“America’s Police State Has Arrived,” screamed a column in Sunday’s New York Times by Masha Gessen, who was a prominent gay rights activist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia before escaping to the United States and writing books on Putin’s Russia.
She's using the byline "M. Gessen" now, and here’s how “they” are identified by the Times: “They won a George Polk award for opinion writing in 2024."
Unfortunately, after less than three months into the second Trump Administration, Gessen is seeing Putinism inside every black car in America, judging by the hyperbolic tone of this piece. The online title: “Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.”
No one will ask Times "fact checker" Linda Qiu to get involved. Within three paragraphs we’re in Stasi territory.
Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”
….
It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in Harlem. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia. ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. ICE agents are wearing brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS -- don’t open the door for deliveries. Don’t leave the house. The streets in the New York neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out.
Of course “word of mouth” isn’t journalism, which Gessen later implicitly admitted.
And then there was a German green card holder at Boston’s Logan Airport who was allegedly stripped and deprived of sleep and his medications by Customs and Border Protection -- actions that could fit the legal definition of torture. (The agency has denied the allegations.) And a Canadian with a job offer who was detained at the southern border and held for 12 days. And another German, a tourist, who was detained at the southern border and held for more than six weeks....
Gessen was obliged to mention the extenuating circumstances to the above horror stories but still suggested it was just window-dressing to cover Soviet-style repression.
It’s the way we dig down for the details of these stories to reassure ourselves that this won’t happen to us, or that there is some logic to these arrests. The German man had a misdemeanor charge a decade ago. The Canadian was possibly using a crossing not meant for people submitting work visa applications. The other German, a tattoo artist, was carrying her equipment and customs agents might have suspected that she was planning to work illegally....
When the range of factors that can get a person arrested stretches from political speech to a paperwork error, we are in territory described by the Russian saying, “Give us a person and we’ll find the infraction.”
After a decade of liberals indulging in promoting career-damaging lists of dangerous sexists or conservatives, after years of curtain-twitching liberals turning in unmasked people or unapproved gatherings during the COVID hysteria, of the ongoing efforts of lefties joining with their former enemies at the FBI to track down January 6 “insurrectionists,” suddenly, lists are dangerous.
It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists. A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” The app promises rewards for “capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity” and possibly even bigger rewards for self-reporting — for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one is “an honest, hard-working undocumented immigrant with no criminal history.” The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries.
Gessen concluded her self-discrediting rant:
….we have to say what we see: The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.
