What happened next should be the biggest story in America.
Alicia Brooks stuck her key in her door to enter her own apartment. An officer grabbed her. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He never told her. She was detained.
Every resident in the building was detained. Not just suspected gang members. Everyone. Adults. Children. Witnesses report children zip-tied together, crying, terrified. One federal officer, when asked about the children, reportedly said: “Fuck them kids.”
Marlee Sanders watched as agents separated detainees by race. “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”
Thirty-seven people were arrested. How many innocent residents were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, detained for hours without probable cause? Federal authorities won’t say. Residents estimate 30-40 additional people were held and released.
Blackhawk helicopters. Flash bangs. A chainsaw to cut through fencing. Doors blown off hinges. Holes in walls. An entire building’s worth of American citizens treated as enemy combatants in a war zone.
This happened. In Chicago. In America. This week.
And we’ve already moved on to the next story.
Thomas Jefferson understood something about human nature that we’re watching play out in real time. In the Declaration of Independence, just paragraphs after declaring certain truths self-evident, he observed: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
Jefferson wasn’t making an abstract philosophical claim. He was describing what he had witnessed throughout history: humans endure tyranny. They accommodate. They find reasons why this particular violation isn’t quite bad enough to justify the terrifying work of resistance.
They suffer while evils are sufferable.
And what happened in Chicago this week? It’s sufferable. Barely. Just barely. But sufferable enough that most Americans will shrug and scroll past.
The bitter irony is that what occurred in that South Shore apartment building represents precisely the kind of tyranny that provoked the American Revolution itself. (...)
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t just prohibit searches without warrants. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—including searches conducted under the kind of sweeping authority that allows agents to detain everyone in a building because the building itself is “known to be frequented by” suspected criminals.
What happened in Chicago wasn’t a targeted operation against specific individuals for whom probable cause had been established. It was a general sweep. Everyone detained. Everyone held. Everyone’s liberty suspended until federal agents decided whether you were interesting enough to arrest.
This is exactly—exactly—what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.
And America yawned. (...)
This is the inversion of everything a constitutional system of justice is supposed to prevent.
In a legitimate legal order, suspicion of specific criminal activity creates the authority to investigate. You don’t get to pick your enemies and then rifle through their lives looking for something to charge them with. You don’t get to declare entire buildings or neighborhoods presumptively criminal and suspend constitutional protections for everyone within them.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. Chicago isn’t an outlier—it’s a demonstration project. A proof of concept. A test of how far the administration can go before Americans say “no further.” (...)
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. (...)
President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military. Think about what that means. 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.
by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Image: uncredited
[ed. Next 'No Kings' rally is scheduled for October 18 (in your home town).]
