‘The enemy within’ … Chicago? / Shut. Down. / Late-night worlds collide

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‘The enemy within’ … Chicago? President Trump told the nation’s assembled generals he’s ready to send the military into Chicago and other cities as “training grounds.”
■ Hundreds rallied downtown last night to protest the notion.
■ A Tribune editorial (gift link, possible because readers like you underwrite the cost of producing Chicago Public Square): “No … Chicagoans are not ‘the enemy within.’”
■ Popular Information: Trump’s use of that phrase evokes an ugly chapter in U.S. history.
■ The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch (another gift link): “Grandpa Trump … saw a five-year-old riot on Fox News, so he’s sending in the troops.”
■ Columnist Steve Chapman: “America is becoming … a country where only those who submit to his every demand can feel safe.”
■ Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul is threatening a lawsuit against the incursions.
■ The Daily Show: The Pentagon’s gonna need some new recruitment ads: “We’ll fly you to hostile lands like … Chicago, where you’ll defend America from people who make fun of our president.”

‘A crazy moment.’ A witness describes ICE’s chase of a bicyclist through downtown Chicago.
■ See it here.
■ Chicago congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh talks to Teen Vogue about the viral video showing her getting tear-gassed by ICE.
■ The suburb of Broadview has launched three criminal investigations of the agents who’ve been terrorizing demonstrators near ICE’s processing center there.
■ WBEZ’s published a transcript and unedited audio of the interview in which U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino admits his team has been choosing people to arrest based partly on “how they look.”
■ In a decision that lawyer and columnist Joyce Vance calls “startling” and “incredibly important,” a Ronald Reagan-appointed federal judge has condemned Trump’s moves to deport pro-Palestinian academics.
■ 404 Media: Reversing an earlier pledge, ICE is buying a tool that tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of phones a day.

‘Ghastly, inappropriate and embarrassing.’ USA Today’s Rex Huppke assesses yesterday’s military conclave to hear from “a former Fox News host and a convicted felon who received five military deferments during the Vietnam War.” (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: For 70 minutes, the president “spoke slowly … delivering to the hundreds of professionals who had rushed from around the world to attend this meeting a rambling, incoherent stream of words.”
■ Evan Hurst at Wonkette: “That Pete Hegseth speech could’ve been a spam email for boner pills.”
■ Axios says 11 quotes convey “Trump and Hegseth’s plan for a MAGA military reset.”

‘There is something genuinely wrong with this man.’ Diagnosing Trump with dementia, Gov. Pritzker is calling for application of the 25th Amendment to remove him from power.
■ On MSNBC last night, Pritzker addressed the president directly: “We don’t want you here.”

Shut. Down. Updating coverage: Much of the federal government’s officially closed for business today—with a quarter-million workers furloughed—and many potentially fired.
■ Jen Rubin at The Contrarian: “If Democrats do their job, Republicans may regret forcing through an agenda Americans detest” …
■ … but, The American Prospect notes, because “the reactionary Supreme Court has given him Congress’s power of the purse … Trump could end any ‘shutdown’ immediately by just directing the agencies to reopen and the money to be spent. John Roberts certainly isn’t going to stop him. Is House Speaker Mike Johnson? Please.”
■ Trump told reporters yesterday he sees an opportunity here: “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
■ In a suit filed last night, multiple labor unions accuse Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought* of using the shutdown as cover to fire federal workers illegally en masse.
■ The AP reviews previous federal shutdowns—including two under Trump’s first term.

Award declined. Facing anti-abortion forces’ objections because he’s supported legal abortion, Sen. Dick Durbin says he’s turning down an honor from the Archdiocese of Chicago for his work on immigration policy.
■ In remarks that Politico’s Shia Kapos describes as “both careful and bold,” Chicago-born Pope Leo himself defended the decision to celebrate Durbin’s career: “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
■ The Sun-Times: A priest later accused of child sex abuse was among the instructors at the future pope’s seminary high school.

Does Amazon owe you? Tom’s Guide explains what you’ll need to collect a share of the settlement of a suit accusing the company of tricking customers into signing up for its Prime service.
■ You’ll have to have enrolled after June 23, 2019.

Late-night worlds collide. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and CBS’ Stephen Colbert were on one another’s shows last night—simultaneously …
■ Colbert shared never-broadcast footage of the moment he learned Kimmel’s show had been suspended …
■ … and Kimmel said his suspension was “like a DUI in L.A., three days in jail where I couldn’t say anything.”
■ It’s comedian vs. comedian as some join a controversial comedy fest in Saudi Arabia.
■ Forty years after its debut, LateNighter offers an oral history of David Letterman’s “Top 10 list” …

Clarification. An item in yesterday’s Chicago Public Square failed to specify that the president’s AI-generated video showed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer labeling Democrats “a bunch of woke pieces of shit.”
Join us for a deep dive into the world of AI tools and fact-check tech—free. Chicago Public Square and Northwestern University’s Local News Accelerator are teaming up to offer you interactive online coaching already received by thousands of professional journalists. Online, Nov. 3, noon-2 p.m. Registration details here.

ICE ‘shit show’ / ‘Disgusting video’ / Back to sleep

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Chicago Public Square’s back after a few days. If you missed it—and that would be lovely—you can catch up via the Square account on Bluesky, where dozens of updates have appeared since Thursday’s edition. And now: Onward.

ICE ‘shit show.’ Gov. Pritzker says the Trump administration plans to unleash 100 “military troops” on the Chicago area to protect the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents whom he blames for “havoc” at the Broadview processing center …
■ … fulfilling the governor’s earlier prediction that the feds would aim to provoke Illinoisans so as to justify military deployment: “In any other country if federal agents fired upon journalists and protesters when unprovoked … I don’t think we’d have any trouble calling it what it is. Authoritarianism. So let’s not pretend it’s something else when it happens in our American cities.”
■ A CBS Chicago reporter’s “absolutely unprovoked” attack by immigration agents outside the Broadview detention facility is under investigation by the police.
■ A conflicted federal magistrate has ordered the detention of a man who brought a gun to a Broadview demonstration: “Who brings a loaded firearm to an ICE protest?”
■ Mayor Johnson, joining Pritzker, repeated that he’s ordered police “to protect the fundamental right to peacefully assemble.”
■ See that news conference in full here …
■ … or read his remarks here.
■ A Tribune editorial (gift link, possible because readers voluntarily support Chicago Public Square): “Even if dozens of heavily armed immigration enforcers have the legal right to patrol Chicago’s most heavily visited areas hunting for quarry, that doesn’t mean they should.”
■ Columnist Eric Zorn: President Trump’s Chicago escalation “may be a step toward giving him increased latitude in … canceling elections in the name of some ginned up ‘national emergency.’”
■ The New York Times (another gift link): Increasingly, U.S. citizens are ending up in Trump’s dragnet.

Be a reporter. Pritzker’s counsel to citizens concerned about the feds’ incursion: “Get out your cell phones, record and narrate what you see. Put it on social media” …
■ … as a number of people did Sunday, when agents loaded a whole family into a border patrol vehicle at Millennium Park.
■ WBEZ’s Chip Mitchell rides along with the People’s Patrol, a volunteer rapid-response network out to locate, document and, on the spot, oppose Chicago-area immigration enforcement activity.
■ Federal agents were out in force this morning in the South Shore neighborhood.
■ Author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich recaps five best practices for engaging with ICE and Homeland Security.
■ The American Civil Liberties Union hosts an online session at 2 p.m. today to discuss efforts to safeguard First Amendment rights and ensure free and fair midterm elections. Register and submit your questions in advance here.

‘Disgusting video.’ That’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ evaluation of an unhinged social media post from the president after yesterday’s meeting with Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to head off a government shutdown in the face of a budget standoff.
■ The president’s (clarification) AI-generated video showed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer labeling Democrats “a bunch of woke pieces of shit.”
■ MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell refused to play it.
■ Updating coverage: A D.C. standoff seemed likely to put thousands of federal employees out of work.
■ Follow the action live on the Senate floor.
■ The American Prospect: “The government has been shut down for months. Today is the day we stop pretending that it’s not.”
■ Columnist and lawyer Robert Hubbell: “The issue of Trump’s illegal impoundment of funds is being ignored by the media.”
■ Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer: “Dems can win the shutdown fight. Trump is so much weaker than the pundits realize.”
■ Shutdown or not, today’s the day federal funding for NPR and PBS goes away.

Exhaustion’s the point. Reporter Aaron Parnas: If following the news is wearing you out, know that Trump’s strategy thrives on that.
■ News-biz critic Margaret Sullivan slams a Times report on how the MAGA crowd’s feeling these days: “How many times do we have to hear ill-informed Trump voters praise the anti-science health travesties of RFK Jr.?”
■ Your Local Epidemiologist: The measles outbreak is spreading.
■ PolitiFact rates Rep. Jeffries’ assertion that “Republicans have effectively ended medical research in the United States of America” Mostly False.

Back to sleep. Abruptly summoning hundreds of the nation’s top military leaders to Virginia, Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth declared an end to “woke” culture—among other things, establishing “gender-neutral” physical fitness standards.
■ Trump before the meeting: “If I don’t like somebody, I’ll fire them right on the spot.”
■ Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein: Trump’s new national security directive poses “real danger” for tax-exempt organizations the administration chooses to demonize as “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American.”
■ Popular Information: Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner “has resumed his role as a top Trump foreign policy advisor while expanding his business partnership with the Saudi government.”

■ A big chunk of that will go toward construction of Trump’s White House ballroom.

‘Shut the damn AI email prompt thing off.’ Columnist Neil Steinberg’s had it with Gmail’s attempt to shape his writing.
■ California now has a landmark law aimed at preventing the use of artificial intelligence for potentially catastrophic things like building a bioweapon or shutting down a banking system.
■ The showbiz union SAG-AFTRA is up in arms about the creation of a computer-generated actress, “Tilly Norwood.”
■ 404 Media: “Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws.”

Square up.

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