"For an educated middle-class woman to face public arrest and a strip search is almost unimaginable"

[woo me with science]

129. *MY* attempt to conflate them?

Oh my WORD. Who brought up Boy Scouts and Little Leaguers, and devoted an entire post to them?

I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

Here's some food for thought: Supporters of authoritarianism rarely approve of the word, "authoritarian." It is standard operating procedure for authoritarians to try to mock, dismiss, ban, or otherwise invalidate the words that most accurately describe what they are doing. It is like when posters here complain that "Third Way" is "namecalling" rather than useful shorthand for a set of policy values and goals that give lip service to certain liberal social issues but join fervently with Republicans on virtually every economic issue that favors corporations over human beings.

When governments are spying on their own populations, militarizing their police forces, criminalizing investigative journalism, persecuting whistleblowers, assaulting peaceful protesters and targeting them for surveillance, misusing "terrorism" statutes, and fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to legalize strip searches for any arrestee, the label of "authoritarian" and discussions of metastasizing authoritarianism are wholly accurate and absolutely necessary.

Flippant, derisive posts about Cub Scout leaders do not contribute to the "serious discussion" you pretend now that you wanted to have about nonviolent and non-convicted arrestees' being subjected to humiliating strip searches in the United States of America.