MAGAs show us who they are
Maris Kabas of The Handbasket writes:
A delivery worker was tased, punched and kicked by multiple federal agents in the middle of the street outside a popular brunch spot in Northwest DC on Saturday morning, a video shared with The Handbasket shows. While customers sitting outside at the Logan Circle cafe munched on avocado smash and matcha pancakes, two and then an additional four masked agents beat the shit out of the man in broad daylight. This is America.
Kabas continues:
America’s largest cities are currently under siege: Not by local gangs and rampant street crime, but by occupying law enforcement sent by the federal government. Strangers—mostly men, many with their faces covered—patrol neighborhoods by foot, car and even horse in search of problems, and this week the terror entered our nation’s capital. Agents from the FBI to the Secret Service and the immigration agencies of the Department of Homeland Security invaded our nation’s capitol this week. As of Thursday, the White House told TIME that more than 100 people had been arrested since Trump’s goon squad took over, claiming they were a result of warrants for various felonies and violations of immigration orders. On Wednesday night alone, 1,650 thugs occupied the city.
During the agents’ violent attack on a delivery worker Saturday morning in DC, bystanders repeatedly demanded the agents share their badge numbers. One of them—his face fully obscured by a black balaklava—eventually shot back, “Do I have to answer to you?”
It was a moment as brazen as it was astonishing. We’ve long known that federal agencies operating under Trump consider themselves above or outside the law. But to hear it stated so confidently, so plainly, that the federal government does not have to answer to the people who pay their salaries was jarring.
And another example from Los Angeles:
She runs a large anti-ICE TikTok account—now agents caught on livestream targeting her in violent arrest.
Agents drag her out of Tesla & throw her on ground where she lay unresponsive—then rushed by ambulance to hospital.
She is well-known to ICE as community activist who films raids in Los Angeles, California—it seems she has been targeted for an especially brutal arrest to make an example out of her.
Watch her livestream from inside the car during the arrest. (timestamp 0:34)
There is no official word about Tatiana Martinez’s immigration status—or where she is currently being held. #DemsUnited
Stuart Stevens, the former Republican and author of “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” responds to Tatiana Martinez’s arrest:
Why are we paying fat thugs afraid to show their faces beat up women?
What a bunch of cowards.
Others agree:
More on Martinez and her violent arrest here. ICE is disappearing people from car washes and kidnapping street vendors and day laborers in the Los Angeles area.
Still more stories from L.A.:
“According to his family, agents joked during his arrest that ‘thanks to him, they get to drink this weekend,’ and laughing about the $2,500 they just secured.”
I found this commentary by a military brat particularly pithy:
Truly, to cite Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
This period will go down as among the darkest in American history, a festival of cruelty.
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