What Safeguards?

~ Clarissa

Are these people trying to be funny? What safeguards? There are zero safeguards protecting anybody on the conservative side. Forget that. There are zero safeguards protecting anybody on any side, including people who took no side and people who aren’t aware that sides exist. There are zero safeguards protecting anybody whom the leftist machine wants to chew down and spit out.

“What if the Dems win the next election and start persecuting us?” Have these folks been asleep for the past 20 years? The Dems already did all that, persecuted, cancelled, arrested, and destroyed. Women were getting raped by male rapists placed in female jails. Elderly people died because COVID patients were placed in old-age homes. Fourteen-year-old girls had their breasts cut off. Two dozen people, including several children, are dead because BLM needed to rage in the streets. David Dorn bled out on the floor of a pawnshop in St Louis. What safeguards?

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Published by Clarissa

48 thoughts on “What Safeguards?”

    1. On a related note, can we talk about the due process afforded to J6ers?

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      1. Yesterday I read the story of a J6er whose lawyer begged at trial that additional 3 seconds of the video snippet played by the prosecution would be allowed to play in the courtroom. The judge refused. Three seconds that would challenge the prosecution’s narrative. The judge refused.

        This is supposed to be due process. The defense was not allowed to show its evidence. Where were the champions of due process then?

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  2. So, the solution is to make it worse?

    You’ve nit picked a few cases where due process may not have been followed properly. What about all the great majority of cases where it was followed and innocent people were kept out of jail? I really don’t understand your logic here Clarissa. are you all for destruction of the system? What alternative do you propose?

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      2. So that you don’t mistakenly deport US citizens or legal immigrants?

        Why do you need to resort to authoritarianism instead of just fixing the process to be much quicker? Other countries have streamlined automatic deportation procedures, why can’t Republicans do the same? What’s the excuse for not codifying new laws right now to make this all happen?

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          1. –this feels like a manufactured concern. Much like the fuss over “women and minorities” not being able to obtain legal photo ID for voting purposes. Better to allow massive voter fraud and the disenfranchisement of millions of actual voting citizens, than risk the vague, unverifiable *possibility* of a single poor, old, indigent person without ID being denied the vote, right?

            Likewise, now we are supposed to be deeply, awfully concerned about the *theoretical possibility* of some poor bastard citizen, who apparently has no ID, no relatives, no old classmates, nobody who knew him when he was a kid, etc. getting deported by mistake… and that theoretical scenario is supposed to have more moral weight than the actual infringement on actual citizens that’s been going on for years already, as the entire third world gets imported into their neighborhoods.

            I don’t buy it.

            Rule of law only works when all parties are acting in good faith. As soon as any significant party to that contract backs out– and they have, massively– it’s broken. I’d like to think we can fix it, but right now, the loud insistence that only the Trump administration has to follow the law (because obviously they’re Hitler and stuff), but nobody else does (because good intentions or something), and that citizens have no rights, but illegal trespasser noncitizens have TONS of rights that, if abrogated, will result in LITERALLY HITLER (which we’ve been threatened with so constantly for almost a decade that it has become totally meaningless)…

            Why would anybody keep listening to that?

            Do you really think the people pushing for due process for illegals would ever be satisfied with an expedited, law-sanctioned deportation process? I don’t.

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            1. Two comments – in my comments in another thread I was actually trying to figure out how easy it would be for an illegal immigrant to vote… Is illegal immigrants voting in any large numbers also a manufactured concern? Or by “infringement” you meant their presence, not alleged voting?

              second, this “of some poor bastard citizen, who apparently has no ID, no relatives, no old classmates, nobody who knew him when he was a kid, etc. getting deported by mistake…” implies some sort of investigation. Which is obviously not a trial by jury, but still some sort of investigation – does he have relatives, does anyone know him, etc. Are the people suspected of being illegal immigrants entitled to this type of investigation? Or is this type of investigation also a waste of resources? And the onus is on those citizens who knew the poor bastard to come forward? How are they expected to know that poor bastard was arrested because of suspicion of illegality?

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              1. Democrats make incessant efforts to extend the right to vote to non-citizens. The meaning of citizenship will disappear completely if we don’t constantly shore up its borders. Here’s a recent iteration of this absolutely insane battle: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-city-law-allowing-non-citizens-vote-struck-down-by-court-2025-03-20/

                That’s this should even be discussed, let alone passed by a state legislature, is deeply concerning. How did we end up in this situation? And what’s next if not the elimination of citizenship as a meaningful category?

                As for an investigation, we have up to 30 million illegals in the country. How is it possible to have an investigation for all of them? And what will the investigation solve? There were at least two deportation hearings for Abrego García. Nobody ever suggested that he didn’t enter the country illegally. And still it’s impossible to deport him without more hearings. We could talk about “what if” scenarios but what’s the purpose if even for somebody who is known to have entered illegally that fact is not enough for deportation?

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              2. that’s just it. All this going on about due process due process due process, as though these people being deported *have already been deprived of it*. Which is clearly not true. “Maryland Dad” had multiple contacts with the courts already and he’s the poster child for deprivation of due process here. How much more due process is he owed in order to qualify as due process in the eyes of people screaming about due process right now? If they had a better example, why didn’t they publicize it? There is no amount of due process that would ever satisfy, because they don’t actually want due process. They’re liars. They want all the illegals to stay forever.

                It is like the vagrants that go around the neighborhoods with a broken lawnmower offering to mow your yard: they don’t want to mow, and in fact cannot. They want you to give them money to make them go away, without getting arrested for panhandling. If you tell them you have no money, they swear at you. If you agree to let them mow, they admit the mower’s broken and ask to use yours, and then the price goes up until you refuse. They won’t take $200 to mow your yard with your mower, because they didn’t want to mow anyway, it’s just legal cover for panhandling.

                If the left wants to collectively decide that ‘due process’ is whatever they say it is, whenever it’s convenient to them, as long as it gets them what they want with plausible deniability, then effectively there’s no such thing: it’s a myth, a unicorn, the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, and there is no reason at all to pay any mind to it.

                I like due process and rule of law, but if we’ve collectively decided those terms have no meaning, then what we’re talking about isn’t law, it’s rule by the whim of faceless bureaucrats, and it’s time to just get used to doing business the way the rest of the world does: by bribing government employees and running a dozen small side-hustles that add up to a single income, so that none of your business is big enough to attract bo doi demanding a cut.

                “I was actually trying to figure out how easy it would be for an illegal immigrant to vote…”

                Look at the investigation material coming out of Arizona. The answer, apparently, is: very easy, and it has already happened, on a large scale. IMO that’s not illegals showing up at the polls, for the most part. It’s highly likely that’s an organized effort by bad-faith parties to register and vote on behalf of illegals, who may not be aware that they voted. On top of that, there’s the hitch that even if you prevent votes being cast by/for illegals, it’s still a lucrative numbers-gaming scam by blue states over the long haul, where they get more EC votes based on the sheer number of people in the state, regardless of whether those people are citizens or not.

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              3. That’s precisely it. None of the people who demand due process for Abrego García care to mention what specific procedure would satisfy them that he should, indeed, be deported. As experience shows, nothing will satisfy them to this effect. There will always be one more hearing, one more appeal, one more set of paperwork delivered by ACLU. It’s impossible to play a game where one of the sides is allowed to change the rules all the time in its favor.

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              4. “And the onus is on those citizens who knew the poor bastard to come forward?”

                Again, even citizens don’t get this kind of due process.

                There was a guy my parents had known since high school. Doctor. Saved my Dad’s life. Good guy. He ended up being one of those leading-edge test cases for DEA prosecution for opioid-prescribing. Easy target because he was black, and was one of the only docs in town who’d see medicaid patients in his practice, and he wasn’t a good bookkeeper.

                My parents wanted to testify at his trial, but by the time they even heard about it, it was over. They spoke at his funeral instead, after he died in some godforsaken prison in North Carolina.

                If you’re arguing that we need a better system for getting out there and contacting witnesses on behalf of criminally accused citizens, yeah, totally, let’s do that.

                If you’re arguing that noncitizens are entitled to more due process than citizens currently get, I’m not on board with that. Our resources are better spent serving actual citizens (not hypothetical ones), and those resources aren’t infinite.

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              5. Ok, I am not arguing that illegal immigrants should not be deported under any circumstances. I was always puzzled by how US treats immigration… or voting for that matter. Again, as I said in some other thread – in order to vote in Canada I have to bring the voter’s card, photo ID and proof of address. And I have no problem with that. (But I do have problem with imprisoning people without proper process.)

                I actually agree with most things Craig said, but statements (by some others here) a la “only citizens are entitled to due process” make me nervous. Let’s say I go hiking somewhere in the US, and leave my passport in my hotel. And encounter some ICE agents who confuse me for an illegal Ukrainian. Now, in a reasonable scenario where I can expect US officials to follow due process (NOT defined as 33 hearings in front of an immigration judge) and common sense, I should be able to claim that my passport is in my hotel, and the officials would actually bother to go there, verify it and let me go without detaining me for any longer than it is required to go straight to the hotel. But I do not trust them to do that, because with some non-zero probability some of them may believe that “due process is for the citizens only”.

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              6. Look, I don’t actually believe we shouldn’t have *any* process for noncitizens, or that it’s totally OK to haul people into vans and deport them just for being found without documents.

                But also, I go a lot of places without my wallet. I don’t worry about it. I’m one phone call away from documentation to prove my identity and citizenship. If, God forbid, my house burned down and I lost all of it… it’s not that hard to replace. I’ve lost and misplaced documents before.

                For *legal* noncitizens who find themselves in an extraordinary bind, like being robbed and stripped naked while hiking in our beautiful national parks… we have embassies, don’t we? This should still be a relatively simple thing to resolve, short of head injury, coma, or amnesia. That’s rare, and nobody’s just dumping them across the nearest border. A lot of effort goes into figuring out who they are, because hospitals *really* want to know where to send the bill.

                This is not a real problem. This is a bogeyman manufactured to scare people into silence about the real problem: more than 30 million illegals currently in the country illegally, cracking infrastructure, monopolizing resources, overwhelming law enforcement.

                The entire “due process” argument is being made in bad faith by people uninterested in due process. The vocabulary is corrupted and rendered meaningless. Now, “due process” means whatever open-borders proponents want it to mean– such as unlimited court hearings for people who’ve been positively identified already as being here illegally (we’re not in doubt about it), all while living free inside the US (not jailed in a detention center awaiting trial).

                But that’s now obscured by using the term “due process”. Because, as we’ve established, that means “get a positive ID and make sure they’re illegal, and then deport them” to some people, and “stay in the country until you die of old age, on one appeal after another” to others. There is no conversation possible when terms cannot be agreed upon.

                And also: noncitizens are here on sufferance. They do not, and should not, have the same rights as citizens.

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            2. Let’s say I am a corrupt left-wing politician who has enough control over a local voting office to do whatever I want, no Republican supervision whatsoever. So I let illegal immigrant vote… But why would I do fraud in such a roundabout way? If I have total control of a local voting office, there are much easier ways to commit fraud. Just throw in as many democrat ballots as I like…

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              2. Serious question.

                Like, when DeSantis went in and investigated the SE FL election offices that kept screwing our whole state in national elections, and fired and arrested people for real, actual, provable election fraud… all of the sudden the Miami area, coincidentally, turned out to be a lot more “red” than previously believed. And all of a sudden, like magic, they can count the ballots in a timely manner, no court battles over hanging chads, we’re not deciding elections in the judicial branch months later. Amazing change!

                I don’t have to know the precise mechanisms of the fraud, to understand that fraud was going on, and that we’re all very relieved that particular rat’s nest has been burned out.

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        2. This idea about the danger of deportation to citizens was invented on purpose to prevent any deportations. It’s all completely invented and manipulative. It’s the equivalent of those tens of thousands of black men murdered by racist cops every year. It’s not real.

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          1. The idea of deporting legal citizens by mistake is absolutely crazy. Where are they going to deport these legal citizens to? Which country? It makes no sense. Why is this even a point of debate? It is a very simple matter to prove a citizenship, whether you are born here or naturalized.

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              2. Obama purposefully killed a US citizen abroad without due process. And what Trump proposes is not deporting but offshoring incarceration. I’m not in favor but this idea didn’t arise in a vacuum. We are in a situation where people get arrested 30-40 times and it’s impossible to incarcerate them. Decades of left-wing policy led to this. Trump’s solution is bad, ok. What is a good one? Who is proposing anything else?

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              3. The article you provided is a straw-man.

                1. You start by talking about mistakenly deporting US citizens.
                2. We tell you that the idea that citizens are going to be deported by mistake is crazy.
                3. You point to an article where the current president is floating a crazy idea about punishing some of the citizens by putting them into prisons in El Salvador. Nowhere it says that such deportation would be (1) by mistake, or (2) without due process. He himself acknowledges that the legality of this has to be investigated.

                Number 1 and number 3 on that thing are not the same thing. Also, what methylethyl said. I think it is best to just ignore for he says as that does not mean anything, but let’s look at what he does.

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              4. “Obama purposefully killed a US citizen abroad without due process. And what Trump proposes is not deporting but offshoring incarceration. I’m not in favor but this idea didn’t arise in a vacuum. We are in a situation where people get arrested 30-40 times and it’s impossible to incarcerate them. Decades of left-wing policy led to this. Trump’s solution is bad, ok. What is a good one? Who is proposing anything else?”

                Thank you for acknowledging it’s a bad solution. I fully agree with then need for overhaul, but we don’t need to go all authoritarian about it.

                Giving credit where it’s due, Trump has gotten illegal crossings down to historical levels, and I’m sure we will see new laws to harden immigration laws. Doing away with asylum should also be on the table. This all just needs to be codified so that when the Democrats inevitably get back in control, they can’t just repeal all the EOs like Biden did and undo all the progress made.

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              5. “Nowhere it says that such deportation would be (1) by mistake, or (2) without due process.”

                Oh, my bad. I should have known Trump wants the deportation of US citizens on purpose, not by mistake. It’s definitely much better when he talks about deporting US citizens intentionally than by mistake, right?

                You and methylethyl should also understand words have consequences. Trump is single handily giving liberals control of Canada, when the conservative candidate was almost a certainty. Nobody likes to be threatened, even if just verbally.

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              6. Getting a pass… I thought we had, collectively, as a country, changed the rules so that when presidents say dumb, incoherent, factually wrong shit in public, it doesn’t matter because how dare you notice that?

                Those are the rules now. We got the memo. Check. If the president says stupid shit, you’re a bad person for noticing it.

                I’m watching what’s happening (see Clarissa’s exegesis on neoliberal obsession with words over actions) wrt executive orders, bureaucratic downsizing, moves toward sane regulation (medical pricing transparency for example) and enforcement, auditing govt. spending, cutting off the influx of illegal migrants, reform to prevent election fraud, trying to save higher ed from its suicidal death-spiral, tax changes, changes to FEMA (you may not realize what a huge deal that is, in our neck of the woods), axing USAID, ejecting some of the crazy from the military and trying to get loyal patriots back in, re-localizing control over grade schools, etc. and I am… hopeful. It’s not perfect and there are some decisions I don’t support, but the overall trajectory seems good.

                For the first time in decades it looks like the country might, possibly, survive and throw off the loathsome, clammy tentacles of our self-appointed globalist overlords.

                Might work. Might not. We’ll see. But hope’s a powerful thing.

                On the flipside, if you’re in the opposition camp, there’s an interesting principle that you may wish to consider: attention is a resource, kind of like money, or energy. You may or may not give any credence to it yourself, but there are lots of people who believe, and not without reason, that paying your attention to something, much like paying your money to it, or putting your energy and time into it, gives it a certain amount of power and importance that it would not otherwise have. When a besotted teenager gives his or her attention wholeheartedly to teen-heartthrob-of-the-week, tracking their fashions, their concerts, their vacations, their hairstyles, their friends, like the most devoted of stalkers… in some sense they are ceding a bit of soul to that idol, and giving it power and importance, fame and wealth. You may not believe in that, but Trump surely does, and uses it totally shamelessly. His opposition has, en masse, ceded an absolutely shocking proportion of their thoughts, their emotional energy, their attention, their time, yea even their souls, to their favorite idol, the Bad Orange Man. Trump gives their lives meaning, and in return they give him their fanatical devotion. They think they hate the guy, but they’ve wrapped their whole psyches around him and given him supreme authority over their thoughts and emotions.

                If they truly want to resist, they need to free their minds first.

                Ultimately the answer to “WHY DO YOU GIVE HIM A FREE PASS??”… on some dumbass throwaway comment is… I don’t pay that much attention to him. I’ve already got a religion.

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              7. “Obama purposefully killed a US citizen abroad without due process….”

                Yeah, but did he say alarming things? Because words have consequences.

                But, you know, actions… not that important.

                This is like the mean tweets thing all over again. They never learn.

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              9. That is … something. People don’t understand or pretend to not understand the attraction of Trump but Trump doesn’t do this. He says whatever occurs to him. And it might be total crap sometimes but it’s honest crap. And that’s very refreshing. Why can’t Warren say the truth even now? Why not simply say it? She’d gain more admiration than with this embarrassing lying. But she’s incapable.

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              10. IKR? He says whatever dumb thing occurs to him. But nothing happens just because DJT says it in front of a camera. Stuff happens after it goes by a team of lawyers, strategists, and advisors, I reckon. They seem to have a long-term strategy this term, unlike last time around.

                Meanwhile, these same people hanging on his every word (do they not have anything better to do?) like it’s gemstones dropping from the mouth of some evil deity… gaslit the entire country for four years about how Biden was “sharp as a tack” because they don’t actually care what the president says as long as whoever is running the autopen is doing stuff they approve of.

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              11. “People don’t understand or pretend to not understand the attraction of Trump but Trump doesn’t do this. He says whatever occurs to him. And it might be total crap sometimes but it’s honest crap. And that’s very refreshing.”

                This, finally, is what the new world hath wrought.

                *headdesk*

                *headdesk*

                *headdesk*

                It’s not even a question of trying to argue with or debate a statement like that. As one of my old profs liked to say, there’s no there there. 

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              12. I swear, only yesterday I wondered where you were, Col Potter. I have now materialized you with the forcefield of my preoccupation.

                Glad you are back and as feisty as ever.

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              13. It’s OK.

                We all know you prefer a president who “looks presidential” and says only dignified, well-vetted things in public, over one who responds to the demands of the majority of the electorate.

                It’s a bit like picking an audiobook for the sound of the reader’s voice, without regard for content. I get it. But some of us want more from the book.

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              14. That was one of the biggest problems with Kamala. She’s so fake. Nobody knows what she actually thinks about anything. I respect people who honestly believe the opposite things from me. But I can’t respect fake people who mouth whatever their focus groups suggest will have impact.

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              15. “I have now materialized you with the forcefield of my preoccupation. Glad you are back and as feisty as ever.”

                Thank you, Clarissa! And I appreciate the welcome. At first I thought I’d just stick to food, movies, and the occasional book comment, but…

                Responding to methylethyl’s “But some of us want more from the book”… so, the “more” you’d like from the book is… refreshingly honest crap?

                And that’s not just a knock on the right. The left has a lot to answer for with the whole Joe was “sharp as a tack” obfuscation. And for the fact that they could not come up with anyone better than someone who offered refreshingly honest crap.

                Ah well. I like Rep. Crockett and Gov. Shapiro. To quote methylethyl, hope can be a powerful thing.

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              16. The weird screamy lady Crockett? Or is there another Crockett?

                Neither she not Shapiro have a hope. He because of his last name and she because she gets strangely emotional.

                Like that Nancy Mace woman. What’s with her? She’s freaking out all over the place. Wasn’t her whole thing that she was in the military? It’s like she’s trying to discredit the very idea of women in the army and politics.

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              17. “more from the book” in this analogy is: action. I care what the administration is doing, not what it is saying… because what it’s doing is mostly fantastic. I like it. I enumerated some of those actions elsewhere in this thread. No need to repeat.

                If you rely heavily on video formats for information, then of course you’ll be more concerned with appearances.

                I highly recommend installing add-ons to your browser both to block images and to forestall autoplay on videos, so that you have to go an extra step on everything to see pictures or watch video, rather than having it fed to you in a passive-receptive-hypnosis fashion. It is amazingly helpful for increasing critical capacity for everything you read on the internet: our primate brains did not evolve to handle photorealistic imagery of any sort, and it sort of hot-wires our emotional responses, bypassing rational thought. The more of it you are exposed to in a day, the more it drains your capacity for critical analysis. Everybody’s got an overload point, and most of us are well past that point all the time, because we fail to exercise any control over the flood of images engulfing us. It exhausts our will and ability to interrogate what we see– similar to decision fatigue.

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              18. I so agree. Everything around us is conspiring at robbing us of our focus, calm, and peace of mind. I very much second avoiding images and anything that flashes in front of your eyes. If you want social media, choose the ones with more text and not stuff like TikTok and Instagram.

                I also highly recommend spending some time looking at a flame of a candle and experiencing inner quiet. Even putting aside time in a day for inner quiet.

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              19. “The weird screamy lady Crockett?”

                Yes, that’s the one. It’s theatre kid energy–before law school, Crockett did college musicals. That’s why she delivers her salty quips to the third balcony.

                As for your analysis of Shapiro’s (non-)chances, it puts me in mind of Wallace Markfield’s joke that he gives to his character Jules Farber: “The time is at hand when the wearing of a prayer shawl and skullcap will not bar a man from the White House – unless, of course, the man is Jewish.” 

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              20. The weird screamy lady Crockett? Or is there another Crockett?

                The funny (and sad) thing is that this woman needs to cosplay as a ghetto caricature to maintain her democratic party base. The white libs love her because that’s their platonic ideal of a black person: cheerfully dancing on cue, shuckin’ and jivin’, ready to bless their savior complex.

                Blacks because “she’s one of us.”

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      3. “Why do we owe due process to non-citizens?”

        Due process is owed all in the US. But,as has been pointed out, the left has done a clever switcharoo…

        For them, ‘due process’ means some kind of jury trial with appeals.

        For me, due process in the context of non-citizen residents comes down to:

        -is the person in the country legally?

        -if they can prove that they are, then ta da! the system works!

        -if they can’t, then ‘is the person in personal danger from the government if returned to their own country for non-criminal reasons? (and burden of proof should lie with the alien it’s not the US government’s job to prove they’re not)

        -if yes, then ta da! the system works!

        -if no, then the person needs to be returned to their country of origin (or other country of their choice that will accept them). Ta da! the system works!

        But the left doesn’t want the system to work. As Lindsay said: the issue is never the issue, the issue is the revolution

        What due process was the Salvadoran gang banger deprived of?

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      4. methylethyl

        Hmmm, well, I may be a Canuck, but I have inlaws and outlaws in Maine, Tennrssee, and Texas. And I expect to be given something approaching Due Process when I visit, afterall we generally treat you well…or used to ;-D

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        1. I have friends, and even relatives, who are legal residents, not citizens. I’m not worried about any of them. They’re not criminals, they are in the US completely legally, they have all their paperwork (and are very scrupulous about it because it was so tedious to obtain), and absolutely nobody is threatening them with deportation.

          We are not talking about legal immigrants/residents here.

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  3. This is unbelievable horseshit, both my wife and myself carried three solid pieces of ID in our wallets from the time that we entered the workforce and could legally drive a vehicle. And even if we had lost our wallets, we could have phoned a family member, or at least a neighbour, or a pastor or teacher that could positively ID us. So exactly how old are the “kids” that are supposedly at risk of being deported?

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