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Hannah Walser
@hkpmw.bsky.social
5257 Followers
2886 Following
Thinking about people thinking about other people. First Amendment, interpretive methodologies, criminal law, law & philosophy. PhD (English) —> JD —> Furman Fellowship at NYU Law. Philly homer; mayor of the quiet car. she/her. hwalser.wordpress.com
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COMING UP: Judge Charles Breyer is set to preside over a bench trial in Newsom v. Trump
The suit, brought by Governor Gavin Newsom, challenges Trump’s use of federal military forces to enforce immigration in California.
I plan to live-post for @lawfaremedia.org.
Follow along ⬇️🧵
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“One year ago, the U.S. was a dead country”
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Definitely. What’s striking to me is that ICE/DHS doesn’t seem to be trying to hide or explain away the fact that they’re arresting/torturing people who have done nothing wrong. They want innocent people to feel afraid, and they’re selling young white men a fantasy of hurting people with impunity
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If we’re truly past that point, as it looks like we might be, then we’re in a place I (and most Americans of my generation, I think) have never been before.
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Right! They’re being made into criminals so that they can be deported more easily. I don’t blame people for finding this hard to understand, because it feels so perverse and wrong—but that’s exactly why it’s essential to understand it
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In some ways, it doesn’t matter; terror is terror. But I share Arendt’s sense that the “hypocrisy” of insisting that you aren’t actually tormenting innocents is not meaningless; it shows that vice still feels some vestigial obligation to pay tribute to virtue (in La Rochefoucauld’s terms).
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Idk how many Trump voters really believed he would only deport immigrants who had committed crimes. But the admin has clearly dropped that fiction now. And a lot of ICE propaganda seems to aim at making people comfortable with terrorizing those who are innocent even “in the view of the persecutor”
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Listening to Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism—you know, to relax during those rare moments when I’m not stressing about the job market—and I found this passage interesting
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Yes! I’m not that far in, but it’s fascinating so far
![A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor. This was the case in Nazi Germany when full terror was directed against Jews, i.e., against people with certain common characteristics which were independent of their specific behavior. In Soviet Russia the situation is more confused, but the facts, unfortunately, are only too obvious. [the next sentence is highlighted] On the one hand, the Bolshevik system, unlike the Nazi, never admitted theoretically that it could practice terror against innocent people, and though in view of certain practices this may look like hypocrisy, it makes quite a difference. Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more "advanced" than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror-namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:pwlygq4vcnwe4wzqxgczcv5u/bafkreiakws7ltr4bsrjsmmzdq6j3evtyvmmsbncugslfbqm3tav6vcwwe4@jpeg)