Abrego Garcia Was Beaten and Tortured in El Salvador Prison, Lawyers Say

The speaker would need to sleep every night with a gun under their pillow, in a room with no window.

In a game-theory-prisoner-dilemma kind of situation, yeah, maybe. In the real world, those guys were always sure to point their to guns to those they knew very obviously couldn't retaliate back. And I'm not strictly talking about minorities, by the way. Simply, those who weren't part of their circle had a rough time and the police made very clear that they would act in their defense if anyone tried something funny.

I've only seen shit like this in sicily in the early 90s, when the mob controlled much of the big cities.

> With that said, it's moot since a large portion of the population wants an authoritarian dictator/king. I'm not sure if the founders addressed the issue of the people possibly wanting a king again.

You're wrong, twice. Most population doesn't want a dictator king. And founders actually put protections against such scenario, in the form of supreme court.

The actual scenario you're facing is the majority of supreme court (and congress) wanting (or willing to bend a knee to) a dictator king.

I don't believe either of those examples are appropriate. The U.S military is never going to withdraw from the U.S due to the public growing weary of the war. The opposite would happen. The insurgency would surrender.

Also in the case of Vietnam, it's worth noting that the Viet Cong for all intents and purposes lost the insurgency. The war was won by the conventional forces of North Vietnam after the U.S ceased military aid to the south.

I also missed the most important point. Neither country had a 2nd amendment and both insurgencies imported arms illegally. And actual military hardware at that, not revolvers and sporting shotguns.

I don't think you can draw conclusions from wars us lost if you cite such different examples as Afghanistan and Vietnam. By that measure US lost also in Korea and Iraq

> An armed populace can stand up to a government. All you have to look at are the wars that the US has lost - Vietnam and Afghanistan come to mind.

The US did not 'lose' Vietnam to a bunch of citizens/people: it was fighting a proxy war against China and the Soviet Union.

Further, South Vietnam existed for many years and when the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, and for a further two years. When the South fell in 1975 it was not because the US was beaten, but because it had moved on in its priorities.

The Vietnam theatre achieved its larger goal of driving a wedge between the Soviets and Chinese in the Cold War. See this lecture from Sarah Paine of the US Naval War College, "Who Lost the Vietnam War?":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjXlvIBQmU0

As I've said in another reply, the U.S public growing weary of the war would not result in a U.S military withdrawal from the United States, but instead would likely result in a surrender of the insurgency.

And the Taliban had Soviet era military weaponry, not legally purchasable under the 2nd amendment firearms.

>Decent hypothesis, but fails when we compare America to other capitalist countries. (Or non-capitalist countries, extant and historically, with extreme wealth inequality.)

What countries other than the US have the sheer extreme wealth inequality the US does?

Really the only other comparison is China. Which went from an existing authoritarian state to an authoritarian state using its working class as effective slave labor for western capital. It's "state capitalism"

Under the first Bush and continued under Clinton, Haitian asylum seekers were interdicted at sea and sent to Guantanamo to avoid due process, which set the stage for its use in the war on terror. However, in these earlier uses it was for additional processing to give a chance at asylum for those claiming persecution and others not seeking it were deported back to Haiti directly.

But it was still used to avoid full due process. Under treaties that are supposed to be law of the land under the constitution, we are supposed to accept legitimate asylum seekers.

Note that this doesn't need to be neoliberals. Liberals/conservative do the same each time the status quo is at risk (see Spanish civil war). The most famous are Hindenburg and Papen making a deal with Hitler with the help of their midwife Shroder, because they were afraid of the agrarian reform supported by the left and saw the electoral decline of their 'center' and their right (including NSDAP) in the last free elections of 32. Nazi were given the power, they weren't voted into it.