 So I want to follow up on the conversation that we had last week about Donald Trump's decision to deploy federal agents to cities like Seattle and Portland. And in the case of Portland, there's been a lot of viral videos on the web that are just downright disturbing of federal agents who don't have any identification in unmarked vehicles, abducting people literally on top of that. They are doing violence. They're assaulting protesters. One of them shot a protester in the face at point blank with a tear gas canister. So I mean, what they're doing here is unspeakable and all of this action that's taking place is happening as the governor, as local officials, you know, the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler are saying, we don't want you here. Get out now just to kind of give you a little bit of a glimpse of what's happening. Take a look at this video and pay close attention to what the agents say as they're detaining this individual and people around bystanders who are watching and filming object to what they're doing. That should send chills down the back of your neck just because you have these people in an unmarked vehicle abducting people. I mean, this is literally what we see in authoritarian regimes. But to make matters worse, in case you didn't hear, one of them said, if you follow us, you will get shot. So the people who are concerned that these strange men are abducting someone, putting them in a vehicle that's unmarked, could be anyone, could be a psychopath, but they're abducting someone and they're saying, follow us and you will get shot. This is taking place in the United States of America, threatening people, abducting people, doing violence. And when I say doing violence, they're doing violence. Take a look at this video of an old Navy vet. He's probably in his fifties or sixties. He's literally not doing anything and police officers assault him. Now he took that beating like a champ. He was pepper sprayed in the face, took it like a champ. He still turned around and flipped him the bird. But I mean, regardless of how well you handle this, you shouldn't be assaulted and sprayed in the face with pepper spray for nothing. If you're out there protesting, exercising your first amendment, right? You shouldn't be assaulted by militarized federal agents. It's completely unacceptable. So it's disturbing and there are dozens of other viral videos you could find online of that same very thing happening. But the silver lining of all of this is that the response from the community has been nothing short of overwhelming. I mean, the words fed goons out of PDX was projected onto the Multnomah County Justice Center and even a small army of moms showed up to form a literal human shield around Black Lives Matter protesters to protect them from police brutality that some of these protesters are seeing from these federal agents. What we're seeing here, the streets on Portland, it looks like a war zone. And not too long ago in cities across the country when the George Floyd protests broke out, lots of America looked like a war zone. But the difference is that these were local police officers. People were demanding their local governments take action to stop police brutality. But now what we're seeing are these federal agents unaccountable to local authorities that Trump has dispatched to Portland and other cities and they're wreaking havoc. I mean, to say that this is a violation of states' rights is an understatement. But we don't hear much from small government conservatives who purport to care about states' rights. In fact, as Mike Jollett pointed out on Twitter, these idiots went from wearing a mask as tyranny to the government can snatch people off the street in unmarked vans in two fucking weeks. Exactly. This is literally tyrannical. It's unconstitutional. If you are going to arrest someone, if you are in law enforcement, you have to read them their Miranda rights. They have to understand why they're being arrested, but they're just being abducted and taken to unknown locations. This is not something that democracies are supposed to allow. They're supposed to be institutional checks that prevent this from happening. Constitutional checks, civil rights and civil liberties that protect us from this. But the fact that Donald Trump is just flippantly violating this and these federal agents from DHS and ICE are complying, that is incredibly disturbing and terrifying and it should shake everyone to their cores. Look, think about if the shoe were on the other foot for a moment. Let's say Donald Trump lost the election and he said it was rigged and he said the results are illegitimate and people took to the streets in Alabama and they started rioting. What this allows is for the president to expand his or her authority and do what Trump is doing. So now if Joe Biden wanted to, he could deploy federal agents to Alabama. It would still be unconstitutional, but since Trump did it and set up this precedent, well now this is a possibility and you would guarantee that the conservatives would not like it if a Democrat did it. But because someone on their team is doing the tyranny, is resorting to authoritarian tactics, they're okay with that. I mean, if Obama did this, if Obama deployed troops to Texas, can you imagine the outcry from Progressives Fox News would never shut up about it? I mean, they were fear mongering about Obama becoming a tyrant and a dictator when he was signing too many executive orders according to them. So for a Democrat to do this, it would be beyond the pill to them. But because it's Donald Trump, that's okay because, you know, he's their guy and if the authoritarian isn't hurting them directly, then it doesn't really matter. To them, democracy is a one-way street. And really these abductions, these illegal detainees, these are just the tip of the iceberg because as journalists Ken Klippenstein uncovered, there are predator drones reportedly on standby, presumably to provide the feds with additional surveillance of protesters. Let me repeat that. Drones are on standby. The same drones that we use to blow up the Middle East and North Africa are on standby in America. So what we're seeing in the United States reflects what our military is doing abroad. So we took the war on terror and, you know, as unacceptable as that was, now we're doing it domestically at home. And the reason why Donald Trump thinks he has the authority to do this is because he signed an executive order that protects statues and anyone who chooses to engage in suspected vandalism in many cases, even if they're not doing anything wrong, well, they are deemed a national security threat. I mean, we already know Donald Trump wants to treat so-called Antifa protesters as terrorists because that's what he said via Twitter. Now we don't necessarily know legally what the implications of that will be, but it certainly tells us what his actions are, you know, what he's trying to how he's trying to justify rather these types of actions, you know, going into Oregon, even if the governor wants him out. Now in response to this, the state of Oregon is now suing the U.S. Marshall Service, ICE and DHS for illegally abducting citizens, which amounts to arrests without them being read their Miranda rights, which is obviously unacceptable. It's illegal. They're also suing for civil rights violations and may even press charges against the one federal agent who shot a protester in the face with tear gas. And additionally, senators from Oregon, such as Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, are taking action as well. Jeff Merkley tweeted, when I get back to DC next week, I will be introducing an amendment to the defense bill with Ron Wyden to stop the Trump administration from sending its paramilitary squads onto America's streets. We won't let these authoritarian tactics stand. And specifically, this legislation would force federal agents to identify themselves, curtail their crowd control abilities, notify local authorities of their presence, and also make violations of said rules illegal. And Representative AOC is releasing a House bill that requires federal agents also to identify themselves. But even though this would make a difference, it's not it's not good enough. Like these agents need to leave immediately. Nobody in Portland wants them there. The governor doesn't want them there. State senators don't want them there. Members of the House of Representatives, such as Suzanne Bonamici, do not want these federal agents there. The people don't want them there. And the city is basically collectively screaming at them to leave, but they're not leaving. And in an interview with Fox News, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf basically remained defiant and said, I'm not going anywhere. I don't care if they want me there or not. I don't care what the governor said. We're going to be there. We don't need their consent to occupy these cities. And so I don't need invitations by the state, state mayors or state governors to do our job. We're going to do that, whether they like us there or not. That's our responsibility. So think about how troubling that is. You have the acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf saying, I, as a member of this federal agency, I don't need the consent to treat citizens in U.S. cities like terrorists and patrol these areas. We're going to do it anyway, whether they like it or not. I mean, this is an extension of the war on terror, but in the United States. And it really should scare every single person who cares about democracy. You know, who doesn't want to see us devolve further into authoritarianism. And on top of that, he admitted basically in a different interview that they're arresting people who aren't even necessarily guilty of any wrongdoing because they're being proactive. I mean, look at this Freudian slip. We are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals and we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable. Now after that interview took place, a minority report was trending on Twitter because this is literally what we saw from the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise where people were arrested because there was some device that was able to predict when someone was going to do a crime if they were thinking about it or something like that. It's been a while since I've seen that. But I mean, they're arresting people who aren't necessarily guilty and they're admitting it and they're not telling them why they're being detained. They're not reading them. They're Miranda rights. They're taking them to weird locations. They don't know where they are. I mean, this is exactly what we see from authoritarian regimes. And I know I sound like a broken record because I've said that multiple times, but this really is a new thing in the United States. Like, we have been stripping away our constitutional protections and chipping away at civil liberties in this country, you know, eroding the Fourth and Eighth Amendments. But this is a new thing. This is a new low, even in our low standards in 2020 America. On top of that, Donald Trump also, in spite of all of the pushback that he's getting, has remained defiant, doubled down and threatened to occupy even more cities if they don't get things under control, whatever that may mean, according to him. And then the police are afraid to do anything. I know New York very well. I know the police very well. New York's finest. And the fact is they're restricted from doing anything. They can't do anything. So what are you planning to do? Well, I'm going to do something that I can tell you because we're not going to get New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore. And all of these Oakland is a mess. We're not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats. And more federal law enforcement to some of these cities. More federal law enforcement that I can tell you. In Portland, they've done a fantastic job. They've been there three days and they really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time. No problem. They grab them. A lot of people in jail, their leaders. These are anarchists. These are not protesters. People say protesters. These people are anarchists. So first of all, note how he just flippantly bragged about how federal agents grab them, grab people as if that's a good thing. Abducting people is something that he's literally bragging about. But on top of that, you know, we saw weeks of protests after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, where police officers in New York, for example, were driving into crowds of protesters shooting pepper spray out the window, marching down streets, militarized police vehicles, you know, yelling at people to go in their homes and shooting at them with tear gas or rubber bullets, whatever it was. I mean, we've seen how brutal these police officers have been, locally speaking. And Trump is complaining that they're too restricted. In New York, for example, where we saw a lot of brutality, they're too restricted. They can't do enough. So that's why we have to send in federal agents, because they need to be more brutal. And I don't have to point out the pattern in the city. See, threatened to send more feds to because he revealed that pattern himself. He said, you know, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland. These are all cities run by Democrats, his political opponents. So he is using war tactics against his political opponents for personal gain, because he thinks that if he appears really tough on crime and is really pro law and order, this can help him get reelected. This is disturbing on so many levels. This is something that we'd see from a country like Turkey with Erdogan who consolidated his power. And it really, like, again, I don't want to sound like a broken record and saying that this is authoritarian, but it is. And as Charles Pierce of Esquire argues, why in the hell is this not a bigger story? A major American city is being softly pinot-shade and broad daylight. And if we know one thing, if this president and his administration get away with this, it will only get worse. You'd have to be out of your mind or comatose since fall of 2016 not to suspect that this could be a dry run for the kind of general urban mobilization at which the president has been hinting since the summer's protests began. This is not an authoritarian impulse. This is authoritarian government, straight, no chaser. And this administration has a powerful thirst for it. It will do anything if it thinks it can get away with it in order to benefit a president who wants to bring the republic down on its head. I agree with this. I mean, we can't keep saying, oh, well, Trump has these authoritarian impulses. Now he's just doing authoritarianism. This is what we see in authoritarian regimes. I mean, if you look at Tunisia under Ben Ali's control, this type of shit was happening and they ended up having a revolution. I mean, not necessarily because this this wasn't the catalyst, but I mean, you had people so skeptical of one another that they could be working for the government, people were being abducted. You know, that's why it's right paranoia. You saw this happening in Chile with Pinochet, people getting abducted. I mean, this is exactly what you see from dictatorships. But it's happening now in America and Trump may be able to get away with this. I mean, what exactly check is there? I mean, you see people taking legal action, but Trump isn't taking legal action to actually do these things. He's just doing it willy-nilly, right, using his executive power to do just that. So what recourse is there in actuality? Is Congress going to pass a bill stopping this? Will the Senate allow it through? I mean, what can actually be done? And that's what's really scary. If there was some type of mechanism to reign in Donald Trump here immediately, that would be one thing. But the fact that he can do this and all we can do essentially is complain. That's really terrifying. And it doesn't help that the federal agencies and the individuals who are in control of these agencies basically are psychopaths who are loving this, like they're getting their rocks off on this, because the CNN's Frida Gittis explains this is far from over. Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan calling the demonstrators criminals flashed a dark glimpse of Trump's playbook on Fox News Thursday that should concern all Americans who cherish the freedom to exercise their constitutionally protected First Amendment rights. I don't want to get ahead of the president and his announcement. Morgan said, but the Department of Justice is going to be involved in this. DHS is going to be involved in this. We're really going to take a stand across the board and we're going to do what needs to be done to protect the men and women of this country. And that right there is really what makes this disturbing because Trump, you know, it's not like he's saying, hey, Mark Morgan, can you go ahead and send some federal agents to Portland so we can occupy that city and stop the protests from happening? And he's saying, I'm sorry, sir. I just don't have the authority to do that, or I don't feel right about doing that. It's not like he's even saying, look, I listened to the president. I deployed troops or agents to the United States at the request of the president. But I would like this to be, you know, legitimized through legislation. Or I would like the governor to formally invite us there. He's just saying, oh, we're going to do it and I love it. And you have the DHS acting secretary saying the same thing. Basically, we don't need their consent. We're going to go into these cities because we are tasked with rooting out terrorism. And if it's happening domestically, if Trump says these people are basically terrorists, we kind of agree with him. We're also fascists just like him. So I mean, this is disturbing. This is disturbing. You see an expansion of the executive and executive power taking place, you know, since the Bush years, Obama also expanded executive power. Trump's doing the same thing. And Biden will most likely do the same thing. I don't want any president to do this because this may necessarily be something that you like and you're cheering on since it's a president and power that you like. But what happens when, you know, there's a power transition and Trump is no longer in office and now a Democratic president wants to do this in a red state, then what? You don't get to scream about tyranny then if you're saying nothing now. And this is a problem that I have with, you know, these small government conservatives, they're only small government selectively. If it's, you know, a particular issue that they really care about, like gun rights or something, then they're small, small government pro-states rights or pro-states rights, if they can, you know, clamp down on civil rights and discriminate against trans people or something like that. I mean, what we're seeing now, this is honestly something that a lot of people aren't taking seriously enough. And I know that this is getting more attention. I know that mainstream media slowly but surely starting to talk about this and its severity, but still this should be so profound to people like individuals in America should just instinctively know that this is so troubling that they should all speak out and be collectively outraged, including Donald Trump's own supporters. And the fact that they're not the fact that probably half the population doesn't even necessarily know that this is happening. It shows that democracy in America is not something that's going to last forever. It's fragile. And we may have, you know, an advantage that other states who devolved into authoritarianism don't have, you know, we have these institutions that have been there forever. But this really shows that democracy is fragile because people, in order for democracy to exist, it has to be legitimate. Like people have to buy into the idea of democracy, right? It can't be selective where they only support democracy, depending on who's in the White House. People really have to deeply believe in democracy in order for it to work. And the fact that so many people in this country, either one don't know or don't care and are cheering on what's happening. It shows you that democracy is in deep trouble. And it's in so much trouble that it's not going to end if Donald Trump is kicked out in November. This is something that requires absolute massive reforms, systemic reforms, institutional reforms, because if we actually believe in democracy and want to protect democracy, we have to make sure that this doesn't happen ever again. Not that someone from our team does it, but that nobody can do this again. This is unacceptable. And I don't think it would be appropriate, even if a governor had requested federal agents. But the fact that they're not and they're doing it without their consent and they're bragging about it, essentially. I mean, this is a, it spells trouble for democracy to say the least.