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Black Americans, Hispanics, and young adults are all more positive on US President Donald Trump than they were eight years ago, helping to drive up his approval rating higher than it was during the first three months of his first term.

What's happening:

-Co-plaintiff, Professor Wa Ngũgĩ: “We shouldn’t be punishing the people who are calling out what clearly is a genocide”

-Eric Lee: “If democracy is going to be defended, it is not going to come from the Democratic Party.”

-Taal’s lawyer, Eric Lee: This “is a test case to determine whether the government can... put you in jail for the things you say”

-“I’m afraid it’s just leading to a fascist state” Hearing begins today on Momodou Taal’s case against Trump

-Lawyers for Momodou Taal denounce Trump administration’s deportation effort as unconstitutional political retaliation-

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in Hollywood has steadfastly refused to release a statement in defense of Hamdan Ballal, co-director of No Other Land, who was brutally assaulted by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the occupied West Bank Monday night.

Precisely three weeks earlier, Ballal had stood on the platform at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles and received, along with Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the prize for Best Documentary Feature Film.

The pretentiously named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as we have previously noted, has a thoroughly unprincipled history. It was set up in the 1920s by studio boss Louis B. Mayer to subvert the unionization of film workers. The establishment of a corporatist entity, with different branches, would—Mayer and the others hoped—induce writers and others to feel they were part of the industry and not make any unreasonable demands.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, during the Red Scare and the purges of Communist Party and other left-wing actors, writers and directors, the Academy played a rotten role.

As late as 1957, on the eve of the collapse of the blacklist, the AMPAS passed a by-law decreeing that no one who had invoked his or her Fifth Amendment rights (against self-incrimination) in front of the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) could receive an Academy Award. It had also stripped award eligibility from anyone who had been a member of the Communist Party. In 1999, the Academy despicably went out of its way to bestow an honorary award on arch-informer, director Elia Kazan.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has launched a campaign calling on the University of New Hampshire and Harvard to withdraw their hirings of former President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan and former White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk. CAIR said in a statement the two men “spent four years acting as shadow presidents and executing foreign policy disaster after foreign policy disaster, from the botched U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to President Biden’s embrace of dictators he once pledged to ostracize to the horrific genocide in Gaza.”

Men wearing street clothes identifying themselves as “the police” whisked away an international graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts after she co-authored an op-ed critical of Israel.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen in the U.S. on a student visa, was detained on Tuesday in Somerville by two men wearing street clothes and masks. In a video posted on social media by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ozturk is seen walking down a sidewalk when she is stopped by a man wearing a hat and hoodie. After saying, “Hi, ma’am,” the man – who did not appear to flash a badge of any kind – seizes her phone as a second man approaches. Those two men eventually handcuff her as others, wearing masks, stand guard.

At one point, one of the men can be heard saying, “We’re the police,” but he did not identify an agency or department.

“You don’t look like it,” a bystander can be heard saying. “Why are you hiding your faces? Why are you hiding your faces?”

One bystander told The Boston Globe that Ozturk informed the men, “I’m a student.” The paper said the bystander spoke on condition of anonymity “for fear of retaliation from the government.”

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” Ozturk’s attorney Mahsa Khanbabai told The New York Times. “No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”

Here's a followup. They kidnapped her to Louisiana: https://sh.itjust.works/post/35100426

https://archive.ph/oLkPE

The Navy plans to send a second warship to patrol the waters off the U.S. by the end of this week after a destroyer was deployed on Saturday as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration and the border, a U.S. official confirmed to Military.com on Wednesday.

The official, who was given anonymity to discuss military plans, told Military.com that a second destroyer will deploy from the West Coast, joining the USS Gravely, which left a naval base in Virginia over the weekend headed for the waters around the U.S.-Mexico border.

https://archive.ph/FqGF0

Ahead of his confirmation hearing Thursday to become assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Keith Bass is facing tough questions from a prominent Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Bass, a retired Navy commander and substance abuse counselor who previously led the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of Medical Services and the White House Medical Unit, was nominated Dec. 22 to manage the Defense Department's $61 billion health system, which serves 9.5 million beneficiaries, including 1.3 million active-duty troops.

According to an article in SpyTalk cited by Warren, Bass allegedly was fired as head of the CIA medical office following his mishandling of the investigation into Havana syndrome, also known as anomalous health incidents, that affected more than 330 U.S. State Department, intelligence and defense officials as a result of exposure to painful, piercing noise from an unknown source.

The article also pointed to Bass' alleged mishandling of the COVID-19 response at the agency, "afflicting its rank and file."

This week on CounterSpin: In early February, when Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Rep. Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say—because a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department.

Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency.

The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people—including students—with disabilities.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement Tuesday criticizing attacks by President Trump and his allies on federal judges. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” he said. Roberts’s statement came after Trump called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the Trump administration to stop using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants. On Saturday, the administration ignored Boasberg’s order to turn around three deportation flights bound for El Salvador. We speak with The Nation's justice correspondent Elie Mystal on the Trump-led breakdown of constitutional order. “There's not a coming constitutional crisis,” says Mystal. “We are in a constitutional crisis right now.”

The Social Security Administration is considering drastic new anti-fraud measures that could disrupt benefit payments to millions of Americans, according to an internal memo first obtained by the political newsletter Popular Information. The changes would force millions of customers to file claims in person at a field office rather than over the phone. An estimated 75,000 to 85,000 elderly and disabled adults per week would be diverted to field offices. This comes even as the Trump administration slashes jobs and closes offices at the agency. Officials in the Social Security Administration who spoke with reporter Judd Legum, founder of Popular Information, have told him that there is an “effort to break the organization.”

Elon Musk’s political action committee is offering voters in Wisconsin $100 to sign a petition opposing what he calls “activist judges” ahead of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on April 1. Two Musk-backed groups have spent over $20 million on the race to support Republican Brad Schimel over Democrat Susan Crawford. The race will decide control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

In other immigration news, The Washington Post is reporting the IRS is close to agreeing to a deal to give addresses and other personal information about suspected undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security. One former IRS official told the Post, “It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes.”

In other related news, DHS has shut down three internal watchdog agencies that advocated for immigrants, including the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.