Whether some DUers like him or not

[Jack Rabbit]

109. No

I am comparing police state tactics, such as mass surveillance of citizens, to police state tactics used by police states of the past to subjugate citizens and even in support of worse things than our government is presently doing, such as genocide. The systematic extermination of 11 million non-combatants, including six million Jews simply because they were Jews, was not possible without police state. That is what Dr. King was referring in that passage. Otherwise, the only comparison he was making to the Holocaust and the beatings and lynchings and segregation of the Jim Crow South is that the laws that gave form and authority to such oppression were unjust.

There is movement afoot in America to promote income inequality as a positive good, or at least a necessary consequence of an unbridled free market, which is viewed by many as a positive good. I simply observe that inequality at that level cannot be maintained without a police state protecting the elites from the oppressed masses. This kind of mass surveillance is the kind of power the state should never have. Indeed, I maintain that our state doesn't have that power under the Constitution; it is prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

Would the government use police state tactics such as mass surveillance against those who might rise against the injustice of income inequality? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I think it would. Perhaps it already has.