The U.S. government shutdown has halted pay to the TSA, but not ICE, so ICE is taking over from the TSA in airports[1]. If you fly to the U.S., starting Monday apparently, the first think you're likely to see is masked gunmen giving you the eye.
The TSA is responsible for more than just airports. As someone with family who works (worked) on port security in the maritime division, I would argue that Chesterton's Fence [0] applies here just as much as anywhere else.
I feel like "form your own private paramilitary organisation with minimal oversight, then expand their reach by having them take over the operations of other government departments" has been done before somewhere, as part of a larger plan.
This is a historical pattern: Bringing border forces to bear against your own population, because those border forces are trained to deal with people who don't have the rights of the state.
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.
Hey, tone doesn't translate well over text, they did not use anu tone tags, and I'm already terrible at reading tone in the best of times. Lol, can you really blame me for at least asking? Haha.
Enter the country and you interact with CBP and that hasn't changed. CBP agents are the ones who murdered the legal observers in Minneapolis so there's that.
TSA checks bags for commercial airlines which is a service that should never have been nationalized.
TSA is mostly people who want a job and act pretty professionally in the hundreds or thousand times I’ve encountered them. ICE encourages people with anger issues who hate brown people to apply. These are not the same.
it isn’t about people and which group is mostly this or that. Americans have long accepted to have their Constitutional Rights violated at the airports so it really doesn’t matter if it is TSA or ICE or whatever three-letter gang runs it
This is binary thinking that has no place in predicting the real world. In practice, the specific person violating your constitutional rights makes a big difference in how badly your rights are violated.
Indeed, particularly given that ICE agents are going to be deployed to airports. Their penchant for killing civilians and otherwise violating civil rights only to lie about their actions hardly seems like a good fit for airport security duties they haven’t been trained to perform.
Your fears were unfounded paranoia fueled by sensationalist media and that's why everything was fine but instead of correcting your priors you're just assuming you "got lucky".
The media induced derangement on display here is fascinating.
I worked in the Pentagon for 10 years, and got my beak wet with neural nets there very early, back when we were using Playstation 3s for their GPUs.
I was staunchly against the Iraq war, but even when Bush was president I didn't let it compromise my patriotism.
The amount of people on here who ignore the fact that Iran was the primary enabler of Hamas' attack on 10/7/23, and therefore sowed the seeds of the destruction of Gaza, is insane. Basically, if Trump does a thing, they are against it, independent of the thing. There is no principle, just reactionary hatred. If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it. I am 100% positive on that assumption.
It seems like about 20% of people judge the actions of a us administration independent of their partisan positions. I am recently joined and cannot claim it is from any virtue on my part. A backlash against an attempted autocratic takeover is a common starting point for successful ones by an opposing party. Leftist autocratic coups are only slightly rarer than rightist ones. We are in the middle of an attempted rightist one, but that doesn't mean we are safe if we remove them.
>If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it. I am 100% positive on that assumption.
I think you're wrong here. As a Biden stan who's gone to the mat debating Biden's policies here on HN many times in the past, he lost pretty much all of the remaining good will he had by defending and supporting Israel for so long after it became clear what they were doing in Gaza. Biden wouldn't be getting a free pass in the Middle East if it were helping Israel's goals (ignoring the fact that Biden is much more of a dove than Trump).
Yes, they are flooding the zone with many alternative explanations so that they're both all deniable, and all accessible to anyone who finds just one of them convincing. This is a strategy.
Would the current state of affairs qualify for cancelling the mid-terms? Is that overly cynical?
Not in the US, not a US citizen or voter. My suspicion is the answer is "no, but it is not a given that a competent supreme court which looks likely to overturn the WH exists, if they say they want to do this"
It's absolutely overly cynical and also evidence that you are completely misinformed.
It's never happened in the entire history of this country, including when we literally had a Civil War.
Your media sources are creating a belief in your head that is utterly deranged from reality.
For example, ICE agents haven't "murdered legal observers" in any other locations than Minneapolis, despite the fact that they are operating all over the country. The reason for this is that the "legal observers" were actually super aggressive protesters in an environment that bordered on a riot due to the fact that local police were not creating a perimeter for these operations. Note that none of this has happened in Texas or Arizona or North Carolina or Florida, despite the fact that vastly more deportations are occurring in those locations. But your media doesn't tell you these details, does it?
All Red states. So if you roll over and let the federal government trample your state's sovereignty, they won't murder people in your state? Somehow I don't think that's what federalism was supposed to mean.
Trump nearly passed out with glee when he was talking to the Ukrainian president and found out elections are canceled, by their law, due to martial law because of the war. I would not so casually assume he won't try it here.
All the people who decided to stay in the Middle East even when the second carrier group was en route, and then thought they were news worth enough to get on camera and comment about there being no commercial flights out of there.
That's the strategy of Project 2025, make all the nice things we have much worse and broken so there's no choice but to scrap and start over. While they're in charge, of course.
Having somebody less incompetent, senile, and corrupt at the helm may not make things "magically go back to normal," but it's a step in the right direction. Necessary but not sufficient.
Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
Very few other people have Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way that connects the various extreme factions of the American right.
None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.
Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
The extreme factions of the right are a very small portion of the electorate. They generally don't decide elections beyond the primaries and generally turn out in favor of the right regardless.
Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men.
Many liberal people think he is an abberation, they would gladly return back to "normal". The point is, he is a symptom of a larger unaddressed sickness, there is no return to business as usual, it will only return far worse.
To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
America has neglected working class people for decades. The economy has shifted from supporting earning income to make a decent living, to protecting assets (bail outs etc.) Trump tapped into this and tricked these people into electing him, bringing along right wing or whatever they are.. and they got hold of power. Don't think numbers are there for this culture war crowd to stay in power unless they hitch a ride with someone.
(edited: typo)
You know what else would make everything worse? A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
But hey, it's not like they funded and backed a bunch of theocratic fanatics who committed a mass atrocity in Israel and provoked a war that destroyed Gaza or anything, right? Or that they were exporting massive quantities of drones to Putin for him to use to murder Ukrainian civilians, right? They were nice guys, and the 35K protesters they murdered deserved it, right?
We should have just let things keep rolling the way they were. It was all going so well, and at no point would the regime that was actively inciting terrorism all over the world for the last 47 years be a threat if they got nukes on the ICBMs we now know they had been a problem. I mean, heck, those missiles they shot at Diego Garcia were just fireworks, purely for decorative purposes, right?
The HN bubble is truly grand. My college girlfriend was the daughter of parents who fled the Ayatollah in 79. You people on here think everyone shares your values and worldview, and that the mullahs in Iran are rational actors. They are not. They are part of a specific sect of Shiite Islam that truly believes that bringing about an apocalypse is a desirable thing. It's such a foreign concept to you that you dismiss it as fantasy and misinformation. But it's real. And you simply lack the life experience to know it. You've never seen entire masses of people infected with the radical religious mind viruses that those of us with firsthand experience with religious fundamentalists have seen.
Imagine the Branch Davidians in Waco with nukes, and you start to scratch the surface of what this would look like if you let it play out.
> A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
Man, imagine that, how scary. I bet in theocratic regimes there's a bunch of stupid stuff going on, like a ~Secretary~ Minister of ~War~ Defense that justifies an attack on a foreign nation by calling it a holy war and prays every time he gives a speech to the troops.
Those theocrats probably do things like de-funding every science project they can when they get power. Or worse, maybe they think vaccines are against god's will and get a bunch of kids sick by opposing vaccines for preventable diseases. Hell they probably don't even teach their kids about evolution or gay people.
Can you imagine if a nation like that had nuclear weapons and long range missiles? Why, they might start a war for no reason.
I agree THAT ethno nationalist country in the middle east, with long-range ballistic missiles, secret nukes and a secret nuclear doctrine that hasn't signed any Non-Proliferation treaty should make everybody worried. But that country isn't Iran.
It's the only country in the world with nuclear weapons that at this moment gets bombarded by missiles right now, if that doesn't make you worried you aren't paying attention.
I feel the same. People have been brainwashed into hating people from their own countries (either the US or countries in Europe) so much that they'll rationalize islamism as a defense mechanism: when people chant "death to america" and burn american flags on campuses, they see nothing wrong.
When there are "sharia patrol" cars driven by bearded men in a major US city, they see nothing wrong.
When the mayor of NYC say it's now time for american citizens to "follow the teachings of Muhammad" (oh we could talk about his life), they still see nothing wrong. I think that mayor has been seen inviting a known terrorist recently too (don't have the link but I'm not surprised).
We're talking about people who are rooting for a regime publicly hanging athletes for speaking against islamism and sending islamist guards into hospitals to finish the wounded.
I'm 100% convinced that the islamist republic of Iran would nuke Israel with the atom bomb as soon as they'd have it. These people, just like Hamas, have sworn they'll erase Israel off the map.
I'm not jewish but I know that after Israel, I'm next.
It's sadly impossible to have a discussion with those refusing to see the inherent evil of islamism. And usually westerners people constantly refusing to criticize islamism tend to be the very same who defend feminism and who make, shamelessly, fun of christians (and I'm no christian either btw): go figure.
Yeah it's a good thing we dismantled that regime and totally didn't empower the most extreme and radical portion of it while removing the politicians who'd tempered that and turned the population against the US and Israel.
But hey, at least we've lifted sanctions and we are now sending them even more money because the oil market was completely destroyed so that's great right?
Obviously this is the best strategy because we can see how the Taliban was completely dismantled in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation right?
Unless you are proposing genocide of Iran or an eternal occupation, what we've done is kicked a hornets nest.
The narcissism of small differences on full display here.
There isn't a single "red state" in the US that requires women to cover their heads and bodies in public or executes people for speaking out against the "regime".
But you pretend like that's the case, while acting like Iran was just minding their own business when they have exported terror for decades, along with drones being used to murder Ukrainian civilians. I mean, I guess supporting Ukraine was soooo 2022-23, and now we're on to the new fashion trend of supporting the people helping to murder them because "orange man bad."
That's not what made it sound like Yoda. It was sticking "has been" at the end, and I agree there was a better choice stylistically: "Crazy how effective this admin has been at making everything worse."
One of President Donald Trump’s lines during the 2016 presidential campaign was his promise that, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’”
Would you qualify complaining about starting an unnecessary war as "whining"? Why? What about ICE agents killing American citizens? Adding unprecedented numbers to the federal deficit, etc.?
How nice it must be to be able to just dismiss these things.
> How nice it must be to be able to just dismiss these things.
I don't know anyone in the US in real life who is happy with the current situation, including people who voted for Trump. The cheer leaders are only visible online.
The people who voted for Harris are saying "we told you so," and the others are saying "he conned us."
I'm not sure where you live, but try going to some of the super-small towns in the Midwest. I unfortunately still see people openly wearing MAGA hats and have MAGA flags on the flag poles in their yards.
Trust me, as sad as it is, those people still exist.
For the people I know, it's mostly just been quiet silence, they don't really want to talk about it (and I don't force it). I know this is uncomfortable for them.
Outside that, what I've noticed in my area is a whole lot less trucks driving around with cartoonishly large American flags and pro-trump bumper stickers. Even homes that proudly flew the "Trump 2024" flags and flew the 2020 flags for a long time have taken those down.
Republicans here (Idaho) have been gleefully touching every 3rd rail (Medicaid, public school funding, public lands). I don't really have hope that the electorate will do anything about it, but who knows. I've never really seen such bold actions against the citizenry.
I don't understand the "he conned us" stance. He was literally saying all these things before getting elected. He wasn't being coy about it, we all knew it would be terrible, and here we are. What was the con exactly?
If there's one thing you can't accuse Trump of, it's ever masking how utterly nonsensical he is.
There are petty peevish folks too, to quote myself lately
October 2025
"I believe Trumps gutting of institutions of learning, culture, democracy, law is punishment for the Branch Covidians. I believe this punishment must continue for some time until the lesson is learned about abuse of power"
Should we reconcile this great nation, not balkanize, not be in an antebellum period, not be a Weimar republic, and walk back the rubicon and cross into more quiet waters, we must turn our attention to what made this country great.
What has made it unique? That our constitution is explicit about what freedoms and rights are reserved for the people and are not to be trampled, touched, or looked at by the government. State, Local, or Federal.
Our founding fathers and great men who preceded us recognized government as a necessary evil, one that must be kept at bay, not used as a violent tool to achieve outcomes.
All of these institutions must walk back their power, give the rights back to the people, to be truly afraid of the populace. Each tax collector must shiver when he goes to work, and each police officer be fully aware that a single parking ticket is an act of violence.
All said, I am afraid, we have lost that. And now we must face the future hoping that someday, another group of smart men can realize something so unique, so right, so innately just and moral was achieved by the signing of the constitution that it must be tried again.
That’s going to age as well as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did. The reality is that only Israel was threatened by Iran and the US is caught up in it simply because we act as their vassal.
People vote for the current government. I’m not sure why you would expect others’ to pay for americas internal messes, we’re already busy dealing with the external ones.
The federal government hasn't passed a budget because the Democrats are blocking it. They feel it's worth the political gamble to cause Americans pain and that it'll turn on Trump.
I got jumped in Italy couple of weeks ago. I was wearing a "volleyball dad" hoodie my kid bought for me but did not realize that the "volleyball dad" is etched in the middle of a large American flag covering my entire back. Luckily (for him, not me :) ) three police officers were 10 meters away walking the area dealing with apre ski drunks and restrained him. fun times
The current situation has been giving me so many flashbacks. Here, my GWB-era teens had the terror threat level, and now we're lazily reimagining State Department traveling warnings as a dark slapstick version (be afraid everywhere, American!)
Iran's source is the one who said they did it in the first place :facepalm: and it was confirmed by UK
As soon as they felt like denying it would be better for them they did and took down https://en.mehrnews.com/ where it was published. Unless you say mehr was defaced and the news were planted by Mossad
No thankyou.
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cede0qyvqz3o
Replacing them with ICE as a political gesture? Not so much
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
And that's stopped them?
TSA checks bags for commercial airlines which is a service that should never have been nationalized.
It's even more disgusting than that:
"Tom Homan: ICE officers will not assist with airport security scanning amid TSA staffing shortage"
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/5795316-homan-ice-...
Which implies they've been trained?
Your fears were unfounded paranoia fueled by sensationalist media and that's why everything was fine but instead of correcting your priors you're just assuming you "got lucky".
The media induced derangement on display here is fascinating.
Impossible to prove otherwise. No reason to try his luck.
I was staunchly against the Iraq war, but even when Bush was president I didn't let it compromise my patriotism.
The amount of people on here who ignore the fact that Iran was the primary enabler of Hamas' attack on 10/7/23, and therefore sowed the seeds of the destruction of Gaza, is insane. Basically, if Trump does a thing, they are against it, independent of the thing. There is no principle, just reactionary hatred. If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it. I am 100% positive on that assumption.
I think you're wrong here. As a Biden stan who's gone to the mat debating Biden's policies here on HN many times in the past, he lost pretty much all of the remaining good will he had by defending and supporting Israel for so long after it became clear what they were doing in Gaza. Biden wouldn't be getting a free pass in the Middle East if it were helping Israel's goals (ignoring the fact that Biden is much more of a dove than Trump).
Because on top of doing terrible things, the non-terrible things he does, he does incredibly badly.
> There is no principle, just reactionary hatred.
No, we’re all good little Bayesians around here.
> If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it.
You’re really missing what’s going on here. The reason that people liked Biden is that he would not have launched this war.
Nothing happened prior to 10/07/23, no sir. Just an evil country doing evil things. Of course the US and Israel are victims on all this.
I re-flagged OP.
It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
Not in the US, not a US citizen or voter. My suspicion is the answer is "no, but it is not a given that a competent supreme court which looks likely to overturn the WH exists, if they say they want to do this"
Trying to cancel elections seems like it'd be a lot harder than in other countries.
It's never happened in the entire history of this country, including when we literally had a Civil War.
Your media sources are creating a belief in your head that is utterly deranged from reality.
For example, ICE agents haven't "murdered legal observers" in any other locations than Minneapolis, despite the fact that they are operating all over the country. The reason for this is that the "legal observers" were actually super aggressive protesters in an environment that bordered on a riot due to the fact that local police were not creating a perimeter for these operations. Note that none of this has happened in Texas or Arizona or North Carolina or Florida, despite the fact that vastly more deportations are occurring in those locations. But your media doesn't tell you these details, does it?
All Red states. So if you roll over and let the federal government trample your state's sovereignty, they won't murder people in your state? Somehow I don't think that's what federalism was supposed to mean.
Trump nearly passed out with glee when he was talking to the Ukrainian president and found out elections are canceled, by their law, due to martial law because of the war. I would not so casually assume he won't try it here.
Like actually tell us what you know so we can make useful decisions about our safety.
"Americans abroad should follow the guidance in security alerts issued by the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate."
Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.
Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men.
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/why-republicans-can-win-with-t...
To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
But it's true he is a symptom.
But hey, it's not like they funded and backed a bunch of theocratic fanatics who committed a mass atrocity in Israel and provoked a war that destroyed Gaza or anything, right? Or that they were exporting massive quantities of drones to Putin for him to use to murder Ukrainian civilians, right? They were nice guys, and the 35K protesters they murdered deserved it, right?
We should have just let things keep rolling the way they were. It was all going so well, and at no point would the regime that was actively inciting terrorism all over the world for the last 47 years be a threat if they got nukes on the ICBMs we now know they had been a problem. I mean, heck, those missiles they shot at Diego Garcia were just fireworks, purely for decorative purposes, right?
The HN bubble is truly grand. My college girlfriend was the daughter of parents who fled the Ayatollah in 79. You people on here think everyone shares your values and worldview, and that the mullahs in Iran are rational actors. They are not. They are part of a specific sect of Shiite Islam that truly believes that bringing about an apocalypse is a desirable thing. It's such a foreign concept to you that you dismiss it as fantasy and misinformation. But it's real. And you simply lack the life experience to know it. You've never seen entire masses of people infected with the radical religious mind viruses that those of us with firsthand experience with religious fundamentalists have seen.
Imagine the Branch Davidians in Waco with nukes, and you start to scratch the surface of what this would look like if you let it play out.
Man, imagine that, how scary. I bet in theocratic regimes there's a bunch of stupid stuff going on, like a ~Secretary~ Minister of ~War~ Defense that justifies an attack on a foreign nation by calling it a holy war and prays every time he gives a speech to the troops.
Those theocrats probably do things like de-funding every science project they can when they get power. Or worse, maybe they think vaccines are against god's will and get a bunch of kids sick by opposing vaccines for preventable diseases. Hell they probably don't even teach their kids about evolution or gay people.
Can you imagine if a nation like that had nuclear weapons and long range missiles? Why, they might start a war for no reason.
It's the only country in the world with nuclear weapons that at this moment gets bombarded by missiles right now, if that doesn't make you worried you aren't paying attention.
I feel the same. People have been brainwashed into hating people from their own countries (either the US or countries in Europe) so much that they'll rationalize islamism as a defense mechanism: when people chant "death to america" and burn american flags on campuses, they see nothing wrong.
When there are "sharia patrol" cars driven by bearded men in a major US city, they see nothing wrong.
When the mayor of NYC say it's now time for american citizens to "follow the teachings of Muhammad" (oh we could talk about his life), they still see nothing wrong. I think that mayor has been seen inviting a known terrorist recently too (don't have the link but I'm not surprised).
We're talking about people who are rooting for a regime publicly hanging athletes for speaking against islamism and sending islamist guards into hospitals to finish the wounded.
I'm 100% convinced that the islamist republic of Iran would nuke Israel with the atom bomb as soon as they'd have it. These people, just like Hamas, have sworn they'll erase Israel off the map.
I'm not jewish but I know that after Israel, I'm next.
It's sadly impossible to have a discussion with those refusing to see the inherent evil of islamism. And usually westerners people constantly refusing to criticize islamism tend to be the very same who defend feminism and who make, shamelessly, fun of christians (and I'm no christian either btw): go figure.
But hey, at least we've lifted sanctions and we are now sending them even more money because the oil market was completely destroyed so that's great right?
Obviously this is the best strategy because we can see how the Taliban was completely dismantled in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation right?
Unless you are proposing genocide of Iran or an eternal occupation, what we've done is kicked a hornets nest.
There isn't a single "red state" in the US that requires women to cover their heads and bodies in public or executes people for speaking out against the "regime".
But you pretend like that's the case, while acting like Iran was just minding their own business when they have exported terror for decades, along with drones being used to murder Ukrainian civilians. I mean, I guess supporting Ukraine was soooo 2022-23, and now we're on to the new fashion trend of supporting the people helping to murder them because "orange man bad."
I don’t think your concern for civilian casualties is genuine.
---
*EDIT*: Corrected word. Lol.
https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2016/user-clip-too-much...
Trump says US is 'winning so much' in longest ever State of the Union - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhQUGjRtq-M - February 25th, 2026
Hence the joke, "I am tired of winning." as the situation continues to rapidly degrade through policy choices. So much winning, it's too much.
How nice it must be to be able to just dismiss these things.
I don't know anyone in the US in real life who is happy with the current situation, including people who voted for Trump. The cheer leaders are only visible online.
The people who voted for Harris are saying "we told you so," and the others are saying "he conned us."
Trust me, as sad as it is, those people still exist.
Outside that, what I've noticed in my area is a whole lot less trucks driving around with cartoonishly large American flags and pro-trump bumper stickers. Even homes that proudly flew the "Trump 2024" flags and flew the 2020 flags for a long time have taken those down.
Republicans here (Idaho) have been gleefully touching every 3rd rail (Medicaid, public school funding, public lands). I don't really have hope that the electorate will do anything about it, but who knows. I've never really seen such bold actions against the citizenry.
If there's one thing you can't accuse Trump of, it's ever masking how utterly nonsensical he is.
October 2025
"I believe Trumps gutting of institutions of learning, culture, democracy, law is punishment for the Branch Covidians. I believe this punishment must continue for some time until the lesson is learned about abuse of power"
Should we reconcile this great nation, not balkanize, not be in an antebellum period, not be a Weimar republic, and walk back the rubicon and cross into more quiet waters, we must turn our attention to what made this country great. What has made it unique? That our constitution is explicit about what freedoms and rights are reserved for the people and are not to be trampled, touched, or looked at by the government. State, Local, or Federal. Our founding fathers and great men who preceded us recognized government as a necessary evil, one that must be kept at bay, not used as a violent tool to achieve outcomes. All of these institutions must walk back their power, give the rights back to the people, to be truly afraid of the populace. Each tax collector must shiver when he goes to work, and each police officer be fully aware that a single parking ticket is an act of violence.
All said, I am afraid, we have lost that. And now we must face the future hoping that someday, another group of smart men can realize something so unique, so right, so innately just and moral was achieved by the signing of the constitution that it must be tried again.
Calvin - 2022
to not be political this lies at the heart of principles, morals, meritocracy
values that the current gvt lacks & things that drove america forward.
There you go - mystery solved.
Please don't do this.
The current situation has been giving me so many flashbacks. Here, my GWB-era teens had the terror threat level, and now we're lazily reimagining State Department traveling warnings as a dark slapstick version (be afraid everywhere, American!)
https://theonion.com/no-blood-for-oil-vs-exactly-how-much-oi...
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-fires-missiles-remot...
And Iran denies it as well: https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2035477318055985648
Makes you wonder who really did launch those missiles?
As soon as they felt like denying it would be better for them they did and took down https://en.mehrnews.com/ where it was published. Unless you say mehr was defaced and the news were planted by Mossad