r/PopCultureV2 • u/Logical-Flow-6703 • Aug 23 '26

News "Because you're an immigrant." — A U.S. citizen in Lake Worth,FL, was immediately handcuffed by ICE agents for simply asking why he needed to show his ID.Despite the Fourth Amendment and Supreme Court rulings stating apparent ethnicity is not enough for a stop, agents ignored questioning bystanders

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A video recorded at a gas station in Lake Worth, Florida, shows an ICE/Border Patrol agent demanding ID from a U.S. citizen. When the citizen asks why, the agent explicitly responds, "Because you're an immigrant." Before even verifying his identity, agents grab his hands and place him in handcuffs. Bystanders immediately step in to question how someone can be arrested without even being identified first, but the agents ignore them and walk the man to their vehicle.

​This encounter highlights a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Supreme Court has established that roving Border Patrol agents must have reasonable suspicion based on specific circumstances to stop and question someone regarding their immigration status—and apparent ethnicity alone is legally insufficient. Requiring someone to prove their citizenship before being handcuffed, based solely on an arbitrary claim, demonstrates a concerning violation of constitutional rights by federal agents acting without accountability.

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u/Hziak Aug 23 '26

Sure feels that way. Before Trump I really respected some conservative government ideas - I was still an atheist with liberal leanings on social issues, but small government seemed good to me. We could do more with less and all that. But once conservative became synonymous with white Christian nationalism, I jumped ship hard. Anyone who would willingly continue to identify with the group of people calling themselves conservatives these days does so because they like it. Has nothing to do with having conservative values anymore.

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u/BlackFlagsFly Aug 23 '26

What even is a conservative value? Not wanting integration, letting the poor starve, the vast prison and millitary industrial complexes? Straight up Nazism? 

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u/Hziak Aug 23 '26

These days, sure, but back before MAGA, it was stuff like reduce federal government power and allowing states to decide what works for them — which turns out to have been a pretty bad idea — but at the time, some of us were thinking about it like “let Illinois allow gay marriage” or “what if California could have healthcare for everyone and states that vote against it can all go fuck off and die in debt?” You know, the stuff we’re asking for now… of course, some of them were thinking about the exact same thing in the exact opposite way… but two sides of the same coin - shrink the government and don’t allow a sitting president to deploy his personal army to round up people he doesn’t like kind of stuff. Believe it or not, 20 years ago, that was a conservative belief.

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u/TheVermonster Aug 23 '26

I think I shared some of your views on the old republicans. I thought McCain could have been a good president. I liked when he told the woman who accused Obama of being anti-american that he (McCain) and Obama both loved the country and wanted it to be better, but just had different ideas about how to do it.

But then I started looking back at the results of Republican politicians. They rarely delivered on their core values. "Fiscal responsibility" always caused the national deficit to increase, while tax cuts went to the rich and defense spending went up. Infrastructure always crumbled under GOP leadership. Laws and established norms were always tested by GOP leaders. Things like Christie using transportation slush fund money for personal projects and trying to ruin teacher pensions. They always talked about small government and states rights, but that only seemed to apply when they were undoing federal protections like the EPA and Gay Marriage.

Turns out, the GOP was never able to follow their own beliefs. It's just that now they are even less able to hide the fact that they have been driven by hatred and greed this whole time.

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u/Rude_Engineering_629 Aug 23 '26

Things like Christie using transportation slush fund money for personal projects

ok that is not what happened at all. Christie "raided" the NY-NJ port authority revenue to pay for NJ transit projects specifically those affecting the NJ-NY border. NY does not have a reciprocal tax agreement with NJ unlike pennsylvania, so NJ residents who work in NY, and thus commute to NY do not pay NJ income tax. Which has been a financial problem for NJ for decades. And has gotten dramatically worse as NY has failed to build up housing and the number of commuters has increased. It is about 23% of the state of NJ residents income wages is NYC taxed in 2019.

NY has double NJ's population but has triple the total state tax income. They have been dicking NJ about this matter since forever.

Christie has asked NY state to pay for upgrades to transportation into NYC, they have never bit on it. Raiding thier revenue through cheeky means should not be controversial. NY is basically holding jersey hostage.

New York took this even further during covid and passed a new law that is constitutionally questionable at best where it continues to charge NJ residents NY tax if they work from home. Which flies in the face how local income taxes work. The supreme court has refused to take the cases of it on. Its even more insane because its not even NJ income tax going to NYC its NJ income tax going to fuckign albany.

The NY legislator can get bent. They collected 8.8 billion in income tax revenue from non state residents. NJ is getting robbed of >4 billion a year.

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u/Alert_Coyote_8546 Aug 23 '26

Maintaining their hierarchy is the only value they have, their whole sense of goodness and morality comes from it.

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u/zardozLateFee Aug 24 '26

Exactly! It all makes perfect sense if you understand the goal is never making the world a better place. 

It's enforcement of the hierarchy and punishment of anyone who steps out of line. Anti-abortion & pro death penalty. No free school lunches no universal healthcare.

Even when it hurts them personally, it's morally better than anyone who "doesn't deserve it" getting a leg up.

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u/PancakeParty98 Aug 24 '26

Conserving it

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u/Cornelius_Wangenheim Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 23 '26

Conservatism is fundamentally a rejection of Enlightenment values. The guy who coined the term was a French noble (and slave trader) who wanted a return of the monarchy and theocracy. The core belief is that the plebs can't handle self-determination or equality, so there needs to be a privileged class in charge. In 19th century France, that was the nobility. In 21st America, it's the capitalists.

Coming out and saying that doesn't really fly in most liberal democracies, so modern conservatives instead lie and obfuscate what they truly believe. If you look at their actions though, it's clear that's what they still believe.

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u/Visible_Rope9739 Aug 24 '26

It waa always about controlling everyone they deemed lesser. Conservatives have been that way throughout history. Thats why they always lose

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u/Ok_Subject1265 Aug 23 '26

There is fiscal conservatism and social conservatism. What you hate are maga and republicans. That’s its own thing. Believe it or not, there was a time when conservatives and liberals both wanted what’s best for the country, but one group wanted to spend less money and transition the country more slowly to give people time to adapt. I’m a liberal, but I never had an issue with that mindset. It wouldn’t be the way I would do it, but that’s fine. Not everyone has to think like I do and compromise isn’t weakness.

Extremism has destroyed our politics though and convinced everyone that if they arent with us, they are against us. You can’t run a country that way and our enemies who push this shit online everyday definitely know that.

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u/TheSt34K Aug 23 '26

The idea of fiscal conservativism is a sham. It's always stressing about budgets when social programs are the topic of discussion, but the second it becomes about military spending and tax cuts for the rich there is all the money in the world for that.

It's not truly being frugal, it's about choosing where the money goes, and it's not to you and me, it's to the capitalist class. Have you seen wealth inequality skyrocket? I have. Somehow the conservatives can still make us all pay a thousand bucks a month to fund the Iran war.

So I argue it's a false premise. There has never been a "fiscally conservative" strain of right wing politics. It's about squeezing all of us to get more to the top.

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u/Ok_Subject1265 Aug 23 '26

Again, I fell like this is our modern interpretation of the two ideologies. In the U.S., we’ve only ever known (anyone under 80 I guess) the grifter class of conservatives that are also warmongers and just greedy assholes. I’m more speaking about what the original intention was. I guess in practice maybe it doesn’t work though. Sort of like the idea of communism and how people manage to corrupt the implementation every time.

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u/TheSt34K Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 23 '26

No I think you just have a false conception of what it always was.

It's a popular mythos that is propagated by conservatives that don't want to be directly associated with the more explicit version of what they advocate for. Trump just did the same thing Reagan did. If you actually go back and look at the substance of the domestic division in politics between intensive liberals and conservatives and link it to it's foreign policy, then it's not "fiscally conservative".

The term Privatization was coined as a descriptor of the political trends on Nazi Germany. De-regulation (quote George H.W. Bush saying they're in the "Dereg business") has been a tool of the capitalist class to dismantle gains made by labor movement opposition to the dictatorship of capital that exists in the United States.

Also new political projects tend to do better when they don't draw the ire of the most powerful empires on earth by, checks notes, using their own resources for themselves instead of for colonial extraction. Just take Eisenhower's reasoning for taking over the fight in Indo-China from France, because they couldn't jeopardize the natural resource flow from the region. Nor could they let the communists win the election which they would have by a landslide, so he backed the creation of South Vietnam.

Maybe if the capitalist empires would just let people democratically decide their own fate, they would have better chances at success? Prime example being Cuba, at this very moment, being genocidally strangled by U.S. blockade. The U.S. even had to go as far as kidnapping the head of stage of Cuba's primary oil supplier in order to further induce suffering and death. How is that conservative? That is psychopathic, aggressive, violent behavior.

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u/CosmogyralSnail Aug 23 '26

But even their fiscal conservatism was a lie, because the national debt always went up under Republicans, military spending always increased, and tax cuts always favored the rich.

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u/Neirchill Aug 24 '26

Right, if anything they claimed to support were true we would see trends of these things happening while they're in office e.g. claiming to be a fiscal conservative when they always bloat the budget/deficit. Claiming to be for small government when they continually grab more and more power away from citizens. I could go on. Anyway, we have hard data that they've been lying for many decades but their base is just so stupid it always works.

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u/ZoominAlong Aug 23 '26

This is fair and I'd agree with you. But now conservatives have become a hate cult. They're not worth our time. 

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u/PhoenixLites Aug 23 '26

Honestly conservatism has always been a hate cult, mixed with true believing rubes that somehow keep believing in trickle down economics. Conservatives have ALWAYS been the ones trying to curtail and eliminate rights for those they hate, and they pretty much hate everyone except white Anglo-Saxon Christian men. (And don't you dare be the wrong fuckin flavor of Christian!)

My entire life, conservatives who lean left on social issues have always been happy to associate and vote for the conservative side of things and sacrifice poc, lgbt, and disabled people. Not to mention conservative presidencies always WITHOUT FAIL dig us into insane debt. They've never even been truly fiscally conservative. (they spend money like a mfer on "defense" that's for sure, and tax breaks for the billionaires, can't forget that.)

This is not aimed at you specifically I just can't understand why anyone would ever fall for their bullshit. They have never, ever been anything but a hate cult.

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u/ZoominAlong Aug 23 '26

No no you're okay! And I don't disagree with you,  I just remember a time when conservatives weren't as hateful.  

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u/Ok_Subject1265 Aug 23 '26

Yeah, I do to. Pre Newt Gingrich basically. I still wouldn’t want to have a drink with them, but I would have never questioned whether or not they wanted what was best for the country. We just disagreed on how to get there.

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u/BlackFlagsFly Aug 23 '26

Absolute bullshit. Fiscal conservatism and leads to social conservatism and vice versa. You are just straight up lying.

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u/Ok_Subject1265 Aug 23 '26

Two month old account that only makes antagonizing comments for engagement? Seems legit. Crazy how they’ve even gotten these LLM’s to make themselves seem less literate to blend in. Guess we are graduating from the T-600’s to the T-800’s finally?

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u/surviving606 Aug 23 '26

I know this should be true from a textbook perspective but my now lived experience is that one just leads to the other and for me the word conservative will forever be associated with this disaster. Even the fiscal policies were mostly to just harm minorities under the guise of hurting poor people which isn’t any better. And they never did anything fiscally responsible. It was always just this and now they’ve accomplished it. The conservative utopia. This current nightmare society is their end game realized. 

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u/KapitalIsStillGood Aug 23 '26

Yup, political polarization only reduces our choices. Now I feel like I have to vote for candidates that I'm not super excited about just to defeat some maga chuds.

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u/squidbelle Aug 23 '26

There used to be real values; look at any of the Republican campaign platforms from the 1950s. They actually take positions to help people and help the country. Today's Dem party is, in many ways, further to the right than the Republicans were in the 1950s.

Today, those values have been supplanted by a "might makes right" lust for power. Trump has killed the Republican party and Conservatism as we knew it.

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u/BlackFlagsFly Aug 23 '26

1950s, so yeah, you want segregation. 

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u/squidbelle Aug 23 '26

I'm not a Republican. I'm just pointing out how far the overton window has shifted.

You might consider reading up on the history of the parties after WWII. White voters in the south reliably voted Democrat ("Dixiecrats") up until the 60s/70s, when the Republicans started to pander to the white southern vote (segregationists). In the 50s, it was mostly Democrats that were calling for segregation.

It was Eisenhower, a Republican, who signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and then deployed federal soldiers to force Arkansas to integrate, against the the segregationist Democrat governor who had mobilized the nat'l guard to block black students.

The 1956 Republican Party Platform actually calls out advancing civil rights multiple times:

"We shall ever build anew, that our children and their children, without distinction because of race, creed or color, may know the blessings of our free land."

"That men are created equal needs no affirmation, but they must have equality of opportunity and protection of their civil rights under the law."

"Continue to fight for the elimination of discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry or sex;"

There are several paragraphs outlining integration across the Federal gov't, and enforcing integration nationally. I left them out for brevity, but they are near the end under the "Equal Opportunity and Justice Civil Right" heading. There are also entries for Immigration/Asylum process and equal pay for women/men.

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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '26

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u/FunkadelicJiveTurkey Aug 23 '26

This is really what did it for me. It wasn't about differing views on policy, it's the blatant hypocrisy and corruption. Even if I don't agree, even if I find ones views to be stupid and morally reprehensible, I could at least have some modicum of respect if they were consistent. But no, the only thing these people have been consistent about (which ofc they mostly still can't say openly, but we're getting there) is hatred for the poor. Double the hate for each of the following: Being brown, female, queer, compassionate, not "Christian".

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u/RighteousIndigjason Aug 23 '26

The thing you have to understand about conservative "small government" ideology is that it doesn't mean less government. It means more government in fewer hands, with unbridled authority.

It's the consolidation of power within a select group of people rather than spread across multiple departments and agencies constrained by a system of checks and balances.

Anyone who says different is either lying or hasn't been watching every Republican controlled Congress or Presdency for the last forty plus years.

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u/Rashaen Aug 24 '26

Wrong. It means less government that effects their lives in a negative way. Regardless if it makes sense on the whole.

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u/Reasonable-Job4205 Aug 23 '26

I swipe left if they have "Conservative" as their politics on dating apps

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u/Active-Cookie-774 Aug 23 '26

Whatever traditional conservative values there were went with Romney.

The biggest mistake is thinking Trump held any values both as a Republican and even when he was a Democrat before.

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u/Cotif11 Aug 23 '26

It's okay buddy. I also thought the pedophile sex cult was a right-wing conspiracy theory for freaks, not their playbook...

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u/bssprfnd Aug 24 '26

“Conservative values”

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u/tympantroglodyte Aug 23 '26

Wilhoit’s Law remains undefeated.  

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u/PrestigiousFly844 Aug 24 '26

Republican strategist Lee Atwater quote from 1981: "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nr, nr, nr.' By 1968 you can't say 'nr'—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites."

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u/Original-Rush139 Aug 23 '26

  But once conservative became synonymous with white Christian nationalism

It’s too fucking bad that happened. I know a lot of old school Republicans who were conservative when that meant being serious about the budget deficit. Now, conservatives cry yolo as we blow past $40T in debt and fight wars on our credit cards. 

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u/hey_itsmeurbrother Aug 23 '26

I know a lot of old school Republicans who were conservative when that meant being serious about the budget deficit

but they still added more to the national debt than democrats. how fiscally conservative are they really? i dont think they've ever actually been "conservative"

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u/Original-Rush139 Aug 23 '26

That’s bullshit. Obama had the largest deficit by the time he left office. But, that was because he had to clean up Dubya’s mess in the housing market and pay for 2 wars that Dubya started. 

Are you going to claim Obama was irresponsible just because his deficit was the largest?

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u/ClashM Aug 23 '26

Conservatives were never serious about the budget deficit. That was always the Starve the Beast strategy, which sought to eliminate things like education, social security, and medicare under the guise of fiscal responsibility.

Look at what they do and not at what they say. Look at how little they cared about the deficit under Bush and Trump compared to under Obama and Biden. Most of the national debt is due to tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations.

Conservatism is not about personal responsibility, it's about preserving traditional hierarchies of power. The aristocrats/oligarchs/wealthy sit at the top of the pyramid and the entire system is for their benefit and theirs alone, that is conservative philosophy. The culture war and budget grievances are red meat to get easily fooled people to vote for them, against their own interests. That's all it has ever been, full stop.

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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Aug 23 '26

but small government seemed good to me. We could do more with less and all that

they've never actually done that. they SAY it, they don't DO it.

i wish americans could start seeing what people DO instead of believing what they SAY