Monday Morning Politics: War With Iran Continues

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. And thanks to Krusha Navadar for filling in last week, very capably, as he does. I saw two of the most racist things I've ever seen people display in front of their houses in a town upstate. I won't name the town because I don't want it to get deputation. I know it's a politically diverse place. So I don't want to make it seem like it's racist-ville and start something like that. It's just what I saw in front of two individual homes, not on the same block or anything even, but in two different areas of the same town. One of them was flying a flag outside the home that was a mashup of the American flag and the Confederate flag. It had the American flag stars in the upper left-hand corner, like a regular American flag. And the hint of the American flag stripes, but the rest of it was the Confederate battle flag, that blue X with the stars inside on a red background. Now, I wasn't in upstate Alabama or upstate Mississippi, I was in upstate New York.
The other display on someone else's lawn included a Trump sign and a lawn ornament. The ornament wasn't pink flamingo or whatever, some other stereotypical lawn ornament might be. It was a cockroach wearing a sombrero, and it was placed right near the Trump sign.
So anybody can support Trump or any other politician that they like, but it came in this case with that lawn ornament. I don't even want to characterize it again out loud. You heard me say what it is. I'm sure you get the idea. So for those of you who haven't left Brooklyn recently or Jersey City or Yonkers or Huntington or wherever you are down here, those are things you might encounter as you travel just a little further in the 2026 United States.
And then I came home to Upper Manhattan. And what did I find? A video that's now making the rounds online and on local TV news, just a few blocks from my building, a masked ICE agent pepper sprayed a woman who was holding up her phone recording the agent's activities. I saw it in a video of her incident that's making the rounds now, as I say. Channel 2 later interviewed the woman, identified a 72-year-old Linda Wolf, who told them she saw a tow truck getting ready to remove an ICE vehicle that was disabled.

**F. Gregory Gause III** (2:43)
I said to the tow truck driver, you know, you should be ashamed of yourself working for ICE. And he got crazy. The ICE guys came over and they just maced me.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:56)
Channel 2 also had this very short clip from right after the incident. You'll hear the woman complain to the ICE agent about what he had done and his response.

**Donald Trump** (3:09)
You just maced me. I'm going to do it again.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:17)
All while wearing a mask. Channel 2 reports the woman, Ms. Wolfe, is considering legal action. AM New York reports it's illegal in New York State for the agent to even be masked while representing the government. AM New York also reports on a larger context. They say borders are Tom Homan's threatened surge of ICE detentions in New York may have now begun. The paper cites other ICE sightings in various boroughs. And another incident at a hospital emergency room in lower Manhattan, the New York Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital on Gold Street, where they report masked ICE agents were seen detaining a man who was in the ER over the weekend. So upstate, we had the racist expressions of two private citizens. Back in Manhattan, I saw on video, but right at the park entrance, a few blocks from my building, a place where almost everyone in Inwood goes, on one day or another, an official of the United States government, pepper spray a woman trying to record him and him promising to do it again. Of course, I should say, to be fair, we just saw the little video clips that have been making the round and not the full context of whatever else is going on there. But I described what I saw and what's going around. Later in the show, we'll talk specifically about that incident and more broadly, the reported surge of ICE agents in the city and the gathering protests against them. Will this pepper spray incident and the one at the hospital be the beginning of New York being the next Minneapolis? We'll see. That's coming up.
Now about that war in the Middle East.
The on again, off again, on again, off again, on again, off again, biggest military campaign since World War II is off again today and less reported, but just essential to the overall situation. A deal Donald Trump says was on for Hamas to disarm and Israel to leave Gaza. Just announced it last week. Deal that he says was on for Hamas to disarm and Israel to leave Gaza now appears to be not on.