Human Rights Watch warned Wednesday, February 4 that President Donald Trump was turning the United States into an authoritarian state as democracy declines globally to its lowest ebb in four decades.
Trump’s return to the White House has intensified a “downward spiral” on human rights that was already under pressure from Russia and China, the New York-based advocacy and research group said in its annual report. “The rules-based international order is being crushed,” HRW said.
In the US, the group said, Trump has shown “blatant disregard for human rights and egregious violations.”
In descriptions that would have been unthinkable in the US section of its previous annual reports, the group pointed to the deployment of masked, armed agents – the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency – which has carried out “hundreds of unnecessarily violent and abusive raids.”
“The administration’s racial and ethnic scapegoating, domestic deployment of National Guard forces in pretextual power grabs, repeated acts of retaliation against perceived political enemies and former officials now critical of him, as well as attempts to expand the coercive powers of the executive and neuter democratic checks and balances, underpin a decided shift toward authoritarianism in the US,” the report said.
The hard part about the erosion of anti-trust laws over the last two decades is it’s really hard to do anything without supporting Amazon due to the sheer amount of things they own.
And even if you made the effort to avoid everything here first-hand, supporting a company whose backbone runs off of AWS ends up supporting Amazon second-hand.