A Promised Land

America as a Developing Country

Here’s the 60 Minutes Segment Blocked from Airing in the United States

Back to Putin's and Trump's good old days.

As you may know, the new CBS editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, reportedly blocked a planned 60 Minutes segment on US deportation of Venezuelans to a notoriously cruel Salvadorn prison just three hours before it was to air in the United States yesterday. In closely related news, the CBS parent company, Paramount Skydance, bought both CBS and Weiss’s (ironically named) site The Free Press a few months ago and is seeking to curry favor with the Trump Administration as it pursues yet an additional huge merger with the media company Warner Brothers Discovery.

The segment was recorded and shared when it aired on Canada’s Global TV, which has the rights to broadcast 60 Minutes. Here’s the Substack post that in turn provides the video link:

https://www.muellershewrote.com/p/watch-the-60-minutes-cecot-segment

Three things struck me about the segment:

1. As disturbing as it is, the reporting actually takes a milder tone than I expected. It doesn’t begin to cover all the ground about how horrible this Salvadoran detention center is and how horrible the other deportations (including to third countries the deportees have nothing to do with) are.

2. Some of the disturbing footage is that apparently provided by the detention facility itself.

3. The video is being circulated in ways analagous to how forbidden news might have been circulated behind the Iron Curtain from the mid-1940s through the 1980s – in other words, for Putin and Trump, the good old days.

Pardon Me

Stranger Than Fiction

The story could inspire a big-budget Hollywood political thriller. A cocaine kingpin – the corrupt president of a foreign country, no less – is convicted and jailed in the United States. But behind the scenes, right-wing tech billionaires persuade an equally corrupt American president to pardon the foreigner. In a violent side-story, the US president proudly orders illegal, lethal military attacks that kill scores of impoverished Venezuelan fishing villagers (some of whom may be small-scale traffickers) whose coke isn’t even destined for our shores and whose possible crimes pale in comparison with the kingpin’s.

In the hypothetical Hollywood version of this story, the truth comes out, the former president goes back to prison and his American counterpart resigns in shame.

In 2025, however, there is no shame and reality is stranger than fiction. Donald Trump publicly boasted of his planed pardon for former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández before then granting it. Lost in the swirl of Trump’s other transgressions, the story disappeared from the headlines soon after first surfacing.

[Continue Reading]

Funeral for a Friendship? Trump Spits at Polite, Pleasant, Insulted Canada

With Friends Like Donald...

And that’s not all we’re sorry about…

Strolling several years ago in Vancouver, Canada, I inadvertently crossed the street in front of a car after my light turned red but before the vehicle began moving. If you do this in the San Francisco Bay Area, the driver might toot and shout at you. In my native New York, you’d hear a loud honk and an even louder expletive.

The Vancouver motorist instead said, “Excuse me, did you know that you’re crossing against the light?”

Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Country

Canadians are among the nicest and most polite people on the planet. Americans are blessed to have them as neighbors.

Yet Donald Trump is spitting in these wonderful folks’ faces, on everything from fentanyl to immigration to tariffs to statehood. His spiteful barbs portend long-term damage to what once seemed our two nations’ unbreakable goodwill. This potential funeral for a friendship says much about America’s shrinking place in the world.

[Continue Reading]

Indian TV, Me and Trump’s LA Military Moves

It's Not Mainly About Immigration

Here’s my recent interview with the Indian TV network WION (World Is One News) about Trump’s deploying the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles. The interview starts at roughly 1:45 in the clip.

The Manchurian President

Speaking hypothetically...What if Putin really did control Trump?

In the 1962 film, “The Manchurian Candidate,” a US soldier is captured during the Korean War and brainwashed in Manchuria (a part of China bordering Korea) by Chinese and Russian agents. They then arrange his supposedly heroic “escape” that earns him the Medal of Honor back in America.

The point of this plan? Acting as an automaton, he will then unwittingly assassinate a presidential candidate and usher in an authoritarian regime serving our enemies’ interests.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. I am not suggesting that he’s been brainwashed or that he deliberately prioritizes the Kremlin over America. His main motivators instead seem to be money, power and narcissism.

But, speaking hypothetically, what  if Trump were in fact a “Manchurian President,” brainwashed  by Russia to  undermine the United States? What would he do?

[Continue Reading]