ICE Just... Decided Millions of People Are Ineligible for Bail. This Is Bad. Like, Really Bad.
Release Date: 07/18/2025
Maxwell's Silver Yammer, Part 2
Opening Arguments
VR5 Part 2 - we continue our analysis of Ghislaine Maxwell's podcast interview on the Todd Blanche Experience. Make sure you caught part 1! Watch the video ! on July 24-25, 2025 (Thomas's Version)
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The Ghislaine Maxwell Interview Was Institutional Corruption Like We've Never Seen Before. Truly.
Opening Arguments
Due to unprecedented corruption not getting enough of a call out, Vapid Response has taken over the Monday slot this week! It's VR5 Part 1. The Trump administration's corruption of the US Department of Justice hit new depths last week when it released audio and transcripts from convicted Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell's so-called “proffer session” with current top DOJ deputy (and former Trump defense attorney) Todd Blanche. OA NYC bureau chief Liz Skeen joins to help us understand just how completely unprecedented everything about this interview and its public release have...
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Republicans Are Messing with Texas
Opening Arguments
OA1184 - The saying pretty explicitly tells us to don't, and yet here they are not don'ting. This week on Rapid Response Friday: why is a Texas lawmaker filing a habeas petition asking a federal court to release her from the state capitol building? What’s the deal with redistricting, and is Texas’s plan to tip the balance in the U.S. House of Representatives actually legal? Jenessa brings her voting rights expertise to explain why this plan is so bad that state Democratic leaders had to go on the lam on threat of arrest to try to stop it. We then briefly discuss the import of Attorney...
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The Boston Globe put out two bootlicking Trump op-eds in one week. What are we DOING
Opening Arguments
VR4 - It’s a Boston doubleheader for this Vapid Response Wednesday as Thomas, Lydia, and Matt take on two truly awful takes from the pages of Matt’s hometown paper last week within 24 hours of each other. But first: a vintage amuse douche from Tucker Carlson on the evils of the National Guard’s occupation of DC--in January 2021 (and apparently no other time)! Then in today’s main stories: (1) Conservative opinion-haver Heather Mac Donald on why she supports Trump’s absolute right to send American military personnel to occupy American cities just because he wants to. (2) Project...
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The Most Important LGTBQ Rights Case You’ve Never Heard Of
Opening Arguments
OA1183 - We continue our ongoing look at some of our favorite Warren Court-era Supreme Court cases with this one-line 1958 decision finding as a matter of law that one of the most important LGTBQ magazines in U.S. history was not publishing obscenity. We begin by trying to find anything resembling smut in the archived pages of ONE magazine before Matt explains a bit more about the history of obscenity law in the U.S. and how Roth v U.S. changed everything just before ONE’s cert petition was taken up. Jenessa gets into the proven psychological benefits of being allowed to be who you are in...
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What Can We Do To Stop ICE?
Opening Arguments
OA1182 - DC is under full federal occupation. California is putting the Trump administration’s unprecedented deployment of the National Guard to support federal immigration enforcement on trial. And a major challenge to a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act is on the line in front of the Supreme Court. It’s Rapid Response Friday, and we’re here for all of it. Finally, Matt breaks down THE BIG FREEZE--a new collective approach to stopping the rapid coming expansion of ICE which every decent person can do something to be a part of. Nothing is inevitable, and none of us are alone. ...
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“ICE Is No Gestapo!” Complain Gestapo Enthusiasts
Opening Arguments
VR3 - It ’s Thomas, Lydia, and Matt versus the entire National Review editorial board! Join us as we take on the conservative magazine’s recent op-ed on why it is extremely rude to compare masked American federal agents of today who refuse to identify themselves as they grab innocent families off of the street and shove them into unmarked vans bound for concentration camps to masked Nazi German agents of 1933-1945 who refused to identify themselves as they grabbed innocent families off the street and shoved them into vans bound for concentration camps. Matt explains with historical...
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Project 2025, Six Months Later
Opening Arguments
OA1181 - In this episode recorded almost exactly six months into the Trump administration, we check in on the progress of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous playbook to remake every part of the federal government in the second Trump administration. What is Project 2025, and who was behind it? How many of its goals have already been accomplished, how many are in progress, and what’s left? , The Heritage Foundation (2023) Check out the OA for all the places to go and things to do!
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Why the Whole Alligator Alcatraz Thing Is Somehow Worse Than It Sounds
Opening Arguments
OA1180 - We begin with some much-needed reminders that good things are still happening and the rule of law is still (mostly) holding on before turning to a recent Trump executive order on homelessness which reads like something out of a (not very good) Batman movie. Jenessa explains how this development fits into the history of long-term institutionalization of vulnerable and unhoused people in the US as we work through what this thing is actually trying to do. In an unfortunately not-at-all-unrelated story, Matt then breaks down the situation with Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” (aka...
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NYTimes lets awful Harvard Law prof lie his ass off for some reason
Opening Arguments
VR2 - Vapid Response Wednesday returns live on video for another round of bad-faith legal takes from the American right’s leading--well, let’s just go with “minds.” We begin with a quick check-in on the divided state of the U.S. “sovereign citizen” movement via a short explainer video in which one of its leading grifters denounces a whole new set of grifters who are promoting the concept of an “American State National.” We then plumb new depths of dumbassery from Harvard Law school professor/crypto-theocrat Adrian Vermeule. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Vermeule has called...
info_outlineOA1174 - Matt is coming in hot from the front lines of immigration court for an exclusive firsthand account of how a new secret memo directed to ICE's attorneys is trying to unilaterally redefine immigration reality and prime the machine for a new era of mass detention well beyond anything this country has even seen before. In better news: an actual federal judge restores sanity in the surprisingly-difficult-to-locate federal district of central California, and a footnote on why some unexpected federal job openings might be good news for people who hate fascism.
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“ICE declares millions of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond,” Maria Sachetti and Carol Leonning, The Washington Post (7/15/25) (via MSN)
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Judge Maame Uwusi-Mensah Frimpong’s findings and TRO against ICE in Perdomo v. Noem (7/11/25)
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Board of Immigration Appeals decision in Matter of Q. Li, 29 I&N Dec. 66 (BIA 2025)
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Alito’s majority decision in Jennings v. Rodriguez (2018)
Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do!