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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Hitlerism as a word never became popular. There is now such a thing as Trumpism. Move over, Nazism. This is the ism that will describe America. By Hal M. Brown

 

This is the Wikipedia entry for Trumpism. The term is a part of the current lexicon.

Hitlerism never became a popularly used word. Nazism did. I am not sure why. Hitler achieved a cult of personality the same way Trump has done. Maybe it is just that the term didn't have a ring to it.

This is from Wikipedia:

Nazism, formally named National Socialism (NS; German: Nationalsozialismus, is the far-right totalitariansocio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitler Fascism (German: Hitlerfaschismus) and Hitlerism (German: Hitlerismus). The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War and therefore after Nazi Germany collapsed.

Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. Its beliefs include support for dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, anti-Romani sentiment, scientific racism, white supremacy, Nordicism, social Darwinism, homophobia, ableism, and the use of eugenics.

It took Trump the four years leading up to the election to position himself to achieve his dictatorial power. He did it differently than Hitler, but the result is the same. Read: 

In January 1933, Hitler did not immediately become a dictator. When he became chancellor, Germany’s democratic constitution was still in effect. However, Hitler transformed Germany by manipulating the democratic political system. Hitler and other Nazi leaders used existing laws to destroy German democracy and create a dictatorship.

In August 1934, President Hindenburg died. Hitler proclaimed himself Führer (meaning “leader”) of Germany. From that point forward, Hitler was the dictator of Germany. Read entire article.

If you are reading this Substack, and have read my previous essays recently, it probably needs no further explanation as to why I have posted the excerpt from this article.

I watch people on TV and in Substack videos and many of them are still smiling as they report on one or another victory against Trump and Trumpism. I only manage to smile, and even laugh these days, when playing pool volleyball and watching a good comedy on TV. I never smile when learning about a victory achived by the anti-Trump movement.

One of the first articles I read this morning was Trump 'clearly' threatening his own people in public: CNN analyst.This is how it begins:

CNN political analyst Mark Preston on Thursday said that President Donald Trump appeared to be openly threatening his own cabinet officials not to get in the way of X owner Elon Musk's efforts to take a wrecking ball to the federal government.

During an interview with host Sara Sidner, Preston said that Trump's first gambit to shut down the United States Agency for International Development looks like just the opening salvo in a broader attack on the government as a whole.

"I think this spells trouble, because this is going to be the first step in really Donald Trump successfully dismantling the government," he said. "Now, everything that he does try to do, Sarah, is not going to be successful but in this first step, he appears to be successful."

The last paragraph is what jumps out. I won’t explain why.

It is hopefully no longer considered by anyone reading this, and many others, to be hyperbole to compare what happened in Germany in the 1930’s to what has happened in the United States in the previous 10+ years. Those of use who see the parallels do not suffer from the pseudo-psychiatric disorder Trump and his allies called Trump derangement syndrome. This legitimately made it into Wikipedia (here), not because it is a real disorder but because it was a political reality.

Coining this term in regard to Trump was an attempt to gaslight his critics, i.e., to manipulate them into questioning their own perception of reality.

What we do suffer, actually suffer from, is seeing things clearly and as a consequence experience anxiety and depression, real disorders, because we see the fate of our democracy.

Addendum:

It isn’t reassuring that the report that a Trump official moved to change the poem on the Statue of Liberty was only deemed partially true by Snopes. Lady Liberty and Hitler are two of the most common themes political cartoonist are using these days.

None of the cartoons which you find when you do an image search for Trump and the Statue of Liberty are funny (Google image search): 

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.