Letters from an American – January 15, 2026 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, January 15, 2026

By Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 15, 2026

You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?

They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19.

Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.

Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.

They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”

The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”

As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.

While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.

In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like [the agents are] talking to us.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: January 15, 2026 – by Heather Cox Richardson

Important to remember when as individuals we feel powerless… there is great strength in numbers.

https://youtu.be/VLbWnJGlyMU?si=Jh9Ad2dNQIhunzwW

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Some thirty or forty years ago Polish writer Stanislaw Lem wrote an essay about the future of warfare.
He predicted that traditional heavy weapons would become so expensive as to be useless (so expensive they would be made in too small quantities, and way too valuable to risk losing).
Thus he predicted that the biggest role in warfare would be played by cheap but numerous weapons.

Ten or twenty years before that Lem wrote a science fiction story called _The Invincible_.
This was an extremely powerful and heavily armed Earth battle starship which was defeated on a distant planet by huge swarms of _very_ simple flying machines.

BBC:
From florist to drone maker: How the weapon became so mainstream
<https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3ydv2ygro>

#Drones
#Predictions
#StanislawLem
#StrengthInNumbers
#Warfare

“Move Fast”: From McCarthyism to Authoritarianism, Jane Fonda Relaunches Father’s Free Speech Group | Democracy Now!
#Resist #Fascism #StrengthInNumbers #Organize

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/3/jane_fonda_committee_for_first_amendment