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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/trumps-police-state-america

https://theduran.com/trumps-police-state-america/

Trump’s Police-State America

24 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On July 22nd, the Burlington Vermont weekly newspaper Seven Days headlined “Winooski Superintendent [of Schools] Detained, Questioned by Border Officials: Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria, a U.S. citizen, was questioned for hours at a Houston airport as he returned from a visit to Nicaragua with his husband”, and reported that 

Winooski schools superintendent Wilmer Chavarria was detained by immigration agents and questioned over the course of five hours on his way home Monday from a routine visit to Nicaragua with his husband.

Chavarria, who grew up in Nicaragua and has been a U.S. citizen since 2018, told Seven Days that immigration officials seized his phone and computer, separated him from his husband, and prevented him from speaking to anyone he requested to contact.

“They falsely stated that I, a U.S. citizen, have no Constitutional rights at a point of entry, and officers became increasingly agitated as I continued to assert my rights regardless,” Chavarria wrote in an email informing school district leaders about the incident.

It happened at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston as Chavarria tried to get through security using Global Entry — a program that allows preapproved, “low-risk” travelers to get expedited clearance when entering the U.S. He said he had used the program many times without issue.

This time, he was pulled aside and taken by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to an interrogation room.

During their questioning, immigration agents cast doubt on Chavarria’s relationship to Cyrus Dudgeon, his partner of 15 years and a teacher at Essex High School, and suggested that he was making up his role as a superintendent, Chavarria said. They never gave him a reason for why he was being detained; Dudgeon was not.

Authorities told Chavarria that he had no right to legal counsel and interrogated him in four different rooms. At one point, four officers were questioning him at once, he said.

The experience, he wrote, was “nothing short of surreal and the definition of psychological terror.”

Chavarria was released and reunited with his husband. Seven Days talked to the two as they were preparing for a flight back to Vermont.

Chavarria was born in a Honduran refugee camp, grew up in Nicaragua and began learning English in high school. Eventually, he attended college in Indiana and went on to earn two master’s degrees, including one from Harvard University. He has led Vermont’s most diverse school district since July 2023. …

On Tuesday morning, while boarding his flight to Vermont, Chavarria said he received an email from U.S. Customs and Border Protection: his Global Entry permission had been revoked. No reason was given.

U.S. President Trump has politicized the U.S. Government so that individuals he despises, such as ones who aren’t at least millionaires and who are foreign-born or homosexuals, and who question and talk-back to and refuse to obey his appointed officials by demanding that his officials follow the laws of the U.S.A., get threatened like this person did, and get their rights as U.S. citizens reduced arbitrarily, as he did when his previous Global Entry permission was eliminated without any explanation — much less with any legal justification. He was there implicitly being threatened that if he again travels abroad, he WON’T, any longer, be on that top-priority-for-re-entry list.

This pattern, by Trump, of his imposing a dictatorial and arbitrary and law-breaking regime, upon any U.S. citizens he dislikes, and not ONLY on NON-citizens who aren’t wealthy enough to qualify for his “Gold Card” invitation to become new U.S. citizens, fits with Trump’s entire fascist J.Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Jeffrey Epstein, Joseph R. McCarthy, Allen Dulles, traitorous against the American people and Constitution, far-rightwing, program for America, of an Amerika that is ONLY for the super-rich, the most successful investors, AGAINST the American people. I have earlier given this example of it:

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.

Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: As always when one political faction (regardless whether it it is one Party or a coalition of Parties) has control over both the Executive and the Legislative branches of the Government — as now the case in the U.S. — these two branches (Executive and Legislative) function as one, and there then will even be a totalitarian dictatorship if they can get the Judicial branch or Supreme Court to call it “Constitutional.” Currently, the U.S. is slipping from a dictatorship towards a totalitarian dictatorship; but America has been a dictatorship ever since at least 1980. And that is a dictatorship by the super-rich. It is actually a bipartisan dictatorship, in which the two political Parties alternate in power but BOTH of them being controlled by only their respective megadonors. The first-ever billionaire U.S. President, who is Trump, is merely the worst-yet example of it. All of this started with the stupidest-ever U.S. President, Harry Truman.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.