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Standing up to Trump’s secret police
Will governors side with state residents or Trump’s paramilitary secret police?
As is my routine, yesterday morning I opened up Twitter expecting to see the usual lineup of outrages from the Trump administration. But something was different yesterday. What I saw made my blood run cold.
I’m referring to the federal paramilitary forces deployed to Portland, cruising the streets looking for people who appear to be protesters so they can arrest them.
Arrest, though, might be too kind a word. In an era when police overreach has been amply documented, the video of these masked stormtroopers taking away 29-year old Mark Pettibone was downright terrifying. For a moment, I had a hard time believing I was watching a video from an American city. It seemed more like something from a movie about Chile where the Pinochet regime “disappeared” critics of the government. Or maybe, it was more like something from the Handmaid’s Tale.
