They seem to like blurring those lines. As though the agents being in danger is part of the goal.

Makes you wonder, what government wants the spark to ignite the powder keg? That would be like packing the Reichstag with flammable stuff and telling a local arsonist about it -- OH.

Many Americans proclaim that they are a "Christian" nation, even though its own founding documents prescribed no religious alignment. It's not hard to figure out why.

When the printing press was invented, the Church was against it because it did not want the knowledge of the scriptures to be accessible by commoners; it wanted control over how the scriptures were interpreted to keep the common folk acted in line with the Church's interests.

For the most part, their fears were unfounded. Even today, with near-universal literacy rates, the average religious American has not actually read their holy book. They rely instead on preachers and the media to interpret the text for them, hence America's widespread endorsements of the "prosperity gospel" and "empathy is a sin".

No fucking shit. The people running this world are just there, no good, and should be gone.

Wouldn't call it the end result, but rather the practice of attempting to make people less empathetic is that of an aggressor looking to divide the people. It has nothing to do with the concept of sin, and everything to do with breaking people apart, making people singular, more manageable targets.

This is a way of convincing people to be less trusting of those around them to prevent them from wanting to organize or cooperate with others out of fear that they may be suddenly arrested by undercover agents.

I am a fan of pilling people at bar trivia:

'Which tactic did Ted Bundy and Immigration Customs Enforcement both use to capture their targets?"

Yep, if history is any guide, Democrats, if they ever get back in power, will want to look forward, not back. They've done that with Nixon, Reagan, the GFC, torture, Trump's whole ass coup, ...

It just means that the exact same characters will just try again.

There's not going to be a regime change. It's just going to collapse like Haiti.

Stop waiting to be saved. It should be on sight at this point. The civil war is here and the rightoids are winning.

I may be from a hive of scum and villainy (southsiiiiide!), but also I have jumper cables, so back up while I take care of this.

Dropping the mask.

Punishing people for any form of kindness so that they are wary of helping anyone else in the future....

Helping someone is communist /s

I think their "rationale" is to snag the cartoon characters they've invented in their minds.

They expect an opportunist criminal to crime them.

This only makes sense if you believe there are literally millions of criminals in a town of 50 thousand residents.

I expect them to shoo away helpful people indefinitely

(Or, more likely, just arrest a random passerby and call it a success)

Isn’t Oklahoma passing a law that makes it illegal to help an illegal Immigrant in any way? If these laws pass, then the agent can say they were posing as an illegal immigrant, making the helper immediately guilty of a crime.