I get the concern bout Palantir but this is not new: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, AWS, have all been extending their reach into government for over a decade. Palantir is the boogey man right now, and it's under a lot of scrutiny because of its work and its political ties, but let's try turning some of the ire to all of the other tech companies empowering the government against people. The others shouldn't get a pass just because of their perceived political leanings.
hmm. i read the whole thing and i'm not sure the point you're making. in the first paper, Wilson points out:
* it is better for government to own its own infrastructure than to depend on private business -- and if the government must depend on business, he stresses the government should be in a position to exert control over the business.
* it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
and the rest mostly pontificates and the distinction between a bureaucrat and a legislator. care to connect the dots between this and a "hostility to democracy"?
> * it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:
"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.
And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."
Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.
I mean, it's also the bedrock of the Constitution as compared to the Articles of Confederation. Most of the "founding fathers" haaaaaaatttteeeedd democracy, equating it with Mob Rule.
The Great MAGA Cultural Revolution has shifted the overton window enough among right wing elite that anti democracy propaganda is now strong and spreading. But it's still our foundation, "we the people" and all that. If the right keeps pushing dictators I see a civil war in our future.
The MAGA cultural revolution fundamentally is an opposition to Wilsonianism and liberal universalism. That's why MAGA's authoritarian impulses are directed to the organs of Wilsonianism--such as executive agencies permanently captured by one party--rather than the public at large.
I had really hoped that by now you'd have seen that the things that you voted for and hoped to see come to pass are not the universal sweet that you thought they would be. But all I see is that every time more news about the disastrous political direction that USA has taken is that you shift your goalposts with it and declare that this too is what you wanted. As a dad of bi-racial kids I would be super worried that those chickens would come home to roost. These are not just paper games and plenty of people who thought their situation in the USA was a safe as houses - and who voted for Trump - have seen that assumption invalidated.
But as they say: a conservative is a liberal with a daughter.
The deeply unpopular destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives is not democracy. It is a billionaire coup, they're blowing up all the safeguards that generations of Americans put in place to protect us from them.
> destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives
Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.
In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.
Not only is it true, it's not even debatable. 84% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Kamala Harris: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... If you exclude DOD, it's like 90%. In State and Commerce, it was like 95%.
> Those donation totals may be explained, at least in part, by the former president’s policies related to those agencies. Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate Education if he is elected. He maintained an adversarial relationship with EPA, proposing in each of his annual budgets to decimate the agency’s spending and meddling in its scientific work. Trump instituted a longstanding hiring freeze at State and referred to it as “the Deep State” Department. Trump has also vowed to do away with a merit-based civil service for much of the federal workforce.
"Employees at institutions being threatened to be dismantled by a presidential candidate do not support that candidate" does not prove what you think it proves. In fact, the same link says Trump got 40% of federal employee donations in 2020, which is much more balanced.
> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.
We'll need more substantial evidence to believe that these institutions are "permanently controlled by Democrats."
Really? Wow. It does not matter one iota who employees vote for. That is a dark and ugly slope. Maybe we should extend such dystopian views to the periphery, too, such as lobbyists.
It is not a surprise to anyone that people who see themselves as Republican, "the party for smaller government" are less likely to work for said government.
But the insult (and I am not even a public servant) that because people are democrats, they are somehow beholden to that over doing their job professionally, is a strong one. You've basically accused them of having a loyalty to party over their jobs.
Education has a left leaning bias, in spite of some prime examples to the contrary in this thread (it's statistics, after all, and not about particular individuals). So given that to become a federal employee (rather than, say, an elected official) you need to have some education and some skills it should be no surprise that they would skew left leaning as well. If there is an argument to be made that the 'deep state' exists and is democratic leaning that would be the one. But it isn't a bad thing and has - until recently - kept the USA from devolving even faster. But now the brakes are off and the train is gaining momentum. Whether it is too late to stop it or not I do not know.
There is an interesting concept in chemistry: activation energy. If there is a fuel/oxidizer mixture it takes a certain amount of energy to get the chain reaction started. Too little and the proto-fire will burn out by itself. But pass the threshold and it will continue to blaze until there is nothing left to burn. There is a good chance that we have passed the threshold as a society even though the fire has really only properly begun to burn a few months ago. Maybe it is not too late. But I wouldn't bet on that, too many people are spoiling for a fight, they'd harm their own interests happily if they believed it harms the other guy more.
This is perhaps confounded somewhat by the fact that Trump's platform included mass layoffs of federal workers. Trump, contrary to past Republicans even, represented an existential threat to the livelihood of every federal worker.
I'd point out that, at the time American went to war against the Nazis, it was in the 3rd decade of an immigration policy so restrictive that the foreign-born population dropped from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. Even though Europe was utterly devastated from war in the post-war period, there was no mass immigration of europeans to the U.S. because of restrictive immigration laws.
So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.
>Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”
Now I haven't read the book "Looking Forward." If I can get my hands on a copy it promises to be an interesting read. But I would like to follow up on the other ideas presented.
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ - Winston Churchill
Democracy for all its imperfections, is symbolic of the idea that the people give power to the government, and that it is the government's duty to give power back to the people. To me, this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Did the people not give money (taxes) and power (accept rule of law) to the government? Is it so bad for the government to return some of that money and power to the people through the New Deal? Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to?
I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda. From the quotes you can see how they are twisting the ideal of democracy "power to the people" to instead focus solely on power (to the government), and thus authoritarianism. To disregard that the government is a powerful institution is foolish, of course, as is to assume that it somehow will magically work toward the betterment of the people. But to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane, and the article you posted, when read in its entirety, agrees.
>...to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane...
> I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda
Praise is often used in a diplomatic context as well. Just because bad actors praised FDR, it doesn't necessarily follow that FDR is equally odious.
That said, at the time the US had shifted from the high growth, individualistic era of the Gilded Age, into the collectivism of the Progressive Era. When people talk about fascism here it is often in the accusatory, partisan context.
If you examine collectivist projects, you will find that they almost always require an authoritarian backstop to enforce the agenda. There are direct parallels between the Corporatist economic model and many of the progressive era reforms. Instead of using the word 'Fascism' as a partisan cudgel, it may be more informative to examine the parallels. Specifically here in economic doctrine.
>Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to?
In my view, yes absolutely. While it maybe fair to presume good intent, we could also judge the programs on their outcomes. Cynics typically look towards the special interests which benefit from the state's largess and dismiss the good intentions as a mere marketing ploy. Is self-professed altruism enough?
Federal Reserve (a public private partnership, see Corporatism) Chairman Ben Bernanke famously observed, "You're right, we caused the Great Depression. We're sorry. But thanks to you we'll never do it again." The comment was directed towards Milton Freedman, at his 90th birthday party. This was before Helicopter Ben presided over the 2008 financial crisis.
As for FDR, his new deal programs are widely regarded as deepening and prolonging the Great Depression.
So from an empirical perspective, yes these were specifically bad attempts.
However, I'm going a bit long here, and the main topic of the discussion is Democracy. Aside from empirical evaluations we can also reason about the premises of the democratic process in relation to FDR's programs. One of the key objections to Democracy as an ultimate good, is that the sum of the democratic process, Democracy the ideal, becomes greater than the whole of the participants. Axiomatically, if no single individual has the power to coerce another into an internment camp or force him to sell his labor at a fixed rate; Then by what magical incantation, did the votes of these individuals empower FDR to intern Japanese Americans or enact price controls?
I agree that there is an order of magnitude of difference between history's worst and FDR. However, many of the rationales and some of the methods are similar. If we are truly opposed to those outcomes or ideals, then we should call out the similarities.
> As for FDR, his new deal programs are widely regarded as deepening and prolonging the Great Depression.
That is absolutely not true. That idea is not widely accepted among mainstream historians and economists.
The generally accepted lesson from the depression is that the fed policy was wrong. That theory has been mostly successfully deployed to subsequent recessions.
Its really easy to read this and be scared without being given any context, not everyone in the room knows who you are referring to and if your reading of their remarks are accurate.
You can also sign up to Curtis Yarvin's Substack and read the kind of thinking that Thiel likes to surround himself with: https://graymirror.substack.com/
Or watch Peter Thiel's interview on the anti-chris and if he thinks humanity should survive (uhhh, well, ughh, ummm, you see). Wild scary stuff. Go watch the whole interview but a taste:
Here’s a more contextual excerpt of the transcript which features the 5 questions prior to this and his answer. When I listened to it, to me it seemed like he was thinking about how to weave answers to those into his response, which he does after the exerpt. It’s an entertaining memed clip but we owe it to intellectualism to understand the full context and not simply consume YouTube shorts as the be-all, end-all.
———-
Douthat: … It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.
Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?
Thiel: Um, yeah.
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Peter Thiel. He says "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
The beginning of the essay
> I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Haha I like that quote, but to her unintentional credit Ayn Rand did force me to think about why she was wrong, whereas if my main exposure to capitalist propaganda were the plausibly apolitical econ classes offered in school I might never have even realized that they were propaganda.
These sound like the exact reasons we don't have a direct democracy.
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”
- not Peter Thiel
It's a nice soundbite, but in reality people (maybe not Peter Thiel though) understand the value of the common goods quite well. (If you happen to be an uneducated American, who doesn't, you can come here to Europe and see.)
I find it illustrative that so many here defend Democracy as an ends to be achieved or an unqualified good unto itself, rather than a process or a means to an end. It illustrates the arguments made elsewhere about how democratic processes and institutions have been succeeded by Democracy, the belief.
As an unqualified good, one can simply claim that the majority has voted or that the Democratic process has been performed, and therefore the outcome is just. There's an apt George Carlin quote...
Hoppe is far too extreme for my tastes and did not seem too interested in rigorously supporting his (distasteful to put it mildly) preconceived notions, but yes direct democracy is undesirable for a number of reasons IMO.
That's exactly how it works already, albeit through the middlemen representatives figuring out what block of voters is cheapest to buy. The only meaningful difference in a representative democracy is that the representatives can choose not to deliver on their promises (in other words: lie), thereby consolidating real power in a smaller group of people.
Except somehow it's the opposite? The Big Beautiful Bill is one of the most regressive bills in decades - the vast majority of the benefits went to the richest while the biggest cuts went to the poorest. The MAGA base is definitely not on the richer end of that spectrum. I.e. they didn't really even get anything for their undying loyalty besides "owning the libs" I guess.
The market already exponentially concentrates wealth, just piggy back on that. There will always be a market for promoting the self-serving politics of the rich.
The idea is that smaller group of people actually have some integrity and sense of duty to the people they represent and the country at large, rather than just pulling the lever for the thing that benefits them the most in the immediate term.
That idea has always been tested, with the current times being the largest test in several decades at least.
The argument that somebody else has better integrity and sense of duty representing my needs or wants is dead on arrival. Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person has a representative.
The founding fathers and many others would disagree. Based on human history, your assessment of the average human's level of integrity and reasoning is irrationally optimistic.
Also, I assume you meant to say "Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person *is* a representative."
It doesn't matter because everyone only has to represent themselves so they don't really need to have integrity or ability to reason in some larger sense, they just have to be selfish — which is a lot easier than reasoning your way to what maximizes societal good, or some average of the opinions of the 100'000+ people you are supposedly representing.
And the amount of power an individual has is negligible so a bad vote is diluted much more than it is in a representative democracy.
What so many seem to be overlooking is the very, very strong belief by the top 0.01% is that science is about to - or already has - found a way to eliminate natural causes of death. Hence the quote from Peter Thiel:
>I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual
Assume for one moment that it is true that science will be able to eliminate natural causes of death in the very near future. If you are a multi-billionaire, what does that mean for you?
What is the biggest danger to you moving forward?
Can the earth support the current population expanding at an ever increasing pace if everyone lives forever?
Is it feasible that the wealthiest 3,000 people on earth can 'control' who has access to the ability to never die a natural death?
I mean, he’s not wrong. Libertarianism is freedom - for the rich. And concentrated wealth is antithetical to democracy because it’s concentrated power. He’s just taking libertarianism to its logical extreme by repudiating democracy.
Is it any wonder that he has helped fund our decline into authoritarianism? We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned increasingly against American citizens.
I don't disagree with any of your conclusions, but he is not even a libertarian ideologically. Somebody who is a boss (owner or manager) in a private company can't be considered to put freedom of his subordinates above all else; it's an authoritarian arrangement. If he was truly a libertarian, he would be either a lone contractor or consider his coworkers to be his peers (e.g. would start a cooperative instead of private company, or he would find a similar position as Linus Torvalds).
This is part of the fundamental contradiction of libertarianism. Why would those with the power and the purse strings curtail the government (including spending) when it doesn’t suit them? Instead it’s things like environmental regulations and social programs that get cut, tipping society’s imbalances further.
The capital-L Libertarian party is a bastardization of the libertarian conception of freedom based on the longstanding American delusion of "temporarily embarassed millionaires", similar to the philosophy-laundering that goes on in the two major parties. So called "right-libertarianism" as a complete overarching philosophy is a logical contradiction. For example, in the "right libertarian" framework, North Korea is isomorphic to a bastion of freedom - Kim Jong Un simply owns everything, and everyone there has contracted with him with some pretty oneous terms, including making all of their children party to this contract as well. The right-"Libertarians" reading this are now reflexively looking for logical escape hatches - restrictions on the freedom to contract, age of legal personhood, etc - but only because this example is so galling it's setting off the atrophied "leftist" inductive half of their mind.
Libertarianism must necessarily be concerned with qualitative outcomes of individual liberty rather than being lured in by axiomatically asserting the existence of freedom by construction (commonly resulting in Newspeak). Analyzing all power structures with an eye for coercion, not falling into the trap of championing new ones with differently-named abstractions while defining away the coercion. The "rightist" deductive logical implication following is of course necessary (one can't get very far without it!), but it is incapable of achieving liberty by itself. Trying to do so inevitably fails spectacularly, which is why there are sibling comments in this thread abusing the concepts of liberty to argue in support of naked authoritarianism.
At Alligator Alcatraz and CECOT, people are held without charges, denied timely access to legal counsel, and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention. At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so. The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials. Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
You do not have to be criminally charged to be deported under civil immigration statues. The years of leftists smugly proclaiming "it's a civil violation, not a crime" ended up being a self own.
>denied timely access to legal counsel
Again, civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
>and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention
They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge. The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
>At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
Not in the US. Deportations to CECOT follow the same practices and statutes as deportations to other countries.
>The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so.
I'll give you this, detention/prisons/etc. centers in the US are universally bad.
>The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials.
It's not punishment, it a temporary holding before deportation.
> Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
Illegal immigrants do not have a constitutional right to stay in the US.
CECOT is part of US mass deportation operations. Sending someone to a concentration camp doesn’t become justified when the destination is a foreign country. In fact the US plans to expand the number of domestic and foreign concentration camps.
> civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
You’re appealing to the law. But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it. It is a human right not a legal right. The history of concentration camps is full of legal supports placed there by authoritarian governments. But legal justifications don’t exonerate governments mass incarcerating people without due process.
> They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge.
Sure there is. Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging.
> The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
Average detention times are around 50 days. Some people crossing at borders for example can be turned back fairly quickly. Others are held indefinitely.
> It’s not punishment
Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
>Sending someone to a concentration camp doesn’t become justified when the destination is a foreign country.
If illegal immigrants were to voluntarily deport before becoming detained, could they avoid incarceration at CECOT? If the answer is "yes", then it seems their own actions/decisions cause this. Why then should I have sympathy for them?
>But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it.
What is the exact nature of their due process rights in that situation?
What process is due, exactly, someone who is detained because they have no right to be in this country?
>Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging
The only people who have a say in the matter on whether or not a non-citizen should be allowed to stay or forcibly deported is a citizen. If you'd like to make the case that they should be allowed to stay (as a citizen), then I am willing to hear your argument.
I'm not willing to hear theirs, and as much as I can influence my government, I will demand that it be unwilling to hear their (non-citizens') arguments as well. In court, or otherwise.
>Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
If you remove a trespasser from your property, it is not punishment... it is remedy. If the remedy (for some reason) deters future trespassing, that still doesn't make it punishment.
People who aren’t trespassers or violating any law are punished and deported without a chance to make their case. You’re assuming that all people ICE sends to concentration camps deserve to be there? But these determinations have been made without fair hearings where people have a chance to formulate a defense. Due process is not afforded these people. Treating people this way is unjust.
They very much are trespassers. They're not citizens, therefor they have no legal right to be here. We issue visas, but we reserve the right to revoke those without notice or for that matter right to appeal. We're removing them from property that is not theirs.
Punishment would be additional to that, but perversely would require that they remain here for the punishment, so people like myself have no interest in it. It's enough that they leave.
>You’re assuming that all people ICE sends to concentration camps deserve to be there?
I don't know what you think the word "deserve" means that it is relevant. It does not matter where they deserve to be, they can't be here. It's our property, they're not welcome.
>But these determinations have been made without fair hearings
There need be no hearings at all. They are not citizens, they have no right to be here. None. You seem to think that some legal right is being revoked, which would necessitate courts... but they have no such legal right. No need for hearings.
>Due process is not afforded these people.
The only process due an illegal immigrant is checking to make sure they're not a citizen. If that process has been followed, no more process is due them. They are not criminals, they get no trial.
> Treating people this way is unjust.
Possibly. But I do not care, not even a little. It is our obligation to make a place for foreigners to live here. This isn't their country.
The issue with suspending due process is you can’t tell if any of these accusations are true. Is this or that victim of ICE really a “trespasser”? Without due process you can’t know that. All you have are accusations and punishment.
A place of mass detention without due process: that’s the definition of a concentration camp.
>The issue with suspending due process is you can’t tell if any of these accusations are true.
None of the detainees are claiming citizenship. Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them. One might think that even someone ignorant of the law might start babbling "you can't do this, I'm a citizen" or similar.
They know the score. They know they're not. Now if only the left would clue in too.
>and punishment.
What punishment? Not all legal remedies are punishment. No criminal charges are levied. No one intends to incarcerate them (hell, that would mean they get to stay). They're just being deported.
> Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them.
Due process is a human right not a right of citizens.
> What punishment?
The conditions of these concentration camps are inhumane, which itself is punishment. Besides, as stated by public officials, Alligator Alcatraz is intended as a deterrent. How can it deter if it doesn’t punish?
And being deported if you don’t deserve it is punishment. And being deported to foreign concentration camps where you are tortured is punishment as well.
And individuals can indeed claim citizenship and get no hearing for their claim. Claims don’t get hearings. That’s because there is no due process. In fact, many people are kidnapped without any formal accusation whatsoever being levied at them - for example Mahmoud Khalil, who had a green card and was retaliated against for protesting genocide, without ever being formally accused of anything.
> No one intends to incarcerate them
Detention at a concentration camp constitutes incarceration. On average ICE detains people around 50 days domestically (although those are dated numbers). Some are detained indefinitely. At CECOT, prisoners are incarcerated for life. And the US plans to increase the numbers of foreign concentration camps it uses as part of its operations, which don’t even have to be the person’s country of origin.
OK, but if I am part of a large flow of people fleeing country X for country Y, more often than not, I cannot move around country Y as I please: I am restricted to a refugee camp. Also more often than not, I am not entitled to a hearing in front of a magistrate to dispute that restriction.
Most refugees don’t live in camps. Some camps don’t restrict movement, and those that do restrict it to widely varying degrees. Some do have features of concentration camps. Typically, even in closed camps, there’s no claim that refugees have violated the law as justification for detentions. Refugees are typically fleeing to escape dangerous situations.
As of the end of 2021 there were around 6.7 million registered refugees from
Syria globally. This figure is reported by the UNHCR (United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees) in their Global Trends report for 2021. These
refugees were primarily hosted in neighboring countries such as Turkey,
Lebanon, and Jordan -- and most of those are restricted to refugee camps -- and the ones who enjoy the freedom to move around the country probably achieved that through bribery, which of course is not the same thing as having due-process rights.
Refugees admitted into Europe are not restricted to camps and do have some due-process rights, but they have at most times been a distinct minority of the refugees in the world.
According to UNHCR, 22% of the world’s refugees are in refugee camps. Camps vary in their quality. And some are more or less closed than others.
Some refugees do live in inhuman conditions. Even if these conditions affected a majority of refugees, that doesn’t justify treating human beings this way.
All people have a right to due process. It’s a human right. Whether this or that government honors this right is a separate question.
We should be trying to emulate governments that honor human rights, not take our example from those that don’t.
I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are? Can you (without cheating)? You've heard the term before (in school most likely), and if you were in the 10% of the students who weren't borderline flunking, you might even be able to name which amendment enumerates due process rights, but in my experience that's about the most any non-lawyer can even manage.
I have a fuzzy notion of what they encompass, admittedly, but nothing about the detention centers or the deportations stands out as a violation of those rights.
>I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are?
It's because most people don't have a good grasp of how diverse and often flimsy administrative and civil process (in cases where one party is the .gov is in reality. Typically the answer is "whatever the enforcing agencies come up with", which isn't very reassuring.
Like for a traffic ticket they at least haul you before a judge in a public court anyone can attend to give some pretext of the accused having serious rights that protect them. It makes sense. Traffic tickets are a "mass market" product so to speak and so the .gov has to put on a good show even if at the end of the day someone facing a $200 civil traffic fine doesn't actually have the same rights as the guy facing a $200 criminal public urination fine.
When it comes to stuff like code enforcement, arcane industry enforcement, fish and game, ICE and everything else federal the process is far less "due", so to speak and is far more likely to not have separation of powers on the government side (i.e. administrative ppl in the enforcement agencies will be making decisions that would be made by a judge in other contexts)
I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil (traffic ticket and the like), which itself is a joke compared to criminal matters.
I would really like to see all this shit thrown out by the supreme court. If the .gov, be it fed, state or local, is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals bet it a fine or jail then they ought to meet the same bar. Allowing people to be jailed (in the case of ICE) or fined large sums (in the case of many other types of administrative matters) because it's not nominally a criminal matter is 100% an end run around the constitution.
>I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil
Then let's explore that. There are some rights which aren't fundamental human rights... that is, you don't get them just by virtue of existing. Voting comes to mind, that's a citizen's right only.
The right to be present within the borders of the United States is another such right. If you aren't a citizen, you do not have this right. We might extend the temporary privilege to non-citizens, but it is absolutely at the prerogative of the United States... subject to revocation at any time. The idea that it can't just be subject to revocation (arbitrary or otherwise) is the dimwitted notion that there is a sort of second-class citizenship... that some not-really-citizens can be here permanently and we can't decide that we want them to return home.
So, if they can be deported (for reason, or none at all), the only recourse such people have is "I can prove I'm a citizen". If ICE isn't letting them do so, if they protest that they are a citizen and the ICE agent sticks his fingers in his ears and chants "I can't hear you" repeatedly, then that would be a violation of due process. The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
I reject the idea that it is necessary or desirable to drag each of these foreigners before a judge to perform this function.
> is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals
I don't want these people punished at all. Punishment would be putting them in prison (where they would stay in the United States). If someone is trespassing on your property and you call the police, the police would punish them by prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating. When they drag them from your property and tell them to get lost, that's not punishment. It's just removal from where they aren't permitted to be. It's still not punishment even if they cry that they don't want to go home.
> The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
A DOJ lawyer literally said they haven't been doing this sufficiently and then he got sacked by Pam Bondi. SCOTUS then reaffirmed 9 to 0 that the original lawyer who admitted this failure in court was actually correct, that DOJ wasn't giving people their due process rights.
I find it extremely hard to believe you have not heard about the Kilmar Abrego case?
Which does not preclude him from having due process rights, as SCOTUS ruled 9-0 (and has been reaffirmed unequivocally by about 180 years of case law).
His due process rights were "if he protests that he is a citizen, then they must make effort to determine if that is the case with haste, and release him if it checks out".
He did not assert citizenship, they did not violate due process rights. No other process is due him. Anyone claiming that it's a violation of due process rights doesn't know what they mean, though for a moment I had hope for you... you sort of described them, or at least hinted at them, but you're unable to apply what you described to this situation. Due process rights can't and won't keep non-citizens in this country if they are trying to avoid deportation, and shouldn't ever. Non-citizens only have the revocable-for-any-reason-or-none privilege of visiting, and that only if they get the visa.
Exactly, you can paint "it's a concentration camp" on the immigration detention facility and it is miraculously still the same thing. Glad you agree, it's not a concentration camp.
Increasingly (from my limited view), people with a progressive viewpoint seem to be making this claim ("account X never participated in good faith and therefore should be banned") without any real grounds for doing so.
I have knowingly voted for less freedoms for myself multiple times and I know it, for example I have voted:
- to have less freedom to pollute the environment.
- to have less freedom where I am able to defraud my customers.
- to have less freedom to have less ability to lie about medical "benefits" of fake cures.
I am also a big proponent of freedom-limiting legislation like GDPR which prevents myself and my employer from secretly collecting and processing your personal information.
And I am currently part of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative which will hopefully restrict the freedom of games companies to sunset and withdraw purchases without a clear roadmap or similar remedy.
I understood your comment as restricting my own freedoms was a fully bad thing, and I therefore tried to provide examples of positive freedoms being afforded to you by restricting my own negative freedoms.
The founders created a representative government with a limited franchise and express protections for private property and economic liberty, precisely because of the concerns over populist democracy. That's why they provided for an electoral college rather than direct election of the president, and for senators to be selected by state legislatures. The push towards making that republican system more democratic started half a century later with Jacksonian democracy and expansion of the franchise, culminating in the early 1900s with direct election of senators and extending the franchise to women.
None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!
> That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
The founders themselves provided for a narrow franchise!
> But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies
What is being dismantled? Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats regardless of who wins the election. There's nothing anti-democratic about that!
I'm not "couching" anything. I'm quite openly right wing! But the right-wing guy won the election, promising to do right-wing things! The entities that are preventing him from doing right-wing things definitionally are anti-democratic. Put differently, what some people really mean when they say "democracy" is "liberal democracy." A system of government where the people are allowed to vote for massive taxes to pay for universal healthcare, but not for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
It's not just about who is the "head" of the agency. In practice, the career civil service has tremendous power and discretion to run the agency; political appointees can't do much without their cooperation.
And the career civil service overwhelmingly is Democrats. 85% of federal employee donations went to Kamala Harris, 90% of you exclude the DOD: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... The proportion of republicans in AOC's district in the Bronx and Queens is more than twice as high as in the federal government outside the DOD. And given that federal workers tend to be highly educated, and more educated people tend to be more politically ideological, you get a federal government that's a true monoculture.
Certainly, we can debate about the degree to which the career civil service zealously carries out the agenda of the current elected administration. I suspect it depends on the agency. What's disturbing to me is the people who think the career civil service should serve as a "check" on the elected administration. These are the people who cite political appointees overruling career civil servants as itself an example of "dismantling democracy." They are the ones who cheered on civil servants who declared their "resistance" to Trump in 2017 at the start of his term. This view--which I think is fairly widespread--nakedly embraces the idea that "democracy" is where one party always runs the government, and that electing a President from the other party simply means that he gets to cajole and try to persuade civil servants into carrying out some of his agenda.
What's great about voting is that it gives the government a mandate from and therefore legitimacy to the electorate. It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
Even theoretically that's not true. But if we stoop to the pragmatic, sometimes they win without even a majority of those still not disillusioned enough to stop voting.
>It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
If not that, then there's nothing about voting that I give much of a shit about. Nor do tens of millions of others. And if he helps to rain destruction upon such systems as you would create, then more power to him.
You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
It seems like maybe you read my "it has nothing to do with X" as meaning "it is not desirable if X." Otherwise not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
>You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
A "mandate" isn't what you just described above. It's always true that those who weasel their way into office have been influenced by someone or someones, but to call that a "mandate" when it amounts to some tiny non-majority fraction of the (even voting age) population is bizarre. Is this some meme joke that I'm just clueless about, because it's difficult to take you seriously.
>not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
An even hand typed the words with a calm heart, and no other emotion other than exasperation. Your takes are pretty far from reality.
The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s. They were not infallible, nor was the system they created.
That's why they created mechanisms for evolving that system.
Except we rarely do. "But Constitutional Amendments", people say.
Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.
Everything is very selective. Infallible when we want it to be. "Oh they didn't mean that/like that" when we want. And completely ignore other parts as inconvenient.
> The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s.
The youngest delegate to the Constitutional convention was Johnathan Dayton of New Jersey, who was 26, and there were three more under 30. There were more over 60 than than under 30.
The people that are frequently cited as being "Founding Fathers" in their "early 20s" (or "between 19 or 21, because we're not sure exactly when he was born", in Hamilton's case) are people who were that age in 1776 and ended up playing an important role. But the Constitution was drafted more than a decade later -- there was a war, plus time under the first system of government under the Articles of Confederation in between.
> Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.,
No, that was not a "doctrine of the founding fathers", it was a belief of Thomas Jefferson expressed later in a letter to, as I recall, John Adams, specifically (the upper limit of the period at which he held any law or constitution needed to expire was actually 19 years, based on actuarial data and a set of assumptions he had about what was necessary and acceptable in terms of avoiding the living being ruled over by the dead.)
You can tell it was not a widely held "doctrine of the founding fathers" (or, more to the point, of the Framers, who are the ones actually relevant to the Constitution, though the two groups have considerable overlap) because instead of expiring by its own terms in 19 years or less, the Constitution was permanent, with a very difficult method of amendment, and that method of amendment was specifically barred from changing certain parts.
There weren't really very many widely shared "doctrines" of the Founders or the Framers. They weren't a hive mind or a cult or even a group as ideologically aligned as the coalition that makes up either of the US's current major political parties. The idea of shared doctrines or a single unifying vision behind the Constitution are mythologies created after, and requiring deliberate disregard of, the facts.
They certainly were not infallible, but the question is whether they were unwavering advocates for democracy.
All of the restrictions they put in place, such as the electoral college and who was able to vote at all, along with the writings we have, suggests as a group they were not.
I think he was saying the antichrist would be more likely to be a person like Greta, not Greta herself, but the clip cuts off the context at the beginning so it is hard to say.
Why is our media literacy so in the gutter? A few second clip of an easily accessible and free interview from a NYT podcast would not be accepted as gospel fact in the hn of the past.
You may very well and with good reason disagree with Thiel on the downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and liberty, but regurgitating “Greta is the Antichrist” just replaces discussions of interesting issues to yelling at shadow puppets in Plato’s cave.
What? GP didn't even contradict anything I said, just claimed there's some ambiguous problem with citing a few second clip of the person saying the thing I accused them of saying.
My claim: "he believes Greta Thunberg is very possibly the actual antichrist"
Thiel's words:
> Thiel: ... The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate....
> in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world.
> In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
He's talking about the Antichrist dude... he's a devout Christian... they believe in things like the Antichrist.
People really do be bending over backwards not to hear the words spoken to them if they seem too wacky to be palatable. Dark secret though: billions of people believe truly wacky shit. Some of those people are unbelievably wealthy.
Anyone can go read the transcript. It's quite clear he's saying he believes Greta might very well be the Antichrist.
Sure. There's a big difference between believing a 20 year old climate activist is a clown versus a harbinger of the apocalypse as foretold in an ancient text 2000 years ago.
Would it make you feel better if they publicly pledged allegiance to democracy and flag and all those sorts of things and privately just ignored all that (like majority of big corporation management)?
Just because Palantir founder was being more open about how things are doesnt not make him or rather the company more evil.
Just for disclaimer, I do think Palantir is evil, but not any more or less than Google or Microsoft or any big tech corporation to that matter.
Also its named after a technology that most often causes its user to die or lose a war by exposing them to disinformation. That's an odd bit of messaging for a surveillance company.
When you look at the totality of the things that people who profess to "believe in democracy believe", advocate for and spend real resources advancing it's pretty clear that they a) don't believe in democracy b) believe in democracy in the the most technical "gotcha" sense because they don't believe in structuring it in a way that results in any serious amount of the implied freedom or autonomy for the individual.
I hate the guy and what he stands for. But at least he's self aware and honest so that puts him ahead of way more people than it should.
I don't believe this is true. The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe. It's frequently expressed online, but a lot of that is not from human Americans.
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
> The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe
The theoretical idea, maybe.
In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal, accepted practices that a lot of Americans (especially on one side of the two party system) accept and actively cheer on, because it's their side that is "winning".
Sorry, this is Orwellian doublespeak. I don't know exactly what "democratic institutions" you're referring to, but you seem to be referring to administrative agencies and adjuncts that are the exact opposite of "democratic institutions." They're anti-democratic checks that are permanently in the control of one party, regardless of who wins elections.
You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
What's the big news right now? Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist." Sorry, that's democracy in action!
> In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal,
California's "independent redistricting commission" drew a map where republicans have 17% of the seats despite getting 40% of the vote. That's worse than Maryland's quite deliberately gerrymandered map, where republicans got 16% of seats despite getting 35% of the vote. "Independent" redistricting commissions get taken over by democrats in practice, like every other putatively non-partisan political body.
> You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
> Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist.
What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
> Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
The constitutional “checks and balances” are between the three branches. The prospect of the President being prosecuted by his own executive branch is not a “check” contemplated by the constitution. The constitution does not incorporate this modern idea of a “neutral justice system” that can be trusted to enforce the law regardless of politics. (If such neutral bodies existed, the whole tripartite system of government would be pointless.)
The DOJ, like virtually every group of lawyers, is 80-90% Democrats. If you posit an “independent DOJ” that can prosecute the former president, and leading candidate for reelection, then you’re envisioning a government where unelected Democrats hold permanent power over elections.
> What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does.
> So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does
Are you claiming that lying about Haitians eating pets to get people to vote for your anti-immigration platform isn't racist? How do you figure that?
The traditional definition of “racism” focuses on treating individuals differently because of their immutable characteristics. Democrats have turned that concept on its head, to encompass opposing cultural change to a community from mass migration of people from foreign cultures. Regarding the specific example, the “food versus pet” distinction is a core one in any culture.[1] Vance’s story aptly illustrates the cultural friction that’s happening. Stephen Colbert would call it “truthy.”
[1] When I was a kid, my muslim immigrant mom told me not to marry a white girl because “they eat snakes.” I married a white girl, and she had in fact eaten a snake before. Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
This so-called traditional definition returns too many false negatives. It would exclude, for example, the inflammatory newspapers of the Jim Crow era. Americans learned with tragic regularity in the Post-Reconstruction era why spreading racial rumors is so reckless. It doesn’t matter to the moral calculus that the rumors were "truthy." The norm against expressing racial prejudice predates the most recent party realignment; it's amply represented in WW2 training materials. This is not a new thing.
We live in 2025, not 1875. The sentiments we’re talking about aren’t rooted in “racial prejudice” constructed to maintain a slave society. They’re rooted in the same reaction that folks would have if tens of thousands of desperately poor Appalachians were resettled in a small town in Vermont or Massachusetts. It’s not antipathy over in immutable characteristics, but actual differences in the aggregate behavior of large groups of foreigners as compared to the existing population.
Democrats’ modern definition takes the social norm against declaring people inferior based on immutable characteristics and uses it to bash through cultural relativism and suppress criticism of cultural change. People have a moral right to use democratic means to create the kind of society they want to live in, and that includes policies to promote and protect their cultural preferences.
This analysis would seem to exonerate even Pat Buchanan, who by the 1990s had learned to couch all his rhetoric in terms of culture rather than race.
> I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?
Nevertheless, his comments drew contemporary accusations of racism. So how modern are we talking about? This was well-trod discourse in 1992.
Buchanan and Vance had every possible culture to draw from to make their points, but they reached for Zulus and Haitians, two nations of Black people whose most famous historical event is a somewhat-successful war against White people. It strains credulity that this messaging is not fine-tuned to the electorate.
> Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
Yes, it is. There is quite the leap from "preferring your own" to lying about a specific group are doing something morally objectionable, in order to reinforce your campaign's anti-immigration messaging, though.
And yes, it is racist to lie about a group of people you don't like to make them sound worse so that other people don't like them too.
Like it was racist when Nazis said that Jews control the world and ate children and whatever nonsense you can think of.
Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism. The couch fucker treated them differently, by lying that they specifically are eating pets.
> Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism
Nobody targeted anyone’s immutable characteristics. If you object to 10,000 Appalachians being resettled in your New England town, that’s not “racism.” It’s an objection based on not wanting them to do to your town what they did to their hometowns in Appalachia. It’s about peoples’ culture and how that manifests in the communities they create.
I think this is hard for liberals to understand because they’re so steeped in cultural relativism. They assume that cultural differences cannot be substantive—cannot shape the communities people create in substantive ways. So they cannot understand why anyone would object to mass settlement of culturally distinct groups except out of prejudice against immutable characteristics. Oddly, they seem to have this blind spot only for non-white people. Most would agree that West Virginia is the way it is because of West Virginians. But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka.
> But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka
And that's fine to say. However, it isn't acceptable to invent a story that these Bangladeshis are eating pets with the goal to get everyone else to hate them though, especially when the place in question actually majority likes them, and was even asking for extra resources to help them.
Being a Haitian immigrant is an immutable characteristic. That aside, these were legal immigrants welcomed by the city and assimilating into the community, used as a scapegoat with a baseless conspiracy to stir anger on a campaign trail. I’m not sure what about this incident is defensible but it has nothing to do with culture. Are you being intentionally provocative or do you really believe this?
They didn't ask you to define racism. They asked you to find sources for your claim, which you have conspicuously forgotten to include.
It's a public source too, so it doesn't cost you anything to support your claim. Are you recalling something that actually exists, or trying to warp the narrative into whatever supports your perception?
They raised the definition of racism by preemptively asserted that articles leveling “legitimate” accusations of racism wouldn’t count.
For example, here’s an article trying to tie Trump’s growing support among minorities to “multiracial whiteness” and minorities “embrac[ing] white power movements.” From where I’m standing that sure seems like calling minority supporters of Trump white supremacists.
January 6 involved a multiracial band of wackjobs storming the capitol for reasons that had nothing to do with race or racism. Framing J6 as involving “multiracial white supremacy” is a great example of how NPR tries to make everything about white people being racist.
In this case, NPR’s ideological blinders caused them to miss the real story. Racism in the country is decreasing, leading to less racial polarization in politics. Trump gained minority vote share in each election, culminating with winning a record number of minorities in 2024 for a republican in the modern era. The GOP is becoming an increasingly multiracial coalition united by distrust of institutions and experts, conspiracy theories, and memes.
> January 6 involved a multiracial band of wackjobs storming the capitol for reasons that had nothing to do with race or racism. Framing J6 as involving “multiracial white supremacy” is a great example of how NPR tries to make everything about white people being racist.
Yes, there are dumb people and there are even dumber people. Even the KKK ha(d/s) black people in it. But who needs the KKK when you can just join the republican party.
But let's see you determine the ratio of 'white people' (without saying whether they're racist or not) and people of color in this nice overview picture of the protests:
I don't think that you're going to come to the conclusion that this was a 'multi racial band of wackjobs' and race and racism is more than likely a connecting factor between these people in spite of what you - against all available evidence - seem to want to continue to believe. A large majority of these people would most likely be happy to see you and your kids deported.
> In this case, NPR’s ideological blinders caused them to miss the real story.
It's not NPR whose ideological blinders caused them to miss the real story here.
> The GOP is becoming an increasingly multiracial coalition united by distrust of institutions and experts, conspiracy theories, and memes.
Experts are probably better to be trusted than distrusted. That includes such experts as Fauci and Powell.
Conspiracy theories are just tools to get people riled up over bullshit that pushes their emotional buttons. Meanwhile, it is not a conspiracy theory that a bunch of people went pretty much all-in on trying to destroy democracy in the USA and for some weird reason you are cheering them on.
> But let's see you determine the ratio of 'white people' (without saying whether they're racist or not) and people of color in this nice overview picture of the protests
A picture shows a group of mostly white people in a majority-white country. They must be connected by racism! Thank you for perfectly illustrating my point about the NPR mentality.
Also, the term “people of color” is more racist than anything that happened on J6 lol. It doesn’t reflect any anthropologically real concept, it’s simply propaganda created by democrats to promote an identity centered around supposed “oppression” to cultivate democratic political loyalty.
This is revisionist history and you clearly know you're wrong. There's no point in arguing with you if you're going to provide examples that you refuse to acknowledge in-context.
January 6th was a major event that was incited by the incumbent president, calling upon his most violent supporters. This went beyond "multiracial wackjobs" and included organized militias that existed for the sole purpose of starting a race war. You can validate these claims by looking up The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys in their own words. Here are a few direct quotes to help you get into the mind of the prosecution during the aftermath:
Bobby Kinch: "Let’s just get this over! Race war, Civil, Revolution? Bring it! I’m about as fed up as a man can get!"
Kyle Chapman: "We recognize that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race."
Wendy Rogers: "the American people are being oppressed by Jewish tyrants."
The people there were insecure about being white. They wanted to support their president because they had more in common with racial identity than rule of law. If you cannot accept that explanation as a bar-certified lawyer, then I suggest you stop reading news altogether and save yourself the trouble of learning anything.
But to circle back to the point. There’s no arguing with NPR listeners who insist that the Trump GOP, which won near-parity among Hispanics, nearly doubled its vote share among black people, and won 40% of asians, is meaningfully based on “racism.”[1] A meaningfully “racist” party does not lead to a decade of racial depolarization. If you have to come up with the concept of “multiracial whiteness” to reconcile your theory with the facts, that’s because your theory is a joke.
There’s myriad valid criticisms of Trump and the Trump GOP. But this one is painfully dumb, and it persists only because it feeds into a self-flattering white-savior narrative in which NPR listeners are enraptured.
I'm not saying that people don't think that the US should be a democracy. I'm saying that people don't think the US is a democracy. When the president of the country is a criminal and blatantly ignores the constitution and the courts, what does democracy even mean?
Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.
It's interesting that so many Americans currently alive actually believe they have ever lived in a democracy. The news they read every day has been controlled since the day they were born. Their choices in every election they have ever participated in have been selected by forces well beyond their control. The only "democracy" they have experienced is the freedom to make choices from a menu created by the actual powers.
In fairness, this has almost certainly been true of every governing system in the history of mankind. The powerful get to define the boundaries of the rules of society - the rest of us get to survive within those boundaries. Some government systems provide more flexibility within those boundaries than others - but at the end of the day, at their core - they are really all the same.
it would not be treason for drone armies of automated bots deployed in the field because they aren’t human?
if there were the same number of people standing on street corners collecting the same data as ring doorbells and waymos in san francisco, to sell for political and military applications, where does the treason begin?
how many humans need to conspire to erode democracy for it to count to your standards?
Whataboutism is designed to deflect attention from a particularly egregious example of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence etc. by claiming "everyone's doing it, why pick on my guys?"
Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.
