Agreed, although I've covered that angle extensively over the years. Esp the inability of either group to say No to anything or anyone. And how easy it was to gaslight and manipulate 'feminists' to do men's bidding simply by appropriating womanhood.
Or just pretends to. Many of these guys are doing it for the AGP wanks, others, I believe, to groom these idiot feminists to do what they're told by men, and others, I think, simply to destroy women's rights because they can't get laid.
Old-fashioned male chauvinism doesn't get them very far with young women raised on post-feminist 'Girl Power' (a movement created and promoted by men to sell products). That's why a new-fashioned male chauvinism was required, to recalibrate sexism for a new generation.
I note that they dropped the 'post' prefix from post-feminism after the 1990's, so that a grown man can now say "The Barbie movie is an important feminist work" without people sniggering, or "It's day one of being a girl!" without people laughing out loud.
Great piece! I agree w/ Steven there re: “brown shirts” but I mostly agree with your takes. It’s hard to be an actual liberal today b/c they seem to be disappearing.
"Hitler's Brownshirts, or Sturmabteilung (SA), were the primary paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, crucial to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s. Known for their brown uniforms, they intimidated political opponents through violent street brawls, protected Nazi rallies, and spread terror." How is ICE today any different?
I don't have a problem with ICE; I barely knew of their existence before Trump II. I call them brownshirts *today* because of the lawless, unconstitutional way they 'enforce' immigration law, as instructed by the lawless, unconstitutional senile old man pretending to run the country. Trump, like everythign else he touches, has run it into the ground.
Seriously? You're the one who called a federal agency doing its job "brownshirts". At the point where you hyperbolically refer to your ideological opponents as Nazis, you've lost all credibility on the subject and frankly minimized the actual reality of what the real Nazis did.
Your Godwin's Law number is 0 and you triggered the Loser Rule. You made lazy, hyperbolic comparisons that trivialized true genocide. You didn't just lose debate on the issue, you flat out disqualified yourself from entering debate on the issue.
You know damn well they're acting like brownshirts. ICE was never this bad before Trump although I'm sure there were plenty of breaches of the law then. They are acting lawlessly and unconstitutionally and many of these people are unqualified for the job--attracted by the nice fat signing bonus and a nice big paycheque for the privilege of beating up, assaulting, including sexually, anyone they like. No due process. No checking for papers. No concern on your part for the US citizens also swept up in the madness (who probably do have papers). You people who defend this disgust me. You know damn well Trump's ICE goes above and beyond what immigration officers are supposed to do. Most Americans want to see illegal immigration cleaned up--no one wants to see families split up, women sexually assaulted by your brownshirts, and especially not people sent to foreign prisons in countries they're not from so that your cardboard president can pretend to himself he looks like a 'man' cleaning up the streets.
You said you 'barely knew of ICE's existence before Trump II.' That's the crux of the problem — you're making confident claims about how the agency has transformed into something comparable to a Nazi paramilitary against a baseline you've admitted you weren't watching.
Let's use your own definition of the brownshirts: a private paramilitary wing of a political party that 'intimidated political opponents through violent street brawls' and 'spread terror.' Then you asked how ICE is any different. Here's how.
The SA had 3 million members by 1933. In March and April of that year alone they arrested 40,000–50,000 political opponents and placed them in camps where torture was standard practice. They murdered political figures, physically intimidated voters at polling stations, and destroyed rival party offices. When Hitler had SA leaders killed during the Night of the Long Knives, his cabinet retroactively passed a law declaring those murders legal — the state didn't abuse due process, it abolished it by design. There was no court to challenge anything in, because the courts had been subordinated to the party.
ICE has roughly 20,000 agents. Every arrest is challengeable in federal court. Agents can be personally sued. FOIA applies. Congressional oversight exists. The Senate's own subcommittee investigation into ICE detention practices — which was explicitly designed to find abuses — interviewed 46 detainees and identified a small number of confirmed wrongful US citizen detentions, virtually all of which were resolved through exactly the legal challenges the system provides for. Those cases are worth scrutinizing. But they represent the system working, not the system being abolished, much less the system being actively designed to produce mass abuses.
Now here's the comparison I'd like you to sit with. ICE told Congress it had identified 13,099 convicted murderers and 15,811 people convicted of sexual assault among illegal aliens not yet in custody — walking free in American communities. By May 2025, ICE had managed to arrest only 752 of those convicted murderers and 1,693 of those convicted sex offenders. The rest are still out there. In Trump II's first year, ICE arrests involving people with homicide, sexual assault, robbery, assault, weapons, and drug charges totaled roughly 118,000 — two and a half times the comparable number under Biden's entire FY2022. Every one of those arrests represents a real victim, or a potential victim who won't become one. ICE isn't terrorizing the US public or endangering it, not by any comparable standard used for other government organizations operating at similar scale in remotely similar conditions, they are objectively MAKING AMERICANS SAFER.
The 'brownshirts' framing doesn't just make a bad historical comparison — it actively redirects moral concern away from those victims and toward a handful of procedural errors that the legal system is already adjudicating. That's not scrutiny of power, it's a substitution of vivid imagery for careful accounting.
You also cite 'no concern on your part for US citizens swept up in the madness.' I'll note that the same Congress you're presumably hoping will check Trump passed the Laken Riley Act, which legally mandates ICE arrest illegal aliens charged with theft, burglary, and shoplifting — which is a primary reason the non-violent arrest numbers rose. The media coverage that treats this as ICE 'going rogue' consistently neglects to mention that Congress required it. That omission isn't neutral. ICE is doing their congressionally mandated job, often in the face of active illegal obstruction by activists and local authorities withholding necessary cooperation to handle crowd control, a role ICE was never designed or trained to handle.
This is what I meant by TDS. Your article is sharp and largely correct about progressive authoritarianism. But where Trump is involved, you're applying a different evidentiary standard — taking the most inflammatory characterization available rather than the most precise one, from sources you'd normally call out for exactly this kind of contextual omission. The brownshirt comparison doesn't sharpen the critique of what's actually going wrong. It lets the few people responsible for specific errors off the hook behind a false equivalency wall of historical horror, and it hands critics of your broader argument an easy target. I'm sure that you're familiar with the concepts of vividness bias and base rate neglect. So why is it that when Trump is involved your arguments tend to devolve from citing facts and presenting analysis to merely hurling unsubstantiated accusations and ad hominem? It's frankly not like you.
Sometimes I agree with what you write and sometimes I don't, but I've always acknowledged that I respect you as a writer and deliberately read you in part BECAUSE I want to hear views that I may disagree with in their strongest form from someone who genuinely believes them. This wasn't to that standard or your own usual standards. You get sloppy when Trump is involved and you shouldn't. I credit you for being someone who usually wants to get called in it when you're not delivering your best. Is that not the case?
You hammered me for having 'TDS' again here. Sometimes I'm hard on Trump, but often I'm not--and I have praised him in the past when he's done something I thought was good. I mentioned his name 15 times in this one and almost all of them were in comparison to similar actions or policies progressives are pursuing. I took a few cheap shots at him (like two or three at the most).
The reason why I didn't pay attention to ICE before Trump II is because they weren't making the news. I'm fine with controlling immigration, an opinion I've stated multiple times in the past year, year and a half. Many other liberals are too. I'm especially supportive of *legal* immigrants because I am one myself--and had Canada turned me down my Plan B was to come in through Quebec--entirely legal, they're allowed to mostly make their own immigration decisions without the federal government's take--and had they turned me down too I would have found somewhere else to go. Had Trump's ICE played by the rules, I'd have STILL supported their efforts. I, too, hoped he'd do something about Biden's illegal immigrants as I knew how much they'd juiced the crime rates in some parts of the country. And I knew Harris would have done nothing, had she won the election.
But, like so much of what he does, Trump fucked it up. He massively expanded ICE not with highly qualified people but any old numbnuts with a yen for violence. They've shot three people now and been filmed manhandling others. Thirty-two people have died in detention (the most in twenty years), and as always with Trump's concentration camps (remember the ones for Mexican kids? And BTW when you concentrate people in camps they're concentration camps) there were allegations galore of mistreatment, poor facilities, crappy and inadequate food and of course, sexual misconduct by the jailers. Families split up. However you feel about illegal immigrants, you don't split up families and especially not children from their parents.
Instead of going after the low-hanging fruit--the CRIMINALS--Trump's ICE went after anyone with darker skin and an accent. Countless human rights violations have emerged from Alligator Alcatraz. And there was the man who started it all, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, from Venezuela, sent to an El Salvadoran prison notoriously brutal. Trump didn't give a shit what he was doing, the cruelty was the whole point.
I don't understand how you can support this man so much. I can acknowledge when he gets something right, and especially when he manages not to crush innocent people doing it. But he doesn't 'do strategy', his whole M.O. is to create shock and awe among Americans, especially liberals. There's little rhyme or reason to anything he does, even when he's doing something most Americans would otherwise approve of, like cutting the government (but not with a drug-addled narcissist wielding a chainsaw and cutting old peoples' benefits).
I see your objection to comparing ICE to brownshirts and I acknowledge the former is not that bad---but I would add--YET. One federal judge has just accused Trump of 'terror' against immigrants. There's little accountability and Trump has demonstrated consistent disrespect for the law and even the Supreme Court--I would love to be a fly on the wall in the White House tonight after today's defeat on tariffs (which we will ignore, because that's what malignant narcissists do--ignore the law, which only applies to others).
Trump has much in common with Hitler--I wrote about it a few years ago--but that was personality-wise. Today, I wouldn't call him a Hitler although I can't swear he doesn't have it in him. There are plenty of clear comparisons, and Trump is new to this game--he didn't have the power to be so dismissive of the law and Constitution before. FFS, the man wanted to end birthright citizenship even though it's clearly protected in the Constitution. (It could be changed, but that battle would long outlive Trump). Hitler didn't start off building concentration camps, either, and Germans weren't as good at killing human beings either--they had to be groomed and trained (read Hitler's Willing Executioners if you haven't already). ICE isn't as bad as the brownshirts--*yet*. Trump's concentration camps have no Final Solution, I don't think he has one, but maybe later--he *is* known to have a fascination and admiration for HItler. He certainly does have a thing for other authoritarians.
I don't think any of this makes me a TDSer. Maybe I'm in denial, but for me, the TDSers are the ones who are in constant hysterics over Trump, take him at his word, and are forever in quaking fear over what they think he's going to do next (and often doesn't). They're the ones who lose their minds if anyone says *anything* positive about him. I have been consistently praiseworthy of Trump over the past year *when I think he deserves it* and that drives the true TDSers over the top. I would freely admit that I'm more critical of him than praiseworthy, but that's because I think he's one big hot mess of a human being and emblematic of just how stupid so many Americans have become, bipartisan.
So I'll tell you what, Steven: Tell me *why* you think I have TDS. I'm genuinely interested in hearing it. Maybe I'm missing something, I don't know.
This is an aside from the main argument in my other reply, but I want to circle back to three specific claims from your earlier reply that deserve more careful examination: Abrego Garcia as a sympathetic victim, 'concentration camps,' and family separation. I think all three are examples of the same pattern — emotionally compelling framings that collapse under the weight of context that you'd normally insist on.
Regarding Abrego Garcia: The case is genuinely complicated, and I want to be honest about that rather than simply try to flip the narrative. The administrative deportation to El Salvador was a confirmed procedural error — the government acknowledged it, courts ordered a remedy, and he was returned. That part of the critique stands. But 'the man who started it all' being presented as a straightforward victim requires accepting a VERY selective reading of the record.
Two immigration judges found him to be a member of MS-13. Two domestic violence protective orders were filed against him by his wife — she later walked them back, saying she filed out of caution and things didn't escalate, which is her right, but the orders existed. In 2022 Tennessee Highway Patrol stopped him driving nine people with no luggage cross-country at 3am, suspected human smuggling, contacted ICE — and the FBI told THP to release him. He was indicted for human smuggling in May 2025 after his return and pleaded not guilty; that case is before a court. The gang membership evidence is contested — the confidential informant's handler was later convicted of corruption, which is a genuine evidentiary problem — but 'two judges found him to be MS-13' is not nothing, and the courts haven't resolved his guilt or innocence on the trafficking charge. He's not an innocent bystander made into a martyr, he's not "the cruelty was the point", he's an unresolved case the administration mishandled procedurally, and the system caught it. The error was real, the 'victim' narrative is not, and there's more evidence there to support the contention that he genuinely is "one bad hombre" than any kind of innocent person getting crushed by malicious intent.
Regarding 'Concentration camps': This framing has a specific historical weight you're deliberately invoking, and I think it deserves direct challenge. By the functional definition you're applying — people concentrated in detention facilities by the state — every administration including Obama's ran 'concentration camps.' Obama's DHS secretary called their own border facilities 'nothing short of a humanitarian crisis' in 2014. The photographs of children in chain-link enclosures that circulated as Trump outrage in 2018 were taken in 2014. That's not a whataboutism — it's a demonstration that the word you're choosing implies something specifically Nazi that the evidence doesn't support across administrations. If the word applies to Trump it applied to Obama, and if it applied to Obama it's lost its meaning as a comparative tool entirely. What you presumably mean is 'detention facilities with inadequate conditions,' which is a real and serious problem worth arguing on its own terms — one that significantly predates this administration and which multiple administrations have correctly pointed out is due to CONGRESS insufficiently funding the agencies that are required to provide these facilities to handle the volume of detainees apprehended. Arguably, President Trump has done more than any previous President to REDUCE this problem by the simple expedient of his policies resulting in the lowest illegal crossing rate we've had. He doesn't control the funding due the facilities, Congress does, but he's done what he can to reduce the pressure on them by reducing border crossing and trying to increase the number of immigration judges so that their cases can be resolved more quickly, getting them out of the camps sooner. If you have a better solution, I'd like to hear it, because neither locking up legal family members nor releasing illegal aliens into the interior are acceptable alternatives to me. They need to stay somewhere until courts rule whether they're admitted or deported. This is what we have to do it with. And btw, "allegations" aren't "evidence" just because you dislike the agency involved. If you're going to say they are 'uncountable', you should be able to offer a sample of representative cases actually confirmed by courts, which we could then use as the basis for analysis of the matter.
Regarding Family separation:This is where I most want to redirect moral attention, because I think the framing of 'Trump separates families' systematically misdirects sympathy away from the children most deserving of it — and buries a moral horror that the previous administration's policies directly enabled.
Start with the journey itself, because this is where the accounting needs to begin. According to Doctors Without Borders' own field surveys of migrants in transit, 31.4% of women reported sexual abuse during their passage through Mexico alone. Amnesty International estimates 60% of women and girls experience sexual violence on the full journey north. Some estimates from humanitarian organizations run as high as 80%. The numbers are wide because the crime is severely underreported — UNHCR found that 40% of assault victims on this route don't report at all, and 10% of those said the police were their attackers. The reality on the ground is so well understood that women and girls routinely obtain contraception before departure specifically anticipating rape. Doctors Without Borders treated 397 survivors of sexual violence in the Darién Gap alone in a single year — including children aged 11, 12, and 16. In October of that year they recorded one incident of sexual violence every three hours.
These are Amnesty International's numbers. Doctors Without Borders' numbers. UNHCR's numbers. Not Fox News.
Now apply the same moral logic you'd apply anywhere else: a policy that creates strong incentives for families to hand their children to cartel-connected human traffickers and send them alone across this gauntlet is not morally neutral about what happens to those children en route. The Biden administration's framework, which treated the presence of a child as effectively a guaranteed pass for adults into the interior of the country, created exactly that incentive structure. Cartels knew it. Traffickers knew it. Children were the mechanism.
When someone is arrested and imprisoned in any country on earth, their family is not imprisoned with them. That's not cruelty — it's the universal practice of every legal system that exists. The question that never gets asked in the 'family separation' framing is whether the adults being separated from children were actually their families. Under Biden, over 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children entered the UAC program. HHS's own director admitted under congressional oath that they lost contact with over 85,000 of them. The nonpartisan DHS Inspector General put the total at over 320,000 children whose whereabouts are unknown. 11,488 were placed with unvetted sponsors never fingerprinted or background checked, in violation of federal law. HHS actively blocked DHS from receiving sponsor information — in their own documented words, because they feared it would trigger law enforcement action against sponsors. Internal staff who flagged children being sent to sponsors with confirmed MS-13 ties were removed from cases and had their credentials revoked. 65,000 reports about migrant children were dismissed, including 7,300 specific trafficking reports. 24,100 children in FY23 and FY24 alone were released to unrelated sponsors or distant relatives. Border agents reported it was 'very routine' to find children placed with adults who were not their families.
The children being 'separated from families' were in many documented cases being separated from their abusive traffickers.
Under Trump, unaccompanied minor crossings fell from 4.6% of illegal border crossings to 0.4% — an eleven-fold reduction. The trafficking incentive structure that put hundreds of thousands of children through the journey I just described has been substantially dismantled. Whatever one thinks of the administration's methods at the border, that result matters — and it matters most to the children who would otherwise have been handed to a coyote and sent across the Darién Gap.
I understand that detained children in difficult conditions is a viscerally upsetting image. It should be. But the children who most deserve your outrage are the 320,000 the federal government cannot account for, and the uncountable thousands who were raped on the journey here by the cartels whose business model was sustained by the previous framework's incentives. The image of a child in a detention facility is visible and photographable. The 12-year-old treated by Doctors Without Borders in the Darién Gap is not. That asymmetry of visibility is not the same as an asymmetry of moral weight.
You want to know why I can support President Trump's handing of immigration in general? THAT is why: I'm including in my circle of moral concern a great many people that your framing is currently ignoring: the US victims of illegal aliens here AND the illegal aliens themselves who are victims of cartel traffickers. You see insufficiently funded detention centers and get upset, so do I, but I took the time to look into WHY those centers were overwhelmed into being crowded beyond their designed capacity, and I looked into the comparison cases of what conditions they suffered before we took custody of them and what conditions many of the most vulnerable among them suffered when we did not retain custody of them. By the numbers, I calculate that President Trump's policies and enforcement are a net IMPROVEMENT in protecting women and children and have significantly REDUCED the total incidence rate of abuses suffered.
You asked me to tell you why I think you displayed TDS here and I want to answer that seriously because you deserve a serious answer — and because I think your own article actually gives me the framework to do it.
Your piece is largely correct that progressives apply a double standard: accepting activist claims uncritically when they confirm progressive priors, attributing everything bad to deliberate malice by designated villains, and failing to apply the same scrutiny to their own side that they demand of others. The technical term for the underlying cognitive error is fundamental attribution error — the tendency to explain the behavior of people we've categorized as bad entirely through their character and intentions, while explaining identical behavior by people we've categorized as good through situational factors and context. You diagnose this precisely when it comes to progressive handling of, say, antisemitism or crime statistics. My observation is that where Trump is specifically involved, you apply the same mechanism you're criticizing. Bad outcomes become evidence of bad character and deliberate intent, and the situational factors that would normally demand your attention get less weight than they would if someone you trusted more were in charge.
Let me demonstrate that concretely rather than just assert it, because that's what you asked for.
You said ICE was expanded with 'any old numbnuts with a yen for violence.' (blaming character without examining relevant context) The documented reality is more specific and more useful: ICE went from roughly 10,000 to 22,000 agents in under a year, cutting training from approximately six months to six weeks in the process — a 75% compression that former ICE directors, including Obama-era directors, flagged explicitly as a standards challenge. That's a real institutional issue worth serious discussion, the administration accepted some significant known risks as necessary to achieve the numbers needed to fulfill the mandate from the voters. Legitimate policy disputes over those choices are valid. But 'numbnuts with a yen for violence' is a character explanation that closes off the more accurate situational one: you unavoidably get errors at scale when you compress training by 75% and then have to deploy undertrained agents into crowd control situations the agency was never designed or equipped to handle. That's not a defense of the policy decisions, we could have that conversation, — it's an insistence on understanding what actually went wrong so it can actually be fixed, which you didn't do here because you were content in this case with believing ad hominems.
You said ICE 'went after anyone with darker skin and an accent' instead of the criminal low-hanging fruit. But in Trump II's first year, ICE arrests involving homicide, sexual assault, robbery, assault, weapons, and drug charges totaled roughly 118,000 — two and a half times Biden's FY2022 comparable figure. ICE told Congress it had identified 13,099 convicted murderers and 15,811 convicted sex offenders among illegal aliens not yet in custody. By May 2025 it had arrested only 752 of those convicted murderers and 1,693 of those sex offenders. The rest are still out there. That's an enormous public safety need that you've said you acknowledge — and it's the context that makes 'brownshirts terrorizing the innocent' the wrong frame even when specific operations went badly wrong. You haven't actually offered any evidence of racial profiling being done at all, much less that the conduct violates any applicable legal standards. Making such inflammatory claims without evidence is unlike you.
You cited 32 detention deaths as 'the most in 20 years.' That's accurate in absolute terms. What's missing is that the detained population roughly tripled over the same period. Deaths per capita is the better metric, and by that measure the picture is considerably less alarming — though still worth scrutiny on a case by case basis, as every death in federal custody should be.
On the two shootings — these deserve the most careful treatment because they're the most emotionally freighted, and I think they're also the clearest illustration of what I mean.
On Good: the core facts are genuinely contested and the investigation is ongoing. What I'd offer is that the legal standard for officer-involved shootings is the agent's reasonable perception in the moment of decision — not frame-by-frame reconstruction in complete safety afterward. Agent Ross had been dragged 50 yards by a fleeing vehicle six months earlier, requiring 33 stitches. That's confirmed by court conviction of his attacker. Human reaction time from threat perception to trigger pull runs roughly 0.2 to 0.5 seconds. The car's position when the bullet arrived is not the same as the car's position when the decision to fire was made. Whether the shoot was legally justified is genuinely contested and the courts will determine that. I don't have the full evidence and neither do you, so it's not to the standard of evidence you would normally demand for claims made to you.
On Pretti: the 'peaceful bystander filming on his phone' narrative doesn't survive the full record. Eleven days before he was killed, Pretti spat on a federal vehicle, kicked out its taillight, and was tackled to the ground during an organized protest confrontation — with a firearm visibly on his waistband. This is confirmed by BBC facial recognition analysis, the AP, the Star Tribune, and acknowledged by his own family's attorney. On January 24 he was once again in the middle of an active confrontation with agents, once again armed. The most credible reconstruction of what happened — consistent with the Gun Owners Law Center, Fox News sources, and DHS's own congressional report, which notably does not say Pretti reached for his weapon — is that an agent removing his firearm triggered a negligent discharge on a model with documented discharge issues, other agents heard the shot and responded to what they believed was a man who had fired on them, and contagious fire killed him. That's a training failure and a crowd control failure, not an execution. According to the best information we currently have available, it was ultimately a tragic accident. But it is also not brownshirt behavior — it's what happens when you surge 2,000 agents into the most hostile possible operating environment and activist organizations overwhelm the crowd control capacity of local law enforcement, causing chaotic situations where snap judgements must be made by inexperienced agents with limited information and life or death consequences.
And that operating environment matters in a way your framing consistently omits. The same agency ran major operations in North Carolina and Louisiana — where local law enforcement cooperated and activist obstruction was minimal — largely without serious incident. The confrontations generating national headlines were overwhelmingly concentrated in sanctuary jurisdictions with organized activist interference: California, Illinois, and Minnesota most dramatically. Federal immigration law does not recognize sanctuary designations as exempt from enforcement. ICE's legal authority to operate in those jurisdictions is not contingent on local political approval. The activists organizing confrontations in Minneapolis — including those Pretti had already physically joined eleven days before his death — did not have the public mandate behind them that the underlying enforcement operation did. You've said yourself you wanted Trump to address Biden's illegal immigration problem. Most Americans agreed. The protest movement physically obstructing those operations does not enjoy comparable public support, and it has directly created the conditions for most of the worst incidents you're citing.
None of this means the administration's policy execution has been flawless or should be immune to criticism based on confirmed facts. The training compression, the inadequate support infrastructure for a doubled workforce doing major operations — those may deserve the sort of critique you'd normally apply. My argument isn't that ICE has been impeccably managed, that nothing ever went wrong, or that individuals shouldn't be held to account when things did go wrong. It's that 'brownshirts' implied deliberate terroristic intent and structural lawlessness by design — and the evidence, examined fully in context, points to institutional growing pains and cascading situational failures instead. Those are different diagnoses with different implications and different solutions. Collapsing them into a Nazi comparison didn't sharpen the critique. It closed off the analysis precisely where the analysis needed to go deeper. And yet you doubled down on it at first. Ask yourself why you needed me to present you with the numbers and counterarguments before you would acknowledge ICE aren't Brownshirts.
That's the double standard I'm pointing at. Not hysteria. A different threshold for how much context and situational analysis you apply depending on whether Trump is involved. You simply often stop looking for any alternative causes or contrary evidence whenever you can settle for "Orange man bad!" as the explanation.
You'd never let a progressive writer cite 32 deaths in isolation without asking about per capita rates or looking for valid comparison cases. You'd never let 'allegations galore' stand against people you like without asking who made them and what their interests were. You'd never otherwise accept 'went after anyone with darker skin' without considering how you could confirm or deny it before publishing that kind of claim. I'm asking you to set your dislike aside and apply your usual standards of evidence and analysis, especially when you dislike the people involved.
Liked it except… make driven trans rights. Trans came out of feminism and LGBTQ
Agreed, although I've covered that angle extensively over the years. Esp the inability of either group to say No to anything or anyone. And how easy it was to gaslight and manipulate 'feminists' to do men's bidding simply by appropriating womanhood.
Any man who joins Team Woman is welcomed, as a convert is to a new religion, by those who believe women are innately superior.
Or just pretends to. Many of these guys are doing it for the AGP wanks, others, I believe, to groom these idiot feminists to do what they're told by men, and others, I think, simply to destroy women's rights because they can't get laid.
Old-fashioned male chauvinism doesn't get them very far with young women raised on post-feminist 'Girl Power' (a movement created and promoted by men to sell products). That's why a new-fashioned male chauvinism was required, to recalibrate sexism for a new generation.
I note that they dropped the 'post' prefix from post-feminism after the 1990's, so that a grown man can now say "The Barbie movie is an important feminist work" without people sniggering, or "It's day one of being a girl!" without people laughing out loud.
Great piece! I agree w/ Steven there re: “brown shirts” but I mostly agree with your takes. It’s hard to be an actual liberal today b/c they seem to be disappearing.
"Hitler's Brownshirts, or Sturmabteilung (SA), were the primary paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, crucial to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s. Known for their brown uniforms, they intimidated political opponents through violent street brawls, protected Nazi rallies, and spread terror." How is ICE today any different?
I don't have a problem with ICE; I barely knew of their existence before Trump II. I call them brownshirts *today* because of the lawless, unconstitutional way they 'enforce' immigration law, as instructed by the lawless, unconstitutional senile old man pretending to run the country. Trump, like everythign else he touches, has run it into the ground.
The sheer volume of TDS in this article is quite disheartening.
I’m sorry, did you resemble that remark? You’re the guy with TDSS, I think…
Seriously? You're the one who called a federal agency doing its job "brownshirts". At the point where you hyperbolically refer to your ideological opponents as Nazis, you've lost all credibility on the subject and frankly minimized the actual reality of what the real Nazis did.
Your Godwin's Law number is 0 and you triggered the Loser Rule. You made lazy, hyperbolic comparisons that trivialized true genocide. You didn't just lose debate on the issue, you flat out disqualified yourself from entering debate on the issue.
You know damn well they're acting like brownshirts. ICE was never this bad before Trump although I'm sure there were plenty of breaches of the law then. They are acting lawlessly and unconstitutionally and many of these people are unqualified for the job--attracted by the nice fat signing bonus and a nice big paycheque for the privilege of beating up, assaulting, including sexually, anyone they like. No due process. No checking for papers. No concern on your part for the US citizens also swept up in the madness (who probably do have papers). You people who defend this disgust me. You know damn well Trump's ICE goes above and beyond what immigration officers are supposed to do. Most Americans want to see illegal immigration cleaned up--no one wants to see families split up, women sexually assaulted by your brownshirts, and especially not people sent to foreign prisons in countries they're not from so that your cardboard president can pretend to himself he looks like a 'man' cleaning up the streets.
You said you 'barely knew of ICE's existence before Trump II.' That's the crux of the problem — you're making confident claims about how the agency has transformed into something comparable to a Nazi paramilitary against a baseline you've admitted you weren't watching.
Let's use your own definition of the brownshirts: a private paramilitary wing of a political party that 'intimidated political opponents through violent street brawls' and 'spread terror.' Then you asked how ICE is any different. Here's how.
The SA had 3 million members by 1933. In March and April of that year alone they arrested 40,000–50,000 political opponents and placed them in camps where torture was standard practice. They murdered political figures, physically intimidated voters at polling stations, and destroyed rival party offices. When Hitler had SA leaders killed during the Night of the Long Knives, his cabinet retroactively passed a law declaring those murders legal — the state didn't abuse due process, it abolished it by design. There was no court to challenge anything in, because the courts had been subordinated to the party.
ICE has roughly 20,000 agents. Every arrest is challengeable in federal court. Agents can be personally sued. FOIA applies. Congressional oversight exists. The Senate's own subcommittee investigation into ICE detention practices — which was explicitly designed to find abuses — interviewed 46 detainees and identified a small number of confirmed wrongful US citizen detentions, virtually all of which were resolved through exactly the legal challenges the system provides for. Those cases are worth scrutinizing. But they represent the system working, not the system being abolished, much less the system being actively designed to produce mass abuses.
Now here's the comparison I'd like you to sit with. ICE told Congress it had identified 13,099 convicted murderers and 15,811 people convicted of sexual assault among illegal aliens not yet in custody — walking free in American communities. By May 2025, ICE had managed to arrest only 752 of those convicted murderers and 1,693 of those convicted sex offenders. The rest are still out there. In Trump II's first year, ICE arrests involving people with homicide, sexual assault, robbery, assault, weapons, and drug charges totaled roughly 118,000 — two and a half times the comparable number under Biden's entire FY2022. Every one of those arrests represents a real victim, or a potential victim who won't become one. ICE isn't terrorizing the US public or endangering it, not by any comparable standard used for other government organizations operating at similar scale in remotely similar conditions, they are objectively MAKING AMERICANS SAFER.
The 'brownshirts' framing doesn't just make a bad historical comparison — it actively redirects moral concern away from those victims and toward a handful of procedural errors that the legal system is already adjudicating. That's not scrutiny of power, it's a substitution of vivid imagery for careful accounting.
You also cite 'no concern on your part for US citizens swept up in the madness.' I'll note that the same Congress you're presumably hoping will check Trump passed the Laken Riley Act, which legally mandates ICE arrest illegal aliens charged with theft, burglary, and shoplifting — which is a primary reason the non-violent arrest numbers rose. The media coverage that treats this as ICE 'going rogue' consistently neglects to mention that Congress required it. That omission isn't neutral. ICE is doing their congressionally mandated job, often in the face of active illegal obstruction by activists and local authorities withholding necessary cooperation to handle crowd control, a role ICE was never designed or trained to handle.
This is what I meant by TDS. Your article is sharp and largely correct about progressive authoritarianism. But where Trump is involved, you're applying a different evidentiary standard — taking the most inflammatory characterization available rather than the most precise one, from sources you'd normally call out for exactly this kind of contextual omission. The brownshirt comparison doesn't sharpen the critique of what's actually going wrong. It lets the few people responsible for specific errors off the hook behind a false equivalency wall of historical horror, and it hands critics of your broader argument an easy target. I'm sure that you're familiar with the concepts of vividness bias and base rate neglect. So why is it that when Trump is involved your arguments tend to devolve from citing facts and presenting analysis to merely hurling unsubstantiated accusations and ad hominem? It's frankly not like you.
Sometimes I agree with what you write and sometimes I don't, but I've always acknowledged that I respect you as a writer and deliberately read you in part BECAUSE I want to hear views that I may disagree with in their strongest form from someone who genuinely believes them. This wasn't to that standard or your own usual standards. You get sloppy when Trump is involved and you shouldn't. I credit you for being someone who usually wants to get called in it when you're not delivering your best. Is that not the case?
You hammered me for having 'TDS' again here. Sometimes I'm hard on Trump, but often I'm not--and I have praised him in the past when he's done something I thought was good. I mentioned his name 15 times in this one and almost all of them were in comparison to similar actions or policies progressives are pursuing. I took a few cheap shots at him (like two or three at the most).
The reason why I didn't pay attention to ICE before Trump II is because they weren't making the news. I'm fine with controlling immigration, an opinion I've stated multiple times in the past year, year and a half. Many other liberals are too. I'm especially supportive of *legal* immigrants because I am one myself--and had Canada turned me down my Plan B was to come in through Quebec--entirely legal, they're allowed to mostly make their own immigration decisions without the federal government's take--and had they turned me down too I would have found somewhere else to go. Had Trump's ICE played by the rules, I'd have STILL supported their efforts. I, too, hoped he'd do something about Biden's illegal immigrants as I knew how much they'd juiced the crime rates in some parts of the country. And I knew Harris would have done nothing, had she won the election.
But, like so much of what he does, Trump fucked it up. He massively expanded ICE not with highly qualified people but any old numbnuts with a yen for violence. They've shot three people now and been filmed manhandling others. Thirty-two people have died in detention (the most in twenty years), and as always with Trump's concentration camps (remember the ones for Mexican kids? And BTW when you concentrate people in camps they're concentration camps) there were allegations galore of mistreatment, poor facilities, crappy and inadequate food and of course, sexual misconduct by the jailers. Families split up. However you feel about illegal immigrants, you don't split up families and especially not children from their parents.
Instead of going after the low-hanging fruit--the CRIMINALS--Trump's ICE went after anyone with darker skin and an accent. Countless human rights violations have emerged from Alligator Alcatraz. And there was the man who started it all, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, from Venezuela, sent to an El Salvadoran prison notoriously brutal. Trump didn't give a shit what he was doing, the cruelty was the whole point.
I don't understand how you can support this man so much. I can acknowledge when he gets something right, and especially when he manages not to crush innocent people doing it. But he doesn't 'do strategy', his whole M.O. is to create shock and awe among Americans, especially liberals. There's little rhyme or reason to anything he does, even when he's doing something most Americans would otherwise approve of, like cutting the government (but not with a drug-addled narcissist wielding a chainsaw and cutting old peoples' benefits).
I see your objection to comparing ICE to brownshirts and I acknowledge the former is not that bad---but I would add--YET. One federal judge has just accused Trump of 'terror' against immigrants. There's little accountability and Trump has demonstrated consistent disrespect for the law and even the Supreme Court--I would love to be a fly on the wall in the White House tonight after today's defeat on tariffs (which we will ignore, because that's what malignant narcissists do--ignore the law, which only applies to others).
Trump has much in common with Hitler--I wrote about it a few years ago--but that was personality-wise. Today, I wouldn't call him a Hitler although I can't swear he doesn't have it in him. There are plenty of clear comparisons, and Trump is new to this game--he didn't have the power to be so dismissive of the law and Constitution before. FFS, the man wanted to end birthright citizenship even though it's clearly protected in the Constitution. (It could be changed, but that battle would long outlive Trump). Hitler didn't start off building concentration camps, either, and Germans weren't as good at killing human beings either--they had to be groomed and trained (read Hitler's Willing Executioners if you haven't already). ICE isn't as bad as the brownshirts--*yet*. Trump's concentration camps have no Final Solution, I don't think he has one, but maybe later--he *is* known to have a fascination and admiration for HItler. He certainly does have a thing for other authoritarians.
I don't think any of this makes me a TDSer. Maybe I'm in denial, but for me, the TDSers are the ones who are in constant hysterics over Trump, take him at his word, and are forever in quaking fear over what they think he's going to do next (and often doesn't). They're the ones who lose their minds if anyone says *anything* positive about him. I have been consistently praiseworthy of Trump over the past year *when I think he deserves it* and that drives the true TDSers over the top. I would freely admit that I'm more critical of him than praiseworthy, but that's because I think he's one big hot mess of a human being and emblematic of just how stupid so many Americans have become, bipartisan.
So I'll tell you what, Steven: Tell me *why* you think I have TDS. I'm genuinely interested in hearing it. Maybe I'm missing something, I don't know.
This is an aside from the main argument in my other reply, but I want to circle back to three specific claims from your earlier reply that deserve more careful examination: Abrego Garcia as a sympathetic victim, 'concentration camps,' and family separation. I think all three are examples of the same pattern — emotionally compelling framings that collapse under the weight of context that you'd normally insist on.
Regarding Abrego Garcia: The case is genuinely complicated, and I want to be honest about that rather than simply try to flip the narrative. The administrative deportation to El Salvador was a confirmed procedural error — the government acknowledged it, courts ordered a remedy, and he was returned. That part of the critique stands. But 'the man who started it all' being presented as a straightforward victim requires accepting a VERY selective reading of the record.
Two immigration judges found him to be a member of MS-13. Two domestic violence protective orders were filed against him by his wife — she later walked them back, saying she filed out of caution and things didn't escalate, which is her right, but the orders existed. In 2022 Tennessee Highway Patrol stopped him driving nine people with no luggage cross-country at 3am, suspected human smuggling, contacted ICE — and the FBI told THP to release him. He was indicted for human smuggling in May 2025 after his return and pleaded not guilty; that case is before a court. The gang membership evidence is contested — the confidential informant's handler was later convicted of corruption, which is a genuine evidentiary problem — but 'two judges found him to be MS-13' is not nothing, and the courts haven't resolved his guilt or innocence on the trafficking charge. He's not an innocent bystander made into a martyr, he's not "the cruelty was the point", he's an unresolved case the administration mishandled procedurally, and the system caught it. The error was real, the 'victim' narrative is not, and there's more evidence there to support the contention that he genuinely is "one bad hombre" than any kind of innocent person getting crushed by malicious intent.
Regarding 'Concentration camps': This framing has a specific historical weight you're deliberately invoking, and I think it deserves direct challenge. By the functional definition you're applying — people concentrated in detention facilities by the state — every administration including Obama's ran 'concentration camps.' Obama's DHS secretary called their own border facilities 'nothing short of a humanitarian crisis' in 2014. The photographs of children in chain-link enclosures that circulated as Trump outrage in 2018 were taken in 2014. That's not a whataboutism — it's a demonstration that the word you're choosing implies something specifically Nazi that the evidence doesn't support across administrations. If the word applies to Trump it applied to Obama, and if it applied to Obama it's lost its meaning as a comparative tool entirely. What you presumably mean is 'detention facilities with inadequate conditions,' which is a real and serious problem worth arguing on its own terms — one that significantly predates this administration and which multiple administrations have correctly pointed out is due to CONGRESS insufficiently funding the agencies that are required to provide these facilities to handle the volume of detainees apprehended. Arguably, President Trump has done more than any previous President to REDUCE this problem by the simple expedient of his policies resulting in the lowest illegal crossing rate we've had. He doesn't control the funding due the facilities, Congress does, but he's done what he can to reduce the pressure on them by reducing border crossing and trying to increase the number of immigration judges so that their cases can be resolved more quickly, getting them out of the camps sooner. If you have a better solution, I'd like to hear it, because neither locking up legal family members nor releasing illegal aliens into the interior are acceptable alternatives to me. They need to stay somewhere until courts rule whether they're admitted or deported. This is what we have to do it with. And btw, "allegations" aren't "evidence" just because you dislike the agency involved. If you're going to say they are 'uncountable', you should be able to offer a sample of representative cases actually confirmed by courts, which we could then use as the basis for analysis of the matter.
Regarding Family separation:This is where I most want to redirect moral attention, because I think the framing of 'Trump separates families' systematically misdirects sympathy away from the children most deserving of it — and buries a moral horror that the previous administration's policies directly enabled.
Start with the journey itself, because this is where the accounting needs to begin. According to Doctors Without Borders' own field surveys of migrants in transit, 31.4% of women reported sexual abuse during their passage through Mexico alone. Amnesty International estimates 60% of women and girls experience sexual violence on the full journey north. Some estimates from humanitarian organizations run as high as 80%. The numbers are wide because the crime is severely underreported — UNHCR found that 40% of assault victims on this route don't report at all, and 10% of those said the police were their attackers. The reality on the ground is so well understood that women and girls routinely obtain contraception before departure specifically anticipating rape. Doctors Without Borders treated 397 survivors of sexual violence in the Darién Gap alone in a single year — including children aged 11, 12, and 16. In October of that year they recorded one incident of sexual violence every three hours.
These are Amnesty International's numbers. Doctors Without Borders' numbers. UNHCR's numbers. Not Fox News.
Now apply the same moral logic you'd apply anywhere else: a policy that creates strong incentives for families to hand their children to cartel-connected human traffickers and send them alone across this gauntlet is not morally neutral about what happens to those children en route. The Biden administration's framework, which treated the presence of a child as effectively a guaranteed pass for adults into the interior of the country, created exactly that incentive structure. Cartels knew it. Traffickers knew it. Children were the mechanism.
When someone is arrested and imprisoned in any country on earth, their family is not imprisoned with them. That's not cruelty — it's the universal practice of every legal system that exists. The question that never gets asked in the 'family separation' framing is whether the adults being separated from children were actually their families. Under Biden, over 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children entered the UAC program. HHS's own director admitted under congressional oath that they lost contact with over 85,000 of them. The nonpartisan DHS Inspector General put the total at over 320,000 children whose whereabouts are unknown. 11,488 were placed with unvetted sponsors never fingerprinted or background checked, in violation of federal law. HHS actively blocked DHS from receiving sponsor information — in their own documented words, because they feared it would trigger law enforcement action against sponsors. Internal staff who flagged children being sent to sponsors with confirmed MS-13 ties were removed from cases and had their credentials revoked. 65,000 reports about migrant children were dismissed, including 7,300 specific trafficking reports. 24,100 children in FY23 and FY24 alone were released to unrelated sponsors or distant relatives. Border agents reported it was 'very routine' to find children placed with adults who were not their families.
The children being 'separated from families' were in many documented cases being separated from their abusive traffickers.
Under Trump, unaccompanied minor crossings fell from 4.6% of illegal border crossings to 0.4% — an eleven-fold reduction. The trafficking incentive structure that put hundreds of thousands of children through the journey I just described has been substantially dismantled. Whatever one thinks of the administration's methods at the border, that result matters — and it matters most to the children who would otherwise have been handed to a coyote and sent across the Darién Gap.
I understand that detained children in difficult conditions is a viscerally upsetting image. It should be. But the children who most deserve your outrage are the 320,000 the federal government cannot account for, and the uncountable thousands who were raped on the journey here by the cartels whose business model was sustained by the previous framework's incentives. The image of a child in a detention facility is visible and photographable. The 12-year-old treated by Doctors Without Borders in the Darién Gap is not. That asymmetry of visibility is not the same as an asymmetry of moral weight.
You want to know why I can support President Trump's handing of immigration in general? THAT is why: I'm including in my circle of moral concern a great many people that your framing is currently ignoring: the US victims of illegal aliens here AND the illegal aliens themselves who are victims of cartel traffickers. You see insufficiently funded detention centers and get upset, so do I, but I took the time to look into WHY those centers were overwhelmed into being crowded beyond their designed capacity, and I looked into the comparison cases of what conditions they suffered before we took custody of them and what conditions many of the most vulnerable among them suffered when we did not retain custody of them. By the numbers, I calculate that President Trump's policies and enforcement are a net IMPROVEMENT in protecting women and children and have significantly REDUCED the total incidence rate of abuses suffered.
You asked me to tell you why I think you displayed TDS here and I want to answer that seriously because you deserve a serious answer — and because I think your own article actually gives me the framework to do it.
Your piece is largely correct that progressives apply a double standard: accepting activist claims uncritically when they confirm progressive priors, attributing everything bad to deliberate malice by designated villains, and failing to apply the same scrutiny to their own side that they demand of others. The technical term for the underlying cognitive error is fundamental attribution error — the tendency to explain the behavior of people we've categorized as bad entirely through their character and intentions, while explaining identical behavior by people we've categorized as good through situational factors and context. You diagnose this precisely when it comes to progressive handling of, say, antisemitism or crime statistics. My observation is that where Trump is specifically involved, you apply the same mechanism you're criticizing. Bad outcomes become evidence of bad character and deliberate intent, and the situational factors that would normally demand your attention get less weight than they would if someone you trusted more were in charge.
Let me demonstrate that concretely rather than just assert it, because that's what you asked for.
You said ICE was expanded with 'any old numbnuts with a yen for violence.' (blaming character without examining relevant context) The documented reality is more specific and more useful: ICE went from roughly 10,000 to 22,000 agents in under a year, cutting training from approximately six months to six weeks in the process — a 75% compression that former ICE directors, including Obama-era directors, flagged explicitly as a standards challenge. That's a real institutional issue worth serious discussion, the administration accepted some significant known risks as necessary to achieve the numbers needed to fulfill the mandate from the voters. Legitimate policy disputes over those choices are valid. But 'numbnuts with a yen for violence' is a character explanation that closes off the more accurate situational one: you unavoidably get errors at scale when you compress training by 75% and then have to deploy undertrained agents into crowd control situations the agency was never designed or equipped to handle. That's not a defense of the policy decisions, we could have that conversation, — it's an insistence on understanding what actually went wrong so it can actually be fixed, which you didn't do here because you were content in this case with believing ad hominems.
You said ICE 'went after anyone with darker skin and an accent' instead of the criminal low-hanging fruit. But in Trump II's first year, ICE arrests involving homicide, sexual assault, robbery, assault, weapons, and drug charges totaled roughly 118,000 — two and a half times Biden's FY2022 comparable figure. ICE told Congress it had identified 13,099 convicted murderers and 15,811 convicted sex offenders among illegal aliens not yet in custody. By May 2025 it had arrested only 752 of those convicted murderers and 1,693 of those sex offenders. The rest are still out there. That's an enormous public safety need that you've said you acknowledge — and it's the context that makes 'brownshirts terrorizing the innocent' the wrong frame even when specific operations went badly wrong. You haven't actually offered any evidence of racial profiling being done at all, much less that the conduct violates any applicable legal standards. Making such inflammatory claims without evidence is unlike you.
You cited 32 detention deaths as 'the most in 20 years.' That's accurate in absolute terms. What's missing is that the detained population roughly tripled over the same period. Deaths per capita is the better metric, and by that measure the picture is considerably less alarming — though still worth scrutiny on a case by case basis, as every death in federal custody should be.
On the two shootings — these deserve the most careful treatment because they're the most emotionally freighted, and I think they're also the clearest illustration of what I mean.
On Good: the core facts are genuinely contested and the investigation is ongoing. What I'd offer is that the legal standard for officer-involved shootings is the agent's reasonable perception in the moment of decision — not frame-by-frame reconstruction in complete safety afterward. Agent Ross had been dragged 50 yards by a fleeing vehicle six months earlier, requiring 33 stitches. That's confirmed by court conviction of his attacker. Human reaction time from threat perception to trigger pull runs roughly 0.2 to 0.5 seconds. The car's position when the bullet arrived is not the same as the car's position when the decision to fire was made. Whether the shoot was legally justified is genuinely contested and the courts will determine that. I don't have the full evidence and neither do you, so it's not to the standard of evidence you would normally demand for claims made to you.
On Pretti: the 'peaceful bystander filming on his phone' narrative doesn't survive the full record. Eleven days before he was killed, Pretti spat on a federal vehicle, kicked out its taillight, and was tackled to the ground during an organized protest confrontation — with a firearm visibly on his waistband. This is confirmed by BBC facial recognition analysis, the AP, the Star Tribune, and acknowledged by his own family's attorney. On January 24 he was once again in the middle of an active confrontation with agents, once again armed. The most credible reconstruction of what happened — consistent with the Gun Owners Law Center, Fox News sources, and DHS's own congressional report, which notably does not say Pretti reached for his weapon — is that an agent removing his firearm triggered a negligent discharge on a model with documented discharge issues, other agents heard the shot and responded to what they believed was a man who had fired on them, and contagious fire killed him. That's a training failure and a crowd control failure, not an execution. According to the best information we currently have available, it was ultimately a tragic accident. But it is also not brownshirt behavior — it's what happens when you surge 2,000 agents into the most hostile possible operating environment and activist organizations overwhelm the crowd control capacity of local law enforcement, causing chaotic situations where snap judgements must be made by inexperienced agents with limited information and life or death consequences.
And that operating environment matters in a way your framing consistently omits. The same agency ran major operations in North Carolina and Louisiana — where local law enforcement cooperated and activist obstruction was minimal — largely without serious incident. The confrontations generating national headlines were overwhelmingly concentrated in sanctuary jurisdictions with organized activist interference: California, Illinois, and Minnesota most dramatically. Federal immigration law does not recognize sanctuary designations as exempt from enforcement. ICE's legal authority to operate in those jurisdictions is not contingent on local political approval. The activists organizing confrontations in Minneapolis — including those Pretti had already physically joined eleven days before his death — did not have the public mandate behind them that the underlying enforcement operation did. You've said yourself you wanted Trump to address Biden's illegal immigration problem. Most Americans agreed. The protest movement physically obstructing those operations does not enjoy comparable public support, and it has directly created the conditions for most of the worst incidents you're citing.
None of this means the administration's policy execution has been flawless or should be immune to criticism based on confirmed facts. The training compression, the inadequate support infrastructure for a doubled workforce doing major operations — those may deserve the sort of critique you'd normally apply. My argument isn't that ICE has been impeccably managed, that nothing ever went wrong, or that individuals shouldn't be held to account when things did go wrong. It's that 'brownshirts' implied deliberate terroristic intent and structural lawlessness by design — and the evidence, examined fully in context, points to institutional growing pains and cascading situational failures instead. Those are different diagnoses with different implications and different solutions. Collapsing them into a Nazi comparison didn't sharpen the critique. It closed off the analysis precisely where the analysis needed to go deeper. And yet you doubled down on it at first. Ask yourself why you needed me to present you with the numbers and counterarguments before you would acknowledge ICE aren't Brownshirts.
That's the double standard I'm pointing at. Not hysteria. A different threshold for how much context and situational analysis you apply depending on whether Trump is involved. You simply often stop looking for any alternative causes or contrary evidence whenever you can settle for "Orange man bad!" as the explanation.
You'd never let a progressive writer cite 32 deaths in isolation without asking about per capita rates or looking for valid comparison cases. You'd never let 'allegations galore' stand against people you like without asking who made them and what their interests were. You'd never otherwise accept 'went after anyone with darker skin' without considering how you could confirm or deny it before publishing that kind of claim. I'm asking you to set your dislike aside and apply your usual standards of evidence and analysis, especially when you dislike the people involved.
Donald Trump isn't authoritarian. He is called "authoritarian" by the authoritarians whose power he's blocking.
When you only see it on the other side, that makes you a...............? 😁
It’s a good thing you aren’t on Medium, because I would have had to highlight the entire article!
Keep on skewering everyone until it’s cool to be moderate again.
You know I got banned years ago for protected First Amendment speech which, like in the Trump administration, doesn't recognize 🤣🤣🤣