But I'm not - I remember how easy it was in 2002 for George Bush to get Americans to follow him gleefully into a completely unjustified war against Iraq.
It was just a few weeks after 911 when Bush said "you're either with us or with the terrorists". Only a few Americans were concerned about this framing at the time, and when Americans held marches to protest the Bush administration's push for war with Iraq, the media hardly covered it - didn't want to be "disloyal".
We are seeing the same dynamic now, a rogue administration hell-bent on warping American values. At least this time, there is social media to communicate what the Resistance is doing.
It was just a few weeks after 911 when Bush said "you're either with us or with the terrorists". Only a few Americans were concerned about this framing at the time, and when Americans held marches to protest the Bush administration's push for war with Iraq, the media hardly covered it - didn't want to be "disloyal".
We are seeing the same dynamic now, a rogue administration hell-bent on warping American values. At least this time, there is social media to communicate what the Resistance is doing.
And I'm no economist, but at some point, its going to come crashing down -- as the US economy slows because of deportations and tariffs and reduced sales of everything from ovens to industrial machinery; as the US government runs out of money because they are wasting billions on concentration camps and detention centres and national guard deployments in their own cities; as social services and hospitals close because government medicare isn't functioning anymore; as life in the United States becomes more nasty, brutish and short...
The Coming ICE disaster
Veterans of Iraq have seen this before
......[in 2003, after invading Iraq] the US realizes a key pole in the Iraqi security tent is a nationalized police force capable of not only maintaining law and order in the cities, but participating in paramilitary security operations targeting insurgent militias, many of whom are Shiite Muslims, a historically poorer and disadvantaged group under the former Ba’athist regime. The US attempts to create over 400,000 police officers and, by 2007, with for all practical purposes a sectarian war underway, 135,000 have joined the federal police or interior ministry security services. As the insurgency peaks and over 100 American servicemen fill body bags a month, political pressure to enroll enough policemen to secure the cities is relentless from not only the Iraqi senior cabinet, but also the Americans. The “IPs” as they were known to the American military, were given a 6-8 week training course, handed a badge and gun, and sent to work.
On the hot Mesopotamian streets over the period from 2003-2007 over 12,000 IPs are killed by insurgents. The frustration and lack of training are evident in incredibly undisciplined operations. The IP’s participate in death squads targeting Sunni civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing aimed at the complete annihilation or removal of Sunnis from Shiite areas. The horror stories mount. Bodies found in garbage dumps, zip-tied with holes from drills dotting their torsos and skulls. Workers kidnapped from factories found dead hours later. Torture facilities with hundreds of emaciated, raped, and beaten Sunnis are found. The US spends over 200 million dollars on the program to train IPs, ultimately turning it over to the Iraqi government as the US withdraws, except for one little problem: the Iraqi government doesn’t want it. It’s ineffective, and the sectarian divisions and atrocities associated with it make it one of the least trusted of nascent Iraqi institutions.
Donald Trump wants to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, and to do it this year. The current budget for ICE has increased by an order of magnitude under the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed and signed into law. The bill intends to train new ICE agents, and rehire recently retired agents. The pay is in the low six figures. The public goal is to deport 3,000 people inside the US per day.
This will end in disaster. In an attempt to scale up quickly, ICE will have to lower standards in order to do so. And the standards are not very high to begin with. As it stands right now ICE training is 15 weeks. That’s half of what an FBI agent goes through. As a SEAL I received about 3 years of training prior to deployment. The average Army Military Policeman needs about 30 weeks, the Marine Corps MP MOS takes about 25 weeks. ICE agents will be on the streets in 4 months, wearing masks, not identifying themselves, rounding up people they rightly or wrongly suspect of being in this country illegally. US citizens have been detained and deported. The length of the training doesn’t just magically create better discipline, though it does help. Longer training scares away some who want the gun, badge, and power as quickly as possible.
And who is going to join? Who are the 10,000 men and women who will join this new and invigorated ICE agency? They are going to be, and I think this is a fair statement, men and women who are eager to do the work we all see ICE agents doing now: wearing plain clothes and hiding their faces as they use beatings and surprise raids against people here in America with brown skin—anonymous agents of the state, doing the bidding of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.
This isn’t hyperbolic; this is reality.
A beatdown in broad daylight was caught on video: Masked men in tactical vests grappled, tased, and piled onto a delivery worker. Pinning the worker face down on the pavement, agents tased him again and punched him repeatedly in the head.
— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) August 19, 2025 at 5:17 PM
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Signs of resistance:I saw my first ICE attack — 4 unmarked black SUVs with blue lights flashing, w three house painters cuffed on the side of a highway they'd backed up for 30 minutes in both directions — and I can tell you this much: I will die hating these people, and I will spend the rest of my life ruining theirs.
— Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com) August 17, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Some Americans are seeing what is happening and are fighting back now. I'm not sure if it will be enough, but at least they're starting to try.
@jessewelles #sInGeRsOnGwRiTeR #OrGiNaL #cOuNtRy #folk #song ♬ original sound - Welles
The Hague is gonna love this👇
— WuTangIsForTheChildren (@wutangforchildren.bsky.social) August 19, 2025 at 4:19 PM
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ICEing the U.S. Economy
Mass deportations will hurt more than people realize
...immigrant workers aren’t spread evenly across the economy. They’re strongly concentrated in certain industries and occupations, where they constitute a large share, sometimes a majority, of the work force. As a result, the Trump administration’s latter-day Edict of Expulsion will be far more disruptive to the economy than the aggregate number of workers deported might suggest.And the cruelty of the Trump administration knows no bounds:
Consider, for example, agriculture. There are about 1.6 million paid agricultural workers in America, the great majority immigrants. Many of those immigrants are here legally, but it’s all too easy to imagine that anyone with brown skin will be at risk. So imagine that 800,000 of those workers end up being incarcerated and/or deported.
That’s a lot of workers, but America is a big country, so it’s only about half a percent of total employment. Not such a big deal, right? Except that the effect would be to cripple agricultural production, inflicting far more economic damage than a half-point across-the-board reduction in labor supply.
The loss of those workers would also be inflationary, sharply raising the prices of farm products.
You can tell similar stories for meatpacking, senior care, construction and more. Immigrants aren’t taking jobs away from native-born workers. For the most part they’re employed in jobs native-born Americans aren’t willing to do. As a result, ICEing the economy will make native-born Americans substantially worse off.
In fact, my guess is that arrests and deportations will eventually do even more economic harm than tariffs.
"Revenge" is the Trump administration's SOP now.
— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) August 22, 2025 at 11:08 AM
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2 comments:
Donald Trump told the crowd, "Get out and vote! Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote again." https://x.com/Acyn/status/1817007890496102490
Charlie Dog has it right. Good bumper sticker. Love the woman who has the Mexican flag bumper sticker.
trump is having gestapo chase, arrest and deport people at an alarming rate without the benefit of having a trial. Wonder why no home grown American criminals are being targeted or are all americans upstanding citizens? Then of course trump maybe just extending professional courtesy to home grown white criminals. trump is after all a convicted felon and sexual predator.
Americans might want to join the Catholic Church in their protests because after he is finished with people of colour he will come after American citizens who oppose him or he just doesn't like.
As the arrests escalate so do the chances of things going side ways and innocent people and gestapo may wind up being killed. The U.S.A. has more guns than people, so at some point civilians may start using them. They will have nothing left to loose. They can die in the concentration camps or in concentration camps in other countries or they can choose to kill a few ICE on the way out. It will eventually happen. Just please be careful around the kids.
Thank you to the priests who are marching. Its not going to be a good look to arrest them.
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