DHS Invokes Immigration Enforcement to Justify Gathering Americans' DNA
reason.com
reason.com
This is governmental overreach and should concern everybody regardless of political affiliation.
I've had extremely respectful dialog with others who don't embrace my values and I find their reasoning to be specious at best.
I have respect for old school conservatism that advocates for limited government but contemporary conservatives no longer seem to care about that (except if it's programs they don't like).
My initial comment still stands: the governmental action of the OP is intended purely to be oppressive and it will not be wielded with any sense of propriety.
I abhor partisan politics and am more than happy to point out flaws on the Left but we've gone through the looking glass on the Right. It's literally a cult of personality and I take no pleasure in saying that.
While a two party system is not a good thing (George Washington warned us about political parties), having proper debate over policies and ideas is a good thing to have and we no longer have that. I've followed American politics for half a century and can unequivocally state that the situation we have here is not normal.
I'm cynical enough that I think this is fairly clear evidence that some political affiliations are less sincere than others, but very few people will acknowledge this.
I can guarantee that the people who argue that the second amendment is more important than keeping people from mass-murdering school children would happily cheer on the government if they started confiscating guns from "the enemy".
Something very close already happened. It wasn't confiscation, but rather with the exact scenario of night time home defense they always trot out. Kenneth Walker lawfully exercised his second amendment right to night time home defense and the government jackboots breaking down the door retaliated by using the place as a shooting gallery, resulting in the death of his partner Breonna Taylor. Rather than realizing the same thing could easily happen to them when exercising our cherished second amendment rights, most of the second amendment fundamentalist types simply rallied around the government agents who committed the murder.
I think the hypocrisy and lack of reasoning ability is strong to begin with, but I think con artist Grump also has an uncanny knack for making gullible people rationalize anything.
So when I see people do math that way, I don't think those folks are hypocritical; rather, I think they are just white supremacists, regardless of how they'd protest about that understanding of their position.
One alternative is maybe they just default to cheerleading government power no matter what (eg authoritarianism), and only understand lofty ideals like Constitutional rights in the context of things they directly experience and don't like.
Let's say Walker/Taylor was a working class white couple, still living in an apartment and unmarried. It seems like more stretching, but there would have still been some reasons to other them and cheer on the murderers. Especially when the media inevitably went to work dredging up other emotionally-laden details. It's always possible to list enough details that someone seems different enough, no?
Personally, I don't feel one way or anther about my reasoning- I feel like I am simply taking folks at their word and trying to understand them in a way that doesn't reduce their position to hypocrisy. There are other tools to understand them, this is just one
I do agree that if Taylor was white-identifying people would have found some other reason to support her murder.
However, I often think of the quote about how "I didn't shoot you because you're a n--, you're a n-- because I shot you".
One fact about white-supremacy culture is that it requires the adoption of very narrow and constantly changing cultural signals. It is, thus, an "empty" signifier: there are both "no white people" and any specific person can theoretically enjoy WS culture if they "act correctly". In that way works very well under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, as someone like Mark Fisher might point out.
In that way, I understand that "whiteness" is about how people are interpolated by the state/community/themselves rather than, say, "skin tone", even if those physical traits are often a hard barrier for the folks doing the interpolation.
That culture is how a lot of folks, as I understand them, square their "love of freedom" with the murder of, say, Renee Cross; she violated XYZ norm (about whiteness) and should rightfully be subjected to the state violence reserved for non-white folks. It's no accident that the current political violence of the state is oriented around "illegal" (to be understood as 'brown') people rather than, say, the world bank or climate justice or student loans or housing.
To be fair, those freedom-loving folks would probably say that their position isn't about "whiteness"- that is certainly my interpolation of their position in an attempt to take them seriously instead of dismissing them as hypocritical idiots. I believe they would, as a short-hand, say that that thy just want people to "act correctly/legally/quietly/with civility" or whatever (not be a lesbian, don't honky your horn, don't color your hair, don't yell at the gestapo, etc).
However, it feels easy enough to unpack their desire for norms into a set of "very narrow and constantly changing cultural signals".
And while there are a lot of tools to analyze how these folks came to believe that their norms are "the" norms, I feel like WS Culture is one easy and useful tool for that work.
Or, at least that tool feels like an easy handle to start to dig out why WS culture is a death cult, harmful to the folks who lean into it: there is no one who is really white enough to survive getting murdered by the state, yet that culture's adherents have decided that somehow that culture won't harm them (and, further, that anyone who can't adopt that culture really isn't a human anyhow).
I used to be a Marxist but at some point I've become a kind of race-reductionist instead of a class reductionist:
for the same reason that if the police can't summarily murder black folks, they probably would have a hard time murdering me,
if WS culture has a hard time operating, then all the other class conditions which operate through it (here I am thinking about subject-ifying people into an authoritarian state through cultural hegemony or, if you prefer, the ISAs, or if you prefer the main tools of "Capitalism") will have a hard time operating against me and my fellow humans.
That is to say, I find the math a lot easier when I just examine these kinds of state-sanctioned murders through the lens of White Supremacy culture; other tools I've found helpful have required me to work out the psychology of a bunch of idiosyncratic cultural practices that end up expressing themselves as internal contradictions and hypocrisy, and I am too old and tired to do that kind of comparative literature any more.
As for this one, overall I find it compelling but I'm left with two main questions: First, is it a good idea to call it white supremacy culture. And second, is it really more useful to wrap the topic up under one label rather than calling out each individual specific dynamic that makes it up (eg hypocrisy, othering, dishonesty, lack of analysis/forethought, and so on)
I can agree that it seems to be centered on some imagined archetype of a white, rural, "real American". I can also see that it descends from slavery, and white supremacy in general. But it still feels needlessly divisive.
Furthermore, defenders of it would also point out aspects of white European culture that are industrious and have made our society very wealthy (despite non-uniformly). I'm not looking to make those arguments, as they're adjacent to or even directly in support of the fascism, but I do think they do contain some truth that needs to be acknowledged in any synthesis.
And then balling it all up in one "WS culture" label rather than focusing on the individual dynamics. I get it, having a straightforward touchstone that explains all of these behaviors rather than trying to wack-a-mole with the surface manifestations. Every time a fascist has bitten on my argument that Breonna Taylor is a second amendment issue, I've always been greeted with some excuse of why 2A magically isn't applicable - so it's not like directly pointing out the hypocrisy is productive. And reading your essay did feel like it "fit" in that it was talking about a whole iceberg rather than the few parts poking out of the water. It was certainly felt much nicer and positive-sum to be reading this than arguing with the umpteenth fascist booster falling back on "but it's legal" arguments to justify the murder of Renee.
Still, I worry about alienating too many people by confronting the topic head on too hard. Maybe this worry is moot at the point we're at though, and we really do need a hard line in the sand and full-on frontal assault to stop what is now being done to our country. I don't know.
(also, define "ISAs" ? It feels like it's going to be obvious but I'm drawing a blank)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403842 . You had missed the mark on where I was coming from, making most of it inapplicable, but there was one thing in particular that perhaps had some fleeting insight that I wanted you to elaborate on more.
Call your Congress critters and let them know how you feel. This is just institutional creep that, like an invasive plant, needs to be pruned back from time to time.
If topics like this make you too emotional to participate, you can just ignore it. Nobody is forcing you to respond to things that make you upset.
Regardless, I already flag articles like this to hide them from my front page. I sometimes comment because I’d prefer a world where I didn’t have to do that.
Like I said, there are already plenty of sources for this kind of content. We don’t really need HN to be yet another Reddit or Bluesky.
The sky isn’t falling, chicken little. However, your emotional disregulation is still being used as a convenient political tool, even after all these years.