How do Rosner and Jacobsen connect federal immigration enforcement tactics, accountability gaps, and the need for critical-thinking education remembering “how not to fall for bullshit”?

In this sharp, profane exchange, Rick Rosner argues that federal immigration enforcement has been weaponized against Minnesota, citing intensified ICE activity, judicial limits on interference with filming, and concerns about shortened training driven by flawed AI screening. Scott Douglas Jacobsen presses on alleged harassment of Minneapolis businesses and recounts stories of aggressive enforcement, then pivots to accountability in a controversial shooting and DOJ stonewalling. The dialogue veers into civic education: both favor replacing language requirements with statistics and media literacy, including how to evaluate scientific claims and recognize misuse of VAERS. Personal asides—socks, boots, travel—humanize the argument.

Rick Rosner: All right, Trump continues to fuck with Minnesota. His latest move is charging Walz, the governor, and Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, by having the DOJ investigate them for obstructing ICE. Trump has flooded Minnesota with maybe 9% of all ICE agents, even though Minnesota probably has less than 1% of all undocumented immigrants in America, certainly less than 2%. The closer you are to the southern border, the more undocumented immigrants you are going to have. This is just fucking with a blue state and with Somalis, because Trump thinks that scaring America about Somalis and fraud is going to work for him.

A number of polls came out today showing that none of this is working very well for Trump, but that does not matter until Republicans start peeling away from him. Republicans, even though independent and Democratic support has fallen away, are sticking with him.

A judge issued an 80-page injunction against ICE, stating that they are not allowed to interfere with people filming them. They are not allowed to arrest them. They are not allowed to use tear gas against them. This follows similar orders placing limits on ICE in California and at least one other state, possibly Illinois.

It is becoming clear how little training these agents are receiving. A month ago, it was known that they were getting eight weeks of training, which is hardly adequate. Today, it came out that if someone has previous experience as a police officer, they are given only four weeks of training.

Their AI system determines whether someone has been an officer or not, and it has been misreading applications. If an applicant wrote, “I want to be an ICE officer,” the system marked them as having previously been an officer and routed them into the four-week training track. As a result, people who have never been cops received four weeks of training and are now out on the street.

That is bad. The culture of being unapologetic and rough is also bad. As I have said before, Kristi Noem has no previous law-enforcement experience and is a notorious asshole, as is likely her direct superior, Stephen Miller, who again has no interest in law enforcement and only an interest in brutalizing non-whites.

All of this has resulted in only about 900 arrests in Minnesota over the past couple of months. Flooding the state with large numbers of agents has not produced meaningful results.

One more thing: this is not the first time a political leader has been given a Nobel Prize by a supplicant. Trump was given a Nobel Peace Prize medal by this year’s winner from Venezuela. In 1943, the same thing happened with a Norwegian Nobel laureate, who gave his Literature Prize medal to Goebbels, possibly as a way to ask Nazi Germany not to brutalize Norway. The circumstances are unclear, but it is a striking precedent.

Jacobsen: In Minneapolis, small businesses are being harassed by ICE agents. Any thoughts?

Rosner: People keep telling the most egregious stories. One family was going home from what I think was a sporting event—possibly kids’ sports. They were not protesting. They were just trying to get home and happened to pass near some ICE action in their neighborhood. ICE deployed an explosive tear gas canister under their car, which lifted the vehicle and flooded it with tear gas.

They had a six-month-old baby in the car. Everyone was gassed. The baby stopped breathing. The mother performed CPR. They got the baby to the hospital, and the baby survived. There was no apology from ICE and no explanation for why an explosive device was set off under a family’s car when they were not protesting or interfering with anything.

Another egregious story from the past two days: ICE went to a Mexican restaurant, ate lunch, then returned at closing time and arrested everyone who prepared and served that lunch. They are just fuckers.

Some statistics: about 73% of the people taken into custody by ICE are guilty of no crime. Only 5.2% of those taken into custody are violent criminals, or have been found guilty of a violent crime. Trump said he would get the “bad hombres” off the street, but roughly 18 out of 19 people arrested by ICE are not violent criminals, and nearly three out of four committed no crime at all.

So yes, it is deeply shitty. I also have to reiterate that many people who believe in MAGA will believe this bullshit until they get old and die. There is no fixing a lot of these broken-brain motherfuckers, which makes me question why I am doing the show with Lance.

I think I am going to go on that show and Lance is going to tell me—something I say with nearly 100% confidence—that the video conclusively shows that Renée Goode was trying to run someone over. Anyone looking at the video competently will see it as a bad shooting.

We have not talked about the fire department yet. Rotten Tomatoes, and a slightly new topic: the DOJ has been stonewalling any kind of investigation into the shooting. They are saying there will be no investigation. That part of the DOJ is run by a political hack named Harmeet Dhillon, whose previous experience was serving as vice chair of the California Republican Party. As a result, very little information is getting out. They are sitting on anything that could constitute a real investigation.

Some information has come out through the fire department’s report. After she was shot and her car crashed, a doctor tried to approach and render aid. ICE did not allow anyone to tend to her. Minutes passed. Eventually, the fire department arrived to take her away. When they arrived, she was not breathing but still had a pulse. They attempted to render aid but could not restore her breathing.

The fire department issued a report on her condition. She had four bullet holes. I understand that entry and exit wounds can be counted separately, but even accounting for that, it is clear she was shot three times.

The first shot apparently went through her arm and into her chest. The second shot went through her other arm and into her chest. The third shot went into the side of her head, causing her brain matter to exit the skull.

When you look at police shootings, an officer is responsible for every shot fired. If the third shot was the fatal shot, and if she could have survived the first two shots had aid been rendered, then the third shot may have been the kill shot. That shot was also the least justified—fired into the side of her head after she had already nearly passed the officer.

That makes the officer potentially liable for murder or manslaughter.

Lance will tell me otherwise, using bullshit like “she fucked around and found out” or claiming she drove into him. He will repeat things that have already been debunked. I do not know why I keep doing the show. It costs me money.

I pay for the model. I pay for the director. What is the point?

He will defend trying to take over Greenland. He will defend kidnapping Maduro. Whatever Trump wants to do, Lance will defend it. He will say Trump is making things cheaper. He is not. Inflation is at 2.7 percent, the same as last year. Trump says that is a great number. When it was Biden’s number, it was a terrible number.

The U.S. has added virtually no jobs since April. Lance will say everything is going great. It seems stupid to keep doing this. Rotten Tomatoes.

Jacobsen: Are you a white-sock guy, a gray-sock guy, or a multicolor-sock guy?

Rosner: White on black or white on gray. I wear Wigwam Super 60 knee-high socks. I wear three socks on each leg: a pressure sock, then a second pressure sock of a different brand, and then the Wigwam sock over the top.

I have varicose veins. If I am not careful, I develop a clot near my shin bone. It is not dangerous because it is superficial. The dangerous ones are deep clots. DVT stands for deep vein thrombosis, and I have not had one of those.

Those are the clots that can move through your body and cause a stroke or a pulmonary embolism. They can be fatal. So I wear very tight knee-high socks and sleep with my legs elevated, like it is the 1970s or 1980s.

These socks came with three wide horizontal stripes across the top. I used to wear colored socks—white knee-high athletic socks with stripes. If you look at sports photos from the 1970s, you will see people wearing those socks along with very short shorts. People wore tiny shorts in the 1970s.

I still wear those knee-high socks with the big stripes, except the stripes are gone now. You can probably still get them with stripes if they match a school color or uniform, but I just wear the plain white ones.

I usually buy half a dozen at a time, and they throw in a seventh pair—at least they used to. I have not bought them in a while.

If I have to dress formally, I wear four pairs of socks. I put a pair of black knee-high support stockings over the other three.

I have never sprained an ankle because I have thick ankles, which gives me leverage. People with skinny ankles seem to suffer more strains. My ankles and feet are padded and protected, wrapped up in all these socks, which adds another few layers of protection.

Rosner: Would you rather wear Crocs with socks, or sandals without socks?

Jacobsen: Neither. I am not going to wear either of those things. I have been wearing boots for years. I got these army-type boots at Big 5, and they are super comfortable. They come up over the ankle, and I like the extra support. I do not want to sprain an ankle. They are really good, so I wear them every day.

Carol has messed up her ankle and feet at least twice from wearing Crocs. Crocs offer no support, and because they are stretchy and floppy, if you place your foot wrong, they can trip you up, which is exactly what happened to Carol. Crocs are stupid.

Oh, one more thing. Since trying to depose Maduro—and even before that—Trump has been seizing oil tankers from Venezuela and just taking them. Depending on oil prices, a tanker can carry roughly $120 million to $150 million worth of oil. He has taken six of them. Even conservatively, that is well over half a billion dollars in oil, possibly closer to three-quarters of a billion.

Those tankers get turned over to his friends in Qatar, and there has been no clear accounting of where the money goes. Maybe the tankers are sitting somewhere waiting for the oil to be sold. I do not know how it works. But it looks like close to a billion dollars in oil was taken through what amounts to piracy on the high seas by Trump. 

Will Americans ever see that money? I do not know how much trying to depose or kidnap Maduro cost—probably at least $100 million, maybe hundreds of millions. Will money from the confiscated oil be used to offset those costs? Will the U.S. get any money from these tankers? Will the people of Venezuela get any money from the oil? It is not clear. Will Trump personally get any money from the sale of the oil? I do not know. But it is insane.

Jacobsen: Have you ever had to learn another language?

Rosner: Yes. I took French for three years in junior high and two years in high school. There may have been a time when I could understand a little of it, but that was long ago, and my understanding was never very good. I hated it. The only reason I took French is that my mother was a French teacher.

I thought having a teacher in-house would make it easier. It did not. Given where I live and the demographics of the U.S., I should have taken Spanish. I also think Spanish might have been easier to learn than French, although neither is especially hard. Language learning is just not my thing. Some people have a facility for it. I am great with English, but other languages, not so much. At this point, there is no real need anyway, since every phone is basically a translator.

It would be nice to understand the language of the country you are in, but almost everywhere Carol and I have gone, there are plenty of people who speak English. You can usually figure out what you need on the streets of Antwerp or wherever until you run into someone who speaks enough English to help you.

Jacobsen: Do you know other languages? Do you feel a need to know them?

Rosner: No. 

Jacobsen: There is a subtle phenomenon people report when they know multiple languages: when they speak a different language, they partially shift into that culture, and a different personality emerges. You see this with people who speak Hebrew and go to Israel, for example. Another version of themselves shows up. The only benefit of mass translation, or even personal translation, is gaining a slightly different sense of self, but that is not necessary in 99.9% of a person’s life.

Rosner: You are talking about code-switching.

Jacobsen: Yes. 

Rosner: So we agree that it might make more sense to eliminate the foreign-language requirement in high school and replace it with something else—statistics, for example, or civics, assuming civics is still required. I honestly do not know.

Critical thinking would be far more useful: how not to be driven crazy or stupid by propaganda. In sixth grade, we had a unit on this. It was not called that, but that was the idea—how people try to change your thinking, how advertising works.

I loved Mad Magazine. One of my obsessions was trying to collect every issue ever published. I came close. I had every Mad Magazine, but before that there were about 23 issues of Mad comics, and I managed to get 14 of them. I also loved National Lampoon. Those things educated me in bullshit, because they made fun of culture, sales techniques, and the nonsense people say.

Eventually I outgrew Mad Magazine, or maybe it got lazy, but I am always happy to see it again, though I think it has stopped publishing.

People should be educated to be suspicious—but not stupidly suspicious. That is part of civic education. Another part should be learning how to tell the difference between a legitimate scientific paper or expert and a charlatan, or between sound research and work that is dishonest, incompetent, or both.

We have this thing in the U.S. called VAERS. You know VAERS.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Since VAERS became widely known during COVID, idiots have produced hundreds of papers claiming vaccines harmed enormous numbers of people. These papers are scientifically dishonest or illiterate, and a lot of people cannot see that. Someone with even a bit of training can usually tell fairly quickly why a paper is bullshit.

That kind of education would not take a semester. It could take one week of a class. A semester would be better spent understanding the world than learning French.

Jacobsen:  If reincarnation is real, what land animal would you want to be reborn as?

Rosner: I do not know. I do not love the thought of being animals; they do not have great lives. I would want to be reborn as a human.

Jacobsen: That was not the question. Humans are land animals, but fine. I will grant that. Aquatic animals, then. 

Rosner: Whales live a long time—maybe a hundred years—and they are smart. I like the idea of having an inner life, and whales probably have one.

They seem to work hard at being whales, constantly moving to filter enough krill to eat. Killer whales eat seals, but that seems like a miserable profession—constantly hunting seals.

Dolphins might be an option. Dolphins are fun, and they have figured out how to get sexual attention from humans. Occasionally that leads to bad behavior, but dolphins seem to understand that if they befriend a human, eventually they can signal what they want.

If I could be a dolphin in a situation where an animal-loving woman would help me out, then maybe dolphin. Of course, society tends to shut that down quickly, and people get banned.

Otherwise, maybe another primate.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Nicole Geri on Unsplash

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