Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
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Wow, I wonder how they got SSH session logs?!
The breadcrumb trail here is chilling.
It's so reassuring to know that all a cloud provider needs to compromise its users trust is an official looking letterhead.
Definitely 0% chance they could ever be phished by a foreign (or domestic) power with enough email (or letter) know-how.
At least other big tech companies were forced to kneel with secret (unconstitutional) FISA orders. Both Apple and Google at least try to show that they're pushing back.
EG: google shifted location data to local device only to combat Geo fencing warrants
EG: Apple [requiring warrants](https://apnews.com/article/apple-push-notification-data-cour...) to read push notifications
(why aren't push notifications E2E encrypted in the year-of-our-lord 202X?)
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28831278-govuscourts...
Complicit?
Two things are true
1) Tech has become more financial people and "techbros" than principled nerds.
2) The powers of the USG have become a lot stronger and far reaching- quite literally to the level where talking about complying with an order is itself a crime.
Except for the little problem that, you know, observed reality is the exact described observation (organisations become more left wing).
>I also note that "O'Sullivan's law" appears to only exist in the minds of Conservapedia and Grokipedia, nowhere else
Nowhere else, certainty not on Wikipedia!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#...
>and that a full one half of the comment history of this account, which has negative karma but is somehow not banned
Ban the wrongthink! Preserve the narrative!
>comments that attempt to muddy political waters by reversing the left and right.
BlueSky brainrot response and delusional projection. What a combo.
At this point there's a non-zero chance you and your employees are detained on spurious national security grounds, or simply end up in an ICE internment centre - accidently or otherwise.
The other side wants to take pictures of and track the masked men taking their neighbors.
This are very much the same, insert meme
And you think there wasn't some legal process involved in the investigation and conviction? There was and it didn't go far enough.
For you they at least require a warrant. Usually. Unless you're crossing the border or are undocumented or something.
The problem here is the cops not where the computer sits.
You can also use proxys and/or tor to create external accounts/upload stuff.
Yeah that’s gonna be super helpful, try to keep chanting “fourth amendment!” while pinned to the ground and the heavily armed swat team that just blew your door away is searching through the house.
I do watch too many movies.
If they don't, they can still do that, but anything they find will likely not be usable in court and you'll have a straightforward civil rights case.
And... Them stomping on you during an illegal search doesn't make it a legal one and doesn't shield them from liability.
Even in a legal search, I'm guessing they can't decide to curb stomp you just because without the risk of legal/other liability.
However, today, every segment in the pipeline of judice -- LEO to PA/DA[1] to judiciary to BoPs -- is utterly subverted ideologically. What happens in this pipeline -- especially regarding a 4A case -- will have little to do with justice, but rather who you are, who is trying you, and what court they manage to pick. And of course the hands and eyes of the whole system is the Executive Branch, now in lockstep[2] at the Federal Level.
Reactionaries will insist to their dying day that the opposing ideology did this first, so today they have the right to do it back harder.
What this means is that it doesn't matter what your rights are, or who has what paper. Because who's taking your case? Where will it go? How long will it take?
In one sense, the reactionaries are right: an opposing ideology HAS been doing this, for a long time. But it's not hollywood or the academy or the commmunists or the legions of wokedom. It's your boss, and your boss' boss. Using their cushion of money to avoid any kind of criminal and civil responsibilities by simply waiting out everyone else in court. They're the ones who broke the ground here, and the post-GWoT security state drove a bus through it, as if Keanu Reeves was at the wheel.
Anyway at this late hour in our accursed year of 2026 . . none of it matters. Doesn't matter who started it, doesn't matter what side you happen to like or not like. Same result: the laws on paper will not protect you. Don't make the possibly fatal mistake of thinking they will. Think like a guerilla, think like Snowden.
[1] But not quite with every SAO, a hairline fracture in the cathedral of oppression we've voted to have built all around us.
[2] Or at least as much "lockstep" as can be bought with the current executive's level of competence. The Dominionists and the Dark Enlightenment sorts are the beating heart of intelligence in the reactionary wing today, and they are still mostly staying in the background, waiting for the collapse.
no such thing called constitutional protections in 2026 USA.
Having your own server and infra, at least in part.
>Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server?
The government doesn't have infinite resources, nor is it immune to political considerations (obviously, that's the problem here!). There is an enormous, qualitative and quantitative difference between:
vs Scale is inherent in the topic here. It's not just "why", "HOW" is "ICE running one of the largest anti-left surveillance ops"? Well, in part because they can do so so cheaply, efficiently, and stealthily via purely electronic means. They aren't kicking down ten million doors and shooting ten million dogs, and indeed they CAN'T do that, not because they wouldn't like to but because it's physically impossible with their resources and would provoke furious (undoubtedly including some lethal) pushback.And again, even if absolutely nothing else, it means something to know they're after you. Nothing stops you from immediately surrendering your server when asked, but you can then also instantly get a lawyer/support and push back right then and there. You can't adapt to what you either never even realize happened or only realized too late.
I think it is a threat model thing primarily, which I should have been more clear about. I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read. But the ssh thing is a totally valid concern for someone doing different activities than I am and I shouldn't have dismissed it.
>I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read
I guess I'd ask if you're really sure about that as a threat model? The fact is that such things are really really rare, particularly for anything white collar-ish. They get press precisely because they're unicorns. The "lawful" bit as well, one of the whole things here is that it's, at best, very dubiously lawful at all; they've been able to skirt that question so far via keeping it all secret and trying to hide from individual suit. Can't do that if a warrant from a local magistrate judge is needed and a private residence is raided though.
In contrast "you can beat the rap but not the ride" seems less dramatic but a lot more common, and in particular more than actual jail all the little ways the government has tried to fuck with people (like putting them on travel lists) that are opaque and much more difficult to even prove are the result of an organized scheme. I'm personally more worried in the near future about "chilling effects at a scale", not hundreds of activists in gulags but millions of people who get pressure in terms of financials or tax investigations or pressure on employers or always getting pulled in the security lines and on and on, and then some sizable fraction change their behavior as a result. It feels more concretely productive and practical to focus on making sure the government would have trouble both scaling and hiding unconstitutional behavior.
Where's the furious pushback for the people they've murdered already?
You're treating this as if the worst thing that can happen will happen, when it's more of a numbers game. They do these raids occasionally on one or two people in order to scare tens of thousands of other people away from participating.
DCs also get bullshit raids sometimes and have processes that don't involve an immediate permanent blacklist.
You have to realise it's a move of desperation by the attackers. If they are seizing a server, it means they don't have anything and they're hoping beyond hope they can get something, anything, from that server.
The US is currently, probably, still a Democracy with a semi-functioning independent Judiciary and public pressure can still have an impact.
Although it may still be possible that some jurisdictions will emerge, even within the US, that have the capacity to preserve basic civil liberties for their residents, whether via tacit agreement or overt paramilitary enforcement.
I wouldn't bet my kids' childhoods on that happening, though.
There is at least still the ability to recognize tyranny when it arrives that exists in the culture here. People have the option of playing jurisdictional arbitrage with their data. ICE isn't part of the actual judiciary and even the DOJ loses cases - routinely, now, under this admin, a mindblowing change from the gears that exercised discretion to keep its reputation under all circumstances.
The case that revealed all this abuse of authority is a relatively minor and poorly chosen set of facts that the government has a real possibility of taking to trial and lose on. What ICE is doing is authoritarian drag compared to pretty much everywhere else that has the capacity to have such agencies in the first place. ICE is genuinely incompetent because all this is new to them, because it's both unlawful and culturally unacceptable, and running a surveillance state is not reflexively easy to most people. They don't know how to prioritize, how to cover things up whether the authority exists or not, and how to even properly police themselves. They don't know how to passively let information reach them and instead everything is loud and noisy and leaves paper trails and frequently ineffectual. What's important is maintaining that reflex about how all this is fundamentally unacceptable in every sense.
A critical mass of people pushing back against fascism leave a country, and that country tends to devolve into the kind of place that starts wars with its neighbors.
This is why I always turn my head and squint at Americans fleeing to Canada, as if an America that fully embraced everything they see it doing wouldn't come right after Canada next.
Imagine a world where we all use Gmail, and one where we all host email on our own servers the host can't get into. In the latter world, a wiretap can identify who's sending mail to who, but not read the email, nor identify the IP address that downloaded any individual email. That's a severe handicap for them over just being able to read your mail. If you have 10 people on each server, they get even less info (but the server owner gets more).
Two concrete questions. Did Fly challenge this request, or just comply? And does he still think server-side trust is a non-issue when the identity in this case was built entirely from provider-side records (signup IP, SSH audit logs, a Stripe fingerprint)?
When I said in 2023 that the infrastructure around E2EE matters, he called it misinformation (rather aggressively).
This case looks a lot like the infrastructure mattering.
As much as you'd like his take to, I don't think he's out to burn bridges or open himself up to a lawsuit.
This is an unreasonable request.
"technical and network-activity records from fly.io included:
SSH session logs (CSV format) listing multiple "New SSH session" entries for <redacted> with verified=true between approximately 2026-03-26 and 2026-04-01, timestamped in UTC.
outbound-connection records (CSV format) reflecting numerous TCP port 443 connections originating from internal fly.io addresses <redacted> to external IP addresses attributed to AMAZON-02 (Amazon Web Services) in the US and Cloudflarenet (Cloudflare)".
"i wonder if fly.io bothers to vet/challenge records requests or if they just hand data over".
(this one can be edited, though. very strange)
thanks dang/tomhow.
the comment that started this was quoting directly from the HSI document.
this comment was one that was killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273618 can you please tell me how i can write it so your bot doesn't think i am a bot?
same for this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273525 or this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50274615. i'll take advice on how to rewrite the original one too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50272749) because im at a loss for words how it was classified as genai.
edit: i just ran all of my recent comments through pangram and they came back 100% human (which i knew, of course, considering i wrote them), so i am really not clear on how you want me to write my comments. apparently using my own words isn't enough for you or your bot.
False positives are going to happen, no matter how much we try to make our systems infallible, and you're welcome to email us if any comments of yours get killed and aren't quickly vouched by other users.
I can still confirm that your comments weren't being killed via any deliberate moderator intervention.
the most annoying part is that i got no indication that i was suddenly shadowbanned. if someone didn't tell me, it would have probably been a day or two at least of wondering why i had no engagement on my comments.
no notification, no appeal system outside of email and pray. very cool system.
It's nice that this place maintains an email endpoint that's actually staffed by humans who can intervene if needed. That's more than can be said about most places these days.
shadow bans here have no purpose. i would have found out in a couple days even if no one told me. so yes, it might as well just be a regular ban, correct. at least that way i would know what rule i broke.
"They don't know who hacked them? Malpractice. What if it was the government?"
This lobbying means that the politicians might be elected by "us" but they work for "them" - the "lobbyists."
Does this answer your question sufficiently?
One is a bribe the other is a health insurance program.
I can’t speak to UBI but it’s not a common platform anyways.
Consider all of the sources of the available tracking data on a person in the United States. If you don't have a cell phone, don't drive a car, don't walk around outdoor networked cameras, don't patronize businesses that have networked cameras, don't use a credit card, how exactly are you interacting with this society?
Also re: AI, how do we not fall behind those who are willing/on the same team as Anthropic, OpenAI, X... SOTA models are currently fully captured by ideologies I would consider to be willfully and gleefully violating nearly all human rights.
Now they can just chip away at whatever regulation is left, and create mistrust in oversight bodies and the rigging of the game is complete.
Better than communism, the government hardly even has to pretend to work for the benefit of the people, because the wealth imbalance has a closed circuit of money between private entities and elections. They can bring suitcases of cash, walk in the front door literally holding a chainsaw and prune off every olive branch extended toward the citizens.
These election "investments" are clearly paying off at high multiples now. Why spend your money in a capitalist competition when you can more efficiently spend it in public elections to eliminate competition, divert tax revenue directly into your businesses and eliminate any responsibility you should have? Do a Nazi salute for the whole world to see, and watch the propagandized twist themselves into whatever shape pretzel you ask them to.
Whether you see that as good or bad or something which needs to be checked and controlled is a separate discussion, but it's an obvious and expected result.
I’m voting against the face eating leopard party every time. I’m not voting for someone. I would like very much to be voting for someone instead of against someone.
The internet era has brought about the rise of small dollar donors making an outsized impact (for better or worse - it's not always a good thing)
This has given rise to more forms of populism (left and right, benign and toxic)
In any case, it does provide some counter weight to large donor class.
Money tends to have diminishing returns past a certain point, when it comes to elections.
And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
They also see it like an insurance payment. Kick some amount to both sides in the hope that they leave you alone.
He’s basically proof of the power of the common man’s vote in the US.
He still spent the least and publicly eschewed donations. His skill was being able to connect with the voters that matter (unfortunately).
As far as I can tell, donations after he was elected in 2016 are simply bribes.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-shrugs-off-campa...
>Trump has spent much of the race so far breaking the mould of a traditional campaign, defeating a crowded field of primary opponents who vastly outspent him in ads and staff.
>During the Republican primary race, he often told his supporters not to contribute money and ridiculed opponents for accepting cash from special interest groups and wealthy contributors.
>He has so far showed little interest in calling donors to ask for money for his general election battle. He only began holding in-person fundraisers in late May.
What I meant was the 2016 Repub primaries are evidence that the common man votes for who they want, not who the large donors want. The Repub party leadership and previous decision makers were usurped, and hence the idea of MAGA supplanting the Republican Party. More evidence is Dick Cheney and the Bush family becoming quickly irrelevant.
Of course, both of these funding models should be banned which would mean dismantling the Citizens United decision spearheaded by the now-known-to-be-fully-corrupt Roberts court, which might require a constitutional amendment.
And I also think of it as pretty esoteric to the mainstream, TBH.
I guess you can pretend Liz Warren, Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, dozens of house reps and thousands of Democratic legisltators in statehouses and towns around the country don't exist and just vote for the "party that lowered my taxes" again , right?
Sometimes they miscalculate. Mitch McConnell once had to filibuster his own bill because he didn't mean for it to pass.
The GDPR comes from the opposite direction - you own the data about yourself.
You can argue the warrant was poorly justified (and I'd agree!), but I don't see a plausible world where "ISPs aren't allowed to do connection analysis on their own networks" is going to help anyone. Well, anyone except spammers. They'd love that.
Because of FUD spread about data protection laws… such as the GDPR?
Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
Homeland Security got one in 2003 with the combination of previous agencies.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 also let those offices start having their own statutory powers and carry firearms without needing to be deputized by the US Marshals Service.
This was heavily affected by them being founded in 2002.
We’re very grateful to these corporate servants of the community.
Yes, it’s been a long-time coming.
Pendulum has to hit something eventually.
The Fourth Amendment gives you zero protections from corporations willingly handing your data over to the government upon a simple warrantless request. A corporation can choose to tell the government to pound sand without a warrant, but they're not in any legal way obligated to do so.
EDIT: Actually, I may be wrong here. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 may give you some protections against data intended to be private, such as Friends-only social media posts, private messages, etc.
I'm guessing those 15 people are these 15 people:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/15-members-direct-action-...
>Charges Include Conspiracy to Impede or Injure a Federal Officer, Interstate Stalking, Interstate Threats, Solicitation to Commit a Crime of Violence, and Assaults on Federal Officers
As a MN'n, I have my own opinions about the escalatory tactics of protestors (the marches were awesome, but many of the follow/callout patrols seemed designed to get people killed), and the predictable response of ICE. All while I strongly oppose gov surveillance and tracking like this.
What operation? Did they go around hacking into servers and invade their privacy?
> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.
Would they not do it in a vacuum? There’s been a a vagrant disregard for laws on their side. Why are they getting the benefit of the doubt here? It’s very clear they have been targeting certain demographics and political leaning from its institution.
If people started doing that to UPS delivery trucks I would expect UPS to do everything in their power to protect their staff.
I fail to understand why this is a problem when they do the exact same thing to civilians? On top of that there are companies like Flock who monitor civilians when ICE isn’t there.
I don’t get why you love ICE so much and want to protect them like they’re doing you some big service and not going around instilling fear in others. Have you been living under a rock?
You are asking why a civilian can't do the same things that a federal agent can?
I followed a lot of the news about them regarding this thing. If I own a business or even simply act as a manager and I know of a constant threat to my staff I would take any action I was legally allowed to protect them. Doesn’t matter if it’s ICE, the postal service, a gas station, theme park, etc.
It’s basic self defense.
ICE agents didn’t start covering their faces just because, they did it because people were doxxing them and going after their families.
People are going to protect themselves and their staff. It’s basic human nature.
ICE is facing backlash because they are breaking the law and discriminating. Flock is facing backlash because they are enabling ICE and the general oppression of opposition to the current administration. Crimes should be investigated, but this falls outside of an immigration agency's responsibilities.
All this coming from a non-american by the way.
One might even go a step further and say people are obligated to do so when the government repeatedly abuses its power to intimidate and violently affect the lives of people without due process or cause.
The headline makes it look like they run "One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US History". The only way the trigger matters is if the response to that trigger is justified. These justifications, once you consider them valid, just start a vicious cycle. Most of the people are being put under surveillance by this "massive anti US citizen campaign" with no reasonable suspicion, no judicial supervision, by an agency which should have no business doing any of this. Just another flavor of authoritarianism. Is it justified for them to escalate? If not then your argument is bunk. The title says what it really is and justifying the extremist actions of one side only betrays a bias.
A proper warrant must be respected and adhered to …
… but was it a proper warrant or just a bluff and, further, was the customer notified?
I insist on knowing the answer to this question and if you are a customer of fly.io (I am not) you should too.
https://www.fox8live.com/2026/08/07/unchecked-overtime-nopd-...
https://niemanreports.org/mining-the-data/
https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness...
I expect a "but this case is different" type reply; it's almost always possible to make an argument like that.
But it's a big grey zone between some clear cut "black" and "white" cases. I don't know if prosecutors are using or will use the fact of surveilling law enforcement as a crime itself or as evidence for intent to commit other crimes.
I’d actually be OK with a symmetric response to this, in fact, I WOULD LOVE a symmetric response: law enforcement can’t use AI to track citizens and we can’t use AI to track them.
… but there is a lot of 1st and 4th amendment shenanigans going on with all of this and I can’t even guess where it will land.
Interesting times man.
The problem is we have a beehive full of ICE/HSI agents that are going around in plain clothes, yelling "trust me bro" in place of warrants/badges/names, and demanding full obedience to anyone they approach.
The same people will injure, sometimes gravely, and refuse medical treatment while holding them in terrible conditions. The party line is that anyone who is arrested by these people are "criminals", which is just a direct contradiction to the bill of rights.
At the end of the day, your comments are saying "I don't care about the bill of rights, all that matters is authority regardless of the legitimacy."
Like, in a non-dystopian world, they'd not be hiding their activities and not be attacking people who observe them, but would instead be behaving legally and ethically and therefor not be concerned.
I’m not surprised, but this is not how it’s supposed to be in the US.
The fourth amendment is supposed to force a high bar for collecting evidence in this way but we’ve been slowly eroding those rights away over the last 50 years.
What is good for the goose and whatnot. What I am saying is that when you do things that are bound to get attention is not to assume that you won't get attention.
You may think you have nothing to hide but See NSPM-7. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 that directs the federal government to disrupt groups “before” they result in violent political acts. In other words, pre-crime.
The DOJ/FBI etc. can now investigate and unilaterally DECIDE if you have something to hide if they believe you hold views "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, government overthrow, race/gender/migration extremism, and hostility toward traditional views on family, religion, or morality"
The DOJ/FBI can DECIDE this for any reason they want -- the shoes you bought yesterday, a Reddit comment from 5 years ago, a rainbow sticker on your water bottle. I have everything to fear just opening my Mac or stepping out my door.
Much to my dismay this is real
I just looked this up and all I can say is wow. Legit reminds me of some of the stuff I read about as a kid about the Cold War, communism, etc
Wild that this stuff doesn’t even make the news anymore
Allowing law enforcement to maintain a default stance of antagonism - “us vs them” - can only lead to law enforcement being leveraged by those in power (political or capital power) to define who the “them” is.
I’d much rather have law enforcement have a default cooperative stance with their communities and society at large. You know, if “protect and serve” wasn’t just a marketing gimmick but an actual principle applied during process and procedures.
In essence: thin blue line is an illiberal aesthetic that has 19th century American leaders rolling in their graves - at least the ones who weren’t chasing down slaves to return to the South.
Your body determines your function oversimplification for the purposes of this argument.
Also SSH isn't a perfectly opaque protocol. There's stuff you can use to fingerprint e.g. client/server versions and often narrow it to architecture, OS, even OS version. That helps.
One person has appointed every single judge to the current US FISA Courts (whose jurisdiction includes domestic surveillance rubberstamping).
You can thank the concessions of Bush v. Gore (2000) for giving this executive-level privilege to the hoNoRAblE [SCOTUS Chief] Judge Roberts.
In 2026, this orchestrated puppetteering probably doesn't even matter anymore..?
Russ Feingold was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot act. I really do think about that a lot.
If everyone else is voting for some necessary evil, it frees me up to vote against it while still wanting it.
In the US we claim we want freedom, privacy, and all that good stuff. But where the rubber meets the road, it becomes pretty clear that we don't.
Sorry, but the German far right party that just won their first state governmental majority vote has the highest share of former Stasi officials in their ranks.
So basically - being ex-stasi is nothing to be ashamed of anymore in some parts of Germany.
Trump is persecuting the same "others" that the "don't tread on me" group also hate. They only wave their weapons when Democrats are sitting in the White House.
In the western world how many of these COVID controls remain in place as of today?
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_bb2352aa-7d...
The actual restrictions were quite reasonable in the vast majority of cases, weren't in place very long, and were only spottily enforced.
Sorry you missed a couple nights at Applebees.
It's ok to think they were reasonable or unreasonable, and which side you fall on seems like it'd largely be determined by personal circumstances and lifestyle.
> Sorry you missed a couple nights at Applebees.
This kind of rhetoric gives off a deplorable sort of pompous vibe. While it's probably untrue to say that both sides are equally authoritarian, it would also be untrue to suggest one side isn't at all. Both COVID and the response to it caused a tremendous of damage for some and created ridiculous amounts of wealth and almost no damage for others.
I reject your slightly modified false equivalency.
The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.
The very big problem I have here is that ICE is not the agency that should be doing this sort of surveillance. Their role is immigration control, not leftist or citizen control. If they suspect there's some dangerous criminal problem going on, then that's the role of the FBI to investigate.
The specific reason they are doing this is because ICE doesn't use traditional courts for most of their actions. As such, they are fairly unaccountable.
ICE also isn't even technically criminal law enforcement, they are civil law enforcers. They are supposed to involve local law enforcement or federal law enforcement when going after criminals. Their roles are, instead, to dish out tickets. The fact that they've been militarized is a major problem. CBP is the only agency under the DHS that is supposed to have any sort of military equipment and general detention powers and those are only supposed to be exerted at a border.
I would also argue that there are no potential benefits that would make this sort of surveillance acceptable, let alone necessary.
That world can't exist. Mass surveillance IS power, and power corrupts. Any situation where the use of surveillance is reasonable is a temporary transitory state, the final end is always the same - repressions and authoritarianism. The technology is a siren song, it's too attractive for bad actors so they will try to get it in somehow. And once your system of checks and balances springs a leak somewhere, it sets in motion its eventual undoing, because there's almost no stopping it once it's relied upon somewhere.
It's not clear that this is political. The Venn diagram for people against ICE's existence, and those that are left leaning, is a near perfect circle. The only group against ICE are left leaning, so they would be the only ones to investigate, regarding any actions against ICE.
Society and its laws have been built around the central idea of selective enforcement. We have all manor of laws on the books that are created with the assumption that they cannot or will not be enforced perfectly.
The spy powers of our governments have always been assumed to be limited - that if they choose to invasively track a person, it would take limited human resources and that would naturally limit their capacity (in theory) to those who the government truly deems a concern.
Omnipresent surveillance that can record and analyze and correlate every citizen's movements and behavior at all times is inherently totalitarian and anti-freedom. It is a power the government should not be allowed to have, period.
The forth amendment is not modified merely because the technology evolves. This is the kind of thing defense lawyers look for. To permit evolving technology to be used as evidence in violation of privacy generally requires new law.
My point is that government cannot be trusted to have this kind of power because it will at some point be turned against the population when dissent threatens the people holding power; it is inevitable. The least we should do is make laws strictly controlling access and purpose of access to such tools for criminal investigations, but I don't think that's enough to stop abuse and civil oppression.
The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported (and not have a path to legal residency) comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens (which will bring economic pain that is intolerable) or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA.
Doesn't the qualification of them being illegal immigrants imply that they aren't going through the legal processes immigrants should go through to get work and residency?
If illegal immigrants gain the same rights as legal immigrants, why even bother following the rules?
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Awkwardly, it was made known to the media that Tyson knew all about it, to the point where they had provided those workers written instructions and tips on how to stay under the radar with respect to taxes, financials, immigration, etc.
When a journalist asked about this at the press conference where DHS was crowing over the success of the raid? "That's not something that is being investigated as part of this operation." Well, what about separately? "We are not investigating the company."
A lot of the theory was that like some other food production firms (Hormel dealing with people getting sick from y'know, inhaling aerosolized pig brain), that it was very much a "won't someone rid us of these meddlesome immigrants" (the ones advocating about child labor, wage theft, OSHA violations). Come round these ones up, you get a press conference and we solve a labor issue.
Reducing illegal immigration is extremely simple and inexpensive -- toss a few Big Ag CEOs in something like "alligator Alcatraz". There's no step 2.
So the first step is revoking the fraudulent claims, and processing the cases so they can be deported legally.
Instead, we spent the money setting up a heavily armored police organization to forcibly find, process, and detain people who "might" have broken a law. Putting everyone in a detention center doesn't really seem like a great way to speed up the processing time. In the meantime multiple actual US citizens have been killed, detained, and intimidated. Makes you wonder what the actual goal was in the first place.
The people that ICE are rounding up today already have an active removal order, and they are actively fleeing law enforcement (for the most part).
People have also been offered incentives to self-deport. The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.
Personally, I would prefer to not have federal police forces and we could use state police to deport people, but both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. If you want to hunt them as fugitives, change the law.
> we could use state police to deport people
So much for states rights.
> both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
In what ways? I don't see a lot of police unions supporting left-leaning or Democratic candidates. Democrats have voted against things like the Patriot Act in much larger numbers than Republicans. Democrats have introduced bills like "Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2026" which have basically no Republican support. The biggest private advocates for an increased police state (Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Palmer Luckey, etc.) are huge Republican supporters and donors.
It sounds like you’re saying we should all just accept that our visas mean nothing, and that in practice literally anyone should be able to just show up, claim asylum, never show up to court for their hearing, and what we should do is absolutely nothing. In “blue” states they are strongly encouraged to sign up for driver’s licenses and welfare programs, and state agencies are forbidden from even asking their legal status. State and local police in those states are often banned from spilling the beans even when they commit crimes.
So, overstaying legal status can’t be addressed by states because Dems think it’s too mean to send them home, and it can’t be actively done by federal agencies because to do so, they have to come into states and investigate people to determine if they’re legally here or not and we don’t like the possibility that they might ever get it wrong.
This is why Democrats lost all respect from moderates like me who used to proudly be part of that party a decade ago. They’re not serious anymore. They appear to want a system that pretends to work but which everyone ignores because everyone knows it’s never enforced. Like driving 70 on the freeway in a 65 zone - everyone does it.
This is not how we should run immigration.
Instead, you completely ignored the "both sides" portion of my comment to build a strawman to rant against.
A lot of states make it illegal for state police to participate in immigration enforcement. And there's a reasonable argument that immigration enforcement is properly the job of the federal government rather than the states; which then requires a federal police force to do that job.
We don’t want the full population of every failed or economically-languishing state (including ALL kinds of people, including the worst elements that exist in every society) to show up overnight and move in, which is what has happened in many western countries including the US with asylum claim abuse.
It’s rapidly turned high-trust societies into low-trust societies because that’s how those who come here from low-trust societies operate by default. People who have been here and know what a proper society looks like don’t like this.
It would have been easier, quicker, and cheaper for me to come here on a visa waiver, marry a USC against the terms of that waiver, and ask for forgiveness (i.e. "adjust status") than it was to do so the "proper way".
Much of your comment just sounds xenophobic.
Additionally, it gives business owners a bunch of workers they can exploit, since those workers can't go to the police or report them to the labor board.
Isn't that obvious? I mean I can't imagine why this would be even remotely controversial.
Yeah, it boils down to the same reasons why many corporations want an incredibly broken H-1B system at the higher end: it provides an exploitable pool of workers.
And currently in both cases you can find a lot of consternation from the people who benefitted from how things worked prior to Trump because the administration is making significant changes to the status quo. The business owners loved the rhetoric about fixing immigration, but assumed the broken systems that gave them the benefits of exploiting those worker pools would largely be maintained as they had been.
And to be explicitly clear with my opinion, neither side of this conflict (businesses that want to maintain the broken-but-works-for-us system, or the Trump administration) are the good guys here. The businesses want to keep exploiting migrant workers unimpeded and the administration wants to be maximally racist more than it wants to help businesses keep exploiting.
Also, you are shifting the blame for immigrants getting arrested to the owners. That means the employees are actually blameless: they are caught between seldom-enforced laws and a need to thrive and feed their families.
A nation is literally defined as an entity that has control over its borders. If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
I’m all for changing immigration laws, giving more people a legal route to becoming temporary workers, students, residents, and citizens. But being choosy about who gets in and who does not. Attract the best and brightest to lift your country up, not freeloaders and criminals that tear it down. Look at the riots in Europe right now - and learn from their mistakes. Immigration is good but there have to be limits, laws, and control over borders.
I can cross a dozen borders in the EU without so much as slowing down. I can sell my house in one US State and move to another without asking for permission.
It wasn't until World War 1 that passports for international travel became common in Europe.
Don't let the xenophobic posts on social media trick you. Immigrants in the US are factually less likely to commit crimes than born Americans, look it up. They've just repeated the lie so many times that people have accepted it.
I would argue this requires at least some sovereign control over borders.
The EU defines their borders as a bloc. States are not nations - and that’s one of the reasons why.
Border control is an important expression of state sovereignty. If you have zero controls the state would experience net migration until conditions declined below the global average and nobody wants to move there anymore. That’s pretty self evident, it’s how economics works and how systems maintain an equilibrium.
Both legal and undocumented immigrants in the US show lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans in major studies; the picture in Europe is different, with clear overrepresentation for non-Western and asylum-related groups. Fiscal impacts depend heavily on skill/education level rather than legal status alone, with low-skilled migrants (legal or not) more often a net cost over their lifetimes.
So control over borders is important, and having standards is a good thing.
There is no magic soil. A nation is the people who make it up. Bring in the violent, stupid, and culturally incompatible people from the shithole countries they are trying to escape and things will trend downwards to some average between those terrible places and our desirable countries. That’s not racist our xenophobic, it’s acknowledging the facts.
People are not equal. Countries are not equal. Education and culture and religions are not equal. There are better and worse versions of all of them. Again just facts. To ignore that is to live in fantasy land that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I have traveled to nearly 50 countries. I have lived in the developing world. My ancestors have had to flee countries and been refugees. I know what I’m talking about. You sound very idealistic and naive.
It turned out that those peoples, given opportunities and in a system with functioning institutions, actually weren't violent, stupid or culturally incompatible and in fact thrived, integrated, built communities, grew the economy and contributed to society.
Something for you to consider.
A state*
A nation is a people with common identity, culture, language, history, etc (see first nations, stateless nations, etc)
Big words considering the rest of your comment.
> If it permits just anyone to enter or exit, it is technically not a nation anymore.
You cannot "permit" something you do not control, so this is a contradiction in terms. If you mean that the constraints put on the US by itself to not police immigration in overly violent or cruel ways mean that it does not control immigration, then by the same logic the 4th amendment implies that there is no rule of law in the US (since certain criminals can't be convicted due to bad actions by the state).
> But being choosy about who gets in and who does not.
Nobody really denies this. The question is how violent or cruel you can be in the exercise of this choosiness.
> Look at the riots in Europe right now
The riots in Europe are not primarily about immigration. Get off twitter.
Statistically this is false. No amount of hand picked undocumented drunk drivers will change this. A large majority of undocumented immigrants follow the law closer, aside from the obvious immigration laws.
So yes, if it quacks like a fascist duck, it's a fascist duck.
Advocating for any restrictions on immigration means you are racist?
If not I honestly don’t understand what point you’re making.
Instead we get... well, whatever the fuck this gestapo shit is.
I guess regulatory reform doesn't really play with the kind of people who will gleefully vote for mass deportation on the grounds that they just want immigrants gone.
Um?
Are you serious? The choice for them was to go back to their home countries.
Or, you know, from the idea that they are doing something illegal and the job of law enforcement is to enforce laws.
It only becomes a crime once you're formally deported
"The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA"
Calling everybody a racist who wants laws enforced is weak. Immigration laws are made necessary by a welfare state I happen to not support. The conversation has literally nothing to with race or racism. We're talking about the laws that govern the country and whether we should enforce or ignore them.
What do you think? Do you have any profound insight or ideas to share?
(And the people who sign onto an organization like ICE knowing exactly what they do and why.)
Th policy has just been struck down, but we'll see whether that makes a practical difference.
IME ICE are simply a death squad. Immigration is a pretext.
The goal is political terror against regime opponents, not a rational and proportional response to people without paperwork.
So if the premise is "business that sponsors politics loves the cheap labour, and there is no cheaper worker than one who will always fall in line out of fear of losing everything", then the logical conclusion is that the party with the higher illegal net migration is the one that the premise refers to, right?
I love to see your source on this one. I personally haven't seen this policy stance from any Democrats.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-u-s-net-immigration...
Just look at net migration, the numbers speak for themselves; Biden & Obama allowed in a lot more people
If anything, it proves that point completely wrong tying higher immigration numbers to better economic conditions. Bush had more immigration than Obama (who deported more people than Trump). Trump had higher levels of immigration than Obama, until COVID happened and basically shut things down. As the economy recovered, immigration went back up under Biden.
How you interpret it: tHaT dOeSn'T pRoVe AnYtHiNg
Sure, buddy
By what metric does the Democratic party want “as many illegal immigrants as possible” and why would they be deporting so many people if that were the case?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-u-s-net-immigration...
Just look at net migration, the numbers speak for themselves; Biden & Obama allowed in a lot more people and they deported some of them
But that isn’t what the right wants; a modern coalition of racists who want no immigrants, and opportunists who want a underclass of labor that can’t organize, vote or otherwise fight back currently is in power.
And that coalition is in power after successfully scapegoating immigrants to average Americans who have no idea what the Byzantine legal citizenship process looks like now when they repeat that they want “legal immigrants”.
The non-strawman argument is that giving someone citizenship of your country should not be automatic and quick. We want it to be difficult to get in, because otherwise, to borrow your word, “opportunists” find a relatively well-off, trusting society easy pickings to rob, cheat and steal from. And because we don’t want our country to turn into a place that looks like where some of these immigrants come from.
Notice how it isn’t Australians or Germans ending up having to be rounded up by ICE. It’s because they come from a country that believes in laws. And before you say “but that’s because you’re racist!!” I’d like to point out that the same thing applies to people from the Philippines or China who don’t look or speak like white Americans, but for the most part they come here legally.
I didn’t say that, I said that the current administration is an ally to racists and business owners who benefit from undocumented labor. This is just established fact at this point.
> Notice how it isn’t Australians or Germans ending up having to be rounded up by ICE.
Plenty of law abiding people who come here legally have been rounded up https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/south-korean-workers-de...
Which begs the question, why are white South African refuges welcomed by the admin while skilled work visa South Koreans are not?
In a case where "the purpose of a system is what it does", whoever changes the outcome changes the purpose of the system
You haven't provided any value to the conversation
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
It's not about the outcomes of something taken in isolation, it's about the actions taken in order to achieve it, and when those actions continually run counter to achieving the stated goal.
So the response article examples are missing half the context needed to make it's claim:
* The hospital only curing 2/3 of cancer patients being simply a failure to achieve it's true mission of 3/3 cures would rely on knowing it is taking action in earnest to actually cure all patients.
While we can assume that for an obvious hypothetical, if for instance a whistleblower leaked evidence showing that 1/3 patients were being intentionally withheld care, the hospital responded it was an accident, but then evidence came out proving they still did this, then POSIWID would apply.
In a real-world, non-hypothetical example:
ICE keeps deporting American citizens. Every time this gets reported on, they insist it's a mistake. They keep doing it.
Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom.
"Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom."
So, in your (faulty) interpretation, the axiom applies perfectly to the fact that cars kill pedestrians
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
And it also fails to address that if a system is continually failing to achieve an acceptable outcome, even if the people operating it are attempting earnestly to do something correct, the people who can and would make the call to discontinue a program that fails to meet their expectations continually (especially when they are doing so to other programs that fail to meet their expectations) are clearly showing that they either have divergent standards, or have a different set of expectations than the operator believes.
At some level, this is because the optics still matter. Most of us don't want to see brown families rounded up and tossed over the nearest southern border.
The fact is, the huge majority of undocumented folks came into the country legally. Most overstayed their visas, had the laws changed out from under them, lost their employment, etc. In other words, they’re virtually all tax-paying, productive members of society who want to be here. It’s a win-win for them to remain.
This obsession with “the law!” only ever really seems related to immigration law. Wonder why…
This is why advocates have always tried to reframe things from "illegal" to "undocumented"
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
The act of crossing the border "illegally" is a misdemeanor (the first time) on the level of something like a speeding ticket - but its still not illegal to be here even if you crossed "illegally"
If you want more people to immigrate you should make the legal pathways more accessible, not tolerate the illegal ones.
How do you do this in a way that preserves the leverage that business owners have over undocumented workers? Those people form a pretty strong coalition with the people who think all immigration is bad for ... other reasons, so this is pretty much a non-starter politically.
Sounds like the Democratic party really wants to exploit those undocumented workers in US
Then say someone is cruel for not allowing more illegal migrants to stay in US (to be exploited I guess???)
IF better immigration laws are not possible because people want to exploit illegal migrants THEN why would it be considered cruel for someone to oppose illegal migration?
P.S. When has anyone ever responded to the the sanctimonious phrase "be better" by actually "being better". You don't want them to "be better", you just want to try and shame them into adopting your ideological views.
How does, e.g., deporting a person who was illegally brought to this country at the age of 2, back to their “home” help their home country? What about the Haitian who came here legally under TPS, then, after Trump ended TPS, is now “illegal”? The Dept of State’s own website currently says of Haiti: “Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” How is deporting people back there helpful?
If it is not a crime, then what is it?
Without a current visa of some kind though, you are deportable, mostly at the whims and mercy of the government. But you wouldn't be committing a crime and deportation is not a criminal punishment.
When you do crimes, you get criminally punished (hypothetically) citizen or not (jail, fines, etc).
Whether the government can, should or must carry out a deportation are all truly separate considerations, often with distinct, case-by-case answers.
And with all this in mind, pause for a moment and sit with the fact that thousands of people who have committed no crime at all are getting grabbed off the street and incarcerated indefinitely by ICE and subjected to ghastly conditions
That is it, you said it.
>And with all this in mind, pause for a moment and sit with the fact that thousands of people who have committed no crime at all are getting grabbed off the street
Would you expect a cop who is detaining you because you were speeding, to let you go without checking your license because of some personal emergency. Why do you expect something different here?
Said what? That deportation isn't a criminal punishment? Oh no, you got me! Checkmate I guess.
I'll answer as if this is a good faith rejoinder, even though we both know it isn't.
Deportation is drastic. Very drastic. It's also very expensive and often very disruptive to many people's lives, including American citizens. Think households with an undocumented spouse, for example.
It's generally a bad thing to do without very good, justifiable reasons. Not the least of which how expensive it is for the state.
> Would you expect a cop who is detaining you because you were speeding, to let you go without checking your license because of some personal emergency. Why do you expect something different here?
I wouldn't expect police to imprison people indefinitely (and at great cost to the state) for minor traffic violations, no. That would be insane.
What about pulling a gun on you, if the cop suspects you are hiding something and not complying with instructions to search you. This put your life in mortal danger, much worse than imprisoning you.
I think frankly people are not thinking this through.
If you're not rich enough to lawyer up, spend five figures fighting through the kangaroo administrative process and then another five sticking it to them in real court a civil infraction is actually worse in a lot of ways because those pesky 4th through 8th amendments don't really protect you all that much. There's a lot of judicial precedent from the past 100yr that basically waters down your rights when a bureaucrat is after you rather than the cops.
Consider this scenario. A friend of yours walks up to you and says "man, I got a ticket yesterday." You will have a general idea of the level of enforcement involved, how that's looked at by the government and others, etc. You probably do not see your friend as a criminal.
Now, suppose the same friend walked up and says "man, I got arrested yesterday, I just got bailed out." You will have different ideas of the enforcement model and perceptions of that. There is now a greater probability that you see your friend as a criminal.
Do you have an example that is not isolated incidents?
And your response is....weird? It is as if there is nothing at the bottom of these (your) arguments. You poke a finger and it comes out of the other end..
It’s a sleight of hand, they say “the worst of the worst” and what they mean is “all immigrants (not just the illegal ones) are the worst of the worst”
This is why they’re going to lose their majorities next week.
Somewhere between half and a solid majority of undocumented immigrants came through ports of entry and have overstayed their visas. Again, this is not a crime
Or perhaps there is a semantic game, but it's coming from the other direction - from those who would demagogue immigrants in order to portray them all as scary, evil criminals
Most of these immigrants aren't islands unto themselves, they are here b/c they have ties here, or have even spent their lives here, and you're ripping them away from their families. Many of the dreamers they're trying to deport right now haven't lived in their "home" country since they were toddlers
That sort of thing leads sensible people to ask themselves, "what good is actually being done here?"
This is why immigration went from a winning issue to a losing issue with Republicans in the span of 2 years.
Our current administration ran on a platform of paying criminals who were convicted of breaking laws.
The social contract is: the President isn’t above the law. Right now and as long as he’s President, that contract is breached. So do immigration laws matter? I don’t know, because the plain text of the Constitution says those who swear an oath to the Constitution and foment insurrection against the US shall be barred from office. And yet, an insurrectionist is the executive right now, enforcing laws against people he doesn’t like and waiving laws that make him rich. So then why should immigration laws matter at this time? And under what authority?
Or maybe you mean only federal laws, like laws around human trafficking?
Or is there something specific about immigration law that requires it be voided when the president is a lawbreaker?
What I'm saying is this executive has violated the insurrection clause (14th amendment), the 12th amendment, the foreign emoluments clause, the domestic emoluments clause, the take care clause, the first amendment, fourth amendment, fifth amendment, habeas corpus, appropriations clause, taxing power, war powers... he's been on an actual crime spree since 2016 violating campaign laws, extorting foreign countries for bribes, extorting governors for votes, fomenting insurrection, stealing and attempting to sell state secrets, violating the Constitution from beginning to end -- all that doesn't matter.
So then why does immigration law matter? And how does that guy have the moral authority to say anything about anyone violating any laws?
Or they could have "moved back south" like you said, and stayed there.
Since this "program" was ended it sounds like it should be as simple as "no papers? gotta go".
Funny how democrats always care so much about "the law" and "due process" until it relates to immigration.
Funny how often the very problems republicans are so adamant about are caused by their own policies. Before the change the population flowed seasonally and had little reason to stay long term. Suddenly it's an issue but by shutting off the flow without a way to do it legally it screwed both parties. Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
"for that wage."
This is wage suppresion you're supporting.
The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.
One can easily go back but will more easily go back if there's no point in staying beyond the momentary moneymaking and essentially just no future.
It's imo how china manages to have roughly as much migration as Berlin despite sharing a border with pakistan, afghanistan, etc and without large militarised force to kick people out. Simply don't give to incentive.
Is this one of these stupid "yeah 300 years ago this used to be on that land!!!" argument? Buddy, if so, stop living in the past. Territories are conquered all the time everywhere throughout the entirety of History.
Plus, this has nothing to do with current immigration laws.
How does it apply to the specific case mentioned in the parent? How does it relate to illegal workers who somehow are now "trapped" in the US because some weird fringe program was stopped?
Lets ignore that the richest man on the planet has a credible record of being n immigrant who stayed in the US illegaly, and has open criminal record probes in at least 2 countries. But I guess a 350 million donation to the standing goverment in campaign donations might make it difficult for ICE to find him
Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race. Perhaps almost everywhere, almost always, people resist the mass movement of new and unfamiliar people into their territory. Perhaps that has been the overwhelming democratic consensus of every western democracy since mass immigration was a thing, and it was only ever enabled by an anti-democratic elite consensus.
You are mistaken: the Irish may be white now, but they weren't then! Whiteness evolved over time, it used to be exclusive for WASPs, and excludes the Irish, Italians, Jews, slavs, and other groups widely accepted as white today. Race is a sociological construct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing
The other immigrants from Catholic countries were also perceived as being "not white", which is why there was a lot of anti-Italian and anti-Spanish sentiment along with the anti-Irish folks. Along with the "they are not real Christians" sentiment (still held by many Evangelicals), they were perceived as "taking orders from Rome" much like (during the Cold War) communists were perceived as "taking orders from Moscow".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United...
If they werent white, they wouldnt have been allowed to naturalize at all, as the law forbad non-white naturalization
The Naturalization Act of 1790 includes "white" as a legal category, quoting, "That any Alien being a free white person..." at that time, and in subsequent acts explicitly the "free white person" eligibility language included European immigrants.
The idea that "whiteness" is a mere sociological category is ahistorical invention of what was a fringe part of sociology, now "whiteness studies", and its mostly "not even pseudoscience". These "studies" speak passively of "what whiteness is" as if sociologists of this type are in some sort of telepathic mental conversation with the 18th century.
Foruntely, this particularly claim about irishness and whiteness has a factual interpretation, so its trivial to show it is false. The european diaspora into america was always "white", and this is trivial to show in 1790 let alone afterwards. "White" refers to the family of european ancestries which 'look white' and this is written into the text of early american law, let alone the ordinary meaning of the word
EDIT, since this is downvoted, here you go:
Irish naturalised throughout the late 18th, 19th centuries explicitly under this 1790 law which limited naturalization to "free white persons". QED. There's no actual debate here. This "irish werent white" idea is a mid-90s invention.
See, eg., at the heights of alleged anti-irish sentiment,
> United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923): ... The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person,’ it was these immigrants — bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh — and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and readily amalgamated with them.
The 1790 law forbids naturalization of non-whites. Irish were naturalized. QED. There's no debate here.
The idea that "whiteness" was understood in 1790 as some kind of "social category of prestige" is mad, and patently ahistorical. It's also empirically demonstrably false. It should also be obviously false if you think about it for a few seconds: did 18th race-realists, basically all western people, who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one, and 'black' another -- think that the irish weren't white?
You think the 18th race-"realists" (urgh), "who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one", would stop there and not begin to divide white people between "good" white sub-races and "vile" white sub-races? You really think that those racists thought that once you're white, you're all good?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment#/media/Fi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment#/media/Fi...
An English priest in 1860:
"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw in Ireland. .. to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much"
Benjamin Disraeli, 1836:
"[The Irish] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood."
_The Spectator_ News magazine in 1882:
"The Tragedy at Maamtrasna, investigated this week in Dublin, almost unique as it is in the annals of the United Kingdom, brings out in strong relief two facts which Englishmen are too apt to forget. One is the existence in particular districts of Ireland of a class of peasants who are scarcely civilised beings, and approach far nearer to savages than any other white men; and the other is their extraordinary and exceptional gloominess of temper. In remote places of Ireland, especially in Connaught, on a few of the islands, and in one or two mountain districts, dwell cultivators who are in knowledge, in habits, and in the discipline of life no higher than Maories or other Polynesians."
H. P. Lovecraft (yes, the famous author), in 1921 (!):
"If the Irish had the 'right' to independence they would possess it. If they ever gain it, they will possess it – until they lose it again. England has the right to rule because she does ... It is not chance, but racial superiority, which has made the Briton supreme. Why have not the Irish conquered and colonized the earth if they be so deserving of regard? They are brainless canaille."
You are deeply uneducated on the topic. I would suggest you stop commenting on a subject you know nothing about and learn a thing or two before interacting again.
Then you agree with me. And all US law which ever mentioned 'white'.
The people in the 90s who invented the idea that the "irish werent white" are trying to advance an theory of 'whteiness' which is completely contrary to these views. They are doing so because it allows them to equivocate whiteness with white supremacy, and to turn 'white' into a theory of superiority.
If you agree with me that the Irish were always white, and that white at the time and since is a theory of european lineage -- then you disagree with this 1990s revisionist history. You agree that 'white' is an ancestory, and that intra-white class and ethnic divisions exist, and that its common place for white people to have more contempt for other white people than often for black, and so on.
The pseudoscientific sociologists who lie about the history of race, and lend some stolen valour to american irish to burinsh their oppresion as 'racial' -- may seem to be on the side of someone, but they are not. They contrive a theory of race, and culture, which makes 'white' evil by making it mean a kind of cultural superiority and it is no coincidence why.
With this definition of 'whiteness' they then need to go back and pretend the irish were not white, because it would reveal the lie at the heart of their project. The irish were always white. 'White' does not mean, nor has it ever, "the mere supremacy of some particular group"
as all of your quotes show
It should go without saying that a white sub-human (according to the bigots of yore) is not a white person.
Which is why sadly the city of Boston is a hellhole and not one of the best cities to live in the USA.
> And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.
Funnily enough reform voters now want the poles back, because industries like construction have slowed down and the lack of EU priority means that the global south now dominates the entry visas into the country. Kurwa we didnt know how well we had it, they say on their way to get a Chinese takeaway on their german car while they check their south korean phone
> Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race.
Well America has a pretty significant history with racial discrimination. I am even going to ignore history, you know little details like the first cops being slave catchers, and just focus on the present. Where brown neighbourhoods have way more police and despite no racial difference in use of drugs, the percentage of arrests for drug use is disproportionately brown. Something that isn't that weird considering chemically crack and coke are the same thing but crack cocaine originally had a 100 year sentence versus the 1 year in jail for coke, or the FBI starting the war on drugs by going after opium and mass rounding of asian workers and renaming weed as Marihuana to make it sound more Mexican and allow another round of mass arrests.
Those kind of things make ignoring the racial issue a bit more difficult. The constant references to eugenics, and "cleanliness" by the admin are also not particularly quiet dog whistles.
But lets pretend for a second that it has to do with mass immigration. Would the populations that "suffer" that immigration not be the ones up in arms because of the problems they cause? How come its rural villages with 0 immigrants that vote for Brexit and red states that are negative tax contributors and no one wants to live in the source of most of the complaints and not the multicultural cities that are the entire GDP of either country and are chalk full of those newly arrived immigrants?
Does it not make anyone think that the statue of liberty saying that immigrants are welcome and NYC being one of the richest cities in the world might be inextricably linked? While Alabama being the world incest capital and not making money once in 50 years might also have something to do with each other?
The type and character of the immigration matters, and the areas which are lower populations have greater impact from a smaller number of immigrants.
Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK: https://youtu.be/HLRWGSLn0RY?is=_jEkmF5MYmdY2NrY -- you'll note a small number of african immigrants harassing women, and some with visibly under-age girls.
You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own. Of course, if you continue to call it "racist" and deliberately misunderstand the mass democractic antagonism to immigration in all western countries since mass immigration was ever a thing -- then you will just produce the current administration.
Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades. He's how extreme a majority of US voters were prepared to go in order for someone to do something.
To give just one example, Lambeth is the council in London with highest immigration and also the lowest vote for Leave in the Brexit referendum
> Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:
citation needed
> The type and character of the immigration matters
No it doesn't. That's a self justification for anti immigration sentiments. Half the city of London and the NHS are immigrants (or obvious descendants of) and you wouldn't have any trouble finding anecdotes of being racially targetted. I was on a train today at Waterloo where a south african man was talking loudly about how you "cannot find a white face in the NHS anymore". The type of immigration does not matter
> Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK
What a stupid counter argument. Frankly you can catch brit guys harassing girls from the smoking area of any Spoons the soon schools are off. Considering Prince Andrew's behaviour one would argue those immigrants are adoption british values.
SA and harashment has never been a priority for british police. The Sarah Everard investigation ended with a 300 page recommendation and evaluation of the MET that found ignoring working class women as a massive issue, and no reforms have been done since.
Similar the tommy robinson protest against small boats mentioned "protecting women" which your video comment alluded to, except 60% of the participants had Domestic abuse records. Being against immigrants because you wanna monopolise abusing women is not really a good proposion for the future of your country
> You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own
Yeah I remember the 2010s when the euros where coming over and all those romanians, and polish and spanish all came to be waiters and do other non skilled jobs (ignore their participation in industries like construction, Software, nursing). I also remember in the 80s and 90s when all the Bangladeshi and indians came with their low skill jobs (ignore Brick Lane being revived, or Rishi Sunak becoming a billionaire through the british education system). Damn how I hated living in Brixton in the 60 with all those Jamaicans that came in the windrush generation, all that lovely food and music scene was unbearable.
But you know my irish parents when they came in the 30s, with their low skill to a council house in Bermondsey they had to hide their accent to not be attacked by "proper brits"...
Its been the same fucking discourse for 100 years, and every single new immigration pattern is "the wolf is coming", don't you lot get tired of being wrong?
> Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades.
That is not true. Popular democratic concerns have been addressed with immigration controls and requirements. What goverments have done is protect demographic collapse and labour concerns because people care about the economy growing and pensions being paid.
South Korea had 0 immigration and currently is tittering on demographic collapse. The country could literally disappear because of so few kids. Japan isnt far off. Do you see the british or american people ready to work into their 80s? Do you see british women ready to have 4 kids each? If the answer is no, then immigration is basically the only solution. Govs have kept it at the minimum acceptable for people to not complain, but as sytemic issues compound (like lack of housing) people look for easy solutions to complicated problems and pointing at brown people is easier than figuring out how we solved housing in 1919 with the council house goverment scheme and yet now people are spending 46% of salary on rent in London.
You can argue about how they should go about deporting people, but them deporting everyone even those without a criminal record is their intended purpose.
This is not in fact the stated mission of the agency.
https://wannabewonk.com/how-are-they-different/
>Many of the discussions above are based on a central fact: Undocumented immigrants are here, now, in large numbers. In a world where America had zero undocumented residents, arguments could be made to be less tolerant of their presence, to discourage them from being here. It wouldn't be patently inhumane to deport someone if they have been here weeks, rather than years or decades.
A serious, ethical attempt to reduce illegal immigration would be to set a path to legal, documented residence for all current non-felon aliens, and begin "undocumented" enforcement with a clean slate.
---
edit to reply to Izikiel43 since my participation in the thread has been throttled:
Is it incomprehensible that we could have a compromise solution not involving deportation of tens of millions of people, while at the same time implementing employment validation and other checks that begin actually doing immigration enforcement before families settle?
You assume that a path to legal citizenship for long-time residents here would 100% mean the situation would repeat itself, and I disagree.
Why follow the rules then? If it happens once, it can happen again, it would have the opposite effect.
So the problem here isn't ICE, it is Trump and his politics. ICE following the law and doing their job is the wrong target.
IMO, Republicans like the status quo because the business class enjoys exploiting workers they can threaten with deportation, and they enjoy it as a rallying cry for their voting base.
Should they go around and do that too?
Anyone who don't say yes just wants a police state, the reason your American police is so dangerous and powerful is because they have these choices and can arrest you for a lot of things that people don't normally get arrested for.
So yes, they should do that. That you think they shouldn't is exactly why the American police is so horrible.
There was a post here about a year or so ago about a guy on Facebook being arrested for incredibly benign posts [1]. It's the clearest example of violating one of our foundational laws of this country. Yet the police get away with a slap on the wrist as taxpayers pay for their abuse of power. American police are powerful and are not subject to the same level of scrutiny or justice as average individuals. They can selectively ignore laws and constitutional rights as is.
[1] https://abc7ny.com/post/tennessee-man-jailed-charlie-kirk-po...
The issue is we don’t run our country that way. We do apply it on a spectrum. So as long as that’s the status quo, I will expect them to back off on things that don’t need strict enforcement. You don’t need to eject every single undocumented person with impunity. It is not productive or ethical.
However what ICE gets to decide is what cases to prioritize, they don't get to decide who to exonerate but their limited resources means that they prioritize those who are bigger dangers. Still if they had infinite resources they would take everyone.
And civil rights are merely a speed bump on the way to the detention center.
Then why is the administration revoking immigration status, and we have evidence that a significant portion of those detained have zero criminal background? Worse, why are you acting as an apologist for fascist and xenophobic policies?
Or "No, we won't be turning that plane around."
I think you mean selectively enforcing some immigration law.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/10/immi...
Who must be deported is mostly left up to discretion.
And since deportation is very expensive and drastic - an option of last resort - it's usually better for all involved to come up with other arrangements.
Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
For better or worse, the arrangement that's been informally agreed upon is to let most of the undocumented who have been here a long time, remain (dreamers, etc).
Sadly, that left them all vulnerable to the discretion of a capricious criminal wanna-be dictator like Trump.
If they recognized this is an issue just add a way for upstanding undocumented immigrants to become documented immigrants, problem solved.
Instead they preserved the status quo where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies, that is a very bad thing. ICE taking everyone is the only way, it robs it of its power.
Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.
Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).
Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.
The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous
We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country
So if someone lives here, works and pays taxes, and has not been convicted of any other crime... why would we want to deport them? By some measures migrants pay more taxes and commit less crime than natural born citizens. We should just get them paperwork and let them continue being good citizens while we also reform the process that resulted in them being here illegally in the first place.
Why should we spend billions of dollars on this problem that in many ways, on paper, is beneficial?
See the execution of Renée Good. Remember how the ICE terrorist deliberately stepped before her car, to try to make a defensive claim aka "had to shoot her to stop her". Meanwhile his other two terrorist buddies were standing NEXT to the car, thus invalidating the lie quite logically. After all, how did two other ICE terrorists manage to not get into that situation that the murderer chose to employ here? So there is a lack of consistency among ICE terrorists.
But in US human life is not worth much.
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...
>Americans’ liberties have been trammeled in a variety of different ways. Under the guise of stopping terrorism, law enforcement officials and government leaders have now been given the right to conduct searches of homes and offices without prior notice, use roving wiretaps to listen in on telephone conversations, and monitor computers and e-mail messages, even to the degree of eavesdropping on attorney/client conversations.
>Conceivably, these extensions of the definition of “terrorist” could bring within their sweep diverse domestic political groups, which have been accused of acts of intimidation or property damage such as Act Up, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Operation Rescue, and the Vieques demonstrators.
It should have been stopped before it grew into the leviathan it is now but the general consensus by the politicos of the time was that this was just histrionic left/libertarian worry, and that something like that could never happen in the USA, we were too just, too democracy-loving.
CBP's job is to protect the border and stop drug and people trafficking entering, whereas ICE's original purpose was to enforce immigration law within the US.
While not "everything" ICE was tasked with was immigration, that was their bread and butter. Where the vast majority of their workforce and spend went.
Put them back under the DoJ and have the FBI handle criminals, not ICE. Bring back the INS.
* Misspelled initially
They're doing exactly what you expect of such a 'secret police' based on the history of basically all other secret polices.
Rogue would imply they are doing something at odds with the President’s wishes. The reality is worse.
There are those the law protects but does not bind.
And then there's us.
I think we're deep into a post-law environment at this point, though. People who weren't bound by the law will not be protected by it either.
That's one of the reasons I don't even look at the front page any more. Rather I look at the "Active"[0] and, less often, the "New"[1] pages.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/active
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
They're not even trying to pretend to not be evil.
They settled down on the shock and awe brownshirt tactics and have settled for just grabbing people quickly and quietly off the street, depending on a basically completely nonexistent court system to deal with the mistakes, and mass surveillance. Most won’t notice it at all. The surveillance started long before this administration - which isn’t a defense of it, just pointing out the entire system is rotten to the core.
That's enough for me.
But I'm pleased you live up to your profile name.
All best,
False premise. The Trump administration is doing exactly what he was democratically voted in to do by the "vociferously pro-gun people": close the border and deport illegal immigrants.
DHS has been dragged into court hundreds of times now and literally stood in front of federal judges and said "we're ignoring your court order, what are you going to do about it?"
Whatever reasons Trump was voted in for, second amendment people should insist on him following the constitution. He's not. That's not even arguable on rhetorical grounds. Trump regularly defies court orders, spends money on things not authorized by Congress, and impounds money allocated by Congress. That behavior is the constitutional definition of tyranny. Therefore second amendment people should be at least metaphorically, if not literally, up in arms about him.
Again inarguably, they are not. Therefore their self proclaimed basis is a lie. They are just blowhards and we should disarm them ASAP. They have no sound reason for existing as an armed group.
If that was true, that is why.
Now in reality, that was not true, they stood with nazi cause they themselves are nazi who want to bully others.
I can gauge how much of an authoritarian you are with one simple question, is it immoral to privately own the means of production?
You keep using the term authoritarian but I don't think you actually know what it means.
And they were go to example of important free speech for years. The gauge was always defending nazi free speech, never defending communist free speech, radical feminists free speech or whoever else free speech.
Your question supposed to determine authoritanianism shows the same fallacy - nazi and other fascists wont count as an authoritarian. If I think all women should be locked at home and be under control of husbands, you wont count me as authoritarian either.
the 2nd amendment (the entire Bill of Rights) was written to protect us from our own government, but it’s way more convenient to just shoot brown people or people who speak a different language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
Just to add color to your comment. These folks were directly exercising 2nd amendment rights against oppressive state forces and that Act was the response to them exercising it.
The leftist gun community is mostly focused on arming the LGBTQ community at the moment though. Your chances of getting canoed while trying to stab a trans woman are way up over the past couple years.
This paper is heavily rejected by mainstream criminologists. It relies on victim memorial lists for a count of victims and it relies on a database made by an anti-Trans group for the perpetrator count. This leads to both a significant undercount of victims and overcount of perpetrators.
The ONS has come out against it and said that official homicide data does not track transgender status so there is no official data to back this research up on.
None of this has stopped rightwingers from heavily circulating this paper of course. Somehow I doubt science is the goal here.
Some people view the actions of ICE, like in this article, to be crossing a line that would normally provoke a response from second amendment types.
It wasn’t self defense, it wasn’t for recreational fun, it is to provide a physical check on government overreach. Therefore it’s sensible to discuss it during times of government overreach.
(disclaimer: this is not my opinion I'm just explaining their logic)
it might listen, and turn...
Do you think the appropriate way to handle people SUSPECTED of having an expired visa is by throwing them in an overseas prison without trial?
Do you think it's RIGHT to throw pregnant women into a prison camp and deny them medical care, just because something was filled out wrong on their immigration paperwork?
I assure you, it is perfectly possible to enforce border and immigration policies without engaging in wanton cruelty or violations of civil rights.
Here's some advice for future debates: drop the petty whataboutisms, quit making strawmen to attack, and address the actual criticisms.
> I assure you, it is perfectly possible to enforce border and immigration policies without engaging in wanton cruelty or violations of civil rights.
The false equivalence, then, is right here:
> If there’s no immigration enforcement, that’s functionally equivalent to having open borders.
Where you again just skip over the enumerated criticisms and pretend that all border enforcement must be done in such an aggressive and violent manner without regard for constitutionally guaranteed rights.
If you don't want to acknowledge the difference between "enforce immigration law in a civil and reasonable manner" and "terrorize neighborhoods and execute citizens to make a point", then I can't help you.
ICE was created in 2002 as part of the notorious Homeland Security Act. Do you think immigration law was just... not enforced before that?
Hint: Immigration law was previously handled by an agency called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, with customs enforcement being handled by US Customs. ICE has shown complete disregard for the Constitution, a common issue with the agencies created by the Homeland Security Act.
Dismantling ICE does not mean stopping border enforcement. It means decentralizing that power and devolving immigration enforcement to agencies better equipped to handle it while protecting the rights of American Citizens.
That is precisely the work of Operation Puppet Master.
Both suck. Lets find a way to fix both before spending an eternity on a stupid circular argument.
I asked claude how ICE was able to intercept signal chats and it seems like it wasn't a failing of signal's encryption, but rather there were some semipublic signal chats that agents were able to join.
And once they joined these signal chats, they launched a privilege escalation attack - in claude's words:
> In one case, an activist posted a license-plate lookup tool, hosted on Fly.io, to an infiltrated chat. Agents then got the service’s DNS queries, Stripe data, SSH logs, and the signup IP, and matched them with DMV records and Thomson Reuters CLEAR data to find a driver’s license number and other personal records. This was reportedly done by buying data from a commercial broker rather than getting a warrant.
Is that true, though? I don't expect that the individual biases of officers or judges, or the institutional biases of the police or immigration departments, can switch at a moment's notice.
These aren't universally positive attributes I'm not necessarily praising them. But militaries have come down into a very broad spectrum of positions around specific coups, revolutions, insurrections etc including abetting or openly joining them, both pro- and anti-democratic.
This is also why the second trump term has been so focused on officer purges! You definitely want the military to come down on your side and making sure all of its leadership is on your side is a reliable step if you can take it.
Americans should absolutely imo not be looking for their military to help them with the problems they're facing. But depending on the exact arrangement, people in other countries may have good reason to hope for that.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t have armed officers (or not have a capitalist society), we just shouldn’t allow rhetoric to convince us of some false ideal. The 3rd and 4th amendment have a spirit that should be much more embraced and expanded at the expense of law enforcement’s ability to do their “job”.
No, I’m not doing that. I’m not even American. But I know that giving someone a weapon means they can eventually try to use it against you.
So the way you treat that is by calling out and resisting the attempts to weaponize the government in new ways, not just throwing up your hands because it was "eventually" going to be used anyway. No, it's bad. You should say that it's bad and take action to oppose it.
If you have deeply unpopular policies but only 1/3rd of the country is expected to vote, telling everyone their vote won't matter is the best stance to take.
Or, more appropriately, on an election's notice.
A plurality of voters preferred to have leaders of a certain political persuasion.
Now, we can complain about the fine print in the platform of those leaders, but..
I mean..
democracy is a team sport. We voted them in.
It's like football:
Yes.
That's an awesome DB. Guy got 2 interceptions and 4 TFLs in that game. I'd love to get that safety for my team.
All that said, his offense didn't score. So guess what? He gets to take an "L" too. That's just how it works.
That depends entirely on the degree to which those in power will respect the results of an election.
Heck, historically the cops have even broken up peaceful union protests, despite being in unions themselves, throwing away all class solidarity in favor of their right wing leanings.
And the police unions have uniquely been extremely right wing, other than during rare highly localized conditions (often involving the democratic candidate being center right at least).
Shocking
David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist was accused and indicted for damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, purely as a scapegoat.
All federal funds to the state of Colorado frozen to force them to release a convicted-and-imprisoned ally of the administration (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOE6DTMjPEc )
All of this happening out in the open, no checks, no balances. Yeah it isn't "pretty close", it is a police state.
I can pearl-clutch too if you want. "It's incredibly disingenuous to equate the Trump admin with a true police state like North Korea"
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/10/nx-s1-5961220/dhs-ice-observe...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pyjxjxrvo
Likely not. I've always been surprised by the amount of authoritarian sympathizers here.
As an aside - thank you for the isolated cases that you sent as evidence which I haven't clearly been following as closely. I know it is a significant problem in the UK but kind of on the other end of the political spectrum.
Like I've stated, there are an unusual amount of authoritarian sympathizers in this forum - though it's possible they are bots. When I first heard of the forum and signed up, it was noticeable and I almost did not stick around, but ultimately decided it was better to know what is going on around the world and the posts here are far better quality than somewhere like reddit. Nothing to do with my worldview, just an observation from being around here for 10+ years. It's nothing personal against you.
ICE has murdered protestors but each case is a headline. Start worrying when it's not a headline anymore. Either because the media are suppressed or because it becomes so common that it's not newsworthy anymore. Wait until the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people and the government isn't even trying to justify it. And when you hear stories of people just disappearing. Then you will be scared to post comments like this.
I fireproof my house before it catches on fire.
I feel like a big lesson of US politics over the past few years is if you hyperventilate and accuse your opponents of doing some type of drastic shit which they haven't yet done, that backfires by creating political cover and possibly even motivation to do the drastic bad thing. "Do not obey in advance" is a related concept. By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable, you might just be doing a favor for a potential tyrant.
Anyways, HN loves to glaze China, and they have much stiffer speech controls. I think these complaints are motivated more by anti-Trump sentiment than a genuine love for liberty.
"If you ignore everything that's happening the problem will just go away. So easy, I don't have to do anything at all".
>By helping to make the unthinkable thinkable
If I just close my eyes the fire will magically go out by myself.
Have you ever stopped to think that the opposite of what you're thinking may actually be closer to the truth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please stop flagging comments simply because they go against your ideology.
There is serious irony in you advocating for this type of knee-jerk censorship of views you oppose, in a thread about authoritarianism.
"The current government is an evil, oppressive police state. Anyone who suggests otherwise must be silenced!!"
By then it's too late
This level of control is unnecessary when the population is mentally captive and the chilling effect of police violence prevents any actual action.
Most of the East side of the Wall was like that, it's just less known.
The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.
If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.
Btw I've lived in one of those regimes. Yes people often privately expressed their stark opinions against the system, sometimes in more vague forms also publicly. There is infinite amount of gray between those 2 extremes, and US is already somewhere there moving darker a bit each day.
Er. No? Start worrying before it is not a headline anymore. If you wait to worry (and take action) at the point you propose, it's become too late to do anything about it.
It's sad that this seems to be a prevalent attitude. "It hasn't gotten unbearable yet so there's no reason to take action now." Ideally we'd be pushing back on these things long long long before they're even a remote possibility.
We still have roving packs of ICE people abducting people across the country with almost no accountability. We're not far from "the army indiscriminately opens fire on crowds of people". I like to believe that if ICE were to go even farther and do something like this that it would trigger a mass pushback/reaction, but TBH I don't feel entirely confident that it would.
"Either because the media are suppressed" -- we're seeing media suppression now, from two angles: the head of the FCC is literally trying to intimidate media outlets regularly, the most recent (that I'm aware of) being telling media outlets not to run polls that show how unpopular Trump is. The other angle is allowing the buy-up/consolidation of media by right-wing oligarchs who then start tampering with news coverage.
Though you're the one comparing getting a 50-year sentence for being a member of a signal chat to "only 36 presents for his birthday".
I am sure you have a reply but "it can only get worse".
Another important concept is the Dual State; there will always be some people who remain within the Normative State even as it shrinks and shrinks, and while the horrors of the Prerogative State become more and more extreme.
classic American cope
and this round, everyone without birth naturalization is being investigated for removal based on their speech, when it doesn’t match the state opinion
Your argument is that if a word gets used more it dilutes the word? That's not how language works.
[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo
... and then shot him dead. I recommend an alternative source than the Daily Mail, it's a sensationalist rag.
You can see everything being described in the video. Other sources show the same thing with more censorship blurring.
Maybe don't start physical alterations with the police when you're armed?
> Maybe don't start physical alterations with the police when you're armed?
A masterstroke of weasel word craftsmanship, it almost helps you get away with the fact the "physical altercation" means 'getting beaten to the ground after barely getting in the way', and "armed" means 'unarmed' as they pulled his gun from him before the killing. They had him pinned down to the ground, and then decided that summary execution sounded about right.
> A masterstroke of weasel word craftsmanship
Really? “Don’t fight cops when carrying a gun” is pretty simple.
say it with me:
In the USA, government agents are not allowed to kill people for protesting. they're not allowed to kill people for being a mouthy lesbian. they're not allowed to kill people for provoking them, insulting them, or making them mad.
Agreed, and I'm glad nobody was killed for those things. In the USA you shouldn't start fights with cops while you're armed or drive over the police. Most other places too.
I know that idiots will argue that "attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder" is "technically correct", but it is stupidity to not understand that it leaves out important nuances.
I'm not the biggest fan of Orwell but the idea that authoritarians work by asking us to stop using language in normal way has been unfortunately helpful.
But instead a few of them had guns, and one of them decided to get into a shoot-off with the police.
You are unequivocally fucked if you have any degree of association with those people doing shit like that on federal property.
(the bodycams and security footage for this event are on youtube)
One of them had a gun, which the US decided was ok for someone to carry in public.
> You are unequivocally fucked if you have any degree of association with those people
Guilt by association is it?
And please don't forget the attempted murder that the leader really did carry out with a firearm.
In fact, let's use your argument. People drown accidentally in swimming pools regularly. So then if some "protester" decided to set up one of those portable pools and forcibly hold people down under water in one, wouldn't they be guilty of attempted murder?
Using things that are known to cause death and serious harm in a way that is intended to cause death and serious harm is in fact the thing I'm against.
Unless of course your guy ends up in power again and offers you pardons and reparations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/podcasts/the-daily/antifa...
tldr, the govt (not the court) decides whether it is terrorism or not, which elevates misdemeanor into decades long felony conviction.
The J6 crowd was not charged with terrorism.
The government's case explicitly tried to throw the book at all involved (including 30 years for someone not even at the protest; for moving a box of anti-fascist literature) in line with new executive direction including NSPM-7[1][2].
The BBC article you linked takes many of the procecutor's statements at face value. Looking into this case more may illuminate how wide this survailance and punnishment net will be cast against the administration's political enemies.
[1]https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr... [2]https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...
If you are too lazy for that, just read the Brooks Brothers Riot wiki page and square that with your recollection of Jan 6.
Cool, cite it.
> Brooks Brothers Riot wiki page
That's a seperate event. What does that have to do with the Capitol riots? On what specific wiki? Do you mean Wikipedia? Wikipedia not a citable reference, according to Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_proceedings_in_the_Ja...
You'll notice many specific claims have things called footnotes that you can click on for corroborating data sources.
> That's a seperate event. What does that have to do with the Capitol riots?
Familiarize yourself with it and if the relationship isn't obvious I can help. Of course, you don't have to believe in a correlation to understand that Jan 6 was premeditated by many participants, it's just a fun piece of Roger Stone lore!
> On what specific wiki? Do you mean Wikipedia?
Yeah typically when someone references "wiki" without qualification they mean https://wikipedia.org. It's the de facto standard for general information, even in the LLM era.
> Wikipedia not a citable reference, according to Wikipedia.
What on earth are you blathering about? If you have a problem with a data source you are welcome to seek alternatives. That doesn't somehow mean an event didn't occur or is unknowable.
> What on earth are you blathering about?
That’s a very clear sentence and there is no need to be rude to me. What specific part don’t you understand, you stupid fucking cunt?
And: which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
They weren't asking about absolute numbers, though
>which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world?
> [El Salvador (16.5/Mln), Cuba (8/Mln), Rwanda (6/Mln), Turkmenistan (5.5/Mln), United States (5.5/Mln)]
And the other protesters had huge, unjust sentences applied to them for protesting.
Or the lack of one for a bunch of feds pinning a man to the ground and executing him. And then scattering like fucking roaches after they do so.
But you know all this. Why are you carrying water for it?
I'm pretty sure that 5 minutes before the incident, everyone involved would agree this was not a life-threatening situation. The only reason there was a death was due to huge failure of ICE.
It's so easy to take any incident where a cop shoot a citizen and says "well, cops have guns, so the onus is on the citizen to be extra careful around cops".
This is the wrong framing. This was a premeditated (first degree) murder. The killer, Jonathan Ross, had previously tried cowboy heroics with a moving vehicle and had ended up being dragged a few hundred feet - surely a traumatic experience. In the run-up to the murder of Renee Good, he went out of his way to approach her vehicle using the positioning of his own body to box it in - in direct violation of written ICE policies of how to interact with motor vehicles (for obvious reasons).
The reasonable inference is that this was setting up a pretext to use his gun if the vehicle started to move, while leaving enough room to jump out of the way - so as to be able to attack a driver who might disobey him, while not ending up getting dragged again. And when Good started to reverse the vehicle, he acted according to that plan.
The involvement of ICE itself is that they are protecting this violent criminal from seeing justice. Not merely as an immediate reaction of waiting until the dust settles, but as long term policy. This indicates the organization itself is a criminal conspiracy, rather than an institution of civil society governed by the rule of law. Of course this is merely one among many other such indications.
What is a baseless "narrative" is your repeated implication that it's somehow within the scope of law enforcement officers - in a civil society governed by the rule of law - to summarily execute people for disobeying them.
As if asserting "I just am right" isn't being righteous...
It seems like you're trying to hang some moral authority on what is, even after having spent most of your time on what ought. But what ought - an abstract model of ideals - is exactly what defines us as thinking beings above the level of animals. Twisting your estimation of what ought based on what [presently] is drags us down to that lower level.
As for what is? That is easy! Would I have started moving my car after I was being assaulted by ICE agents? Probably not. Would I have engaged in the type of protest she did now that I have a kid? Fuck no. There are plenty of things Renee Good could have done differently to avoid being murdered that day! And I'm sure if she could have gone back and changed her actions after seeing the consequences they ended up having, she would have.
But still, none of this has any bearing on what ought to be in a society based around individual liberty and a government subservient to the People! And what ought to be, what we should be aiming for if we want to have a just society, is that murderers end up behind bars regardless if they happen to be employed by the government.
I am not familiar with the case under discussion, but surely there is no legitimate advancing that one should be tame in front of danger (as in "bending as they are armed").
In other words, to disambiguate: an example about prudence proportionate to danger cannot be simply exported to social life.
Hmm. I see.
My personal recommendation is that you at least few videos before commenting then. It may make you reconsider your support of this particular 'cause'.
And again, your argument is illogical: you can say exactly the same about the ICE agent (they did not acted carefully enough). Why is the victim guilty of not have considered the aggressor as unhinged, and the aggressor not guilty of avoiding the situation that they use to justify their behavior.
Because the 'aggressor' is not aggressor, but a governmental employee mandated to be violent when necessary AND we do have a verb ( and corresponding crime ) for people who choose to stand in the way of such an employee: obstruction of justice ( edit: replaced duty -- other thread was on my mind ).
Your whole world is mildly warped, because you think you can simply apply victim/perpetrator filter to make the whole concept somehow flip. But reality does not work that way.
You were saying that the onus is on her for putting herself in a situation where she should expect to be shoot. But by your own admission, even if we accept that what she has done properly constitute obstruction of duty (which I doubt is the case, and at best is highly arguable) she was putting herself in a situation where she should never be in any real danger.
But again, you did not answer: she was at the wrong time at the wrong place, she did not go out of her way to be in this situation. Pretending that she "looked for it" is just twisting the facts.
> Your whole world is mildly warped, because you think you can simply apply victim/perpetrator filter to make the whole concept somehow flip. But reality does not work that way.
No, your "whole concept" is just highly subjective. You decided that "the onus is on her" because you decided that when she has responsibility over the fact that the ICE agent was unhinged, while the ICE agent had zero responsibility on the fact that she might be unhinged.
Ok. I think we got to stop for one simple reason. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Just a short overview for you and the -- apparent -- audience:
While it is possible for obstruction to be small enough that it will not matter, it can easily move to felony with actual punishment also highly dependent on specifics of a given case. Therefore, your assertion is, at best, your opinion.
That said, my point stands. Had she not been in US illegally none of this would have transpired including this ridiculous conversation.
When it involves weapons, evidence tampering or higher crime, which is clearly not the case here.
> Had she not been in US illegally none of this would have transpired including this ridiculous conversation.
What are you talking about? Who was illegally in US? I thought we were talking about Renee Good, who was a US citizen, was never a migrant (even legal), and dropped her son 7 minutes ago and was on her way home.
> I thought
Ooooh finally, I have been insisting in a handful of replies to the poster "what (case) /exactly/ are we talking about". Is this confirmed, poster?!
'Guy' in the anglosphere is often para-gender (e.g. Australia).
> nonsense
Unfortunately, that is not the telling difference between LLMs and human specimens...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50274143
> at least few videos
Sure, but I objected to the general principle: prudence has a limit - the value of one's life has limits. Justice comes before life, Dignity comes before life, etc.
No. Most of the stuff out there. I am already wasting time on HN. I won't also google this stuff for you ( or w/e equivalent you use ).
<< Sure, but I objected to the general principle:
That is reasonable objection, but absolutely not how actual cases work. Minute details matter in how they contribute to a given defense. And it seems you know this.
<< the value of one's life has limits
Sadly, it seems in US it is even quantified.
<< Justice comes before life,
Justice. I hate to go all HS on you, but.. what does justice mean to you.
I cannot understand how you cannot understand. ___Which___, of the many cases I may have heard of, is the one you are talking about.
> not how actual cases work ... And it seems you know this
Yes. But within general principles, you cannot present a principle of prudence as primary when it is suggested that others may be at play. It is a true statement that prudence does not override other factors. If we went into details still within the general principles, if a suggestion were made about "power as would-be giving more freedom", it required a strong rebuttal - very much not (power to potentially exercise violence does not confer a legitimacy for further freedom). In actual cases, discrimination in judgement is required - but that will happen in front of actual cases.
> I hate to go all HS on you, but.. what does justice mean to you
What is "HS"? "Hismajesty Socrates the maieutist"?!
Within what I said earlier, "you do what you have to do". Do it prudently, reason it properly within the constraints you are given, but if it is what you have to do you do it (not "but going away is safer"). (Still the general principles.)
But second, your example is moving the goal post. You started by saying "the onus on her". Then you say "when I'm next to my family member that has a gun, I'm almost automatically more careful". But the onus is on your family member. Are you seriously saying that if your family member would shoot you, you will agree that the main responsibility is on you?
And where do you put the bar? Does it mean that if I carry a gun, people should be extra careful next to me and please all of my requests, because it is "on them" if somehow I get angry and shoot them?
This line of reasoning is just so bad. It is "unfalsifiable": you can use this argument anyway you want to blame any people in the situation. Why did you not say "well, the ICE agent should have known that this woman may be dangerous, so he should not have acted in a way that led to increased tension, the onus is on him". And if the ICE agent would have been the victim, would you have said "the onus is on him" for not having been more careful?
I am, admittedly, a simple man. I do not put myself in dangerous situations unnecessarily or, at least, go out of my way to avoid them. Blame may be shared, but it really is on me to assess a risk of any given moment. I admit that it must be nice thinking everyone else is responsible for me. However, that is simply not true.
<< you can use this argument anyway you want to blame any people in the situation.
You make me sound smarter than I am, but, really, you are just misunderstanding the argument ( not sure if on purpose or not ).
<< The main point is that she did not put herself voluntary in a dangerous situation.
You know what. I am all ears. I may simply be wrong. Present your evidence of the case as you see it.
Which is quite a move from "the onus is on you".
> but it really is on me to assess a risk of any given moment
Yes. And the situation we are talking about should clearly not be a situation that should be assessed as "life threatening". By your own admission, she put herself in a minor offense, not something that should be life-threatening. And the fact that the ICE agents carried guns does not justify that one should consider that any interaction with them means that they are putting themselves in life threatening situation.
> I admit that it must be nice thinking everyone else is responsible for me
Well, you are litterally the one here saying that the ICE agent should think everyone else is responsible for them.
No one else does that. I fully agree that people share some responsibilities in the situation they put themselves into. Where we disagree is when you are saying "the onus is on her". No, the onus is not on her: she put herself in a situation that should NOT be something that should be assessed as overly dangerous.
> You make me sound smarter than I am, but, really, you are just misunderstanding the argument ( not sure if on purpose or not ).
Your argument makes no sense at all. Your argument was also quite downvoted. Surely not because of a woke conspiracy, probably more because indeed your argument makes no sense. Maybe you should consider that maybe it is the case?
> You know what. I am all ears. I may simply be wrong. Present your evidence of the case as you see it.
I asked you first. My FIRST COMMENT: "What do you mean? For what I know, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, did not do anything voluntarily illegal, and was in a situation where everyone should agree would never have had to degenerate into a life-threatening situation."
You never answered.
If you want the discussion to progress, first provide your answer first. I asked you three time to answer on this point.
edit: in another comment, YOU say: """ << can you give information about the case? (Which "videos"?)
No. Most of the stuff out there. I am already wasting time on HN. I won't also google this stuff for you ( or w/e equivalent you use ). """
You are so full of it. Someone says "present your evidence" when you explicitly said there are videos and you refuse, and here, you are asking exactly "present your evidence".
Before I present my evidence, apply to yourself what you put to others, just strong-man the discussion and try yourself to find element that support my way of seeing the situation.
Friend. I don't care what you downvote. I have seen what you vote for. In a sense, I don't even have a need to convince you here. Life will go on with or without this argument proceeding. Allow me to demonstrate.
End of communication.
I also don't care about convincing you. Simply, it is nice that when someone says something totally stupid, other people stops the non-sense to be spread.
And indeed, conveniently for you as you were unable to provide basic evidence of your claim, end of communication.
At first level this seems simplistic. Then, it seems inconsistent with «happily dropping them for school» - can somebody explain...
Edit: and the "simplistic" perspective is outside the gross understatement of "«should not have been there» hence «only to be shot»"... Which again makes no sense without all the relevant information (hopefully).
Edit: maybe the poster could elaborate on which details exactly he believes justified the events.
I understand your effort to engage in good faith, but iugtmkbdfil834[0] has made it clear that they are not.
They're operating out of what Sartre called out[1] as a primary mechanism of anti-semites, but is also applicable to folks like this:
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iugtmkbdfil834[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-...
today i learned everyone is supposed to be a docile sheep, just put your head down and keep on plowing the fields
Friend, we are trying to be nice about it and move within the contours of the lines drawn. Surely, that is preferable to people just doing whatever they want?
There is law to be enforced. There is mandate to be carried out. Do you have problem with either or both?
I hope you wont have to hear this when the gestapo is at your door because that's how they get into power, people like you just saying we need to follow the law when people get executed by trigger happy <law> enforcement
>Ha! Fuck around and find out!
right?
But even still, stop fucking victim blaming.
First, she was a willing participant and apparently was explicitly targeting ICE agents and blocking their cars.
Second, what she is is a useful victim; as in, useful to people like you who use her death as a prop.
> useful to people like you who use her death as a prop.
Hmm.... reflection?
Sure, just like there were likely less chancy way to protest, but here we are.
<< Hmm.... reflection?
I would argue I am reflecting pretty well.
Edit: to expand on this - if you think interacting with an ICE agent(even if that interaction is blocking their way with your car) is "gambling" then I'm afraid you've accepted that you live in judge dredd society - where agents can execute someone on the street and face no repercussions. After all, they are defending the law, and Renee Good was a criminal for blocking them, right? You know what would happen in a normal country? She would be arrested. The coward of an officer pulled out his gun and fired at the vehicle driving away. I wonder if he'd have the balls to explain to her kid why mummy isn't coming home. I wonder if you'd tell her child that mummy isn't coming home because she "gambled". I'm disgusted by your comment.
> What guy? This comment proves more than anything else that you're a bot, or are not really able to read comprehensively. Multiple people have asked you to clarify your position and you always give some crappy excuse why you can't, walking around it like a shit circling the drain. And now you replied to me talking about a completely different person? Are you just following some script?
So you either are: Mindlessly arguing about sensitive topics to get a rise out of people OR Completely clueless on what the fuck is being discussed OR A bot created to argue about sensitive topics to get a rise out of people
Which one is it?
The First Amendment was written by people who experienced this same chilling of free speech.
Why do you need to protest at the slightest sign of the government becoming authoritarian when you have "the ultimate argument of force" on your side?
But it's an illusion. Guns are a nice hobby I enjoy as well. They are great for self defence, but good luck to you if you think you'll use it "against government tyranny"... You'll be dead and no one will care.
2nd amendment makes an ultimate duty of a citizen in a democratic country - to not allow it to turn into a tyranny, into "you don't need to worry about politics, worse case scenario you have your AR15 and a box of ammo".
While in a country without such false ideas people get out and protest in mass numbers.
I don't think I've ever heard of a proper protest happening in USA. The kind of protest that involves 10% of adults at least and happens in every city and town. (Also I'm not talking about rioting like in France)
Burning down a school to protest against class overcrowding is like something straight from idiocracy.
Peaceful protests work on governments, even those hell bent on authoritarianism, but they have to be massive.
Let's say you have a million or two of people show up in Washington. Will it make any difference? Nope. Why? Because it's under half a percent of US population.
Let's now say 10% of people in every city and town go to their town centre and protest. Does this make a difference? Yes it does, because it shows real power to everyone.
If you're using your 2a rights to fight against the government (tyrannical or not), it does not free you from facing the consequences if you don't "win", or prevent the government from fighting back (in self defense, or otherwise).
It's an incredibly serious thing to say "the government is so tyrannical that we need to use violence to overthrow it" (see: history).
There is no meaningful way in which you can exercise your "2nd Amendment rights." With the 1st Amendment, we say that it's specifically a protection for speech that people don't like, because otherwise what's the point? And people do successfully defend that right in court, on occasion.
But with the 2nd Amendment, you can't expect the State to uphold a right to attack itself. It hasn't ever happened at it never will. Which, in turn, proves the bullshit-ness of the 1st Amendment. If the 1st Amendment described a meaningful right that could challenge the State, then you wouldn't be allowed to have it.
So that's the ground truth. The point I was making was that people who espouse the importance of the 2nd Amendment are bullshit themselves. Because it is trivial to see that the 2nd Amendment is toothless, making it a single-issue voting policy as most of those people do indicates either they are delusional or they seek some other end and the guns are just a cover. The fact they keep voting for a party that keeps damaging the economy in the name of Sticking It To Brown People seems like a pretty good candidate for why.
I would make two points here.
1. ICE is breaking the law in many, many different ways. It is not legal to murder multiple US citizens like Alex Pretti and Renee Good. The conditions of their internment camps (I will use the euphemism as I suspect you would not like the more accurate term) are not legal. And many, many other issues, please see:
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/we-documented-12...
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/ice-cb...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-administration-has-de...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/courts-have-ruled-4...
By your legalist moral standards, is this not also "black and white"? Do people not have a right or duty to protest it?
2. What is legal is not always what is morally right. The comments you are making mirror those in past "legal" civil rights violations at scale. The same arguments were made against the civil rights movement in the 60s, anti apartheid movement, and pretty much every civil rights movement. The answer in all of those cases is the same: what is legal does not determine what is morally right, and we have a civic duty to nonviolent protest when the two conflict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
If their job is arresting people in the country illegaly, any other matter of public safety should be handled by the correct institution at local or federal police level. Hint, its not ICE.
This antecedent is false, so we don’t even need to read the consequent.
It did not happened. What happened was police committing crimes and people making videos of it.
> If paramedics help casualties, and people impede the paramedics helping casualties
It did not happened. However, police and ICE did in fact intentionally impede the paramedics helping casualties on multiple occasions.
Following you so far
> and they do that,
Yeah, that's where you fucked up. That's not what ICE is doing that everyone is upset about. It's the locking up, deporting, and killing of people who are here legally, they just happen to be brown.
>"When the President of the United State of America does it – it isn't illegal!"
>–Nixon, probably
Obstructing law enforcement is a crime even if you don't like law enforcement. I think it's a stretch to go from "Minnesota 15 investigated" to "ICE is a private police force used to suppress dissent". Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is anti-democratic.
Actually, the way the criminal justice system works here in America is that you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. It's not the job of the newspaper to exonerate the victims of government overreach.
Generally the evidence seems vastly more narrow.
The indictment itself makes no specific mention of violence as far as I know because there was no actual violence committed. It's staggering that people are getting set multi-million-dollar bonds for what is essentially civil disobedience.
"Also, there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders? I get the sense this writer believes deporting people is opposed to democracy."
A few things to unpack with this statement. 10 million people never entered illegally, that number is derived from DHS reporting of 10 million encounters which includes people who are arrested, denied entry or removed. Also, that doesn't cover the fact that this was a recognized issue by Democrats hence why the party had the bipartisan border bill that was killed by Trump because he wanted the border as a political issue for the upcoming election.
The bipartisan bill would've still allowed in thousands of people per day. Some people don't want that. It wasn't even proposed until 2024. By then people might not have trusted the admin.
First of all, the bipartisan bill would have de-facto ended catch and release due to significantly ended "Catch and release" or Notice to Appear since there was now sufficient capacity to adjudicate.
You are correct 10 million were not substantially deported because a majority of them never entered at all that 10 million figure is just a downright lie. Based on the data from Title 42 expulsions around half of that 10 million were people sent back.
"The bipartisan bill would've still allowed in thousands of people per day."
Funny because if we take your (lies) about 10 million the legislation would have cut that down by 80% on just the caps alone. Increase in adjudication and the end of catch and release (if we assume all of the 2 million getaways are entirely dishonest) then it would be less than 10% of that figure.
Perfect is the enemy of good or something like that.
The bipartisan bill was full of loopholes and it only triggered when border crossings exceeded certain rather high thresholds. Do you realize that? It wasn't comprehensive at all. Here is an example of a loophole: "While the president’s parole authority would be narrowed, he or she would retain the power to parole entire classes of migrants and would have greater authority to do so at airports." (https://digital-release.thehill.com/?p=4447957). So this assumes Biden and Mayorkas were genuinely trying to fix the problem all of a sudden in 2024 as they were facing an election. Why would we want to codify allowing in a certain high number of people along with loopholes when we could just replace Mayorkas and Biden?
The thing is that Mayorkas WANTED the border to be open. This wasn't a mistake. It's an unofficial policy that you're dancing around. I am not interested in stupid Trump vs Democrats or GOP vs Democrats bullshit. There's a substantial nnumber of people who want large scale immigration and a substantial number who don't so all this legalistic bickering is just window dressing for this issue but don't try to pretend that it's universally the moral or democratic norm to have open borders.
Are we now doing “guilty until proven innocent?”
> there's no mention of the ~10 million people who entered illegally under Biden. Is it democratic to have open borders?
Where is that figure sourced from? Are the borders still open?
You’re ignoring the bipartisan bill that would have increased border security in 2024, but Republican politicians shot down for political purposes to help Trump in the election. What did that bi-partisan solution get wrong that you would have done differently?
I get the sense this writer believes Immigration Enforcement Officers deporting and tracking legal American citizens is anti-democratic.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/15-members-direct-action-minn...
The difference is Nixon had real domestic enemies to worry about: The Weather Underground were bombing buildings, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the "Symbionese Liberation Army", the Black Panthers were making demands which conservative America found frightening, mass protests were going on about the war in Vietnam on college campuses which resulted in the deaths at Kent State. Nixon believed these protests were driven by Chinese and Soviet influence to support North Vietnam in the war. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS spent years looking for foreign control of the antiwar movement and reported back that there wasn’t any.
What domestic enemies does Trump have? Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. Black Lives Matter protests were his last administration. There have been a few lone wolf attacks like the Dallas ICE sniper, but the domestic threat is no here near what Nixon faced.
Under the Trump's White House directive NSPM-7, which defines a potential domestic terrorist as anyone expressing “anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, or anti-American” views, DHS launched an operation to find a “network of conspirators” against ICE.
The surveillance op in the Wired article targeted labor unions, a climate change group and socialist collectives — the SEIU had three years of wire transfers investigated, and the AFL-CIO, DSA and Showing Up for Racial Justice were also investigated. That’s the mismatch: a 1970s-scale dragnet for a threat that isn’t 1970s-scale.
Trump appears to be grabbing power for the sake of grabbing power.
yeah - he's shaken u.s institutional protections to their core. but lucky they keep standing. maybe he or someone else will finally make a break through - but most likely it won't be trump due to his incompetency and him surrounding himself with 'yes' incompetent people.
Either the institutional protections are strengthened after 2028 (presuming the Democrats win the presidency) and before 2030 (presuming the Democrats lose a bunch of seats in Congress in the midterms), or the next try (whenever it comes) is likely to break the institutional protections and result in authoritarian rule over the US.
Read The Nerd Reich.
When they are arresting news anchors for reporting on ICE's activities, it should be obvious that Trump and his administration is fascist-curious.
But no, that's silly. The folks running these protests are the same population that's been protesting law enforcement in other contexts forever, and ACAB is a founding principle. They know as a matter of unshakable faith that the fuzz will cheat and lie and commit atrocities, and the the paradigm of the protest is to catch them in the act.
So failing to apply that to your IT work is... bad praxis, sorry. The one argument I can see here is if they actually wanted to get caught to troll an article just like this one. Which would make the operator in question a martyr and not a dummy, I guess.
I would not call it "Anti-Left" though. Fascism should never be confused with having an agenda other than fascism itself, be it Trump's corporate fascism or Putin's neo-Stalinism. All pocket away wealth and power to their cronies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280200
Are the denizens of this site so intolerant of different views that they need to flag them out of sight? Whatever happened to the hackers in HN? They'd vociferously defend their own standpoint, pointing out all the errors in my post. The would not hide behind appeals to authority by pressing flag links. What gives, other than that you - meaning those who flagged this innocuous post - just can't stand anything dissenting with your desired narrative to remain on this site? If so, please hand in your hacker card at the exit and find your way to the closest subreddit where such behaviour seems to be cherished. Otherwise discuss, let us know what you think so we can respond or agree or maybe just shake our heads in disbelief but still consider your opinion yours enough that you are willing to post it.
No, this is not the first time I write something like this. I can not help but notice that I've had to write more and more such replies these last years though, things are not looking up here.
you are centrist and have a good point to complain about not liked by them, sorry you are now left
you are conservative right, but have very different views about separation of religion and state, sorry that is woke you are now left, too
you care bout civil right of all US citizens and especially want to better protect workers against abuse, oh dang I fear that is "left extremist" maybe even "domestic terrorist"
/s
Back when it was just nerds on the internet, and powerfull people with agenda's had not infiltrated everything
It's a thankless thing, but we need more people who are willing to just do it. Now I know some of you will point out that Kim Dotcom was hosting movies, shows, music, etc. That's not my point, look at HOW they took him down, and WHEN. They were trying to pass SOPA, claiming it would help them take down people like Kim Dotcom "because they couldn't" so what they did to Kim Dotcom was questionable from a legal perspective...
Sigh. I really do miss the internet before the 2nd and 3rd waves of "Eternal September" (Facebook then Smartphones) it was much nicer.
<https://www.little-gamers.com/2001/12/13/372>
Very apt. These two things did really make the internet a lot worse. I would even add AI as the 4th wave, with all the captchas and slop we now need to deal with :-(
For a free connection (no binaries) see eternal-september.org
People on the earlier internet - I was and still am one of them - did not so much share political views but were far less likely to consider those with different views not worth speaking to. We could speak about other subjects without needing to inject politics into everything, we could take others' opinions for what they were without needing to taint them with some political slur because he happened to vote for a different party or faction. We could actually make fun of those things and did not as a rule throw slurs and attach labels at those of a different view, at least not in anger.
Alas, how things have changed...
[1] https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/iwk-party-buildi...
[2] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/...
> Comrade Knee-Jerk, what did you do for the cause today? Answer me! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49789968
> you'll notice a bunch of useful idiots calling themselves the 'Democatic Socialists of America' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166926
> some activist group doing something stupid https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710719
You have a repeat history of attaching labels to people who have a different view from yourself. It is also bizarrely obsessed with socialism on unrelated topics, which probably explains why your "political" commentary is being flagged. You should consider discussing politics without these kinds of labels if you want people to reply in good faith.
Then to the rest:
The first line you quote - Comrade Knee-Jerk - is satire so that is in a different category.
The second is a good example, "useful idiots" of the "DSA" which in my opinion they absolutely are but you're right in calling me out, guilty as charged. They're still useful idiots though...
The third line isn't an example of me labelling anyone, there's no label there.
Let's take a gander at your rather prolific commenting habits, just to see what you're up to:
Their submission history is reminiscent of other motivated accounts that dilute the website's intellectual curiosity with zero-sum editorials. It's certainly deliberate, and their comment history seems to defend the submissions rather than conceding their obvious low quality.
No, you are willfully misinterpreting the purpose of their project and suggesting completely unrelated, insane and unrealistic remediation.
I stopped after two pages. Maybe you need to check the guidelines once more, especially those sections regarding astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like (first comment) and respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith (second comment).
Now that we've both taken apart each other's commenting histories maybe we can go back to the regular program, post and comment about things we're interested in and try to keep the politicking at bay? It has been made much harder by the way the don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle rule is applied but we can still try. Just assume that the person on the other side of the screen might not agree with you whom to vote for but otherwise has many of the same interests. That does not make him or her evil and it does not mean his or her opinion on unrelated subjects is not worth considering.
Although this default expectation is pessimistic (and some countries might not be nearly that harsh), I don't think it's wildly inaccurate. What I don't understand is why it's common for intelligent people (seemingly only in the US) to consider violations of visa/immigration conditions acceptable and ICE bad guys for enforcing the law?
People have died in our detention centers due to unsanitary conditions.
They arrested a five year old and sent him to one of these detention centers without his parents.
They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.
I favor responsible immigration enforcement. This is not that.
To play devil's advocate for the heavy handedness and harsh detentions, Australia had a problem with 'boat people' in the 2000's, and subsequently built a massive detention centre on a island, meaning those intercepted never made mainland. The heat was oppressive, processing times were usually measured in years, and illegal arrivals were mostly sent back to where they came from.
But.. the illegal arrivals basically entirely stopped. So although it was harsh (including on a lot of legitimate refugees), it did force entry via legal channels (of which Australia has historically had many).
They stopped reporting on individual boat arrivals, a media blackout was imposed and enforced.
For quite a while is was illegal for news to report on conditions. Doctors, nurses, security guards, other staff could be punished for reporting conditions there.
Australia spent over $9m per asylum seeker held on Nauru in 2025–2026. Some people there couldn’t afford food or clean water (it wasn’t supplied).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/20/nauru-asylum-s...
https://rsf.org/en/australia-suppresses-coverage-refugees-na...
We outsourced it, at huge expense to the taxpayer and unfathomable suffering to many refugees.
It would’ve been cheaper and faster to house, feed, and educate them.
That said, a lot of US's immigration problems has been neglect to enforce immigration law, deliberate sabotaging of legislation throughout the years, and multiple broad amnesty decrees that basically broke the system. The system is broken by design and almost tailor-made to foment anti-immigrant sentiment that has sparked this new, ugly phase driven by unaccountable maniacs.
US immigration policy used to be simply... Less. You could pretty much come and go as you please along the southern border. So people did, and therefore there were simply fewer issues because folks didn't feel the need to "sneak in," not when getting in and out of the country was as easy as a day-pass. People would live in Mexico and work a job in a border city.
The tightening of the rules began in (if I recall correctly) the '80s, and with it the actual crisis; if you could come and go as you please, it was no issue to live in Mexico, but people, when forced to choose, stayed where the economic productivity was.
If the goal was actually just about enforcing immigration laws we wouldn't see armies of masked thugs beating the shit out of people in the streets. That's counterproductive because it drives local governments away from cooperating, which is essential to actually getting things done in a productive way.
Look at how this administration handles cases where ICE agents murder non-threatening people. They lie relentlessly and blatantly, even when there is clear video evidence showing up happened. Then they absolutely refuse to investigate any violent misconduct and even go out of their way to block other governments from investigating or trying to hold violent incompetent agents accountable.
The message should be clear to everyone. Fascists love a good spectacle. This is about that, and developing a paramilitary force that operates outside of the rule of law.
Something, something, Borders do not exist as anything other than an abstract concept.
The other issue is intent.
I support reasonable immigration enforcement for practical reasons like added strain on public facilities like social programs. That’s rational.
Our 2024 Trump-aligned candidates ran on more of a xenophobia-centric platform. Xenophobia is irrational and unpredictable reasoning for immigration enforcement.
Unapologetically, then tried to frame each of these people as radicals who deserved it. And there is no investigation, no punishment, no accountability.
It is the utter shamelessness and craven dodging of responsibility that is criminal.
And the American media and American populace do not hold their feet to the fire.
There is no line they won't eventually cross, and the slide into the abyss is accelerating.
Read the exit comments of journalists who worked there.
> “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me,” Pelley said. “And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/scott-pelley-cbs-new-yo...
This is the state of media, and it's looking like the media of certain other countries.
To meet the unrealistic (practically, per resources) targets for arrest and deportation that the administration set for itself, they greatly loosened the training constraints and qualifications for new ICE agents.
Analogies to the German Sturmabteilung of the '20s and '30s are not entirely inaccurate.
But even never minding that, you could say a lot of things : The U.S.A is a country literally built by immigrants. The native-american are a minority in their own land. So is it surprising that a lot of people in an immigrant country support immigrant ? Then, there is the dirty economic secret that illegal immigration fill the low-wages jobs that citizen don't have to lower themselves too. A lot of ties, rule of law, etc. Of all country, it is weird that the U.S is turning anti-immigration.
I've never met someone who wouldn't prefer to change the law rather than be forced to violate them. But only cowards and the intellectually incapable think that supporting the enforcement of an unjust law while campaigning for it's fix is someone a morally superior stance.
And to answer why America? Because if we can't do it, nobody can. What kind of yellow-bellied, unpatriotic attitude can you have to think "oh, let's just let some better country solve the problems we've created in the world through prolonged geopolitical control over the 20th century". Fuck that. If America is great enough to conquer the world, it should be great enough to solve the side effects that come with it.
> Also, what makes refugees specifically the US's responsibility? E.g. verifying, processing and integrating refugees puts strain on domestic systems, and strain scales with volume.
I think nobody said it's the U.S responsibility, in spirit. Factually it is by the fact that they have to handle it and international laws. But that is why country sometimes collaborate on those issues. The U.S and Mexico do collaborate on immigration issue. Mexico do stop a lot of south american immigrant from reaching the U.S border. But the border is huge. There is also other ways to get in, legally or illegally. You can't possibly stop everything. And it is the burden you get when you are a rich country. The U.S is not the only one. And mind you, the U.S and Western European country have benefitted a lot from exploiting the people and resources in poor country and pushing allied authoritarian regime there. Immigration is but a small cost they pay for what they did, and got.
Overstaying a visa in the us isn't necessarily illegal. It can mean that the next time you leave, you'll have to get a new one before being allowed to re-enter which can take months even if it's the same one.
I'm not saying this is universally true for all visas. But if the underlying reason you're eligible for the visa is still there then overstaying it is not a problem.
So I get your assumption, and being pessimistic on that front is probably a good idea. However, immigration isn't straightforward and things that sound bad could be completely legal.
Why not let the judge say "you shall be immediately deported" and then immediately deport them? Right now they're not even letting the judge issue a decision.
Also, any of this can happen to you even if you're a lawful citizen.
The situation in the USA is dire and it's going to get, much, much worse.
Ironically this is why I flag these articles, any slightly nuanced discussion is not allowed, its all the reddit/X style commenters adding 0 value.
ICE has yet to roust a Philly DSA meeting, in contrast.
https://www.aol.com/articles/nashville-judge-orders-release-...
https://www.aclu-co.org/press-releases/federal-judge-rules-i...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/nyregion/ice-judge-condem...
https://alabamareflector.com/2026/09/22/federal-judge-orders...
This is downstream of the fact that the US government just doesn't work well. Problems fester, and are unsolved. Immigration policy hasn't made sense for longer than I've been alive (and I'm 40+).
Imagine that you find that the water supply in your town was built illegally, because the former mayors prohibited the building that was necessary. You may think that is a travesty, you may want to enforce the law strictly in the future, and force the issue, rather than working around it. But what you will not do is tear up the water system and leave the city without water.
If you think that the former mayors are ideologically and morally committed to an illegal water supply, and will immediately stop enforcing the water supply law the second they get back in power (and also somehow the illegal water supply disproportionately helps them win elections); then it might well be a reasonable political move to tear up the water system and leave the city without water. That's one way of forcing the issue.
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!" - Mario Savio
This seems relevant. In other policy areas (unrelated to immigration), there's the concept of gradual change, or a 'glide path'. For example, when raising prices on things like licences or levies, sometimes governments do it gradually over a number of years. Another example: when something is banned, the ban is not enforced immediately but intermediate steps are taken to ensure the public can adjust. By contrast, the transition from immigration rules being unenforced to enforced seems to have been sudden.
Detention in particular is a violation of human rights, with an exception to strictly for the time it takes for the next flight to take off.
Also, in normal countries, if you break the law, arbitrary abuse is still not the expected behavior of the police.
One is that America is exceptional. It's a huge country with massive wealth, resources, and land. It fundamentally lacks the back-pressures that some other countries have against immigration - in fact, it currently has a declining birthrate amongst its native populace and needs labor-age people to backstop an economic inversion.
The other, regarding ICE specifically, is simple trust. People know that the executive branch is, at this time, extremely white-supremacist-adjacent if not just actual white supremacists (Stephen Miller is currently the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), so any claimed purpose for immigration crackdowns is fighting an uphill battle against the presumption that (a) the actual reason is racial segregation (you'll note a disproportionate enforcement on Latinos as opposed to native Germans or Italians or Slovakians) and (b) this administration will not treat people in its care humanely (because they don't follow rules as a general principle).
(a) is the larger "national identity" issue that makes it difficult to build a coherent national immigration policy (because even some good ideas meet an uphill battle against "Does that stop us from serving as the keepers of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?"). But what you're likely observing is (b); American intelligentsia is looking at current events out their window and hearing the echoes of clergy in Europe before and during World War II reading from the book of Exodus and asking their congregation "Who are today's midwives?"
Today being anti-h1b is deemed racist although no other than Bernie Sanders was outspoken against it for decades until very recently. Never mind.
Never mind that some people deemed anti Covid measures racist (ie hugged people in Chinatown for PR stunts, or licking handles in public transit for online clout) and unscientific (masks are bad) until Trump did a 180 (ie. masks are mandatory now). Or how many ppl said they would never have the „trump-vax“ injected and yet after Trump lost the election 2019 were gluttonous about the restrictions to be implemented against the unvaxxed.
That's sometimes reasonable - e.g. the apocryphal loaf of bread being stolen to feed a starving family. But it's not a universal defence. And not all illegals are poor in the first place.
If you make it illegal to sleep on the street at night (by extension, sleeping anywhere that isn’t a legal residence), you are de facto making it illegal to be homeless.
That a law applies to everyone is not a “universal defence” in its fairness.
But your problem seems to be a combination of the wealthy having an easier time accessing the US (agree, but many countries have purchasable visas), and poor illegal immigrants having no other option (partially agree, but not all illegal immigrants are poor, and many who are do have alternative places they could go legally).
Your point is that immigration laws don't sufficiently take into account an illegal migrant's economic status (i.e. make reasonable accommodations for those in poverty or desperate circumstances), which is a totally fair perspective.
But that doesn't affect OP's initial question/observation, since countries other than the US also apply their rules uniformly, which disproportionately affects the poor.
I think you’re focused specifically on the parenthetical: “seemingly only in the US”, whereas I am commenting on the overall sentiment, especially with the context of the first sentence of the OP’s post. Take out the parenthetical entirely from the OP’s post, and possibly the reference to ICE specifically as well, and you get a closer version to what I interpreted as the argument.
This:
> Your point is that immigration laws don't sufficiently take into account an illegal migrant's economic status (i.e. make reasonable accommodations for those in poverty or desperate circumstances)
is a fair(ish) summary of my argument.
But, it’s not really that reasonable accommodations aren’t made, it’s that there’s a vicious feedback loop that the more violent and dehumanizing your immigration policy becomes, the higher the average level of desperation your median immigrant possesses, and the fewer the means they have to avoid the worst of the human suffering that migrants experience (murder, rape, sex trafficking, alligator moats, etc). If you let that vicious cycle go untouched or even reinforce it, you’re enabling human rights violations. Citizens of countries that enable (and perform) human rights violations shouldn’t sleep well at night.
As for why ICE are the bad guys, well that’s a completely different question. The way they enforce laws is thug-like and have resulted in multiple innocent deaths. Regardless of if it is ICE or a normal police department if enforcing laws causes death you bet there will be a large pushback.
For current left this period is now.
Reaching really hard to try to both-sides the narrative.
If you want to change things then vote to change it, don't attack the people doing the work that just makes things worse. These "protests" are on the same level as the people threatening and blocking abortion centers, don't do that it just makes you a menace even if you believe it is a good cause.
But yeah just vote man. Just vote!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Texas_redistricting
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/01/tarrant-county-remov...
https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/10/15/republican-house-can...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/13/trump-voting...
And then, ya know, the whole January 6th fiasco - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Wanna convince me? Substantiate your implied claim.
1. Threatened me and my family for having the wrong political opinion and ethnic background up to and including calling the house phone and threatening to shoot and rape(!) us.
2. Claimed that my relatives who ended up in the Soviet Gulag must have deserved it, because imprisonment by default implies guilt.
3. Happily implemented surveillance networks on everybody "for their own good" when they were anywhere near power.
4. Have repeatedly told me that I am a stupid immigrant and that I should do exactly as they say because I'm too stupid to understand things for myself.
5. Have simultaneously held the positions that all of the above was "justified trolling/just joshing man" and "words are violence" depending on when it suited them.
Behold, the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.
You will fail to achieve anything if you mentally approach these things from a partisan view (like all the comments, general public). ICE should not be running surveillance Ops on Left activists or immigrants and the FBI should not run surveillance Ops on Right activists, J6 rioters.
The tools violate all of our rights full stop. Please don't support this garbage again when Dems sweep into power, trying to debank ppl for X tweets etc.
I think an important distinction here ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so they have no reason to be spying on US citizens unless we're harboring illegal immigrants.
The FBI's *is* the domestic intelligence and security service. So an angry armed mob smashing the Capitol building, threatening to hang the vice president, interfering with the lawful transfer of power, and attempting to gouge the eyes out of a police officer are absolutely something the FBI should be investigating and surveilling. If I merely posted online that I *wanted* to do any of those things, I would expect to be surveilled by the FBI. Actually doing those things is a guarantee.
Neither agency should be doing it for political affiliation reasons, but J6 was a lot more than people just "being conservatives".
Looking at your comment history, it looks like your comments were flagged for Holocaust denial, white supremacist sentiments and uncouth conduct in general. The parent comment was flagged for being low-effort and factually incorrect. If HN didn't flag these comments, the website would be indistinct from /pol/.
[1] Here's a nice read-up on the subject: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-white-supremacy/ ... and please don't tell me that James Lindsay is a white supremacist to avoid ending up in an endless loop. He isn't, not even when he says something you don't agree with, see https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/07/maybe-we-sh...
It takes 15 seconds to check. HN isn't an anonymous messageboard.
> when the 'ban' on political posts was seemingly lifted as long as those posts were aimed against the orange man and his ilk.
That "seemingly" is doing all your heavy lifting, there. Read my last comment again; users are the ones who enforce flags on those posts, in the vast majority of cases.
It can lead to scenarios where apolitical submissions are flagged, or where flamebait slips through. There is almost never a moderator with their finger on the button waiting to flag something on /new, much less in the comment section. The only exception is banned users and banned domains, both of which prevent repeat offenders and disingenuous content from reaching the front page.
Just about every social media site is privately-owned, and protected by Section 230 from most political blowback. If you want to discuss white supremacy and Holocaust denial, you'll have to do it on federal honeypot sites like /pol/, not here. The OP thread is on-topic, intellectually gratifying, high-quality and relevant to HN as it mentions a YC 2020 batch company (Fly.io).
As a centrist my observation is that that left crossed it first, believing that they were doing it for a just cause. Unfortunately that broke the contract and now we are seeing both sides trying to grab power by any means necessary. Until both sides de-escalate, this will continue.
Just like war, many innocent people will pay the price as collateral damage until a truce can be negotiated.
Just that line alone makes me think you're far less centrist than you claim to be.
Go farther back and we have Hoover building kompromat on basically everyone, farther still you get McCarthy anti-Left. I don't think there's an era without any kind of corruption or abuse of power. It's romantic to think there was ever restraint, and like believing so seems to depend on starting the clock at an aribitrary historical point.
And what does any of that have to do with a Government-run, nation-wide spying operation?
As to your last point, I don't recall BLM ever storming the capitol and defiling the building by smearing the walls with their own feces, but in any case, rioters are criminals under the law and should be tried and charged according to due process.
Not saying I agree but if I had to guess…
We can very easily count the murders that happen in the US every year. With the exception of COVID, which was largely due to unemployment and school closures, homicide has dropped precipitously since the invention of “calling people Nazis online”
Where are all these murders caused by calling out racism and fascism?