Ezra Klein

We've seen this in other countries.

We've seen it in history where you attack your own population and you look for pretexts then to escalate.

The question is not how to prevent violence.

the killing of Rene Good from happening again, but actually how to escalate around the killing of Rene Good in order to catch more of the Trump administration's enemies in their net, you know, call the protesters domestic terrorists, etc.

It's not exactly knowable, but it is a very important distinction whether this is seen by the Trump administration as a tragedy.

We need to think about how we are training our troops versus

part of the policy, actually.

We've been talking about physical raids, but one thing you've written about is how the OPBBA bill, which included a huge amount of money for ICE, for Border Patrol, for the Department of Homeland Security, that included all of that money for advanced technology and surveillance systems.

And that the effort to build a very different form of surveillance network, given advances in AI and digital tools, is ongoing and might create something that is around for a long time.

What can you tell me about what's being done or envisioned there?

something that I think has really stuck in my head all year, that after the OPBBA, the amount of money going to domestic immigration enforcement is larger than the budgets of any military in the world, save the US or China.

And in addition to worrying about that on behalf of immigrants, when you think about these questions like surveillance, when you think about how Trump talks about domestic opposition, how Stephen Miller talks about domestic opposition, I think something that I fear, that I see, I would say the shadows of, but I think it's actually much more visible than that,

is an infrastructure that could be turned against all kinds of internal targets, political opposition, media, protesters, anybody they don't like.

You know, you've seen very strange as picking up of random academics and students, and it seems that it has something to do with social media posts.

When people build infrastructures like this,

They tend to get used.

It's very, very hard to resist using what you have and when you're as radical administration as this one is.

So I guess I'm asking how the infrastructure itself looks to you.

There's what it's being used for now.

But when you think about how many new agents this is, how much more they're spending on new weapons for the new agents, when you think about the surveillance, when you think about, which we'll talk about in a minute, the dramatic increase in detention centers, what does that look like?