Chicago And The End Of American Liberty. [View all]

“… Why are we accommodating this?

The calculus is simple and ancient: it’s not happening to us. The targets are gang members and their unfortunate neighbors — mostly Black and brown people in neighborhoods most Americans will never visit. This violation doesn’t affect me directly, and resisting it would require effort, risk, discomfort. Easier to believe that people detained probably did something to deserve scrutiny, even if we can’t quite articulate what.

Because it’s sufferable.
This is the logic that makes tyranny possible.

Every authoritarian regime in history has relied on this same human tendency to accommodate violations of other people’s rights while trusting that “it won’t happen to me.”
Every descent into authoritarianism proceeds through exactly this pattern: define an enemy (gangs, immigrants, terrorists, dissidents), suspend normal legal protections in the name of fighting that enemy, expand the definition of who counts as the enemy, repeat.

The architecture is always the same. Only the specific targets change.

And here’s what people still don’t understand:
once you normalize the suspension of constitutional rights for one group, you’ve eliminated the principle that protects everyone.

Once you accept that the government can detain entire buildings full of people without individualized probable cause because “bad people might be there,”
you’ve conceded the logic that makes your own rights contingent on someone else’s judgment about whether your neighborhood, your building, your home might harbor someone the government wants.

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect gang members.
It protects Pertissue Fisher, standing in her nightgown with a gun in her face. It protects Alicia Brooks, grabbed at her own door. It protects those children, zip-tied and terrified.

It protects you.

Or it did. Until we collectively decided that protecting those people was too much trouble.

President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military...
Not that the military should train in Chicago — that Chicago itself, an American city, should serve as practice for what? Urban warfare? Population control? The exercise of federal force against civilian populations?

This isn’t hyperbole. These are his words. And the response from most Americans has been… silence. Accommodation. The sufferable evil...

Because we are falling now.

Not metaphorically. Actually.
The constitutional order that prevents arbitrary government power is collapsing in real time, and most Americans are scrolling past the evidence on their way to something more entertaining.

The wire is breaking. The center cannot hold. And the ground approaches.

You can feel it if you’re paying attention — that sickening acceleration,
that sense that things are moving faster than our capacity to process them, that each new violation makes the previous one seem almost quaint in retrospect. Warrantless mass detentions. Children zip-tied. American citizens sorted by race. American cities as military training grounds.

Each accommodation makes the next violation easier.
Each shrug gives permission for something worse. Each time we decide that this particular evil is sufferable, we lower the threshold for what becomes acceptable.

This is how it happens. Not all at once, but through a series of choices
—individual and collective— to look away, to accommodate, to suffer what seems survivable rather than risk the unknown consequences of resistance...

The ground approaches. You can choose to notice.
You can choose to care. You can choose to say “this far and no further.”

Or you can scroll past. You can shrug.
You can decide this particular evil is still sufferable, that someone else will hold the center, that surely it won’t come to your door.

All experience hath shewn which choice most people make.

But you are not most people. You are you — conscious, capable, still free enough to choose what you will accommodate and what you will resist.

Federal agents detained American citizens without individualized probable cause this week. They handcuffed children. They sorted people by race. They treated an American city like occupied territory.

This happened.

The question isn’t whether it happened.
The question is whether you’ll decide it’s sufferable.

Because that choice — your choice, made right now, in this moment — is what determines whether we land or crash.

The ground approaches.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day.

And the Fourth Amendment means nothing if we collectively decide it’s too much trouble to defend.

Hold the center. Or watch it collapse.
There is no third option.”

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/03/chicago-and-the-end-of-american-liberty/

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