Radley Balko

speaker

278 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 28 Jan

Radley Balko’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart · The ICE Age of Surveillance and Enforcement · 28 Jan 2026 podcast

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah.

I mean, the interesting thing is, um,

I'm getting a lot of credit for having predicted this, and I don't actually think I did.

It's actually – when I've debated people from law enforcement about police militarization over the years, the debate is always – there's always been some common ground, which is that –

police exist to serve the public and keep the peace and that it's bad for the military to be doing domestic policing, that that's not something free societies do.

We disagreed about methods and tactics and accountability and where that trade-off between civil liberties and public safety is.

But there was always that kind of common understanding.

And where we are now is you have an administration and its defenders who are just openly stating that these federal law enforcement forces, which are basically paramilitaries, exist not for public safety but to carry out the will of a single person, of the president.

And you have a president who's just openly saying,

We need the military marching up and down U.S.

streets doing day-to-day policing.

And so, I mean, I think this is why you're seeing so many law enforcement officials also express a lot of alarm at what they're seeing because we are just in a completely new frontier at this point.

I mean, the third option is you could elect them president and appoint them head of HHS, right?

Right, right.

Referring to the rapists, yes.

So, I mean it was always going to be like this, right?

When you look at the numbers during the campaign, the sheer number of immigrants that they were claiming that they were going to deport,

you are never going to be able to get to that number by arresting the worst of the worst, right?

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