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In an article headlined: "Why White Lotus toothgate is a massive SCAM! Attention-seeking Aimee Lou Wood needs to get braces… or admit the truth" the Daily Mail has urged the actress to either change her appearance or make an admission of some kind.

Wood, 31, who originates from Stockport, has been under increased investigation by the publication since becoming the breakout star in the latest White Lotus TV series, in which she plays the character Chelsea.

She brought attention to the article with a repost on her Instagram page (as shown above) which showed how perniciously she was being targeted.

Since season three of the HBO TV show began in February, the paper has published dozens of articles, on an almost daily basis, concentrating, for the most part, on Wood's teeth.

Wood's treatment reveals the dichotomy women in the public eye face, given the paper's unhealthy obsession with the alterations, or 'tweakments' they believe should, or should not have, to rectify their faces and bodies.

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The repost from Wood, which originated on Emily Clarkson's Instagram page, signposts another article, with the caption "The impossibility of being a woman in the Daily Mail."

However, just a day after the paper's toothgate article, the paper had taken a rather different position.

This time journalist, Cassie Carpenter suggested actress Anne Hathaway may have had plastic surgery and was 'sparking concerns' with her taut face.

Exactly what those concerns were, and by whom, the newspaper did not specify.

In other words, actresses cannot win the Daily's Mail's beauty pageant - seemingly damned if they do, and damned if they don't adjust their looks to the paper's impossible requirements.

The White Lotus star was recently ridiculed on SNL, (Saturday Night Live) in a sketch which mocked her teeth and Wood subsequently complained about the lack of sophistication in the "mean and. unfunny" send up.

"I am not thin-skinned. I actually love being taken the p**s out of when it's clever and in good spirits. But the joke was about fluoride. I have big gap teeth, not bad teeth.

"I don't mind caricature - I understand that's what SNL is. But the rest of the skit was punching up and I/Chelsea was the only one punched down on… Okay, end of."

Her post was met by widespread support from the entertainment industry and from the public.

Wood received "apologies from SNL" including an apology from the comedienne Sarah Sherman, who appeared as the actress in the show.

Following the SNL backlash, the Mail published a photograph of Wood, visibly upset and crying, which had been snapped in the street, speculating her tears were a reaction to the satire.

Clearly not enough to deter the paper from publishing their latest slur.

Further in the article, in a somewhat threatening tone, reporter Bullock states: "It's time toothy White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood braced herself for a reality check."

Bullock goes on to suggest the actress's indignation was born out of desire for publicity rather than being genuine.

Labelling Wood "a self-absorbed B-list leading lady buoyed by a tiresomely predictable squad of virtue signalling cheerleaders."

And her teeth being "a talking point" that she has played to her advantage.

Bullock writes: "Her buck tooth battle against the odds is a neat narrative propel her career and celebrity."

"London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts trained, Bafta-winning star of HBO's bi...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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UK politics has been slowly but steadily unwinding from a two-party to a multi-party system for decades. Just like going bankrupt, things in politics change gradually and then very quickly. Is our political system about to enter a new era? In an important piece for Prospect magazine, veteran pollster Peter Kellner argues that we could be at the tipping point. What's going on, why and what's it likely to mean?

If Kellner is right, and I suspect he is, then this long-time coming paradigm shift is going to have some very peculiar impacts, as a system purposely designed to create a two-party duopoly gets warped into a multi-party reality.

Back in 1951 Labour and the Conservatives secured 98% of the vote between them. By 2024 that figure had dropped to 59%. The latest polls put Labour and the Conservatives on less than 50% between them. There have been blips along the way, most notably in 2017 and 2019 as Brexit shaped the landscape and the appearance of a two-party tradition was momentarily maintained. But the underlying trend is towards fracture and fragmentation.

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Kellner is right to argue that much of this is down to one simple word: class. In the past the two parties largely mirrored the two-class structure of society, with the battle over who could command the middle ground and enough of the middle class vote.

A three-decade long negotiated truce between labour and capital led to unprecedented growth and the greatest level of equality the country has ever known. This broke down in the 1970s as control over inflation was lost and capital gained the upper hand in a world where technology and globalisation trumped local union organising power. Instead of a broadly agreed settlement, an elite group of winners moulded the world in their image and their interests. Even that was OK while capitalism could provide consumer baubles to keep enough voters happy, but when this fatally broke down in 2008, as capital without constraints always does, then the outcome was always going to be messy.

At the same time the shift from a society in which we knew and understood ourselves and each other as producers, to society in which we knew and understood ourselves predominantly as consumers, was always going to raise fundamental questions about a political system which only offered a political choice between product A or product B. In a multi-platform, multi-channel world who was going to settle for just the BBC or ITV? Especially when neither of the two main parties seemed any longer able to deliver enough growth, to enough people, enough of the time.

The fact that the dam hasn't burst before now is only down to the electoral system, first past the post. By rewarding parties only based on who wins the most votes in any seat, massive structural barriers are raised against new party entrants who can't compete in enough places to a sufficient degree - but can still win millions of votes that go 'wasted'. This led to the lazy and cynical assumption that voters had nowhere else to go. But generations of party loyalty were slowly worn down by disappointment and disillusionment. People may not switch party immediately but first stop bothering to vote at all. And then something happens which sparks a shift to voting for someone else. In Scotland it was Labour campaigning alongside the Conservatives to stop independence that opened the floo...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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On 18 April, Renaud Camus the French far right thinker and originator of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory which states that there is a "genocidal bloc" of elites deliberately destroying the identities of white European nations through immigration, was prevented from entering the UK by the Home Office.

An email seen by the Telegraph stated that the reason given for barring his entry was that his presence was not "conducive to the public good".

The Great Replacement theory was cited as motivation in the manifestos of the Christchurch and Buffalo mass shooters.

Camus had been on his way to speak at the "remigration conference" of the Homeland Party, a fascist, ethno-nationalist party formed out of a split in the neo-Nazi movement Patriotic Alternative.

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Remigration is a euphemism on the far right for deportations of non-white minority populations from Western nations. The criteria that the Homeland party's website gives for being "remigrated" are immigrants that are "illegal", "unintegrated" and "unwelcome".

Critics of remigration consider it a form of ethnic cleansing of minority populations.

Camus' ban on entry to the UK sparked uproar in the right-wing media. Matthew Goodwin of GB News interviewed Camus, asking him softball questions.

In the interview Camus referred to his idea of the Great Replacement as "what is going on in Britain" and called it a "crime".

Writing in Charlie Hebdo in 2021 after Camus was interviewed on the French far right news channel C News, the journalist and specialist on the French far right Jean Yves Camus (no relation) referred to it as "Fascism invited on prime time".

Connor Mulhern of the Reactionary International Research Consortium, a group that monitors the far right told Byline Times: "The Homeland Party was formed as a splinter group from the openly white supremacist Patriotic Alternative, founded by members who sought to prioritise electoral politics over street activism. Late last year, the English branch of the pan-European extreme-right identitarian movement merged into Homeland.

At the core of the party's message is the promotion of the so-called "great replacement" conspiracy theory, coined by Renaud Camus.

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"It claims that political elites are deliberately working to replace the "indigenous" white British population with "non-indigenous" immigrants, with the party's flyers explicitly focusing on the growing number of non-white people in the country. They assert that they are "being replaced in [their] own homeland" and advocate for the "remigration" of non-white people, regardless of whether they hold British citizenship".

This vital context was largely omitted from coverage of Camus' ban on entry to the UK. The ban was reported by the Telegraph and GB News. The Telegraph noted that Camus had been invited to speak at the Homeland conference but referred to it simply as the "nationalist and anti-immigration Homeland Party".

Aurelien Mondon, the co-convenor of the Reactionary Politics Research Network, told Byline Times, "Until recently, Renaud Camus was considered as b...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Greetings from a gloriously sunny and warm Kyiv, quite a turnaround given it was snowing just a week ago.

As ever, the news has not stopped so let's get right into it.

The Ceasefire

It's almost as if Donald Trump isn't actually that good at making deals. Shortly before taking office, the incoming administration made a big deal of the belief they could bring peace to Ukraine in 100 days, revised slightly up from the original target of 24 hours.

As I write this, we are 89 days into those 100, and a genuine peace deal is still a long way off.

So what is the US going to do about it? Nothing. Trump is simply going to wash his hands of the whole thing.

"If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we're just going to say: 'you're foolish, you're fools, you're horrible people', and we're just going to take a pass. But hopefully we won't have to do that," Trump said on April 18.

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What's really remarkable about this isn't the disconnect between no deal, and Trump's self-professed image as the king of deal makers, but the fact that he hasn't even put in the minimal amount of effort required to reach one.

OK, that's not entirely accurate - he put a little effort in, but it was completely misdirected.

I said this last time, but it's worth reiterating - on March 11, Ukraine agreed to a full, 30-day ceasefire. Russia refused.

A peace deal was there for the taking - all it required was just a little bit of effort to apply some pressure on the Russians.

All along, Trump has had multiple options to do this - increase sanctions on the Kremlin, impose secondary tarriffs on countries buying Russian oil, or increase military aid to Ukraine.

He used none of these. Russia even escaped his "Liberation Day" tariffs. That's right - Trump has applied more economic pressure on almost every other country in the world since taking office than he has on Russia.

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And now that his absolutely toothless approach to reaching a peace deal is looking like a dud, he appears to be blaming both Moscow and Kyiv equally.

Again, Ukraine already agreed to a full, 30-day ceasefire. On April 17, Russia's UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said a full ceasefire in Ukraine is "unrealistic".

There's only one side not playing ball and the frustration here in Ukraine has you screaming "how can you not see what's going on?" every time Trump or one of his minions opens their mouth.

You could argue that that Trump administration is compromised, the US President is a Russian asset, or that the White House has fallen victim to Russian propaganda.

But look a bit wider - Trump has failed to stop the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, and this week his officials will begin negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran that's almost certainly going to look a lot like the one he tore up when he was last president.

He's just stunningly, and devastatingly incompetent and has surrounded himself with people of the same caliber.

The Minerals Deal

Unlike the ceasefire, there does actually appear to be some progress on this front. This week will see a new round of negotiations between the US and Ukraine following the signing of a memorandum on April 17.

Although not all the details have been made public and officials on both sides say there...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Last week the UK Supreme Court decided that I was legally male. It no longer matters what papers I have, what medical interventions I'd had, or how I live my life. It was important to strip me of recognition to bring "clarity" to the law.

What the Court also tried to say was that the impact of their ruling was extremely limited, as trans people would still be protected by provisions in the Equality Act. Lawyers have tried to give support to emotionally devasted trans communities by parroting these statements.

But all of it, the ruling and the attempts to limit its impact, is fundamentally untrue. The highest court in the land can't lay out detailed arguments supporting their view that some women are legally male, and then say but it only has impact on one specific law in Scotland.

Sure enough, the following morning, the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission was on national radio saying the ruling clearly meant that trans women should not use any women's single-sex spaces or facilities. Because trans women were legally male, if they used such spaces, the spaces would cease to be single-sex.

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And later on Thursday the British Transport Police announced that, when strip searches of trans women were required, they'd now be carried out by male officers. Well, that happened a lot quicker than I thought it would. It doesn't matter how we look, what paperwork we have or what medical procedures we've undergone, it's men's hands around our privates now.

Other women, the ones who the Supreme Court still recognised as legally female, started to ask questions. How would the BTP know who was trans and who wasn't? Some trans women are physically indistinguishable from other women. What would happen if a woman who wasn't trans couldn't prove they weren't trans? After all, weren't all trans women simply going to deny the fact?

Legal clarity - apparently.

The UK has moved into a space where all women, trans or not, will now be legally judged on their appearance. You can't rely on paperwork. The Gender Recognition Act allowed trans women to obtain a birth certificate marked with an F sex marker, so birth certificates aren't proof. Some trans women will have vaginas, so that's no use either. Nope. And what happens if a woman discovers she was born without a womb? How does she prove she isn't trans? Don't think people are arrested without due cause? Think again. Men's hands around women's privates - legally, just following procedure. Just hope they don't share the videos, again.

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Remember that ten years ago, some papers were still using the "Trans or Woman" "game". It's pretty much impossible to identify trans women as trans all the time, despite what the haters say. Heck, they even think Michelle Obama and Brigitte Macron are trans, so they clearly can't always tell.

Instead people are going to base decisions on how someone looks, moves and sounds. It won't catch some it's supposed to, and it will catch some it's not. But a small price to pay, according to the trans abolitionists who have pushed and pushed and pushed for this outcome.

And that's why I don't buy the arguments that this ruling...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Kim is an asylum seeker from Zimbabwe. She lives on about £7-a-day while supporting her small child and is not allowed to work. So, when she received a £10,000 NHS bill for giving birth, she penned the only proposal she thought she could make work, requesting a repayment plan of one penny per month.

Kim's story made one headline this week - in the Guardian, which consistently provides what little proof there is in the mainstream media that women seek asylum at all.

"All the immigrants that we have are MEN!" exclaimed one riled-up TalkTV guest, in a segment titled: 'This Is Going To Make You Choke On Your Cornflakes'. In it, 'health and wellbeing expert' Monica Price seethes about asylum seekers receiving "priority" NHS care, demanding: "Where are all the women and children?!"

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This article is not about the straightforward reasons that elude our media regarding why men disproportionately risk long asylum journeys (far more women and children would starve to death in overcrowded camps, were it not for the funds young men in their families risk their lives to send them).

This article is about the women who break that trend, and the fact our media is as disproportionately silent about female asylum seekers as it is disproportionately noisy about male asylum seekers.

"They'll be showing videos of men on the television that are crossing the Channel, saying, 'oh it's only men'" objected our guest this week, Kim, the 34-year-old mother whose healthcare debt prefaced this column, "but when we sought asylum, it was an all-female group - but that media coverage, it wasn't there."

There's loads of women and children seeking asylum, it's just a myth about only men seeking asylum

Kim, asylum seeker

It is true that some two-thirds of asylum seekers arriving in the UK are men, but the media's fixation on this group, which they have deemed the most problematic and easiest to demonise, means the thousands of female asylum seekers also arriving get almost no coverage at all.

Like Kim, who went from destitution to debt for giving birth with the NHS.

In theory, asylum seekers should be exempt from the 'NHS cost recovery' programme, first introduced by the 2015 Conservative Government to target migrants and overseas visitors. But it is frequently misapplied, explained Judith Dennis, policy lead at Maternity Action, which has documented substantial caseloads with devastating effects.

"Rules are misunderstood, people move around, not of their own volition. One of the things that we need to think about is the mismatch between what people are eligible for and what's actually happening."

Maternity Action is seconding a campaign by the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) to urgently review NHS charging. The campaign has managed to overturn Kim's mistaken charges, but many women are not so lucky, and disappear from the asylum system into the far-darker undocumented world, for fear of being deported over their debt.

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It is just one example of the ways gender and displacement interact to make refugee women as disadvantaged in our society as they are invisible in our media.

When she first became pregnant, Kim delayed seeking medical care for fear of being deported. "It was putting the pre...

This article was originally published in the May 2025 print edition of Byline Times

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Perhaps it's the times we're living through, but I've been thinking a lot about the Devil of late.

I've always been intrigued by the number of times the Devil appears in English place names: once you start to notice, Old Nick appears everywhere.

There are Devil's chimneys, elbows, dykes, ditches, causeways, punch bowls, arrows, quoits, chairs, holes, bridges, pavements, leaps and even pulpits and churchyards.

Being me, I looked for a book on the subject and it turns out there is an excellent one: Cloven Country - The Devil and the English Landscape by Jeremy Harte.

Harte makes the point that the stories that tend to cling to these names are often not much older than the 18th Century and tend to portray the Prince of Darkness as a trickster who is easily outwitted by the ordinary person. This is closer to the Satan of the medieval mystery plays, in which he is often deployed for comic effect, rather than the conflicted fallen angel of Paradise Lost, or the horned and cloven-hooved priapic demon of Catholic imagination.

The idea of evil immanent in a landscape, or of evil concentrated into a single person or being, are probably universal human tropes. The fact that the English landscape's adoption of diabolic names feels more quaint than unnerving tells us more about the way stories are transmitted than anything profound or disappointing about our culture.

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Harte has a lovely insight into this: "Folklore is not a tree but a lattice; stories are continually crossing over and exchanging motifs with each other, developing new variants or dying out, acquiring fresh heroes and forgetting old ones. Stories that were once sacred mysteries have become children's entertainments, and stories told for a joke have been made into foundational myth."

I was thinking about landscapes that still feel genuinely evil when watching Simon Schama's recent BBC documentary, The Road to Auschwitz. Here, properly, was a vision of hell, and seeing Schama force himself to make the journey, struggling as both a historian and a Jew to look at the disgraceful, degrading evidence, to feel his mounting anger - "screw pity!" he spits out at one point - is to be reminded that evil, palpably, exists and must be resisted.

Appropriately, Schama ends his harrowing film with a testimony of a living survivor, Marian Turski, the Polish-Jewish historian who died earlier this year, aged 98.

"Auschwitz didn't fall from the sky", Turski tells us. "Evil comes step by step".

Schama had prepared his viewers for this by showing how it was the complicity of ordinary Lithuanians in Kaunas (where his mother's family were from) and the appropriation of the bureaucratic excellence of the Dutch state that had enabled the systematic extermination of European Jews long before the gas chambers had been built.

If you dehumanise people, if you make hatred acceptable, terrible, unimaginable things can happen. Evil comes step by step.

This feels very relevant to the present moment, in which kindness is mocked as a 'woke religion' and empathy condemned as a form of moral weakness. The Devil doesn't start his work with mass executions and the furnaces of hell, but with the quiet temptation of giving in to intolerance and prejudice.

When the great Jewish-American philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, coining the phrase that has haunted her reputation - "the banality of evil" - she wasn't downgrading Eichmann's guilt or demeaning the suffering of his victims, as some of her critics concluded.

Like Schama, she was animated by rage at the enormity of the Holocaust, at the scale of the moral problem it represented, and by a philosopher's determin...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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I never thought I'd say it: Thatcher wasn't this bad.

Back then, I was young, eager, and full of anarcho-socialism. Naive, even. I didn't pay attention to the small print of policies - which, I realise with hindsight, were horrific. But our fight was different.

It was the era before the Disability Discrimination Act, the Equalities Act, and the larger reach of the independent living movement. When local authorities kept disabled people's organisations going. Campaigning became activism. The Disabled People's Direct Action Network blocked roads and buses. Some things did change and there was a brief sense of optimism.

Those classed as 'severely disabled' fought hard and agencies such as the Independent Living Fund were established. It wasn't easy, but there was a sense of progress, of collaboration, and even respect.

Then came the modern Conservative onslaught. Work capability assessments and the creation of us as 'frauds' and 'scroungers' in the political culture. We were to blame for austerity.

But the current Labour Government's moral compass is null and void, with its plans to save £5 billion a year by 2030 by tightening the eligibility for the main disability benefit, the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) - which is not means-tested and never has been.

The responses by those in my network echo the depth of my own horror.

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Many are ripping up their Labour membership cards in disgust, in the knowledge that they assisted Keir Starmer's election victory. We are almost beyond processing what is happening.

According to the Disabled People Against Cuts group, "current PIP fraud figures are 0% according to the Department for Work and Pension's 'Fraud and Error in the Benefits System' annual report of 2024, so the Government's crackdown on benefit fraud and its impact is inconsistent with the figures and very low rates of PIP fraud".

Despite Labour's headline-grabbing rhetoric of 'getting disabled people into work', many are terrified that the very support that gives them a chance of finding, or staying in, work, will now be denied.

Similar threats exist in terms of the underfunding of accessible transport, independent living, appropriate care support, and the vastly inefficient Access to Work scheme.

We are, at the very least, being encouraged to believe that no one cares.

Some non-disabled people continue to claim that disabled people are committing fraud when it comes to their right to a mobility vehicle. That we claim disability benefits because we are unfit for work, then dare to, for one moment, stand up from a wheelchair. Or that we put down our crutches and walk. On it goes. I could keep listing the vilification that this Government is plainly supporting and encouraging.

It is brutal to live it - and this is under a Labour Government, which I foolishly believed would be socialist. Its punitive decisions, which do nothing but heighten the scapegoating of disabled people once again, are alarming.

We are surely targeted on the assumption that we're the easiest to hit - alongside the belief, conscious or otherwise, that this is justified.

'Rinsed blue' Labour simply doesn't care, so we find ourselves as not merely the 'useless eaters' of the Nazi era, but demonised in new interpretations as the 'too costly'.

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Activists from the climate, Palestine and West Papuan independence movements picketed BP's office last night in protest at BP's ongoing sales of oil to Israel and the operation of liquified natural gas fields in West Papua.

The activists gathered in St James Square outside the company's London headquarters on the night before the AGM, holding banners that read "BP fuels Israeli war crimes" and "Stop fuelling genocide and climate breakdown".

Protesters accuse BP of complicity with Israel's war on the Palestinian people through the operation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which supplies oil to Israel.

In February this year BP announced that it would be slashing planned investment in renewables and would increase oil and gas investment to $10 billion a year.

It has been alleged by researchers of oil supply chains that oil from the pipeline is converted into jet fuel for F-35s in Israel. The pipeline supplies 28% of Israel's crude oil imports.

The protesters also accused BP of abandoning its climate strategy and criticised it for operating in West Papua, a region considered by many to be under military occupation by Indonesia.

Rosie Latchford of Fossil Free London said "we're here today because it's the eve of BP's AGM […] they've recently just scrapped their climate targets completely, which research has just shown today will lead to 72,000 excess deaths Global Witness found, and they have also been fuelling the genocide in Palestine over the last few years through the BTC pipeline".

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Investor Rebellion

The protesters are not the only people critical of BP's climate targets The Guardian reports that an investor rebellion is brewing and that it is expected that Helge Lund, BP's chair will be voted out following the scrapping of climate targets.

Increasingly climate protest and pro-Palestine protest run together as companies such as BP present targets that can be pressured by both movements.

The XR offshoot Youth Demand has staged a series of actions over the last few weeks blocking roads and creating pickets linking the economy of fossil fuel extraction to Israel's war on the Palestinian people.

Leila Shafiee from Energy Embargo for Palestine a group urging states and companies to prevent the flow of energy to Israel as a means to end the war said that they "demand an energy embargo and the end to BP's complicity with Israel. BP currently fuels Israel's genocide through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that runs through Azerbaijan and Turkey and this oil is currently 30% of Israel's total oil imports and once that oil is in Israel it is refined into military grade jet fuel. They are also looting Palestinian waters through renewed gas licenses, and this is while Israel is denying basic necessities to Palestinians and has placed a more brutal energy blockade on Gaza".

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Shafiee added "in the wake of the genocide […] the general trade union for the Palestinian Federation released a call internationally for activists, unions and organi...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Sebastian Gorka, Trump's counterterrorism adviser, recently declared on NewsMax that Americans should be sorted into two categories: those who "love the President" and those who are "aiding and abetting" criminals. His rhetoric underscores an increasingly binary worldview in the White House that may soon escalate dramatically - and that other authoritarian regimes have deployed before.

By Sunday, officials in the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are expected to recommend that President Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, a move that would deploy federal troops for mass deportations. Hina Shamsi, Director of the ACLU's National Security Project, has called the proposal "unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful."

The invocation of the Insurrection Act would further militarise an increasingly unconstitutional and authoritarian state of affairs. Already, Legal foreign students have had their visas revoked for protesting genocide, Armed ICE officers have stormed neighborhoods, hospitals, even elementary schools and due process for deportees has been effectively abandoned. Through it all, White House officials have denied, twisted, or ignored basic facts in service of an increasingly authoritarian vision of state power.

Trump's Persecution Projection: the Tyranny Escalates

Alexandra Hall Hall exposes Trump's increasing attacks on free speech and his weaponising the judicial system against former officials who have been critical

Alexandra Hall Hall

The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia became symbolic of Trump's shift towards authoritarianism. Deported to a Salvadoran gulag without due process, Garcia has been stripped of the basic liberties guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The administration has made conflicting claims: that he's a dangerous MS-13 gang member (a charge the Fourth Circuit Court ruled has "no evidence"), and simultaneously that his deportation was an "administrative error." Despite a unanimous 9-0 Supreme Court ruling ordering the White House to "facilitate and effectuate" Garcia's return, the US Government has made no effort to comply.

Instead, Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and ominously warned that "homegrown" American criminals may be next, suggesting Bukele might need to build "about five more" CECOTs. Bukele, whose Government Amnesty International describes as engulfing El Salvador in a "human rights crisis", told reporters that to "liberate" 350 million Americans, you'll "have to imprison some."

Legal analyst Chris Geitner has described Garcia's detention as part of a broader strategy: "a Schrödinger's box - quite literally, the CECOT prison is that box - where anyone can be sent under an agreement between the US and El Salvador, at which point the US Government can claim it no longer has any authority, because the person is in the custody of a foreign sovereign."

"If they can get Abrego Garcia out of the box," Geitner writes, "the plan does not work."

Barbara McQuade, former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, echoes Geitner's concerns: "Like anyone in the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Abrego Garcia is entitled to constitutional protections, including due process, which means notice and an opportunity to be heard before our liberty can be taken from us."

"By spiriting him out of the country without either, he was denied that right. And if he can be denied that right, then so can any of us."

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