Law Versus Order

 Paul Campos links to a Gessen piece about the nature of totalitarian and terror regimes. He's among the more alarmist of the writers I read (doesn't make him wrong, just saying), and I don't think we have a totalitarian regime right now. That seems absurd. If we did, there would be no coverage at all of the execution of Alex Pretti. It is clear though that what Trump and his legions want to implement is state terror. 

What ICE is doing in Minneapolis is not remotely "legal" under any earlier understanding of the word. It is not constitutional, certainly, as they routinely engage in illegal searches, they attack people exercising their First Amendment rights and they basically kidnap people without warrants. We can add extrajudicial killings to the litany of illegal actions. Instead, as a commentator note, what they want is not "law" but "order," which is to say compliance. Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive, if they simply laid down and did not challenge the state's actions - actions, again, that are constitutionally highly dubious. 

I have argued in the past that Trumpism is not conservative but reactionary, and I stand by that. The reflex to impose order at the expense of liberty is, however, a hallmark of conservatism. The impulse to bow down to hierarchies is at the root of all conservatism. There are times when that makes a certain amount of sense, but it is certainly not universally true. Conservatives hated Martin Luther King with a white hot passion - not because he was violent, but because he challenged the structures that imposed a brutish order.

Watch the lying the sacks of shit who go before cameras and lie to you about what your own eyes can see. They aren't serving the law or the Constitution, they are serving their ideal of an authoritarian order where the strong crush the weak.