FBI Agents Visit Anti-ICE Protester: "Your name was brought up."
kenklippenstein.com
kenklippenstein.com
That is exactly the chilling effect on speech that the FBI investigating political matters risks creating.
Ugh, I might have to start caring about politics again, this is unacceptable.
So maybe this particular visit was not just about "chilling effect"?
But now the story is out, which can have a chilling affect on many people considering attending future No Kings or similar protests.
If you keep reading articles over a few months about different people being visited/interviewed by the FBI, you'll at some point have the thought "can they somehow find out about me?".
It's Panopticon-lite, give the impression they might be able to see you even if there's no realistic capacity to watch everyone at once and you'll feel a little more paranoid, that's a chilling effect.
Now couple that with the friend of the administration Larry Ellison's quote about "if we watch every citizen they'll be in their best behaviour", and you get to a political project of control.
Arguably, they added to it, since now nation-wide policies are instead being blocked locally by multiple district courts instead of just facing nationwide injunctions in the first place they are litigated.
Good advice but it should be any law enforcement…not just federal agents.
“I don’t answer questions without my attorney present. Leave me your card and I will have my lawyer contact you” are powerful words.
Yes. This. James Duane lays out[0] why this is so important. I strongly encourage everyone resident in the US to view this video as it makes (IMHO) a very strong case for never talking to the police -- they are not (at least in their official capacities) your friends.
I'm guessing most are just scared/intimidated.
Another POV is, why assume that this do not cooperate advice, which smart people keep not following, is right? It’s a meme. Are memes important for law and life? They are brain rot.
But hey, do what you want since you apparently seem to know it's a meme and not advice worth following.
Me: "Am I under arrest?"
No: "I would like my attorney present before starting this discussion. Please provide me some contact information so we can schedule this."
Yes: "I wish to have my attorney present. I will not be answering any questions or discussing this matter."
Now, I don't know if I'm actually that brave, but I've at least got a plan.
There are no easy answers here. If you want change, expect to fight for it.
peacefully expressing opposition is enormously powerful.
there is still hope that it will be the path out of this worsening nightmare.
It doesn't matter how many of you there are if none of you are willing to actually do anything. If I just ignore you, how does it change anything in my life? The only thing you're achieving is making yourselves feel better about accomplishing nothing.
at a minimum, it makes it clear to others that they are not alone in thinking this regime is beyond the pale.
people who are able to take other actions like engaging via the judicial system, or peacefully refusing to continue working, are also encouraged by seeing peaceful masses of people agreeing with them.
it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible.
I think it harms the cause to feel better about accomplishing nothing. You've created a morale booster, but you haven't actually achieved anything or put forth any sort of plan to enact any sort of change. Assuming your goal is to make the government function according to written laws, why would the current president give a shit about anything you say when he can just continue to ignore you? If he ignored you before, you holding up a sign isn't going to do anything.
Protests work when there is some sort of threat behind it. Most protests you read about in history aren't a few hours on the weekend, they're ongoing where everybody is already participating in a strike. And many of them have the obvious threat of violence behind them. This "protest on the weekend" shit is pathetic. I'm not going to congratulate you for wasting time while everything continues to get worse. From my perspective you are part of the problem.
This is not true. There are trivially many historical examples.
For what it's worth, I don't think this is a new phenomenon. I remember quite clearly the way the press treated Occupy Wall Street, pretending that it was just a bunch of random loiterers who didn't have clear demands and goals.
In that case, the media simply made the editorial choice not to go out of their way to engage with the protesters, metaphorically covering their ears and then asking why they couldn't hear anything. Things have only gotten worse in the decades since.
Do both. The person in this story clearly was not ignore.
They do in fact care otherwise they wouldn't be so beligerent about it. It takes 3% of the country protesting to get undeniable attention and last weekend was getting close to that threshold. 330m Americans or so, the threshold is around 10m. And this weekend was counted with 7m.
Your voice does matter, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
And of course, keep your eyes peeled for any elections in your area. No matter how minor a position. If you can donate / volunteer for their campaigns, all the better. These situations will need to be fixed bottom up in the long term, so you never know what comptroller today becomes a senate tomorrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_in_Nineteen_Eighty-...
-Trump
This man is a child with questionable critical thinking skills. Now we have agents out running around chasing his imagination because he thinks nice paper and printing is hard to come by.
Or for a longer form explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Is FBI being instructed that protesting ice is antifa terrorism?
This is super concerning.
That's like saying there is no such thing as communism. There is such a thing as communism, it is an ideology, not an organization. The Communist Party USA is an organization, not an ideology.
You can fill in the rest.
Antifa, in the US context, is used to describe an organization that doesn't exist. People were protesting various causes, but very vocal right-wing extremists started using that label to imply there is an organization which they can blame for alleged violence.
Yes, both the President and the Attorney General have been doing this openly, and explicitly citing it as the basis for their instructions to federal law enforcement. They have also been prosecuting based on false testimony of federal officers about assaults (and being forced to dismiss a stunningly high number of filed cases on that basis), and still using the numbers from those false claims as basis for asserting a huge spike in assaults on federal offficers, which also is being cited directly as justification for reallocating resources and setting enforcement prioirities.
I'm in Canada, but what's going on South of the border has become highly concerning. It's starting to feel like Belgium up here.
There are people who think that every person on the planet should be able to immigrate to the US (or other first world countries). This is a radical position as it couldn't possibly work.
(I don't know about this person, I'm not saying it's widespread, just saying what a radical is.)
This isn't what makes a position radical. It's radical for being far different to the current norm.
Probably something similar to those “domestic terrorist” parents who were investigated by the DOJ for speaking out at school board meetings in 2021?
Is the FBI being "instructed?" Yes. But it gets "instructed" every day, what has changed? (1) Republicans aren't a no-regulation thing, they are a vague regulation thing. The policies and regulations exist, they just make less sense, they're less visionary, less consistent than the ones that Democrats make. (2) There is better alignment between the tools, like a Palantir dashboard that LLM-reads social media posts, and these vague policies. (3) A list of names cuts through the bureaucratic / administrative friction of vague policy.
That so many Americans, in the self proclaimed land of the free, voted for this reality under the delusion they were against "socialism" is the most historically illiterate thing ever.
Moderation at scale, even HN scale, is hard!
The panopticon is built on the technology and culture at the center of HN, so hopefully they have sympathy for my not being able to predict that the post would be flagged. I think it's important to understand and discuss the escalating technology-based erosion of our privacy and rights, but I'll guess we'll just do that at the monthly Antifa meetings. /s
That's a useful fiction, useful until it's not. This post[1] was on the front page briefly today. These people aren't obscure or powerless, they're billionaires, embedded in the current administration, etc.
> Then I started noticing something I couldn’t ignore. Smart people I respected—especially in cryptocurrency—were casually discussing feudalism. Not as history or provocation, but as serious proposals for organizing society. “Democracy and freedom are incompatible.” “Most people aren’t capable of self-governance.” “Elite overproduction is the problem—we educated too many people above their station.”
> These weren’t fringe cranks. Peter Thiel writing that democracy and freedom are incompatible. Curtis Yarvin publishing blueprints for corporate monarchy. An entire neo-reactionary apparatus in Silicon Valley while I optimized payment systems. And they were explicit: the democratic experiment failed, constitutional constraints prevent necessary action, most people should accept subordinate roles, the intelligent few should rule.
[1] https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-coming-clash-of-civ...
> to suppress or delete as objectionable
HN moderators will tell you flagging is a user voting phenomenon they have control over, but it's not - I was also told my flags don't count, because mods disabled my flags from counting because I flagged things different from what the mods wanted to be flagged. Flags are not a type of user voting, they are a centralized moderation thing.
- Some people support the current regime and will flag any content they consider anti-establishment.
- Hacker News is designed so that it takes very few flags to stick, so as to aggressively filter signal from noise, for as greedy a definition of "noise" as possible.
There's no conspiracy here, it's just Hacker News being Hacker News. If you want to be able to discuss these things freely, find another platform. Otherwise just accept that any "political" content will very likely be flagged at some point.
It doesn't matter what arguments you make or who you make them too, they aren't going to stop flagging.
I believe it is productive to continue discussing these topics here.
Hacker News has a reputation as a place where you can have reasonable discussions with smart people in good faith. It is a facade, but tearing down this facade is done by making the attempts at censorship more visible and blatant.
Instead, it's an attitude of "I know what I voted for, and I'd prefer not to be reminded of its negative externalizes, thanks. Also, I'd really prefer it if this sort of news not filter out into the greater consciousness of Hacker News, because it might cause other people to reconsider their support."
One of the biggest lies of HN is that it's a place of open and reasonable debate and discussion. In reality, it is highly curated by the users who have access to the moderation tools in order to shape the conversation. There's no direct coordination or conversations, just a widespread unspoken agreement.
I don't disagree with their decision-making in a vacuum. There's nothing wrong with bias if it's something people are generally aware of, so it can be accounted for. On the other hand, I think that there's a significant moral hazard of a site that pretends to be unbiased but has an unaccountable cabal of users putting their collective thumbs on the scale, and HN very much falls into that camp.
I think you underestimate the amount of racetards and magas, even on this website.
Not a lawyer, but I would advise anyone in a similar situation to exercise their right to tell these goons to fuck off. You always have the right to remain silent.
But legally I agree with the advice.
Neither us nor the author apparently know whether the men shown were real FBI agents. Con men operate the same way - wave a badge and pretend to be someone.
People are jumping out of unmarked vehicles with masks on and grabbing people.
We are getting closer every day to violent times.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-...
All this work plus the risk of a charge of impersonating a federal agent... and they didn't ask him for money. Deep grift.
This comment reads to me like you understand the implications and it makes you uncomfortable so you're deflecting with nonsense. Let's assume they're real FBI agents: what do you think of this action?
Didn't bother, no, no. And why should we assume anything?
No. I'm just tired of BS "news" stories.
We need better reporting and part of that is verification.
What about this story makes it "BS"? Your comment(s) provide no rebuttals or anything to discredit this story. It doesn't sound like you're a skeptic, more like you'd made your up mind prior to reading the article.
> why should we assume anything
Because discarding something as fake news is not good faith. Believe it not, you can simultaneously be skeptical and engage with the content of the article. The question still stands: what do you think about the FBI going to a protestors house to ask him questions about it?
> We need better reporting and part of that is verification.
He tried reaching out to the FBI but they declined to comment due to the ongoing government shutdown as noted in the article. What level of "verification" would make you happy?
There is no onus upon me to provide "rebuttals or anything".
I am a skeptic.
There is no requirement to presume/assume "good faith".
Do you accept part or all of the entire post as factual? If so, based on what exactly? "Good faith"?
Maybe in your bubble that's true.
> There is no requirement to presume/assume "good faith".
You're not answering anything with substance. Yes, it's a convienent strategy to assume everything is fake news when it doesn't fit your narrative. But that's not reality and it's pretty obvious that you're deflecting.
> Do you accept part or all of the entire post as factual?
Yes, he's an independent journalist that's reported on some big stories this year already. Given the actions against civil rights we've seen already from this administration, sending FBI agents to ask questions is certainly tame by comparison and very plausible.
what happened to "The Five W's" in journalism: "Who, what, where, when, and why"?