President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I wasn't saying you do. You said, "People I know do interpret it as “abolish the police!” I was responding to that (them).

 

Former ICE spokesman who resigned alleges "intimidation" by government - CBS News

The video is really worth watching. This guy was a spokesman for ICE. He turned whistleblower and resigned because he was asked to lie and the administration was telling lies (Jeff Sessions) about what happened when the Oakland mayor tipped off people about an ICE raid several months ago. He has actually showed a ton of courage by standing up for what he thought was right. CBS happened to be doing an interview with him in his living room -- and this is months later -- when two goons from DHS showed up at his door trying to intimidate him and send a message to any other potential whistleblowers.

 

Honestly, I'd rather take my chances with all of the amorphous threats that get thrown out there to scare people into allowing more and more of a police state, than I am willing to sacrifice my freedom (a word the same people will quickly pervert).

I realize this stuff isn't anything new. Technology has made it so that the tools are allowing an unaccountable bureaucracy that just gets bigger and bigger to take greater and greater licenses with people's civil liberties. And it has turned the NSA, for example, into an organization right out of an Orwell novel. ICE is an extension of that. What they are doing with people who by and large just want a better life for themselves and their families, is just indecent in my opinion. American exceptionalism, if it really exists, has always been about the, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” . ... not about trite patriotism, which wanna-be banana boat dictators and fascist regimes have always utilized to repress people. It's a transparent playbook.

Even though this stuff didn't just come out of nowhere with Trump, I think it is particularly stark right now, because he is an so shockingly a bullshit artist and liar, and he works from a particular brand of hyena-like populism that feeds (a minority of) hateful, bigoted people who would gladly turn us into a police state nation to further the hateful things they want to see.

You have people turned off by the indecency of what their country has been doing, and that feeds an "eliminate ICE" groundswell. That gets the, "You want open borders, we're going to be overridden by an army of marauding Mad Max characters" nonsense. But there is a place (and I realize you probably see it similarly) that sits between how out of control we have gotten with the law and order and security crap. ... and outright anarchy. It's the hardest balancing act we have to pull off as a country that values freedom and liberty more than anything.

I'd argue that the much greater threat is giving up small bits of that freedom and liberty in the name of security. First, way too often those promises of security are the cloak used by bad people to take power, when their goals are much more insidious. Secondly, even if it isn't that bad, getting any freedom and liberty back once you cede it, is very difficult. That freedom and liberty is what we should be valuing most as Americans. Hell, it's the promise of it (to whatever degree we have it) that draws so many people from oppressive places. And it is those people throughout our history, that made America truly "great." It bothers me that so many people don't realize that, because go back on the family tree of virtually any of us and you have people who uprooted their lives for religious freedom or who left their families behind somewhere to ride steerage across an ocean because they were being murdered and oppressed. Some self-aggrandizing bullshit artist who promises "winning," isn't what is really American.