Let me paint a picture for you – an alternate reality, if you will. A government, elected on the back of lies and deceit, uses its awesome and difficult-to-challenge powers to oppress and suppress its people. It decides that there are a large population of light skinned people who are in the country illegally. They are the source of crime in the country and must be excised from their borders. They send a masked quasi-military force into communities to thin out this population. The courts have supported the ability of the force to use the shade of their skin as a element of probable cause to question and detain people meeting this description, incarcerating them for days or weeks, with no contact permitted and no reasonable way to argue their innocence.

This same country uses its military might to bomb undefended boats in its hemisphere, telling the public that the pale occupants of the boats are terrorist and drug-running threats to our way of life. They cannot identify by name who their targets are; they simply murder the occupants of the boats as enemies and publicly declare victory. They declare the white leaders of countries in their hemisphere as drug-lords and enemies of the state.

The leaders of this country targets its political opponents for jail and execution. They use social media to suggest the death by hanging of political opponents. They suggest law enforcement target criminal investigations based on political loyalty and political affiliation. They encourage the display of anti-minority emblems used throughout history to represent violent movements and actions.

Do these actions describe a decent country? A set of leaders exemplifying the highest ideals? A magnet and beacon of freedom and liberty? If you answered yes, then book your ticket to Afghanistan or Somalia and stop reading this blog – I think you should experience oppression first hand. If no, then ask yourself how you intend to fight the indecency of the Trump Administration.

The United States, under the Trump Administration, has placed a dark stain on our decency. We have ICE agents pulling over every Latin looking person (irrespective of age) and depriving them of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whether people are citizens, on immigration parole, in the process of being naturalized, or in the country illegally doesn’t matter. A recent investigation by ProPublica found over 170 citizens that have been deprived of their Constitutional rights by ICE during this racist campaign. That doesn’t include the thousands more of non-citizens that have had their rights suspended. And none of them have any recourse.

The justification for this immigration crackdown was crime. But this same government has released data on 2024 crime rates, showing dramatic declines (all after large immigration influxes). Another justification was drug interdiction. Thus the bombing of small boats off the coast of South America – not with any evidence of drugs being transported, let alone knowing the names of the people they murdered on the boats. And when survivors of a boat bombing are retrieved, instead of prosecuting them for their supposed crimes, the government sent them back to their home countries (countries that returned them to their families, for lack of any evidence of them committing crimes). In the meantime, local police authorities have been actually interdicting drug activity, most recently in Washington State and Colorado. Both of these were linked to Mexican cartel activity – activity that has not been targeted by the Administration.

But law and order in the US has become a very selective matter – with President Trump leading a charge to bias enforcement against his political opponents. Following the successful effort by Congress to release files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, the President called for the Justice Department to investigate Democrats linked to the sex offender (because Republicans like himself that are connected to him should get a free pass). He already has directed the Justice Department to investigate attorney Jack Smith (special prosecutor on the classified documents case against Trump), James Comey (former FBI Director and critic), Leticia James (successful prosecutor in NY State on Trump’s felony convictions there), and Senator Adam Schiff (a particularly thorny opponent) – some with cases filed in court (largely flailing as we speak). In his most recent rant, the President has called for a group of congresspeople to be ‘hanged’ – for informing federal employees of their rights and obligations to disobey unlawful commands. I suspect the President would not find language aimed at him in this way to be acceptable. But there is nothing but double standards in the Trump Administration.

But the last dark cherry placed atop the rancid cake this week is the decision by the Coast Guard to reclassify certain hate symbols as merely “potentially divisive”. Those symbols that are now tolerable? The Nazi swastika and the image of a noose. Apparently troop cohesiveness can take a back seat to keeping racist soldiers in the armed forces. Ironically, in Germany the use of a swastika can result in up to three years of imprisonment.

Where has the decency in America gone?

And the national disgrace continues…