke: “You know, a little piece of Greenland? A little piece of Venezuela? All we want is piece!”

Now which is the worst part of this: that awful delivery, or the fact that in the 1983 film To Be or Not To Be, Mel Brooks plays none other than Adolf Hitler and makes literally the same joke to great laughter from a Nazi audience. But in 2026, it’s told completely unironically.

Mr. Brooks, if you’re a Useful Idiots subscriber, please let us know which one hurts more, the Nazi thing or how he badly he butchered your joke.

Also in this week’s Friday Free-For-All: former IDF soldier Josh Shapiro got offended that Kamala Harris’ 2024 VP vetting team asked if he had ever been an Israeli agent (the answer is yes, he has). Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accidentally admits that US sanctions were designed to kill ordinary Iranian civilians. And a new Zohran Mamdani-vs-Israel feud leads to a vicious Twitter battle between Katie and a brain-dead Zionist.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s Friday Free-For-All. Support independent media and subscribe to watch the full episode here: