I am a little queasy of throwing the fascism word around willy nilly, but the story of "internal enemies" could not have been more formulaic.
“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth said. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”
It's not exactly subtle. The message is "we're going to commit war crimes more" and "we plan to use the military against people inside the US".
We all have somewhat of an understanding of the power of the US military and foreign agencies
But it’s tough to square this quote with that - what is going to change ?
What need to be untied ? Mass world surveillance, bombing foreign countries?
All of that has happened- what more is needed and why ?
There's a big disconnect w/ people in media and people not terminally online. You hear a narrative about "democracy", "rule of law", etc. And you see organized movements like "no kings" in a similar vein. It's essentially a theoretical argument. "You can't deport so and so, that's a denial of habeas corpus".
But for better of for worse, most people aren't persuaded by these arguments. They see some dude with a criminal record and face tattoos and think "this person probably shouldn't be in our country". You could disagree but this is the normie take.
A lot of people in a big city just see filth and people sleeping on the street and are annoyed that things have gotten like this. They hear about people committing crimes and read that they have been arrested over 20 times before and question why do we keep arresting this guy and letting him go. These abstract arguments about rule of law, or some Paul Krugman post that says people should really be concerned about right wing violence just aren't persuasive. They weren't particularly persuasive 10 years ago and they're certainly even less persuasive today.
It is a problem of recent creation.
>But as I said, this isn’t about crime. It’s about paranoid conspiracy theories and an attempt to dismantle democracy.
Most people don't think of 'normal law enforcement', they just see crime, people in the country illegally and others trying to make law enforcements job harder. They don't care about these types of arguments about how this is different from "normal" law enforcement.
You can care about these arguments , and a small percentage of people do, but if you want to be persuasive to the overwhelming majority, you have to put it in concrete terms how more police and law enforcement is actually bad.
Rich people in safe neighborhoods very commonly turn down police because they don't want their local taxes to go up. It's as simple as that. You can also add to the fact that they don't want their children slammed into the pavement for minor infractions such as having an open container beverage or doing 35 in a 25 mph zone.
Its always been rules for thee but not for me.
Rich people can count on being treated differently by police.
This is what I'm talking about. Completely delusional about what police do, or at least the perception of police in rich neighborhoods.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/30/politics/trump-poll-immig...
It’s much shakier than that.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647303/confidence-institutions-...
Chicago was 77% Democrat in the last election.
These behaviours won't stop if there's no blowback from the MAGA base.
evelant•33m ago
MSFT_Edging•27m ago
The people who were shouting their worries and concerns were told they were being political. Politics is just life now a days, I don't know how you can actually excise that.
actionfromafar•21m ago
foogazi•6m ago
lapcat•11m ago
This has been happening long before W, and the Democrats are complicit too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
piva00•4m ago
Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either party will always look out for the moneyed interests, anything else they might champion for is just there to give a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's the foundation of American democracy, donations, aggressive lobbying, business-first mentality, the votes are there just to decide which side of the coin will move these interests forward, not to decide what platform is best for the citizenry in general.
glenstein•10m ago
I do think the Bush years were the first major destabilization of rule of law domestically that helped create conditions for today, along with Obama's "look forward, not backward" enshrinement of it as bipartisan consensus. Bush also normalized a kind of partisan unresponsiveness to mass democratic uprisings that people used to believe were capable of influencing the government.