"ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. ICE agents are wearing brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS — don’t open the door for deliveries. Don’t leave the house. The streets in the New York neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out."

Masha Gessen, with knowledge and perspective. nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion… (2/2)

Opinion | Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. America’s Police State Has Arrived.

Those of us who’ve seen secret police in action can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity.

^{M. Gessen (The New York Times)}

Is there any chance that mayors and state officials county officials clamp down on ICE?

This is ridiculous. The rule of law is being destroyed constitutional rights are being violated at the national level.

Local officials have to step up and put an end to it.

Kinda why I'd always turn the tables on other white folks who said George Floyd had a criminal past and was "no hero"...by agreeing.

Something like, "Sure. Next time some white Karen is having a meltdown and threatening a teenager in Walmart for asking her to wear a mask, we should just send in the cops to murder her. Judge, jury, executioner. Just kill the bitch on camera and post the footage on YouTube. She's no hero".

Then suddenly they believe in due process. Go figure. 🤷‍♂️

How would anyone actually notice all the science and research that doesn't happen? Or recognize that regulatory work isn't being done? That preventable food safety and industrial accidents may happen more frequently? That universities are churning out students unable to think critically about anything outside the party line? Or that fewer and fewer grad students can find positions as their grant funding dries up? Or that companies become even more white and male?

Like the only immediate impacts going on here are the tariffs, but even that is hard to measure when it's just "idk, prices are going up, but prices have always been going up. They went up under Biden too.

One of the saddest examples of "Haha Only Serious" humour I've read recently is that yes, conservatives really do want to run the country like a business—a business being looted by a hedge fund.

If they have their way, Canada's conservatives will win on April 28th and we're next.

I sometimes wonder if the offenders now trying to destroy essential regulatory agencies imagine that they would somehow escape the consequences.

Then I remember that RFK Jr. admits to having gotten a parasitic infection from tainted meat and mercury poisoning from contaminated seafood; and yet despite that he continues with his lethal quackery.

If only there was an official opposition that would explain exactly how bad things are, and demonstrate—literally—exactly how important it is to resist.

Alas, Julius Nyerere's observation still holds: “The US is also a one-party state. But with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”