Are we becoming a police state? Look at the definition. By Hal M. Brown

 

I'd like to believe I am being an alarmist. I hope I am wrong. If I am, I'll give the biggest mea culpa of my life.

Trump’s ICE Gestapo grabbed up a Columbia University student and sent him off to a detention camp in Louisiana. Then there was this:  ICE Deploys Tear Gas into Home To Take a Migrant; 'They Kept Throwing Things At Us'

Juan Ramón Hernandez-Limon, 28, was startled when ICE agents approached him while he swept his front porch in San Antonio, Texas, on Friday, January 31. The agents did not have an arrest warrant, so Hernandez-Limon retreated into his home, where his wife, their one-year-old daughter, and two other minors were present.

The interaction was followed by a six-hour operation that involved local, state, and federal agents equipped with military-style vehicles. While waiting outside Hernandez-Limon's home, the agents obtained the arrest warrant they needed and proceeded to break windows and doors, deploying tear gas into his home, according to a new report by Univision.

Hernandez-Limon's wife spoke anonymously to a network reporter to discuss the incident. She said the family was trying to exit the household but was afraid of being struck by the objects the agents were throwing into their home.

These are just two examples. There have been others and there will be more. Consider the defintion of a police state from Wikipedia:

A police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are typically one-party states and dominant-party states, but police-state-level control may emerge in multi-party systems as well.

Originally, a police state was a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century it has "taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force that operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state. Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law to German jurisprudence, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the anti-aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

I subscribe to The Contrarian, the Substack started by Jennifer Rubin when she left The Washington Post and lawyer Norm Eisen who made the news yesterday. In this conversation, Rubin talked with the founder of Indivisible, Ezra Levin. They are talking as if we aren’t living in a police state. This is my comment with a link to a Substack I posted two days ago.

All this seems to me seems to be a la-de-dah happy talk and refusal to admit that we have rapidly gone beyond being a nascent police state to being a police state just gaining unstoppable momentum. Geeze, folks, read the news. The people with the guns have taken over. They just grabbed up a student in NY and sent him of to a detenton camp in Louisiana. ICE terrified a family throwing flash bang grenades into their house. What's next, declaring Indivisible an enemy of the state? Only the other group with guns can save us. This is the US military. I try to lay how this could be done here: https://halbrown.substack.com/p/thinking-the-unthinkable-about-fighting

Basically what I have been saying is that the only people who can save democracy from the people with guns in the enforcement arm of the police state is the people with more, and better, guns. This is, of course, the military.

Are the generals and admirals going to sit idly by when we turn into a police state? I addressed another issue yesterday, the seeming alignment we now have with Russia. Between these two will the top leadership of the amrmed forces do what was once unthinkable. Will they do the only thing that can end a police state which may very well be trying to reshape the world order? 

There has been a great deal written about a coup effected by Donald Trump and his minions. This doesn’t meet the defintion of a coup, i.e., “a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government.” If we had a military coup it could meet this defintion if it was violent. It wouldn’t have to result in bloodshed. It could be what is called a soft coup (see Wikipedia).

Whether the power of the military is actually used (picture tanks around the White House) or not, the threat that they could do this would enable them to effect a soft coup. That would certainly be far more preferable than a hard coup.

I don’t know how far Trump has to go excercising the power of the police state before the media and public start ignoring many less alarming issues, or at least putting them in perspective. For example, the effects of tarrifs, DOGE with Musk’s street gang taking over Social Security with access to all your data and being able to cut or stop benefits. Then there’s the recent DEI absolute nonsense about Georgetown Law School: 

Ed Martin ‒ appointed by Donald Trump as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, despite not having any prosecutorial experience ‒ emailed Georgetown Law School Dean William Treanor on Monday to whine about Republicans’ favorite bogeyman: diversity, equity and inclusion. Article.

Even abandoning Ukraine and the cruelty of cutting life saving USAID programs will be lead-up chapters in the book of how Trump and his enablers turned us into a police state.

I am afraid that before long we will look back at all of these matters as smoke and mirrors. We will see how they diverted attention from from how Trump made ordinary citizens live in fear having Gestapo thugs bust down our door in the middle of the night, or shoot flash bang grenades into our homes on an idyllic spring weekend.

I hope I am wrong about all of these dire predictions. 

Maybe public outcry about this will stop the excesses of the police state. Rather than a “hard police state” we’ll have what might be called a “soft police state.”

We may have to live with all the other noxious aspects of Trumpism until the midterm elections. Then, if the Democrats take over Congress, some of the policies can be thwarted. That is unless Trump dares to ignore the law. Two years after that, if we have a Democratic president, we can see a return to Democracy.

(About the photo. I took this on our cranberry farm property in Massachusetts. This was when local police departments decided they needed AR-15 rifles and needed to learn to shoot them. Previously they only had shotguns in their patrol cars.)

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When I read news like this I imagine seeing Trump literally as Putin's hand puppet. By Hal M. Brown

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It's as if his KGB ringed finger is protruding from his mouth.

A marionette is a puppet controlled from above by someone pulling its strings. A hand puppet is a type of puppet that is controlled by the hand that occupies the interior of the puppet. (Wikipedia)

I am not a cartoonist so I couldnt draw the illustration for today’s Substack. Of course, cartoonists often depict Trump being manipulated by Putin as both kinds of puppets.

Trump’s threats against NATO, alienating Europe, his claiming Russia didn’t invade Ukraine, how he’s treating Zelensky and pausing aid to Ukraine were without a doubt delighting Putin. Then we had not allowing Ukraine to use Starlink, Add to this Hegseth ordering our cyber command to stand down on Russia. Taking DEI to extremes, he’s forcing the military to lose talented personnel. He’s banning members from serving in the US armed forces and gutting the military’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Now we have this news:

The climate change move could be seen as a small thing compared to the other actions, but it is yet something else which will please Putin. 

Imagine what the generals and admirals leading our armed forces think of all of this.

I have absolutely no doubt that Trump wants to rule the country unrestrained by the annoying constraints of the Constitution. No matter what one wants to call someone who does this, a king, emperor, dictator, or overlord, it all amounts to their being the absolute ruler. He is well on his way to achieving this goal. 

Can he be stopped?

This is what I wrote yesterday:

I see our only hope being for the military to decide to intervene to save our democracy. This could come if Trump declared a national emergency and martial law to put down protests using violence if protesters refused orders to disperse. It should not be open to debate that Amercians have the right to peacefully protest, that pesky First Amendment, but it would be easy to rationalize a lethal attack against civilians. We could easily have another Kent State Massacre.

I see two ways the military could save us. One I call effecting a soft coup. This would involve barring Hegseth and whoever he’s elevated to power from entering the Pentagon. The patriotic generals would announce that they would no longer obey illegal and unconstitutional orders. The other alternative would be a hard coup. It would begin with tanks around the White House and soldiers removing its occupants. A general would take over as acting president. It would be announced that free elections would be held once the country was stabilized. By then I want to believe the majority of voters would decide they wanted the country to be a democracy and not a dictatorship.

Putin wants to see the United States descend into chaos. He wants it beset by internal warfare, whether peaceful or violent. In his dreams he’d like to realign the world’s powers so the United States joins Russia, North Korea, and possibly China. I am not sure about the latter since they depend so much on us for trade.

There’s no way I can see Putin wanting to see our top military leaders running the country. I certainly can see him wanting Trump ruin the United States, but for all those West Point, Air Force, and Naval Academy graduates to be actually running not only the military, but the country as well, that would be a bridge way too far.

It is very possible that Putin still hasn’t figured out what he wants from Trump aside from helping him win in Ukraine and for him to destabilize NATO and Europe, as well as weaken the country as a military threat. The notion of new world order, an actual alliance with the United States is probably just a fantasy. He knows how that worked out for Hitler and his Third Reich. He knows what happened to the Holy Roman Empire when their reach exceeded their grasp. 

Of course Putin wishes he could restore the old Soviet Union, but likewise he knows this would be unrealistic because, with or without the United States as a member of NATO, attacking any member of the alliance would trigger Article Fivefor the only time since the September 11 attack. I can’t see any way that Putin wants to be engaged in World War III. Putin is a realist. If he can’t have a five course meal he knows he may have to settle for Ukraine, or parts of Ukraine, as a tasty appetizer.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Putin, who we know talks to Trump from time to time, if not on a regular basis, really has his hand up his butt as far as it can go and is able to order him to do his bidding. Putin says “jump” and Trump asks “how high?” 

Putin wants what is in his own interest when it comes to the United States. To this end he has to understand American society and American politics at least as well as our most brilliant historians and other academics. I am not saying he doesn’t think he does, but does he really?

Maybe Putin is controlling Trump and is both brilliant and is narcissistic in believing he knows exactly what he is doing. He’s also reportedly extremely superstitious, has an obsession with the occult may believe in reincarnation. (Article)Maybe the I Ching (the ancient Chinese book of divination) or his Magic Eightball is telling him what to do.

This all boils down to one of two possibilities. Trump listens to Putin but doesn’t take orders from him or he is truly a Putin puppet. Either way, unless our military saves us, our democracy is well and truly fucked. We have a mentally unstable president who wants to be king or we have a Russian dictator who believes in the occult as defacto president.

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Trump's hellscape has become just plain normal for half the country. From supporting Putin to firing CIA officers to being just plain rude to a reporter, it's all become just plain normal for half the country to accept that this is the president.

 

Watch the short video of President Donald J. Trump both refusing to answer a simple question and being rude to a reporter from NBC News and ask yourself if there’s any other president since the press asked questions on television who would have done what he did.

There is an article about this on RawStory: ‘You’re not supposed to be asking that’: Trump refuses to answer questions about Musk.

On MSNBC this morning former CIA director John Brennan was talking about new employees at the CIA being fired and he noted that these were people who were hired because they had crucial expertise. In the background of the screen was an image that said “Reshaping the World Order.” I thought “reshaping, hell, they are overtruning the world order.” I’m not the only one to think this. Consider that this was published in The Wall Street Journal: Trump Is Overturning the World Order That America Built. (Subscription not required to read.)

Here’s an excerpt from the article. The paragraph below the photo is mind-boggling and horrific.

America’s 80-year run as the world’s strongest power, a relatively benevolent hegemon that attracted willing partners and allies, has been rooted in two major U.S. initiatives launched in response to the upheaval of World War II.

One was to convene the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which enshrined the idea of free trade and low tariffs, generating unprecedented prosperity for the West. The other, five years later, was to lead the establishment of NATO, an alliance that won the Cold War and has ensured peace in Europe.

To fashion this system out of the chaos and rubble of world war, wrote Dean Acheson, a key adviser to Roosevelt and Truman throughout this period, required America to make “an imaginative effort unique in history and even greater than that made in the preceding period of fighting.” Acheson, who first entered politics in the 1930s to combat “America First” isolationists, called his memoir “Present at the Creation.”

Both of these legacies are being undone with stunning speed by President Trump. His second administration has targeted America’s closest allies with punitive tariffs, has ordered an abrupt stop to military assistance for Ukraine, has frozen foreign aid—and is raising the prospect of a geopolitical realignment toward authoritarian Russia.

It is easy to be distracted by what could be seen as the amusing or ridiculous things that have been happening like the scrubbing of a reference to the bomber Enola Gay or innocuous words that could be consdered woke or DEI (article).

The nonsense that RJK Jr. has precipitated like ordering a new study on vaccines and autism and recommending olive oil as a measles treatment (read article) are distractions. 

The clash between Musk and Rubio is nothing more than a fart in the wind.

The attention being paid to court cases, many of which are rulings against Trump & Co’s. actions also amount to small victories which will add up to nothing when Trump & Co. cements their power.

My friend Dianna Jackson in her Substack post “It’s the Lawyers, Stupid” dreams of the American Bar Association stepping into sanctions to disbar unethical attorneys. Trump acolytes want to take over the DC Bar Association. Trump’s attacks on the ABA are threatening the group’s funding. This is a distraction. When they are ready, as far as Trump and Co. are concerned “the courts be damned, full speed ahead” when is comes to creating the Trump Reich.

What Musk tweets about the judiciary will also be irrelevant.

Many elements of DOGE are also lots of smoke and many mirrors which obscure what Trump & Co. are really doing.

In a similar way, eliminating the Department of Education and eliminating or drastically cutting back USAID and foreign aide is irrelevant. Their employees don’t carry guns.

Not only are tariff threats lots of choking smoke, no mater how toxic to the countries targeted, but I shouldn’t have to bother to point out how immaterial to Trump’s ultimate goal demanding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal become parts of the Untied States are.

This background image was on MSNBC this morning: 

Purging the federal payroll of thousands of employees makes us miss how he/they are reshaping crucial agencies like the CIA and FBI to be his Gestapo/FSB and SS.

The two things Trump is doing dwarf anything else that seems like a tsunami of malevolent mishegaas. The craziness has come in a giant wave washing over us. It is difficult to pay attention to the most dangerous elements of the Trump & Co. agenda. 

One is to turn us into an autocratic police state with no checks and balances on what nicely could be called “executive authority.”

This MSNBC chyron will be relegated to the history’s heap of futile efforts:

What we are observing now is the a king’s juggernaut to exercise his weaponization of his power both to eliminate opposition and satisfy his need for revenge. 

The other is equally grave and alarming. It is that Trump & Co. have only just begun to extricate the United States from our traditional allies and realign the country with Russia. He is using the war in Ukraine as an excuse. In fact this has less to do with the war than a convenient way to establish a new world order where he is a kind of Ceasar or Hitler with the military might to dominate every other country and force them to bend to his personal will. He doesn’t see himself as ruling over a Holy Roman Empire which will last for generations or a Third Reich. He doesn’t care who the ruler is if by chance it is true that he is actually mortal and will eventually die. He doesn’t even care about starting a dynasty that his son Donald Jr. can take over when he dies, and then Barron, and then more Trump spawn.

Trump wants what he wants for the rest of his life. After he dies his attitude is “fuck it” let the chips from one of his defunct failed casinos fall where they will.

Addendum:

Stories like 'It reeks of incompetence': Lawmakers baffled by demoted Trump appointee still on the job and others showing ineptitude are just setbacks as Trump’s blitzkrieg to take over the country hits a few bumps in the road.

I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

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I couldn't write this without using the F-word. If you're offended by profanity don't read it. It is about 1960's protesting and protesting Trumpism. By Hal M.Brown

Above is a photo me which was taken last night. Below is me in 1969. I had more hair back then but was just as pissed off then as I am now, and was just as involved in protesting what the goverment was doing. Today I do it mostly on Substack. Then I was one of the leaders of the protest movement at against the Vietnam War at Michgan State, albeit only in the Social Work Department. Michigan State students and faculty were very active in protesting against the war. There were rallies, marches, and teach-ins. After the Kent State Massacre there was a student strike. All of my grad school clesses were held off campus or not at all. Out of five classes I got deferred grades in four of them. MSU was one of the five universities featured in the book “Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (read review).

You can read more what happen at Michigan State here. 

In the 1960’s I subscribed to Paul Krasner’s not particularly slick antiwar and anti-establishment magazine, The Realist. It was printed on newsprint paper.

One isse was sent out with an insert that became infamous becasue of one word. That word was “fuck.”

This is photo of Krasner is from The Realist Archive Project.

From the Archive:

Original "Fuck Communism!" Typography and Design by John Francis Putnam, who also designed The Realist logo. Poster concept was a collaboration with the suggestion for "Fuck" belonging to Putnam, followed by the suggestion for "Communism" belonging to Krassner. Putnam was a regular contributor to The Realist, best known for his MODEST PROPOSALS column. Read a few here, here and here. 

Also Note: The MOTHERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was a fake organization created by The Realist for use on this poster, and for letterhead for occasional correspondence with parties of differing political opinion that would most likely not communicate with The Realist itself.

The idea of the poster was to mash together two charged themes of the early 1960s, obscenity and anticommunism, but it was obviously Krasner want to offend people by using the then charged word “fuck.” Now even people like Mary Trump use it in their writing. She has finally had it with him so much so that in her recent Substack podcast, The Depravity is the Point, she used the word fuck twice. 

Here’s a bit about Krasner from Wikipedia:

Paul Krassner (April 9, 1932 – July 21, 2019) was an American writer and satirist. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining.

Here’s the part about the poster which Kurt Vonnegut described as

"a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2." Vonnegut explained: "With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM. At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. ... By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn't merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

Now we have many versions of merchandise saying “Fuck Trump.” This is from Amazon.

I think we need to go beyond saying just “fuck Trump” even though he is so easy to demonize. He has fostered a cult of personality. He wins when we make it all about him. It is about the movement he has unleashed which would still be here if he died tomorrow. We don’t just need to fuck the hell out of Trump, we need to fuck the hell out of Trumpism. If he disappearred tomorrow, we’d still have J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, and all the wee fascists in Congress, and half the coutry who voted for an autocracy.

I personally think this is too much of a cliche to buy one of these “Fuck Trump” posters to put on my wall. I don’t want his name in my house. I want anyone who comes into my living room to look at this sign and mentally see the word “Trumpism” rather than”Communism.” I want it to be a testament to the protest movement which led to the result we wanted.

Enough about posters:

What this time in our country reminds me of is when protesting against the government ended up making a difference. The Kent State Massacre was a turning point during the Vietnam War. Many supporters of the war found scenes like this to be too much.

One photograph more than any other showed the horror of the war.

Then the most credible voice in the county, Walter Chronkite, said the war was hopeless.

This is the conclusion of his editorial:

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

I hope I don’t have to wait as long as I did for the end of the war against Trumpism to result in the victory for democracy as I did for the end of the Vietnam War. It is possible that at 81 I won’t live to see Trumpism defeated. I may spend my final years watching in horror along with half the county as Trump turns the United States into a police state.

Addendem:

Now the word “fuck” appears in two pictures in my house.

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I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.