Mastodawn

Tony Mar 29, 2025

❝ These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” This man was slapped for his tears, beaten for his vulnerability.

No phone calls. No visitors. No books. No talking. Just exile to a place “so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten.”

And all of this—every slap, every sob, every stolen dignity—stamped with American approval. Coordinated with American officials. Executed with American efficiency. ❞

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/28/what-is-it-exactly-that-being-an-american-means-to-you/

What Is It, Exactly, That Being An American Means to You?

Is it a flag on your porch? A sense of pride during the national anthem? A particular vision of freedom or prosperity? Perhaps it’s a story you tell yourself about who we are and what we stan…

Techdirt

Asta [AMP]Mar 28, 2025

@nazgul do we know their names? Have you found or seen anything about the people… we did this to??

Kee Hinckley Mar 28, 2025

@aud We know the names of some of them. The soccer fan with a soccer tattoo, a tattoo artist, the gay barber, the guy with a tattoo honoring his grandmother, the one with one honoring his daughter. But none of them deserved to be denied due process.

El Salvador did return some due to not matching their agreement. Several woman, and a guy who wasn't even from Argentina.

That alone tells you how rushed and completely without logic this was. Speak Spanish, have a tattoo, and on our list of asylum seekers? In you go.

Asta [AMP]Mar 28, 2025

@nazgul I actually ended up finding a list of their names! CBS news published it last week: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/venezuelans-deported-el-salvador-names/

But yes, the whole thing was clearly racist, fascist garbage: “how many brown people can we imprison via extraordinary rendition and without habeas corpus and get away with it?”

Here are the names of the Venezuelans deported by the U.S. to El Salvador

CBS News has obtained an internal government list of the names of the Venezuelans the Trump administration deported to El Salvador.

CBS News

Overdrawn at the Gravitas Bank Mar 28, 2025

@nazgul
Perhaps I am over-cynical, but I'll guess that there are between fifteen and twenty-five percent of our populace for whom this is _candy_. 'Bad things happening to bad people.' something to relieve the pain of your own life.

When British troops liberated concentration-camps they said 'Poor bastards!'; Americans? most of them did the same, but others loudly asked 'What horrible thing did they do to deserve _this_!?'—belief in individual responsibility &a Just World create that question.

PeachMcD Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul
The US was built on stolen land, from murdered populations, using enslaved labor

"A house built on sand cannot stand...." & this house has been given plenty of time to recognize its cruel ignorant arrogance

I am heartbroken about the suffering the fall of this house is causing but praying we can eventually rebuild on Rock:
#Equity #Compassion #Truth #Solidarity

Darwin Woodka Mar 29, 2025

FUCK this fascist bullshit. Trump, Rubio and Noem need their day in The Hague for this alone.

MegatronicThronBanks Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul Sorry I have an issue with 'American Efficiency'

mask-wearing, socially distant entity Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul This is so utterly terrifying and heartbreaking. It’s all too much.

RobinF❌️👑Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul And then Homeland Security Sec makes an obscene threat video with them as her background

Cees de Groot Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul after WWII, the cop-out was "wir haben es night gewußt". Maybe it held up back then, there was no TV, no Internet. I wonder what Americans will say when this is all over and the horrors of this fascist regime are documented by historians (and by, hopefully, the equivalent of the Nürburg tribunals). "We did not know" it cannot be.

DB Schwein Mar 29, 2025

@cdegroot @nazgul

nicht rather than night, but yes, all of it.
Ignorance (of the law) is no defense is true even when "the law" changes.

Cees de Groot Mar 29, 2025

@deirdrebeth heh. Didn't notice the spell checker playing interference. Verzeihung.

DB Schwein Mar 30, 2025

I only did because I tried the auto translate and failed 😄

Juho Mäntysalo Mar 29, 2025

I mean, even the term "American" is imperialist. It was taken from Natives and taken by colonists so "America belongs to Americans" would refer to them. And after colonisation was over, they kept using it, as if they'd have better right to it than Brazilians, Canadians or Mexicans, to name a few.

[ Yeah, "Statesian" doesn't roll off the tongue, but you could also say you're "from the States", or ask "what does US citizenship mean to you?", to give few examples. ]

Daniele10 Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul What we are doing is an abomination. The US is an evil empire under trump.

Deborah Sampson Mar 29, 2025

This is who we are…this darkness & cruelty
Always existed.
The evil done in our name is known to us.

The freedom-fighting, fair-mined problem-solvers…
Are baked into us too!

Neither completely overtaking control…
More like a teeter-totter…finding balance.
No longer.
We’ve deluded ourselves…
Drinking our poisoned Kool-aide…oblivious.

Time to wake up to our reality.
Stand against those perverting & distorting the ideals
We’ve claimed throughout history.
#fight

Deborah Sampson Mar 29, 2025

This pieced something deep inside…chills!

“Being feared isn’t strength.
True strength lies in being just when it would be easier to be cruel.
In maintaining our principles when they’re inconvenient. In seeing the humanity in others even when it would be politically expedient to deny it.
What kind of nation have we become that we measure our greatness not by who we protect but by who we can brutalize?
Not by what we build but by what we destroy?”

🍉 –Hans Bot– 🙃Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul Throughout history, whenever man in power started dehumanizing groups of people, it never ended well

Polly Waugh Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul
“… This is the true test of what being an American means: not what we proclaim when standing tall at a ballgame or wrapping ourselves in patriotic symbols, but what we permit to be done to the vulnerable when we think no one is watching.”
(Bears repeating)

punIssuer Mar 29, 2025

@nazgul "Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day."

With House GOP, not even that remains true...

"In this case, Republican leaders did so using a particularly unusual contortion: They essentially declared the rest of the year one long day, nullifying a law that allows the House and Senate to jointly put an end to a disaster declared by the president."
– https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/us/politics/trump-tariffs-house-gop-vote.html

Republicans Quietly Cede Power to Undo Trump’s Tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China

House G.O.P. leaders tucked the provision into a procedural measure needed to pass a government spending bill.

The New York Times