Rumeysa Ozturk
While there is a lot of focus on the major scandals involving Donald Trump’s administration, it’s important we don’t lose sight of what’s happening inside this country, where we are witnessing the federal government snatch people right off the streets for their political speech. The latest, most chilling example of that happened Tuesday outside of Boston, when Rumeysa Ozturk, a Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar at Tufts University, was taken off a residential street in Somerville, Massachusetts.
At 5:15 p.m., Ozturk, who came to the United States from Turkey on a student visa, had just left her apartment when, as video obtained by NBC News shows, she was approached by a man in a dark hoodie and hat who grabbed her hands. In that video, you can see and hear how upset and scared she is. Eventually, an ICE agent finally pulls out a badge and appears to identify himself as law enforcement.
Pause for question. Why do they do that? Why don’t they wear uniforms and badges and make it clear who they are? Why simply mug a woman on the street? Sheer sadism?
Ozturk is quickly surrounded by half a dozen cops, all in street clothes with their faces covered by masks. They take her cellphone and physically remove her backpack. She is then handcuffed as a bystander films and asks how anyone is supposed to know these people are law enforcement officials. The ICE agents then lead the terrified woman to their unmarked vehicles and drive off.
Now, if all that were not chilling enough, an attorney for Ozturk released a statement earlier Wednesday saying in part: “We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her. … No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”
Tuesday night, a district court judge ordered Ozturk not be moved out of Massachusetts “without first providing advance notice.” But late the next afternoon, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee locator, Ozturk is currently being held in a south Louisiana ICE processing center, nearly 2,000 miles from where she was snatched off the street.
This is what fascist states do. It’s not what liberal/democratic states do. The fascism is here already, a couple of months in.
It’s just straight up secret police bullshit, on top of all the other kinds of horrendous bullshit.
Even if we give Rubio credence for cancelling her visa (and I don’t), his claim that she was ‘creating a ruckus for us’ is just that she co-authored an article in the school magazine last year. Wow, protected speech and not especially inflammatory at that. At worst he could have written to her saying ‘your visa is revoked, you have 30 days to leave the country or you will be arrested and deported.’ Still not justified, but humane. This is all about terror, not just for her, but the rest of us watching.
Like, all of us, including journalists, activists, bloggers…
This is tangential, but one thing that bugs me about the reporting is this: her surname is Öztürk, not Ozturk. Literally that means “Pure Turk”. Until the 1920s, most Turks didn’t have surnames; that was one of Atatürk’s reforms, and Öztürk, for better or worse, became one of the most popular surnames.
It’s far from the most important aspect of this story, but still journalists should get it right.
I’m seeing less of the Substack commentariat making excuses for this than for Khalil, but it’s still pretty loud. I hate to come off this way, but a lot of these anti-anti-Zionists just aren’t the moral equals of their ancestors.
We’re gonna see Tesla vandals shipped off to the gulags soon unless the career agents decide to monkey wrench Bondi.
You can readily find videos of Kristi Noem (the dog and goat killer) in El Salvador, standing before a huge cage packed with prisoners. She is dressed in her latest finery, and giving a little pep-talk about how the Trump regime is going to treat immigrants. Yes, as Rob says, this is all about instilling terror, not only among immigrants but also among the entire American people.
https://youtu.be/BUHieXSR9mA?si=iKCwWs1zG084pDqO
There’s also this about Trump’s invocation of war powers to justify to pack off anybody to El Salvador, and about the new invocation of ’State Secrets’ in order to deny the possibility of revealing who exactly has been sent there.
https://youtu.be/p6i5grKbXSo?si=kzlbT4Wqkl35pNqa
What a Maroon #3
That is an excellent point BUT my keyboard is too stupid to manage.
I have I (faint) hope that everyone working in a high powered – bigass – journalism thingy would have access to keyboards with alternative options.
and access to the interwebs
And there is also this, which strongly suggests that the use of Signal for governmental discussions is not a bug, but a feature – intended to keep Americans in the dark about what is actually being discussed and done behind the scenes, and to evade the responsibility of the government to keep records and to be as transparent as possible about what it is up to.
Dina Doll reports how the Signal chat was not only a major breach of national security but an apparent attempt to follow a core principle of Project 2025.
https://youtu.be/_azEHND7CPQ?si=UxoeR-DAXq9s4S7k
Chigau,
It’s easy on an Apple (iPhone or Mac)—just hold down the relevant key, and several options pop up. Of course Windows makes it more difficult; when I’m on my work computer I usually just Google the character I want and then copy and paste. But like you, I’m not a big-ass journalist.
From Noem’s book No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward (via the Guardian):
Indeed; every accusation is a confession.
What a pity the dog didn’t get rather more dangerous with Kristi Noem before the latter got dangerous with her first. And is Kristi Noem an actual name? It sounds like that of some small plastic toy stuck by the manufacturer in a packet of tooth-rotting breakfast cereal so that children may be be encouraged to start the day on a sugar high: “Oh, Mommy, I got the Krispi Gnome! And it’s got a Rolex watch on, too!”
Tangentially…
chigau, my diacriticals hack, when for example typing a European name into a recording session log, is to find it on Wikipedia and then copy-paste. Therefore “Antonin Dvorak” can be rendered “Antonín Dvořák” in a trice.
This shouldn’t be necessary; most of those marks are available on Word (if that’s what you’re using, and I suspect others have it, too). You just have to go to the Insert menu, select Symbol, then scroll until you find the one you want. I use diacriticals all the time, and don’t have to copy-paste them from anywhere. It’s easy once you figure out how.
I don’t really know much of this story, but I will say an aggressive dog is a problem. Our puppy, as a grown up dog, started attacking my husband, leaving him a bloody mess one day. We planned to have him put down, because it’s nearly impossible to give away an aggressive dog, but we were fortunate to find someone who would take him, because the only person he ever attacked was my husband. They were fully informed, so they would be prepared. But it’s nearly impossible to get rid of a biting dog without destroying it, unless you are as fortunate as we were. We received the news he would take him the night before the dog was scheduled to be put down (we had to wait before we could do it for a period after the attack, and we had to keep him inside, which made it worse). I might be sympathetic with her if I knew all the details. It was a devastating time for us, and a broad relief when we were able to give him away.
In Word, most are available (but not all–a lot of IPA symbols are missing, for example). But when I’m typing on Facebook or here, for example, I have to go elsewhere for the symbols I want. Sometimes I go to Word, sometimes to Google.
(Also, I’m too lazy to find a better solution.)
Thanks. This made me laugh, just a little, but a little laugh is better than no laugh, right? As for me, I will search the help menu and poke around trying things until I figure out how to do it or that it can’t be done. I think I’m hardwired that way.
Historian Timothy Snyder (who is in the process of moving to Canada) chillingly points out how alarming this is (or should be) for everyone:
If you hold down the “Alt” key and type 0176 … °
Alt 227 … π
Alt 130 … é
there are others, of course, but those are the ones I have at hand.