This is my official new favorite story ever. It’s from the Journal News, which covers three suburban counties just north of New York City, and it’s about local congressman Mike Lawler (R) and a raucous town hall which I actually covered back in May. It turns out that at that town hall, his deputy district director, Erin Crowley, was simultaneously patrolling the boisterous constituents who had showed up to express their opposition while also apparently egging the anti-Lawler crowd on to disrupt the town hall using a fake identity known as “Jake Thomas.”

The Journal News is careful to note that it is impossible to prove definitively that “Jake Thomas” is Erin Crowley — who is also a county legislator in addition to being Lawler’s staffer. But they’ve got hard proof that “Jake Thomas” used Crowley’s cell phone when “he” joined an anti-Lawler Facebook group and the Signal group it uses and used during the May town hall.

I wanted to elaborate on some points Theda Skocpol addressed in her reader email this weekend about ICE and the supercharged ICE the new Trump budget law envisions. Some of this may be obvious just seeing what we’ve all seen in recent months. But I wanted to describe some of the exact modalities we’re talking about.

First, a general point about ICE. Long before the current moment and even the controversies of the first Trump term, ICE was generally known as a place made up of people who couldn’t get jobs at the more established and reputable federal policing agencies — so, FBI, U.S. Marshals, DEA, ATF, etc. Because of this, it has a high proportion of people who are there because they want to wear a uniform, knock people around and act tough. That’s an aspect of every policing organization. But more professional organizations do their best to weed those people out on the front end and instill discipline that keeps those impulses in check. There’s much less of that at ICE. So it’s never had a good reputation within federal law enforcement.

AdImpact is the canonical source that many journalists use to track political ad spending, where ads are running, the ability to see the actual ads and so forth. A few times I’ve considering subscribing for TPM during the peak of the big election cycles. (These are very high-dollar price points.) So I’m on their mailing list for the data overviews that are basically teasers for subscribing. I got one of those today and something immediately jumped out at me. The top political advertiser by spend this cycle is the Department of Homeland Security.

I want to focus your attention on this new piece by Josh Kovensky on the DOJ appearing to open the door to denaturalizing citizens based on political activity or belief. I doubt I need to convince anyone reading this that this is a bad thing. But I want to underscore what is implicit in what is bad about it but needs to be as front and center as possible. The only cases in which denaturalization should ever be used are in the most extremes cases of egregious acts which, had they been disclosed prior to naturalization, would have barred citizenship in the first place. Even in most of those cases, the downsides usually outweigh the upsides. Because outside of the most extreme and unusual cases denaturalization is a stark threat to the equality of all American citizens.

I was born in the United States. Depending on what I do, the state can send me to war, imprison me, even execute me. But I can never stop being an American citizen unless I affirmatively renounce that citizenship. As long as that threat exists in any meaningful sense, no naturalized citizen is really my equal. Their membership in the club is contingent, contingent on behavior, which is to say not equal at all.

Bill Moyers died last week at the age of 91. TPM Executive Editor John Light worked for Bill for a number of years and has written this remembrance of him which I recommend to you. I wanted to share some additional thoughts about Bill and how his life affected my own and the life of this site.

The first thing I want to mention is two documentaries Bill produced in the late 80s. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth is a series of six one-hour interviews with Campbell, who died shortly after the interviews were completed. The second is Amazing Grace, his documentary about the history and life of this song, so embedded into the cultural and spiritual life of the Anglophone world. College is a time of promise, adventure and challenge for many people. And I encountered the first of these at a moment of particular challenge in the summer of 1988. Amazing Grace debuted in 1990. I haven’t watched either in many years, though I own a copy of Amazing Grace. They explore common themes from very different directions. Both showcased Bill’s ability to bring fascinating, human issues to life in ways that are both sophisticated and accessible to a mass audience.