In favor of the morally sane thing
The United States is now a country that disappears people.
Visa holders, green card holders, and even occasionally citizens mistaken for non-citizens: Trump’s goons can now seize them off the sidewalk at any time, handcuff them, detain them indefinitely in a cell in Louisiana with minimal access to lawyers, or even fly them to an overcrowded prison in El Salvador to be tortured.
It’s important to add: from what I know, some of the people being detained and deported are genuinely horrible. Some worked for organizations linked to Hamas, and cheered the murder of Jews. Some trafficked fentanyl. Some were violent gang members.
There are proper avenues to deport such people, in normal pre-Trumpian US law. For example, you can void someone’s visa by convincing a judge that they lied about not supporting terrorist organizations in their visa application.
But already other disappeared people seem to have been entirely innocent. Some apparently did nothing worse than write lefty op-eds or social media posts. Others had innocuous tattoos that were mistaken for gang insignia.
Millennia ago, civilization evolved mechanisms like courts and judges and laws and evidence and testimony, to help separate the guilty from the innocent. These are known problems with known solutions. No new ideas are needed.
One reader advised me not to blog about this issue unless I had something original to say: how could I possibly add to the New York Times’ and CNN’s daily coverage of every norm-shattering wrinkle? But other readers were livid at me for not blogging, even interpreting silence or delay as support for fascism.
For those readers, but more importantly for my kids and posterity, let me say: no one who follows this blog could ever accuse me of reflexive bleeding-heart wokery, much less of undue sympathy for “globalize the intifada” agitators. So with whatever credibility that grants me: Shtetl-Optimized unequivocally condemns the “grabbing random foreign students off the street” method of immigration enforcement. If there are resident aliens who merit deportation, prove it to a friggin’ judge (I’ll personally feel more confident that the law is being applied sanely if the judge wasn’t appointed by Trump). Prove that you got the right person, and that they did what you said, and that that violated the agreed-upon conditions of their residency according to some consistently-applied standard. And let the person contest the charges, with advice of counsel.
I don’t want to believe the most hyperbolic claims of my colleagues, that the US is now a full Soviet-style police state, or inevitably on its way to one. I beg any conservatives reading this post, particularly those with influence over events: help me not to believe this.
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Comment #1 April 3rd, 2025 at 11:26 am
Thanks, Scott! I was wondering if you had any takes on what universities’ roles with regards to this should be, if any?
Comment #2 April 3rd, 2025 at 11:31 am
So you support repealing the law that gives the Secretary of State the ability to revoke a visa? How about the one that allows the Attorney General? Or you wish for some amendment allowing *more* judicial review?
Just so we’re clear we’re talking about the students and professors whose visas are being revoked specifically. AFAIK they are all in court receiving due process as we speak. From what I understand they could at any moment choose to leave the country and no longer be held. They are choosing to stay and fight the deportations and the revocation of their visas, right?
It could be that you object to *specific* acts of the Sec. of State with regard to specific people or you object to the laws as stated or object to how they are being carried out and operationalized, but it isn’t clear exactly what you’re objecting to.
Comment #3 April 3rd, 2025 at 11:43 am
Adam Treat #2: I’m in favor of the courts interpreting the laws in such a way that the Secretary of State can’t just revoke visas based on transparently pretextual justifications (“this person criticized Trump on social media; therefore we judge them to be a threat to national security”). Those who know the relevant laws are welcome to hash things out here—maybe I’ll learn something that materially changes my view!
Comment #4 April 3rd, 2025 at 11:48 am
Khalil is literally having his day in court , in front of a judge. Its not clear what more you want to happen. He is not vanished
Comment #5 April 3rd, 2025 at 11:52 am
Long-time reader, seldom commenter.
For context, yes, I voted for Trump and I’m a huge fan of him.
To be honest, you do sound like the typical woke “bleeding-heart liberal.”
Foreign nationals do not have constitutional rights. They do not have due-process rights. This is clear in the text of the forth and fifth amendments themselves—and it’s also clear from decades of jurisprudence. The president and the secretary of state retain broad powers to deport foreign nationals who pose a risk to national security. They do not need to go through a judicial process.
Think about it: Should illegal aliens and non-citizens really have the same constitutional rights as actual Americans? How does that make sense?
Our country is being flooded with drugs and crime from illegals and foreigners. It is quite literally an “invasion,” as Trump has said. Americans are dying from the drugs. Foreign aliens are bringing them in and corrupting our country. It is a serious crisis.
There are so many illegals here (tens of millions) that they’ll never be deported if you have to go through some bureaucratic judicial process just to get them out. Trump is the first president to actually just get them out, and that’s because he values the safety and prosperity of our great country and our citizens more than the non-existent “rights” of aliens, which as I explained, don’t actually exist according to the constitution and judicial precedent.
There are gangs coming in, there are people bringing drugs coming in to make our youth sicker and corrupt them. There are also terrorists. As the college protests showed, there are terrorist sympathizers on all our college campuses. Foreigners who come in here just to sew division and support terrorist groups. If you are a foreigner supporting anti-American terrorists, you don’t have “rights.” Trump is getting these terrorists out of our country, which is an unequivocally good thing.
He cannot go through the courts because 1. It’s a bureaucratic process that takes forever, and 2. Many of these judges are Democrat appointees who support anti-American far-left ideology and are treacherously trying to stop Trump at every turn. Our President cannot deal with these far-left plants in our judicial system. Many of them are essentially communists and “traitors” who support foreign terrorists over our own citizens. Trump must go around them.
Please. Stop reading this far-left stuff attacking what must be done.
Comment #6 April 3rd, 2025 at 11:55 am
Scott #3,
Part of the problem is the speed with which the Govt. must give evidence of their justifications. To be very clear, I would place my priors that the Sec. of State will eventually proffer good justifications in open court as very very low. It could be that in some of these cases there *are* valid justifications, but given his public statements I doubt very much it will be in all cases. To put it simply I don’t trust Rubio. I want to verify.
It is agonizingly slow to even reach the stage where the judicial branch gets a chance to review the justifications and make sure they are not pretextual. I would support modifications to the laws that would allow the judicial branch to review the justifications *much* faster. One way I can conceive of doing this is allowing visa holders to continue being free inside the United States unless/until the Govt. gives a showing that a Judge stamps to say they are dangerous or validates the justifications. That showing can even be given deference to the Govt. but they should have to make *some* showing subject to judicial review before detaining. Even stronger for deporting.
Regardless, the right wing should be very careful imagining how a future Democratic president might choose to wield this power. That is why we need safeguards and due process. It protects us all.
Comment #7 April 3rd, 2025 at 12:22 pm
your colleagues unfortunately are right.
I grew up in a police state, family friends were tortured and disappeared.
The USA is now doing these things. See link from my name for a running count.
The only question left is, how do we stop it ?
General strike seems the only thing remaining to ordinary citizens.
Comment #8 April 3rd, 2025 at 12:31 pm
MAGA All The Way #5,
The 14th amendment:
> No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
A plain reading, and all precedent, indicates that the 14th amendment does protect non-citizens, who are in fact persons.
Comment #9 April 3rd, 2025 at 12:32 pm
MAGA All The Way #5:
Foreign nationals do not have constitutional rights. They do not have due-process rights. This is clear in the text of the forth and fifth amendments themselves—and it’s also clear from decades of jurisprudence.
Please read the following sentence:
It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings
Then reread it a second, third, and fourth time. Where does the sentence come from?
From a Supreme Court opinion written by the noted woke radical, Antonin Scalia.
Go away in shame.
Comment #10 April 3rd, 2025 at 12:45 pm
I recall that in the 90s, Rabin deported 415 Hamas leaders to Lebanon. Then the Israeli justice system + some pressure from the Clinton administration forced Rabin to bring them back. While in Lebanon, these people learned from Hizballah to make very good bombs, which lead to a huge rise of bus bombing, the second intifada, and well, anything that lead us to this timeline.
I’m not saying that you are wrong Scott, you are absolutely right. These people should have the right to defend themselves in court because otherwise there’s no law or justice, and the government can do whatever they want to people.
However, I’ve seen at 7.10 hordes of barbarians barely stopped a few dozen miles from my home, and then most people in the world support them (or being the silent majority as you said in previous post). And that’s the smartest people on earth (e.g., Columbia, Harvard etc). For example, this month, I’ve seen German foreign minister shaking hand with Syrian prime minister (ex ISIS, still murdering minorities), demands the arrest of Netanyahu, while the German government is selling advanced weapons to Egypt.
I’m so heart broken and in shock from recent events, that I don’t even know what the rules are at this point, and what is their purpose.
Comment #11 April 3rd, 2025 at 12:45 pm
Mostly agree with everything you say here but where did the “grabbing random foreign students off the street” quote come from, since the word “random” seems over-the-top? — surely EVERYone would find THAT objectionable. However weak, or poor, or unproven they are, there are reasons why individuals are selected out; they’re not “random” in any normal sense of that word (or what am I missing?)
Comment #12 April 3rd, 2025 at 1:07 pm
MAGA All The Way #5
Your ratio about to commence in 3,2,1…
Comment #13 April 3rd, 2025 at 1:13 pm
Those who expect a court to protect them should read about the case of Kilmar Garcia.
The short version:
These are the facts as presented by the government. You can read the memorandum here. Note that the governments’s argument does not depend on the fact that Mr. Garcia entered the USA illegally. It does not depend on the fact that Mr. Garcia is accused (without trial) of being a gang member. And it does not depend his deportation being caused by a good-faith mistake.
I hope I’m wrong, but it seems that the government is claiming that if they seize anyone for any reason and bring him to a foreign country to be imprisoned, then there is no redress that a court can order. Isn’t that peachy?
Comment #14 April 3rd, 2025 at 1:56 pm
The Ozturk case is currently being heard. DOJ is arguing that they did not violate the order to move her out of Massachusetts and to their preferred forum in Louisiana because she was in Vermont at the time of the arrest. And that if she was in Massachusetts they would have followed the order. Those with bluesky accounts can follow along here:
https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3llwjppsrb224
Comment #15 April 3rd, 2025 at 2:27 pm
Judges should have been involved before that millions entered illegally. This high number makes practically impossible to celebrate court cases a posteriori: it would be equivalent to accepting massive illegal immigration. This happens in Europe, where lawyers suggest tricks to delay and delay court decisions: a statistically impossible numbers of immigrants claim being underage, gay, etc, and it’s impossible to check.
Comment #16 April 3rd, 2025 at 3:02 pm
The new low for sanity and honesty in the US is dropping by the hour, not by the day. I advise everyone to stop being surprised and shocked by this, accept the new reality, extrapolate this trend into the future (worse yet to come, there is never “enough” for the fascist mindset) and plan your actions accordingly. Most importantly, realize that this is not like some crisis or natural disaster that will pass by itself. This is an intentional regime change, its chiefs plan to stay and feed on the people for decades, unless resisted. There won’t be new elections where everyone could vote for democrats and reverse everything back. And the courts won’t save your country, the judges can’t stand against money and power that “solve” the cases as they please in the fascists world order.
Comment #17 April 3rd, 2025 at 3:09 pm
Danylo Yakymenko #16: Of course I’m worried about that! But it would sure be convenient for the Trumpists if the entire opposition just assumed democracy is dead now, and therefore surrendered without a fight. And certainly there are examples (Brazil?) of countries that looked like they were in free fall from democracy to authoritarianism, but that then successfully reversed themselves. We’ve got to try.
Comment #18 April 3rd, 2025 at 3:11 pm
Scott #3: I sent a link to this discussion to a law professor friend of mine, and here’s his reaction:
The discussion seems to be running together two different things the administration is doing—one, grabbing people and sending them to a prison in El Salvador without judicial review and two, detaining foreign students, presumably as a prelude to deportation, based on op-eds or social media posts. As to the first, that’s a clear constitutional violation. Noncitizens do have due process rights, and in any case you need process to determine not just which noncitizen is a gang member and which isn’t but, more fundamentally, who’s a citizen and who isn’t. If the rule is that noncitizens don’t get procedural protections even to determine their status, the government can just say that you’re not a citizen and poof, there go your rights.
As to the second, noncitizens also have First Amendment rights. The standards governing visa revocation are not the same as the standards for putting someone in jail for speech, but it’s not actually clear that the law that seems to vest total discretion in the Secretary of State to decide whether someone’s presence is a threat to national security, or to deport people for espousing terrorism, is constitutional. If the government would like to notify people that it’s revoking their visas on those grounds and then give them a choice of leaving or litigating, that would be an appropriate way to test the law. But I don’t see any reason why they had to grab Rumeysa Ozturk off the street and send her to Louisiana. That seems like abusive conduct designed to terrify people.
Comment #19 April 3rd, 2025 at 3:14 pm
Alessandro Strumia #15: On the one hand, if we’re just talking about a few hundred or a few thousand Hamas-supporting radical students (plus a few thousand suspected gang members, etc), then I see no reason why each of them couldn’t argue their deportation case before a judge.
On the other hand, if we’re actually talking about a mass deportation of millions of people, that will be a humanitarian nightmare, one that I predict even much of Trump’s base won’t be able to stomach once they see the reality of it. There’s a reason why the previous, saner generation of Republicans was looking to make a deal where we’d tighten border enforcement, but also provide a pathway to citizenship for those already here who work and are peaceful.
Comment #20 April 3rd, 2025 at 3:25 pm
Larry #18: Thanks!! I’m actually pleasantly surprised if running together the different legal issues of the Louisiana cases and the El Salvador cases was my worst error!
Comment #21 April 3rd, 2025 at 3:30 pm
Scott #20: To be punctiliously legalistic about it, he said the discussion, not you. 🙂
Comment #22 April 3rd, 2025 at 6:38 pm
Given some responses (even on this blog), it’s clear that a big swath of the country see MAGA=good regardless of the merits.
The only hope we have is that the administration goes all-out and literally everybody sees how ugly most of its decisions are, by knowing firsthand somebody who got hit one way or another.
For example why was Jasmine Mooney detained? Absolutely no reason I can tell, AFAIK she did not even criticized the administration, Trump or Tesla. It looks like she got detained just because the government could do that and bureaucrats have no punishment for such capricious decisions (and perhaps they have prizes for the reverse instead? or are they all been spontaneously overzealous?). And she could get out relatively quickly only because of the large resources she has as a richer-than-average and more-famous-than-average person. An average person would probably remain in prison for a very long time, even if they did nothing wrong (not even exercised their 1st amendment rights, if we accept — and I am not saying we should!!! — that such a thing is wrong)
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/02/nx-s1-5341465/jasmine-mooney-canadian-actress-ice-detention
Comment #23 April 3rd, 2025 at 7:37 pm
Any authority Congress gave the Secretary of State to do this is not unlimited, and subject to the First Amendment, obviously. “Congress shall make no law…”
Comment #24 April 3rd, 2025 at 8:07 pm
Due process was invented to protect the rights of the people we don’t like, of the people we wouldn’t care that much if they were sent to jail, of the people we already *know* to be guilty, for the people we would be tempted to send straight to jail or worse. So, the more hideous the person seems to us, the more we should be protecting their rights to due process. It’s a barrier we put to our worst instincts. It’s essential for living in peace.
Not respecting due process is counterproductive, it ends making possible nasty people martyrs in the eyes of their supporters and even of some well intentioned people. Anyway, of course, Trumpism is not about the rule of law anyway, so that ship sailed long ago once he got elected again.
Comment #25 April 3rd, 2025 at 8:18 pm
Alessandro Strumia #15
Forgive me for seeing only hypocrisy in your remark.
The United States cannot afford a robust judicial system because anti-tax, libertarian conservatives have spent the last half century working to undermine effective governance in this country with “starve the beast” and “own the libs” politics.
I respect conservatives. But, I hold them accountable for what their hatred of government has wrought. At least there is something honest about the raw hatred at the extreme right and the extreme left. I cannot say that about the conservative elites.
Comment #26 April 3rd, 2025 at 9:40 pm
What fascists want —
1. Money
2. Power
3. Go To 1
What fascists need —
1. Scapegoats, scapegoats, any old scapegoats will do.
2. Useful Idiots, useful idiots, hordes of twittering, useful idiots.
Comment #27 April 3rd, 2025 at 9:53 pm
Like many others I’ve been watching the news out of the US with shock, bemusement, outrage, eye-rolling and acute worry for friends and colleagues in American universities.
Hang tight. It can get much, much worse – and it would be foolish to expect it won’t.
‘How could America do this to itself?’ has many answers, some of which are revealed in the comments in #5.
The most parsimonious explanation comes from the blog of Noah Smith, who writes today:
“My high school history teacher was a colorful character. I still remember one time when I asked him why some historical actor had done something stupid. He grinned asked me: “Why does a dog lick its balls?” When I couldn’t come up with a good answer, he waggled his eyebrows and said: “Because it can.”
That wasn’t a particularly satisfying answer. But in the 21st century, it often seems like America does stupid things just because it can.”
Comment #28 April 3rd, 2025 at 11:15 pm
I would recommend *everyone* to start carrying an actual proof of citizenship with you anytime you go on the streets, maybe that will help in some situations.
Oh, and if you happen to have a tattoo with a crown, like many fans of the Real Madrid:
https://www.google.com/search?q=real+madrid+tatoo
get it removed…
Comment #29 April 3rd, 2025 at 11:25 pm
I guess that not many people here are aware of this
“President Donald Trump said he’s looking into whether he can imprison American criminals of the “most severe cases” in other countries.
“I’m just saying if we had a legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “I don’t know if we do or not, we’re looking at that right now.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/04/trump-foreign-prisons-americans-011750
We now know at least one of those “other countries”, but what will be his interpretation of “criminals of the most severe cases”?
Comment #30 April 4th, 2025 at 12:33 am
Scott,
>if we’re just talking about a few hundred or a few thousand Hamas-supporting radical students
I’m not a legal expert, but I don’t think you could find a way to ban Hamas-support in a system that recognized neo-Nazi support as constitutionally protected. Gang affiliation is also legal – the law is against “gang-related activity” (not protected by freedom of assembly). If they could use the law to accomplish the same thing under the theory that the constitution restricts laws and not interactions with citizens, they would. After all, the legislative branch is allowed to write new ones.
Comment #31 April 4th, 2025 at 5:06 am
Concerned #30: IANAL, but there seems to be a deep conflict of legal principles here:
– On the one hand, it’s established that the First Amendment does apply to resident aliens.
– On the other hand, it’s established that we can deny visas to those who support terrorist organizations. And if someone claims not to support terrorist organizations, but later it turns out they do, then they lied on their visa application and their visa can therefore be revoked.
How does one reconcile these two principles? Dunno, sounds like a question for a judge!
Comment #32 April 4th, 2025 at 6:54 am
Re: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8758#comment-2007101
Words like “support” and “terrorist” or even “terrorist organization” are vague in the extreme. I don’t know if there are fixed legal definitions, but I bet they vary both in the eye of the beholder and from country to country.
For instance, consider the following rationale given by Marco Rubio —
“Evidence that an applicant advocates for terrorist activity or otherwise demonstrates a degree of public approval or public advocacy for terrorist activity or a terrorist organization may be indicative of ineligibility,” reads the memo, sent by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio. “This may be evident in conduct that bears a hostile attitude towards US citizens or US culture, including government institutions or founding principles.”
The way I see it, “Bears a hostile attitude towards US founding principles” would of course be grounds for renditioning #Rubio to El Salvador #Magaprison for life.
Comment #33 April 4th, 2025 at 7:23 am
“On the other hand, it’s established that we can deny visas to those who support terrorist organizations. And if someone claims not to support terrorist organizations, but later it turns out they do, then they lied on their visa application and their visa can therefore be revoked.”
Despite what people as saying on X I do not think most judges, including Republican-appointed ones, would say this is being applied by the current administration properly. First this provision hasn’t been applied in something like 30 years and has hardly ever been applied. It is like the use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in the way the administration is applying it. More importantly Rubio has explicitly stated this issue is students who are “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests.” However, in the case of Ozturk, who as far as anyone knows only wrote a totally anodyne op-ed which isn’t close to supporting terrorism, and in several other of these cases, it strains credibility to connect this to foreign policy or terrorism.
Comment #34 April 4th, 2025 at 7:37 am
Jon Awbrey #32 and Dave #33: Yes, I completely agree that the way Rubio et al. are interpreting the relevant statutes seems ridiculously overbroad. The case against Khalil, who represented CUAD, which distributed literal propaganda from Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organization, seems one hell of a lot stronger than the case against Öztürk (for example), whose worst offense seems to have been writing a pro-divestment op-ed for her school newspaper.
Comment #35 April 4th, 2025 at 8:15 am
I’ve been a fan of Peter Woit for a very long time, been reading his blog since the String Wars in the aughts, read both his books, etc. I’m reaching out to say that I’m absolutely ashamed and disgusted by his vituperative and inappropriate behavior towards you. It was shocking. I don’t think he’s an anti-semite, but he’s so blinded by his politics that he can’t even conceive that Jewish students are being targeted at Columbia. In any case, he responded to your polite and measured comment with an unhinged rant, basically calling you mentally unwell because you’re concerned about anti-semitism at Columbia.
Has he reached out to you since then to apologize?
Comment #36 April 4th, 2025 at 8:25 am
Scott, I want to thank you for this post, you’re right that all this should be implicit, that may be true in normal times, but these times are anything but normal… so it’s great you’re taking the time and have the courage to plant that flag.
Too many intellectuals who have been very vocal on Trump in the past are now pretty silent, like Sam Harris – when Trump won he said he wasn’t going to comment from a knee-jerk reaction every time Trump says something outrageous, that only actions matter… there’s been plenty of bad things happening, yet it’s now mostly silence (except for having a couple of guests who safely comment on things from 30,000 feet)
Then we get Bill Maher who’s just been visiting Trump at Mar-a-lago… a guy who had been sued by Trump for defamation over jokes he made.
What those two now have in common is that they’re still focusing on blaming the far-left for all this… it’s very safe to do, and it’s as if they’re standing on the sidewalk watching their house burn down with their kids inside and the best they can do is trying to call their lawyer to try and sue the real estate agent who sold them the house… there’s an appropriate time for everything, and if you miss the time window, it’s too late.
Yet another outrageous action that’s taking place right now: the Trump regime (through RFK jr) has been laying top people and doctors at the WTC Health Program, which has been created and funded to help victims of 911 deal with the cost of their disease (mostly cancers) treatments… a lot of hero firefighters in there… now apparently it’s already impossible for any victim to get a new condition reviewed and approved.
Anyway, thanks again Scott for maybe restating the obvious, but it’s comforting to hear it in those crazy times.
Comment #37 April 4th, 2025 at 8:56 am
The actual intent of these actions is to create FUD in the minds of those who are just “joining the flow” – those non serious people who don’t end up creating actual trouble. Law enforcement is not scalable until the signal to noise ratio is high, i.e. you need to separate out the potential trouble makers
Comment #38 April 4th, 2025 at 8:57 am
Another crucial point to make is that the overlap of narrative between
1) student visas getting revoked for national security reasons related to Israel
and
2) the seizing of alleged gang members off the streets to immediately send them without due process to foreign prisons
is slowly but surely growing more and more, by design.
The two things are rooted in “combatting terrorism” since Hamas is a terrorist organization but the Mexican cartels and gangs have also now been labeled terrorist organizations.
And as I reported above, Trump is also pushing to send American prisoners of the worst kind to foreign jails… do you see where this is going?
Trump is putting everything in place to create its own version of the Gulag, Guantanamo isn’t good enough because he needs something bigger and that’s a one way ticket where US courts have no jurisdiction.
And if you think I’m exaggerating, go listen to Steve Bannon, he said that the layoffs of FBI agents and officials who worked to investigate Trump was just the first step, that the next step is jail.
Comment #39 April 4th, 2025 at 9:49 am
Scott #31
> And if someone claims not to support terrorist organizations, but later it turns out they do, then they lied on their visa application and their visa can therefore be revoked.
Although we would both like to see this argument tested in court, it seems to me that the difference in time between the two events would be enough to defend against accusations of having fraudulently claimed anything.
> who represented CUAD, which distributed literal propaganda from Hamas
Depending on the type and manner of representation, this could be an instance of working as an unregistered foreign agent, a crime that was prosecuted often during the Cold War. The distribution of as you say “literal propaganda” though would not be a crime. You are allowed to sell copies of the Soviet Military Review (https://archive.org/details/soviet-military-review-198808), for example.
Comment #40 April 4th, 2025 at 10:41 am
Adam #35: No, he has not.
Comment #41 April 4th, 2025 at 11:18 am
I missed another point in #38 (keeping track of the insanity is a full time job)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/21/trump-tesla-vehicles-elon-musk-bondi-vandalism/
“President Donald Trump on Friday escalated his administration’s threats against those who destroy Tesla vehicles, pondering on social media whether he should send the vandals to an El Salvador prison notorious for its rough conditions.”
while burning property is criminal, they’re also targeting anyone protesting in front of Tesla dealerships, it’s again one more thing being swept under a broad use of “terrorism” to include another group of Americans he referred to as “the enemies from within” during the campaign.
Comment #42 April 4th, 2025 at 11:34 am
Dear, Scott,
An unintentional conservatives reading your blog, here am I. An unintentional because I would consider myself a liberal, voted for Gore, huge fan of Bill Maher, deem freedom of speech above all, etc. However, the Left, the “progressives” moved so far left, that, without changing my views, I find myself on the Republican side on 60% of the current issues. Not enough to vote for Trump, but more than enough not to vote for his opponents either.
Since October 8 I have a bit of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, freedom of speech above all. On the other hand, the delusional aggressive Left permeated everything, especially academia, and pretty much cancelled freedom of speech years ago. And now that people don’t dare to speak politically incorrect objective truth, the deeply racists and now also genocidal Left is claiming 1st and 4th amendment rights for themselves, while denying those rights for everybody else.
Is Left anti-free speech? Ask those who got cancelled. Ask professors who wouldn’t dare to speak up for the fear they would get cancelled too.
Is Left anti-due process? Ask the wrongly accused students who were denied one.
And now Left demand that for themselves.
Is Left racist? Ask stellar Asian applicants who got rejected.
Is Left genocidal? “From the river to the sea”, “globalize intifada”, “it depends on the context.”
And now Left accuses their targets of that.
It was Karl Popper, I believe, who said that the tolerant should be intolerant of intolerants. Otherwise the intolerant ones would take over and that would be the end. This is what we saw in many avenues of life recently. I think one of the things the current administration is trying to do is the descent into the abyss of leftist intolerance that permeated everything in the recent years if not decades.
“I don’t want to believe the most hyperbolic claims of my colleagues, that the US is now a full Soviet-style police state, or inevitably on its way to one.”
Recall that Soviet rhetoric was 100% leftist. Equity, socialism, political correctness of speech and though, all those excesses of the Left are coming from Soviets. The “full Soviet-style police state” is exactly where we were heading for, and one of the things the current administration is doing is trying to prevent one.
Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to escape the wrong trajectory once the minds of the people were set on it. There were several historical examples.
Post-Nazi Germany, after 1945: most people still believe in National Socialism. The Allies force civilians dig out the mass graves to shove their faces into their own crimes that they denied. There was no due process involved. Here’s a shovel; go dig and smell.
1950s McCarthyism. What an awful time to live in. I wouldn’t want to experience that, although it increasingly feels that we might. Staved off communism though, which would be much worse.
So, please tell me how to prevent English Socialism of 1984 in this country without McCarthyism-style counteractions to leftism. IMO the freedom of speech and due process are of utmost importance. How would you protect free speech from those who prevent speech different from theirs from being heard and even uttered? How would you protect due process from those who deny you yours?
Again, I don’t want to live in the McCarthyism era. I don’t want to live in 1984 thoughtcrime policing state either. Unfortunately, the two major parties are pushing for these alternatives.
Alas, it’s difficult to dissuade you from the notion that US becoming a police state because it looks like we are heading for one, regardless of which party is in control.
Comment #43 April 4th, 2025 at 12:20 pm
Scott #19, the deal you propose (tighten border enforcement, but also provide a pathway to citizenship) happened twice in Italy: next the left reopened the borders.
The same would happen in the US, because the lefts no longer are the party of workers.
About the morality of “mass deportation”, it depends one what one expects for the future. Lot of evidence indicates that the politically correct view about immigration is wrong. If, in reality, too many immigrants escape from themselves, then their problems have no solution: the final result of immigration would be recreating in immigration countries the same problems of emigration countries, ending the oases of civilisation that now exist as demographic minorities.
So, having everything checked by judges should be balanced with the worry that, if some critical threshold is crossed, judges will become things of the past.
Comment #44 April 4th, 2025 at 2:44 pm
Alessandro #43
the big difference is that the US is really a pretty young country of immigrants, if you don’t count the indigenous minority which got wiped out by the all the initial waves of European immigrants.
Comment #45 April 4th, 2025 at 5:13 pm
Adam Treat #2: Since it wasn’t mentioned as a direct reply to your question, I’d like to point out that there has been at least one report of someone being detained due to visa issues and being held for multiple weeks despite repeatedly offering to pay for her own flight out of the country.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney
In this case, it was a Canadian citizen who does not appear to have ever been accused to being involved with gangs, terrorist organizations, or anything like that. She was detained at the border while attempting to enter legally, and was not given easy access to lawyers or phones.
I’m not familiar enough with the cases of the students to know what choices they’ve been given (so I can’t answer your question directly). However, it’s worth keeping in mind that the alternative to fighting in court (and/or getting media outlets involved) might be worse than just getting sent to their country of citizenship: it could mean prison. Conceivably (although not yet done in the case of protestors, to my knowledge), even being sent to El Salvadoran prison, where the current administration has argued constitutional rights do not apply to anyone.
That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be worth fighting even if the penalty was only a plane ride back to their country of origin.
Comment #46 April 4th, 2025 at 8:59 pm
Scott, there is no one on the earth whom I despise more than our current US president. And I am deeply concerned by what he is currently doing. I am not nearly well informed enough to properly assess the severity of the situation. But what I have heard does indeed sound dire.
But Scott. You ask for conservatives to ” help you not to believe this.” Fact checking is indeed a worthy goal.
But I don’t think this comment section is going to help you to achieve this.
when I look at your comment section, most of the people in it are people who agree with you on how terrible trump is.
Of the ones who disagree, a large fraction are trolls.
It is possible the current situation is exactly as bad as you fear. And it is possible it is not at bad as you fear.
But regardless of what the truth is, on this particular matter, I do not expect your comment section to help you find it.
If you want to hear the best conservative arguments for the current state of affairs, I would look somewhere else. Where, exactly, I don’t know, for I am not a conservative.
Comment #47 April 4th, 2025 at 10:31 pm
Much appreciate that you use this, however limited, public forum to speak up. There is no inevitability to the US descending further towards authoritarianism but unfortunately all the pieces for a rapid deterioration are in place. At this point pretty much the last guardrail are the courts. And they are under attack from within as this video clip from a senate hearing with Sen. Cruz and Sen. Klobuchar aptly demonstrates.
https://youtu.be/CMx1zsr2Wk8?si=vFp69bnkURo9lcFC
Much will depend on conservatives stepping back and seeing the writing on the wall. Authoritarians can only consolidate power if people comply in advance.
Comment #48 April 5th, 2025 at 2:42 am
Dear fred #44: if immigrants are generically good, why North America is more successful than South America, while Haiti is a disaster? Why South Africa regressed badly after the regime change supported by the intelligencija?
Trump is needed because the alternative, being unable of even considering politically incorrect issues, repeats the same mistakes.
Comment #49 April 5th, 2025 at 2:50 am
scott: you wrote: “some of the people being detained and deported are genuinely horrible.[ …] Some trafficked fentanyl”.
there is nothing wrong with the trafficking (selling) of fentanyl. like any other commodity, it should be available to any adult consumer. the deliberate ingestion of ANY drug by an individual is a decision which each individual is entitled to make (as with abortion rights, “my body, my choice” is the proper dictum).
of course, spiking (in slang, “spiking” refers to adding alcohol or drugs to someone’s drink without their knowledge or consent) other drugs with fentanyl is horrible as it denies the consumer their basic right to make an informed decision about what they ingest.
Comment #50 April 5th, 2025 at 7:25 am
In #38 I wrote
“Trump is putting everything in place to create its own version of the Gulag, Guantanamo isn’t good enough because he needs something bigger and that’s a one way ticket where US courts have no jurisdiction.”
It took only a few hours for the WH spokesperson to use that very “argument”!
“In a statement, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Xinis should contact President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador “because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.”
Which is a total troll because it’s clear the Trump regime is coercing El Salvador to take those people into their jails (probably through a mix of economic pressure, payments, bribery of officials…), no questions asked, so they sure as shit can tell El Salvador to return them any time they want…
Comment #51 April 5th, 2025 at 7:39 am
Alessandro,
isn’t your very own far-right Giorgia Meloni, protector of Italy against the brown invasions and Mussolini era nostalgic, caved in to the demand of her own industrialists, who begged her to let a very significant amount of brown immigrants in again, because they need them as workforce? 😛
If you want to protect your shiny white civilization, you better stop posting in blogs and start making babies…
Comment #52 April 5th, 2025 at 10:44 am
Re “…some of the people being detained and deported are genuinely horrible…”
There is a cognitive trap here which I see people falling into (though you did not).
Let’s be clear and careful to say: denial of due process is still wrong even if they’re guilty.
The wrongness of the act isn’t about who THEY are, it’s about who WE are.
Comment #53 April 5th, 2025 at 2:00 pm
We’re lucky here to interact with so many experts on US Visa, immigration, free speech, and due process.
So let me ask them a question:
Does this brand new 5-million-$ Trump Green Card come with its special free-speech protection, or is it just as easily revocable as the standard permanent visa, depending on what you say about various conflicts currently going on around the world?
At the very least, would it get you a first class seat if you get flown to El Salvador?
Comment #54 April 6th, 2025 at 1:37 am
Some folks seem to really get hung up on this comment of Scott’s
“…some of the people being detained and deported are genuinely horrible…”
Hence I think it bears repeating that the entire point of due process is to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt if someone is “horrible” i.e. guilty.
The Bill of Rights clearly states it applies to all persons. This is at the very core of the US constitution.
Comment #55 April 6th, 2025 at 2:22 am
fred,
while France, Germany and EU remain undemocratically blocked by history, Italy moved forward and nothing bad happened. Meloni is just a reasonable politician, so careful that she does little. Her party grew from few % to majority because others before her went woke: they favoured massive illegal immigration and attacked people who dared to notice that the result differs from the ideology.
Comment #56 April 6th, 2025 at 12:03 pm
Alessandro #55
“Her party grew from few % to majority because others before her went woke”
10 years of Berlusconi, your very own version of a billionaire corrupt clown, was indeed the best you ever managed and deserved :_D
Comment #57 April 6th, 2025 at 5:28 pm
Alessandro #55
I find that there is a very simple test to apply to see if a right wing politician is corrupted: Do they toe Putin’s line or do they support Ukraine? I was pleasantly surprised when Meloni passed that test. Most European right-wing extremists do not and are clearly Putin’s fifth column. Of course Salvini is busily trying to corrupt her.
Comment #58 April 6th, 2025 at 7:49 pm
It’s terrific to be able to solve every single issue out there by applying tariffs or cancelling visas.
And when your entire state department has basically only one employee left, Marco, it’s important to streamline everything.
“US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that the US is immediately revoking visas issued to all South Sudanese passport holders due to the African nation refusing to accept its citizens who have been removed from the US.”
Hopefully none of those South Sudanese ‘guests’ paid 5-million-$ for their visa.
Comment #59 April 7th, 2025 at 4:36 am
Alessandro #48, your question made me recall one explanation, an essay by Niall Ferguson I read a decade ago maybe. The point of the essay was IIRC that in South America the vast majority of land got owned by a small ruling class descending from a small group of conquistadors, while in North America a large number of small farms and settlements got created by a large number of hard-working immigrants. Another part of the story (according to NF, IRRC) was the work ethics deriving from Protestant Christianity and its later derivative, the scientific way of thinking.
Therefore the landowners in North America had a lot of say in the matters of governance. So much, in fact, that the novel political inventions of 1776 took place there. South America, contrary to that, evolved into banana republics that were lead by king-like presidents, into a series of revolutions, and in general stalling the path towards prosperity. This happened regardless of the fact that in the 1500’s and 1600’s it seemed that South America had better prospects to found flourishing nations and imperiums, because of greater natural resources and the amount of gold available there.
The thought of scientific thinking evolving from protestantism is mine and not N.F’s. I’ve been impressed by the idea of Martin Luther that men (and by modern extension, women) can have a direct contact with God, and do not need a class of priests to act as mediators. Although Luther from the modern hindsight can be criticized for many of his views, that one was a revolutionary idea in 1517, and at least I can see how it was a step towards an even more evidence-based worldview.
Anyway, the progress in South America seems to have been hindered by consequences of an early formation of an oligarch class that owned the land, the main generator of wealth before the Industrial Revolution. Possibly also by differences between the Catholic v.s. Protestant worldviews, the former one being more stagnated of the two. The more prosperous starting point in South America was not enough to compete against the speed of progress in North America.
It would be interesting to find again the essay by Niall Ferguson I hope I’m paraphrasing correctly here.
Comment #60 April 7th, 2025 at 5:52 am
Hello, Scott, I’ve noticed a pattern shared between your position here and on the seemingly unrelated question of antisemitism in universities. The pattern goes like this:
– there’s an evil minority doing bad things.
– there’s a “sane majority” that disapproves of the bad things but for some mysterious reason does nothing to stop the evil minority.
– there’s Trump who says that enough is enough and demands that the “sane majority” gets rid of the evil in their midst, or else.
– there’s Scott Aaronson who correctly recognizes that the evil minority is game-theoretically mugging him and the rest of the “sane majority” to let them continue doing bad things… and sides with the muggers.
In case of mass illegal immigration I could suspect that you’re not entirely honest, and while on paper you recognize that objections to it have merit, secretly you like it and make a sigh of relief as you point out that unfortunately nothing could be done about it now, so we have no choice but to give them all citizenship.
But you behave exactly the same in case of campus antisemites and obviously you are not secretly supporting them. When you have to recommend Jews to not enroll at the University of Columbia, admitting the de facto Literally Hitleresque effect of their policies, I expect you to honestly believe that it’s bad and a kind of a big deal. And yet you sigh and conclude that nothing can be done about it. What gives?
The only explanation I could come up with is that you deny the “sane majority” the locus of control. It kind of matches your own personality, described in your own words: you are resigned to the fact that now and then bad things happen to you, it’s out of your control, you can only complain and persevere. So it doesn’t occur to you that there are concrete people in the UC administration who can stomp out the antisemitism and therefore have a moral responsibility to do it, and if they have been shirking that responsibility it’s entirely reasonable to put a metaphorical knife to their throats and demand that they get their shit together. And if they still don’t do it, it means that the evil is actually in control of the institution and it’s better to burn it to the ground.
Similarly, if we the sane majority agree that unlimited illegal immigration is bad actually, the only way to guarantee that the next administration doesn’t immediately sabotage the border security again is to deport all current illegals. Yes, it will cause a lot of suffering, maybe the democrats should have thought about this in advance and maybe they will remember it in the future. The alternative is being perpetually game-theoretically mugged and sighing and accepting it as the way the world is, I guess.
Comment #61 April 7th, 2025 at 7:58 am
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Comment #62 April 7th, 2025 at 10:56 am
Name required #60: To take the two issues one by one:
On campus antisemitism, no, I’ve never thought either universities or the federal government should just lay supine in the face of an “evil minority.” During the Biden administration too, I supported much stronger enforcement of universities’ existing, content-neutral time, place, and manner rules to maintain a safe environment for Jewish and Israeli students, and I thought Title VI lawsuits had an obvious role there. And I’m intellectually honest enough to say that, yes, the Trump administration is doing part of what I wanted there, even if it’s part of what I see as a broader program of dismantling academia and all other centers of opposition and liberal democracy itself. I will say this even if it causes me to get denounced by both sides.
On immigration, I do see border enforcement as a necessity for various reasons, but I don’t see most illegal immigrants as “evil” in any way. For the most part, I think they’re doing the same things you or I would do in their situation, fleeing violence and crushing poverty in search of a future for their kids. A tiny minority come here to commit crimes; the rest come here to pick fruit or cut up cow carcasses or do other grueling but necessary work that even the poorest Americans usually don’t want to do, for subsistence wages, and to raise their kids to be Americans (as we’ve recently learned, often even Americans who will vote Republican!). You can argue that our absorption capacity is limited, but I don’t see how you can blame someone for trying for that if the alternative is death and misery for their kids.
Comment #63 April 7th, 2025 at 12:17 pm
At least now student visas are getting canceled for actual infractions, rather than based on sounds coming out of their throat /s
“That’s when she remembered: a year ago, she was driving home when she got two speeding tickets: one for speeding and another for failing to stop. She hadn’t seen the police car behind her until it was too late. To get the charges dismissed, she showed up in court, where she was fingerprinted.
Lisa is one of several students across states who found their legal status revoked by the US government on 4 April, without prior notice or clear explanation.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/trump-student-visas-deportation
Looks like Little Marco has to meet a pretty hefty quota!
Comment #64 April 7th, 2025 at 4:23 pm
The Supreme Court sided with the Trump Administration on the Abrego Garcia deportation case. This is the one where the administration admitted that he was deported illegally, yet claims they now cannot do anything about it since they have no jurisdiction over El Salvador.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia
The gravity of this cannot be overstated. This essentially invalidates habeas corpus. ICE simply has to claim that they believe a person is an illegal alien, and since they can deport faster than any court can intervene, this means “administrative errors” can affect anyone.
One would have to be extremely naive to assume that US citizens won’t be swept up in this eventually. Once habeas corpus in gone it’s pretty much Game Over.
Comment #65 April 7th, 2025 at 5:21 pm
Henning #64: I thought they just temporarily blocked it, with their actual decision coming later? I still have a faint hope that sanity might prevail here…
Comment #66 April 7th, 2025 at 6:29 pm
Scott #65
Well, you know what they say about hope …
The nice thing about the US constitution is that it is very plainly written. Distance through time makes some of the wordings a bit archaic but you don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to understand that removing someone without due process is a violation of habeas corpus. This should have not even been taken up by the SC.
What is truly terrifying is that the Robert’s court simply accepts the executive’s claim that Garcia is a gang member. There was no due process to determine that this is the case. All evidence indicates this is an entirely spurious claim. So I am not very optimistic about this court reversing course.
There’s a screenshot at the link that dresses this up in high and mighty legalese. A great slight of hand simply presenting at fact what a court should have determined.
https://bsky.app/profile/jaywillis.net/post/3lmae2v33is26
Comment #67 April 7th, 2025 at 6:30 pm
@Henning
“…Once habeas corpus in gone it’s pretty much Game Over.”
I know! You and any of the others above complaining about the current/imminent fascism: if you’re in the US, you should definitely get out now while you still can! Please and thank you!
Comment #68 April 7th, 2025 at 10:03 pm
@Scott #65. the Supreme Court decided removed the lower court’s temporary restraining order (arguing that it should be filed in Texas which is where ICE took them after they were arrested in DC). They say that the plaintiffs are free to re-file in Texas, but since the court removed the TRO, all of the plaintiffs have almost certainly been flown to El Salvador by now.
Comment #69 April 8th, 2025 at 6:49 am
Henning #64,
“The Supreme Court sided with the Trump Administration on the Abrego Garcia deportation case.“
No, at least not yet. Robert’s did stay the order but it was a routine stay to allow the justices to confer and consider the briefs. Plaintiffs have already responded so we should get an actual decision in next 72 hours. If they do side with Govt. then I would agree that is pretty much the ball game for due process.
Comment #70 April 8th, 2025 at 8:39 am
Scott #62
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, by the “evil minority” in this context I didn’t mean any of the immigrants, but the people who enable unlimited illegal immigration.
As you said, you do see border enforcement as a necessity, and from what you said before that about reasonable Republicans bargaining for a stricter immigration control in exchange for legalizing all already present immigrants you’re not vehemently opposed to that either. And I’m pretty sure that if I point out how blatantly undemocratic all this is, you’d agree and also agree that it’s very bad on this meta level.
As in, there are various Green Card quotas, to the tune of several hundred thousand people per year in total. If some people think that there should be more immigration, in a Democracy they will form a special interest group, solicit donations from like minded people, lobby congressmen, run campaigns in support of congressmen who promise to try to get that number increased, etc etc, and get that number increased more or less democratically.
Instead that number was made irrelevant by the fact that there were 10 times more immigrants crossing the border illegally. And the Border Patrol, nominally in charge of preventing that, was apparently entirely captured by undemocratic interests and instead of patrolling the border was cutting razor wire installed by Texas on the border (afterwards it was kinda infuriating to hear complaints about Trump torpedoing a deal that would give more money to the Border Patrol “for purely political reasons”).
Democracy is good as a terminal goal, because people deserve to have a say in how their country is run. Democracy is good as an instrumental goal, as an alternative to revolutions and civil wars. Disenfranchising people gets leaders like Trump elected, and that’s about 1% bad on the scale of the consequences of trampling democracy.
We can split hairs about in what sense the undemocratic minority sabotaging US border enforcement was truly “evil”, but I think that you, I, and most of the “sane majority” agree that what they were doing was pretty bad, all things considered. Even the people who like immigration in theory would disagree with the methods, I hope.
Which brings us back to the pattern I noticed. All that stuff is not being done by some faceless and incomprehensible societal force. It is done by the people who have names, addresses, and official government positions. There was a concrete official who signed off on the order to go cut that razor wire. There was a concrete official who hired them because they saw eye to eye on such issues. There was a Democratic president who appointed the head of the Border Patrol, and his advisors who told him that it will be fine with the voters. Those people had the power to solve the problem and they made a decision not to. They are responsible, and can, and should be held responsible for solving it. With a metaphorical knife to their throats.
It’s very similar to the Columbia University situation. We can charitably assume that their administration was not particularly antisemitic itself, but they didn’t want to get their cars egged by the activists, felt vaguely ashamed to appear to take Israel’s side before their liberal friends, and so on, so it was much easier to sigh, shrug their collective shoulders, and be, like, nothing can be done, unfortunately we will now have to live in a world where Columbia is a Jew-free zone. All the while lowkey thinking to themselves: or else what are you going to do, defund the entire university? Start deporting the students? No you won’t.
Similarly, the people who could have fixed the border but didn’t (here because they really wanted unlimited immigration) were thinking, what are you going to do, fire us all? Deport ten million immigrants? No you won’t.
The only game-theoretically correct response is to realize that you’re being mugged and call their bluff. Otherwise you will find yourself in a perpetual cycle of the border “inexplicably” turning into a colander, a “reasonable compromise” involving an amnesty being agreed upon in exchange for an enforced border security, rinse and repeat (Reagan in 1986, DREAM/DACA under Bush and Obama).
Comment #71 April 8th, 2025 at 8:55 am
As far as I can tell all the drama between Peter Woit and Scott has been totally expunged from his blog.
Comment #72 April 8th, 2025 at 10:12 am
Name Required
“I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, by the “evil minority” in this context I didn’t mean any of the immigrants, but the people who enable unlimited illegal immigration.”
Get your facts straight, bro.
First, there was more deportations of illegals under Biden than under Trump 1.0, twice as many actually.
Second, the surge of illegal immigration during Biden was because everything was pretty much frozen during COVID, and when things thawed down, there was a huge backup of people waiting for years to finally get in (and the economic strain of COVID on poorest countries increased the number of people desperate to get in).
Historically Democrats have never been “open border” or for “unlimited illegal immigration”, quite the opposite. No one deported more illegals than Obama.
One can argue that the border was never secured enough, but that’s just one aspect. The other one was Border States starting to send illegals in blue cities under Biden.
Comment #73 April 8th, 2025 at 12:21 pm
Adam #69
Would be great if I am wrong about this. Unfortunately the language in the preliminary ruling makes clear that they already accept executive classifications as factual although there was no due process to come to this conclusion. They also pushed habeas corpus petitions to the courts on an individual basis depending on where the arrest happened, preventing summary injunctions. In reality this will prevent many of those arrested to actually assert their rights. Also they left many who have already been arrested in a legal limbo.
We’ve seen this movie before, nominally you leave the rights and processes in place but in practice you deny access to them. This way tyranny can install itself while keeping the trappings of legality.
Also the judges didn’t even address the other elephant in the room: The US is not at war with Venezuela or some gangs. At any rate, this Slate article explains all these ominous signs much better than I can:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/supreme-court-analysis-trump-el-salvador.html
It seems very likely that this SC will only uphold the trappings of lawfulness while in practice making it easy for this administration to trample all over our civil rights.
Again, I wish for nothing more than to be wrong about this.
Comment #74 April 8th, 2025 at 12:31 pm
Fred #72
We have 10x to 50x more illegal crossings but 2x more deportations. We the Democrats are actually working on deporting all the illegals, close your eyes, shutter your mind.
I will not reply to you any further unless you can provide a Democrat-aligned argument against open borders. How would you convince a fellow democrat to vote for Trump to have the border closed for 4 years, then we’ll see. Can you do a mini political Turing test here?
Comment #75 April 8th, 2025 at 5:10 pm
LOL
as anyone who’s been following the news since “liberation day”, the matter at this point isn’t about fevered campaign claims that “The democrats are for open borders” (whatever the hell that even means), but:
Why is MAGA so anti-immigration (both illegal, legal, and from fruit pickers all the way up to phd students and researchers) when the Orange Clown claims he’s going to relocate *all* the basic blue-collar industry back inside the US, when there isn’t any of the workforce to handle it:
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted in a Face the Nation appearance today that President Trump’s tariffs will “stay in place” and will result in things like “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones” coming to the US.
Your average illegal from Guatemala who walked thousands of miles to get to the Texas border has more of an actual plan than those freaking morons…
So, yea, “Named Required”, stop arguing indeed and get your screwdriver ready… :_D
Comment #76 April 8th, 2025 at 8:14 pm
The recommendations outlined in this article will probably prove useful in the not too distant future.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what-to-do-if-the-insurrection-act-is-invoked/
I especially hope the Democratic governors have the strategic savvy to call up their national guard to preempt their usage when the Insurrection Act gets invoked.
Comment #77 April 9th, 2025 at 2:09 am
scott writes:
“I don’t want to believe the most hyperbolic claims of my colleagues, that the US is now a full Soviet-style police state, or inevitably on its way to one. I beg any conservatives reading this post, particularly those with influence over events: help me not to believe this.”
As a Libertarian (defintely NOT a conservative), i can say that any comparison to living in a Soviet-style police state, could only be made by a person who has not lived in such a state (note: i lived in Prague during the historic ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 and witnessed its liberalization under Dubcek followed by its suppression by Russian invasion). and as despicable as Trump is, he has not (yet) adopted Putin’s method of silencing his political opponents by having them murdered.
Comment #78 April 9th, 2025 at 9:22 pm
Richard #77
No political murder yet that we know of but we are already at the “signing of Executive Orders to persecute political dissidents” stage.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-directs-doj-investigate-2-officials-term-critics/story?id=120658983
Comment #79 April 11th, 2025 at 2:36 am
henning #78 – you’re correct. and apparently, Trump wanted to shoot (but not kill) protestors during his first term. As for the use of executive orders, that didn’t start with Trump (who is neither original or intelligent); it goes back to both Obama and Biden, who couldn’t be bothered with trying to persuade the legislative branch in order to advance their agendas.
Comment #80 April 11th, 2025 at 10:02 am
I haven’t kept up with the case, and maybe I’m misreading, but it seems like you’re sympathetic to the effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil. What *specifically* was the “literal propaganda from Hamas” distributed by CUAD that you think justifies his arrest and deportation, presumably to war torn Syria? Like I said, I’m not that familiar with the case, but I’d think it’d have to be pretty grotesque to get a classical-liberal college professor to be happy about the deportation of a student who’d legally made his life in the US, married an American, and had a baby on the way. But I’m sure you made sure what his *speicific* conduct was and that it met that threshold before you expressed support for his life being upended in this way.
Comment #81 April 11th, 2025 at 10:36 am
Anya #80: My position has consistently been that I don’t know whether Khalil should be deported or not, and that the question ought to be decided in court, according to law and evidence—not in the media and not by Trumpian fiat. On the one hand, Khalil was a leading spokesman for CUAD, and CUAD has clearly coordinated with Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organization. On the other hand, I think it ought to be the government’s burden to prove that Khalil is being deported for “material support for Hamas” (and by implication, lying on his visa or green card application) rather than merely for anti-Israel opinions. I want to see more evidence about what he actually did for CUAD (and whether his association with CUAD continued past Fall 2024, when they adopted Khymani James’s “all Zionists need to die” platform, which caused even many former CUAD members to resign).
Comment #82 April 11th, 2025 at 6:32 pm
The always great wisdom of David Frum on the latest insanity
Comment #83 April 11th, 2025 at 6:34 pm
AFAIK no one, including the government, has even alleged that he gave material support to a terrorist group. That’s something that would be illegal regardless of his citizenship status and regardless of anything on his green card or visa applications. So if that’s your standard, I think you can safely start condemning his treatment along with the poor girl at Tufts.
Comment #84 April 17th, 2025 at 11:08 am
Trumposaurus Rex 🦖 is the new Trojan Horse 🎠
Comment #85 July 13th, 2025 at 8:04 am
“I don’t want to believe the most hyperbolic claims of my colleagues, that the US is now a full Soviet-style* police state, or inevitably on its way to one. I beg any conservatives reading this post, particularly those with influence over events: help me not to believe this.”
I am wondering if you have rethought this take in light of the accumulating evidence.
Have you seen the ICE budget numbers? That’s a full-scale regime-loyal paramilitary, unbound by law, larger than most nations’ entire armed forces.
Concentration Camps. Trump: “Well, I think would like to see them in many states. Really, many states…. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system.”
Stephen Miller’s target is to haul away 3,000 people per day, or 1,000,000 people per year.
There are now literally troops on the streets in the US. Some have been sent to Florida.
The federal legislative and judicial branches are failing.
The mainstream press is collapsing into collaboration and cowardice.
I follow maybe 20 academics and journalists focused on the history of fascism, democratic decline, civil war, concentration camps, etc. None of them have any doubt this is the real thing. Two people I follow have fled the United States. One is in the process of doing so. Another is advising the Canadian government on protecting Canada against the United States.
What precisely is the line which must be crossed?
Comment #86 September 29th, 2025 at 3:20 am
This is absolutely depressing, seeing how America have fallen to fascism like this. But seeing this trend happening in Vietnam, my home country, in parallel hurts me even more. I would hope that all citizens of the world can unite to fight the ultimate threat from the ruling class: the obsession with, and the oppression of power.