If you're not a criminal, you shouldn't fear government

Hartmann Report - Because of the decision made this week by the doughiest white boy on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, to allow racial profiling by ICE, 65 million Hispanic Americans now live in terror of the police, carrying their passports and dreading traffic stops or shopping at Home Depot.

If you’re not a criminal, you shouldn’t fear government. Instead, as Jefferson often pointed out, government should fear you.

This is the foundation of the American experiment, that our system of government was created, as the Declaration of Independence says, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

And, yet, today increasing numbers of Americans are afraid of their government, or at least afraid of the people who now run it.

Our news media are terrified of being sued or otherwise harassed by Trump, so much so that two of our three big TV networks have paid him millions in what was essentially protection money. CBS just put a rightwinger with ties to the GOP as their ombudsman, and NBC is on the verge of spinning off MSNBC, which is increasingly problematic for the network as it regularly draws Trump’s ire.

Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate are so cowed by Trump’s primary threats and the hundreds of millions in political dollars he controls that they’re desperately engaging in a coverup of his alleged participation with Epstein in importing “models” from Eastern Europe and raping underage girls.

Writers I know on Substack and elsewhere are watching their words carefully to avoid provoking rightwing ire and the death threats it often brings, at the same time a series of very-well-funded rightwing media empires are growing.

Armed men in civilian clothes with masks on their faces are snatching people off the street and disappearing them, now with the blessing of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court; it’s often impossible to distinguish them from gang members trying to kidnap people for torture or ransom.

People of faith and goodwill are fleeing social media sites ever since their billionaire owners opened the sites up to Nazis and tweaked their secret algorithms to favor hate, fear, and the hard right while suppressing voices of compassion or advocates for democracy here or abroad.