So, what horrors have been passed by Trump/MAGA/project 2025? Here’s a bad one: “$29.9 billion toward ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations, increasing ICE’s annual budget three-fold“ per the American Immigration Council.
Tyranny expert Anne Applebaum: “We have never before had a federal police force built on that scale, and around the thuggish culture that appears to be emerging at ICE….ICE has already begun behaving very differently. Its members wear masks, carry military grade weapons in public streets and seem to have a mandate to arrest people without asking questions, on the suspicion that they might be Hispanic. They also seem to feel empowered to break the law first, answer questions afterwards, the opposite of what American police, in a democracy, are supposed to do.”
We are bombarded with videos of Hispanic farm workers, street vendors, shop workers, people who are our neighbors and local workforce being physically dragged away by masked men in military protection and weapons. Video of swarms of ICE, some on horseback, sweeping through a park in LA. Why? They want us to get used to government thugs grabbing people as the natural way of the new MAGA America. And because the sociopaths Stephen Miller and Donald Trump demand a daily quota, irregardless of any evidence of criminality.
They aren’t only going for Hispanic criminals and gang members. They’re rounding up brown people just to show that they can. And when innocents are rounded up, they say who cares? They’re brown.
And, of course, it doesn’t end there. Once the country gets used to these cruel injustices they go after…judges? Lawyers? Journalists? Protestors? Labor Organizers? Doctors? Politicians? Me? You?
They have a playbook. What did the Nazis do? What did the Communists do? Do you think Trump and Miller and Bondi and Noem and Patel are different?
I don’t.
But the United States of America has been a democracy for nearly a quarter of a millennium, and we are not likely to have a tyranny established as easily as Tsarist Russia or Depression wracked Germany. They are going to fail.
