It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years. This has always been the plan, it hasn’t been hidden, corporate media has just succeeded in sanewashing it for decades. Abdication of journalistic responsibility in the name of profits has allowed construction of alternate realities for so many people that these atrocities are now possible with few noticing.
The only part I would disagree with here is that there was a plan dating back to the George W. Bush Admin. I think "the plan" in earnest came into being between 2020 and 2024, and I don't think anyone from the Bush years would find a home in the party let alone the current administration. It's not that they had no plans necessarily, they just weren't the ones in charge anymore.
I do think the Bush years were the first major destabilization of rule of law domestically that helped create conditions for today, along with Obama's "look forward, not backward" enshrinement of it as bipartisan consensus. Bush also normalized a kind of partisan unresponsiveness to mass democratic uprisings that people used to believe were capable of influencing the government.
I don't like putting the blame on a "plan". Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and the US has had a strong anti-democratic strain since slavery. Probably even feudalism before that. Once you see it, you see it everywhere and can't unsee it. There's a reason Trump's best polling issue is immigration
I think the more complete view is that the current generation of fascists learned from the Bush admin's mistakes (or, I suppose you could say, they feel unshackled by Bush era "restraint").
Combined with a cult of personality frontman to distract, aided by a captured media ecosystem and a radicalized judiciary, they are empowered to build on the shoulders of giants.
It was not self evident in the 00's that we would end up with Miller/Vought running the show - the actual form could have been something completely different. Indeed, Rove himself recently popped back up to chastise them!
I think it's because we've gotten so used to avoiding political speech as a method of "civility", we've collectively put our heads in the sand.
The people who were shouting their worries and concerns were told they were being political. Politics is just life now a days, I don't know how you can actually excise that.
I was just too young and things exploded by the time I really could start to understand what was gonig on.
I was very early Elementasry for 9/11, Middle school for the GFC. I was early 20's focusing on college in 2016, which would have been the 2nd nationals I could vote in. Then I was only a few years into my career when COVID hit.
The Obama era gave me hopes, but I didn't realize how easily it could be relinquished in the name of corporate interest. I just figured all the checks and balances would keep things from really going backwards. Obviously Trump winning was the first huge red flag, but things seemed fine. But the real red flag I (personally) saw was Ruth Bader Ginsburg not stepping down and instead dying during the Trump administration. Having 3 judges appointed by Trump (plus 3 from W. Bush beforehand) was a death knell for decades to come, even if Trump never got elected.
It might take a couple more generations, a lot more misery, and maybe even a complete breakdown of democracy in the USA, for its population to finally learn that Democrats or Republicans are bound to the same higher power in the USA: money.
Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either party will always look out for the moneyed interests, anything else they might champion for is just there to give a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's the foundation of American democracy, donations, aggressive lobbying, business-first mentality, the votes are there just to decide which side of the coin will move these interests forward, not to decide what platform is best for the citizenry in general.
Why does it imply that? You only need one side to consistently antagonize the other and turn everything into us-vs-them rhetoric. The other side can either choose to ignore it, try to maintain higher-level discourse, or start playing the same game; the end result is still the same. I don't see why a bipartisan conspiracy would be required.
Are they limiting their raids to be within 'blue' states / districts to minimise the collateral damage their reputation may receive from those sympathetic to this cause?
Chicago was 77% Democrat in the last election.
These behaviours won't stop if there's no blowback from the MAGA base.
Blue states and heavily-Democratic urban areas are also likely to have explicit local laws preventing local police authorities from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, since whether it is good or bad to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement is a central point of disagreement in partisan American politics right now. For the same partisan reasons involving political support for illegal immigrants, there are probably more illegal immigrants physically residing in heavily-Democratic urban areas and in blue states. So if you're federal immigration enforcement and you want to mass-arrest illegal immigrants, blue states and districts are where you're gonna be inclined to conduct raids anyway.
In any case, visibly arresting illegal immigrants is a core political demand of the MAGA base, and they eagerly want to see more raids like this one. The fact that prominent figures from Democratic-party aligned institutions like prestige news media and academia (which certainly describes Paul Krugman) strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.
> strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.
Every day MTG’s “national divorce” sounds like the only real solution. These people live in entirely different realities and despise each other. Insane to believe you can manage a functional country that way.
Too bad it’s a political and logistical pipe dream.
> Are they limiting their raids to be within 'blue' states / districts to minimise the collateral damage their reputation may receive from those sympathetic to this cause?
As of right now, it's pure agitation. They're pointing the guns into protest zones (not "blue states" really, though that's obviously where they concentrate) hoping things get out of control. At that stage, it becomes easier to paint political enemies as military ones. And you'll start seeing the use of state power against sitting legislators and judges, etc...
You can't dismantle democracy all at once. The military[1] won't follow those orders[2]. But if you create a culture where "antifa" or whoever is actually shooting stuff and blowing things up, the moral calculus becomes an easier sell. They aren't "doing a coup" by ejecting the governor of Washington State (or whatever), they're just defending America.
[1] At the end of the day, remember that authoritarianism is always executed by the military. The figurehead may come from somewhere else originally (like New York real estate development in this case), but when the regime is based on the use of force it is always run, ultimately, by the users of force.
[2] Because the military aren't MAGA, not yet. They're career officers who built careers in an existing bureaucracy and, all other things being equal, see value in that bureaucracy and don't want to tear it down.
The article features a prominent screenshot of a post from Stephen Miller. I cannot find that post on his account https://x.com/stephenm. Is this a quirk of X being difficult to navigate?
My impression of Trump is that he's a showman with crazy ideas, but ultimately not organised or determined enough to see them through. On his own, he might flail about and go round in circles a bit like his first term. Undeniably, he is good with the public.
The thing that really terrifies me is the people who attach themselves to him, thinking they can use his mandate to push their agendas through. Because there seems to be plenty of skill and determination, paired with objectives I find repulsive. I suspect it is those people who really push, or at least permit this process.
Why aren't senators stopping this? Why aren't judges? I suspect they all think they can use Trump to achieve their own means.
I suspect that in the end Trump will destroy anyone he thinks is getting in his way or using his name to get ahead, but the whole process will cause tons of chaos and pain the US and beyond.
A lot of senators and judges are trying to stop various aspects of the Trumpist poltical agenda. And in turn the Trump administration is working against those senators and judges, to the great approval of the MAGA base.
There are a lot of people who really want the objectives you find repulsive, and they want the elected officials they support to smash through the opposition of the elected officials (and judges) that you support. In a democracy, it will often happen that different elected officials supported by rival factions of citizens bitterly fight each other for control of what policies the state actually carries out.
This was after Trump's secretary of war said the following on the same stage:
“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth said. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”
It's not exactly subtle. The message is "we're going to commit war crimes more" and "we plan to use the military against people inside the US".
This should be repeated far and wide in the media for, as you have specified, what it really means.
I mean, Secretary Pete Hegseth, in his prior role as a Fox News mouthpiece, he defended the actions of a convicted war criminal[0][1], so he has form in displaying a total lack of ethics.
Yes. The "swear an oath to the leader" comes a bit later in the game. At this pace though, who knows? It could be really soon. Something drastic must be done about the midterms, or Trump could be impeached, and that is not in the cards of these people.
I fear that, yes, Trump is on a path to do something drastic to prevent the midterms.
It will either be 1) war, 2) martial law, or 3) declaring an insurrection.
1 is dicey. It will require, first, a declared war, not just Trump saying so, and second, the courts agreeing (against all precedent) that we can't hold elections in wartime. This isn't Ukraine; our constitution doesn't have a provision for elections not happening during war. So, while Trump has sounded like he likes the idea, this one is unlikely to work.
2 or 3 seem more workable. At the moment at least some members of the administration seem to be leaning toward 3 (see, for example, Miller stating that a judge ruling against Trump sending troops to Portland was "a judicial insurrection").
Note that when I say "Trump is on the path to", that does not mean that he will inevitably do so. We will see whether he will restrain himself, or whether others around him can restrain him. And if they don't, then we will see whether the courts can.
And if they can't, then we'll see if there's ever a point where the military will decide that his orders are illegal, and their oath is to the constitution.
Readit News
I do think the Bush years were the first major destabilization of rule of law domestically that helped create conditions for today, along with Obama's "look forward, not backward" enshrinement of it as bipartisan consensus. Bush also normalized a kind of partisan unresponsiveness to mass democratic uprisings that people used to believe were capable of influencing the government.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
I think the more complete view is that the current generation of fascists learned from the Bush admin's mistakes (or, I suppose you could say, they feel unshackled by Bush era "restraint").
Combined with a cult of personality frontman to distract, aided by a captured media ecosystem and a radicalized judiciary, they are empowered to build on the shoulders of giants.
It was not self evident in the 00's that we would end up with Miller/Vought running the show - the actual form could have been something completely different. Indeed, Rove himself recently popped back up to chastise them!
The people who were shouting their worries and concerns were told they were being political. Politics is just life now a days, I don't know how you can actually excise that.
I was very early Elementasry for 9/11, Middle school for the GFC. I was early 20's focusing on college in 2016, which would have been the 2nd nationals I could vote in. Then I was only a few years into my career when COVID hit.
The Obama era gave me hopes, but I didn't realize how easily it could be relinquished in the name of corporate interest. I just figured all the checks and balances would keep things from really going backwards. Obviously Trump winning was the first huge red flag, but things seemed fine. But the real red flag I (personally) saw was Ruth Bader Ginsburg not stepping down and instead dying during the Trump administration. Having 3 judges appointed by Trump (plus 3 from W. Bush beforehand) was a death knell for decades to come, even if Trump never got elected.
This has been happening long before W, and the Democrats are complicit too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either party will always look out for the moneyed interests, anything else they might champion for is just there to give a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's the foundation of American democracy, donations, aggressive lobbying, business-first mentality, the votes are there just to decide which side of the coin will move these interests forward, not to decide what platform is best for the citizenry in general.
This implies a (bipartisan) conspiracy to agitprop the nation into violent division as pretext.
Chicago was 77% Democrat in the last election.
These behaviours won't stop if there's no blowback from the MAGA base.
In any case, visibly arresting illegal immigrants is a core political demand of the MAGA base, and they eagerly want to see more raids like this one. The fact that prominent figures from Democratic-party aligned institutions like prestige news media and academia (which certainly describes Paul Krugman) strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.
Every day MTG’s “national divorce” sounds like the only real solution. These people live in entirely different realities and despise each other. Insane to believe you can manage a functional country that way.
Too bad it’s a political and logistical pipe dream.
As of right now, it's pure agitation. They're pointing the guns into protest zones (not "blue states" really, though that's obviously where they concentrate) hoping things get out of control. At that stage, it becomes easier to paint political enemies as military ones. And you'll start seeing the use of state power against sitting legislators and judges, etc...
You can't dismantle democracy all at once. The military[1] won't follow those orders[2]. But if you create a culture where "antifa" or whoever is actually shooting stuff and blowing things up, the moral calculus becomes an easier sell. They aren't "doing a coup" by ejecting the governor of Washington State (or whatever), they're just defending America.
[1] At the end of the day, remember that authoritarianism is always executed by the military. The figurehead may come from somewhere else originally (like New York real estate development in this case), but when the regime is based on the use of force it is always run, ultimately, by the users of force.
[2] Because the military aren't MAGA, not yet. They're career officers who built careers in an existing bureaucracy and, all other things being equal, see value in that bureaucracy and don't want to tear it down.
With liberals, deploying the military to their cities is about instigating actual violence, so they can imprison and kill them.
The thing that really terrifies me is the people who attach themselves to him, thinking they can use his mandate to push their agendas through. Because there seems to be plenty of skill and determination, paired with objectives I find repulsive. I suspect it is those people who really push, or at least permit this process.
Why aren't senators stopping this? Why aren't judges? I suspect they all think they can use Trump to achieve their own means.
I suspect that in the end Trump will destroy anyone he thinks is getting in his way or using his name to get ahead, but the whole process will cause tons of chaos and pain the US and beyond.
There are a lot of people who really want the objectives you find repulsive, and they want the elected officials they support to smash through the opposition of the elected officials (and judges) that you support. In a democracy, it will often happen that different elected officials supported by rival factions of citizens bitterly fight each other for control of what policies the state actually carries out.
I am a little queasy of throwing the fascism word around willy nilly, but the story of "internal enemies" could not have been more formulaic.
“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth said. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”
It's not exactly subtle. The message is "we're going to commit war crimes more" and "we plan to use the military against people inside the US".
Deleted Comment
This should be repeated far and wide in the media for, as you have specified, what it really means.
I mean, Secretary Pete Hegseth, in his prior role as a Fox News mouthpiece, he defended the actions of a convicted war criminal[0][1], so he has form in displaying a total lack of ethics.
[0]: https://time.com/7176342/pete-hegseth-donald-trump-pardon-wa...
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/turning-a-blind-eye...
We all have an understanding of the power of the US military and its foreign agencies
But it’s tough to square this quote with that - what is going to change ?
What does a nuclear superpower need to be untied ? Mass world surveillance, bombing foreign countries?
All of that has happened - what more is needed and why ?
It will either be 1) war, 2) martial law, or 3) declaring an insurrection.
1 is dicey. It will require, first, a declared war, not just Trump saying so, and second, the courts agreeing (against all precedent) that we can't hold elections in wartime. This isn't Ukraine; our constitution doesn't have a provision for elections not happening during war. So, while Trump has sounded like he likes the idea, this one is unlikely to work.
2 or 3 seem more workable. At the moment at least some members of the administration seem to be leaning toward 3 (see, for example, Miller stating that a judge ruling against Trump sending troops to Portland was "a judicial insurrection").
Note that when I say "Trump is on the path to", that does not mean that he will inevitably do so. We will see whether he will restrain himself, or whether others around him can restrain him. And if they don't, then we will see whether the courts can.
And if they can't, then we'll see if there's ever a point where the military will decide that his orders are illegal, and their oath is to the constitution.
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