Why Conservatives Hate the Government But Love the Cops

Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs:

It is tempting to label Gadsden a hypocrite for designing a flag endorsing freedom from violent coercion while personally depriving others of their freedom through violent coercion. But Gadsden was not a hypocrite. He was just evil. His principle was that he and his fellow white property owners ought not be made to do anything they didn’t want to do. The flag says nothing about whether Black people ought or ought not be trodden on. Similarly, there is nothing peculiar about a “Blue Lives Matter” flag next to a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. The combined message of the two is: please tread on someone else. 

“Small government for me but not for thee” is the right’s implicit motto. Frank Wilhoit put this pithily when he said that conservatism consists of the single proposition that: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” […]

Thus, conservatives are not really sincere when they say they believe in “small government.” What they mean is that they believe in small government when it comes to anything that could restrict them (conservatives generally but also members of the privileged in-group) from doing as they please. The lovers of liberty, however, want the government to be omnipresent and carry heavy weaponry in order to regulate all kinds of behaviors of other people.

Building the Camps

Andrea Pitzer, clear-eyed on the Trump Administration’s race to build its massive detention and deportation infrastructure:

When I got the contract to write a history of concentration camps in 2014, I really hoped to keep the US from ending up where it is today. That part didn’t work out. But now, it’s critical to understand how much is already underway, and the enormity of what’s coming. The sooner we act to stop it, the more people we can save, and the less infrastructure there will be to dismantle in the future.

The United States of America already has massive capacity to cage people because we’ve over-invested in jails and prisons forever. This administration is gobbling up that capacity.

Prairielands Freedom Fund, a decade-long bond fund here in Iowa City, is seeing a crushing demand from immigrants detained in the reopened, privately owned for-profit North Lake Processing Center, the largest ICE detention center in the Midwest and one of the country’s largest.

It’s a bad as you think.

But our massive prison infrastructure isn’t enough for a campaign promising to deport 20 million people and conceived to terrorize millions more.

More and more news reports are popping up, describing warehouses the administration is acquiring, with plans to convert them to detention facilities. ICE has spent nearly three-quarter of a billion dollars acquiring these formerly commercial sites. And that’s in addition to other places, like the tent city Camp East Montana, already operating around the country. 

[…]

Whatever noises Trump made about dialing back the aggressive actions from immigration enforcement agents after the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, there has been no real halt to the ethnic cleansing project driven by Stephen Miller and blessed by the president. On the streets, the secret police’s tactics of ICE and Border Patrol are becoming more strategic. But the overall mission is moving full speed ahead.

The work to build this authoritarian support system of concentration camps requires otherwise unused warehouses and commercial sites. Because that’s how you spin up a concentration camp system quickly while you work to build something permanent. The infamous, death camp Dachau started as a closed munitions factory before it was converted into a concentration camp in 1933. 

Pitzer offers actionable path to resist including leveraging NIMBY tendencies to slow or prevent the acquisition or opening of concentration camp infrastructure and continuing to make ICE employment and collaboration shameful and taxing by refusing service and threatening costs to companies who provide services.

    I struggle with the use of what feels like hyperbolic use of terms like “concentration camp,” not by Pitzer specifically, but generally. It is so loaded, locked into an abhorrent era of human existence, so I appreciate this:

    So few people understand exactly what’s happening—this is one of the reasons I encourage the use of the term concentration camp. People recognize that term as an escalation of the usual state of detention. And the current potential for harm is vast.

    We seemly use a different term each time we cage humans and stop pretending it’s humane: concentration camp, gulag, interment camp, labor camp. “Camp” feels amorphous. But we’re on the path to death camp authoritarian regime here, so the sooner our nomenclature fits, the better.

    Lack of Student Interest, Scheduling Issues Delays UI Center for Intellectual Freedom

    Grace Bartlett at The Daily Iowan:

    The Center for Intellectual Freedom, newly housed at the University of Iowa, postponed classes set to begin in January to March following issues with staff scheduling and a lack of student participation. 

    The center’s Political and Economic Institutions in the United States class has two of 32 available seats filled and its American Culture and Values class has four of 32 seats filled as of Feb. 2. 

    You love to see it.

    Fuck This

    Federal agents have murdered a man, identified as 37-year-old Alex Jeffery Pretti. He was a registered nurse and was recording ICE and Border Patrol activity in Minneapolis like many of his neighbors in the unprecedented, decentralized resistance in Minnesota.

    Masked police took Pretti to the ground. Then 10 shot in five seconds. Then his body went limp.

    Fuck this.

    A World Without Prisons

    To celebrate a year of publishing a monthly newsletter, Iowa City Mutual Aid solicited responses to the prompt “what does a world without prisons look like?” Here is my response.

    Prisons are a symptom, edifices to a culture insisting people are either good or bad—a lesson we learn as children and one that saturates our media, politics, policies, and the ways we move through the world.

    Prisons are places where we lock people away for their faults and imperfections. We build them to contain those who harm so we can pretend to rehabilitate them; those who are mentally ill because we don’t have treatment for them; those without homes because we don’t have houses for them. We build prisons to hide, out of sight, the people we choose to discard rather than care for.

    And then we build more. We rebuild them. We expand them. Prisons become an excuse not to construct—or even imagine—something better.

    A world without prisons is a world that accepts each of us as a human with imperfection and responds with care, rather than exile. It is a world oriented toward healing and transformation and justice for those who cause harm and those who are hurt. It is a transformed world of peace that knows people are not simply good or bad. It is a world that knows each and every one of us needs healing, causes harm and is worthy of care.

    ‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams Dies at 68

    Mark Kennedy for The Associated Press:

    It all collapsed quickly in 2023 when Adams, who was white, repeatedly referred to Black people as members of a “hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans.” He later said he was being hyperbolic, yet continued to defend his stance.

    Almost immediately, newspapers dropped “Dilbert” and his distributor, Andrews McMeel Universal, severed ties with the cartoonist. The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Massachusetts, decided to keep the “Dilbert” space blank for a while “as a reminder of the racism that pervades our society.” A planned book was scrapped.

    “He’s not being canceled. He’s experiencing the consequences of expressing his views,” Bill Holbrook, the creator of the strip “On the Fastrack,” told The Associated Press at the time. “I am in full support with him saying anything he wants to, but then he has to own the consequences of saying them.”

    It’s OK to Be Angry. You Should Be Angry.

    Look. We don’t have to agree about policing in America. We don’t even have to agree that the state shouldn’t have the power to kill. But I hope we can agree that the state shouldn’t be able to kill someone in the street.

    We call that murder.

    Can You Imagine What We Could Do If They Spent This Time On Our Community’s Urgent Issues?

    On Tuesday, Jan, 6, 2026, the Iowa City Council will hold its organizational meeting where they will elect the mayor and mayor pro tempore, and assign councilors to a variety of other roles of various power.

    The amount of work and focus this biennial decision takes is absolutely ridiculous: opaque, petty and ego-driven.

    What if our elected leaders spent this energy and urgency on something that actually mattered?

    Watch when later this month they give less attention to advancing a multimillion-dollar budget.