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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

Wait until they declare nonresidents are not entitled to properties in the US and seize all bank accounts and 401k, USSR style.

The scariest thing, and most absurd to me, is that even though I made that joke just 1 minute ago, now that I think about it, it is not completely impossible in this current political climate...

I dread to think about what the US will be 10 years from now. Trump is not the problem. He is a solution, or claimed to be, to the ailments that plague the US. The people here want change, they know something is rotten but they don't even know what is the problem with so many lies and misdirection and days to days burdens they have to bear. So Trump become their cry for help. It is just sad and tragic. Truly something for the history book, if we ever get there.

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I don’t think your hypothetical is crazy at all. I learned this weekend that much of my close family, who were pretty normal conservatives just a couple of years ago, now believe that all legal and illegal immigrants have been let into the country by jws to eliminate the white race. And that’s not an exaggeration at all. Like I’m mincing words to make them look less bad.

My family is not the down and out, they never supported these things because they have financial stressors. If anything the economy of the last 20 years has been too good to them. They are relatively wealthy and have stable lives and good jobs. They listen to too many alt right podcasts and are too deep down the Facebook hole.

Two weeks ago I was relatively optimistic. Now I’m really scared, how do you cope with loved one’s who believe these things? We’re off to a really dark place.

There's a huge difference between not being able to buy properties and seizing them.

The former is already in place to some degree in various forms including anti-money-laundry and sanction-prevention pretexts: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/politics/texas-legislature...

The latter is far more overreach but US already practices Civil Asset Forfeiture in other contexts, even for US Citizens, nothing new.

Comments or opinions like yours are the reasons why I think my hypothetical scenario is possible.

It is too easy to view everything as "nothing new, already done in some way" and ignore the slow boil, especially when they are not directly affected or ideologically opposed to it. That is how we get people clamoring for the government to post pictures of chained people marched into extrajudicial prisons without due process.

All I can say is that while some people will be insulated from the consequences, if the situation keeps escalating, do not bet on you being one of those privileged few.

Citizens aren't far off. I give it until election season.

JD Vance wrote a cover blurb for a book arguing to the MAGA base that all the milquetoast liberals they know are actually "secret communist revolutionaries" who must be "crushed" by any means necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans

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