THE FUN CONTINUES!
Last piece kicked us off on the new Trusk Aministration, the first post since post-election analysis and what I intend to be a resumption of semi-regular coverage. In keeping with that general style, this piece will make no attempt to cover every event that has occurred or issue that has arisen in the meantime because, frankly, there is far too much shit happening and I believe such an endeavor would be self-defeating. So instead, we take a miscellaneous sampling of current happenings and elaborate and commentate upon them. THE 2025 REGIME FOLKS:
If the banality of evil is technocrats and cold calculated procedure, we are now experiencing the stupidity of evil. It is cheap, gaudy, and vengeful, contradictory and spiteful, often unpredictable and, yes, dangerous. BUT HERE’S TO THE ABSURDITY!
March 10th - 13th
Well, Donald Trump said he could not rule out a recession, and the markets have responded accordingly. For someone that has such a loose relationship with the truth, it was an odd occasion to be forthcoming. Trump has been imposing and delaying tariffs, giving menacing whiplash, but all in all, compared to his first term, he seems much more serious about their full and total implementation. He’s even said he plans to increase what’s already on the table. So, given this and other matters such as the firing of large swathes of the federal workforce, but mostly the tariffs, he was given the chance to reassure the market: give them that bullshit optimism that they so love, and that bullshit that he is so good at giving. Smooth it over! Instead, he did not. He left the door open to voluntarily walking the country into a recession and immediate pain.
Well, great!
A couple immediate thoughts: First, Donald Trump ran on being the best for the economy, on having a strong economy, and being loved by the markets, and now that he is in, less than two months in, he is telling us the economy and the markets may have to suffer. BAIT and SWITCH! The Republicans have doubled down on this tactic recently, namely the last election cycle and this administration, and where there used to be a sort of ~gentlemen’s agreement~ that the bait had to have some small resemblance to the switch, now there is not. That inconvenience is gone. Now it is quite acceptable to tell an outright lie and replace it with an outright lie OF ANOTHER SPECIES ENTIRELY! No resemblance. Scream it all loud enough and with enough emotionally-charged terms interspersed and they’ll take what they’re served. Perhaps my favorite current example: Trump’s total disavowing of and distancing from Project 2025 during the campaign, and Russell Vought’s subsequent very consequential appointment as head of the OMB.
Second, if Trump is willing to say that a recession is possible and there may have to be some pain - just how bad is he expecting it to get? That is to say, was this a random moment of being forthcoming with the American People, contrary to previous habits, or was this an informed maneuver to begin to prepare us for what his administration now sees as the inevitable suffering - a tepid pivot from the outright lie to an understatement more closely aligned with the truth? The truth then being CRASH AND DESPAIR. This then being a chance to waffle, or pivot, and begin to veer down the path of, “Well, we never said that it wouldn’t get bad before it was good, folks, you see…” An attempt to preemptively soften the inevitable blowback when the lie was so large. I suppose time will tell!
Alright, sure. But what about the underlying point that he’s making here - the necessity of short-medium-term economic pain for long term prosperity, for a whole realignment? Well, here, conceptually, I may actually agree. The great offshoring of American manufacturing and related jobs was a death knell for the blue-collar middle class backbone of the country - the Rust Belt was not so rusty before the likes of NAFTA and associates. When you allow the exporting of jobs for owners and shareholders to maximize their profits, but provide no protections or plans for the domestic workers that are affected, there are going to be negative consequences. Negative consequences for the workers, and so inevitably and profoundly, much to the elites’ chagrin, negative consequences for the country. We have seen that on an immense level over multiple decades. There is an argument to be made that rather than provide alternative conciliatory measures, this wrong needs to be righted, and jobs need to be brought back into the country, and thus there will be inevitable pains during the adjustment. An argument to be made, sure. And much of the detail missing in this brief writing. However, there was also the busting and gutting of unions. And there was also the vast deregulation and hyper-growth of the financial sector, really culminating in the Financial Crisis and Great Recession, but still just as present, still with an addiction to zero or near-zero interest rates. Then there’s also the wealthy elite and primarily Republican assault on worker protections and rights. And then, more broadly, there’s also alternative arguments to be made, that rather than try to bring the old jobs back, we should create new jobs, in new industries - you can’t turn back the clock so look ahead, not backwards.
But my point is this - in fairness to the administration, I am not totally against the idea that there is a need to make some fundamental shifts in our economy, even if those shifts cause some temporarily painful disruptions and CUT OFF THE GRAVY TRAIN for a bit, so to speak. We can’t always focus on the short term gains to the detriment of the long term trajectory, as Trump said in so many words. However, from there I diverge. Who is this shift for, and what are its real goals? Are we just trying to bring back some car manufacturing factories for a hollow red district win, then pay the workers shit, offer shit benefits, bust up their unions and siphon more profits off to domestic wealth holders? Is there any real focus on the worker beyond a potential swing state voting bloc? Do their rights matter - does their dignity matter? If a corporation by necessity must place profits for its shareholders above all, who will place the good of the workers above all? If we don’t establish that kind of oppositional balance of tension in the system, then how will any of this matter? How will workers be able to live well if they aren’t allowed to fight for themselves, and if no one is fighting for them?
Well, what else? We have the energy secretary saying, to oil and gas executives, that climate change was “a side effect of building the modern world.” Correct! Thank you, Secretary Wright, for confirming what scientists have been saying to people like you and your audience for decades. What a bold and brave man to take such a stance in this administration - to proudly confirm that climate change in our time is indeed human-driven. Kudos, sir!
No? Am I misinterpreting that remark - missing some context, perhaps?
Tesla shares have been sliding dramatically, so just last night our President declared that he would purchase a Tesla - today! This morning! He would do so to support his friend and Certainly Not Our President (CNOP) Elon Musk, explaining that “the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby’, in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for.”
Alright - first, of course, as is always first in THIS PUBLICATION - the raw and powerful absurdity. We have a Republic, a NATION, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and our dear leader is issuing late night proclamations… that he is going to buy a new car. From his friend’s company. In the morning.
Next, more seriously, is the always-hyperbolic and, more darkly, intentionally-maligning suggestion that the collective actions and protests being organized against Tesla are illegal, and in a nod to his prior troubles, collusion. Collective action is collusion, and protests, when inconvenient, are illegal! This is actually part of a broader and quite serious push by Trump to paint protests that are against him, his allies, or his causes as illegal, as criminality, and thus the protestors as criminals subject to police and legal action - ILLEGALS THEMSELVES. If you can’t beat em, LOCK EM UP!
(An aside - as with Secretary Wright, I am pleased that President Trump has hit the nail on the head, noting that the protests and boycott of Tesla are intended to “do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for.” How astute!)
And on that note, we arrive at a dark tale for The People’s rights - the detention of Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil goes to Columbia and was an organizer of the pro-Palestinian protests last year. He’s an activist, and he’s loud about it. This put him on the radar, as it often has throughout the brief and beautiful history of Our Nation. It also plays directly into the current culture war obsession with the Israel/Palestine conflict, meaning both the current actual war in Gaza, and the myriad accusations of racism at home, namely the left slamming the right for anti-Palestinian sentiment, and the right slamming the left for antisemitism, particularly during and after the aforementioned pro-Palestine campus protests.
Well, I’ll try not go get too lost in THE WEEDS here, but there’s various talk of pro-Israeli individuals and organizations back-channelling with sympathetic political contacts with the explicit intention of having Khalil punished/deported. Through some kind of strange and twisted grapevine, Khalil’s name made its way into the consciousnesses of the Trump administration upper echelon, i.e. Trump himself and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Here it was met with a hostile audience, a la Trump’s executive order 14188, signed in early February, which calls for the deportation of students with visas who have broken laws during the previous year of protests. It also finds the administration’s recent cancelling of approximately 400 MILLION DOLLARS in federal money for Columbia based on the university’s perceived lack of action on the protests… that’s a very real and very serious cudgel that the administration has chosen to beat the university with.
Right, a little background context, but the point is, Khalil was seized from his home in New York by ICE agents on March 8th. They pulled him out and put him in an unmarked car in front of his pregnant wife, and then they did not bother to tell her where he was being taken. He ended up in a detention center in Louisiana where he was then initially denied attorney-client-privileged phone calls.
Khalil is a lawful permanent resident of the US with a green card, and his wife is a US citizen. The ICE agents displayed no warrant. Khalil was able to get his lawyer on the phone during the arrest, and she spoke to one of the ICE agents. The agent said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. The lawyer informed the agent that Khalil actually has a green card, to which the agent said, well, we’ll revoke that instead.
The administration has cited a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that permits the deportation of lawful residents if the Secretary of State believes that their presence presents a risk of potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.
Trump took to his Truth Social airwaves to say that ICE had “proudly apprehended and detained” Khalil, and that “this is the first arrest of many to come,” amongst other maximalist language.
Actually, you know what, here’s the full Trump post because I think we should all know exactly what our President thinks about the matter:
“Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you!”
Tom Homan, director of ICE, said the administration considers Khalil a national security threat. He went on to ask, “Can you stand in a movie theater and yell fire? Can you slander somebody verbally? Free speech has limitations.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Khalil’s case is not about free speech. He said, “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
Maybe no one has a right to…citizenship?
Right. So here we have the Trump administration doing a snatch and grab on a legal US resident who has not been accused, let alone convicted, of a crime. Instead, he’s being portrayed as a radical terrorist supporter, an antisemite, and a bad person - he’s being accused by the administration of having the wrong views, views that are not in the national interest, and expressing these views loudly, and then the administration immediately and FORCEFULLY tells us that this case has nothing to do with free speech!
“Well, sir, why are you deporting this man?”
“Well, we don’t like the way he thinks, ok?”
“Well, sir, uh, how do you know what he thinks?”
“Well, he said it!”
“Ok sir, and uh, are you not then deporting him because of what he said?”
Brow furrows and eyes narrow, “Listen, buddy, I know what you’re trying to do here - I’ll tell you this right now, ok? This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It’s just… well, we can’t have him here SAYING THESE KINDS OF THINGS!”
So we have a picture forming - expressing the wrong opinions and engaging in the wrong activities can land you as persona non grata with the administration. At this point, those opinions and activities may just start to be construed as pro-terrorist and/or anti-American, against the national interest. And worse, actually, that may be akin to standing up in a theater and yelling, “FIRE!” or in other words, not under the purview of protected speech - not even a matter of free speech. At this point, the individual, because of their opinions and activities, may be deemed a threat to national security, and at that point, well… let’s see what kind of obscure legal code we can cite to GET RID OF EM!
See, as the administration is telling us, this isn’t a matter of free speech - it’s just, well, bad people doing bad things that maybe aren’t actually crimes but still need to be punished so maybe just some murky legal theory or even extralegal (illegal) means will have to be used to get to the desired end, which is, well, getting those people to stop doing those bad things… but then again maybe if those things aren’t actually crimes and they’re just things those people are saying then maybe we’ll just have to get them to stop saying those things… which maybe actually it will be easiest and really BEST FOR ALL if the people just go away? A little detention or deportation because, well, we have to stop them because they’re BAD. So you see, nothing to do with free speech, just bad thoughts from bad people that need to go away. BAD ACTORS ONLY! Easy breezy!
Is it more fun to skip stupidly and merrily into authoritarianism?
Everyone should be fired up about how our government is treating Mahmoud Khalil simply because it is wrong. It is wrong, cruel, and stupid.
But it should also be alarming to everyone. Make no mistake, this kind of action starts with the easiest targets - people without full US citizenship. Easiest legally and easiest socially. The “others.” All the while the REAL CITIZENS are assured they have nothing to worry about! But if a regime is allowed, by the courts, by the populace, to begin punishing people for having views contrary to theirs, they will not stop at the “others.” No, they will gradually find ways to make all those who loudly disagree with them into “others.” And then it’s open season.
Well, Donald Trump said he could not rule out a recession, and the markets have responded accordingly. For someone that has such a loose relationship with the truth, it was an odd occasion to be forthcoming. Trump has been imposing and delaying tariffs, giving menacing whiplash, but all in all, compared to his first term, he seems much more serious about their full and total implementation. He’s even said he plans to increase what’s already on the table. So, given this and other matters such as the firing of large swathes of the federal workforce, but mostly the tariffs, he was given the chance to reassure the market: give them that bullshit optimism that they so love, and that bullshit that he is so good at giving. Smooth it over! Instead, he did not. He left the door open to voluntarily walking the country into a recession and immediate pain.
Well, great!
A couple immediate thoughts: First, Donald Trump ran on being the best for the economy, on having a strong economy, and being loved by the markets, and now that he is in, less than two months in, he is telling us the economy and the markets may have to suffer. BAIT and SWITCH! The Republicans have doubled down on this tactic recently, namely the last election cycle and this administration, and where there used to be a sort of ~gentlemen’s agreement~ that the bait had to have some small resemblance to the switch, now there is not. That inconvenience is gone. Now it is quite acceptable to tell an outright lie and replace it with an outright lie OF ANOTHER SPECIES ENTIRELY! No resemblance. Scream it all loud enough and with enough emotionally-charged terms interspersed and they’ll take what they’re served. Perhaps my favorite current example: Trump’s total disavowing of and distancing from Project 2025 during the campaign, and Russell Vought’s subsequent very consequential appointment as head of the OMB.
Second, if Trump is willing to say that a recession is possible and there may have to be some pain - just how bad is he expecting it to get? That is to say, was this a random moment of being forthcoming with the American People, contrary to previous habits, or was this an informed maneuver to begin to prepare us for what his administration now sees as the inevitable suffering - a tepid pivot from the outright lie to an understatement more closely aligned with the truth? The truth then being CRASH AND DESPAIR. This then being a chance to waffle, or pivot, and begin to veer down the path of, “Well, we never said that it wouldn’t get bad before it was good, folks, you see…” An attempt to preemptively soften the inevitable blowback when the lie was so large. I suppose time will tell!
Alright, sure. But what about the underlying point that he’s making here - the necessity of short-medium-term economic pain for long term prosperity, for a whole realignment? Well, here, conceptually, I may actually agree. The great offshoring of American manufacturing and related jobs was a death knell for the blue-collar middle class backbone of the country - the Rust Belt was not so rusty before the likes of NAFTA and associates. When you allow the exporting of jobs for owners and shareholders to maximize their profits, but provide no protections or plans for the domestic workers that are affected, there are going to be negative consequences. Negative consequences for the workers, and so inevitably and profoundly, much to the elites’ chagrin, negative consequences for the country. We have seen that on an immense level over multiple decades. There is an argument to be made that rather than provide alternative conciliatory measures, this wrong needs to be righted, and jobs need to be brought back into the country, and thus there will be inevitable pains during the adjustment. An argument to be made, sure. And much of the detail missing in this brief writing. However, there was also the busting and gutting of unions. And there was also the vast deregulation and hyper-growth of the financial sector, really culminating in the Financial Crisis and Great Recession, but still just as present, still with an addiction to zero or near-zero interest rates. Then there’s also the wealthy elite and primarily Republican assault on worker protections and rights. And then, more broadly, there’s also alternative arguments to be made, that rather than try to bring the old jobs back, we should create new jobs, in new industries - you can’t turn back the clock so look ahead, not backwards.
But my point is this - in fairness to the administration, I am not totally against the idea that there is a need to make some fundamental shifts in our economy, even if those shifts cause some temporarily painful disruptions and CUT OFF THE GRAVY TRAIN for a bit, so to speak. We can’t always focus on the short term gains to the detriment of the long term trajectory, as Trump said in so many words. However, from there I diverge. Who is this shift for, and what are its real goals? Are we just trying to bring back some car manufacturing factories for a hollow red district win, then pay the workers shit, offer shit benefits, bust up their unions and siphon more profits off to domestic wealth holders? Is there any real focus on the worker beyond a potential swing state voting bloc? Do their rights matter - does their dignity matter? If a corporation by necessity must place profits for its shareholders above all, who will place the good of the workers above all? If we don’t establish that kind of oppositional balance of tension in the system, then how will any of this matter? How will workers be able to live well if they aren’t allowed to fight for themselves, and if no one is fighting for them?
Well, what else? We have the energy secretary saying, to oil and gas executives, that climate change was “a side effect of building the modern world.” Correct! Thank you, Secretary Wright, for confirming what scientists have been saying to people like you and your audience for decades. What a bold and brave man to take such a stance in this administration - to proudly confirm that climate change in our time is indeed human-driven. Kudos, sir!
No? Am I misinterpreting that remark - missing some context, perhaps?
Tesla shares have been sliding dramatically, so just last night our President declared that he would purchase a Tesla - today! This morning! He would do so to support his friend and Certainly Not Our President (CNOP) Elon Musk, explaining that “the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby’, in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for.”
Alright - first, of course, as is always first in THIS PUBLICATION - the raw and powerful absurdity. We have a Republic, a NATION, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and our dear leader is issuing late night proclamations… that he is going to buy a new car. From his friend’s company. In the morning.
Next, more seriously, is the always-hyperbolic and, more darkly, intentionally-maligning suggestion that the collective actions and protests being organized against Tesla are illegal, and in a nod to his prior troubles, collusion. Collective action is collusion, and protests, when inconvenient, are illegal! This is actually part of a broader and quite serious push by Trump to paint protests that are against him, his allies, or his causes as illegal, as criminality, and thus the protestors as criminals subject to police and legal action - ILLEGALS THEMSELVES. If you can’t beat em, LOCK EM UP!
(An aside - as with Secretary Wright, I am pleased that President Trump has hit the nail on the head, noting that the protests and boycott of Tesla are intended to “do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for.” How astute!)
And on that note, we arrive at a dark tale for The People’s rights - the detention of Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil goes to Columbia and was an organizer of the pro-Palestinian protests last year. He’s an activist, and he’s loud about it. This put him on the radar, as it often has throughout the brief and beautiful history of Our Nation. It also plays directly into the current culture war obsession with the Israel/Palestine conflict, meaning both the current actual war in Gaza, and the myriad accusations of racism at home, namely the left slamming the right for anti-Palestinian sentiment, and the right slamming the left for antisemitism, particularly during and after the aforementioned pro-Palestine campus protests.
Well, I’ll try not go get too lost in THE WEEDS here, but there’s various talk of pro-Israeli individuals and organizations back-channelling with sympathetic political contacts with the explicit intention of having Khalil punished/deported. Through some kind of strange and twisted grapevine, Khalil’s name made its way into the consciousnesses of the Trump administration upper echelon, i.e. Trump himself and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Here it was met with a hostile audience, a la Trump’s executive order 14188, signed in early February, which calls for the deportation of students with visas who have broken laws during the previous year of protests. It also finds the administration’s recent cancelling of approximately 400 MILLION DOLLARS in federal money for Columbia based on the university’s perceived lack of action on the protests… that’s a very real and very serious cudgel that the administration has chosen to beat the university with.
Right, a little background context, but the point is, Khalil was seized from his home in New York by ICE agents on March 8th. They pulled him out and put him in an unmarked car in front of his pregnant wife, and then they did not bother to tell her where he was being taken. He ended up in a detention center in Louisiana where he was then initially denied attorney-client-privileged phone calls.
Khalil is a lawful permanent resident of the US with a green card, and his wife is a US citizen. The ICE agents displayed no warrant. Khalil was able to get his lawyer on the phone during the arrest, and she spoke to one of the ICE agents. The agent said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. The lawyer informed the agent that Khalil actually has a green card, to which the agent said, well, we’ll revoke that instead.
The administration has cited a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that permits the deportation of lawful residents if the Secretary of State believes that their presence presents a risk of potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.
Trump took to his Truth Social airwaves to say that ICE had “proudly apprehended and detained” Khalil, and that “this is the first arrest of many to come,” amongst other maximalist language.
Actually, you know what, here’s the full Trump post because I think we should all know exactly what our President thinks about the matter:
“Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you!”
Tom Homan, director of ICE, said the administration considers Khalil a national security threat. He went on to ask, “Can you stand in a movie theater and yell fire? Can you slander somebody verbally? Free speech has limitations.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Khalil’s case is not about free speech. He said, “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
Maybe no one has a right to…citizenship?
Right. So here we have the Trump administration doing a snatch and grab on a legal US resident who has not been accused, let alone convicted, of a crime. Instead, he’s being portrayed as a radical terrorist supporter, an antisemite, and a bad person - he’s being accused by the administration of having the wrong views, views that are not in the national interest, and expressing these views loudly, and then the administration immediately and FORCEFULLY tells us that this case has nothing to do with free speech!
“Well, sir, why are you deporting this man?”
“Well, we don’t like the way he thinks, ok?”
“Well, sir, uh, how do you know what he thinks?”
“Well, he said it!”
“Ok sir, and uh, are you not then deporting him because of what he said?”
Brow furrows and eyes narrow, “Listen, buddy, I know what you’re trying to do here - I’ll tell you this right now, ok? This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It’s just… well, we can’t have him here SAYING THESE KINDS OF THINGS!”
So we have a picture forming - expressing the wrong opinions and engaging in the wrong activities can land you as persona non grata with the administration. At this point, those opinions and activities may just start to be construed as pro-terrorist and/or anti-American, against the national interest. And worse, actually, that may be akin to standing up in a theater and yelling, “FIRE!” or in other words, not under the purview of protected speech - not even a matter of free speech. At this point, the individual, because of their opinions and activities, may be deemed a threat to national security, and at that point, well… let’s see what kind of obscure legal code we can cite to GET RID OF EM!
See, as the administration is telling us, this isn’t a matter of free speech - it’s just, well, bad people doing bad things that maybe aren’t actually crimes but still need to be punished so maybe just some murky legal theory or even extralegal (illegal) means will have to be used to get to the desired end, which is, well, getting those people to stop doing those bad things… but then again maybe if those things aren’t actually crimes and they’re just things those people are saying then maybe we’ll just have to get them to stop saying those things… which maybe actually it will be easiest and really BEST FOR ALL if the people just go away? A little detention or deportation because, well, we have to stop them because they’re BAD. So you see, nothing to do with free speech, just bad thoughts from bad people that need to go away. BAD ACTORS ONLY! Easy breezy!
Is it more fun to skip stupidly and merrily into authoritarianism?
Everyone should be fired up about how our government is treating Mahmoud Khalil simply because it is wrong. It is wrong, cruel, and stupid.
But it should also be alarming to everyone. Make no mistake, this kind of action starts with the easiest targets - people without full US citizenship. Easiest legally and easiest socially. The “others.” All the while the REAL CITIZENS are assured they have nothing to worry about! But if a regime is allowed, by the courts, by the populace, to begin punishing people for having views contrary to theirs, they will not stop at the “others.” No, they will gradually find ways to make all those who loudly disagree with them into “others.” And then it’s open season.