White House posts "enemies list" of Democrats critical of ICE | Hacker News Reader

White House posts "enemies list" of Democrats critical of ICE

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66 pointsamazonhut25 comments

I'm really glad to see this post is not flagged. Have things finally gotten to the point where Hacker News realizes we're not in Kansas anymore? This is literally a political enemies list, and these so-called enemies are completely normal politicians, most fairly centrist, who believe in the rule of law and our Constitution. This is insane. What are we going to do about this, folks?

It's their way or no way with the GOP in America, no dissent, or even questions are allowed.

The "free speech absolutists" really gave that phrase a bad name by being so hypocritical. Republican national and state leadership has revealed itself as liars, hypocrites, and even un-american.

From the outside, it looks an awful lot like the US is sleepwalking into a civil war and the genral populace isn't paying attention.

I get up each day, the news gets more insane, I go to work, nobody mentions it. I keep wondering how insane things need to get before Midwest politeness decides to even acknowledge it.

It happened during the rise of Nazism, in "They Thought They Were Free" you can read quite candid interviews with everyday Germans from a small town on how they perceived it.

It becomes normalised, the window shifts, and it has already shifted a lot.

Things that were unthinkable to be done or said by politicians 15 years ago now happen almost daily. Speeches that would be scandals are just another drop in the bucket, rhetoric that would've crashed careers, and get people in absolute shock now became celebrated.

You just have to remember you aren't going crazy, this is not normal and shouldn't be normal, the window just shifted so much that a lot of people learnt to agree with it, for their own reasons, by manipulative tactics.

A civil war would require a second side. There's nothing here but enthusiastic support from bloodthirsty nazi freaks.

From the outside, it looks an awful lot like the US is marching straight toward a reincarnation of Hitler's Germany, and nobody is doing anything at all about it.

  “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” the president responded. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.”

  “They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming here. And we don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street,’”

Given those recent comments, can this be anything other than a list of people for right-wing radicals to target?

It's a proscription list, ie a "we'll look the other way if anything happens to these people" list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proscription

Just wait a bit more and it's a list for (masked) government officials to target.

How many steps away from troikas is this? Because however big the gap was, it sure is shrinking.

Not enough.

It's still kind of crazy that we have masked federal agents abducting people off of the streets en masse and hauling them away to foreign concentration camps without due process.

Even at America's lowest points (Fugitive slave act, Bleeding Kansas, Japanese internment) this is not something Americans would have tolerated of their federal government.

I feel the need to remind people that Americans labelled Hitler a tyrant and were willing to march to the death to Berlin before they even knew about the concentration camps.

Feels crazier that there is literally zero resistance to it.

Really drives home that the median American is a bloodthirsty nazi freak.

> I feel the need to remind people that Americans labelled Hitler a tyrant and were willing to march to the death to Berlin before they even knew about the concentration camps.

This is probably a tad too cynical, but I think it was the attack on Pearl Harbor, by an ethnic and culturaly distinct nation that solidified "the great other" as an enemy. It allowed the nation to overcome the pro-fascist forces which were also present at the time. Racist propaganda alongside a sense of besiegement bound together the nation. You saw the same thing with 9/11.

America is not a democracy anymore. How can we call the American regime now? Autocracy, dictatorship?

Americracy?

What I don't get is why the US media seems to keep talking about these things in terms of "left" and "right". Trump uses terms like "far left extremists" to designate large swaths of people who are clearly right of center, they're just not on the MAGA side. The average conservative or liberal pro-business party in Europe would be designated as "Marxist" or whatever by the GOP these days. But the media seems to go along with this and refer to every one to the left of Trump as "the" left?

"Far left extremists" is a dogwhistle used by non-POTUS/non-VEEP parts of the regime to avoid running afoul of the Hatch Act. 47 sometimes adds "Democrats" but that's not illegal per the law. The whole point is to demonize the other party priming the population and apparatus for the purges or "final solution" they intend to wield against non-MAGA politicians.

That's the whole trick. If you redefine everything that isn't MAGA as 'left' you just whitewashed your own reputation to 'right' instead of 'fascist'/'right wing extremist'.

Yes. Well, and now everyone who isn't MAGA or disagrees is a "terrorist" subject to deportation and/or stripping of citizenship.

I hope that room full of generals and master chiefs in Quantico agreed to secretly back-channel with each other such that they have a "break glass" plan of mass refusal to execute illegal orders per UCMJ.

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