The Intercept has a long article, supported by horrifying video evidence, detailing case after case of armed, often masked and non-uniformed ICE agents in unmarked vehicles rounding up and assaulting people who have not done anything wrong and violently attacking bystanders who try to record the events or protest this thuggish behavior. The ICE agents then later falsely claim without evidence that they were attacked first, though the idea that ordinary unarmed individuals are going to attack gangs of armed people is absurd on its face.
I really cannot do justice to the article by providing excerpts. It has to be read and the videos seen. It is a disgusting series of actions that has to be considered criminal but is being carried out by agents of the government, who have been given a quota of people to arrest and deport and are reaching it by going to places where Latino people work in low-level jobs and grabbing them off the street by brutal means.
No one who reads these cases can then deny in good conscience that we are living in a police state.
From an article at Vox: “Trump, unlike [previous] presidents, has clearly expressed, in word and deed, his disregard of any limits on his powers to do pretty much anything he wants to do,” writes David Post, a legal scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. “It gives each individual act of malfeasance — such as ‘nullifying’ a federal statute — a much, much more sinister resonance.”
Not far from here, the owner of the China Moon Restaurant was hauled away by ICE. The local police chief was not notified. The chief said he was at the restaurant within 10 minutes of being contacted about it, and the owner and ICE were already long gone.
https://www.uticaod.com/story/news/local/2025/07/09/ice-makes-arrest-in-camden-owner-of-china-moon-taken-into-custody/84521783007/
ICE claims the owner has been in the country illegally for 25 years. At this point, I no longer trust their claims. Either way, it is obvious that this small business owner does not make any sort of positive contribution to his community and is a huge threat to the security of our nation. Clearly part of a sleeper cell that will be reactivated around 2075. /s
The Guardian
George Monbiot
“How does the right tear down progressive societies? It starts with a joke”
.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/10/right-progressive-societies-joke-glastonbury-starve-benefit-rod-liddle-lewis-schaffer
https://roncobb.net/img/cartoons/pol/ihm4033-on-No_More_Anarchy-pol.jpg
It’s not a police state because a police state is what *other* countries do.
Just like how “indoctrination” and “terrorism” are what other people do. Christianity (or Islam, or occasionally Hindu) is either the only real religion or the only thing which is not a religion, depending on who’s saying it and why. The enemy is definitely doing whatever evils I imagine them doing because I’ve defined them as “the enemy who does whatever evils I imagine them doing”, and anything I do to the enemy isn’t evil because I also defined them as “the enemy who deserves whatever I do to them”. If someone does evil things to me because they think *I’m* the enemy, they’re wrong, because enemies are other people and I’m not other people, I’m me, so they’re just doing that because they’re evil and therefore the real enemy. Also the unwanted sex which I forced on someone wasn’t rape, because I’m not a rapist, and when I took some other person’s stuff it wasn’t theft, because I’m a good person who deserves things and I’m pretty sure they’re not.
I’ve never seen anyone who appears to believe in all of the above, and I’ve rarely seen anyone directly admit to such things, but they all seem to stem from the same line of *not* thinking: a general lack of self-awareness, and claiming a monopoly on goodness for whatever they personally identify as.
…oh wait, and I should have added: “Straight” is the only thing which is not a sexual orientation, because I have defined “sexual orientation” as anything which is “not straight”, don’t you dare associate me with those [slurs] even categorically. “Cisgender” is a slur for “normal”, same reason. I even saw “white is not a race” once.
How can having a quota fit with probable cause and the 4th amendment? Basically the Trump coup’s strategy is “what happens if we ignore the law?”