We ask things like this because we fundamentally misunderstand the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement's fundamental claim is that America is under attack by an insurgent force. The Trump regime (read: Heritage Foundation) is a counter-insurgency operating under emergency conditions.
We all voted for this, we are getting what we voted for. Why would we try to stop it?
ICE is scanning public info anyway, nothing they’re doing is illegal or even new. Many parts of the federal government are already scanning social media, like the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.
But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
The Federalist papers, Thomas Jefferson, and the Supreme Court as recently as 2008 have all identified the right to bear arms as a mechanism for protection against a tyrannical state. It's surprising as a 2A supporter that you seem unaware of why the amendment exists.
Yes, every gigantic new secret police force answerable only to the executive is created to "catch criminals" or "deport immigrants" or do whatever else people will accept, until said police force's mandate is morphed as needed. That is why so many 2A defenders are (rightly) skeptical of large domestic police forces answerable to the executive branch, which is what ICE is; it's also why so many defenders have been skeptical of the FBI, ATF, and so on. The only people who think the mandate won't adjust as needed are, to be blunt, trusting patsies, which is not what 2A defenders have historically been.
The creators and defenders of the second amendment were and are smart people. They were skeptical of highly concentrated power, which is why we have a federalist system; they were also highly skeptical of large concentrations of militarized police power, which is why our police in general are run by states and municipalities. It is really quite difficult to reconcile support of a massive ICE apparatus with any sort of comprehension of the political philosophy of the US constitution.
They should. The president posted today on his official account [1] that ICE (among other law enforcement) should arrest anyone burning the flag, an act recently affirmed by SCOTUS to be legal. That has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. Sounds like jack booted thugs to me.
The reference was to the somewhat bombastic set that like to talk about the reason for the second amendment being a backstop against government tyranny or whatever. You seem to be hiding behind a variant definition that covers only advocacy for the second amendment itself. Maybe you're not in the demographic, but there are a lot of them here on HN.
Or were. They've been extremely quiet the last few months. Turns out tyranny isn't so bad when it's aimed at the people you already hate.
> The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.
This is effectively a strawman argument.
We are not discussing their principles that pertain to whom should be allowed to own guns, nor is that question even relevant to the heart of this topic. We are discussing the core, underlying principle that has been used as the primary justification for WHY people should have a constitutionally-protected right to own mechanized, efficient killing machines. You of course already know: the rhetoric (for literal centuries) has been that the preservation of our system of democracy from hostile internal actors requires a citizenry that has the means to effectively fight back.
Without a noble-sounding pretense of existential importance for 2A defenders to shield themselves with, things start to look a lot more like weighing "guns are fun, plus think about hunters" vs "we should reduce our yearly slaughter rate for schoolchildren to match those of other 1st world countries" and choosing the former. So, when people see what they believe to be the increasingly-obvious beginnings of authoritarian overreach in this country, and at the same time seeing most of the 2A crowd saying absolutely nothing about it, it looks like a genuinely remarkable, thoroughly nauseating display of hypocrisy and selfishness.
> But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
Dishonest framing aside ("assembling a social media team", like how drug cartels simply assemble a team of chemists, semantics be damned!) and with full context considered, I assume you are stating here that you see no problem with the current actions of this administration, both ICE-related and not, and have caught no whiffs of authoritarian overreach. Otherwise, social media monitoring and tracking teams within an organization that does not have the rules, oversight, requirements, or legal vulnerability of existing (previously) non-partisan agencies with similar teams, would be extremely concerning.
Though after writing this out, I'm not even clear on how much of this is a matter of opinion versus a matter of awareness and understanding of current events. One needs to only look at the events of the last 7 days to find egregious evidence of authoritarian movement, things that would've sent recent Democratic presidents into political exile and impeachment. I just learned that my neighbors and I are enemies of the US last Tuesday - literally, verbatim, "enemies from within" with no additional qualification beyond living in a blue city - for example.
