Conservative politics

Let Me See Your Papers

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Some people don’t seem to grasp the reality that Department of Homeland Security agents, be they ICE or CBP, have no authority to demand a U.S. Citizen produce identification. TSA agents are, of course, an exception when someone is passing through airport security. Customs and Border Protection can naturally require identification at border crossings. That’s the extent to which DHS agents can compel a U.S. Citizen to produce identification. The purview of DHS agents is strictly restricted when it concerns U.S. Citizens.

Hell, no Law Enforcement agency has authorization to require a U.S. Citizen produce identification unless they’re operating a vehicle, lawfully detained, or under reasonable suspicion of a crime. Even in States with “Stop and Identify” Laws on the books, those only apply if there’s reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. It’s worth noting that refusal to produce identification does not, in and of itself, constitute reasonable suspicion. There is no legal requirement for any U.S. Citizen to carry any identification.

I mention all of this because, while discussing ICE overstepping their legal restrictions, I had an old friend try to insist that people only fail to identify themselves if they’re attempting to avoid being picked up on a Warrant. Further, he suggested that refusing to comply with ICE or CBP requests to produce an ID constitutes obstruction. This clearly displayed two things for me. The first being that the individual in question has no comprehension of what “obstruction” means. The second, he fails to grasp that ICE and CBP have more restrictions regarding interactions with U.S. Citizens than other Law Enforcement Agencies (including local police), not fewer.

This same person attempted to state that Constitutional Rights do not apply to non-citizens, which leads me to suspect that the educational system has dramatically failed.

The Supreme Court clearly disagrees with his claim. Constitutional Rights to all “persons” within the United States have been upheld by the Supreme Court several times, starting in 1886, with Yick Wo v. Hopkins. Decisions in 1982 and 2001 further guaranteed this interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. I suppose I shouldn’t be too harsh in my judgment of him, since President Trump seems to be similarly lacking in comprehension of Constitutional Rights and their application. Of course, the list of things President Trump comprehends would be woefully short. The same applies to many members of his Administration.

In case anyone needs further clarification, it has been decided that any “person” (U.S. Citizens, documented, or undocumented immigrants) within the United States is protected by the Constitution and they are entitled to the same “standards of fairness encompassed in due process of law.”

It’s not the protesters or citizen witnesses who are violating the law; it’s the agents working for DHS who are violating the Constitutional Rights granted to even those who have entered this nation unlawfully. I would go so far as to say that their crime is far more egregious than that of one who has overstayed a visa or illegally crossed the border, because neither of those crimes violates the rights of anyone within the United States. If not criminal, what does one call a member of Law Enforcement who breaks the law? Are they not bound by the same set of rules and restrictions as the rest of us?

Coming To Terms with Absurdity

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At some point, we have to come to terms with the fact that a whole swath of the American public has literally no consistent set of values or beliefs. The absurdity of it all is that they’re also the same ones who are so desperate to shove their beliefs down the throats of everyone around them.

They’re the crowd that spent much of 2020 shouting “Back The Blue” and “Blue Lives Matter!” That is, until the police stood in the way of them storming the Capitol Building or arrested them when they were acting as agitators at a protest. A Right-Wing Influencer gets arrested, and suddenly, the police are corrupt and acting on behalf of “Radical Marxists.” They’re the people who said–with straight faces–that no one has anything to worry about if they just comply with existing laws and the people charged with enforcing them, but then treated a woman killed while breaking into the Capitol as if she was a martyr. They also conveniently had a litany of excuses for all the times it was clearly evident that someone did comply before they were killed, since it didn’t fit their narrative.

They’re the same people who insisted, “All Lives Matter,” as long as those lives don’t belong to people whose political ideologies diverge from theirs. If you’re Black, Indigenous, Central/South American, LGBTQ+, Liberal, or Leftist, your lives only matter if you keep your thoughts to yourselves and comply with their restrictive and toxic worldview.

These people will share every poorly Photoshopped piece of nonsense they can find, to disparage or discredit a victim–while hauling out the torches and pitchforks every time someone quoted Charlie Kirk with well-documented statements he’d made. They’ll condemn anyone who wasn’t saddened by that death, while reveling in the deaths of anyone killed by ICE or Border Patrol, blaming the victims for what happened.

They’re the evangelical Christian antichrists, distorting the Bible until Jesus is as cruel and mindless as they are…while simultaneously insisting on the utter infallibility of the same book.

The fact is…you can’t trust these people. No one can. They can’t even trust one another, because they’ll turn on each other at a moment’s notice.

They’re just liars.

It’s all they are. It’s all they do. And it’s why what they believe changes as rapidly as they shed skin cells. They have no beliefs. They have no values. They have no standards. All they know how to do is keep shifting goalposts around in a frenzied attempt to get one over on someone else. They have no concept of nuance or context. What they have is a desperate need to feel like they’re winning, even as they shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly.

They will perform whatever feats of mental gymnastics they need to, to uphold that delusional certainty that they are winning.

They’re all losers, though.

A pack of losers and liars; grifters who aren’t even really in on the grift, because they’re being conned and scammed along with the rest of us. The difference is that they’re just too stupid to see it.

That’s what we all need to accept. They’re all either stupid or evil…or both.

Either way, it’s worth it just to see what they have to say and reply with, “You don’t actually believe any of that (or you won’t by next week), so why should anyone else?”

As another deadly shooting at the hands of Department of Homeland Security agents takes place in Minneapolis, it still somehow amazes me that there’s still any debate over the incident on January 7, 2026, when Renee Nicole Good was murdered. It shouldn’t surprise me, but I can’t help but hold on to just a kernel of faith in humanity, despite there being little to no cause for that faith.

People on the Right conveniently disregard 18 U.S. Code 111, which states that anyone using a deadly or dangerous weapon while resisting arrest shall be fined and/or imprisoned not more than 20 years. Unless they’re on the receiving end, of course.

That’s a far stretch from summary execution.

And, of course, the narrative predicated on Good using her vehicle as a deadly weapon (which she was not) was transparently fictional from the jump. Nevermind the mental gymnastics required to pretend the ICE agent was not actively violating the DHS “Use of Force” policy that says agents “…should always avoid intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.”

People can make believe it wasn’t murder all they want–and they will–but it was murder perpetrated by a state actor. Anyone insisting otherwise is grifting…or stupid.

The same people who are so adamant regarding the Right To Bear Arms are the first to state that a man deserved to be shot by Federal Agents simply because he had a firearm on his person. It’s just another example of the complete and total lack of coherent or consistent beliefs among these people.

It’s time to shed the optimistic, rose-colored perception of humanity as being capable of overcoming gullibility. I wish there were evidence supporting the assertion that we could trust the people around us to have any capacity to see through manipulation, gaslighting, and grifting.

Greed, Grief, and Desperation make people altogether too susceptible to manipulation by even transparently ridiculous cons, performed by transparently idiotic conmen and women.

There’s a well-known story about how Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini crossed paths in the 1920s. It happened because the previously rational and reasonable Doyle was driven to believe increasingly outlandish spiritual claims following the tragic losses he and his family suffered during the First World War. Houdini hoped to remedy this by performing a magic trick involving automatic writing, but Doyle stubbornly maintained his belief in the paranormal nature of the experience, even after Houdini walked him through how he had performed the trick. No amount of proof or evidence could shake Doyle’s belief that what he’d witnessed was anything but supernatural–even when it was supplied by the man behind the experience itself.

Imagine how much Houdini could have taken the man for, had he just leaned into Doyle’s erroneous, preconceived notions. That is precisely what grifters have been doing for as long as there have been people on the receiving end of their manipulation.

Even without Greed, Grief, and Desperation involved, it’s hard for people to admit they were taken advantage of, even if they’re capable of seeing the truth of it.

No one wants to admit they were fooled. It makes them feel foolish.

Unfortunately, too many people can’t seem to see that it would still be better to admit the truth and correct course than to continue acting like a fool. And so that is what they do. They insist on behaving foolishly.

It’s impossible to turn on the television or open social media timelines without seeing obvious grifters at work, so confident that they’re not even putting in much effort to make their lies plausible or even halfway coherent. There’s a reason they’re so confident, too, and it’s because they believe they are that much smarter than everyone else, or because they’re victims as well–unable to admit they were made a fool.

What the world needs now is a wake-up call and a willingness to admit when we’re wrong. We need fewer fools.

The Nazi Narratives Helping Conservatives Sleep At Night

/ MeltdownMessiah / 1 Comment

Conservatives sure do have a knack for claiming (accurate) accusations of Nazi parallels in their policies are hyperbolic while distorting historical facts to make (flimsy) accusations of Nazi comparisons with their opponents. What’s truly impressive is that they also do an excellent job of turning an aggressively blind eye to blatant Nazi corollaries.

The Weimar Republic, before 1933, was exceptionally progressive in many ways, even by today’s standards. Germany had been a global example of what we would consider LGBTQ+ inclusion. It was where, in the 1920s, the first Transgender magazine was published, and where some of the world’s first medical transitions were performed. These, and other factors, led to Berlin becoming a beacon for the global LGBTQ+ community.

All of that changed as Nazi control spread and ultimately dominated the political realm in Germany. Suddenly, Transgender women’s gender identities were denied, and they were treated as men acting out some perverse impulse or displaying some manner of mental illness. Additionally, homosexuality was treated as a crime, and the punishments were frequently more severe for those who engaged in what was categorized (at the time) as transvestitism.

While there were distinct differences in how Gay and Transgender people of persecuted ethnic/cultural groups were treated when compared to Gay and Transgender Aryans, there remained an overarching atmosphere of suppression and repression throughout the regions where the Nazis assumed control. Gay men and Transgender women were met with bigotry, intolerance, and hostility (regardless of Aryan status). But those who fit the narrow, White Nationalist aesthetic were often afforded certain leeway, as long as they kept their indiscretions quiet and hidden.

This, of course, did not mean that they were safe. There was ample State-Sanctioned hostility and violence directed toward those marginalized groups, and in particular, those who remained open about who they were by engaging in relationships or gathering in public. And, while Aryan Gays and Transgender people weren’t immediately sent to Concentration Camps, the imprisonment they experienced was far from humane, and the legal rights they were afforded often seemed more performative and conditional than legitimate.

The Nazi State’s assessment of Transgender individuals was neatly summed up in 1938 with the following sentiment: “Their asocial mindset, which is often paired with criminal activity, justifies draconian measures by the state.”

This was a massive departure from the previous German Government, which had allowed Transgender people to legally change their names, form their own organizations, and even receive gender-affirming medical treatments. Those changes came quickly. In 1933, Officials in Hamburg passed along the following dictate: “Police officials are requested to observe the transvestites, in particular, and as required to send them to concentration camps.”

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was quickly dismantled, and Hirschfeld himself was sent into hiding. And that was emblematic of those times for anyone who was part of what we recognize as being LGBTQ+ today. They were forced to hide who they were or face State-Sanctioned persecution.

Naturally, now that an ostensibly Transgender person perpetrated a school shooting, there’s talk at the highest levels of American Government of restricting access to firearms for individuals who don’t identify as the gender they were assigned at birth. Never mind that the vast majority of these crimes are committed by straight, white, cisgender males.

Of course, any time Democrats seriously propose firearm legislation (which never involves disarming gun owners), disingenuous Conservatives start claiming any efforts tangentially related to gun control are evidence that “The Left” is behaving like Nazis, who they insist had disarmed the German population before taking over. But as is true every time we hear Conservatives talking about the past, their arguments are ahistorical at best.

They’re right in saying that the Nazi Party implemented rigid gun control measures, but where they’re entirely incorrect is that the gun control was selective and that there were established regulations already in place.

Following WWI, the Weimar Republic had originally attempted to ban firearms altogether, in large part to comply with the Treaty of Versailles. But that legislation had been both massively unpopular and poorly enforced, and those restrictions had been relaxed by 1928, when permitting and registration took the place of the attempted ban.

But by 1935, the Nazis had largely succeeded in using those registration records in an effort to remove from (and restrict firearms for) Jewish people and members of opposing political parties. Of course, this only included the guns that had been registered, and there were many (purchased both before and since WWI) that had never been. Regardless of this, even if every citizen in Germany had been a proud gun owner, there would have been no chance of standing up against the might of the State by the time the Nazis seized control.

By 1938, the Nazi Party relaxed or outright removed firearms restrictions for Party Members, Government Workers, and those with Hunting Permits. Of course, all of those people had one thing in common, in that they were not the kinds of people the Nazis were targeting. In fact, they went so far as to outlaw the ownership of any weapons by Jewish people (and not just firearms). They were already systematically raiding the homes and businesses of Jews and Political Opponents, confiscating weapons from those people.

The Nazis utilized existing firearm registration records in Hungary, Poland, and France as a means of strategically confiscating guns from undesirables as they advanced into those nations as well.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the Nazi Party wasn’t particularly fond of homeless people. Like Gay and Transgender individuals, homeless people were branded as “asocial,” and were afforded the same lack of liberty as others branded as such. The Nazi solution to homelessness went into effect almost immediately, and in 1933, the mass arrests started. This process was accelerated as the 1936 Berlin Olympics approached, because the Nazis wanted to present a clean facade for the visitors from other nations.

Soon enough, it wasn’t just homeless people, but anyone unemployed or begging, prostitutes, as well as drug addicts. Anyone deemed to be unsavory in the public eye was summarily rounded up. Persecution, sterilization, and one-way trips to Concentration Camps awaited anyone unfortunate enough to fall outside of the strict social norms imposed by the Nazi Party.

To maintain that social order, armed and uniformed political and military forces patrolled the streets wherever the Nazis were in control, not only in the territory taken through conflict, but in the cities of Germany as well. These police actions served to intimidate the population, suppress political opposition, and all but eradicate civil unrest of any kind. I suspect it’s unsurprising that Party Leadership was thrilled to proclaim the low crime rates they’d achieved.

It took until 1935 for the Nuremberg Laws to go into effect, at which point all Jewish and Roma people were stripped of their German citizenship. Before Kristallnacht, the Nazis focused on the forced deportation of Jewish people, but by 1941, those avenues of escape were officially blocked. The Roma people were classified as enemies of the State and treated as criminals as soon as the Nuremberg Laws went into effect.

If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, then you haven’t been paying attention. And if it sounds familiar, and you agree with any of it, maybe you should just accept that you might have been a Nazi as well. My recommendation is that you own it. Wear that title proudly, because they certainly did. Plus, as a bonus, it will make it easier to round you up when the next iteration of the Nuremberg Trials comes about.

You may notice that, aside from some pretty awful policies the Liberals have employed regarding homeless people, and the abhorrent treatment of Indigenous people, none of these things run parallel to any Liberal Administration within our lifetimes. I suppose it makes sense that members of the KKK and NeoNazi groups have been showing up at rallies for Conservative Candidates, because they’re not thrown out of those gatherings.