This is "computer says no (not a citizen)". Which is horrifying
They've just created an app to justify what they were already doing right? And the argument will be "well it's a super complex app run by a very clever company so it can't be wrong"?
This was also one of the more advanced theories about the people selection and targeting AI apps used in Gaza. I've only heard one journalist spell it out, because many journalists believe that AI works.
But the dissenter said that they know it does not work and just use it to blame the AI for mistakes.
Accountability literally means "being forced to give an account of your decisions", i.e. explain the reasons behind why you made the choices you did. The idea is that when you have a public forum of people with common values, merely being forced to explain yourself will activate mechanisms of shame, guilt, and conformism that keep people inline. Otherwise you'll face the judgment of your peers.
This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right. Or you just don't care and figure solipsism vs. the status quo is just a matter of degree.
When they decide that someone is in the US illegaly using the app... what happens? Is the person apprehended? Driven straight to the border? Taken into custody while more data about them is gathered?
There's no "custody", these people aren't being afforded the Constitutional, legal, or human rights. This is internment by militarised fascist gangs.
"Officer", ha. These are people given a gun and told to go out and brutalise others. There not performing an office of state, they're far outside the law. All, it seems, to try and force those who support democracy to step out of line so Trump/Vance and their handlers can have more people killed and claim civil war is getting in the way of having elections.
Incidentally, I was reading about the Lincoln County War recently and realized it was a microcosm for all the kinds of corruption that we see on display nationwide today. The rings controlled commerce and any upstarts were facing brutally low chances for success and would be snuffed out if they became a threat.
As long as they can claim that whatever they did to you is part of their official duties (which, again, good luck expecting the current federal government to take your side on this even if the ICE officer clearly oversteps their duties) only the federal government/DOJ can prosecute them for misconduct, which also obviously won't happen under the current administration.
1: https://xcancel.com/ProjectLincoln/status/191249066980685851...
But of course fed-cops were never seriously prowling neighborhoods where the nearest grocery store is a Whole Foods so nobody on HN cared until now.
Border patrol specifically is wildly different, looking for people who are suspected of being subject to their jurisdiction without a specific indictment, detaining with in practice, if not in law, a much lower standard of suspicion than applies usually, and then generally having those detained subject to process that is almost entirely within executive branch “courts” with consequences as severe as criminal process but much lower protections than criminal process (where literal toddlers defend themselves in “court" against government lawyers.)
The current “immigration” crackdown, while ICE (which historically has worked more like a regular federal law enforcement agency despite its detainees often flowing into the executive immigration system and not the criminal justice system) has been the public face of it is effectively applying the Border Patrol culture/approach far more broadly (which is also why, in frustration with the “inadequate” results so far ICE middle leadership is being purged and replaced with Border Patrol personnel.)
The road to hell wasn't paved in a day.
I worry what this app and systems like it might mean for me. I'm a US citizen, but I used to be an LPR. I never naturalized - I got my citizenship automatically by operation of law (INA 320, the child citizenship act). At some point I stopped being noodlesUK (LPR) and magically became noodlesUK (US Citizen), but not through the normal process. Presumably this means that there are entries in USCIS's systems that are orphaned, that likely indicate that I am an LPR who has abandoned their status, or at least been very bad about renewing their green card.
I fear that people in similar situations to my own might have a camera put in their face, some old database record that has no chance of being updated will be returned, and the obvious evidence in front of an officer's eyes, such as a US passport will be ignored. There are probably millions of people in similar situations to me, and millions more with even more complex statuses.
I know people who have multiple citizenships with multiple names, similar to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45531721. Will these hastily deployed systems be able to cope with the complex realities of real people?
EDIT: LPR is lawful permanent resident, i.e., green card holder
Will ICE get it right? or will she be put into a prison for months with poor conditions, with an administration that does not want lawyers involved, with little ability to be found or call out for help?
This site likes to do the cowardly take of avoiding politics as long as it's advantageous. I'm going to look into these companies that produce this tech, and memorize the company names. If a resume ever passes my desk with a significant time at any of these companies, it's going to be a "no" from me. That's the small bit of power I hold.
Hands on the ground don't read the laws, they only bring people before the person who actually knows them.
So no, ICE goons will do the basic thing -- check how white the person is, if not white enough, ask for documents, if documents are not convincing enough to them, snatch the person and let the more nuanced decisions to be made by those who can read.
Now if the person above them isn't agreeing with interpretation of the law that was used to issue those documents, it's sitting in the jail waiting for a judge time.
Better yet -- whisk her out of the country and then claim that she no longer has standing to sue.
I struggle a lot when I see comments like this. The point is to be a pain. The point is to empower a national police force to subjugate the populace. The people in charge don’t care if it is “ able to cope with the complex realities of real people.”
I don’t understand why people, especially those like you who have complex realities, significantly more complex than me a white man who can trace his lineage to the 1600s in VA, are still giving any benefit of the doubt to these actions.
and where exactly did those white men in 1600s VA come from? right, you're an immigrant, you should be detained. the 1600s detail is just smoke. the only key thing you said was white. everything after that is just fluff for telling the story.
This comes off to me as a more refined "Yes of course, what did you expect you naive person ?" type of comment you often find online (somewhat common among radical leftists)
Maybe commenter agrees with you that the point is to empower a national police to subjugate the populace (This opinion does not raise any of my eyebrows) but do you think this is going to reach people who don't already think that ? To put any doubt in their minds ? I understand the anger the current situation is causing and I am guilty of breaking the hn guidelines a few times myself but I am also convinced of the need to actually explain what you think are the actual problems from the ground up rather than just casting your own conclusions onto people, no matter how obvious they seem to you
So I did think they did a good job with their comment
Otherwise, you have a 'king' issuing general warrants which allow federal agents to search and seize anyone they want in the course of their investigations based on 'feels'. What makes it even worse is some court said racial profiling is sufficient reason to conduct a Terry stop to determine if the person is engaged in (civil) criminal activity and lets law enforcement demand they show their papers or be scanned by some dodgy app.
An ICE officer can't just detain somebody for having an accent or whatever, but if they have probable cause to think the person may not be a citizen then they have a substantial amount of leverage to affirm that. Probable cause has been tested somewhat rigorously in the courts and really means probable cause and not the knee-jerk obvious abuses like 'he's brown!'
Seems to the rest of world that this is very much what America is now.
Meanwhile last week I was in LA for a family thing and caught some TV ads playing there. That dog-killing gnome woman was on TV saying something like "We will hunt you down and deport you, there is no hiding, leave now". Initially I thought I was watching some comedy skit, but no it was an official US government advert.
Whether I'm in Montana or in LA vastly changes my perception of what's considered ok in America today.
Do you just throw up your hands “i guess there is nothing we can do”?
What I find entertaining as a non-US citizen is how border enforcement is table stakes in every other country I’ve lived in (5 so far). Even the left doesn’t question it, it’s a basic function of a government.
Even the less developed countries have relatively straightforward enforcement. You produce proof you’re there legally or you’re put on the next flight home.
Since I lived in the US people keep asking me why some Americans don’t want border security. I don’t have a good answer.
Cope with?! These systems and procedures are designed to circumvent the "complex" realities and give cover for deporting citizens and legal residents. So maybe you have a passport, but you've been attending protests, and perhaps even dared to be lippy towards an ICE agent; your passport is going to the shredder, and your ass to Liberia.
I don't know how folk keep assuming DHS/ICE are acting in good faith - a shocking number of people continue to be oblivious until the agents come for them or theirs.
I get that nobody wants to be tracked by the government. But we are already being tracked... just imperfectly to the point where innocent people are being jailed.
The question should be how accurate do we want the government's data on us to be. And how much of our taxpayer money do we want to spend on companies like Palantir to fuzzy match our data across systems when we could simplify this all with a primary key.
If the U.S. wanted to have a national ID system with rules, a defined scope, and redress procedures when things went wrong, and established it in the open, following a democratic process, I would be much happier.
The system we are getting instead has all the downsides of centralisation, with none of the upsides.
States prefer having the power to issue ID cards and all of the control that grants them, they do not want to give up those powers, and politically the states have enough political and legal power to keep it this way.
Don’t make the mistake of presuming that this the result of a flawed cooperative system. It isn’t — it’s adversarial.
Just look at how long states fought to stop Real ID legislation.
I see you, Wintermute, I see you.
It's the official status of green card holders.
(second result was Lawful Permanent Resident; make of that what you will)
If you get captured as part of this Mobile Fortify stuff, it sounds like it's going to merge it with all other CBP records you have (including all border entry interactions). Pulling up at the passport desk or at a land crossing is just begging for the officer to see that an ICE HSI agent pulled you at a protest and scanned your face to pull you in for "secondary screening" for "higher risk factors" going forward and throwing nice glowing red targets on your back.
If you're white British with an accent from our shores, you don't have a very serious problem. Sure you could get locked up somewhere away from a lawyer for a few days which is terribly inconvenient —- that clearly is happening to British citizens -- but nobody is going to pin you to the ground until you can't breathe. We appear to be getting the benefit of some doubt (unless we have opinions).
And if you are white and have an American accent you're going to be ignored entirely anyway.
Perhaps carry any paperwork you need, definitely carry any medication you'll need for a few days.
As to whether the officer will ignore evidence presented: that is clearly what they are being told to do. There are lawful citizens carrying their papers with them and there's video of an ICE agent mockingly saying "what papers?"
Because on the ground it's not about immigration status really, it's about race and white power and sheer numbers of arrests to meet Stephen Miller's quotas.
This may be statistically true, but it's probably not very good advice. You might equally end up deported, now that they are running everyone through every database looking for things that might make you technically deportable that would never have come up under previous administrations:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78nj7701o
You used to be able to get bailed while stuff got sorted out. That has changed. Now they keep you locked up for months, not days. How long are you prepared to hold out before agreeing to be deported despite being in the right? Racial profiling is certainly happening, but anyone can find themselves in this situation if the wrong database pings when they walk through an airport, and once you have been dropped into immigration detention, relying on your ethnicity to get you out is not a sure thing.
They've certainly been held in custody, though.
Unfortunately, lots of people are going to arrive at a first-hand understanding of the oft-repeated systems adage: "the purpose of a system is what it does."
For now, until they move on to persecuting political adversaries.
It’s no different than a US citizen having an arrest warrant but then showing the cop a final disposition from the court showing the charges were dismissed.
Whats next? It’s certainly not the cop just walking away.
You detain the person until the discrepancy can be resolved.
Are some innocent people going to be held in custody? Yes, in both cases. But until a better approach can be found (other than just ignoring it), it’s how it works.
(Not suggesting anything about enforcement practices - just trying to understand what the edge cases are like.)
Unfortunately USCIS doesn’t know anything about this (as it was all handled by the department of state), and presumably thinks I’m an alien who abandoned their status.
The headline plus this quote reveals the real intentions — to create a comprehensive dataset that includes biometric data and can be used however the government wishes, regardless of one’s citizenship. I have no doubt that this data will also be sold to other entities.
I remember reading years ago about how facial recognition was particularly bad at correctly identifying people with darker skin and was generally not great as the sole method of identification. The possibility of a mistaken identity being captured by this app would have life-altering implications with essentially no recourse. This is really disturbing.
Not forgetting Elon's mass data scraping from earlier this year.
That's what happens when you don't have mandatory id system and want to enforce immigration policy -- government just does whatever bullshit sticks and there is no carefully crafted set of safeguards and procedural rules to slap it for doing too much.
> remember reading years ago about how facial recognition was particularly bad at correctly identifying people with darker skin
I would imagine that for current administration it's not a bug, but a feature.
But later it flanderized into, we want to break the rules. The rules are an impediment to goodness, not the guarantor.
Rorschach was the bad guy.
Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
Oh yeah, and facial recognition does not work to anything like this degree of accuracy, and probably never can. Nice try.
The light turns green.
You go blindly.
Get maimed in an accident.
"But the light was green!"
https://theonion.com/trump-claims-he-can-overrule-constituti...
You roll a persuasion check: it's a 1 - it failed. Your argument of "you can't do this, the Constitution says nu-uh" failed.
"Fuck the constitution", the masked ICE officer yells at you. "civil rights are for real American citizens, not for your kind." He spits in your face.
The two masked goons holding you start to drag you towards their unmarked van. You struggle a bit. The officer stashes away his Scanning Smartphone and puts his hand on his sidearm.
What is your next move?
A lot of Americans have the impression that SCOTUS keeps deciding in the administration's favor, but this is not true.
SCOTUS is saying: "We're not going to hear this case right now, but we likely will in the future. In the meantime, we are going to overturn the lower court who did actually hear the case and allow the administration to continue its actions. No, we will not explain we think the lower court got wrong."
Increasingly these SCOTUS orders totally unexplained which is a blatant violation of their judicial obligations, and they are frequently unsigned by the majority (conservative) Justices. Presumably because they don't want their names written on papers that they know will be understood by future generations to be totally indefensible.
SCOTUS has proven itself functionally incapable of fulfilling its Constitutional duties and has proven that we need a lot more Justices. If you don't have the time to hear the cases we need you to hear, then the court needs to be scaled up and we can pick random panels to hear different cases.
Nothing to do with policy disagreements (how would any American even know if they had a policy disagreement with an unexplained, unsigned SCOTUS order?) – we just need courts that can decide on things that are important to our country.
The supreme court over the years has watered down constitutional protections against government enforcement upon individuals massively because doing so was necessary to empower the government to enforce speeding tickets, financial regulation, environmental regulation, chase bootleggers, etc, etc, with it's power only constrained in practice by political optics.
So now here we are, in a situation where the government is doing what it always does, levying what's essentially a criminal punishment (incarceration in this case, typically fines historically) in a case where allegedly no crime has been committed, and then give the accused only kangaroo court administrative process because it's not a crime, but now it's doing it at scale, flagrantly, loudly and against the political will of some of the locations it's doing it in.
There are a lot of bricks in this road to hell and someone somewhere was issuing a warning as each one was laid. Should have listened.
What is the point of a database with incorrect biometric data connected to a person?
The point is domination, and the app is simply one means to that end. They'd find another if they had to.
This is a problem from your government, by your government, that you voted for - one way or another. Pretending this problem is originating from anywhere else except the political choices you're making as a nation is denying reality.
What happens right now is this: ICE can run loose and do whatever they want. If some judge finds their activities illegal, they can block ICE from doing the illegal things.
But...who's going to stop them? Not the DOJ. Stephen Miller has said that ICE have "federal immunity". The keen observer will of course know that there's no such thing as "federal immunity", so a charitable way to interpret that statement is that no-one federal will go after them.
So what about states, and local police? Sure, they could start arresting them, but then again, Miller et. al have warned the states about not interfering, threatening with going after LEO's etc. with federal charges if they do so.
The long story made short is that they can (and will) keep doing illegal shit until someone stops them, and that's not going to happen as long as Trump is POTUS. DOJ and ICE leaderships has explicitly said that their workers should just ignore the law and courts.
The scary thing is that there is.. you should look up "sovereign immunity". The government has complete immunity, except where and how the law permits it to be held accountable. And while we have a constitution, defending those rights through the courts requires legislation to permit it. For the most part, federal law permits lawsuits against states that violate the constitution, but have permitted far less accountability for federal actions that violate the constitution.
For example, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act only permits individuals to sue state and local governments for rights violations. It can't be used to sue the federal government.
There's many court cases, dating back decades, tossing out cases against the federal government for rights violations. Look how SCOTUS has limited the precedent set by Bivens over the years, basically neutering it entirely.
Their budget right now is larger than the Marine Corps and a lot of their members are looking at unemployment or prison time if the democrats get back into control of the government. Think about what they are likely to do during the mid terms if they are told to monitor election sites. They are a gang of dangerously brutal violent thugs operating with complete impunity.
The immunity is only from state prosecution and only for acts taken required as part of their official duties, but it does exist.
States ought to do that aynway, then instigate cop-on-cop violence. Ask Putin or Xi for help.
The fact that Americans are getting caught in the dragnet, having their possessions and lives destroyed, getting sent to secret jails or being assaulted for merely being in the same zipcode as an ICE agent doesn't matter to them. It's all about inflicting harm on people they dislike, and if ICE is harming someone then obviously it's because it's they did something bad.
It's pretty dire circumstances. ICE was always close to a paramilitary organization, it just took Trump to actually fund it and push it over the edge.
This is in fact one of the most distressing parts of the situation. Most people conceive of getting off the couch to vote in the midterm as the absolute height of their potential power to stop this. Phone banking for some blue dog in the midterm isng going to cut it in this situation.
Meanwhile the "opposition" has decided to lay low rather than risk their (checks notes) low 30% approval rating by taking a stand on anything (except funding genocide) for most of this year. Every institution is being steamrolled, gutted, corrupted, and weaponized faster than we can keep track, and folks are trying to make themselves believe if we just vote hard enough this will all end in 2-4 years like it was a bad dream rather than an ongoing play-by-play descent into fascism.
I think it remains to be seen how broader US society responds to the approach being taken. Hard to say how close the Senate will be next year.
For example, deportation is a civil action, not criminal. That means that to exile you from your home the government does not need to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, does not need to provide you with legal representation if you can’t afford a lawyer, and the procedure takes place in an administrative court. There have been numerous cases of small children representing themselves in deportation proceedings. And this was all before the current administration.
The point of a bogus database is to give them cover for arresting, imprisoning, and deporting anyone they wish to.
> What is the point of a database with incorrect biometric data connected to a person?
The answer to both questions is ‘to cause fear among the [immigrant] population.’
To keep everyone else in line. Americans are so programmed to defer to aw enforcement that they will watch the most blatant abuses carried out right in front of them with little other than hand-wringing. Immigration status is just the excuse, compliance is the goal. What do you think is going to happen at the next election? ICE doesn't even need to intimidate people at polling places, just the rumor that hey are doing so will be enough to scare many citizens away from voting in person. They could vote by mail, but no doubt you're aware that the President ad his party constantly impugn the validity of such votes. How much do you trust them to uphold and abide by the voting process? We've already seen what happens when they get a result that's not favorable to them.
First of all, it's misleading in its categorization: "half of people who voted in the last election" is not the same as "half of all eligible voters".
Second of all, a lot of the people who voted for Trump do not meaningfully "want fascism". Some do—no question about that! And, unfortunately, some who didn't before have rationalized themselves into wanting it now in order to self-justify their decision to vote for him.
But many of them are low-information voters who genuinely do not understand what is going on, and fall into one (or more) of a few categories:
- People who have always voted Republican, because their parents always voted Republican, and that's just The Way Things Are.
- People who have been brainwashed by constant propaganda from Fox News over the past 30 years telling them that Democrats are Evil.
- People who have poor to no civics education, have seen their economic situation slide slowly downward over the last few decades (or fall off a cliff, eg in 2008), and have heard the various Republican candidates telling them, over and over, "Just vote for us! We will solve all your problems. You don't have to worry about how!" (or "...by punishing the evil Others who are the cause of every ill in this country", depending on how racist they're already primed to be)
None of that requires "wanting fascism". And I can tell you, from personal experience, that there are still people out there—left, right, and center—who genuinely do not know what is going on. They don't watch the news. They just try to get by. They have no idea that ICE is abducting citizens off the streets, that Trump has shattered the executive branch institutions that actually run this country, or that the Supreme Court has said that Trump can do whatever the hell he likes.
If you want to be able to fix a problem, you have to understand it in all its nuance, and just dismissing tens of millions of people as "eh, they all wanted fascism; guess there's no possible way to reach them, then" is the wrong problem definition.
To act as the domestic enforcement arm for Trump's autocratic fascism red in tooth and claw, the culmination of what everyone not drinking social media Kool-aid has been saying for the last 10 years. Yet a third of our country chose to aggressively reject these concerns because throwing the Constitution in the trash "owned the libs", which was the only concrete policy they had left after decades of being led around by the nose by the corporate state.
It's probably not, but your post almost reads like satire in reference to the tv show by Sacha Baron Cohen with the same name. Living with so many contradictions for so long just leaves one confused and disoriented when it all shatters around you. American exceptionalism means the freedom to poison the well and the freedom to die from drinking poisoned water.
If anything, it seems to be helping the people more than the government. Turns out that if the government decides it doesn't need due-process, it doesn't need to spy on people either.
Meta and Palantir are probably the IBM:s of the current age.
For the record: Apparently they helped the original Nazis. One link of many: https://time.com/archive/6931688/ibm-haunted-by-nazi-era-act...
> IBM, according to Black’s book and the lawsuit, was responsible for punch card technology used by Nazi demographers in the years leading up to World War II — and eventually by the SS, which was charged with rounding up Europe’s Jews. Although it has long been known that IBM’s German arm, which was taken over by the Nazis, had cooperated with the regime — and, indeed, was in a consortium of companies making payments to survivors and victims’ families — Black says that the American parent was fully aware of the use to which the technology was put. And after the Germans surrendered, Black says, IBM’s U.S. office was quick to collect profits made during the war by the subsidiary, called Dehomag.
> The punch cards and counting machines, says Black, were provided to Hitler’s government as early as 1933, and were probably used in the Nazis’ first official census that year. The technology came in handy again in 1939 when the government conducted another census, this time with the explicit goal of identifying and locating German Jews — and finally, Black alleges, in tracking records at Nazi concentration camps.
> It’s this specificity of purpose, says William Seltzer, an expert in demographic statistics at Fordham University, that provides the most damning evidence. “Microsoft is not responsible for every spreadsheet made with Excel,” Seltzer told TIME.com. “But if someone is doing custom designing of a database, they have to know what’s going on. With these punch cards, Dehomag had to design a card for every piece of new information that the government wanted.”
Fake masks are so advanced now, I'm sure the IC has 3d printers that could just arbitrarily map any face to any user. And this insane spoofing capability would give not just the government, but contractors, corrupt police departments, or hackers or rich people that aquire the data.
And that's just the physical realm because to me that's the scariest one, but giving these power manipulators access to likeness for deep fake video is probably sufficient to cause all kind of havock.
There may be some confusion here. It's legal for anyone to take a photo of anyone else in public, with few exceptions. TFA is not saying that ICE is forcing people to stand for a photo, it's saying that once ICE takes a photo, they can do stuff with it.
As an aside, it's my understanding that, unless someone is arrested, they're free to wear whatever clothing they like including something that covers their face. Probable cause is required for arrest, therefore ICE cannot force you to uncover your face. I'm not sure this has been tested much though, especially with folks temporarily detained.
Second aside, I anticipate a ton of lawsuits where folks give clear and convincing evidence of US citizenship and are unlawfully detained thereafter.
You don’t have to look too far on the internet to see that ICE is acting with impunity, and that the regular rules and rights are not being applied.
I have US citizenship + SSN but never lived in the USA. I do have a passport though and visited a few times for vacations.
This is a trust issue.
I've been troubled by the normalization of "daddy" and paternal government rhetoric, especially the "daddy's home" framing that's become so prevalent. This language isn't just colorful—it signals something genuinely dangerous about how we're being asked to relate to political authority.
When we accept government through a paternalistic lens, we're accepting a fundamentally anti-democratic premise: that citizens should be treated as dependents rather than as autonomous equals. This isn't new—fascist regimes have consistently used paternal imagery to justify concentrated power, from Stalin to Hitler to countless others. The "strong father" archetype is a proven tool for normalizing authoritarian control.
What's particularly troubling about the "daddy" rhetoric we're seeing is how it combines paternalism with threats of punishment and retribution. It invites a dynamic where citizens compete for approval from a leader who's positioned as both protector and disciplinarian—someone who will "spank" the nation for "misbehaving." This language erodes the principle that government authority should be accountable to the people, not the reverse.
Democracy requires citizens who see themselves as stakeholders in governance, not children waiting for a father figure to tell them what's best. When we accept government as "dad," we're tacitly accepting a hierarchy where some people are "favored children" (the in-group) and others are outsiders to be excluded or punished. History shows this path leads away from democracy.
We should resist this framing, not because strong leadership is bad, but because paternalism is incompatible with democratic equality and individual autonomy.
I am not saying you are, but many people who talk about individualism and autonomy are.
It is ridiculously inconsistent.
You are choosing a daddy(or rather 50%+1 best case is choosing a daddy for you) ignoring the technicalities for each so-called democratic-block country (sometimes it's a committee, sometimes the committee chooses a daddy, sometimes they choose the most voted daddy even if only by a minority, etc.).
We could discuss the benefits of more direct participation in politics but I don't think that framing changes the essence of the question as it stands.
Some don't trust the committee, others don't trust the strong man, others don't trust the 50%+1, others don't trust the 50%-1. None of them being able to trust anyone else is the core issue.
You can't refuse your transfer to New Eden.
The slide into authoritarianism and fascism is becoming more blatantly obvious every day. It’s legitimately terrifying.