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Stasi Nation -- Digby
Radley Balko is one of the best reporters around, particularly on the subject of our fast encroaching police state. It’s worth a subscription if you’re interested in this subject. This post illustrates why we should be:
This is straight up Stasi shit except as far as I know, the Stasi did ,at least usually,wear uniforms. You can read the post for yourself bugt in a nutshell it tells the story of a fellow in Texas who gave some pro bono legal advice to a latino family who had a complicated situation with a combination of a U.S. citizen, a DACA recipient and someone who had been detained by ICE. A few days later he was visited at home by a couple of men in plain clothes who refused to identify themselves asking about it and was told ‘We have information that you are obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation.’” They had apparently shut off his wifi in order to keep from being filmed by his ring camera as well.
As you can read above, after he made the incident public he was fired because the owner of his company is a Trump cultist.
That’s the East German method all the way. Official intimidation, neighbors informing on each other, business acting as an arm of the authoritarian government to help keep the population in line. The right organized itself around opposition to this kind of repression for decades. We knew much of it was just a pose considering Jim Crow and the use of government police agencies to surveil political enemies during the Hoover decades. But still, they used to at least pretend they cared about personal freedom. Not anymore…
I recently wrote about Clay Jackson, the Texas attorney who was visited at his home by law enforcement after giving some pro bono legal advice to an undocumented family. Just a few hours after my post went up, Jackson was fired by his employer, the Fortune 500 insurance company Fidelity National Financial. Judd Legum at Popular Information then followed up and found some internal emails in which an executive at the company accused Jackson of “professional misconduct” that hurt the company. It’s also come out that the CEO of FNF is a big Trump supporter, and that prior to her appointment to DOJ, Pam Bondi worked for the law firm that lobbies on behalf of FNF.
This is straight up Stasi shit except as far as I know, the Stasi did ,at least usually,wear uniforms. You can read the post for yourself bugt in a nutshell it tells the story of a fellow in Texas who gave some pro bono legal advice to a latino family who had a complicated situation with a combination of a U.S. citizen, a DACA recipient and someone who had been detained by ICE. A few days later he was visited at home by a couple of men in plain clothes who refused to identify themselves asking about it and was told ‘We have information that you are obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation.’” They had apparently shut off his wifi in order to keep from being filmed by his ring camera as well.
As you can read above, after he made the incident public he was fired because the owner of his company is a Trump cultist.
That’s the East German method all the way. Official intimidation, neighbors informing on each other, business acting as an arm of the authoritarian government to help keep the population in line. The right organized itself around opposition to this kind of repression for decades. We knew much of it was just a pose considering Jim Crow and the use of government police agencies to surveil political enemies during the Hoover decades. But still, they used to at least pretend they cared about personal freedom. Not anymore…