While our eyes are on the welfare state's destruction, Trump is building a police state

[Lonestarblue]

We are watching Trump turn the US into East Germany as Musk fires essential workers but not any worker “necessary to meet law enforcement, border security, national security, immigration enforcement, or public safety responsibilities.” Red states are following his lead. Alabama is trying to prosecute anyone who helps a woman get an abortion in another state. Other states have tried to set up tracking mechanisms to police women’s actions. The East German Stasi relied on snitches to keep people in line. Texas has already created a law for snitches. Other states will follow as they fire workers and hollow out services for citizens so they can spend more money on their police state tactics.

“While we’ve had our eyes on the wrecking ball–Doge pulverizing social services, environmental protection and scientific research, we’ve hardly taken notice of what is being constructed. In the footprint of the already shabby, now half-demolished US welfare state, the Trump administration is building a police state.

In spite of Doge’s cuts to the FBI, the agency’s director, Kash Patel, is gearing up to turn the agency – whose job has always been to spy on US citizens, including enemies of the state as identified by the government in power – into Donald Trump’s personal secret police. At the state level, lawmakers are compiling their own enemies lists and filing bills to reward those who snitch on abortion seekers, transgender people, undocumented immigrants, and school librarians suspected of harboring the wrong books.

The Republican House budget includes $300bn in new funding for defense and border control. Among the Senate budget committee’s announced priorities are finishing the border wall, increasing the number of immigrant detention “beds”, hiring more border patrol agents, and investing in state and local law enforcement to assist in “immigration enforcement and removal efforts”. While no figures are provided in the attached budget, the Senate budget committee assures Americans that any new spending will be offset by reductions.“

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/05/trump-welfare-police-state-government-layoffs

[JanMichael]

1. Don't worry we are polite and believe in our institutions

[Lovie777]

2. We are aware................

project 2025.

[Marthe48]

3. I've lived my whole life with a benign govt.

Can we imagine how bad it was to live through WWI, worldwide flu epidemic, the first effort of the religious right to oppress us (Prohibition) The Great Depression and WWII? It was bad enough so that world governments, including the U.S. took major steps to avoid the series of disasters happening again. And while it was bad for white people, the time was worse for POC, other minorities, disabled, really anyone who was different. As world governments pulled whites out of the quicksand, they finally started throwing ropes to others as well. I can remember the milestones we passed: civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, enforcement of legal treatment of criminals, extending help for education and medical bills.
I remember when my grandmother and great-aunt first got Medicare, in the mid-60s. My grandmother was thrilled for the sudden help for herself and her aunt.
I also remember the crushing medical debt my parents incurred when one of my siblings after another developed unusual and expensive ailments. They had no medical insurance and within a couple years, our standard of living dropped from middle class to poverty.
Maybe if every single person had a perfect life, perfect response to any problems, perfect children, perfect marriage, perfect education, the countries in the world wouldn't have to create and maintain a floor under their populations. But there is no perfection and for my whole life, the drive to ease the suffering was a benefit for all people in the world.
Somehow the human community has become perverted with the idea that a few people need to hold all the wealth and power, and the rest us can suffer, it seems, to their delight. The Spanish Inquisition didn't last forever. Margaret Thatcher's government didn't last, Poland's extreme right is failing, even if it has taken years. I hope Americans will learn from other countries how to throw off the yoke of rwnj extremists and fatally flawed billionaires and get us back to a government that has tried for half its existence to be by the people, for the people.

[Kid Berwyn]

4. That crunching sound you might've heard...

…were the courts folding under the tank tracks.

The press? That was the first bump they went over a long time ago.

[Scrivener7]

5. This. This is the plan.