Speaking of which:
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tells Fox viewers to buy Tesla stock
Possibly not the most egregious of government law-breaking under Trump – but probably the most blatant and bizarre.
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Also an object lesson in how the same kind of tactics used by creationists are used by supporters of authoritarianism and fascism, and hence the spread of creationism can indeed lead to “great societal harm.”
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I’m glad you agree that due process is important, but fail to see where it is not the right choice. How can we distinguish between a citizen with rights and a criminal non-citizen except by allowing due process? It not a question of one man being illegally deported (tho that is bad enough), but any of us could be deported, citizens with rights or not.
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Hi Dan
I don’t believe either of us are known criminals or part of a criminal organisation like ms-13. What am I missing?
Agreed we are not criminals. Now suppose we are both accused of being members of MS-13 and unceremoniously thrown a prison in El Salvador. What should we do about it?
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I agree mere accusation is not enough.
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You’re missing the part where, after ICE picks you up and manhandles you into a truck for no reason other than that you were standing next to a building where an illegal immigrant lives, you get a chance to tell a court that you are a US citizen with no criminal record.
Without due process, you would be taken out of that truck and put onto a plane to El Salvador.
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@Roy kind of spoiled it already, but I’ll fill in the holes. I think we agree that mere accusation should be not be enough all by itself; there should be some evidence to back up the accusation, and some sort of hearing to evaluate that evidence, maybe even a trial. In other words, there should be due process.
But now Due Process is off the table, and we can be thrown into a dark hole of a foreign prison at the whim of whoever is in power, and there is nothing we can do about it.
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I think you make a good point and the same goes for the death penalty.
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Lack of due process is one of the hallmarks of fascism.
Even though the label of fascism has long been cast about far too casually, I think this period of American history is not one of those times. The danger is real. We see it in the news everyday. If someone attributes it to mere “fake news” and the “liberal media”, I will simply ask them to read the White House website and also watch the White House press briefings. That is all the evidence one needs.
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Right-wing nationalism is present in nearly all countries, and ascendant in many countries. These movements are xenophobic, racist, hate feminism, and despise democracy and tolerance. This was the case also in the 1930s. We had no problem labeling most of those movements as fascist then, and when many of those countries got subsumed into the Third Reich, the adherents of those parties became the enthusiastic collaborators of the Nazis. We are in a situation similar to the 1930s now. So whatever Trump’s personality is or isn’t, the worldwide threat is extreme. I am not saying that all the voters of these parties are fascists. But in order to “restore tradition” or “restore order” they end up voting for fascism.
When I was young I was fascinated by the literature of the 1930s and the dilemmas people faced coping with fascism. I would imagine myself facing these and would grandly decide that in such a situation “I would definitely do X, but I would absolutely never do Y!” I never dreamed that I would find myself in that situation in my own lifetime.
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Hi Allen
You may or may not be right here but I will concede the point for arguments sake. If we are on the tip of a fascist take over the question I would ask is how did we get here.
I would look back 25 years with the Bush administration where we started the ball rolling with excessive government deficit spending leading to increasing debt. No President since Bush has been able to change this trend.
Now due to higher interest rates our debt service is larger than our military budget.
I see some noise that claim we are addressing it but I am skeptical until any real results are demonstrated. Bottom line for me is that status quo is not ok at this point.
It’s not that difficult to plot the path – Fox News, Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party movement, and Mitch McConnell would be major milestones in the journey.
And I would point out that you’ve established no relationship between deficits and fascism.
And I would say that your “bottom line” misses the point – which is that as bad as the status quo was, things could get worse and
under Trump things have already gotten worse.
Due to Trump’s tariffs, you will have both an economic slowdown (and a likely recession), resulting in increasing unemployment, and increased inflation – i.e. stagflation – which, per Wikipedia:
presents a policy dilemma, as measures to curb inflation—such as tightening monetary policy—can exacerbate unemployment, while policies aimed at reducing unemployment may fuel inflation.
It’s taken Trump just a single quarter to tank the stock market, the bond market, the American economy and the World economy – it will be interesting to see how much worse he can make it in the remaining 3 3/4 years he has left in office. Trump is arrogant, ignorant and surrounds himself with fringe figures and yes-men who will agree with anything he says, no matter how ill-advised and counter-productive.
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One thing that the current situation in the US has confirmed for me: People don’t really much care about things like freedom, human rights, that their gov’t is democratic, etc. Not in a principled way. They will object if their personal freedom is abrogated in some way by the state. But if they are not personally affected, by an large, they are indifferent to the violation of the most basic human rights. I’m not particularly surprised by this, but it is sobering.
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Is this a global phenomenon, or a localised problem?
I can see the US, with its emphasis on “freedom to” over “freedom from”, being somewhat of an outlier – as long as your average American is still free to carry a gun, drive an oversized and inefficient monstrosity of a pickup, and eat carcinogenic ultra-processed food, they appear callously uncaring that anybody else is being denied due process, or that their government is corrupt.
I’m not claiming that it is confined to the US – but I’m not yet willing to endorse that it is a worldwide phenomenon.
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I think China is another example. Not to say old-fashioned brutal oppression does not still play a role there , but now that people’s standard of living has so greatly improved there I doubt we’ll see anything like the Tianneman Square uprising any time soon.
France? Italy? The UK? The far right is on the rise all over, and often thru support from voters in a democracy. Or that was the case. I think one of the few positives of Trump is that this might be reversing.
I think the Far Right had stalled in the UK, even before Trump. Reform UK only got 4 out of 650 Commons seats in last year’s election, and have had considerable internal turmoil since. They were hoping to replace the Conservatives as the main UK conservative party – but I think their window for doing this may be closing. They don’t look anything close to a ‘government in waiting’ – and its arguable which of them and the Tories look more like a clowncar at this stage.