There's Something Happening In Portland

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down 
- "For What It's Worth," Buffalo Springfield

What trump is doing in Portland Oregon should terrify you. Via Trevor Timm at The Guardian:

A remarkable and nightmarish scene playing out in Portland should terrify anyone who cares about the US Constitution: unmarked vans full of camouflaged and unidentified federal agents are pulling up next to protesters on street corners, then snatching and arresting them with no explanation.

If this were happening in Venezuela or Iran, the US government would be threatening international sanctions. Since it’s happening in the US, Trump’s acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary is defending the decision and even promising more.

The stories from witnesses and those who have been picked up by the unmarked vans – apparently being operated by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is under DHS’s control – are downright terrifying. One victim told the New York Times: “One of the officers said, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ and just grabbed me and threw me into the van. Another officer pulled my beanie down, so I couldn’t see...”

Most of the earlier stories from the abducted had them shoved into vans, dragged through one or federal buildings, and then let go as though they were training runs. Later stories are more frightening with people grabbed off streets, bound as though arrested, warned they were being charged usually for things they weren't even doing, forced to sit in cramped conditions with many of them coping with beatings and bleedings, and then let go. The obvious next stage is actually keeping the abducted held on "charged" without even a chance of speaking to lawyers or loved ones.

I may be an amateur with the law, but I have a basic enough understanding to know that a lot of this violates core principles like Habeas Corpus, the Sixth Amendment guarantee to legal counsel, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee to due process, and the general idea that police brutality is a goddamned no-no (it's why the protesters are out there in the first place).

And the acting DHS, Chad Wolf (seriously? I guess Roy Stalin was already taken) under the claim of "increasing mob violence" in other major cities is threatening to spread these unbadged - and turning out via reports they are untrained at crowd control - thugs to enforce trump's vision of a cowed and quiet population.

Comparisons to Nazi Germany Gestapo have been rampant.

It is doing nothing to clamp down on the protests in Portland, by the by. Mothers are now placing themselves in harm's way to keep the DHS thugs away from everyone else (although the thugs are now firing on the women as well).

But this is trump, struggling to invoke fear in the voters so he can cheat his way to a November re-election, needing violence in the streets to make the middle class Whites terrified of the chaos. The kind of fear that stirred reactions in 1968 leading to Nixon's win.

But this is also trump, losing the suburbs over his screwups handling the pandemic, and there's no evidence that the middle class Whites are going to buy what trump is selling: The suburbs are supporting the protests against police brutality.

And this is us, the United States facing a new threat from trump's regime, one that had been focused on hurting Latino and Asian immigrants and hurting Muslims and hurting Blacks now looking to hurt more Americans.

It won't just be Portland or Chicago. It's going to be Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and Manhattan, and Boston, and Miami, and Orlando, and New Orleans, and Houston, and anywhere else trump is desperate to impose fear and suppress opposition.

He dare not win. trump's cronies dare not win.

Stand up, America.

Navy veteran Chris David stood up. The thugs hurt him. But he stood. They withered. We can stand too.