“I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We are going to kill them, you know? They are going to be, like, dead.” — Donald J. Trump, president, United States of America, October 23, 2025.

How many of us thought the primary cause of global warming would be the President of the United States setting the world on fire?

Yeah, this week’s blather is going to be a bit personal. As you may know, I’m a proud and vocal Chicagoan. I am reminded of what we used to say back in the 1960s. Chicken Little was right.

I grew up in a neighborhood called Albany Park, on my city’s mid-northwest side. Like most Chicago neighborhoods, its character and personality evolved with the various ethnicities who lived there each generation. It was largely Ashkenazi-American when I was a kid, and as my group moved to other neighborhoods over time their apartments were rented by Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Arab-Americans, and all kinds of folks who marked their turf by establishing amazing restaurants. That’s why Chicago had such an amazing public transportation system.

Earlier this month, Trump’s Troopers invaded Albany Park as well as several other neighborhoods as they sought out anybody who looked or acted the least bit Latino. They tear-gassed people, beat them, and arrested them regardless of their citizenship or its status or any evidence — let alone indictments — of criminal behavior.

Tear gas is indiscriminate; it doesn’t ask about a person’s ethnic heritage before it sets their lungs ablaze. While Albany Park Latinos were being gassed, beaten and disappeared, so were the folks from Korea, the Philippines, India, Cambodia, Somalia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Romania, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon. It is one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in America.

Nearly twenty years ago I stopped by my old grammar school, Patrick Henry (the name now seems ironic) to show my wife where I had toddled. A five year old was sitting alone on the school’s front steps. My crisis intervention mode kicked in, and I asked the boy if he was all right and if somebody was coming to pick him up. Being 5:00, the closest school doors were locked. I asked him his name and he replied “Miguel.” I said that was my name as well (look it up), and he was completely unimpressed. A kindergarten student, he was equally blasé when I said I had gone to kindergarten there. It’s tough to impress a five year old. Today, Miguel is of voting age… assuming he’s still alive and in the United States.

Even so, this month small children whose greatest crime was pooping their pants were zip-tied and tossed into unmarked cars and taken… elsewhere. As usual, the Trump Troopers were masked head to toe, unbadged and unidentifiable, a sight that will terrorize any human being. That is their point.

I saw the photos and the footage. As the cameras wandered my home turf I didn’t look at the locations in remembrance of how it was when I lived there.

I was thinking we are moments away from the American Kristallnacht.

We’ve all seen the footage of his Storm Troopers conducting similar atrocities across the Blue States. When it is the ground upon which you grew up, where you first went to school, where you attended your house of worship and you played in the parks with your friends, it’s more than heart-wrenching. It sears the soul. It reminds us of our oft-asked question “what is this world coming to?”

If we stay on our asses, we can easily predict what is this world coming to.

You may have had a similar reaction when you saw Trump’s destruction of nearly half of the White House. Typically, he did this a day or two after he promised he would not harm a single brick of America’s most hallowed edifice. I’ll bet that bastard sues to get his security deposit back.

Trump shouldn’t resent being called a fascist, even though the concept of a dictionary is beyond his ken. He should be reveling in the inculcation. I gather Trump and his pal Shonda Steven Miller are looking to reenact the Reichstag fire.

Next to lying his ass off and raping women, being a fascist is what Trump does best.

(Special thanks and a tip of the Hatlo to my pal Rick Oliver, who brought Ernie to this week’s table.)