'Warning sighs on road to tyranny'
Six weeks into the Trump administration last year, Chris Hedges spoke at an anti-Trump event in Vancouver, British Columbia, March 3, 2017.
Hedges warned about the prospect of militarized federal and local police "terrorizing and deporting" immigrants living in the United States, waging a "race war" against black and brown folks, more racial profiling, random police stops, wanton human rights violations and abandoning the common good.
All of which existed and have been accelerated by Trump in a broad project to make America white.
Said Hedges:
White Europeans who are undocumented are not being targeted. The executive orders of Trump are directed against people of color. They begin from the premise that white Americans are the true victims of neo-liberalism, deindustrialization, and falling living standards. The Trump orders are written not to make America great again. But to make America white.
They are an updated version of the NAZI's Nuremberg laws, the Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Naturalization Act of 1870. They are intended to institutionalize an overt racial hierarchy in the United States, one already far advanced in the miniature police states where people of color live in marginal communities.
In these impoverished enclaves there is no right to trial or due process. Militarized police kill with impunity, and the courts lock people away often for life. Rights are treated as privileges that can instantly be revoked. The poor, especially poor people of color, are exempted from moral consideration. They are attacked as impediments to social cohesion. And these impediments must be eliminated.
Hedges warned about the cruel consequences of insane social movements finding an oasis in the Trump adminstration, welcoming the dispirited and politically alienated.
Sane Americans saw this coming, but too many did nothing.
From March 2017:
Where can I find a transcript of his Vancouver speech? Thanks
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