United States | News & Politics

it's hilarious, except they represent all of us. impeach or w/e. ww3 going to be a stupid timeline. have iodine tabs

"My goal here is a unified, strong opposition party to the regime," Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, said ahead of the March 28 protests.

"Most of the perpetrators are lodged within large corporations run by white executives with excellent and expensive legal representation," wrote one journalist.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54268663

As authoritarianism accelerates — as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights — people are scrambling for reference points.

But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn’t Afghanistan. This isn’t Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn’t who we are.

These statements are meant to comfort. They are meant to regulate fear, to calm the nervous system with the promise that no matter how bad things get, this country is somehow exempt from the logic of repression. Instead, they reveal how deeply many people still misunderstand both this country and the nature of authoritarian power.

They rest on a dangerous fiction: that large-scale state violence, political terror, and repression belong somewhere else — to “failed states,” to the Global South, to places imagined as perpetually unstable. This is not only historically false; it is how people in the U.S. have been trained not to recognize what is being built in front of them.

Socialist publications like Jacobin and Current Affairs were clear-eyed about the threat Trump posed to democracy and Americans’ basic freedoms. In fact, we warned, as countless left-wing voices had during Barack Obama’s first term, that the mounting terrorism-fighting excesses, warmaking powers, and national security–based rights violations that the Democratic president was racking up were ripe for dangerous future misuse by Trump or another authoritarian.

We continued to make this point during Joe Biden’s presidency, calling for urgent reforms to and rollbacks of what liberals once correctly called the “imperial presidency,” only to be completely ignored, often in the name of party loyalty. In fact, it was actually worse than this: many erstwhile “resisters” stayed mum or actively cheered as Biden and the Democrats expanded the government’s potentially tyrannical surveillance powers and targeting of left-wing activists and poured more money into the what Kamala Harris called, to uproarious applause from a Democratic audience, the “most lethal” military on the globe.

The socialist critique of the Resistance was that simply pointing and shouting “fascism” was not actually enough to stop Trump’s authoritarianism from taking hold. We argued that the only way to effectively resist Trump was to move the focus away from him and other individual figures, and to instead aggressively attack the conditions that let him flourish: growing wealth inequality and the oligarchic power it created, the economic struggles Obama did too little to alleviate, and the cost-of-living pressures that now everyone acknowledges fed Trump’s 2024 victory.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42298498

“Just for the record, my deputies don’t wear masks,” Swank told a state legislative committee recently. “But once you pass this law that they can’t, I will not only allow them, but I will encourage them to do so, just to see what you do. “I don’t recognize your authority to impose these controls over me.” There you go: “I don’t recognize your authority.” That’s the masked-up mentality, as bluntly put as can be.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42299690

So we've gone up from 4th Amendment violations to the 5th Amendment. Soon it'll be 6th, and the 13th is a little shaky.

After a yearlong investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board blamed multiple systemwide failures for the midair collision of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and American Airlines regional jet that killed 67 people.

"Deep, underlying systemic failures — system flaws — aligned to create the conditions that led to the devastating tragedy," said NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy in her opening remarks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42296354

Selamawit Mehari, an Eritrean single mother of three, was starting her day when federal agents showed up at her apartment in St. Paul, Minn., on a recent morning. As her 13-year-old son wailed and her older daughter produced paperwork proving her mother was in the United States lawfully, the agents shackled Ms. Mehari and took her away.

“They didn’t explain anything,” recalled her daughter, Yosan, 21, who described the encounter to The New York Times. “We didn’t understand. We had done everything right.”

The next day, chained at the wrists, waist and ankles, Ms. Mehari, 38, was shuffling up the steps of a plane bound for Texas, tears streaming down her face in the frigid wind.

More than 100 refugees with no criminal record from about a dozen countries have been arrested in Minnesota by immigration agents in recent weeks and flown to detention centers in Texas for interviews, according to lawyers, family members and faith leaders. At least some, including Ms. Mehari, were eventually released in Texas, leaving them to find their own way home.

Archived at https://archive.ph/t725T

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42295858

Archived at https://archive.ph/BP4LY

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42296006

The woman who survived five gunshots from a Border Patrol agent in Chicago last fall, only to be criminally charged and then cleared, now wants a judge’s permission to share evidence that shows how the feds respond when “their agents use deadly force against U.S. citizens.”

Marimar Martinez’s lawyer argued Monday that top Trump administration officials continue to smear her name, and that the White House’s false narrative about her arrest has even seeped into writings by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

All the while, a standard court order bars Martinez from sharing records in her case, such as body-camera footage and electronic communications. Designed to protect against the improper disclosure of evidence, attorney Chris Parente said the order has instead become “a prophylactic to countering a pernicious misinformation campaign mounted by the United States.”

Archived at https://archive.ph/3hNlh

Bystander videos have shaped public perception for decades. The ability to now spread video widely can lead to real-time access and transparency, but experts say videos can't tell the full story.

A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

“In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this,” one worker wrote on Slack.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260127142032/https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-ice-dhs-alex-pretti-killing-workers-slack-minneapolis/

Before you read this post, I want you to try to recall the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard someone say. Go ahead and hold that memory in the back of your head.

Amazon on Tuesday appeared to have prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday morning by sending a commiseration email and team-wide meeting invitation hours early.

Reuters reported on Friday that Amazon intended to lay off thousands of corporate employees starting this week. But the company has not yet informed impacted employees, nor has it confirmed the layoff plan.

The email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs.

In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday meeting was almost immediately canceled. Amazon referred in the email to the layoffs as "Project Dawn."

"Changes like this are hard on everyone," Aubrey wrote in the email, reviewed by Reuters. "These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success."

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More in the article.

Video footage of the incident shows the man being tackled to the ground after assailing the congresswoman