“Empire at home.”

Tyranny behind masks.

‘There’s something happening here.’ (Photo, C.M.)

13 JANUARY—ICE is out of control, and the nation slides into a crisis from which it will not easily extricate itself. Countless videos show agents brutalizing people on city streets, behaving in ways altogether reminiscent of Germany’s Braunhemde—the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, so named for their brown shirts.

On Monday FOX News shared video of a man praying over an ICE agent and asking Jesus to protect him. This occurred as if staged—and almost certainly it was—at the scene of the murder of Renee Nicole Good, shot by an ICE agent on 7 January in the city of Minneapolis. Pundits on the same propaganda channel spent much of Monday discussing the legal consequences of calling an ICE agent a murderer.

The party of small government, supposed small-government, constitution-abiding and ever an advocate of states’ rights, now wants name-calling to be a prosecutable crime. “Hypocrisy” isn’t strong enough to describe these kinds of obscene contradictions. Just how fragile are these armed and masked ICE goons, I find myself wondering. Who are the snowflakes now?

More seriously, because little could be more serious at this moment, what we’re seeing on social media and our TV screens is evidence, more or less a record, of the American imperium sliding into ever-accelerating decline—at home and abroad—and taking the Constitution and ordinary citizens down with it.