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.

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.

With liberals, deploying the military to their cities is about instigating actual violence, so they can imprison and kill them.

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.

>But as I said, this isn’t about crime. It’s about paranoid conspiracy theories and an attempt to dismantle democracy.

Most people don't think of 'normal law enforcement', they just see crime, people in the country illegally and others trying to make law enforcements job harder. They don't care about these types of arguments about how this is different from "normal" law enforcement.

You can care about these arguments , and a small percentage of people do, but if you want to be persuasive to the overwhelming majority, you have to put it in concrete terms how more police and law enforcement is actually bad.

> "Do you think Donald Trump has gone too far, has been about right, or has not gone far enough when it comes to deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally?"

52% said too far.

If you phrased the question something like "do you think the federal government has done enough, too much or not enough to deport illegal immigrants" you would get much different results. Or even including Donald Trump in the question is leading. And using "immigrants living in the US illegally" gives you a much different response as illegal aliens. All surveys are biased, but this one could be improved on so many levels.

Look at a much simpler survey about law enforcement attitudes and you'll see, especially in high crime neighborhoods, people want more policing not less:

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/88476/...

Seems a contradiction.