It certainly seems that way, as long as said apparatus ensures their team stays in power. The alternative, consistently and actively engaging in politics, was too much.

They used to sell a slow cooker whose catch phrase was "set it and forget it." This also described prevailing attitudes about political engagement beyond elections.

We've sure tried to forget them, but even though they miss 95% of the bomb exercises they are put through, they insist that we dont move on from them.

Itd be faster and just as effective if we made a bonfire of our money at the airport and all just emptied our wallets into it as we passed by them.

It does make sense to have someone who coordinates all the different federal police and intelligence forces in the country. The US has TSA, ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, Secret Service, Federal Marshals, even the USPS has a police force.

Without some kind of coordination you have undercover agents of one service being wiretapped and followed by another service. Plus, you get the kinds of things that happened around 9/11 where each agency had a slice of the picture but they weren't sharing info so nobody had the whole picture.

I think in a sensible country ATF would be the alcohol branch, tobacco branch and firearms branches of the federal police force. DEA would be the drug enforcement arm of that federal police force. It seems really strange to me that the FBI is basically the federal police force, but for some reason when it comes to firearms-related crime, that's someone else's department.

Also, in a sensible country, someone would be policing the police. I don't actually think any country has properly figured that out though. In reality, it seems like an important role for the police is to enforce the status quo, and ensure that the people on top remain on top and the people on the bottom remain there. That allows police to place themselves slightly below the people on top, but importantly significantly above those on the bottom. Because of that, I don't think the rich and powerful in any country really want a fully controlled police force, otherwise they can't do the extra-judicial things that maintain the hierarchy.

Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности), which translates to the Committee for State Security

tusk tusk, er I mean "tisk tisk..."

Honestly, I'm more scared of TSA than anything they are supposedly preventing.

Huh, almost like that was the point -- make it so sprawling people can't comprehend getting rid of it. Too bad a lot of us remember a world before the DHS, and it wasn't rampant street terrorism in the USA like they'd have you believe.

ICE is under DHS. DHS is also doing a bunch of wildly unpopular political "investigations". There are also a lot of concerns about surveillance in general, which DHS is definitely doing (like buying adtech data on everyone) It is not at all controversial to call for scrapping the whole department. Maybe the messaging needs refinement.

Defund the police was a popular slogan in 2020, the year that Trump lost. Also, 65% of Americans polled thought burning down the Minneapolis East Precinct was justified.

Also, DHS is much smaller & newer than the idea of police departments. America existed for a long time without DHS, so I don’t even think these are equivalent things at all.

Gotta slowly reverse boil the frog - these are definitely great first steps and will hopefully warm the public up to demilitarizing, then defanging, then defunding/abolishing the police state.

A lot of us remember an America without it and the DHS. They are both 9/11 knee jerk reactions that have been nothing but bad for us, exactly like the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. We would have been so much better off to just take the (L) after 9/11 but W kept trying for a (W).

Also the Espionage Act.

And Taft-Hartley

It's not the party, though. There are progressive members of the party, and when they introduce bills like this, the rest of the Democrats cough uncomfortably, and sidle away quietly, leaving the brave progressive to bear the full brunt of the right-wing outrage machine. (See, for example, the Green New Deal.)

There are a lot of adults alive today who’ve had it their entire lives