MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow says Americans no longer have to fear potential authoritarianism in their own country, because “we are there” already — and cited President Donald Trump’s widespread immigration raids, detainments without probable cause and use of military force.
“We have crossed a line,” she said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday. “We are in a place we did not want to be, but we are there. The thing we were all warning about for the last few years is not coming, it is here. We are in it. This is what [it’s] like, it turns out.”
Maddow argued that large swaths of the country might easily overlook this downward slide, as movies are still being produced, sports continue to be played and families are still discussing the same old issues they always have around their kitchen table each night.
“But also, at the same time, life in the United States is profoundly changing,” Maddow added Monday. “It’s profoundly different than it was even six months ago, because we do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge.”
She then put it even more bluntly: “We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.”
While the MSNBC host went on to acknowledge that this might sound “melodramatic,” Maddow noted the U.S. now seems to have its own “secret police,” which is commonplace across dictatorships, in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under Trump.
“A massive, anonymous, unbadged — literally masked — totally unaccountable internal police force that apparently has infinite funding but no identifiable leadership,” said Maddow. “And they act in ways designed to instill maximum fear and use maximum force.”
Maddow continued: “I mean, when you imagine an authoritarian country, what you imagine is masked secret police breaking people’s car windows and snatching people off the streets and out of church parking lots and courtroom hallways and taking them away with no charges, no notice, no paperwork, no explanation, not letting them see lawyers and then moving them secretly to what are effectively black site prisons where they won’t tell you who’s there and where no one’s allowed in to see what’s going on.”
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow posited that the U.S. military under President Donald Trump could be turned against Americans.
Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Experts have already warned that one such prison, Florida’s immigrant detention camp that Republicans have dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” is “a human rights disaster waiting to happen.” Democratic lawmakers initially blocked from visiting were finally granted access last month and confirmed its horrid conditions.
The president has justified nationwide crackdowns on undocumented workers, as well as the detainment, arrest and deportation of college students and professors across the U.S., as necessary protection against supposedly violent and anti-American immigrants.
Maddow argued it won’t stop there, however, and that the U.S. military in multiple states has already “extended the legal boundaries of nearby military bases” by hundreds of miles “so they can give active duty U.S. troops the power to arrest and search people on U.S soil.”
“We are not heading toward something like this,” Maddow said Monday. “We are there. It is here. It is the environment in which we are now living. And so, given that you now live in a country with an authoritarian leader, the question is: What can you do for your country?”
Watch the full monologue below:
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