Lesbian MSNBC News host Rachel Maddow told viewers last night that Americans in the U.S. “now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge,” adding, “We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country” under President Donald Trump. She then laid out her case.

Maddow noted the use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as a “secret police,” calling them, “A massive, anonymous, unbadged, literally masked, totally unaccountable internal police force that apparently has infinite funding but no identifiable leadership,” and saying that “they act in ways designed to instill maximum fear and use maximum force.”

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She then shared videos of ICE agents “breaking people’s car windows and snatching people off the streets and out of church parking lots and courtroom hallways and taking them away with no charges, no notice, no paperwork, no explanation, not letting them see lawyers, and then moving them secretly to what are effectively black site prisons, where they won’t tell you who’s there and where no one’s allowed in to see what’s going on.”

One of these prisons includes CECOT, the Salvadoran torture camp where Trump sent a gay asylum seeker and hundreds of other men who had not been charged with crimes. The administration sent the men there without due process to determine if there was a reason to send them there and then claimed to be unable to either check on the men or release them. The gay asylum seeker was unable to speak to his family or lawyers while detained there, and the detainees described brutal sexual, physical, and psychological torture that they endured there.

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Maddow noted that, like most dictatorships, Trump has targeted immigrants as a “scapegoated minority group.” She also highlighted Trump’s recent comments that he intends to strip Americans of their citizenship in the indeterminate future, “in a cartoon caricature of an authoritarian country,” Maddow commented.

She also noted Trump’s $25 million to $45 million June 14 military parade, which he falsely claimed was attended by a crowd of 250,000.

“Displays of military might are not just for the country’s external enemies, they’re for the country’s own people, right?” Maddow said. “Because in an authoritarian country, you turn military force inward toward the people of that country.”

“The Trump administration plans to permanently integrate the active duty U.S. military into, of course, immigration enforcement,” she said. “So we will have our own U.S. military troops mobilized on U.S. soil … in an ongoing and permanent way for immigration enforcement.” She then shared images of ICE agents attacking pro-immigrant protestors in Los Angeles to illustrate the use of military tactics and weaponry against U.S. citizens.

She also noted that congressional Republicans have authorized hundreds of millions of dollars to build new immigration detention facilities across the nation — including at U.S. military bases — something she referred to as “prison camps.”

She then pointed out the president’s extortionary tactics, seeking to intimidate and silence any media outlets, universities, law firms, and other authoritative government oversight organizations that challenge his power and his version of events.

“Protests must be criminalized. Media must be intimidated into saying and doing what the leader wants, or they must be shut down,” she said. “For institutions like that, it’s not just the boldest or most strong critics of the president who must be shut down — it’s the most mainstream, the most prestigious, the most credible, because that’s what’s so dangerous about them…. There can’t be any source of authoritative statements of fact that compete with what the leader insists must be the new truth.”

She then noted that this authoritarian need to control and silence all opposition now extends to government departments, the military, and U.S. foreign intelligence agencies, noting that, “If you want to be a four-star general or admiral in this military, you must now pass a personal one-on-one interview with the president, who personally will decide if you are to his liking or not.”

This authoritarian inclination was shown most recently in his firing of the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) after the department released a report on job numbers that dissatisfied Trump. She also noted that U.S. intelligence officials repeated Trump’s claims that U.S. attacks “obliterated” Iranian uranium enrichment sites, even though multiple intelligence reports suggested that the attacks didn’t completely destroy them.

She also said that Trump continues to insist that he won the 2020 election against Joe Biden even though there’s no proof to substantiate the claim. He also continues to deny that Russia helped him win his 2016 election, despite the large amount of evidence supporting that conclusion.

“The question is no longer how to prepare for this risk, or how to try to avert it, but rather how to fight it now that it is here,” she said. “We’re all living here. It’s very obvious that this is not going to get better on its own. This is not going to fix itself.”

Maddow then said that numerous Americans have been resisting ICE officers — recording them, tracking their movements, announcing their presence to others, and generally obstructing their ability to kidnap and detain people. She said that opposition Democratic politicians have been visiting detention facilities, demanding access, and drawing media attention and that opposed individuals have also been attending town hall events of Republican politicians to speak against the rising tide of fascism.

“I mean it when I say we, the country, gets it and is more against it than they’ve ever been,” Maddow concluded, “and opposing this administration and what Trump is trying to do is turning out to be the story of the century.”

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