What frightens is not just this single moment of violence, but the machinery that made it foreseeable. Governments do not wake up one morning and discover they have thugs roaming their streets. They manufacture them. They take administrative agencies, arm them, strip away restraint, replace training with ideology, and aim them politically. When that process is complete, brutality is no longer a breakdown of the system. It is the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Tag: Tyranny (Page 2 of 4)
There are two horrible stories this week. Two stories separated by a thousand miles but driven by the same engine: a government drunk on its own authority and a political movement cheering it on like spectators at a public stoning. The first story comes from Dilley, Texas. Under President Trump, ICE’s family detention regime has […]
The most terrifying authoritarian actions never arrive wearing jackboots and shouting decrees. They arrive in legal briefs, phrased in the language of “security,” “integrity,” and “national interest.” And now Donald Trump is preparing one of the most dangerous authoritarian projects in modern American history: the power to strip millions of naturalized Americans of their citizenship […]
“All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID” — President Donald J. Trump It sounds simple — obvious, even. That’s the trick. Authoritarians have always loved the obvious answer because it disguises the malicious one. The United […]
“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” benjamin franklin In 1982, a man in Alabama named Willie Simmons stole nine dollars. It was a street-corner scuffle: a man knocked down, his wallet grabbed, a few crumpled bills taken. There was no weapon, no blood, no […]
Anti-fascism did not begin as a movement of masked youth or street protests. It began as the most basic moral instinct of humankind: to resist domination, cruelty, and the worship of power. Long before anyone called it “Antifa,” it was the underground network smuggling Jews out of Germany, the Spanish Republicans fighting Franco’s troops, the […]
There is nothing accidental about the way Trump talks about American cities. He does not stumble into exaggeration; he crafts it. He calls Portland a “war zone” on a Monday and by Sunday the narrative is seeding itself across cable shows and social posts. He points a finger, the cameras magnify the finger, and then […]
The latest trick of America’s ruling blowhards is branding the most obvious human decency as terrorism. Say you’re anti-fascist and suddenly you’re a threat to national security. Antifa! they shriek, as if the word itself has fangs. Let’s be clear. Antifa means anti-fascist. If you aren’t anti-fascist, then what exactly are you? Pro-fascist? Neutral on […]
I grieved when I saw the footage. I did not like Charlie Kirk. I despised his politics, his methods, and the damage he caused. But watching him gunned down on a college campus filled me with horror. No one deserves that. Not him, not anyone. To see a man murdered for exercising his right to […]
It is easy to imagine a secret police force as something beyond the law: clandestine, illegal, operating in shadows. The horror of ICE is subtler and more insidious: it acts within the law, and that legality is the shield that allows its abuses to continue. ICE does not need to break the law; it is […]