Don’t fall for the lie that this is at all about illegal immigration- that is just an excuse for what has become state sponsored KKK style racial terrorism operating completely outside the law. Videos all over the Internet show them violently attacking and terrorizing hispanic looking people with no concern for if they are citizens or not. At the Wilder raid in Idaho they were shooting children with rubber bullets, and zip tying them to watch as they brutally beat their (mostly US citizen) parents in front of them. At the same time you have the administration actively encouraging white immigration from South Africa, while firing all federal immigration judges that were still willing to hear valid asylum claims from brown skinned people.
I want my country, freedom, and civil rights back.
I stopped hearing claims that it was about illegal immigration almost instantly after the debate where he claimed “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” It was eerie.
That dehumanizing rhetoric is so weird and surreal, it boggles my mind that it seems to actually work... there was a horrific video on Facebook of the Wilder raid in Idaho, and many people were basically commenting things like "this isn't great, but it's really our only choice because these people are killing so many of us." We're talking just a regular peaceful small farming town where people were out watching a horse race with their families- people that were mostly US citizens of Hispanic descent. Obviously none of them are killing anyone, it's completely absurd.
Very much so. There's multiple videos of them standing in Walmart parking lots and as shoppers walk out with their carts, anyone vaguely Hispanic is being questioned. "Where were you born? Are you American?"
Probable cause is out the window. This is, firsthand, Steven Millers White America policy starting to take effect.
I expected a lot more pushback on here for calling this out as terrorism than I got… I took a several month hiatus from this site and before I left it was all “you’re just being hyperbolic, Trump is just going to enforce the immigration laws exactly as written.” It seems that nearly all of those people have rethought their opinions in light of recent events- which I guess/hope bodes well for the chances of our country coming together in a unified way to stand against this.
The unfortunate reality is that lots of those people were agents of propaganda, such as Russian bots. The goal was to get the authoritarian elected and the ball rolling - so they're all gone now.
I took a vacation from this site many years ago because it was clear that the moderators of this site were at the very least complicit in the rise of bad faith user moderation, from both bots and so-called "fellow travelers."
The only thing I can't decide on is if YC let this rot take hold because they were also fellow travelers, or if they made the wrong choice that a good number of failed internet social spaces make in following their own stated guidelines to the exact letter at the expense of all common sense and decency.
Not that it matters much in the end - the end result is what we got.
Seems very plausible but how can we be sure of that? There definitely were two groups, one had thoughtful counterpoints, and also histories of insightful comments on other topics, and could usually be persuaded eventually with some extended discussion. The other group had usually no post history and literally just posted things like “cry harder libtard.”
The latter were probably just bots/scripts but I’ve often thought it hilarious to wonder what their lives are like if they were real people that spent their day responding “cry harder” to genuine concerns over human rights violations and atrocities. Do their partners and family know about it? Do they have some sort of personal narrative that makes them a hero for being like that? Is that just how they relax and blow off steam after, what I can only assume was a long hard day of strangling hookers and shooting puppies?
I saw many people expose shallow, hateful views that had account creation from 2017 and earlier with a comment history to then sort of come out the wood work here and basically say, "mandate, this is what the american people want." There is a large support for DOGE on this site.
In Wolfenstein, the main character shot Nazi soldiers. It was made back when we had shared societal values like fascism is bad. Today, such a game would be called a product of tHe rAdIcAl lEfT.
It is absolutely insane that the party who tried on the Libertarian mask less than 20 years ago and rode high on a wave of "don't tread on me" individual liberty is now suddenly ok with masked thugs scanning everyone's faces for their master database of enemies of the state.
It makes more sense when you frame it as "party of shameless self interest and racial stratification acts in shameless self interest while racially stratifying". You can draw a straight line back to even before the US civil war of the anti-federalists using their station to undermine the republic and liberties it stands for.
Frankly, I don't think this is a party thing. Our elected officials are mostly party line. There are a few who have actual ideals that they adhere to but the rest of them are weather vanes.
You basically have to be a party loyalist to get campaign funds so, unless you can self fund, you gotta toe the line.
Party probably wasn't the best word to use there. I didn't mean it as in the discrete political entity, but more of the amorphous group. The color of the hat doesn't matter as much as what they believe in.
> The color of the hat doesn't matter as much as what they believe in.
I agree but the argument I'm making is that the "what they believe in" part is usually, "I should be re-elected". There are very few elected officials that I believe would choose to not be re-elected rather than change their touted core beliefs.
The generous part of me says this is an example of "you become what you hate". The ungenerous part of me says that all their talk about freedom, liberty, state's rights, etc., has always been a lie.
You should go to rumble and watch the Charlie Kirk show. It is a huge stream of jingoistic fallacies, fear and hate mongering and a bald faced usurpation of what it means to be an American. Anyone they that disagrees with them is an unpatriotic unamerican leftist that hates all that is good in the world. Their words.
As a libertarian, I had given Republicans the benefit of the doubt figuring they earnestly wanted freedom, but were just terrible at understanding the details of how their freedom gets taken away. But I still had figured that conservatism actually meant something - trusting institutions / "the system", believing America is a force for good in the world, slow measured change, etc.
But the point we've arrived at, with so many of them complicit in these wanton attacks on our freedoms and our society, it's hard to see that there are any sort of ideals or values behind their party. People are going about their days, getting accosted by unaccountable masked gangs, having their face scanned, then getting sent to a concentration camp when some buggy app claims they aren't a citizen? How can one possibly look at that and think anything but "this could easily happen to me or my family" ?
The only answer I've been able to come up with is that it is straight up racism. They believe they could never possibly be on the pointy end of this fascist dystopia, because they look "American" (ie white), and so would never possibly be scanned in the first place? I earnestly hate this "racism everywhere" chant the Democratic party has fallen into for the past decade. But I'm having a real hard time finding any other explanation, so I'm reluctantly coming around to that. Someone please convince me I am wrong.
I'm coming from the same basic perspective as you describe, and always tried hard to see people in the best light and sympathize with their concerns, but am no longer finding that possible in this situation, and it is disheartening.
The only explanation for the core MAGA supporters that I can come up with is that it is a sort of loose coalition of people that feel disaffected and judged by society for various reasons and want acceptance - and vengeance. It includes many people that are, e.g. sociopaths and racists, and want someone to tell them that being like that isn't bad, it's actually "protecting American from inferior people" or some such thing.
There is just no way that people don't realize that Trump is a malignant narcissist that lies every time he speaks, and tries to sadistically harm anyone that doesn't support him. The only explanation is that people don't like him despite that, but because of it- him being so awful, and proudly like that with no hint of remorse, absolves them of the lifelong guilt and fear that they might be bad people also, and instead frees them to also be proudly like that themselves.
Recently I've been reading a book about the history of the Jim Crow era in the south, and the extremely widespread brutal terrorism and mass murder, and I can't really reach any other conclusion than that those people just laid low for a while while they regrouped and strategized, but they're just as prevalent, violent, and racist now as they ever were, and they're done hiding. They see the Confederate/Nazi/Fascist dream of a totalitarian white ethnostate in their grasp, and they are ready to make it happen - they aren't ashamed for wanting that, and they aren't afraid anymore.
I get that this is a really dark view of current events, and I really hope it is not true, but at this point, I think it is delusional to pretend that it's anything but the most likely explanation and prepare accordingly.
I'm not really a fan of Hillary Clinton and I thought that comment was a bit ham-fisted at the time, but as it turns out she's been thoroughly vindicated.
The GOP uses fear and hate to spread their message and scare people into voting for them. The flavor they use changes, but the fear and hate are always there.
It's not insane when you recognize the animus behind both is white nationalism and racism. Tea Party was a response to Obama being President, not so much the taxes as they claim.
You’re right in general but it has been striking to see how much the current Republican response has flipped from what we heard for years after the Elian Gonzalez case, where Giuliani described the BORTAC agents as “storm troopers” and the outage is credited with flipping Florida for Bush in 2000.
You can expect the party to vote along party lines. The real funny one here is all the Rogan libertarians who made a conscious choice to vote for this.
The only difference between today and 20 years ago is the war machine is being directed against Americans rather than foreigners. 20 years ago people called GWB a fascist for his actions in Iraq, and Americans said it was hyperbole and everything that was happening was patriotic. 20 years later, it's the same shit, different country, and white people are the victims, so it's easier for folx to recognize this as fascism.
Biden's CBP goons stripped me naked, imprisoned me, ran up an ER bill for which I'm still being chased for by debt collectors, and tranported me by prisoner van all over the state, while they were enforcing Biden's (and now continue with Trump) insane war on drugs. I did not have drugs, I am not involved with drugs.
Of course nothing was found, and the allegation was hearsay by an HSI detective that some unnamed dog alerted to an unnamed officer, neither of which I have any idea what they were even referencing.
Yes, ICE has been a bad actor since the day it was created, which is why "shutdown ICE" has been a thing on the left for a while now. But it's now operating as the private military of Donald Trump and the executive branch on a scale never before seen in America. Its upcoming budget is greater than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. We see videos every day of their gleeful assaults on anyone they like, while their leadership has explicitly stated there will be no repercussions, and that they should be as abusive as they want.
What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later? Osama bin Laden had a fairly specific immediate poltical goal, resisting US military influence in Muslim countries and US support of Israel. His broader goals involved revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim countries of the middle east. None of this was related to Latin American immigration to the US, legal or otherwise.
> What do the 9/11 terrorists have to do with the US federal government using federal police to enforce immigration law largely against illegal immigrants from Latin America, decades later?
The centralized security apparatus in the Department of Homeland Security being leverage here exists entirely as a result of the reaction to 9/11.
No, 9/11 did nothing more than give Americans permission to fully activate our latent racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and bigotry, which existed long before 9/11. The problem with America is we are racist to our core, and we'll do absolutely everything and anything to prove it to the world time and time again.
I wasn't aware that Trump coordinated 9/11 with Bin Laden (through the Saudis?), but at this point it wouldn't really surprise me. (tongue in cheek, of course)
But please let's stop framing recent developments as if they are merely continuations of existing trends. The surveillance state and federal "law" enforcement were definitely out of control well before Trump, and both authoritarian parties share responsibility for that. But it hadn't been being used to launch a frontal assault on domestic civil society. Responsibility for that rests solely on Trump (and his enablers/supporters).
“How exactly can they do it if every Democratic-run state and city refuses to comply? How can the democratic will of citizens be carried out?”
If a candidate makes campaign promises that do not work in the framework of our constitution or civil rights that is the candidates problem to figure out, you don’t get to throw away those things because your side won and they make your job hard, that is not how this is supposed to work.
What I wrote isn’t about democrats vs republicans- it’s about calling out terrorism from white supremacists for what it is- the fact that plenty of democrats are also extremely racist does not change what is actually happening here. They are not selective in only targeting black people- they have expanded that to include middle eastern, hispanic, and LGTBQ people simply because more of them are now visible in this country, with no reduction in their hatred and targeting of black people. We’re talking about the same groups of people doing the same things, now with a BUFF and a tactical vest instead of a white hood. Trump was raised in a KKK household, his dad was arrested at a KKK rally, and both he and his dad were sued and lost for racial discrimination in housing against black people and then ignored the rulings and continued the discrimination. He launched his political career by stoking hatred for a black president. His core supporters are a group of people that never accepted that they lost the civil war, and have been able to continually derail the reconstruction and the civil rights movement to this day. They are putting back up confederate pro slavery statues, and flying confederate flags. The KKK itself is mostly organizationally defunct, but these people are not simply “like the KKK,” they are literally the same people. However, for the first time in US history, they now have essentially complete control over the federal government.
Actually I was very active in criticizing both the Obama and Biden administrations, attending town halls, etc. to criticize their blaming of problems on immigrants. However what they were doing was literally enforcing the immigration laws as they were. That should not in any way be confused with the brutality, cruelty, sadism, criminality, and scale of what is happening now- which has nothing to do with immigration, which was the point of my comment.
Parent comment flagged and removed, but it was basically "Why didn't you complain in the past?".
This is a known tactic of propagandists, implying that you have no right to complain if you didn't complain in the past. Anyone using this method is immediately suspect of not seeking honest discussion. Also, it doesn't work outside of a few social networks, stop trying it everywhere.
I want my country, freedom, and civil rights back.